I wasn't much of a dancer, but when Beth took my hand and started to move to the music Lionel Hampton's band was playing at Vassar College's Spring Semi-Formal—this was about a year before the conversation I just told you about—I started to move as well, and soon we were turning in not-quite-graceful imitation of a ballroom dance around the two or three square feet of floor we could claim as ours. When the music slowed, and the crowd thinned to those couples drawing each other close for the evening's first romantic dance, Beth leaned into me and whispered, "I like the way you move." I don't know why, but in her words I heard Bill voice telling me I had "a dancer's cheeks," and for a split second I was back in the catering hall and his hand was clamped between my legs and I was trying not to cry out as he pushed and lifted me from behind.
The moment passed, but I was no longer in the mood to dance, so I told Beth I wanted to sit down. The truth was that I felt a little out of place wearing only the plain blue suit that was the only suit I had. To the left of where we sat, a man in a tuxedo wearing Bugs Bunny slippers on his feet began to dance with a woman who'd accessorised her very formal white evening gown with a Miss Piggy nose and wig. Behind them, someone was dressed as the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland and behind him was Gandalf the Wizard from Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. I could tell because it said Gandalf on his staff.
While Beth saved a seat for me, I made my way to the bar to get us a couple of drinks. On my way back, someone walked very close behind me and put his or her hand on the small of my back to keep us from colliding. I turned quickly, expecting to find Bill's eyes staring straight into mine, but the person who'd touched me was already gone, and what I felt instead was that everyone was staring at me and that they all knew what was going on in my head. I decided then that I had to tell Beth what Bill and the old man in my building had done to me. I don't know why, but I felt like I had no choice but to tell her that night, as if the end of the dance were a point in time beyond which my story would no longer be valid. I handed Beth her drink, sat down facing her and took a deep breath. "I have to tell you something," I said.
"What?" The music was too loud; she hadn't heard me.
"There's something I need to talk to you about." A flute solo left room for me not to shout.
"Okay," she nodded her head, but her eyes were still on the dance floor and she was tapping her feet restlessly to the music.
"No, really, there's something about me that you need to know."
This got her attention. She turned to face me, leaned her elbow against the back of my chair, rested her chin in her hand, and waited.
"When I was a kid, I was mol—" At that moment, the entire horn section began to play, drowning out the rest of my sentence.
"When you were a kid what?" She had to raise her voice to make sure that I heard her, and I could see a hint of impatience on her face, as if she suspected that what I had to tell her could probably wait until the dance was over.
"When I was a kid, I was molested." We were nearly shouting and I was praying no one was paying attention.
"You were what?!"
"Molested. By a man who lived in my building."
"Uh-huh," her voice was the voice that people use when they don't know what to say and are waiting to hear more, but I didn't have it in me to tell anymore, and so I fell silent, and Beth went back to watching the dance floor and tapping her feet to the music. I felt tremendous relief. The words had come out of my mouth and the world had not fallen apart. My girlfriend hadn't called me a liar, or said that I'd deserved it, or walked out of the dance in disgust at who I was. In fact, when we finished this conversation the next day, she was warm and understanding, and angry for me, and filled with compassion and a tender protectiveness for which I am still grateful.
Beth and I met at the same summer camp where the leader of that training session had said he was only going to talk to us about girls who'd been abused sexually. At the time, she was seeing two other men: the one she thought she was going to marry and the one she was seeing to make sure that the one she was going to marry was really the one. We became friends leaning one night against the telephone pole outside the teen division's main office. If I remember correctly, we'd come out to watch a lunar eclipse. We talked for hours, though I could not tell you now a single thing we said to each other. I liked Beth immensely, but I had no desire to square the love triangle she was in, and neither did she, but the more we talked—and after that first night we talked as often as we could—it was hard to deny that we were attracted to each other. Then, one night, as we were sitting together on the hill outside my tent, Beth climbed into my lap and put my arms around her. We sat like that for a long time without saying a word, and we sat like that on subsequent nights as well, and while it would be another year before we became lovers, and still another before she broke up with the guy she'd come to camp thinking she was going to marry, when we finally did become an "official" couple, we already knew each other very well as friends.
It was this friendship that I trusted when I told Beth about the men who'd sexually abused me, and it was this friendship I did not want to betray by continuing to have intercourse with her as if we already agreed on what the full significance of that act and its possible consequences meant between us, or as if those consequences did not exist. Or, which was to me at the time the strangest part of our conversation in Friendly's, as if the consequences were hers alone to worry about, not mine. "It's my body," Beth had told me. "Why can't you let me worry about it?" But it was my body also, and my future also, and the child that was at the heart of the original question I asked Beth would have been ours, and his or her future ours to worry about, ours to provide for, and because Beth and I were such good friends, I assumed that even if the abstinence I was insisting on made her uncomfortable, she too felt she could trust in and would her best to preserve the underlying bedrock of our friendship.
It would be easy at this point to lie and say that we did in fact abstain completely from intercourse until Beth said she was ready to talk, and it would be even easier to say that the times "we fell off the wagon" were initiated by Beth, because I remember clearly that one time was initiated by her—because I asked her about it and she told me she'd gotten "carried away"—but the fact is that I know we had intercourse more than once during this time, and not only do I not remember clearly who on those occasions initiated what; but even if Beth did initiate it, I could have and should have stopped her.
Looking back, of course, I see much more clearly than I could then just how profoundly complex my insistence on abstention was, me, the guy, the one who was supposed always to want sex. All I can say now is that I was in over my head and I didn't know it. I was, after all, only twenty one and not really equipped, emotionally or otherwise, to set and live by the limits I wanted to set. More to the point, I didn't know what it was I was over my head in.
