A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

• • •

I had scheduled appointments that day as though I were running a relay race. I went directly from seeing my thesis adviser to Cilla’s office, passing the baton, as it were. I had not spoken with her since my return from the funeral in Maine the week before. I had thought we’d be talking about that, but since talking to Leland, Maine was no longer the priority.

Cilla offered me tea, which she tended to do when I arrived looking upset, which tended to be every week.

“My thesis adviser was sympathetic, but I still think my profile sent a very different signal than what I intended. In the profile, all my favorite novels were variations on a theme: things are not as they seem. I listed my favorite song as Jack White’s ‘Love Interruption.’ ”

“I don’t know that song.”

I sang the first few verses.

“Holy God.” Cilla’s laugh shaded into a cough. “Is that why you went home with the Cajun?”

“ ‘Swampthing.’ But Swampthing wasn’t in charge.”

“That could have overturned itself in an instant.”

“I had an audience in the other apartments. Very Rear Window. ”

“But having exposed yourself to anonymous neighbors, you then walked home alone late at night, in an industrial neighborhood.”

“I did indeed.”

“Honey, I have to say that that is the behavior of a potential victim.”

“Is that how you see me?”

“You went home with a woman you’d just met on a Greyhound bus and got raped by her boyfriend. You’ve been putting yourself at risk for a long time. I don’t see you as a victim — not at all — but I see a pattern of self-destructive behavior. Either you learned it from living with your tormented mother, or you have a neurological predisposition to it. The latter requires some form of external activation — such as the rape you endured.”

“You’re saying I was ‘asking for it’?”

“No one asks for what happened to you.”

“Are you saying I’m the kind of woman I study?”

“At the risk of sounding like a Freudian, do you think you are?”

I felt snappish, but sat quietly for a moment. Then something occurred to me. The issue was not or , it was and . I was this way and that way. I was a woman who studied victimology, and I was a woman whose actions had contributed to being victimized. Didn’t this duality make us human? And wasn’t it less damning to think of myself as both, instead of just the one?

• • •

On my way back from Cilla’s, I passed the Delacorte Theater. I had last been there to see Meryl Streep in Mother Courage , a rousing performance, a first and last date. You wouldn’t think you’d feel like having sex after seeing Mother Courage , but my date and I found ourselves groping each other as we walked past Belvedere Castle after the play. We turned into the maze that is the Ramble, and my skewed logic allowed me to follow him down a rocky, unlit path, skewed because I actually believed myself safe, given that so much homosexual coupling was likely to be nearby. That’s what the Ramble was known for, after all. Yet what did I think? That if I found myself in trouble, gay men having intercourse would stop to come to my rescue? Straight men having intercourse would not.

McKenzie would not have led me into the Ramble. Oh — hello! Here was McKenzie, back in my thoughts. Cilla and I had finished the session discussing why I had so many Swampthings and no McKenzie. If I got what I wanted — the bad ones — then how did a person change what she wanted? What she wants. But I did want McKenzie. And he chose Billie. Billie offered to help him, while I had wanted him to help me.

I continued on to the ice-skating rink. I didn’t feel like skating, but it had the best hot chocolate in the city. One winter I’d skated there two or three times a week, feeling like a kid, loving the gliding across the ice, even though it was crowded. I’d finally been driven off by the music — it seemed that whatever time I skated, the sound system was playing a Lionel Richie medley.

I saw a homeless man bundled up and sitting on a bench, reading from a paperback copy of War and Peace. A vendor selling roasted chestnuts was warming his gloved hands under the heat lamp keeping the nuts warm. Dogs wearing coats from tony stores were walked on braided-leather leashes. A well-dressed man wearing different-colored gloves saluted me as he passed. Nice, or nuts, I couldn’t tell.

The salt on the paths left a white ring on my black boots; I would have to oil them when I got home. As I approached my apartment building, I thought of the study that had been done on the moment a dog knows its owner is coming home; film had been made of dogs moving to sit by the front door when their owners started home after work, even when their schedules were irregular. I hadn’t yet unlocked the downstairs door when I heard Olive begin to bark. Hysterically. I raced up the stairs to quiet her before the neighbors complained.

I took Olive for a perfunctory walk, having had such a long one myself. She didn’t seem to mind. She seemed glad for it. After, she curled up at my feet as I waited for water to boil for tea. I heard the murmur of the people in the next apartment, and I liked the vague sounds — it was company without having to have company. It was the hour when the lights inside turned the windows into mirrors, the time when you can no longer discern color in the sky. I turned off the kitchen light so that I would not see my reflection. It was the opposite of my performance in the Cajun’s apartment. Standing in darkness allowed me to look inside others’ apartments, though I saw nothing like what I had done, just strangers making dinner.

• • •

On my incomprehensibly bundled Internet, phone, and cable service a representative had tricked me into getting — the first two months were free — all my electronics were synced, whether or not I wanted them to be. This meant that I could be watching television and the phone number of whoever was calling me would blink in the corner of the screen, interrupting my true-crime shows, which were all I wanted to watch. I used to like them because I couldn’t believe how easily people were taken in, how mundane was the trigger for the crime that followed. Now I watched as one of the taken-in; in the show that most spoke to me, women discovered whom they had really married, after they had married these bigamists, murderers, and rapists.

A late-night call showed up on the screen.

“Have you heard from the man you call Bennett? I’ve heard nothing for ten days.” Samantha sounded urgent and scared.

“Since I just got home from his funeral, no.”

“What are you talking about?”

“His mother invited me. The funeral was in Maine.”

“What happened to him?” Samantha’s confusion was palpable.

I could have jerked her around and fed out information slowly. I could have been sarcastic and made fun of her refusal to acknowledge what I knew to be the truth. But I also knew that this woman was unhinged and desperate, or else someone was pretending to be Bennett and tormenting her. The mature psychologist part of me took over. I told Samantha that when I located his mother, his mother had arranged for her son’s remains to be flown to his hometown of Rangeley, Maine, for burial. His real name, I told her, had been Jimmy Gordon. I told her that he had been killed last September, and that I was sorry to have to deliver this news twice.

“I never heard of Jimmy Gordon, but my fiancé is in Canada and was e-mailing me up until ten days ago.”

“ Somebody has been contacting you, but not him.”

“I want that woman’s phone number.”