“Hardly.”
“Do people really change, Ross? Or are they showing faces they hid before?”
“People do change. They change if they have good reason.”
“Like?”
“Like if they’re sick because of obesity or smoking and they need to change or die. Or they want something in life, and they’re going after it in all the wrong ways. But unless there’s that kind of big motivation, your personality traits stay pretty consistent. If you’re a reserved little kid, you probably won’t end up as a drummer in a rock band.”
“What if you change for the worse?”
“That usually happens because of some kind of inflicted trauma. An event outside the individual’s control... You hear these things all the time—he was so loving and affectionate when he was a little boy but then he was abused in boarding school and that impacted his trusting personality...”
“Oh damn, Ross, don’t useimpactas a verb. It makes me want to dump that fizzy water on your head.”
“Isn’t it a verb too?”
“No! At least, it shouldn’t be...”
“So something changes and it changes the person, essentially.”
“Would you assume that she was sexually assaulted as a kid or something?”
“That’s definitely one thing that’s been linked to that kind of promiscuous behavior. If you accept that it’s behavior that degrades the woman, or the man, there are lots of reasons people give for what they do. Some people think it’s meant as a kind ofvengeance on the abuser... look what you made me do! Some people think that it’s meant to be a way to establish power for somebody who felt powerless once. Some say it’s purely transactional: I’ll give you this and you give me a lot of money. But lots of people think that it’s an unconscious impulse to degrade themselves further because they feel ashamed even when it’s clearly not their fault. Maybe it’s a little of all those things.”
“Who do you think it was? Her stepdad? He’s a fundamentalist minister. You know the Starbright Ministry, that huge campus.”
“Sure. I mean, that’s classic, maybe too simple. Pedophiles lots of times try to get into situations where they’re going to be respected and trusted... you know, plausible deniability but also lots of access to the victims.” He added, “Look at the cases with Catholic priests. And even when those guys got nailed, half the time the diocese just tried to cover it up and send them somewhere else.”
We talked for a while about people we both knew. After a two-year stint teaching in Tampa, Ross was happy being back in Wisconsin, a place he once couldn’t wait to leave. I wondered if I would ever feel that way. I still sometimes thought that Midwesterners were what Ivy called “primitive.” I still had strong if fleeting urges to flee.
At last, Ross handed me a card with three names. “I should never have written these down, Reenie. If anyone ever asks you, this intel didn’t come from me.”
“You can trust me. It’s not like I’m going to go to these guys and say Ross Bell, you know the guy in psychology? He said you were one of this hooker’s johns!”
Ross looked wretched. Two of them were professors, he went on, one a department head in his fifties, another who’d just achieved tenure, and the third one was university counsel, a specialist in the implementation of equity in women’s sports.Not a good look for him at that moment. He must have been shitting a whole brick factory.
“These are decent guys. I play softball with them. They’re worried that it will all come out. She’ll expose them.”
“I assume they can probably count on that. Won’t the police talk to them? So I will too.”
“For a story? That could ruin their reputation,” Ross said.
“Wait, they’re the ones who ruin their own reputation, not me.”
“They have families.”
“Then they shouldn’t have been seeking the services of a sex worker.” I got up and stood next to the window, with its cool against my hot cheek. Under a freckled scarf of stars, an ice boat glided across the lake, its hull festooned with a festive string of small lights. It looked fleet as a gull, but I would bet that the pilot was getting his balls pounded by the surface impact.
Ross sighed, then sighed again. “It’s not that simple, Reenie.”
“It is that simple. If I had a dime for every time a man has said to me it’s complicated, I’d never have to work again.”
“You’ve never done anything wrong?”
“I sure have. I’ve done things that were really wrong, but I never blamed it on my inability to resist biology.”
“Apparently, Felicity has some pretty irresistible biology.”
