Worlds

16. Seduction of the Innocent

30 Sept. 84

Daniel dear,

I know it must have been an ugly shock to you, getting my letter about the rape right after sending your letter exhorting me to go out and butterfly. I also know you’ve tried to call me at least twice. Forgive me for being “out.” I never was any good on the phone, even for something simple.

I didn’t keep a copy of my letter, but I’m afraid it was a little hysterical. Subsequent therapy and some kind friends calmed me down.

Let me save you the cost of a call and answer the obvious questions. One: Yes, I’m all right physically. He gave me a severe beating, but the hospitals here have a lot of experience with that sort of thing. Two: No, he didn’t make any sexual contact with me, unless you count stabbing me in the butt. He didn’t have time, even though I was pretty well unconscious; a half-dozen students grabbed him and kicked him to a pizza. He died. I’m glad. Three: Yes, I do feel uncomfortable and ambiguous about men and especially about sex. Or is it the other way around. Anyhow, Four: Yes, I’m going to take your advice. I will write you about it honestly, as we agreed.

Tell Uncle Ogelby that crystalline lamination obviously causes senility, and that I can haul my own ashes in a pinch. Much love—

O’Hara

2 Oct. 84

Daniel dear,

I didn’t have to give too much thought to deciding who my first earthman would be. There are a few who have expressed interest (including one woman), but none of them appeals. I set my sights on a poet whom I shall call Byron.

Byron and I have a class together, study together frequently, and have gone out occasionally, to eat or drink or sightsee (he’s a native New Yorker and enjoys playing Native Guide). He spent a lot of time with me while I was in the hospital, chatting and playing cards. He is gentle, intense, political, intellectual, and bushy. He has a sense of humor that John would describe as wonky. In all the time we’ve spent together, he’s never once made an advance, never mentioned any girlfriends or boyfriends, and seems about as close as you could get to being aggressively non-sexual. Now I know why.

I asked him over last night to study. Dressed for action and plied him with wine. For a couple of hours he deflected all of my hints, so I finally dropped subtlety and asked him right out to spend the night, sleep with me, do the beast with two backs.

By then he wasn’t surprised, of course, but he seemed almost resigned, then embarrassed—he blushed—and he stammered out an explanation, saying he’d never talked to anybody about it.

He’s an old man of 25, but had had a total of only two (consummated) sexual experiences. One with a woman, which was devastating, and one with a man, which was little short of rape. His few subsequent forays into the sexual arena were absolute functional failures, and he had been celibate for the past four years.

I have to admit I felt out of my depth. I hadn’t expected to be the therapist in this little encounter. I was ashamed with myself at having pushed him into sharing the painful confidence, and for once in my bigmouth life I was at a loss for words.

He rescued me with a light joke, though, and wryly volunteered his services, so long as I would agree to expect absolutely nothing. We talked a long time about it, I revealing my past in all its sordid (by Earth standards) variety, and then spent a sweaty couple of hours.

As you might imagine, it wasn’t exactly a night of a thousand delights, since Byron has all the self-control of a bunny in heat, and knows absolutely nothing about a woman’s body, and it wasn’t the time or place to begin teaching him. But I know a thing or two thousand about men (and am modest besides) and was able to surprise him with his own recuperative powers. I didn’t fake any response myself, which I felt would be too manipulative, and couldn’t fantasize myself into anything, because I was too worried about him.

(Which from the point of view of my own needs was probably the best thing that could have happened. I never once thought about the proximate motivation for seducing the poor boy, and I think managed to solve my own problem, obliquely, by addressing his. Isn’t that a terrible cli-ch6? Things become banal by being true, though.)

Anyhow, when I woke up this morning he had his scratchy beard on my breast, and was wearing a childlike smile in his sleep. I left him a note and had an amphetamine breakfast, to get me through the morning classes (the class we have together meets at 9:00 a.m. on Mondays, but I decided to let him sleep through it).

So I have come to terms with it. The rape was not at all a sexual act, and wouldn’t have been even if he had entered me. It was violence, pure and simple. Not simple. We found that the man had killed and raped—in that order—five women in the past, and what he did to them was so brutal that I can’t bring myself to put it down on paper. But it doesn’t have anything to do with Byron (had to erase his real name there), except that his homosexual experience was spoiled by cruelty, and it has even less to do with you.

Speaking of yourself, I daydreamed about you all day and so have virtually nothing in my notes about Hemingway, Eli Whitney, and Methodism. The night with Byron was somatically unsatisfying, but it did reawaken an over-powering itch I’ve been scratching away at by myself for a month.

Sorry, old groundhog, I can feel your ears getting red. But I’ve made an exhaustive study of masturbation over the past few weeks, and I would like to share with you my findings: it is quick and easy and you don’t have to clean up your room beforehand. I would do it right now but I have a late seminar and can’t afford to be more tired than I already am. If I take another ’phet I’ll be up all night, and be out of phase with the rest of the world for a week. (That’s how dull and rationalized my so-called sex life has become.)

So I will bow to your wishes (and John’s) and stop keeping my hands to myself. Whether I’ll continue the tutelage of my pet poet, I don’t know. See if he’s still smiling, the next time I see him. Love—

Marianne