Lost and Wanted(80)

“They should rename it.”

“The theater?”

“And the chair.”

“They’d have to rename a lot of shit.”

I remembered this conversation the spring after Charlie died, when I read that Harvard Law School was changing its crest in response to student protests. The original design came from the coat of arms of one of the school’s initial benefactors, a brutal Antiguan slaveowner. Within a week of that decision, the college also did away with the designation “Master” for the heads of its residential houses. They kept Mather House, named for another of the university’s slaveowning patrons, as well as Agassiz House, Agassiz Theatre, and the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Peering out the window of my college bedroom that night, I didn’t know any of those facts. I was just processing new information about the school I’d been so proud to attend, of which I’d been so anxious to prove myself worthy. It was one of those moments when I knew Charlie was giving me a chance to catch up.

“So what do you want to do?”

“Right now?”

“About this—Pope. I mean, he broke into our house and threatened you.”

“The doors were open, so technically he didn’t break in. And he didn’t say a word, at least after he came inside.”

“But with his body?”

“He didn’t touch me.”

“He trapped you on the couch.”

“And I just sat there.”

“Well, I mean, he’s a man.”

“An old man.”

“He’s not that old.”

Charlie opened her eyes wide and shook her head. I could tell she wanted me to stop talking, but I couldn’t let it go.

    “How long did it last?”

“A minute or two.” She hesitated. “Or longer?”

“So what now? If we’re not going to call the police.”

I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. Charlie was still on the window seat, her long body folded in three parts, her chin resting on her knees. Her eyes were very bright.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she said.





13.


We arranged to borrow Charlie’s friend Brian’s old VW Jetta, and first thing the next morning we set out for Aunt Penny’s house in Gloucester. Penny was Carl’s sister, and Charlie’s favorite aunt. During the week, she shared an apartment with another teacher near the high school in Roslindale, where she taught history, but Gloucester was her real home. Charlie kept a key to the house on her ring, and said we were welcome whether or not Penny was going to be there. But when Charlie called that night, it turned out that Penny was staying in the city for the weekend; she encouraged Charlie to use the house.

Charlie drove at her breakneck, Boston pace, even once we were outside the city. In the car we alternated between Automatic for the People and 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of…and didn’t talk about Pope. We didn’t talk about how the university might have made it easier for students to report unwanted sexual advances from other students or faculty. We didn’t talk about what Trisha might have meant, when she said Charlie was Pope’s type, and we certainly didn’t talk about whether Charlie was going to tell her parents what had happened. I don’t think it ever occurred to either of us that she would.

Maybe today black girls and brown girls and white girls, lesbians and bisexual and trans people sit in their dorm rooms talking about privilege and adjacency and intersectionality. It’s just that it wasn’t like that then. Talking about it would have violated every unspoken rule of our friendship, which was like that game, popular in the nineties, in which you removed rectangular blocks from the base of a tower, adding them to the top. Charlie had the theater, I had the lab; Charlie had her social club, I played intramural soccer; Charlie had a “summer place” in Gloucester, I had a work-study job; Charlie was black, I was white. When that last binary came up, we dismissed it with a kind of eye roll. It was uncool, sort of embarrassing and outdated, to make a big deal about it.

    Instead, on the way up, Charlie asked me about Neel.

“You have to call him,” Charlie said.

“And say what?”

“Invite him up.”

“You mean another weekend?”

“Tonight,” Charlie said. “As soon as we get there. He could take the commuter line to Gloucester.”

“Isn’t that a little—”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s ballsy.”

“Not this weekend, though. You need to recover.”

“Oh, spare me the therapy session—it was no big deal.”

I didn’t think that; I didn’t think Charlie thought it either, but there was a tone I recognized, just a little louder and more flippant than the situation warranted: a warning to back off.

“If there were a bunch of people, maybe.”

Charlie sighed. “I don’t want a bunch of people.”

“Neither do I!”

She looked at me sideways, one hand resting only very casually on the wheel. “But you want him.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes,” Charlie said. “You do.”