Born with Teeth: A Memoir (15 page)

He was late picking me up. This time, it felt intentional, although I said nothing when he leaned across the gearshift and opened the passenger door to his Volkswagen Bug. Not one to get out of his car and open the door for a lady. Not one for old-fashioned courtesies. He made it crystal clear that he didn’t go
in for any of that antiquated nonsense, that we were two equals who shared a common love of the theater, and who, because they also needed to eat, were free to share a table.

The restaurant boasted a strong Indian motif but served food that somehow defied description. The beer was legitimate, however, and we both kept our glasses filled, sitting by the window at a small table, in shadow.

We talked of nothing important until, quite suddenly, Robert Egan said, “I have a girlfriend, her name’s Ky. We’ve been going out for about a year. I don’t like to fraternize with the actresses working at the theater. Not on that level. I just wanted you to know that, so that there’s no misunderstanding.”

I looked at him, and I knew. He was protecting himself, from me. When I had fully absorbed this, I relaxed and, smiling, said, “Let’s just have a nice lunch, then. Tell me about yourself. Where are you from? And why the theater?”

It was a learning experience, that afternoon, at that table, and one I was fairly sure I enjoyed. Egan talked at length about himself, and I could see that he was very proud of his accomplishments, particularly regarding his education. It was an impressive résumé. Boston College, followed by a stint at Oxford University, and finally Stanford University, where he had worked on his dissertation, a thesis on Marxist aesthetics.

“Ah, so you’re not only a socialist but a doctor, too,” I said, lifting my glass in obeisance.

“Not quite,” Egan responded, with a wry smile. “I didn’t actually finish my dissertation.”

“Why on earth wouldn’t you finish the job and take home the prize?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

Robert shook his head, as if slightly embarrassed, and shrugged. “Life gets in the way.”

I didn’t buy this explanation but decided not to pursue it; we were getting along so well, and I didn’t want the conversation
to end on a sour note. Then I spoke, and said something I hadn’t planned to say. I think I must have said it to alleviate any discomfort Robert felt about his unfinished dissertation. I think I must have said it to bring us closer. “I know a little about life getting in the way. I got pregnant a few years ago, and I had the baby. I gave her up for adoption.”

Robert didn’t know what to say.

He sat there, silent and still, but something shifted in his expression, a subtle softening, which made me feel he understood. And something else was shared, more difficult to explain, something hundreds of years old, a crossing over, a sadness, almost a reluctance. The strange shorthand between members of the same tribe, who certainly never expected to run into each other so far from home.

In the middle of rehearsals, Roberto came for a visit. He complained loudly about the weather, the rehearsal schedule, the apartment, and my attitude. I realized that it was pointless to explain to him, as I had done countless times before, the sacred nature of the rehearsal process and the need to protect my space while I was developing a character. He scoffed at this, in his dismissive Italian way, and suggested we throw a party instead.

Roberto rented a car and drove maniacally around Seattle, abruptly pulling over and double-parking while he ran into some obscure market to acquire items for his inimitable
pastasciutta,
which was to be the pièce de résistance of our dinner party. He bought huge arrangements of yellow roses, a beautiful cashmere throw for the living room sofa, and a sophisticated boom box for our listening pleasure. I was sure that my bleak concrete apartment, in all its pathetic history, had never known such glory.

The party was a great success. Everyone came, with the exception of John Kellogg, whose near psychotic mood swings
and caustic behavior had alienated the entire company. The actors drank, the designers danced, and everyone ate Roberto’s magnificent pasta. Robert Egan arrived late, as was his custom, and stayed close to the front door, where the bar was situated. At one point, I introduced him to Roberto, who looked him over as one would an attractive puppy. Roberto may even have said, “Nice boy,” before walking into the living room, where the actresses were gathered in a knot, gossiping. Egan and I exchanged a look, and then he left.

Roberto came one more time, for opening night. By then, the tension between us had grown into something constant and ugly. By then, too, Robert Egan and I had met several times outside of the theater, and one night, when he was again late picking me up, I raised my voice in frustration and he stopped my mouth by kissing it. So it wasn’t a disappointment, or even much of a surprise, when, at the opening-night party, Roberto accused me of flirting with Egan, and I confessed that, yes, I was guilty of wanting another man. Roberto glared at me and then, enraged, declared, “This is a joke! You will never last with this boy, never!”

He was wrong, but we recovered ourselves sufficiently to salvage the evening, and when it grew late, we crawled into bed and, like exhausted children, held each other tenderly.

One last time.

It’s not late, but the sky is already darkening on a January afternoon in 1982. I am walking home after having drinks with some friends in the neighborhood. It is cold, and even though I’m dressed in my workout clothes, I hurry. My arms are laden with grocery bags; my purse is slung over my shoulder. When I turn off Columbus Avenue and start walking west on Seventy-Sixth Street, I realize, too late, that my keys are in my purse and I will need to put the bags down in order to retrieve them. I approach my building and adjust the bags to set them on the stoop while I find my keys. My apartment is on the ground floor, and the bedroom window faces the street. I usually leave the light in the bedroom on, but today, for some reason, I didn’t. It’s dark. When I have my keys in hand, I take the two steps down that lead to the front door, but have the second key
ready. Between the front door and the door leading into the apartments, there is a closed foyer where the mailboxes are, and above these are the buzzers that are necessary to push in order to be let in. I need the second key for the second door. I insert the key into the front door and, just as I push it open, struggling to hold on to the grocery bags, I feel something cold pressed against my neck. Then I hear a voice, and it says, “Get inside, now.” I enter the foyer and stand there while the man who has followed me decides what to do next. He is young, maybe twenty, and black, and he has a serious bruise under his left eye. There is a knife in his right hand, and he holds it close to his side, as if trying to hide it but at the same time letting me know he has it. He’s wearing a quilted green jacket, not very warm, and a checked hunting cap with flaps. His head is on a swivel, back and forth, back and forth. I lower my voice so that it is flat and level and I say, “You can have my necklace, it’s a diamond, and my diamond ring. I just went to the bank and there’s three hundred dollars in my wallet. I’ll give it all to you, if I can put these bags down.” He nods sharply, and flashes the knife, wants me to get on with it. I put the grocery bags on the floor and slowly reach behind my neck to unclasp my Elsa Peretti diamond pendant, then I slide the band of diamonds that Roberto had given me off my finger, and hand them to him. He takes them roughly and quickly and avoids touching my hand. When he has stuffed them in his pants pocket, he gestures toward my purse, wants the money. I take out my wallet and give him all its contents, credit cards and everything, and I say, in the same low voice, “The jewelry is good and you can pawn it for a lot of money. Take it all. I’m just going to sit down here, on the floor, and do nothing. I won’t do anything for a long time, and then I’ll go inside, but I won’t do anything. I mean it.” He looks at me, and I can see that the knife is shaking in his hand. He’s nervous, maybe even
scared. I slowly and deliberately sit on the floor, never taking my eyes off him. He has a wild look in his eyes, almost like he’s about to cry, but he doesn’t. He moves toward the front door and puts his hand on the doorknob, then he looks at me and says, “You move, cunt, and I’ll kill ya. I know where you live and I’ll fucking come back here and kill ya, if you even move, bitch.” His voice is as low as mine, but not as level. He talks to me the way he talks to women, I think. I get as small as I can in the corner and say, “I won’t move for an hour, I promise you that. And I will not call the police, or anyone. That’s a promise.” He looks at me for what feels like a long time, and then he turns the doorknob with his hand and opens the door a crack. He looks outside for maybe thirty seconds, and I know he is trying to figure out what to do. He opens the door a little wider, and just as he puts one foot out to hold the door in place, he turns and stares at me, as if he is just now seeing me sitting there in the corner. Then he moves his foot, not even an inch, and the heavy door closes. He says to me, “We goin’ to your place, so get up and open the door inside.” My apartment is on the ground floor, just a few feet away, and it is empty. I never take my eyes from his face, and I say, “We can go inside, but my husband’s in there—he works at home—and he carries a gun. He’s Italian. Volatile. The minute he sees you, he’ll shoot.” He gets mad then; I can see his face changing. He doesn’t want to believe me, but he can’t take the chance. The knife is flashing in his hand, and he looks me up and down, for what seems like a long time, and then he says, “Take off your shoes and pull out the strings.” I don’t want to do this, but he moves toward me a little, and I bend down and undo my sneakers, then I pull out the laces. He yanks them from my hand and tells me to stand up, “Fast, and turn to the wall.” “What do you mean, my back to the wall?” “To the wall, bitch, you fuckin’ know what I mean.” I stand up and turn around.
He does something I can’t see, and one of the bags of groceries spills. I feel him close behind me, and then he pushes me and orders me to put my hands against the wall and to shut up. He has the shoelaces and he is trying to tie my hands together, but he needs to put the knife in his pocket to do this, and then he binds the laces, tight, around my joined wrists, and knots them. Time is going fast and slow, fast and slow. I can’t see him. It feels too long and I think someone else will come home and I know he’s scared, but then he grabs my sweatshirt and cuts it straight up the back, so that both sides of the shirt are just hanging there. He pulls the waistband of my sweatpants out and cuts through the elastic, rips it until the pants fall around my ankles. I feel the blade of the knife against my back, and he severs my bra strap. He has one hand around my waist, and the other, the one holding the knife, he is running up and down my breasts; he draws the tip of the knife across my nipple and I whisper, “Please don’t cut me.” He doesn’t stop, but then he suddenly jerks me up, off my feet, and enters me from behind. It hurts, but I don’t want to struggle with him because the knife is everywhere now, and I can sense that he’s losing control and getting more and more furious and so I say, “If you’re going to kill me, do it fast. Please be fast.” The knife goes slack, then, and he’s out of me, and I fall to my knees, facing him. He’s adjusting his pants and slipping the knife into his jacket pocket. The door is opening, and he is about to step outside, when he suddenly turns, looks down at me, and says, “Fuckin’ cunt.”

It’s dark now. The eye above the bruise glistens; he looks like a young kid. He opens the door just wide enough to snake through, lowers his head against the cold, and is gone.

I heard voices, muffled. Muted. Voices I recognized, just down the hall, tantalizingly close. One voice belonged to my mother, and the other to my boyfriend, Robert Egan.

These two voices, above all others, had the power to move me out of my state of torpor. Drugs, I was sure, had laid me low. They must have given me tranquilizers when I got back from the hospital, or maybe after the police lieutenant had questioned me for the third time. Someone must have taken pity, at last, and said, Oh, for Christ’s sake let her sleep. It must have been Beth, or maybe my landlady, who lived upstairs, they were both there, though Beth had come much later. It fell to
Beth to make the necessary phone calls, and now look, here they both were, my mother and Robert, talking in the living room.

Then I remembered that it was I, in fact, who had called Mother, but Dad had answered the phone, and when I told him I’d been raped, he said not a word, I sensed the briefest internal scuffle, and then only, “Here’s your mother.” I can’t recall what I said to her, but she got on a plane, pronto, like a good mother. So Beth must have called Robert Egan, and there was certainly some back and forth about it, and tranquilized as I was, I must have said, Let’s not bother him, he won’t come, and Beth must have cried, He will too come, he has to! He didn’t have to, of course, no one has to do anything unless he’s married and not necessarily even then, but we weren’t married, far from it, we’d only just begun. In fact, Roberto Meucci’s things were still hanging in the closet, his easel in the back room displayed an unfinished seascape, paints were scattered everywhere.

But Robert had come, and now he was facing off with my mother in the living room, and I could hear them going at it. My legs were like leaden weights, but I managed to manipulate them over the side of the bed, and then I lifted myself up, using the bedpost for support. I crept along the hallway, leaning against the wall, moving along like a ghost in my long white nightgown. I needed to be as quiet as death; the part of me that had always been drawn to trouble needed to hear what they were saying.

I stopped at the end of the hallway, and although I couldn’t see them, I could hear them very clearly. Mother’s voice was rising and falling, as if she were having trouble modulating her tone, so I pressed my head against the cool plaster wall and held my breath. Mother was explaining to Robert that there was not room enough for the two of them in my apartment,
that there was only the one narrow bed in the studio and the small sofa in the living room and that both of them squeezed into the same space for two days would make for uncomfortably close quarters. “My friend Jean Smith lives across town, and I’ll be staying with her, but I’ll be back first thing in the morning,” Mother said, as if reading from an itinerary. “Kitty’s been sedated, so she’ll sleep through the night—good God, I hope she sleeps for a week! She needs rest more than anything. The poor thing’s been pretty heavily sedated.”

There was a low murmur of acquiescence from Robert that, for some reason, seemed to irritate my mother. “You do understand, Robert, how serious this is? “

Robert took offense: “Yes, Mrs. Mulgrew, I do understand the seriousness of what’s happened, that’s why I came.”

“You came,” my mother interrupted him, “because you’re a gentleman, and because it’s the right thing to do. But you must leave her alone. Do you understand what I mean? She needs to be left alone for a long time, Robert.”

I couldn’t see Robert’s face, but I knew he was smiling. The kind of smile that would grate on my mother’s nerves. Then he responded, “Don’t worry, I know what to do.”

My mother was silent for a moment, then there was a rustling, perhaps she was reaching for her coat and her bag. Mother lowered her voice to its most stripped-down level, where there was a touch of menace, and real ice.

“I want your hand on it, then,” Mother said, and I could feel her moving closer to Robert. “That you will sleep in the studio. Give me your promise that you will leave my daughter alone.”

I thought I heard the lightest of chuckles, as if the sound had escaped Robert’s lips before he’d had time to recapture it. “Of course, Mrs. Mulgrew,” Robert Egan said, with exaggerated deference, “you have my hand on it.”

I scurried back to my bedroom, just in time. The front door
was triple-locked, I could hear mother’s footsteps receding in the outer hallway and then, moments later, the door to my bedroom was opened. I pretended to be asleep, but I knew that his jacket was coming off, his shoes, his pants. The blankets were gently pulled aside and Robert Egan got into my bed. He lay there for a moment, thinking. Then he put his arm around me and pulled me to him, saying, “I’m here now, everything’s going to be all right.”

I didn’t move. Frozen. Robert moved closer, this time with more confidence, and whispered, “Come here, sweetie, let me take care of you.” And I did.