Unwifeable(36)

We walk along farther, to a small stone house in the park.

“I want to show you a trick. It is nice. It is nice,” he says.

He unzips his pants and puts my hand on his dick once more. I feel outmatched. I turn around. “Jerk off on my back,” I say. “I just don’t want to touch you.”

He does, I close my eyes, and we walk away. I’m stunned and disgusted.

“Why are you so quiet?” he asks.

“It’s just confusing being a woman,” I begin.

“Let’s not get into all that,” he says, and then launches into the world’s most boring story about his cell phone provider, and as we walk across the gravel, I am counting steps, grateful for the gift of disassociation.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asks.

“Busy,” I say. I leave him, and walk zombie-like across the street to use the bathroom at the Sherry-Netherland to wash the come off my dress. I am so revolted with him and with myself. Why didn’t I just get out of there? Why was I so willing to dispose of my own sense of safety in order to not create a scene or make a man angry at me?

I tell the story to Mackenzie, who cannot believe it, nor the insulting texts he sends me afterward when I say I don’t want to see him ever again. He says I am a bitch, a typical American, etc. Not only that, but he’s put me on his stupid fucking email newsletter, and every day I get some new message saying that I have not confirmed my membership with a donation to help Africa or something.

I finally write him back on a whim one day. I’m sick of his fucking newsletter with the tagline “Whatever You Can Do or Dream You Can, Begin It.” I don’t want to think about this guy ever again.

“Hoping you’ve been able to keep it in your pants!” I email him back.

He responds immediately in hilariously garbled English, “Ms. Stadtmiller: This letter is to inform you that our database indicates record of your email communications and profanity comments. You are also inform that due to your insanity and unprofessional conducts, you have been deleted from our newsletter list.”

I forward it on to Mackenzie, “I’ve finally been unsubscribed—hooray!”

I write about him in one of my earliest columns and call him Mr. Whip-It-Out.

Three years later, I get a text from Mackenzie: “You know how I have this thing for remembering names . . . Wasn’t that crazy whip-it-out guy named Hugues-Denver Akassy? Because he just got arrested for rape.”

My stomach sinks. Holy shit. I contact Steve, tell him about what happened, and he has me write a story that ends up on the front cover of the newspaper: “A Date with the ‘Rapist.’?” The ejaculation-on-the-back part is withheld—for my sake and for the newspaper’s. “Doesn’t really pass the breakfast test,” Steve explains.

But I am so glad it is deleted—because the next day, I am barraged with the most racist email I have ever received in my life. I’ve been put on some white-supremacist site with the headline “Unattractive Post Reporter Dates N—er Rapist.” The disgusting emails and even letters pour in. I am a ruined, filthy, disgusting woman, my corpse should be spit on, they tell me. I am a race traitor.

But dozens of women also reach out, thanking me profusely and confiding in me their stories. The emails that I have quoted from Hugues in my story were used word for word and sent to them, too. His TV show does not exist. The footage of the interviews he got was stolen from Charlie Rose. These women’s stories matched mine: charmed initially—and then things got scary. Stalking. Abuse. I’m floored.

Shaken, I call my father. We talk for a while, and I tell him how much all of this has upset me. I read him one of the letters from some deranged bigot railing at me, saying he wishes he could spit on my corpse because he is so revolted that I dated a black man. I’m crying as I read it aloud. I don’t know why I am letting this into my psyche. I don’t know why I am digging deeper into the wound, but I can’t seem to stop. I want to show how alone and scared and alienated and attacked I feel. I want to feel protected. I want to feel nurtured and defended and tended to by my daddy, who will guard me from the evil in this world. My father listens patiently. He expresses his disgust. But I do not feel the concern I am so desperately seeking. Instead, I feel distraction, almost indifference, and a practicality that taps into something deeper, younger, rawer inside of me—it’s an ancient wound, and I feel like a neglected, self-pitying child. Is he just purposefully being withholding?

“Please,” I say to my dad at one point, “ask me if I’m feeling okay.”

My father is quiet. And then he speaks.

“You sound okay,” he says flatly.

Of course—I understand, my dad has been through so much. He sees the world through a lens of combat vet brutality. He is right, for sure. I do sound okay. Because I am breathing. Because my eyeball is not dangling out of my head. Because I am not being left for dead in the Vietnamese jungle. This too will pass. And my feeble attempt at trying to express my needs in this moment makes me wish I was a combat marine myself—and not his daughter.

When a Manhattan assistant district attorney gets in contact with me, I’m able to connect her with countless women, which is one good thing that does come out of the experience. But when I go down to talk to the ADA in a corporate conference room on the third floor with Post lawyers present, going point-by-point through what happened (“And what did you do when he pulled out his penis the third time?”), something unexpected happens.