The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (29 page)

He taps me on the shoulder twice. That’s code for me to turn on my side so we can spoon. I sink into the warm, music-filled sweetness of him. The adagio ends.

“Wow,” I whisper.

“I knew you’d like this. It’s sweet. Like you.”

“Oh God, I’m not . . .”

“
Shhhhhh
.” He switches off the music. I press close, as close as I can, and we drift into our separate sleeps.

A
ND WHAT WOULD
I tell him if I was able? That sometimes I wake in the morning with such madness in my heart, with nothing else on my mind but where, how, I can sneak off and find some kind of fix. A thrill I can only get elsewhere, not here in our sweet bedroom with the clean flannel sheets, under his favorite portrait of Buster Keaton. Not in the warmth of us, of our home, but in the wilderness of some other place, some stranger.

This would be, this is, the hardest thing to speak of. It terrifies me. To speak would change everything, I think. He would see me for what I am and leave. And I would not blame him.

I think sometimes of my first-ever boyfriend back at acting school in San Francisco. An ardent, elegant boy named Bill. We were crazy for each other, and one night when he found out that I’d gone off to a bathhouse with our ballet teacher, he confronted me, slapped me across the face, and yelled: “You are nothing but an anxiety-ridden slut!” My cheek stung for days. My heart for months. Stung with anger and with what I felt was the truth of it. Stings still when I recall my inability to, at the very least, speak honestly. When I think of how fearful and confused I am around matters sexual. It seems to me that I have no integrity, that I simply own the kind of desire that sullies.

The thing to give up here, to sacrifice, is the secrets.

To converse, to draw close. To make sacred. This is what I want to do. But I am terrified to speak.
How will Henry and I ever make it?
I wonder.
Survive
me?

I
WAS SITTING
at a piano, sharing the bench with Ricky. We were in a cozy old apartment in Philadelphia. It was an autumn morning in the early 1990s. Ricky was the composer of a new musical in which I was performing, an ambitious saga about the birth of the United States. He was teaching me a love song hot off his press, and during a break, as will happen, the subject of sex came up. He talked of an early experience, how painfully shy he’d been in high school and college. At one point, surprising myself because I seldom thought and had only rarely spoken of it, I tossed off what felt to be a bit of a joke. “Well, hell, I had an affair with an older guy when I was twelve. It went on for nearly three years. One of those Catholic stories, you know?”

“You’re kidding,” Ricky said.

“No.”

“That’s kind of
major
. Don’t you think? I mean, that’s like . . .
abuse
.”

“Nah,” I said, swiping a hand toward Ricky’s furrowed face. “No.”

My
no
came out rather more sharply than I’d meant. I was aware of how much I hated, how defensive I felt about, that word:
abuse
. How it was necessarily and frighteningly tethered to words like
crime
and
perpetrator
and, worst of all,
victim
. God, I wanted nothing to do with that. I didn’t want to be anywhere near that loser word, that kind of sad-sack story.

“I mean, the guy wasn’t violent or evil,” I told Ricky. “And . . . ya know . . . I got over it. It happened. No big deal.”

I spoke these words, I remember, with simple conviction. Ricky cocked his head and fiddled with his glasses. “I think you don’t realize how major that is. I mean, Marty, you were twelve. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself it’s nothing, but I think it matters in ways you don’t even know.”

“Ricky, look, I struggle with things. I have hang-ups, probably, around sex. I mean, God knows . . . I was raised Catholic. But look. I’m OK.”

“But this is more than that. You were a kid.”

I dismissed his words, but his eyes, I remember, slammed into my gut, and somewhere at the bottom of my diaphragm a portal popped open. I felt how I wanted to kick it closed, this little trapdoor, but something was in the way, the tip of an iceberg, the foot of someone wanting to sell me on the past. On how much it matters. But I didn’t want to waste one nickel, one bit of the now on what was then. I sat up and snatched my sheet music, suggesting we get back to work, back to singing.

That night, I was onstage playing an eighteenth-century Scotsman who had traveled alone to the New World to search out a place, the means of survival, for his beloved wife and children back home. In the play he sang his epistles to his faraway love, and each one began:
My dearest life
. Ricky had set these words to the most haunting and beautiful melody. During that evening’s preview performance, I kept choking up whenever I sang them. When I got back to the apartment afterward, I telephoned Henry. When he answered, I said, “My dearest life.”

“What’s that?”

“A tune in the play.”

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Had a teary show. Miss you.”

“You’re cute.”

“You’re cuter.”

After I hung up and hit the pillow, Henry’s voice wouldn’t leave me. Nor would the song. I kept humming the notes. The interval between
my
and
dear
was a sixth. And then
life
landed on the fifth of the chord, pure and simple and restful. Perfect harmony. It suited wonderfully the character of John, the strong and loyal Scotsman. A man of such integrity. Perfect for Henry, too, I thought.

My dearest life
.

It matters
, he’d said. What does that mean? Ricky’s music, his stubborn words, wouldn’t leave me. A sad and sour feeling came over me. I was thinking of the pack of scribbled pages I’d stuck in a drawer. The ones with the circled
C
. And I was wondering about the ugly, persistent depressions. And all the stuff that was hidden.

My dearest life.

I picked up the novel I was reading. The bookmark was blue and ragged. It came from an old store called the Book Barn. I stared for a long time at the etching of the barn, the little window drawn over the hayloft.
Christ
, I thought,
if you start digging into this, you’ll never get to the bottom
.

Several weeks later when I was back in New York, Ricky phoned. He wanted to tell me about a men’s group run by a pair of doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital. An eight-week course based on Mike Lew’s groundbreaking book.
Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse
.

“Thanks,” I said to Ricky.
Jesus, no way
, I whispered to myself as I hung up the phone.

We met, seven guys and two mellow doctors, for eight consecutive Thursday nights. We sat in a circle under fluorescent lights. An easel with poster paper and colored markers stood at the front of the class.

Loss of Childhood
.

Men and Feelings
.

Incest
.

Survival Strategies
.

I could barely look at the lingo on the board. Mostly I kept my eyes on the red carpet, on the ring of snowy boots that were jiggling on the feet of seven young men. The docs’ voices gently dovetailed. They were good at this stuff, but mostly what I heard was my own voice telling me how my case was different.

By the end of the third meeting I couldn’t avoid it any longer. It was my turn to say something about my “story.” I’d listened to the others through the noise of my squirming brain. There’d been a drunk uncle, a violent father, a coach, a neighbor. Harrowing. My heart went out to them, poor guys. Now I leaned forward, my hands clasped between my knees, and tried to explain the basics about a Catholic summer camp and a counselor. About three years of furtive encounters. “And, look. I’m the one,” I blurted. “I went back, I partook. He was a kind of a . . . I don’t know. Like a friend. It wasn’t destructive. I don’t think. It happened. Life goes on.”

The doctors nodded calmly. OK. No judgment here.

One of them, the younger, shorter one, began to discuss the particular difficulty men have at revealing experiences of abuse. The sense of threat to one’s masculinity, the struggle with sexual identity. The shame of feeling complicit. The denial. I stared at the carpet.

The taller, dark-haired doctor chimed in. “I understand what you’ve said. That you don’t see what went on in your early adolescence as necessarily harmful. But, can you consider for a moment the particular violence, the trauma, inherent in a sexual act between an adult and a child. That inequality of power. Consider what it is for the natural bond of trust between a boy and an authority figure—a camp counselor, for instance—to be suddenly broken.”

I began to say that, yes, I could see that, I could consider it, but that
violence
seemed such an extreme word. And then, trying to explain what Bob and I were to each other, I fell silent.

“Consider,” the doctor went on, “the capability of a twelve-year-old to partake. The brain of a boy that age is not fully developed. By a long shot.” I felt an odd lift in my chest. Like something, someone, being let off a hook. “And certainly not capable of absorbing the enormity of a sexual violation—in your case, a chronic violation that, as Mike Lew points out so clearly, is traumatizing.”

At the end of the meeting that night, after I’d put on my parka and folded my chair away, I stepped over to say goodnight to the doctors. The younger one said, “You know, Marty, it’s the job of a kid to fall in love. And it’s the job of the adult to have boundaries.” Simple enough.

I walked across the Columbia campus that night to get to the Number 1 train. I stopped to sit on the steps of the library, next to the statue of Alma Mater. Soul Mother with her bronze arms outstretched as if welcoming one and all to crawl up into her cold lap. Ten at night might as well have been noon. Students rushing everywhere. They looked twelve, for God’s sake. A young Asian woman loaded with books passed me on the steps. She had on a red plaid skirt, very Catholic-school.

An image took hold of me:

A boy, a little kid, balancing on the rear axle of a tractor
.

Staring at the back of the head of the man driving
.

A rubber band is there, attached to the man’s glasses
.

It cuts into the skull, across the tangled, greasy hair
.

And I knew it. Absolutely knew that this kid was in trouble. I felt how every nerve of his body was scrambling to hide, to make sense of, what had just happened. How he’d woken with his underpants missing, his innards going haywire. I could see him perched there on the tractor, fine boned, numb. I knew the exact place. I knew the date, the exact morning. I knew the kid. It’s like his skin was folded inside of mine, pushing hard to get out.

And I thought:
It matters. It does
.

I went to my dog-eared Webster’s that night:
Trauma
.

A wound to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent
.

A disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from mental or emotional stress or injury
.

The following Thursday there was a long and colorful list on the board.
Frequent Issues Faced by Survivors of Sexual Abuse
. Among them were compulsive sexual activity, anger, extreme anxiety, suicidal thoughts. That night the doctors launched into a description of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I was back to staring at the floor, back to my profound discomfort of things (of me) being reduced to lists. To some sorry syndrome.

What a load of psychobabble crap
, came a familiar iteration (my father’s? An old highschool priest’s? my own?) ringing in my head. I could certainly accept how this syndrome might apply to those who’d survived the horror of war, but not to those who’d stumbled into the vagaries of early sex. As I struggled to listen, the doctors came to a word that seized me.
Compartmentalize
. Compartments. It made me think of Max, the guy on the old TV show
Get Smart
, and his silly secret compartments. “It’s very common for a victim
(that fucking word)
to have a public self and an entirely hidden other self. A split. A fragmentation. This is a prevalent condition among survivors of trauma. Compartmentalizing things as a way to survive. It can become a pattern. A way of life.”

And I thought:

That’s really true
.

And I thought:

Yeah, the brain takes a box with a very tight lid and stashes the stuff away
.

And I thought:

Stuck in my compartment are countless unspeakable items
.

• A sexually active altar boy

• One molesting camp counselor

• The counselor’s naked girlfriend

• One lying little cuss

• One unfaithful lover

So many items tucked away tight:

• One San Francisco dance professor. Remember? He was sixty, for God’s sake. You, nineteen. He offered attention, free classes. You gave out. Secret rent boy, feeling trapped.

• One brief and frightening transgression with an underage boy in a Coney Island men’s room. Never forgotten.

• One massage advertisement. Remember? Placed by you, way back, your early days in New York.
Student with a swimmer’s body, trained hands
. You rang the doors of Upper East Side gentlemen. Seventy bucks a pop. You got to be, wanted to be, the young, adored one. Never told anyone. Little hustler killing time, soul going bankrupt while you scrambled for rent.

Ad infinitum. The secrets.

How often have I said to Henry when he tells me that he loves me, “If you really knew me, you wouldn’t.”

“Why do you always say that?” he’d ask, irritated, and I’d shrug, continuing to wash the dishes or fold the sheets, feeling the corrosion seep from my secret compartment and stick itself, like a dark wedge, between us.

Somewhere near the end of the eight-week course, I’d begun to talk more with Henry about why I was attending these Thursday-night meetings. I didn’t use the word
survivor
, another tag I hated. Like I was in some club of fellows who’d made it through a shipwreck. I did, though, begin to mention this man Bob as one might talk of a creepy junior high school teacher or the distant memory of a groping priest. I’d begun to speak more seriously about how I felt this counselor had left a mark. That I had stuff to figure out. “I’m thirty-two years old,” I said to Henry, “and for some reason this is bubbling up bad and I realize I feel so much shame about it. About who I am.”