“Right.”
“And you would have cleaned out your computer files, but you’ve been shut out of the system.”
“Yes.”
“Which means that you can’t change anything.”
“That’s right. I can’t do anything. It’s like I’m an assistant.”
She said, “Were you going to change any files?”
He hesitated. “No. But I would have, you know, looked around.”
“Nothing in particular you were aware of?”
“No.”
“Mr. Sanders,” she said, “I want to emphasize that I have no judgment here. I’m simply trying to prepare for what may happen tomorrow. I want to know what surprises they’ll have for us.”
He shook his head. “There isn’t anything in the files that’s embarrassing to me.”
“You’ve thought it over carefully?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then considering the early start, I think you better get some sleep. I want you sharp tomorrow. Will you be able to sleep?”
“Jeez, I don’t know.”
“Take a sleeping pill if you need to.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Then go home and go to bed, Mr. Sanders. I’ll see you in the morning. Wear a coat and tie tomorrow. Do you have some kind of a blue coat?”
“A blazer.”
“Fine. Wear a conservative tie and a white shirt. No after-shave.”
“I never dress like that at the office.”
“This is not the office, Mr. Sanders. That’s just the point.” She stood up and shook his hand. “Get some sleep. And try not to worry. I think everything is going to be fine.”
“I bet you say that to all your clients.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “But I’m usually right. Get some sleep, Tom. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He came home to a dark, empty house. Eliza’s Barbie dolls lay in an untidy heap on the kitchen counter. One of his son’s bibs, streaked with green baby food, was on the counter beside the sink. He set up the coffeemaker for the morning and went upstairs. He walked past the answering machine but neglected to look at it, and failed to notice the blinking light. Upstairs, when he undressed in the bathroom, he saw that Susan had taped a note to the mirror. “Sorry about lunch. I believe you. I love you.
S.”
It was just like Susan to be angry and then to apologize. But he was glad for the note and considered calling her now. But it was nearly
midnight in Phoenix, which meant it was too late. She’d be asleep.
Anyway, as he thought about it, he realized that he didn’t want to call her. As she had said at the restaurant, this had nothing to do with her. He was alone in this. He’d stay alone. Wearing just shorts, he padded into his little office. There were no faxes. He switched on his computer and waited while it came up.
The e-mail icon was blinking. He clicked it.
TRUST NOBODY.
AFRIEND
Sanders shut off the computer and went to bed.
WEDNESDAY
In the morning, he took comfort in his routine, dressing quickly while listening to the television news, which he turned up loud, trying to fill the empty house with noise. He drove into town at 6:30, stopping at the Bainbridge Bakery to buy a pull-apart and a cup of cappuccino before going down to the ferry.
As the ferry pulled away from Winslow, he sat toward the stern, so he would not have to look at Seattle as it approached. Lost in his thoughts, he stared out the window at the gray clouds hanging low over the dark water of the bay. It looked like it would rain again today.
“Bad day, huh?” a woman said.
He looked up and saw Mary Anne Hunter, pretty and petite, standing with her hands on her hips, looking at him with concern. Mary Anne lived on Bainbridge, too. Her husband was a marine biologist at the university. She and Susan were good friends, and often jogged together. But he didn’t often see Mary Anne on the ferry because she usually went in early.
“Morning, Mary Anne.”
“What I can’t understand is how they got it,” she said.
“Got what?” Sanders said.
“You mean you haven’t seen it? Jesus. You’re in the papers, Tom.” She handed him the newspaper under her arm.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Connie Walsh strikes again.”
Sanders looked at the front page, but saw nothing. He began flipping through quickly.
“It’s in the Metro section,” she said. “The first opinion column on the second page. Read it and weep. I’ll get more coffee.” She walked away.
Sanders opened the paper to the Metro section.
AS I SEE IT
by Constance Walsh
MR. PIGGY AT WORK
The power of the patriarchy has revealed itself again, this time in a local high-tech firm I’ll call Company X. This company has appointed a brillant, highly competent woman to a major executive position. But many men in the company are doing their damnedest to get rid of her.
One man in particular, let’s call him Mr. Piggy, has been especially vindictive. Mr. Piggy can’t tolerate a woman supervisor, and for weeks he has been running a bitter campaign of innuendo inside the company to keep it from happening. When that failed, Mr. Piggy claimed that his new boss sexually assaulted him, and nearly raped him, in her offices. The blatant hostility of this claim is matched only by its absurdity.
Some of you may wonder how a woman could rape a man. The answer is, of course, she can’t. Rape is a crime of violence. It is exclusively a crime of males, who use rape with appalling frequency to keep women in their place. That is the deep truth of our society, and of all other societies before ours.
For their part, women simply do not oppress men. Women are powerless in the hands of men. And to claim that a woman committed rape is absurd. But that didn’t stop Mr. Piggy, who is interested only in smearing his new supervisor. He’s even bringing a formal charge of sexual harassment against her!
In short, Mr. Piggy has the nasty habits of a typical patriarch. As you might expect, they appear everywhere in his life. Although Mr. Piggy’s wife is an outstanding attorney, he pressures her to give up her job and stay home with the kids. After all, Mr. Piggy doesn’t want his wife out in the business world, where she might hear about his affairs with young women and his excessive drinking. He probably figures his new female supervisor wouldn’t approve of that, either. Maybe she won’t allow him to be late to work, as he so often is.
So Mr. Piggy has made his underhanded move, and another talented businesswoman sees her career unfairly jeopardized. Will she be able to keep the pigs in the pen at Company X? Stay tuned for updates.
“Christ,” Sanders said. He read it through again.
Hunter came back with two cappuccinos in paper cups. She pushed one toward him. “Here. Looks like you need it.”
“How did they get the story?” he said.
Hunter shook her head. “I don’t know. It looks to me like there’s a leak inside the company.”
“But who?” Sanders was thinking that if the story made the paper, it must have been leaked by three or four p.m. the day before. Who in the company even knew that he was considering a harassment charge at that time?
“I can’t imagine who it could be,” Hunter said. “I’ll ask around.” “And who’s Constance Walsh?”
“You never read her? She’s a regular columnist at the Post Intelligence,” Hunter said. “Feminist perspectives, that kind of thing.” She shook her head. “How is Susan? I tried to call her this morning, and there’s no answer at your house.”
“Susan’s gone away for a few days. With the kids.”
Hunter nodded slowly. “That’s probably a good idea.”
“We thought so.”
“She knows about this?”
“Yes.”
“And is it true? Are you charging harassment?”
“Yes.”
Jesus.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding.
She sat with him for a long time, not speaking. She just sat with him. Finally she said, “I’ve known you for a long time. I hope this turns out okay.”
“Me, too.”
There was another long silence. Finally, she pushed away from the table and got up.
“See you later, Tom.”
“See you, Mary Anne.”
He knew what she was feeling. He had felt it himself, when others in the company had been accused of harassment. There was suddenly a distance. It didn’t matter how long you had known the person. It didn’t matter if you were friends. Once an accusation was made, everybody pulled away. Because the truth was, you never knew what had happened. You couldn’t afford to take sides-even with your friends.
He watched her walk away, a slender, compact figure in exercise clothes, carrying a leather briefcase. She was barely five feet tall. The men on the ferry were so much larger. He remembered that she had once told Susan that she took up running because of her fear of rape. “I’ll just outrun them,” she had said. Men didn’t know anything about that. They didn’t understand that fear.
But there was another kind of fear that only men felt. He looked at the newspaper column with deep and growing unease. Key words and phrases jumped out at him:
Vindictive . . . bitter . . . can’t tolerate a woman . . . blatant hostility . . .
rape . . . crime of males . . . smearing his supervisor . . . affairs with young women . . . excessive drinking . . . late to work . . . unfairly jeopardized . . . pigs in the pen.
These characterizations were more than inaccurate, more than unpleasant. They were dangerous. And it was exemplified by what happened to John Masters-a story that had reverberated among many senior men in Seattle.
Masters was fifty, a marketing manager at MicroSym. A stable guy, solid citizen, married twenty-five years, two kids-the older girl in college, the younger girl a junior in high school. The younger girl starts to have trouble with school, her grades go down, so the parents send her to a child psychologist. The child psychologist listens to the daughter and then says, You know, this is the typical story of an abused child. Do you have anything like that in your past?
Gee, the girl says, I don’t think so.
Think back, the psychologist says.
At first the girl resists, but the psychologist keeps at her: Think back. Try to remember. And after a while, the girl starts to recall some vague memories. Nothing specific, but now she thinks it’s possible. Maybe Daddy did do something wrong, way back when.
The psychologist tells the wife what is suspected. After twenty-five years together, the wife and Masters have some anger between them. The wife goes to Masters and says, Admit what you did.
Masters is thunderstruck. He can’t believe it. He denies everything. The wife says, You’re lying, I don’t want you around here. She makes him move out of the house.
The older daughter flies home from college. She says, What is this madness? You know Daddy didn’t do anything. Come to your senses. But the wife is angry. The daughter is angry. And the process, once set in motion, can’t be stopped.
The psychologist is required by state law to report any suspected abuse. She reports Masters to the state. The state is required by law to conduct an investigation. Now a social worker is talking to the daughter, the wife, and Masters. Then to the family doctor. The school nurse. Pretty soon, everybody knows.
Word of the accusation gets to MicroSym. The company suspends him from his job, pending the outcome. They say they don’t want negative publicity.
Masters is seeing his life dissolve. His younger daughter won’t talk to him. His wife won’t talk to him. He’s living alone in an apartment. He has money problems. Business associates avoid him. Everywhere he turns, he sees accusing faces. He is advised to get a lawyer. And he is so shattered, so uncertain, he starts going to a shrink himself.
His lawyer makes inquiries; disturbing details emerge. It turns out that the particular psychologist who made the accusation uncovers abuse in a high percentage of her cases. She has reported so many cases that the state agency has begun to suspect bias. But the agency can do nothing; the law requires that all cases be investigated. The social worker assigned to the case has been previously disciplined for her excessive zeal in pursuing questionable cases and is widely thought to be incompetent, but the state cannot fire her for the usual reasons.
The specific accusation-never formally presented-turns out to be that Masters molested his daughter in the summer of her third grade. Masters thinks back, has an idea. He gets his old canceled checks out of storage, digs up his old business calendars. It turns out that his daughter was at a camp in Montana that whole summer. When she came home in August, Masters was on a business trip in Germany. He did not return from Germany until after school had started again.
He had never even seen his daughter that summer.
Masters’s shrink finds it significant that his daughter would locate the abuse at the one time when abuse was impossible. The shrink concludes that the daughter felt abandoned and has translated that into a memory of abuse. Masters confronts the wife and daughter. They listen to the evidence and admit that they must have the date wrong, but remain adamant that the abuse occurred.
Nevertheless, the facts about the summer schedule lead the state to drop its investigation, and MicroSym reinstates Masters. But Masters has missed a round of promotions, and a vague cloud of prejudice hangs over him. His career has been irrevocably damaged. His wife never reconciles, eventually filing for divorce. He never again sees his younger daughter. His older daughter, caught between warring family factions, sees less of him as time goes on. Masters lives alone, struggles to rebuild his life, and suffers a nearfatal heart attack. After his recovery, he sees a few friends, but now he is morose and drinks too much, a poor companion. Other men avoid him. No one has an answer to his constant question: What did I do wrong? What should I have done instead? How could I have prevented this?
Because, of course, he could not have prevented it. Not in a contemporary climate where men were assumed to be guilty of anything they were accused of.
Among themselves, men sometimes talked of suing women for false accusations. They talked of penalties for damage caused by those accusations. But that was just talk. Meanwhile, they all changed their behavior. There were new rules now, and every man knew them:
Don’t smile at a child on the street, unless you’re with your wife. Don’t ever touch a strange child. Don’t ever be alone with someone else’s child, even for a moment. If a child invites you into his or her room, don’t go unless another adult, preferably a woman, is also present. At a party, don’t let a little girl sit on your lap. If she tries, gently push her aside. If you ever have occasion to see a naked boy or girl, look quickly away. Better yet, leave.
And it was prudent to be careful around your own children, too, because if your marriage went sour, your wife might accuse you. And then your past conduct would be reviewed in an unfavorable light: “Well, he was such an affectionate father-perhaps a little too affectionate.” Or, “He spent so much time with the kids. He was always hanging around the house . . .”
This was a world of regulations and penalties entirely unknown to women. If Susan saw a child crying on the street, she picked the kid up. She did it automatically, without thinking. Sanders would never dare. Not these days.
And of course there were new rules for business, as well. Sanders knew men who would not take a business trip with a woman, who would not sit next to a female colleague on an airplane, who would not meet a woman for a drink in a bar unless someone else was also present. Sanders had always thought such caution was extreme, even paranoid. But now, he was not so sure.
The sound of the ferry horn roused Sanders from his thoughts. He looked up and saw the black pilings of the Colman Dock. The clouds were still dark, still threatening rain. He stood, belted his raincoat, and headed downstairs to his car.
0n his way to the mediation center, he stopped by his office for a few minutes to pick up background documentation on the Twinkle drive. He thought it might be necessary in the morning’s work. But he was surprised to see John Conley in his office, talking with Cindy. It was 8:15 in the morning.
“Oh, Tom,” Conley said. “I was just trying to arrange an appointment with you. Cindy tells me that you have a very busy schedule and may be out of the office most of the day.”
Sanders looked at Cindy. Her face was tight. “Yes,” he said, “at least for the morning.”
“Well, I only need a few minutes.”
Sanders waved him into the office. Conley went in, and Sanders closed the door.