The summer passed, and in September I resumed my regular weekly stayovers at Marco’s house. Alicia, his daughter, had moved in recently, along with her partner. Hanan was also staying there, having given up the lease on her own apartment. She was a Lebanese-born Australian, with a background in finance, who’d got into film after raising money for a documentary on the looting of antiquities in war zones, and divided her time between Sydney and New York. She always seemed a bit absent when I met her. Polite but distracted. I attributed this to the remoteness of her origins from the little world of Brooklyn, which I imagined must have seemed a bit frivolous to her; a village of pampered neurotics. But it might just as easily have been jet lag, or a lack of interest in me personally (she did seem to have trouble remembering why I came to stay at the house every week). She and Marco had a quiet, undemonstrative relationship. She was quite a bit younger than him, but they seemed content, and well matched. She’d taken over the money side of his Crime and Place series, which was by now officially in development after preliminary financing had been agreed on by a consortium she’d put together. The household was livelier than usual, and Marco seemed to be thriving in it.
True, he had a lingering, somewhat morbid tendency to talk about his ‘ordeal’, but he’d been badly shaken by it, so perhaps that was natural enough. Sometimes it was the moment of victory he’d want to relive, and he’d go back over his meeting with Mel Sauer with voluptuous relish, as if there were still vital juices to be sucked from its memory. Sometimes it was the dread that had come before; the sense of imminent ruin. Meanwhile he’d become more obsessed than ever with the assault and harassment scandals that seemed to be breaking just about every week in the news. The stories triggered violently contradictory responses in him, all of them transparently visible as he sat at breakfast in his shabby blue bathrobe, reading the New York Times. The progressive liberal in him would rejoice in the fall of some dinosaur mogul or smug college jock, drunk on their sense of unassailable omnipotence.
But then, as he began reappraising the story from the point of view of his own experience, misgivings would seize him. Might the accusations be false? Or at least exaggerated? Or over-simplified? If the truth happened to be complicated, could that complication ever be addressed by a process that recognised only the strictly differentiated categories of predator and victim? Was it possible to get a fair hearing in the current climate, where a good chunk of the populace seemed to have come to a tacit agreement that it was better that a few innocent men should be ruined than a single guilty one go free? He’d remark on his own quickness to condemn accused men; his willing – even exultant – participation in the ritual of public denunciation that these stories offered, and he’d shudder at how close he’d come to being the victim of that quickness and willingness himself. Then, as if catching himself sliding into sympathy with that week’s proven sleazeball staring at him from the pages of the Times, he’d frown and toss the paper aside, muttering: ‘Fuck this asshole anyway.’ And then a week or so later the whole cycle would start up again.
‘I’d like to make a documentary about these men,’ he said one morning, jabbing at the paper. ‘I think I could get them to talk, and I think they’d have interesting things to say about what it means to be disgraced in this era. They’re all very different, of course, but collectively they comprise an interesting anthropological phenomenon. They’re guilty, I don’t question that, except in a few instances, but they’re also functioning as sacrificial figures. We’re entering a phase of political theatre not unlike what you had in China and Russia back in the day. The morning denunciation. The noon denial. The evening firing squad. Or in our case just the firing – so far. I’m thinking of “The Tarnished” for a title. How does that sound?’
‘How about “The Abusers”?’ Hanan said. ‘Or “The Harassers”?’
She’d been sitting quietly next to him, working her phone and combining precisely measured amounts of grain and seed into her cereal bowl, seemingly uninterested in his words. It occurred to me that she still didn’t know anything about his own troubles in this department. I remembered his remark about not wanting to ‘put her to the test’.
‘That’s not the aspect of their stories I’d want to focus on,’ he said.
‘There is no other aspect.’
She pointed to his newspaper, where a picture of Roger Ailes, all chins and jowls and baldness and bad skin, stared out. ‘You think people want to hear about how unfairly he’s been treated?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘No!’
He frowned, staring at the photo, and one could practically see the heavy machinery of his interest in this topic grinding through its cycles.
His daughter, Alicia, emerged from the basement with her girlfriend, both of them groggy from a night on the town. ‘Morning, Daddy,’ she said sweetly, stooping for a kiss on the forehead. The tones and habits of childhood were still second nature to her. I wondered if it had ever crossed her mind that coming nonchalantly to her father’s breakfast table in a T-shirt and shorts with a female lover who, from the pale tuft of beard at her chin, seemed (though Marco hadn’t dared ask) to be switching gender – whether she’d considered that all this constituted a momentous breach with several thousand years of tyrannously inflexible social convention, especially concerning the behaviour of marriageable girls. No doubt it had; she was well informed and curious. She’d graduated from Vassar that summer and had a place lined up at Cornell for a masters in International Relations. But she certainly wasn’t burdened by the knowledge. She had the aura of inhabiting an entirely benign cosmos that had always and ever been thus.
As if finally subdued by the combined effect of his daughter’s innocence and his girlfriend’s scepticism, Marco put down the paper and dropped the subject.
But later that morning, after they’d all left the house, he started up again, arguing that the condition of being ‘tarnished’ was somehow intrinsically fascinating and worthy of study, and propounding, at some length, a theory that the older a man was, the more vulnerable he was to accusations of harassment, and the less likely to be given any benefit of the doubt, for the simple reason that it was repulsive to imagine older people having sex under any conditions at all.
I listened with my usual non-committal expression. As I said, I wasn’t required to agree or disagree, just to provide him with an audience. Also, I genuinely didn’t know what I thought. My opinions about these cases were as unstable as his, lurching between an icy willingness to condemn every accused man without further questioning, and what appeared to be a perverse, atavistic loyalty to the patriarchy that would take hold of me like a temporary seizure, and from which I would emerge stunned at myself. I didn’t trust any of them.
The documentary idea seemed to fade, but Marco’s agonisings over the subject persisted. They dominated our conversations at dinner when we went out after my class. And they were what prompted him into dragging himself across town for events such as that talk at the Irving Foundation, on rape and memory.
After the talk ended, Marco and I took the subway back to Brooklyn. We discussed the presentation for a while. Marco made a caustic comment about the slideshow, likening the installations to the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and from there we got on to the topic of a new phenomenon I’d noticed among students, namely a growing reluctance to discuss anything to do with sex.
‘They’ll fall into this embarrassed silence whenever I raise the subject, which is problematic, since that’s what drives most of literature.’
‘Sex?’
‘Well, sex and money. Death too, though death they’re okay with, especially if it has to do with Female Character Sacrifice, which is something they can get righteously indignant about. Money’s tricky since characters who have any are presumed a priori to be villains, which makes nonsense out of most nineteenth-century novels. But sex is impossible. They’ll just clam right up, and if you try to draw them out you start feeling like some pervy creep in a park.’
In the crowded A train with its noisy teenage schoolkids primping and posing and flashing their smartphones like mating plumage, I told him about a class I’d taught on Anna Karenina, in which I’d tried to get the students to isolate the psychological principle underlying the opening descriptions of Anna, where Vronsky meets her and starts shifting his allegiances towards her, away from Kitty Shcherbatsky. I’d drawn their attention to Kitty’s extreme virginal reticence, and then pointed them to the contrasting passages where Vronsky and Anna dance the mazurka together, and where Anna takes the train through the blizzard back to her husband in Petersburg. I wanted them to grasp the particular quality of awakened sexuality in Anna that draws Vronsky to her, and the way Tolstoy frames it as something at once powerfully life-enhancing and highly dangerous. I’d told them to look at the phrases he uses to describe Anna in that first meeting; those repeated images of barely contained ‘animation’; of natural desire swelling up against the straitjacket of a dead marriage. Look at the ominous notes of painful pleasure on the train back to the husband she’s about to betray, I’d told them, where she feels as though something were being torn to pieces, but at the same time finds that feeling oddly exhilarating. I’d wanted them to feel how Tolstoy himself felt the iron law of social convention twisting his heroine’s amazing carnal vitality away from life and onto the path of destruction – the deathward track that supplies the gruesome terms for the big scene of sexual consummation, with its charnel-house imagery of murder and hacked bodies, its terrible mixture of ‘shame, rapture and horror’. But I couldn’t get anywhere. The more I talked about Kitty’s inviolable virginality and Anna’s awakened desire, the more stubbornly silent the students fell, and the more embarrassed they all looked.
Marco chuckled. ‘Why do you think that was?’
‘I assume because the whole subject has just become so fraught. They’re terrified of saying something that another student might find offensive or, you know, “triggering”. There are serious consequences for doing that now – actual legal consequences. So they prefer not to say anything at all. Somehow we’ve recreated the taboos of the Victorian era. Different reasons maybe, but the same anxious squeamishness around the whole topic.’
Marco was shaking his head.
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s it at all.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s you, pal.’
‘Me?’
‘It’s because you’re old! Not as old as me, maybe, but old. They don’t want to listen to some balding geezer with the flesh beginning to sag under his chin – no offence – talking about desire and virginity and the life-enhancing power of awakened sexuality. Of course they find it embarrassing!’
I considered this, trying to ignore my wounded vanity. It hadn’t actually crossed my mind as a possible explanation for these awkward silences, but I had to admit it made a depressing sense.
‘This is as per your theory of why older men are vulnerable to accusations of harassment?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘Same deal. Similar, anyway. Older men are going the way of older women. Maybe even overtaking them in terms of perceived repugnance. Power and status aren’t enough to blind people to the liver-spots and age-warts and wrinkles any more. Plus there’s a punitive element: societal revenge. We’ve finally been unmasked as the real villains of history.’
We got off the subway and ambled through Clinton Hill past the old pre-gentrification bodegas with their faded carnival bunting, and the glass-fronted newer establishments, gleaming complacently in the sunshine. Marco appeared to be in an expansive frame of mind. He moved at a leisurely pace, hands in his jeans pockets, his open coat of russet suede hanging in folds either side of him, doubling the width he took up on the narrow sidewalk so that every time we came to one of the thick old blotchy plane trees with gnarled roots breaking through the paving slabs, someone had to stand aside and wait for us to pass.
‘Speaking for myself,’ he said, ‘I’m reconciled to growing old. I embrace it. I’m actually happier, on balance, than I’ve ever been. I felt that way before this crap with Julia started, and I’m starting to feel it again. It does have something to do with sex, I think, in a negative way. I’ve discovered I like not being at the mercy of physical desire the whole time. I don’t lust in the abstract any more; only when occasion demands it, i.e. in bed with Hanan. It’s very nice. I don’t feel I have to make a conquest of every attractive woman I encounter. I don’t have that ridiculous idea that their attractiveness is somehow specifically directed at me, which leaves me much freer to enjoy all the secondary effects of desire – the pleasure of a good conversation, a good meal, a nice painting. I’ve come to appreciate all that, as well as all the little ordinary chores and rituals of life, things I barely noticed before or else regarded as drudgery. Going out in the morning to pick up an espresso and smelling all the neighbourhood smells of cooking, or spring blossoms, or diesel fumes; bumbling off to the gym or a board meeting at the Cinema Collective; watching people going about their lives … I never imagined such humdrum things could be enough to make life worth living, but they’re more than enough. If I were religious, those are the things I’d want to give thanks for. As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s almost worth becoming religious so as to be able to give thanks for them. They fill me with gratitude, and an urge to express that gratitude …’
I thought of pointing out to him that this ‘humdrum’ life of his was what most people would consider the height of leisure and luxury, but I refrained: I disliked falling into the role of purveyor of cold water in his company. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he didn’t already know it.
We reached his house and climbed the steep steps to his front door. There was a commotion going on inside. Alicia and her partner, Erin, were in the first of the adjoining reception rooms with Hanan, all of them laughing loudly. Alicia had a shiny black device strapped on over her eyes attached by cable to a monitor with a stereoscopic image of what looked like the inside of a fairground House of Horror. She was leaping with shock, staggering back as if the floor had just collapsed beneath her, flailing her arms as if to fend someone off (a man with six-inch fingernails and a face like Freddy Krueger had appeared on the monitor), all the while shrieking with terror and dissolving into giggles. Erin stood behind her, catching her as she fell and keeping her from banging the wall as she jerked sideways from her imaginary attackers. Hanan explained what was going on: the mask was a virtual-reality headset. We stood with her for a bit, laughing along, and then Marco noticed a light flashing on the answering machine by the sofa in the next room. He went in through the open archway.
‘Could you guys be quiet a moment?’ he called out. ‘Please?’
Alicia took off the headset, and we lowered our voices. The voice that came spilling out as he hit the playback button silenced us completely. It was high-pitched, unsteady, and filled with a bitter rage so intense it was as if some tormented spirit from the underworld were manifesting itself in the cosy shabbiness of that parlour room.
‘Yes, this is a message for Marco Rosedale. Marco, I want you to know you haven’t succeeded in silencing me. It’s Julia here, by the way, Julia Gault. I’ve found a publisher for my memoir. I’m sure your papa knows her, if you don’t. Renata Shenker. She’s going to publish the whole thing. As a book. Whitethorne Press. The Whitethorne Press. Anyway, I’m making some revisions. I’m going to say you raped me, Marco. Yes. This time I’m going to say it. Because you did. You raped me.’
Marco hung motionless for a moment, bent over the end table as if trying to convince himself the message was just the result of some freakish malfunction of the answering machine. Straightening up, he turned back to the archway and looked at the four of us with a stunned, almost dreamy expression. His daughter had flushed pink. Erin was staring off to the side with an odd smile. Hanan faced him, her eyes glittering as if a mass of thoughts were already firing in rapid succession behind them.
‘Who was that?’ she asked.
Marco seemed unable to answer. He gazed blankly at her, the hawkish set of his features lending a helpless, irrelevant dignity to the shock imprinted on them. I felt his discomfort so acutely that I found myself trying to think up some innocuous explanation for the message. Wrong number … Different Marco Rosedale … Crank call from an old friend with a twisted sense of humour … Before anything plausible came to mind, however, he spoke. His voice was surprisingly calm.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you the whole story. I was hoping not to have to burden you with it, but I see that’s no longer an option.’ He turned to his daughter. ‘You too, sweetheart.’
He beckoned them into the living room. Erin retreated tactfully down the passageway to the basement stairs and I went up to the spare room. I remember feeling surprised and impressed by the stoic courage he appeared to have found in that excruciating moment. But I feared for him all the same. The voice on the machine, so familiar to me and yet so changed, had disturbed me profoundly. It seemed to me Marco was up against a more formidable antagonist than he, or I, had quite realised.