Habit of Fear (2 page)

SHE WALKED QUICKLY
, unheeding of pace or appearance, her raincoat swinging open, a duffel bag slung from a shoulder strap from which she struggled to free her hair. Let it go, let everything go. Only her anger was real, a rage fueled by her helplessness, humiliation, and something that had to be jealousy. Not to have known … Not to know now where or why or when it happened. Along Sixteenth Street and up Sixth Avenue, she strode through the flower district, where spent roses and irises and baby’s breath lay wilted on the curb. She crossed the street because the light was with her and she could keep on moving. She turned uptown again toward Forty-fourth Street, where she had an office with a hot plate and a cot and chairs and a bathroom to throw up in. Virginia Woolf and her goddamn room of her own. The relief of a moment’s amusement before the pounding anger took over again.

She found herself striding along a street she was pretty sure was in the thirties and too far west for where she wanted to be. The skeletal steel structure of a monster building project crisscrossed the sky. At street level was a wall of boards; in the street itself the giant cranes sat idle, like long-necked beasts dipping their heads to somewhere beyond the reach of her eye. And across the street, wheeled into place where the rubble had not been entirely cleared first, was a caravan of trailers that serviced the construction-site workers. So complete was the Sunday shutdown not even a security guard was in sight. The West Side Highway traffic provided a mobile border to that swatch of deserted city.

The Hudson River lay beyond the highway and, time no longer mattering, she set the river as her immediate destination, wherever she could gain access to a pier. Sky and water and ships that were going out to sea. She thought of an Irish seaman she had known who spouted poetry although he could barely write his name … and she thought of her Irish father, whose very name had been taken from her. … And Jeff with his year abroad—to write a book, et cetera.

She stopped, hearing something at once familiar and, in that setting, strange: she thought she heard an infant crying.

O
R WAS IT A CAT
, perhaps, or a kitten, and what would she do about that? But the cry persisted, and she knew that it was human. It came from behind the nearest trailer, a whimper, then a series of gasps, then silence, then it started over again. She took a few cautious steps among the broken bricks. Nothing about the trailers suggested that some of them might be residential, but that didn’t prove it wasn’t so. Something, someone was alive there.

She stopped and listened for sounds other than the crying. None nearby. She took stock of how far she had come from the street, uneasy. But it was far from a cul-de-sac she was heading for. Beyond the trailers a long vista lay over the leveled rubble, climaxing with the lower-Manhattan skyline, its totems of trade etched into the horizon. A lone figure scratched among the debris with what looked like the shaft of an umbrella. He—or she—turned up bits of treasure and bent an already stooped back to where he could collect his finds and deposit them in a shopping bag. The crying grew more frantic, yet the solitary reaper paid no attention. Deaf, perhaps. Julie moved into the open on the far side of the trailer.

The trailer door was wide open, but there were no steps up to it. In the doorway, bundled in a blanket, the little bald head just visible, was the helpless figure that sounded barely able to cry any longer. And it was about to tumble out onto the ground.

Julie ran, her arms outstretched, to catch the child before it fell. The instant she saw that it was a doll, not a child, she tried to stop. But it was too late.

A man’s hand shot out from the side and caught hold of her hair before she could pull back. He made a twist of it round her neck and at the same time compelled her forward and clapped his hand over her mouth. The scream was stopped in her throat. A second man clutched her arm, her bag, her clothes, whatever he could hang onto. The two of them dragged her up and into the trailer. She kicked and swung out at them and tried to use the karate she’d studied years before. But there was no time, no way she could position herself. Panic. She could not even swallow. Fear was stuck, a lump in her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She was flung to the floor, facedown. One man jumped astride her and again clapped his hand over her mouth. The hand was soft and sickening with a putrid smell—vomit, stale medication.

“If you promise to shut up you won’t get hurt. Hear me?”

He was leaning over her, his face close to hers. He was wearing a stocking mask, but she could smell stale beer and more vomit, and she tried to turn her head away.

He spoke to his partner: “For Christ’s sake shut the door. What’s the matter with you?”

“The lock’s broke. We broke the goddamn lock.”

“Get something you can tie it up with. Jesus.”

Julie tried to beat on the floor. He raised himself and then thumped down on her back. She moaned at the pain in her ribs and breasts. That made him do it again, riding further up on her. He took his hand away from her mouth, but only to grasp her throat with both hands. She gagged with the pressure and the pain. He let up the pressure. “Promise you won’t scream?”

She nodded. She couldn’t scream if she tried. She opened her eyes and saw his hands: white, very white, with little clumps of black hairs on the fingers. She could see the open door, but no more of the outdoors than a fringe of distant skyline. Eye level was the doll where it had been kicked aside. She saw the other man for a second or two against the sky. He, too, was wearing a mask, and he waddled or was lame. He made a slipknot around the knob with an electric extension cord. She could not see where he fastened the other end in the near darkness.

She said the prayer of her childhood, the Lord’s Prayer, and closed her eyes, waiting. Her mouth was dry, and the foul taste had to be of fear. But the panic had passed. She was able to remember a detective she’d heard lecture on rape and how he’d driven home the point again and again: don’t fight it. Don’t resist. It’s your life that matters most. Save it. … Don’t fight. Don’t resist …

The lame one, if he was lame, had a knife. While they pulled off her clothes, he slashed through buttons, straps, whatever obstructed them. To make her shape up, to take whatever position suited them best, he kept pricking her with the small sharp blade. They helped one another clumsily, obscenely. One sodomized her. The pain bolted into her head, all that way, with every thrust. When she passed out, they revived her. The knifer raped her, the pain just as bad, its source so close to the other wound. When conscious, she feigned unconsciousness and tried to concentrate on color, sunsets, Cezanne, oranges.

When they were finished with her, they bound and gagged her with pieces of her clothing they pulled out of her duffel bag. The smell of semen and sweat made her retch and choke under the gag. The sodomist removed the gag to let her vomit and get her breath. Then he gagged her again. He threw her coat over her and over her head something that smelled of dampness and mold. The doll’s blanket, she thought.

She lay utterly still. They did not speak except to make sounds of urgency to one another. When the door opened, she could see a speck of light. It vanished when the door closed. She watched for the light to appear again. When it didn’t she knew that they were gone.

With her first attempt to move she almost passed out again. After that she plotted every change of position before she tried it. First she got her head out from under the blanket and studied the contents of the trailer. A table and several folding chairs. A naked unlighted bulb hung over the table. Thin, horizontal ribs of daylight streaked the ceiling, seeping through the upturned slats of the blinds. She watched for some time until a shadow moved across the ceiling. She made a noise, but from behind the gag, it wasn’t much of a noise. Nor was the thump of her head on the floor.

She turned her attention to the door. Reason told her that if they had had to fasten it closed from inside, they must have pushed it closed after them on something to make it hold when they left, a thickness of flexible material, rags, say, or folded paper. On her side, moving with care, she inched toward the door. Her hands, tightly bound, were getting numb. So were her feet. She tried to sit up and flung herself down again with the pain. Even more cautiously then, on her back, she eased close and pushed on the door with her feet. The wedge ought to have fallen but it didn’t, and the pain again became more than she could handle. She rested and shepherded her strength. When she was reasonably sure of not passing out before the impact, she gathered her feet, her knees to her chest, and let them fly at the door. When it swung open, she hauled her feet back into the trailer and let the wracking pain ease off. With the fullness of light she could see her own body. Some of the knife pricks had gone in deeply. Some wounds were blood-caked, some still oozing. She tried to reach one on her breast with her tongue. Nausea. She stank all over. Sweat drenched her body, chilled and revived her. She scanned the wasteland for the vagrant with the shopping bags. Gone. She thought of trying to reach the ground. To try to hop? Even the thought was excruciating. She couldn’t even handle the pain when she tried to reach the strap with which her ankles were bound. Nor could she use her numb fingers until she had pressed her wrists even more tightly together and gradually brought the pins and needles and then the feeling back into her hands. Lying on her side, she began to work her thumbs beneath the gag. She bruised her lips but managed to get one thumb into her mouth. She intended to use her teeth as a fulcrum against which to stretch the gag. And the plan was working when she discovered the consolation of having her thumb in her mouth: it gave her such comfort that she closed her eyes and for a little while was mother to herself.

The tardy watchman found her that way.

J
ULIE HAD RIDDEN ONCE
before in a car with the sirens screaming—when she’d been taken to the morgue by the police to identify a murder victim. It drifted through her mind that if she needed identification, they would call Jeff. No.

She must have said the word aloud, for someone reassured her. “It’s going to be all right. You’re safe now.” She opened her eyes and a young medic riding on the jump seat winked at her solicitously. “They’ll get the bastards.”

How, she wondered, did he know there was more than one?

There were many things she wondered as she drifted in and out of sleep in the hours and days that followed. She wondered at the meanings of the various medical attentions. A stubborn infection set in from the several knife wounds. The doctors were having trouble keeping her temperature down. They’d taken to calling her Sebastian. “How’s my little Sebastian this morning?” Neither males nor saints appealed to her. She kept silent. She wondered how Dr. Callahan came to be sitting at her bedside one day when she opened her eyes. How many appointments had she had to cancel to be there? She wondered how Jeff felt, how he really felt, trying to hold her hand. She took it away and hid it beneath the sheet. How had they first come to know? Was it the newspapers? On television …
Gossip columnist raped. … Wife of noted newspaper
c
olumnist. …
She didn’t want to speak to anyone and didn’t. Except to the police, who came regularly to prod her for just a little more information. And any help she could give in identifying her attackers could save other women from her experience. She tried to care, to sort out why it had happened to her. Any woman would have done them, the female of any species. And there came the moment when the police therapist tried to get through to her by assuring her that her husband, an intelligent, understanding man, would not reject her because of what had happened. Julie looked at the woman, grimly amused.

“You’d be surprised,” the therapist said, oozing kindness.

So would you, Julie thought, but she said nothing.

She wasn’t even curious about all the flowers, from whom or from where they’d come. She did like one arrangement that arrived without any card at all, tiny golden roses. “They don’t even look real,” the nurse said.

Nothing much did.

When the infection healed and it was time for her to leave the hospital, she became the very model of cooperation. She intended to prove her competence; under no circumstances did she intend to return to Sixteenth Street. A friend from the Actors’ Forum came and camped with her for a few days at Forty-fourth Street. The greatest healer was making living quarters out of the shop. The waves of revulsion came more rarely. She could generally turn them aside before they swamped her. Which was not so with the almost constant rage over the Jeff situation. She was sick of her own anger, but she could not escape it. She needed help. It was funny how much better she felt just admitting it. Dr. Callahan gave up a lunch hour to see her right away.

I
T DID NOT SEEM
like old times. Not at all. Except for the long silence between them before she was finally able to say, “Jeff wants a divorce.”

“Let’s talk about it,” the doctor said, which was more than she had used to say, even to get things going. Jeff had said she would be supportive, and as usual, he was right.

Julie declined the couch. That way she was able to talk. “I don’t mean he wants it because of what happened to me. I’m not laying that on him. But I keep thinking that’s why it happened. I went crazy when he said it, wild, you know—out of control. The very things I didn’t want to say I kept saying over and over. The only way I could stop was by getting out of the house.”

“What did you say that you didn’t want to say?”

“Things like ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Or, ‘What am I going to do?’”

“Why was that such a terrible thing to say?”

“I wanted it to be me who asked for the divorce.”

“Oh,” the doctor said, drawing the sound out almost mockingly. Was it the truth? Julie wondered. It felt like it. “So why didn’t you do it?”

“I couldn’t. I was afraid to. I’m not sure what I’m saying is true, doctor. I can’t remember thinking seriously of divorce until Jeff brought it out in the open. I feel I did, but that’s not knowing. I’m not making sense, am I?”