note: names and some details have been changed - this will lead into another discussion of writer ethics, fairness, rules of evidence, and how we treat our witnesses
Fenn flipped the switch on his drafting table lamp and showed me the tiny, delicate paper insects he was painting, so small he needed a magnifying glass to see the details. The bees in particular were giving him problems - neck aches from late nights spent obsessing over a stinger or wing.
"I can't wait to see these in a box," I said. Fenn made boxes along the lines of Joseph Cornell, working late at night in a little studio down the street. His fingertips smelled like hot metal and burnt splinters from hours spent trimming wood frames with his Japanese saw, and they tasted like blond wood and paint chips.
Tacked above the table was a print of a Balthus painting, one of many infamous portraits featuring a little girl lounging back suggestively, her legs raised just so. I could not help but look at it, the way I always did when I walked past the drafting table.
"Sometimes I think I should take that down," Fenn said. "People do not understand it. Nobody wants to accept that children are sexual, too."
I thought back to the day before, when his friend Tara crashed our date, and she mentioned a twelve-year-old cousin or niece that Fenn had met at a picnic the previous spring. "She is an intense kid," Tara said, winking at Fenn. "And poor Fenn can hardly stand it when she's around."
Fenn blushed, squirming uncomfortably in his chair. Tara laughed. As usual, I was not in on the joke.
I watched Fenn's eyelids flutter up and down as he examined the print. "Some people think this kind of thing is on par with rape," he said, pushing his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and clearing his throat. Whenever he did that, he reminded me of Harrison Ford in the Mosquito Coast, but he hated when I said so. "But then, that is another subject that's up for debate."
When I didn't say anything, he looked up from the print and turned to face me, leaning with one palm on the drafting table. "The real trauma," he said, "is not half as bad as the one society prepares you for. It's only sex." He paused. "Not saying rape is morally correct, but I am saying we do a disservice to girls by teaching them to be traumatized when it happens."
He already knew my history, but we had never discussed anything deeper than surface details: thirteen years old, alone with an older boy in the middle of nowhere, no police report. At that time, the surface details were all I was willing to verbalize, let alone face. I liked to think that I had escaped the assault without a scratch. Here was proof: I could handle myself against a man almost twice my age; I could play the game without falling for him.
"You're right," I said. "About preparing girls for trauma." I paused. "And about it not being as bad."
"You see," he said, "that is what I always suspected."
I felt oddly proud. Maybe now Fenn saw me as a true avant-garde thinker, older and wiser, not just a kid, some twenty years younger than he was, practically a niece.
Back then, I had no reason to believe I would ever want to retract my statement. I thought, since I still denied the damage done to me, that perhaps Fenn was onto something, a cutting-edge sociological observation.
Now, of course, I see that he was wrong, and so was I. The only problem: my words already helped him to prosecute his case - to confirm his interpretation of sexual politics. There is no taking it back, no erasing what I said, no possibility for retraction. To anything I say now, he could respond like a lawyer cross-examining a witness: "Do you recall the statement you made twelve years ago?"
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