Adelaide Piper (36 page)

As I stood with the girls in the hallway outside the studio, waiting for the elevator, Tobias made his way toward me and handed me his card.

“May I call you for an interview for our newsletter?” he asked. “I think your story is amazing. How you're helping to write your school policy after what you've been through.”

He hesitated for a moment, rubbing his chin, and I guessed he was wondering if he should risk asking for my number in front of four post-rape victims. I smiled his way as if to encourage him. He was truly dashing— tall with wavy blond hair and fair skin, and attractively dressed in an urban-preppy blend of a tattered oxford and corduroy pants. “Do you think I could buy you a cup of coffee before you leave town?”

“Sure,” I said, looking over my shoulder at the heavy burdens of the girls behind me. I was happy to have a great-looking young man take an interest in me, and maybe these gals needed to know that there was life after assault.

“How about now?” I asked.

His bright blue eyes lit up like the front of the subway trains, and he couldn't conceal his sheepish grin.

“Great!” he said as the elevator door opened. “Let's go.”

It was a mild and beautiful August afternoon, and after ducking into a coffeehouse and getting two cappuccinos to go, we walked uptown to Central Park, where we meandered through the lush pathways of the circumscribed forest while we talked.

When we shared a mustard-smothered knish on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, he told me about the pain of losing his sister. He had been a senior at Georgetown University when she passed away, and after graduation he called the big-name accounting firm that had promised him a job to say he was starting a nonprofit in her memory and he wouldn't be able to take them up on their offer.

He had created Rachel's Rape in a one-room “suite” in the attic of an old investments building on K Street in Washington DC, amid several other minor nonprofits, and he'd spent the last two years lobbying Congress for tighter campus security mandates as well as creating educational programs for campuses to use, particularly in the Greek and athletic worlds, to teach men about what rape is and what the consequences will be for them if they commit the act.

After we shared our stories, he admitted he was late for a meeting with a potential funder and needed to catch a cab downtown. “Can I take you out to dinner tonight?”

“Can we go to Chinatown?” I asked. “My friend Harriet said I have to try the dim sum at Little River.”

“How about Little Italy?” he asked. “I can't do Chinese—digestive issues, you know? But Luigi's has incredible hand-rolled pasta and tiramisu.”

He had noticed a smudge of mustard on the knee of his pants and took out a towelette like the kind they serve with lobsters still in their shells. Then he tore it open and rubbed it on the spot before pouring a little water from his cup over his knee.

I chuckled at his meticulous cleaning job before saying, “It's a date.”

“Terrific,” he said, smiling up at me. “Why don't I catch the first cab for you so you can get safely back to the hotel?”

“I'm fine,” I said, “and I might as well check out the Met while I'm here.”

He folded up the towelette, slid it into his back pocket, and shook my hand firmly good-bye.

“I'll look forward to seeing you tonight,” he said, staring into my face as if I were the most extraordinary sight he'd ever seen. “I'll meet you in the lobby at seven.”

I blushed and pointed out a cab that had just pulled up to let a lady out in front of the steps.

I met Tobias in the lobby of the hotel just as the sun was setting. As we walked out onto the street, I watched the windows come randomly to life in a cacophony of light. New York City at nightfall was simply magical, and I was delighted to see a place that lived up to its reputation.

“Isn't it amazing?” I asked Tobias as he stared at his map and tried to figure what route to take to Little Italy. “It exceeds all expectations,” I continued before lifting my arms to embrace the air. I nearly whacked a short lady who was trying to pass us with an armful of groceries, and she grunted, “Watch it!”

He looked over his map and smiled longingly at me before his pale blue eyes glazed over with sadness. “It doesn't do that for me, Adelaide,” he said gently. “My sister was raped here, and she died here. I can't walk up to Ninetieth Street without losing it.”

Of course,
I thought.
How insensitive of me
. It was my first real date in a while, and I was already bringing the poor guy to tears. This kind and serious fellow with towelettes in his pocket and a sensitive stomach. I smiled encouragingly back at him. With the exception of Frankie (who had the heart of a true reporter) and Randy (who was my second cousin, after all), I hadn't known any young man of my generation to be as tenderhearted as Tobias seemed, and it was truly refreshing.

“So you're dissin' us for that total stranger?” Allison had asked me in the elevator earlier as she and the other girls headed for the same restaurant we dined in last night.

“Let's meet up for coffee in my room later,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said.

“Be careful,” Belinda whispered.

But I felt safe enough on the arm of an antirape activist, and even if I didn't,
I was going out.
So I talked on and on to Tobias Moore as if there were no tomorrow as he asked me question after question about my life.

He seemed to hang on my every word through dinner. He was a gentleman and completely transparent, and I was taken aback at the attention he was paying me.

He hugged me good night at the revolving door of the lobby, and I breathed in his delicious scent, a combination of fresh mint and aftershave.

“Have breakfast with me tomorrow morning,” he said just as I was turning toward the door.

Before I could respond, he assured me, “I'll pick you up in the lobby at 7:00 a.m., and I promise I'll have you in a cab bound for LaGuardia by 8:00 a.m.” He motioned to a well-worn diner across the street that was lit up and bustling with patrons. “We'll just catch a little bite there and have a few more minutes together.”

Cabs were racing down Eighth Avenue as though the city was just beginning to wake up to the summer night. They were honking at one another as a traffic light turned yellow, and in the distance was the sound of a police siren. An elderly man with two Scotties walked by and tipped his hat toward us. Tobias was standing on the balls of his feet, waiting for my response.

“See you tomorrow, then,” I said, tilting my head to the side before waving good-bye.

He stayed on the sidewalk, tapping his thumb against his thigh as he watched to make sure that I made it safely through the lobby and into the elevator.

That night the three girls made their way into my room. They sat along the edge of my bed and recounted the interview as I poured them decaf coffee from the hotel pot.

After a lull in the conversation, Allison said, “Don't you guys dream about castrating them?”

Belinda pulled her legs up in the fetal position on the opposite bed and rocked back and forth. She sort of smiled at the thought of it as she rested her chin on top of her knees.

Leah breathed a sigh and said, “Yes, I do.”

Mmm.

I looked beyond Allison at the city view. My back stiffened when I pictured coming face-to-face with my assailant.

“I used to imagine I'd get him in his sleep,” I said.

“Yeah, and he would never know what hit him, right?” Allison said.

Belinda let out a peep of laughter.

“I'm going to video my interview and FedEx it to him,” Allison said, holding up her cup for a refill.

“You know where he lives?” I said.

“Exactly,” she said. “I've driven by there before, and once I stared him down when he was getting out of his car after a workday.”

“What'd he do?” Belinda looked up to ask.

“He looked like he had no idea who I was, and then he bolted into the house.”

We all chuckled sinisterly, and when I said, “Mine works on Capitol Hill,” the laughter grew until Belinda and I plummeted back on our respective beds and held our aching stomachs.

Allison kicked in the air, and when we came back up again, she said sarcastically, “So how was your
date
?”

“Nice,” I said. “You know, not every guy is an assailant.”

She was biting the inside of her cheek, and I hoped she wasn't wishing some awful fate on me the way she had her offender.

But the other two—Leah with the depression and Belinda with the anxiety—seemed to look at me as though I had two heads. Leah's mouth was half open, and she was taking deep breaths, and Belinda was blinking her eyes over and over as though I were certifiable.

“What?”
I asked. “Why are y'all staring at me?”

“How can you date?” Allison said.

“Because I'm not dead,” I said.

I thought of a verse that Shannon had sent me, and I said it out loud:

“‘There is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease.' That's Job 14 something—”

Allison waved away the words and shook her head in a kind of bitter disbelief. “So you're religious. That explains it.”

Leah and Belinda chuckled behind her.

“Back to my fantasy,” she said. “I've got it all worked out in my mind.” And she went through a step-by-step castration plan that would make Lorena Bobbitt look like a peacemaker.

We finally decided to call it a night.

“Keep in touch,” Leah said to me, and then we all exchanged numbers and addresses.

After they plodded back to their separate rooms in their shackles of pain, I could hear Allison's television turn on in the room to the right of mine, then the squeak-squeak of Belinda rocking back and forth in what I imagined was the fetal position in the room to the left.

After crawling into bed, the hotel chocolate from my pillow melting in my mouth, I thought about Devon Hunt and his telescope and the stars on the campus hillside, as the sound of cab horns and screeching breaks wafted up and into my window. As I fell asleep, I wondered what had become of him.

“May I write you?” Tobias asked the next morning after we ordered our pancakes and coffee.

He had been sitting in a lobby chair facing the elevators when the steel doors slid open at 7:02 that morning. I was blotting my lipstick on an old Kmart receipt when he stood up to greet me.

“Sure,” I said. “I love to get mail. With the exception of bad poetry.”

He reached out and took my hand before fixing his eyes on me. Either the poetry thing went right over his head, or he didn't give a hoot about anything other than my “Sure.”

Tobias wrote me every day for the next eight weeks before he and his communications director, Glenda Lyles, traveled down to NBU to interview Cecelia, Dr. Atwood, and me for their newsletter. When I was giving him the campus tour on the early October afternoon of his visit, he stopped as the fiery-colored leaves fell down and around us on the quadrangle, took my hand again, and said, “You're very important to me, Adelaide. I really want us to get to know each other. There could be something here between us.”

I nodded and gave him a wide grin. After all, he was handsome, tenderhearted, socially conscious, and we didn't share the same gene pool.

“What's not to like?” I said to Ruthie and Jif after he left. They were lounging in the snack bar, watching
Thirtysomething
reruns and eating junk food.

“He's a looker, that's for sure,” Jif said, sucking on a Tootsie Pop.

“I mean, those cobalt eyes. C'mon!”

Jif was in a better place once again. She was not concerned about her weight, because it would be months before school was out. Also, she was making a real effort to circle the wagons and spend time with her old friends before graduation.

“Yeah, but more important, he's nice, and he seems to respect you,” Ruthie added.

Jif pulled a bag of jelly beans out of her bag and offered it to us before declaring, “Go for it, Adelaide! You deserve a fresh romance, girl.”

God, I really like Tobias,
I prayed as I meandered out of the library that evening and watched a couple embracing at the top of the colonnade.

I hadn't been writing my thesis or preparing my graduate-school applications. Instead, I'd been going over the campus map and marking off every twenty yards where an emergency “attack” button could be installed. The plan was due to the engineer the next morning.

As a couple walked arm in arm through the pillars, I thought of Tobias and his affectionate gaze that afternoon on the quad, and my heart leaped.

“Someone likes
me
!” I grinned. “Someone really wants to
get to know
me!” And I skipped (landing awkwardly and saving myself at the last second from a sprained ankle). It was a big-time confidence booster, and I welcomed it with open arms. It was about dern time!

Wait,
I might have heard the third voice say, but I was too excited to tune to that station. Rather, I began to connect the loose dots in my mind so as to convince myself that a relationship with Tobias was right.

“He sounds neat,” Shannon told me during a phone conversation halfway across the country. She had ended up at Wheaton and was majoring in theology. She was planning to serve with a team of inner-city missionaries in Colombia, South America, as soon as she graduated.

“How's your thesis coming?” I asked her.

“It's a breeze,” she said. “You know, just a little ol' examination of the sanctification process.”

“Sanctifa-who?” I said as I continued to picture Tobias saying, “I think there could be something good between us.”

“Well, it's complicated. I mean, it's like after you receive salvation, then you go through a process where the Holy Spirit brings all that you are into obedience and conforms everything about you to the standards of His Word.”