A fact of my life was that I had a morbid fear of reproach, especially from women. Somehow I persuaded myself that I could get away with not returning either of the women’s messages. Nor did I bring the matter up with Oswald; being so afraid of reproach myself, I hated to inflict it on a friend. It seemed possible that Lucy, who lived off campus, might have cooled down by the next time I saw her, and it didn’t occur to me that a woman militant enough to wrap herself in butcher paper might show up at the DP in person.
As the executive editor, I had an actual office I could use as a study room. If Anabel had come to it in bib overalls, the Penn uniform of feminist militancy, I might have guessed who she was, but the woman who knocked on my door, late on a Friday afternoon, was dressed expensively, in a white silk blouse and a snug below-the-knee skirt that struck me as Parisian. Her mouth was a slash of crimson lipstick, her hair a dark cascade.
“I’m looking for Tom Aberrant.”
“Aberant,” I corrected.
The woman registered her surprise with the bulging eyes of a hanged person. “Are you a freshman?”
“Senior, actually.”
“Good Lord. Did you come here when you were thirteen? I’d pictured somebody bearded.”
My baby face was a sore subject. My freshman roommate had suggested that I age myself by manufacturing a dueling scar in the nineteenth-century manner, by cutting myself with a saber and laying a hair in the cut to keep it from healing cleanly. I believed my face to be the main reason why, although I was good at befriending women, I wasn’t having sex with any of them. I got physical attention exclusively from very short girls and queer guys. One of the latter had walked up to me at a party and, without a word, put his tongue in my ear.
“I’m Anabel,” the woman said. “The person whose message you didn’t return.”
My chest constricted. Anabel shut the door behind her with a chicly booted foot and sat down with her arms crossed tightly, as if to conceal what her blouse wanted to reveal. Her eyes were large and brown, like a deer’s, and her face rather long and narrow, also like a deer’s; she shouldn’t have quite been pretty but somehow was. She was at least two years older than me.
“I’m sorry,” I said wretchedly. “I’m sorry I didn’t return your message.”
“Lucy told me that you were a good person. She said I could trust you.”
“I’m sorry about the article, too. The fact is, I didn’t even read it until after it was out.”
“Are you not the editor?”
“Authority is delegated in various ways.”
I was avoiding her eyes, but I could feel them blazing at me. “Was it necessary for your reporter to mention that my father is the president and chairman of McCaskill? And that I’m not a well-liked person?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “As soon as I saw the story, I realized it was cruel. Sometimes, when you’re in the thick of putting a story together, you forget that someone’s going to read it.”
She tossed her dark mane. “So, if I hadn’t read it, you wouldn’t be sorry? What does that mean? You’re sorry you were caught? That’s not sorry. That’s cowardly.”
“We shouldn’t have used those quotes if we couldn’t attribute them.”
“Oh, well, it makes for a fun guessing game,” she said. “Which person thinks I’m a spoiled rich girl, which person thinks I’m a nut job, which person is so sure my art is bad. Of course, it’s maybe not so fun to sit in the same room with the people who said those things, and know they’re still thinking them, and feel them looking at me. To have to sit there with those eyes on me. To be visible like that.”
She still hadn’t lowered her arms from the front of her blouse.
“You’re the one who showed up naked in the dean’s office,” I couldn’t help pointing out.
“Only after they ripped the paper off me.”
“I’m saying you wanted publicity and you got it.”
“Oh, it’s not like I’m surprised. What’s more interesting than a nude female body? What better to sell papers? You proved my point better than I could have proved it myself.”
This was the first of the ten thousand times I had the experience of not quite following Anabel’s logic. Because it was the first time and not the ten thousandth, and because she seemed so ferociously sure of herself — it hurts me to remember the ferocity and assurance she still had then — I assumed the fault was mine.
“We’re a free paper,” I said lamely. “We don’t worry about selling.”
“Actions have consequences,” she said. “There’s a high road and a low road, and you took the low road. You’re the editor, you put those things in print, and I read them. You hurt me and you’re going to have to live with it. I want you never to forget it, the same way I’m never going to forget what you printed. You didn’t even have the decency to return my phone call! You think because you’re male and I’m female, you can get away with it.” She paused, and I saw a pair of tiny tears dissolving her mascara. “You may not think so,” she said more softly, “but I’m here to tell you you’re a jerk.”
Her looks and her superior age gave the accusation a particular sting. In truth, though, I was already primed to doubt my goodness. One Easter, when I was in seventh grade, the younger of my older sisters, Cynthia, had come home from college transformed into a hippie, with octagonal wireframes and a biblically bearded boyfriend. The two of them took a friendly clinical interest in me as one of the first new men of tomorrow. Cynthia asked me about my air rifle: Did I like to shoot and kill my enemies with it? Did I like to blow their heads off? How did I think it felt to have your head blown off? Like a game?
The boyfriend asked me about the butterfly collection I halfheartedly kept in an attempt to please my father: Did I like butterflies? Really? Then why did I murder them?
Cynthia asked me what my ambitions for life were: I wanted to be a reporter or a photojournalist? That was cool. But what about being a nurse? What about being a first-grade teacher? Those jobs were for girls? Why only for girls?
The boyfriend asked me if I ever thought about trying out to be a cheerleader: It wasn’t allowed? Why not? Why couldn’t a boy be a cheerleader? Couldn’t boys jump, too? Couldn’t boys cheer?
Together, the two of them made me feel like a stodgy old man. This seemed mean of them, but I also had the guilty sense that there was something wrong with me. One afternoon, a few years later, I came home late from school to a rodent emergency in the attic, my belongings spread across the floor of my bedroom, my closet door open, my father’s legs visible on a stepladder. I allowed myself to hope that he’d somehow overlooked the worn copy of Oui magazine that I’d shoplifted from the back of a used-book store and hidden in the closet, but after dinner he came to my room and asked me what I thought it was like to be the women in a pornographic magazine.