I THOUGHT I WAS LESS CONFUSED
I think everyone was confused about the situation, but I thought I was less confused than everyone else about the assault. I am so confused as to why I said that—seeing as how I didn’t think our friends were really thinking about the assault. My college boyfriend was. I knew that much, because he expressed confusion and anger about my apparent lack of anger. I never should have insisted he meet Mark.
For my thirty-fourth birthday, Chris’s mom mails me a mood ring.
This is so perfect, I tell Chris.
And I didn’t even tell her, he says, that we’d been joking about this.
I put it on. According to the ring, I’m mad.
Two minutes later, I’m not.
A minute later, I am.
Now I’m not.
My advisor put his hand between my legs while I wore clothes.
Mark put his hand between my legs after he removed my clothes.
My other friend pinned me down and raped me after he removed my clothes.
I tell myself the progression is meaningless. Just a coincidence. I consult the ring. It’s yellowish. According to the color/mood chart, I feel either imaginative or unsettled mixed emotions. Is the ring questioning my memory, alleging that I’m imagining all of this? No, no, of course not. It’s reassuring me that my emotions are indeed unsettled and mixed.
Now the ring is telling me I’m calm and relaxed. Either the ring is broken, or I’m broken. Or it’s a novelty item and I should stop investing so much energy in analyzing it.
Like me the night of the assault, the ring has no agency.
I wonder if Mark used me like a mood ring. Suddenly, he could see how angry he was. Angry about his virginity. So angry that he’d hurt one of his closest friends. It’d be easier to say that Mark wasn’t thinking about my feelings that night. But I had been crying about my dad’s death, crying about what my newspaper advisor had done to me. Mark, I’m sure, was thinking about my feelings. He selfishly used them to his advantage. I don’t care if I don’t have proof of his emotions that night.
I take off the ring. I’m mad.
. . .
ME: It’s tricky. You’re in a tough rhetorical position. This is a hypothetical, but if you had a son, how would you—I’m not saying come up with a solution, but I guess what do you think leads to teenage boys forgetting impulse control and making decisions like this?
HIM: I think part of it is unique to my own personal experience, but I think—let me see if I can come up with an answer here that makes any kind of rational sense. My family writ large does not communicate emotion well and my experience with it has been basically, Well, I’ll not talk about it and not talk about it and not talk about it and not deal with something until it just erupts and then it’s like a dam breaking and who knows what direction—who knows what collateral damage you’ll get. So I think if I had a son, I would try to get him to be more open than I was, or am, and deal with his feelings and emotions directly. But I also don’t plan on having children.
ME: Boys are often taught to suck it up and be a man, and I think of how damaging that has been for everyone involved. Do you also think—I mean, you and I were such good friends. Did any part of you feel like, I’ve been there for her so much, this was—
HIM: Well, I think what you’re trying to ask me is did I think I deserved some sort of sexual accommodation, which, I don’t really think so. I think definitely I wanted to figure out a way to move our relationship to an actual relationship and not just a friendship, but—
ME: You weren’t sure how to express that.
HIM: Right. Because I couldn’t even say, certainly at the time I couldn’t even express, that I did like you in that way, let alone—I’m still not good at talking about it.
ME: It’s hard to talk about. I’m asking you questions like, What sort of pornography did you watch in high school? and Did any of it portray nonconsensual sex? It’s okay.
HIM: I’ll admit to having been a little caught off guard by that, but it’s not an unreasonable place to start.
ME: But you think a lot of it goes back to: you didn’t know how to express how you felt.