I didn’t want to write about “Matti,” the last story in Yael Hedaya’s collection Housebroken. Perhaps because it’s a story I’m tired of hearing: women forgiving men for the most unforgivable sexual transgression of child rape.
The title character, Matti, is dying of brain cancer. He is not the narrator; one could say, at least, that Hedaya denies him the power of a first-person narrative. His story is told by two different women. The first is his wife, Mira, who foresees the difficulties in caring for a terminally ill man, a man who was never easy to love from the beginning. She recalls the day that they moved in together, friends came to celebrate the occasion:
“So he’s the child rapist?” Dan said to me in the kitchen, when he came back to get soda for the Scotch they’d brought us from their trip abroad. “He looks pretty normal.”
And Liora, who drifted into the kitchen, because Dan had forgotten the ice, said, “He’s sexy.”
“Really?” I said. “You think so?”
“Wow!” she said. “I can see why that little girl fell in love with him.”
The casual, reckless manner in which her friends discuss his character and his crime, and then so quickly absolve his wrongdoing—a necessary forgiveness that Mira explains as a way to “guide him through the intricacies of bourgeois life”—made my skin crawl. And Mira’s chief concern is not the rape itself but that Matti is still obsessed with Alona, the teenager whom he seduced and whose breath Mira can still “feel in his silence.” She pictures the young Alona “sitting with her legs crossed on top of the bookcase, laughing at all of us.” Mira is not horrified that Matti cannot let go of Alona; she is jealous.
The second narrative belongs to Alona, who met Matti when she was only fifteen years old and he was thirty; however, as with Mira, this is not Alona’s narrative. It’s the telling of Matti’s life that matters most—or rather, we only understand and know of Alona where Matti is the reference point.
At the beginning of this narrative, Alona knows a “sad-looking” man is watching her as she writes poems in a café, hopeful poems that would reveal her as a “dangerous and mysterious woman, with caffeine and nicotine and promising flowing in her veins.” The man saunters over to her table, claims that his table is “full of chiggers,” and has the waiter move his things to Alona’s table. He tells her that his car is parked nearby and “that he didn’t know why he mentioned it, he didn’t mean anything by it.” Nevertheless, they leave together and end up at his place where they have sex—by which I mean he rapes her. Afterwards, she has a mental and emotional breakdown; he taunts, threatens, and accuses her of wanting to be “rescued from her virginity,” that her “eyes were begging” for it. Then he gives her a key to his place and rapes her again.
Alona has moments where she sees this as rape and moments where she believes she has given her consent. She tells herself that she wanted to come to his unkempt, sparsely-furnished place with a “small TV with a twisted coat hanger for an antenna” and a bedroom “where life takes place on the floor,” with only a mattress on the ground. They have what she believes is a relationship, as she returns again and again to his place, the windows forever “shuttered . . . not letting in a bit of light or air” for fear of his neighbors seeing them together. She lies to her family that’s she sleeping over at a friend’s, as he becomes more and more controlling. He calls her a slut when she puts on makeup, which she frames in the context of other young women, how it “removes them from the custody of the guy who loved them in his own particular way, the love of old men.”
It’s only when he tells her that he’s falling in love with her that she finally feels “suffocated,” knowing now all those poems she wrote under the “ugly fluorescent light” of his kitchen will never come to anything. She leaves him. A year passes, and Matti continues to harass her, daring to call her at her parents’ home, belittling her: “You knew nothing when we met! Nothing, Alona, not even how to fuck!” Even when, decades later, she is at his deathbed, sitting next to his wife, Alona frets over the loss of her physical beauty: “It’s horrible how much I’ve changed. He probably wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”
That Alona—an insightful would-be poet—is so easily possessed by a nondescript and unexceptional man disturbs me because I know such a story is the dream of such men. It hurts me. It makes me angry. Many others have tried to wish away this kind of anger in my reading of texts, in writing, and otherwise, because it seems to be such a “female” anger. But this anger does not originate within girls and women—that’s the misunderstanding. It’s an anger we are given.
* * *
In undergrad, I had similar trouble with Lolita, and my professor asked me to “compartmentalize” my queasiness in analyzing the text. His exact words: Approach the story like a man, a serious scholar; listen to the beauty of those opening words. Don’t be such a woman about it.
Around this time, I’d come out as bisexual and fallen in love with a woman, a native New Yorker who took me to museums, galleries, fashion shows, and music venues like CBCG just before it shut down. She was worldly as she was patient with my endless questions about things she’d known for years. Our relationship became serious, and I remember leaving Bobst library late at night, my Jansport backpack swollen with books, and meeting her in the middle of Washington Square Park just to kiss goodnight for a good hour. We were fearless in our affection, which transcended things I did not yet understand. She came from money; I did not. We were brought up very differently, but none of that mattered. And it was not the differences of race or class that would be our undoing. It was something outside of us, something so insidious and commonplace that looking back, I am amazed at the damage done by one person. One commonplace man.
One night, we went out to a club with some friends. I was only nineteen and the age limit was twenty-one, but my friends always had connections to these places and I usually got in. I never drank, because I liked to take it all in: the deafening music, the dancing, the high fashion. When my girlfriend introduced me to an indie actor whose work I loved, I tried to play it cool, but I was in awe that whole night, of being held tight in a beautiful woman’s arms. I was having a wonderful time until I was coming back from the ladies’ room. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder and another pinch at my waist. A firm grip, a knowing feel, both from large hands, larger than I’d ever felt on my body. I turned around, thinking it was one of our friends who’d had too much to drink, but it was a stranger. A man.
He wouldn’t leave me alone, this stranger. He looked to be in his late thirties. He wore a suit, and seemed to both be out of place and in control at the same time. I took his hands off my body, and he laughed. At me. As if he knew how this was all going to play out. I remember thinking how foreign he was to me, against the backdrop of that night, a foreign male body of nondescript whiteness.
I thought to myself: But we have nothing to do with each other.
I began to walk away, but he followed, talking to me as if picking up where we’d left off some time ago. He worked in finance, I remember, because he kept mentioning work, and offered to buy me a drink. I shook my head. When I tried to move past him, he stepped in front of me again. I batted away his grabbing hands. He laughed, smacking my hands in return.
My girlfriend soon found us, and at first he didn’t understand that we were together. He made some underhanded comment about who had a better figure, which I knew even then intended to pit us against each other in vying for his attention.
Again I thought: But she and I have nothing to do with this. With you. With THIS.
I told him to leave us alone, that we were together and weren’t looking to be picked up. He still didn’t get it, and misunderstood us as the kind of “together” that involved a ménage à trois fantasy. When my girlfriend cleared that up real fast, that’s when the smile disappeared from his face. He got angry. Like zero-to-sixty angry. I’d never seen anyone get so angry, so quickly, over something that had nothing to do with him. He looked like he was going to punch us both.
“This isn’t a lesbo club,” he shouted. “You’re lucky you’re both chick chicks or—” At this point, my girlfriend grabbed my hand to pull me away, but he grabbed the other.
“There’s no way you’re twenty-one,” he said to me. “I should get you thrown out of here. Fucking kid. Fucking tease.”
I squirmed, and my girlfriend began to yank me away from him, but he wouldn’t let me go. It happened so fast—suddenly there were our friends and then a bouncer—but not before his last words poured out of his mouth: “You’re fourteen, aren’t you fucket?” I remember how he licked his lips when he said this and I could see how much it was turning him on—how this whole scene and the attention he was getting and the noise he was making, all of it was turning him on—and I hated him. I hated him in the way I’ve never hated anyone. I wanted to wipe the floor with his insides. He kept shouting that I was fourteen as the bouncer threw him out. A crowd drew around me, around our group, but for a moment, I couldn’t hear anything or anyone. I shut my eyes and sat right down on the floor.
After that, we all left. I cried in my girlfriend’s arms on the way home, but her grip was looser, less certain of my body. She patted my hair and lightly kissed my forehead. She didn’t offer to come up with me. She was unable to look me in the eye. I went to bed alone, crying softly so that my roommates would not hear me.
I didn’t hear from her the next day, or the one after. We didn’t have any classes together, so I never saw her around the college. I called her cell phone; there was no answer. I wanted to stop by her apartment on the Upper West Side, but she lived with her family and I was afraid a gesture like that would scare her off. I never knew before in my life how careful one had to be. We’d only been together for a month. I didn’t tell any of our friends what happened. I couldn’t explain the shame I felt, a shame I was given.
A week later, she finally called. She didn’t want to see me; she wanted to talk over the phone. She knew it was ridiculous but she couldn’t get those words out of her head. She said maybe I was too young. Maybe I didn’t know how to handle myself in places like that yet. Or maybe we just looked wrong together. Maybe he was right. All she knew was now, it just didn’t feel right. My bones were small, she said. I was so small in her arms. And she cried. I love you, she said, but now it just feels wrong.
It was the first time a woman ever told me she loved me, and I was angry. I was angry this strange man we’d never see again had ruined us. That he decided how and where we’d end.
* * *
Just last year, the Huffington Post reported that lauded feminist icon Joan Jett and her Runaways bandmate Cherie Currie witnessed and ridiculed the drugging and rape of sixteen-year-old Jackie Fox by their producer Kim Fowley. Even though Jett and Currie denied that they were there at the time, guitarist Steve Tetsch, a close friend of Fowley, admitted the two men “used to drive to high schools looking for teenage girls to hit on.” He has heard a different version of Fox’s story (among other stories involving Fowley sexually assaulting women) and doesn’t doubt its validity. Currie herself admitted that once Fowley pimped her out to a music executive, but explained she had to forgive him: “It’s like battered-wife syndrome. Some women love the abusive men they’re with and that’s kind of the way I was with Kim. I really wanted his approval.”
Despite ongoing allegations, Fowley prospered as a both a musician and a producer, even appearing in a Beyoncé video. When he died, having battled bladder cancer for a long time, Lita Ford wrote on Facebook: “Sometimes I wonder if there would ever have been a Lita Ford without Kim Fowley.” Joan Jett tweeted: “Kim was a friend, he taught me so much. I am very sad.” Cherie Currie wrote on Facebook: “Thank you for starting my career when I was a just a child. You were instrumental in so many getting started in this crazy world of music. You are a genius. You are loved. You will be so missed.” There was little mention of any scandals in the tributes to him, such as this one and this one. Jackie Fox has been told, in so many ways, to sit down and shut up; the man has passed, a man with a prolific music career, a man who, according to guitarist Steven Van Zandt, “was one of the great characters of all time. Irreplaceable.”
I don’t believe anyone wants to shame the dead, or put anyone on trial who’s battling terminal cancer. And this is how I believe Hedaya tries to make Matti more palatable and sympathetic: by giving him an incurable malignancy. Alona herself wonders if she’s “his brain tumor,” the cause of his devastating illness, as his memory and mental capacities fade away, “his legs covered with a thin blanket, one eyelid drooping and the other open and the room smelling of shit.” Both Mira and Alona are left to grieve at his side and struggle to a find closeness with each other, wanting to “be friends or something,” although “it sounded unnatural, because what did we have in common aside from this strange temporary intimacy, and an unconscious man lying a few feet away.”
Cherrie Currie, who’d been at odds with Kim Fowley for years over royalties concerning her time with The Runaways, reunited with the producer; along with his fiancée Kara Wright, Currie took care of the dying man, the man she equated to an abusive husband, a man who’d pimped her teenage body for his own personal gains.
It dawns on me that in both cases, all these empathies, whether fictitious and real, are more exceptional than the men who deserve them.
* * *
I remember my mother saying to me as a child: I don’t want you to hate men. I don’t want you to be scared of the world. But I want you to be careful. You have to be careful, always. You’re never alone—even when you think you are.
We were washing dishes or doing laundry, some menial task, and her words came from nowhere. But they didn’t. Of course there was a reason for them.
A few days before, we had engaged in another menial task: going to the grocery store. My mother was in a hurry to get to work, and sent me to the dairy aisle to grab milk and eggs. I was nine years old. It was a hot day, so I wore my favorite red shirt with a blue butterfly on it and black cut-off denim shorts. I remember I was checking the eggs, picking them up one by one out of the carton to make they weren’t broken, when I noticed a man standing beside me, watching me. He had a bushy mustache and wore a denim shirt. He looked familiar in a way that I did not find comforting. He smiled widely, and picked up a similar carton. He checked his eggs in the same way, sneaking glances at me, and let out short, low laughs.
I thought he was making fun of me, and I gave him a dirty look.
In response, he stuck his tongue out at me.
I thought it was the most childish thing for an adult to do, but on impulse, I stuck mine out back at him.
This caused him to nearly drop his eggs. He steadied himself, and let out a loud sigh. He smiled again, and then reached over and squeezed my arm with his free hand. Then he opened his mouth to say something when my mother shouted, “What the hell are you doing?”
She was right next to me.
In fact, several people were standing around us. They weren’t looking at me; they were looking at the man. It was as if they’d been there the whole time.
The man hastily put the eggs back and dashed off. Only he didn’t put them back properly, and they fell to the ground, splattering everywhere.
I thought my mother was angry, and would blame me for the mess. But I couldn’t see her face because she was kneeling down, her arms going around me. My mother is not an affectionate person. She believes hugging a child too much leads to weakness. As she wept, I felt it for the first time: a shame that someone else had pinned on me. I didn’t understand what I’d done to feel this way, or why my mother had to kneel down on the floor of a grocery store.
She and I didn’t talk about that day when we got home. She asked me to change out of my clothes immediately, and then snatched them from me. I never saw them again.
This is the last installment on the work of Israeli writer Yael Hedaya. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.