Consent

The package sat, unopened, on the coffee table.

It had been there for days. Through sun and rain and summer thunderstorms. Next to it was a fat candle from Pottery Barn that I’d bought on sale and a stack of books I was reading for graduate school. In front of the table was an old, wood-framed couch. I’d thrown a thick blanket over it to hide its cheap cushions, stained from former occupants of my university-issue apartment, with its cinder-block walls and tall bright windows that I loved with all my heart. It was the first place I’d ever had all to myself. Behind the table was the hulking television set I’d won during my first year of college and had lugged around for years. It was from my residence-hall lounge, and the RAs had raffled it off at the end of the semester. I was the lucky winner they’d pulled from the hat.

The package was thin, a rectangular manila envelope, my address handwritten on the front in careful script. Its contents could have been anything. Happy photos of friends or pictures from a wedding. But there was an article sealed within that dull yellow envelope. The draft of one.

I knew this because the author, who was also my mentor, told me so, along with his directive that I read the essay inside of it, that he needed me to read it. I would be a bad person, a bad student, a bad friend if I ignored this duty as I’d ignored so many other needs and requests from him lately.

He sent it to me on the day he left for a monthlong trip. It was the end of July, it was hot and humid, the blacktop outside my apartment literally steaming with the heat. He called to inform me the article was on its way, that I had the entire month to get to it. Maybe he believed that lack of time or warning was behind my failure to read anything else he’d sent recently. Maybe he thought that allowing me a whole month was a kindness.

During the four weeks he was away, he called to ask if I was reading, if I had already read. He called over and over and scolded when it became clear that I had not yet fulfilled this simple obligation. Time was running out, August was waning, and I hadn’t even opened the envelope.

“Don-na,” he’d say over the phone in that singsong way he always spoke my name. “I’m coming home. I want to be able to talk about this when I get back.”

Why, why, why? I wondered, silently, as I promised him—because I did promise him—that I would get to it soon, maybe today. Why me? I was a nobody graduate student. He was an important professor, famous in certain circles. Didn’t he have colleagues whose opinions he could solicit? Why did he care about mine?

By then I knew the answers to my own questions. The desperation in his voice was evidence enough. But still, the knowledge was murky and vague, fearful and suspicious. I’d pushed it deep into the recesses of my brain, done my best to kill it. I was in denial and I relished this denial, so fierce and powerful that it was almost magnificent.

As I sat there, watching television on my couch, that ugly manila envelope taking up space on my table next to the remnants of my latest take-out dinner, a part of me was still hopeful that I was wrong; that the nagging feeling consuming my insides would turn out to be a product of my melodramatic imagination.

Day after day I rose from bed, walked out into my living room, wishing that the envelope had vanished overnight. But no, it sat there, among my things, just steps from my hideous Pepto-Bismol–colored kitchen, where I cooked lavish dinners for friends, for my RA staff, for myself. Seeing the envelope each time I came in the door was like discovering someone had left a ticking time bomb in my apartment while I was out buying Advil at CVS. I would agonize over its presence in my house and my life, doing my best to disarm it.

It was just an article. An innocent thing. A stack of papers, typed up and printed out and stapled together. Strings of words in black and white. What was I afraid of? What, really, was the big deal? I read articles all the time. I was a graduate student, a voracious reader. Reading was my calling, my purpose, my joy.

Just do it already, my mind would push, one minute. But I don’t want to, it would tug, the next. Come on, Donna, I would admonish myself. It’s not like an article can actually hurt you. It’s not like it’s packed with knives and bullets and poison.

Back and forth, back and forth went this spiral of thoughts. As the days marched forward, the questions of how I’d gotten to this place, and whose fault it was, plagued me. Whose responsibility was it, really? Mine? His? The answer was so hard to parse out, but parse it out I did, and then I did again.

I allowed the article in my house. (Consent?) I placed it on the coffee table. (Also consent. Right?) I answered the phone when he called, pleading with me. (Consent, technically. But there was no caller ID back then, so maybe not?) I made him promises that I would read. (Is there consent when there is also cringing? When he is begging?) But I also resisted touching that yellow envelope. (I did not want to consent to it.) I didn’t open it for nearly a month. (This was a silent no. But do silent nos count?) I scowled when I looked at it. (A bodily gesture of resistance. But then, it wasn’t like he was in the room and could see me scowling. Thank God.) I did my best to ignore its presence, its persistence, I didn’t move it, didn’t touch it, not at first. (Does the absence of a response imply a yes?)

The mere sight of the article on my coffee table filled me with a dread so profound I’m not sure I can ever convey its depths. Words are not enough. Then again, shouldn’t I have used my words? Shouldn’t it have been that easy, just saying the word no loud and clear and true like a bell?

I waited until the day before he returned from his trip to open the envelope, to take out the article, to actually touch it with my fingers. I held it as if I might be allergic to the paper, averting my eyes. It was like readying myself to take the most disgusting medicine in the history of the world, medicine you know is going to make you sick but somehow you have to get it down your throat. You have to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and swallow it, then do your best to distract yourself from such a pervasive level of disgust that you know gagging and retching are inevitable.

I turned on the television so there was noise around me, so it felt like there were other people nearby. I didn’t want to be alone with it, not any bit of it, not the envelope, the paper, the article, not the words on the pages.

Then, finally, I started.

After so much resistance, I let my eyes settle on the first word and then the second and the third, until I was allowing them inside my brain, inside my body, where they would cohere into sentences that would take on meaning. I convinced myself that after so much melodrama I was about to find out the article was as benign as the stack of books I read for my classes, that soon I would be laughing at how silly I’d been to make such a big deal over nothing, that I would be rolling my eyes at the way I’d fought this article off as though it were a mugger in a dark alley. I’d realize that the author really did mean well, that he had no ulterior motives or harmful agenda.

I waited for the relief to hit, for the cool wave of it to flow through me in the oppressive August heat.

But as those words entered me one by one, piling up into a massive heap of sentences that became paragraphs that became sections, it turned out that the article was poison after all, that it really was going to make me sick. So ill that I got up from my couch and lay down flat on my back on the floor of my apartment, holding my stomach.

The article was a confession of love.

But it wasn’t a direct confession. There was no Dear Donna at the beginning, or sentences that included the words I’ve lately realized that I’m in love with you. He’d told me he loved me without telling me directly, while cloaking it in a lengthy, lofty reflection—no, an honoring—of a real-life love between an older man, a famous writer and thinker, and a young woman thirty years his junior, with whom this man began a passionate and clandestine affair, one that was revealed to the public only many years after his death. The essay was about forgiving this man the transgression of loving the younger woman, of pursuing her, of being unable to stop himself from doing so, from corralling his desires. The article justified his love for her, praised it as virtuous, even divine, and exulted in the fact that she reciprocated that love, forbidden as it was to both of them because the man was also a priest. I imagine my mentor believed this was the ultimate romantic gesture, to craft an essay about the love he felt for me, but to do so metaphorically. To invite me into a sexual relationship through the poetry of a well-written paper. For him, a deeply thought-out intellectual essay was the equivalent of a sonnet.

It was sneaky and convoluted and, ultimately, cowardly, though it was like everything else that he did, which was also sneaky and convoluted and just indirect enough to leave me doubtful, to make me question my instincts, my judgment, my intuition, that something was deeply wrong with his behavior toward me. His movements were always just shy of obviously inappropriate, they were always potentially completely innocent; acts that could be interpreted as overtures of something romantic, yet that also could be misinterpreted as such.

There was always room for doubt with him, and this was part of his talent as a stalker of me.

Eventually I got up from the floor and sat on the couch again. I tossed the papers onto the coffee table and they fanned across it, obscuring the cheap wood. My dread ballooned outward to encompass the entire apartment, oozing through the screens of my open windows and poisoning the humid summer air.

What was I going to do? What was my plan?

He was going to call me the second he returned home and push for a face-to-face meeting so we could “discuss” his article. Not answering the phone wouldn’t do any good, since he would simply show up at my door and wait for me to come out. I could deny that I’d read it. I could deny and deny, but then he would just badger and badger until I couldn’t deny any longer. I could say yes to him, I could have the conversation and act like I didn’t see any connection between his essay and the situation I now found myself in. That he’d put me in.

As these thoughts flew through my head, my entire being revolted. My entire self, my body, my brain, my heart, my soul, were one big no. No, no, no, no. I cannot do this. I cannot. I wanted to die. I wanted to die rather than deal with what was looming.

The phone rang.

I considered not picking up because, you know. It was probably him.

But I did pick up, because what else was I going to do? Never answer the phone again? I had a job to do, with RAs who depended on me. Friends. Family. A boyfriend.

It was my father on the line.

“Your mother has cancer,” he told me the moment I said hello, his voice thick with grief. “It’s not good. You have to come home. She’s having surgery tomorrow. She might not make it. Your mother might die.”

I listened to him, barely comprehending his words, their terrible meaning. As I held the phone to my ear, already beginning to pack my things, something incredible registered inside of me. I would not be here tomorrow because my mother was having surgery. Major surgery. For cancer. She might die. This was the ultimate excuse to be away when he came back. There could exist no better excuse to avoid the dreaded conversation. To never ever have that discussion he was so desperate to have.

As my father continued to talk, I thought to myself: I am a horrible daughter. And later, as I hung up the phone and zipped up my travel bag, I thought to myself:

I am saved.