Afternoon of a Faun Read online

  “No,” Marco corrected him, “I probably did sleep with her that night. I’m not disputing that we had a fling. But it certainly didn’t happen the way she describes it.”

  That “probably” of his was a mistake; at any rate it gave Sauer a little crack to slither through. “Do please correct me if I’m wrong,” he emailed back, “but it sounds as though there’s some uncertainty in your memory about the events of that night. Is that in fact the case?” To which Marco retorted impatiently: “Of course there’s some uncertainty about that night! It was forty years ago! But I’m damn sure whatever happened was fully consensual.” Already he was beginning to feel pestered—angry at being drawn in even this far. “I understand, of course,” Sauer wrote soothingly, “memories can be slippery, can’t they? As I said, we’d be very open to something by you presenting your side of the story. We’re always terribly concerned to be balanced. Do please let me know if you’d like to write a riposte of some sort. Perhaps you might want to remind people that all kinds of behaviors we condemn now were considered perfectly acceptable in those days. I think that’s a point of view many of our readers would sympathize with.”

  Enraged, Marco typed: “Go fuck yourself you slimy sewer rat. All I have to say is that if you print this, I’ll sue you and your shitty excuse for a newspaper for every penny you’re worth.”

  He deleted the words, however. He wasn’t the son of a barrister for nothing; he understood the dangers of emailing abuse and threats to a newspaper features editor who already appeared to be out for his blood. Instead he wrote, “Thanks, but my point is that I never indulged in those ‘behaviours’: never wanted to, never needed to, never felt they were ‘acceptable’ even in ‘those days.’ As I said in my first email, the article is defamatory. Really I have nothing further to add.”

  There was no immediate reply, and after a while Marco began to feel cautiously hopeful that his point had been taken. Libel laws being stricter in England than the States, he knew the ­Messenger would have to be careful. It seemed possible this man Sauer had genuinely thought he might not mind the article, and that Marco had scared him off just by showing that he did. Sauer’s response, when it finally came, didn’t entirely dispel this optimism: “Thank you for this, Marco, enormously appreciated. As I say, just wanted to take your temperature. Will discuss with my senior editor tomorrow. Have a good night!”

  Marco slept reasonably well (he remembered this because it was the last good night’s sleep he got for several weeks), but in the morning he found an email from Sauer in his inbox. “Hello Marco, we do feel Julia has a right to tell her side of this important story and are inclined to press ahead on the basis of that, but we equally feel you should have an opportunity to defend yourself. I’m attaching a suggested snapshot about you, listing your considerable accomplishments in I trust acceptable terms, though do please feel free to revise as you see fit, and we are more than happy to offer you equal space with Julia to comment however you choose, within reason. Greatly looking forward to your thoughts about this.”

  The “snapshot” described Marco in ingratiating terms, making him sound far more successful than he really was. He was flattered for a moment, but soon realized that in the context of the proposed article itself, the flattery would merely make readers dislike him even more than they were going to anyway. What really unsettled him, however, was the opening: “Marco Rosedale, son of eminent barrister Sir Alec Rosedale QC . . .”

  Having lived half his life in the United States, Marco sometimes forgot what a considerable personage his father still was in British cultural and political circles. Even now, in his nineties, the old man was something of a public figure, lending his name to progressive causes and occasionally appearing as a guest on TV shows, where he cut a figure of simple dignity: white-haired, mild-eyed, his mind as alert as it had ever been, his sympathies for the downtrodden undimmed. Marco revered him, but preferred not to define himself in terms of his distinguished paternity, and it was always a bit of a shock to him when other people did. On this occasion, along with the shock, came a sudden suspicion of why the Messenger was so interested in publishing Julia’s tale. Dirt on a well-known, well-respected name. Just the kind of sleazy exercise English newspapers liked to indulge in on behalf of their readers; the more respected their target, the better.

  I’m not sure I agreed this was their sole motive. Julia had had her own celebrity moment (albeit briefly and long ago), and Marco himself was not a totally unknown commodity, so there was some scandal mileage in each of them in their own right. But no doubt the connection to Sir Alec helped. Either way, the thought of his father getting dragged into this was upsetting to Marco for all sorts of reasons. He’d always had a sense of himself as somehow questionable, dubious even, compared to his father: generationally inferior you could say; condemned, by historical forces if not personal inclination, to be looser and loucher. So the accusations touched a nerve. Then, too, he was just plain mortified; ashamed at the prospect of his father seeing him engulfed in this miasma that seemed to be moving toward him, wafting like a bad smell out of Sauer’s emails.

  He steeled himself for battle, resolving not to trouble his old man’s peace, even though he could have used his advice.

  3

  THE FIRST I HEARD of all this was in May of 2016, when Marco called me upstate and invited himself for the weekend: “I need to talk to you about something . . .”

  He was wearing one of his usual casually dapper outfits when I picked him up at the train station—dark jacket over a mustard turtleneck, English cords tapering to grained leather boots. But he looked pretty ragged all the same: eyes bloodshot, gray-brown stubble blurring the normally clean lines of his chin and cheekbones.

  “I haven’t slept for a month,” he said, catching the look on my face.

  “How come?”

  “Tell me something. Have you been following these sexual harassment dramas in the news?”

  “You mean like . . . Bill Cosby?”

  “Cosby, Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jian Ghomeshi . . . Do you follow them?”

  I felt a shade apprehensive.

  “Some, a little. Why?”

  “What interests you about them?”

  “I mean, they’re all very different from each other, aren’t they?”

  “In what way?”

  “Well . . . I suppose with some it’s just the fascination of hearing about appalling behavior . . .”

  He nodded gloomily. “And others?”

  “Maybe something more like a suspense novel? Guilty or not guilty? The mystery of what happens between two people in a room. I think I prefer that kind.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess because there’s no basis for an objective judgment, which means the onus of belief is entirely on the believer.”

  I had a foreboding, as I spoke, of what he was about to tell me—the gist of it if not the details. It stirred an odd mixture of reactions: empathy, but also something more like self-protectiveness. Certainly I didn’t want to indicate any willingness to be recruited in support of some defunct male prerogative, if that was where this was going.

  “The onus of belief . . .” Marco repeated, thoughtfully. “What does that mean, ‘the onus of belief is on the believer?’ ”

  I’d blabbed out the words without thinking, but I did my best to make sense of them: “Well, you make a judgment one way or the other, because that’s how the mind works. It’s geared toward judgment, presumably because life requires decisions to be made, constantly and rapidly. But in these kinds of situations there’s no solid basis for judgment other than your own assumptions and prejudices. So you’re forced up against yourself, your own mysteries. I like that kind of story.”

  We drove in silence for a bit. The wooded mountainsides either side of the state highway were coming into leaf—powdery sprays of pale pink and green. I’d always thought these spring colors, subtler than their fall equivalents but just as varied, weren’t properly appreciated, but
I refrained from comment. Marco clearly hadn’t come up to talk about the scenery.

  I want to be accurate about the nature of our friendship. It had begun ten years earlier, when I’d recognized him at a party in New York. I still had some vestige of my old teenage sense of him as a heroic figure, which made me deferential, which in turn seemed to make him comfortable. Anyway, we hit it off. The fact that I was no more successful in my sphere than he was in his, probably helped—he could be prickly with people doing obviously better than he was. For my part I was always glad, in my somewhat isolated life, to make a new friend. More positively, I liked his cast of mind, which was detachedly curious and cheerfully unillusioned. That our fathers had both been prominent figures in the London we’d left behind (mine was a well-known architect), gave us plenty to talk about. Also, we’d both been Englishmen-on-the-make in New York at one time, and some of the old fun of that game revived itself when we were together. I began spending Wednesday nights at his house in the fall, when I taught in New York. These weekly stayovers were something I looked forward to, and I think he did, too. In return for his hospitality I’d take him out to his favorite restaurant on Gates Avenue where they kept a taleggio risotto with chicken liver on the menu just for him (or so they told him), and we’d usually be nattering till long after they closed the kitchen. So in that way we were good friends—pals. On the other hand, we’d connected too late in life to form the kind of really deep bonds that transcend all other considerations. There were limits—we hadn’t tested them, but they surely existed—to what either of us might be willing to endure or sacrifice for the other. It wasn’t an elemental relationship, in other words, though in a way this made it more interesting. One gets a taste for impure things, as one gets older.

  “Well, anyway,” he said as we turned off the highway, “I have one of those stories for you. The mystery kind. Starring me.”

  4

  HE’D SKETCHED the outlines by the time we arrived at the house. Caitlin, my wife, was in the dining room, sorting through a delivery of wine. Rows of freshly unpacked bottles stood before her on the table, glittering in the sunlight. She liked organizing things and she liked wine, so she was in excellent spirits. She liked Marco, too. His good looks and slight air of dissipation brought out a sort of answering rakishness in her. She’d had a wild youth herself, before we got married, and she enjoyed being reminded of it.

  “I’m plotting out the drinks’ menu for today and tomorrow,” she said. “I thought we’d build up to something really stellar. Maybe these Volnays?”

  Marco was always pleased to see her, though I sensed he was wary of discussing his situation in front of her. He hadn’t told Hanan, for instance, his girlfriend of four years. “You don’t know how people are going to react,” he’d explained in the car. “Hanan especially. She may be supportive or she may decide she has some obligation of sisterly solidarity with Julia. I don’t want to put her to the test if I can avoid it.”

  We talked about other things at lunch, mainly what Caitlin was going to do with her life now that our kids had left for college and the demands of motherhood were tapering off. Marco, who’d always seemed genuinely intrigued by her decision to become a full-time mother, participated valiantly. But as he was quizzing her on her various pre-motherhood jobs, she interrupted him, putting her hand on his arm:

  “It’s nice of you to be interested, Marco, but what’s going on with you? You don’t seem happy.”

  He hesitated, before nodding.

  “You’re right. I’m not. I’m about to have my life destroyed.”

  The three of us spent the rest of the day talking about it. When it grew chilly in the kitchen we moved into the living room and lit a fire. At intervals Caitlin went over to the dining room table, and, after carefully reinspecting the bottles, chose one to suit the drift of conversation, and refilled our glasses.

  In concrete terms, what had happened since Sauer’s email inviting Marco to write something to “defend” himself, was a protracted standoff.

  “The invitation smelled like a trap to me,” he said, “a way of getting my implied consent to publish the excerpt. My instinct was still to say no. They’re nervous of being sued, I could sense that, and I didn’t want to do anything to make them less nervous. Also I didn’t want to give any legitimacy to the idea that there really are two sides to this story, which there are not. I know I can’t expect anyone, including you guys, to just take that on trust. You can’t not have doubts. I understand that. I’m not asking for belief anyway, just advice. And maybe some pity! But I certainly wasn’t going to give any ground on it. On the other hand, I felt I should keep my options open in case they decided to print the fucking thing anyway . . .”

  He’d skirted the issue, ignoring Sauer’s invitation and simply restating that the article was defamatory. His curt email produced another promising silence. Two whole days passed, and then Sauer wrote: “Marco, I hear your concern. Definitely don’t want to publish anything defamatory. Running the piece through legal and will get back to you. Thanks ever so for your patience!”

  “He sounds kind of creepy,” Caitlin said.

  Marco nodded.

  “Anyway, a couple more days pass and then he sends this.” He read from his phone:

  “Marco, Legal feel the piece is not defamatory and so we want to go forward with publication. Have you by chance given further thought to writing something from your side? We want to offer you every opportunity to put your own case if you dispute Julia’s version of events. Think our readers will find the two perspectives on this fascinating. As said, we’re happy to give you equal space, and can assure you we won’t edit (though just bear in mind we’re a ‘family’ newspaper!!).”

  “How could their legal department just unilaterally decide it wasn’t defamatory?” I asked. “It’s not like they have any way of proving it, I assume?”

  “Of course not,” Marco said, frowning. “Frankly I thought they were bluffing. I still do. It doesn’t make sense. This is the kind of thing juries award millions in damages for. I might come out of this a pariah but there’s a good chance I’ll be an extremely rich pariah.”

  “You could move up here, Marco,” Caitlin said. “We’d still socialize with you.”

  He smiled. “On the other hand, maybe there’s something I’m just not seeing. I’m not a lawyer, after all. I’d have asked my dad for his advice, but I don’t want him dragged into this . . . But I did draft a long email to this outfit in London that deals with complaints against the press. I haven’t sent it yet because I don’t want to spread the story around, even to them, if I don’t have to. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to drop their name to Sauer, so I emailed saying I was going to ask Ipso—that’s their name; Independent Press something or other—what they thought about my writing this riposte, and that I’d get back to him.”

  “Good move,” I said.

  “Well, it did seem to rattle him.”

  Sauer’s reply offered a minor concession: after further consultation with “Legal,” he’d asked Julia to take out the sentence about lying naked underneath Marco on the hotel bed, and she’d agreed. “Less explicit that way,” Sauer wrote, “and we hope you feel that makes it acceptable. Planning to go to press end of month so you have another three plus weeks. Very hopeful you’ll send us something to accompany this lighthearted but important article. Think it over!”

  There’d been a few more rounds of brinkmanship since then, but that was more or less where things stood that weekend. No commitment from Marco to write a response; no further concessions from Sauer except for an attempt at financial enticement (“fee could be negotiable if that helps”) to which Marco hadn’t deigned to respond; and a clock apparently ticking.

  I haven’t conveyed the discomfort Marco was in as he recounted all this. Despite the sardonic humor he maintained, it was clearly intense; present in his wracked expression, in the pitch of his voice, in the flinching, frowning, jerking-back motion that periodically seized h
im: a sort of excruciated recoil, as if from some unsavory presence continually encroaching on his private space. He’d convinced himself that Sauer was acting out of purely cynical, gutter-journalism motives; that his claim to believe Julia’s article was “important” was hypocritical crap; his proof being the half-heartedness with which Sauer actually made this claim. He believed this half-heartedness was intentional; a deliberate, jeering signal that Sauer didn’t in fact give a damn whether the piece was “important,” or even true; that along with the prospect of a juicily salacious story, he was enjoying himself making Marco writhe. There was the business about knocking his father also, Marco believed, and bound up with that, possibly, a class-war element, with Sauer, definitely not a beneficiary of a private education judging from his writing style, reveling in having got a son of privilege into his grimy clutches. Again, I wasn’t sure I agreed with every aspect of the analysis—Marco was always a little quick to read class warfare into his exchanges with other Brits—but I could see how Sauer’s oily pretense of concern could get under his skin.

  “Almost the worst of it,” he said, “aside from not being able to sleep, is not being able to think about anything else. As you can see I’ve become a complete monomaniac. Even if my friends and colleagues don’t shun me for being a sexual predator, they’ll do it for being a crashing bore. Listen to me! I haven’t even asked about your kids! How are your kids?”