A friend came over the other night and we sat on my roof for a while. I told him some gossip. I love gossip. I think all writers do. His parents were adamantly against it: he was raised that it was a bad thing. I think I always thought of gossip as storytelling when I was growing up. That it was just information. I remember my mother as an eavesdropper when we were standing in lines in public, and I’m one too. It’s hard not to be, especially in New York. I think everyone wants to be overheard here, whether they admit it or not.

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A few years ago I worked with a woman who lowered her voice every time she said something critical about someone else, so much so that you were forced to lean in just to hear what she was saying. I understand that the point was that so no one else could hear it, but there was another layer: you must pay attention to what I’m saying. She did it so seamlessly. One minute, she’d sound totally normal, and the next it was as if someone were projecting a totally different voice into her body, as if she were a ventriloquist’s dummy, and the gossip came from somewhere else.

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I am a terrible liar and an excellent gossip, but I can keep a secret. You have to tell me it’s a secret though, or I’ll never know. You have to pinky swear me. I’m nearly forty, but the pinky swear still works.

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When I was a freshman in college a friend of mine physically assaulted me. We were in a writing class together, and I thought we were very close. He was a brilliant writer, even at that young age. But he was a hellion. He was wild, and drank too much, and he didn’t seem to shower very often. He was also an athlete. The frats loved him, of course, and he was pledging a popular one. He was unlike anyone I had met before, and I was probably the same for him. We had a deep conversation one night about how I was a virgin, and how I wanted to wait, although for what? I didn’t know exactly.

This happened in in the fall of 1989, by the way. In Baltimore.

One night, during mid-terms, I studied late at the library. As I was walking home to my dorm through the upper quad, I saw him coming toward me on the path. I said hello, and he took his book bag and swung it at me and hit me across the side of my body. I laughed nervously. Then he swung it at my head, and before I knew it, he had me down and was dragging me across the ground by my hands. He was drunk, I think. I remember I was wearing a blue and green plaid jumper with a white t-shirt underneath. I kept telling him to stop. He finally pulled me near a tree and sat on top of me. I honestly don’t think he knew what to do with me once he had me there. I was terrified. I told him to get off me. He laughed at me. Two students walked by us and I yelled for help, but his laughing threw them off; I think they thought we were playing. They kept on walking and he said, “Looks like no one cares if you lose your virginity.” I began to cry – all of it so hurtful, but this, it seemed, the worst thing of all – and he finally got off me and left.

When I got back to my dorm I was bruised and my clothes were torn and stained with green. I went to the RA and told him what happened, and he asked me if I wanted to call the police (or perhaps it was just campus security, because that’s how they do things at those fancy private schools), and I said yes because I had been a feminist my entire life and when men tackled you and dragged you around and laughed at you while they were doing it, it was unacceptable. It did not occur to me that this was a bad idea.

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If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.

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What followed was the worst week of my life. Everyone talked about it, and everyone had heard a different story. Some people had heard that he raped me. Others had heard I was claiming rape but of course I was a liar. People started talking about what a slut I was. A few boys came forward with stories that I had slept with them. He had some friends in my dorm, and they held meetings about me. What to do about the “situation.” Sometimes late at night they would bang on my door and yell, “Move out.” One night, someone pissed on my door.

I had a meeting with some dean or another the week after it happened, and the dean, a woman, offered me the choice of forcing him to seek therapy, or kicking him out of college, which, I was informed, would ruin his life forever. By then I had been so thoroughly terrorized that I felt my life would be ruined forever if I kicked him out. So I said he could stay.

It didn’t matter either way, as it turned out. The rumors persisted for the next few years. Lots of people didn’t want to be my friend, although obviously those people were totally worthless. Boys definitely didn’t want to date me, although they did want to sleep with me. At some point I lost my virginity and dyed my hair pink and went to college in England for a year and started smoking hash every day and by the time I came back I had perfected my I-do-not-give-a-shit veneer, which I pull out to this very day for special occasions, or even sometimes just because it’s Tuesday.

Which is to say: You can say whatever the fuck you like about me and I will always know the truth.

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By the way, was that gossip, that story I just told? Did I just gossip about myself?

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We took Robert Stone’s fiction workshop together senior year of college. We never made eye contact. We gave each other positive feedback. He defended my work vehemently once, as I recall. After the last class everyone went to get drunk together and we talked for a moment and he said he was sorry for everything, and that the worst part of all of it was that I had been one of his best friends, and all of a sudden I wasn’t his friend anymore.

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Don’t you want to know what happened to him? He graduated from college and got into a prominent MFA program and then worked on Wall Street. Then he left New York. He’s married now, has a family. He started a literary magazine, and last year, his first novel was published. I almost went to his reading in New York, because I thought if I saw him again it would give me closure and maybe I would be able to finally write about it, but closure is bullshit of course, and I don’t need anyone’s help at all to tell this story.

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That last part was definitely gossip.

(06/22/11) | 1 Comment »