not sure it matters — if it was him or not. Do you want coffee?” She signalled for two coffees.
“The bastard must have been in his forties.”
“Does that make it worse?”
“Miranda, for goodness’ sake.”
“I don’t know if it was rape.”
“For God’s sake!”
“To hell with God. It was sexual. Understand that!”
“Damn! It wasn’t your fault. It was rape!”
“Listen, it was the culmination of a summer of testing, flaunting, I don’t know, playing with fire. It was after a year of wondering, dreaming dream lovers, a winter of waiting, playing kissy-face with Danny Webster, who turned out to be gay, and then it was summer again and I went out there of my own volition …”
“You were raped.”
“I don’t know.”
“You were seventeen.”
“Just turned eighteen. What’s your hang-up on age? My friend Celia got pregnant with her second child when she was eighteen.”
“Eighteen is only grown up when you’re eighteen. You were playing with sunlight and shadows. And then it was real, this guy in his forties. He raped you, Miranda.”
“I just don’t know,” she said, looking wistfully into the gorge, shuddering again from the chill air rising.
“That’s the point. You blocked it out for twenty years.”
“It was traumatic, for weal or woe.”
“There’s no ‘weal,’ Miranda, no good side to rape.”
“You’re a lovely man, Morgan. Someday I’d like to marry you.”
“For weal or woe.” He smiled. “Miranda, if you don’t think it was rape, that’s simply not fair to the girl you were.” He paused, thinking of her as an eighteen-year-old. She looked like Susan, her dark hair turned auburn. She looked like herself, through a lens softly. “It’s not fair to the woman you are. You were foolish perhaps, but Griffin had all the power.”
“Guilt, Morgan. The fact that I feel guilty implies responsibility.”
“No way! Guilt is how you deal with something. It’s not the thing itself.”
“Do you want me to admit I’m a victim, that I’ve suffered? I didn’t even remember until Wednesday night.”
“Blanking out doesn’t make something not happen, Miranda. Anaesthetic doesn’t mean the surgery didn’t take place, or leave scars.”
“It wasn’t violent. I didn’t get beat up.”
“I don’t believe you said that, Miranda. The charge of sexual assault has misled us. There’s no such thing as non-violent rape.”
“It was him, Morgan.” She was looking over at the British racing green Jaguar XK 150 parked by the railing at the side of the mill. “That car — for Christ’s sake! What are we doing driving that car?”
“Vengeance?” he suggested.
The coffee came. Miranda glanced away from the waitress, who asked if there was anything else she could get them, fussing over them, trying to catch hold of the drama. “No,” said Miranda. “Not another fucking thing.”
“I’ll get you your bill,” the waitress said, scurrying back into the mill.
Miranda looked up at Morgan and smiled through tears. “I don’t swear, Morgan. I do not swear.”
Morgan leaned across to cup her hands in his. “Why don’t you cover the bill? It’ll make you feel better.”
She stared at him with a depth of affection that disturbed them both. “I’ll write it off against the old bastard’s estate. Let’s give the waitress a fifty, no, a hundred-dollar tip. She’ll wonder about us for weeks.”
“Grab immortality where you can,” said Morgan. “However conditional.”
Miranda shifted into reverse, started to back up, muttered, “Vengeance is mine,” jammed the gears into first, and roared forward to an abrupt halt, bumper to the rail.
“Glad you stopped,” Morgan said, gazing out over the precipice ahead.
“Don’t move,” she declared, leaping from the car. In less than ten minutes she returned, wearing a first-of-the-season ankle-length black shearling coat, tags still fluttering from a sleeve. “Let’s go. Detzler’s Landing. Let’s get outta this ‘puke-hole.’”
As they drove down a side road, Morgan said, “One-Eyed Jacks.”
“Marlon Brando, the only film he directed,” she confirmed. “‘Scum-sucking pig’ — from the same film. That’s all I remember.”
They drove on in silence until Morgan leaned over and said, “He followed you.”
“Where?”
“To university.”
“Morgan, you’re scaring me.”
“Well, how else —”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m saying it’s very disturbing to think about that.”
“Can you remember him in your other classes besides semiotics?”
“I don’t remember him anywhere. He’s in the photograph. I don’t know whether I remember him now, or the picture, or the corpse.”
“Repressed memory syndrome, you know, it isn’t straightforward.”
“By definition.”
“The invented past doesn’t just peel away like the husk of a coconut, and then the shell falls open and there’s the meat and the juice inside. It’s not that simple.”
“That’s an astonishingly inept analogy, Morgan. I don’t really need to go there. How about an orange? There’s juicy stuff in nice neat segments. Or stripping back the skin of a banana, and there’s that firm and tender shaft rising to the light. Oh, God, I hate Freud. I don’t have a syndrome, Morgan. I just needed to forget. It’s too easy to give something a label and then expect the symptoms to conform.”
“Your coat.”
“What?”
“It comes down to your ankles.”
“It’s supposed to.”
“I like it. It’s a good coat.”
“Damn right.”
They
