The Gentleman Rapist
Patricia Mulcahy
Word Count 1315
I came home from work one night to find my door unlocked: someone had picked the lock and broken in. When I left my husband, I brought very few possessions to my new home: a rust-colored futon, the sole living room furniture by day and the bed at night; a small table with a single chair for eating; and a chest of drawers just beyond the arch that defined the two sections of the room.
Now the first thing I saw when I walked in was a soiled white gardening glove on that chest of drawers—a taunt in plain sight. My heart rushed upward into my chest, constricting my breath. I’d felt nested in my new home; now I was utterly exposed.
Once I calmed down, I looked around and saw that the intruder had taken a duffel bag out of the closet and stuffed it with everything of worth in my barely outfitted domain: my camera, a radio, some stereo parts, and most heartbreaking, a delicate necklace bequeathed by my maternal grandmother – the only “heirloom” I ever received. “Modest” barely begins to describe our family legacy.
Scared but full of resolve, I worked with a local detective who dusted for prints.
A week later, my phone rang at 2:00 a.m. “Good evening, I am sorry for the lateness of the hour,” said a voice, as smooth as silk, “I’ve been in your apartment, and I can come back anytime.”
Decades later, I can recall these exact words and the pure terror they induced. Panic-stricken, I raced down three flights of stairs and pounded on the door of our feckless super, a five-foot-four, grade-B Stanley Kowalski. After I told him about the call, he wordlessly handed me the phone to call the precinct.
Detective Mazola, “like in the oil,” asked: “Is there a pitcha of you in the apahtment?”
The detective suggested I set up a meeting with the caller so that the police could grab him. There was nothing more they could do, he informed me, until they had more information on the “perp.”
I had no intention of acting as a decoy.
Until the apartment could be fortified with new locks and a gate on the fire escape, I moved back uptown with my ex. He was a lousy husband, but he wasn’t without a heart. My husband actually helped me find the new place, since his behavior wrecked our marriage. He admitted this, just as he admitted that he’d once slept with my best friend years earlier. By the time he mentioned casually that he had slept with a woman in one of his classes at business school, I’d had enough.
We met in college. I should have run the day he claimed he picked me out in the cafeteria because I had big, sad eyes, like “those dolls painted on black velvet.”
Never did I envision myself against a velvet backdrop of any kind.
Still, I was susceptible to this man, who felt so familiar. He was from an adjacent lower middle-class Philadelphia suburb, and on a pristine New England campus with a fairly high percentage of prep school students, he felt like safe harbor. He was tall and curly-haired, with sensual lips, and often wore dashing high boots, like a character in a children’s book. He was very enthusiastic about sex.
I gave my boyfriend a pass as I reflected on his problems as a child of divorce in a blue-collar family who grew up barely knowing his father. Years later I told friends he reminded me of Bill Clinton: a brilliant glad hander, but too ready to say “yes” to people who affirmed his shaky ego.
He was the one who wanted to get married. By then we had already lived together for five years, off and on. We were ready to start a new life in New York, a place I dared not face on my own. How much different could it be, to be married?
Big miscalculation.
I was never a girl who dreamed about the dress, the parties, the glory of it all. I spent my young life watching my beleaguered mother struggle valiantly to meet the demands of her noisy, argumentative brood.
On my wedding day, my father leaned over to my new husband and said, “I’ve taken care of her all these years. Now it’s up to you.”
In my flowing, empire-waist dress, which I made myself, I was a picture of feminine fulfillment; inside I was furious.
Our entry to New York City was in a railroad flat, with its bathtub in the kitchen and water closet in the rear behind the bedroom, in the less glamorous precincts of the Upper East Side. We moved in during a blackout and painted the place by candlelight. The next day we strolled the streets, accepting free ice cream from local merchants whose stock was melting rapidly.
Yet this sense of new beginnings, fraught yet also exhilarating, could not shore up a marriage built on shaky foundations of shared risk. Fear is not an adequate bonding agent.
When I moved back in temporarily with my ex, post robbery, I think he may have entertained the notion I’d be coming back for good. We slept sexlessly side-by-side and tried to avoid any emotionally charged analysis of how things had gone so wrong between us.
Shortly thereafter, I was especially grateful to him when the likely identity of my caller was revealed. The Village Voice dubbed him “The Gentleman Rapist,” because of his very polite manner in addressing his victims, women all over the Village he’d been stalking for months before he was finally caught. Finally feeling safe, I went back downtown.
I saw my husband for the last time for brunch on New Year’s Day at a homey restaurant not far from my new place. We made polite conversation, and I asked about his grandparents, who raised him.
As we prepared to take our respective leaves, he said: “You’re never coming back, are you?”
“No,” I said simply, and headed home. Though I continued to send him Christmas cards, I never spoke to my husband again. Despite it all, I was crushed we couldn’t maintain some contact, even if infrequent.
I missed him more than I could articulate.
Patricia formed the editorial consulting service Brooklyn Books (http://brooklynbooks.com) after over twenty years in book publishing. She started as a temp at Farrar Straus and Giroux and left as Editor in Chief at Doubleday. Her authors included bestselling crime writers James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly.