Afternoon of a Faun Read online

  “I’d like to make a documentary about these men,” he said one morning, jabbing at the paper. “I think I could get them to talk, and I think they’d have interesting things to say about what it means to be disgraced in this era. They’re all very different of course, but collectively they comprise an interesting anthropological phenomenon. They’re guilty, I don’t question that, except in a few instances, but they’re also functioning as sacrificial figures. We’re entering a phase of political theater not unlike what you had in China and Russia back in the day. The morning denunciation. The noon denial. The evening firing squad. Or in our case just the firing—so far. I’m thinking of ‘The Tarnished’ for a title. How does that sound?”

  “How about ‘The Abusers’?” Hanan said, “or ‘The Harassers’?”

  She’d been sitting quietly next to him, working her phone and combining precisely measured amounts of grain and seed into her cereal bowl, seemingly uninterested in his words. It occurred to me that she still didn’t know anything about his own troubles in this department. I remembered his remark about not wanting to “put her to the test.”

  “That’s not the aspect of their stories I’d want to focus on,” he said.

  “There is no other aspect.”

  She pointed to his newspaper, where a picture of Roger Ailes, all chins and jowls and baldness and bad skin, stared out. “You think people want to hear about how unfairly he’s been treated?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No!”

  He frowned, staring at the photo, and one could practically see the heavy machinery of his interest in this topic grinding through its cycles.

  His daughter, Alicia, emerged from the basement with her girlfriend, both of them groggy from a night on the town. “Morning, Daddy,” she said sweetly, stooping for a kiss on the forehead. The tones and habits of childhood were still second nature to her. I wondered if it had ever crossed her mind that coming nonchalantly to her father’s breakfast table in a t-shirt and shorts with a female lover who, from the pale tuft of beard at her chin, seemed (though Marco hadn’t dared ask) to be switching gender—whether she’d considered that all this constituted a momentous breach with several thousand years of tyrannously inflexible social convention, especially concerning the behavior of marriageable girls. No doubt it had; she was well-informed and curious. She’d graduated from Vassar that summer and had a place lined up at Cornell for a masters in international relations. But she certainly wasn’t burdened by the knowledge. She had the aura of inhabiting an entirely benign cosmos that had always and ever been thus.

  As if finally subdued by the combined effect of his daughter’s innocence and his girlfriend’s skepticism, Marco put down the paper and dropped the subject.

  But later that morning, after they’d all left the house, he started up again, arguing that the condition of being “tarnished” was somehow intrinsically fascinating and worthy of study, and propounding, at some length, a theory that the older a man was, the more vulnerable he was to accusations of harassment, and the less likely to be given any benefit of the doubt, for the simple reason that it was repulsive to imagine older people having sex under any conditions at all.

  I listened with my usual noncommittal expression. As I said, I wasn’t required to agree or disagree, just to provide him with an audience. Also, I genuinely didn’t know what I thought. My opinions about these cases were as unstable as his, lurching between an icy willingness to condemn every accused man without further questioning, and what appeared to be a perverse, atavistic loyalty to the patriarchy that would take hold of me like a temporary seizure, and from which I would emerge stunned at myself. I didn’t trust any of them.

  The documentary idea seemed to fade, but Marco’s agonizings over the subject persisted. They dominated our conversations at dinner when we went out after my class. And they were what prompted him into dragging himself across town for events such as that talk at the Irving Foundation, on rape and memory.

  After the talk ended, Marco and I took the subway back to Brooklyn. We discussed the presentation for a while. Marco made a caustic comment about the slide show, likening the installations to the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and from there we got onto the topic of a new phenomenon I’d noticed among students—namely, a growing reluctance to discuss anything to do with sex.

  “They’ll fall into this embarrassed silence whenever I raise the subject, which is problematic, since that’s what drives most of literature.”

  “Sex?”

  “Well, sex and money. Death too, though death they’re okay with, especially if it has to do with female character sacrifice, which is something they can get righteously indignant about. Money’s tricky since characters who have any are presumed a priori to be villains, which makes nonsense out of most nineteenth-century novels. But sex is impossible. They’ll just clam right up, and if you try to draw them out, you start feeling like some pervy creep in a park.”

  In the crowded A train with its noisy teenage schoolkids primping and posing and flashing their smartphones like mating plumage, I told him about a class I’d taught on Anna Karenina, in which I’d tried to get the students to isolate the psychological principle underlying the opening descriptions of Anna, where Vronsky meets her and starts shifting his allegiances toward her, away from Kitty Shcherbatsky. I’d drawn their attention to Kitty’s extreme virginal reticence, and then pointed them to the contrasting passages where Vronsky and Anna dance the mazurka together, and where Anna takes the train through the blizzard back to her husband in Petersburg. I wanted them to grasp the particular quality of awakened sexuality in Anna that draws Vronsky to her, and the way Tolstoy frames it as something at once powerfully life enhancing and highly dangerous. I’d told them to look at the phrases he uses to describe Anna in that first meeting, those repeated images of barely contained “animation” and of natural desire swelling up against the straitjacket of a dead marriage. Look at the ominous notes of painful pleasure on the train back to the husband she’s about to betray, I’d told them, where she feels as though something were being torn to pieces, but at the same time finds that feeling oddly exhilarating. I’d wanted them to feel how Tolstoy himself felt the iron law of social convention twisting his heroine’s amazing carnal vitality away from life and onto the path of destruction—the death-ward track that supplies the gruesome terms for the big scene of sexual consummation, with its charnel house imagery of murder and hacked bodies, its terrible mixture of “shame, rapture and horror.” But I couldn’t get anywhere. The more I talked about Kitty’s inviolable virginality and Anna’s awakened desire, the more stubbornly silent the students fell, and the more embarrassed they all looked.

  Marco chuckled. “Why do you think that was?”

  “I assume because the whole subject has just become so fraught. They’re terrified of saying something that another student might find offensive or, you know, ‘triggering.’ There are serious consequences for doing that now—actual legal consequences. So they prefer not to say anything at all. Somehow we’ve re-created the taboos of the Victorian Era. Different reasons maybe, but the same anxious squeamishness around the whole topic.”

  Marco was shaking his head.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s it at all.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s you, pal.”

  “Me?”

  “It’s because you’re old! Not as old as me maybe, but old. They don’t want to listen to some balding geezer with the flesh beginning to sag under his chin—no offense—talking about desire and virginity and the life-enhancing power of awakened sexuality. Of course they find it embarrassing!”

  I considered this, trying to ignore my wounded vanity. It hadn’t actually crossed my mind as a possible explanation for these awkward silences, but I had to admit it made depressing sense.

  “This is as per your theory of why older men are vulnerable to accusations
of harassment?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Same deal. Similar, anyway. Older men are going the way of older women. Maybe even overtaking them in terms of perceived repugnance. Power and status aren’t enough to blind people to the liver spots and age warts and wrinkles any more. Plus there’s a punitive element: societal revenge. We’ve finally been unmasked as the real villains of history.”

  We got off the subway and ambled through Clinton Hill past the old pregentrification bodegas with their faded carnival bunting, and the glass-fronted newer establishments, gleaming complacently in the sunshine. Marco appeared to be in an expansive frame of mind. He moved at a leisurely pace, hands in his jeans pockets, his open coat of russet suede hanging in folds either side of him, doubling the width he took up on the narrow sidewalk so that every time we came to one of the thick old blotchy plane trees with gnarled roots breaking through the concrete slabs, someone had to stand aside and wait for us to pass.

  “Speaking for myself,” he said, “I’m reconciled to growing old. I embrace it. I’m actually happier, on balance, than I’ve ever been. I felt that way before this crap with Julia started, and I’m starting to feel it again. It does have something to do with sex, I think, in a negative way. I’ve discovered I like not being at the mercy of physical desire the whole time. I don’t lust in the abstract any more—only when occasion demands it—i.e., in bed with Hanan. It’s very nice. I don’t feel I have to make a conquest of every attractive woman I encounter. I don’t have that ridiculous idea that their attractiveness is somehow specifically directed at me, which leaves me much freer to enjoy all the secondary effects of desire: the pleasure of a good conversation, a good meal, a nice painting. I’ve come to appreciate all that, as well as all the little ordinary chores and rituals of life, things I barely noticed before or else regarded as drudgery. Going out in the morning to pick up an espresso and smelling all the neighborhood smells of cooking, or spring blossoms, or diesel fumes; bumbling off to the gym or a board meeting at the Cinema Collective; watching people going about their lives . . . I never imagined such humdrum things could be enough to make life worth living, but they’re more than enough. If I were religious, those are the things I’d want to give thanks for. As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s almost worth becoming religious so as to be able to give thanks for them. They fill me with gratitude, and an urge to express that gratitude . . .”

  I thought of pointing out to him that this “humdrum” life of his was what most people would consider the height of leisure and luxury, but I refrained: I disliked falling into the role of purveyor of cold water in his company. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he didn’t already know it.

  We reached his house and climbed the steep steps to his front door. There was a commotion going on inside. Alicia and her partner, Erin, were in the first of the adjoining reception rooms with Hanan, all of them laughing loudly. Alicia had a shiny black device strapped on over her eyes attached by cable to a monitor with a stereoscopic image of what looked like the inside of a fairground House of Horror. She was leaping with shock, staggering back as if the floor had just collapsed beneath her, flailing her arms as if to fend someone off (a man with six-inch fingernails and a face like Freddy Krueger had appeared on the monitor), all the while shrieking with terror and dissolving into giggles. Erin stood behind her, catching her as she fell and keeping her from banging the wall as she jerked sideways from her imaginary attackers. Hanan explained what was going on: the mask was a virtual-reality headset. We stood with her for a bit, laughing along, and then Marco noticed a light flashing on the answering machine by the sofa in the next room. He went in through the open archway.

  “Could you guys be quiet a moment?” he called out. “Please?”

  Alicia took off the headset, and we quietened down. The voice that came spilling out as he hit the playback button silenced us completely. It was high-pitched, unsteady, and filled with a bitter rage so intense it was as if some tormented spirit from the underworld were manifesting itself in the cozy shabbiness of the living room.

  “Yes, this is a message for Marco Rosedale. Marco, I want you to know you haven’t succeeded in silencing me. It’s Julia here by the way, Julia Gault. I’ve found a publisher for my memoir. I’m sure your papa knows her, if you don’t. Renata Shenker. She’s going to publish the whole thing. As a book. Whitethorne Press. The White-thorne Press. Anyway I’m making some revisions. I’m going to say you raped me, Marco. Yes. This time I’m going to say it. Because you did. You raped me.”

  Marco hung motionless for a moment, bent over the end table as if trying to convince himself the message was just the result of some freakish malfunction of the answering machine. Straightening up, he turned back to the archway and looked at the four of us with a stunned, almost dreamy expression. His daughter had flushed pink. Erin was staring off to the side with an odd smile. Hanan faced him, her eyes glittering as if a mass of thoughts were already firing in rapid succession behind them.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  Marco seemed unable to answer. He gazed blankly at her, the hawkish set of his features lending a helpless, irrelevant dignity to the shock imprinted on them. I felt his discomfort so acutely that I found myself trying to think up some innocuous explanation for the message. Wrong number . . . Different Marco Rosedale . . . Crank call from an old friend with a twisted sense of humor . . . Before anything plausible came to mind, however, he spoke. His voice was surprisingly calm.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll tell you the whole story. I was hoping not to have to burden you with it, but I see that’s no longer an option.” He turned to his daughter. “You too, sweetheart.”

  He beckoned them into the living room. Erin retreated tactfully down the hallway to the basement stairs and I went up to the spare room. I remember feeling surprised and impressed by the stoic courage he appeared to have found in that excruciating moment. But I feared for him all the same. The voice on the machine, so familiar to me and yet so changed, had disturbed me profoundly. It seemed to me Marco was up against a more formidable antagonist than he, or I, had quite realized.

  Part Two

  1

  LATER THAT FALL my mother had a serious stroke. I flew to England to be with her and my siblings. She’d left instructions not to be kept on life support, and after nine days she died in the hospital.

  As far as I can tell, the emotions prompted in me by these unexpected events had no impact on my reactions to Marco’s story as it continued unfolding, so at the risk of appearing callous I will keep them to myself. In a more practical sense, however, the events themselves did have some effect. For one thing, they brought me to London.

  In the mass of things needing to be done in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death, the task of contacting her friends about the funeral fell to me. Her address book was an enormous gray spring binder, creased and dilapidated, but still bearing the faded insignia of my father’s old firm, where it had originally been prepared. It contained a thick sheaf of old printer paper—the kind you had to pull apart along the perforations after each printing job—interspersed with newer sheets of miscellaneous size, added as need arose. In the years since my father’s death my mother had done her diligent best to keep it up to date, scribbling or whiting out obsolete addresses, ­writing down the new ones in her increasingly unsteady hand, adding email addresses and mobile phone numbers as those things came into existence, crossing out the names of deceased friends with an eloquent single line of ink (apparently she couldn’t bring herself to consign them to total oblivion with the white-out brush), and inserting an occasional more recent acquaintance, sometimes on a thin snippet of fresh paper pasted onto the overcrowded ­original sheet.

  Going through it was an unsettling experience. The names of my parents’ friends, living and dead, already had a certain talismanic significance for me. Together they brought back a powerful aura of that vanished world, which had come to seem about as remote, in my eyes, as that of t
he ancient Greeks and Egyptians, and almost as heroic. That much I could have predicted. What I hadn’t reckoned on was finding myself back in the force field of Marco Rosedale’s saga. It hadn’t exactly been at the forefront of my mind since my mother’s stroke, so it was a surprise to be confronted by the names of so many of its principle players as I turned the pages.

  Marco’s parents, Alec and Gabriella Rosedale, were there, their unchanged information testifying to a rare marital and geographic stability. Renata Shenker, proprietor of Whitethorne Press, was there, along with her neatly crossed-out late husband Otto. And Julia was there, too. She and my mother had of course been close once, but that was at a time before even this ancient tome had been compiled, before personal computers and perforated printing paper had been invented. She’d faded from our lives, and I was under the impression that she and my mother had lost touch.

  But there she was, with a whole inserted page to herself, full of scribbled-out addresses and phone numbers and email addresses, many with question marks or the words “not sure” written beside them. The most recent address was of the house in Maida Vale from which Julia had been evicted after refusing to leave (the owners she’d been house-sitting for were friends of my parents). That was a little over a decade ago, and it appeared my mother’s efforts to keep track of her former protégée had exhausted themselves after this.

  We weren’t planning a big funeral, just family and close friends. Julia, who at one time would have probably been considered both, no longer fell into either category. And yet I found myself trying all the phone numbers on her page. I was aware of an element of idle curiosity in this. The thought of seeing her in person, or at least of talking to her, after all that had gone on with Marco, intrigued me. But I felt a little furtive as I dialed the numbers. I don’t like to think of myself as a busybody, though that in itself doesn’t seem enough to account for this dim sense of wrongdoing. Perhaps I was aware of the dangers of becoming implicated—of shifting from neutral observer of this drama into something more, shall we say, participatory. At any rate I was as much relieved as disappointed, when none of the phone numbers or email addresses worked. No doubt I could have got hold of Julia if I’d really wanted to, but I decided to take these failures as a sign that I should let the matter drop. I hadn’t forgotten her voice on Marco’s answering machine, and I could certainly see the benefits of not confronting its owner.