The Attack

When it happened to Mimou, she was seventeen. She was so perplexed and stunned when it went down, that she felt later she had not sufficiently opposed, and wondered for years if she could have fought him off instead of the pathetic attempts of a surprised school girl's feeble verbal nos. Yet at the same time she was full of childish astonishment and wonder: was that the way it was done, was that – abyss - what being an adult was all about? Did everyone else go through it, too? Was being with a man like that, forced, a secret rite of passage?

She was stupid.

Afterwards, she never told anyone except Peri, and even then she would not use the actual word for it. She wouldn’t use it for another twenty years.

The guy was flamboyant and suave, he wore a striped jacket, had carefully disheveled hair with too much gel in it. He had a gap between his front teeth. He wrote her a poem on a piece of napkin. He went to an extremely prestigious and hard-to-get-in art school.

Ten years later, a movie and documentary director with the same name emerged. Mimou went to great lengths never to find out if it was the same man.

She had won a hotel gift certificate in another town in a raffle for her school. She had her books with her, she promised mother she would be careful and she would see her tomorrow, she figured she would shop and study for a big exam.

She met the guy right there at the bus station.

When she had lost her virginity to that drunken jerk from another school she had blamed herself, for drinking too much, for allowing the fact that he had lush curly hair delude her into thinking he was a nice guy. But everyone lost their virginity to some jerk at a drunken party. Maybe it did upset her a little, but she compartmentalized it and wasn’t scarred. After all, she had okayed it. It was nothing like with this guy.

They had a good time at first. He dazzled her with knowledge and prestige. He spoke in hushed tones. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he had something about him. To ask him to come check out her room after the lunch together seemed like an innocent enough idea. Did she think it would possibly lead up to having sex? Perhaps, eventually. But right then she just figured they’d go leave her luggage in and go roam the city. They did not.

It was over fast. She lay on her stomach, fully clothed except for her skirt and underpants which the guy had shoved down to her ankles. The worst part was, she thought afterwards, that the guy would not leave. She tried to stay as invisible as possible. She went into a shock and was unable to leave the room or move at all.

There was a movie house inside a mall attached to the hotel. When she could, much later, she went inside to see a movie. She had a roundtrip ticket, and it never occurred to her she could just leave. For the life of her she would never be able to bring back what film she went to see that night. Years later she marveled a little how she never, even for one second, as it was going down, or even later, when the guy just took a shower and made some calls and made himself at home at her hotel room, was scared for her life. There was a part of her that really thought this was the way it must be, since the guy offered no apologies, no remorse, and took her into no consideration whatsoever after having had his way with her. It was almost as if she ceased to exist to him.

As fate would have it, decades later, she found herself working at that exact same movie house for some years, the one that was still right next to the hotel. When she once read a story in the paper about the multiple rapings that had gone on inside the hotel, she was chilled to the bone, and found herself thinking that that was the real Overlook Hotel, where Jack had always been, and would continue to be, the caretaker.

That night she promised herself she would never be caught off-guard like that again. That she would make herself the baddest, the best, the rawest, and no one would have the chance to send her to have her blood checked for HIV, or sit at the doctor’s telling some tale about a broken condom to get the morning-after pill, again.

What happened was, after all, her own fault. God, she had been so stupid. She swore to lose the naivety, to lose the trust. Ten or so years later, when she accidentally stumbled on the poem the guy had written her in the restaurant, and realized it was a lesser-known piece by one of the country’s major poets, she was not surprised, only sad that there once was a girl so gullible.

And learn she did. She did become the best, the baddest, the rawest. She also lost all real interest or desire for sex. She was the best they ever had, but her heart was never in it. She did it all by the numbers. To have an orgasm would be to lose oneself in the moment, so she made damn sure to never ever come. She wouldn’t touch herself even when alone. Sometimes, when she awoke in the night to her body convulsing, and felt it was trying to release on its own, to unwind on its own, she felt a deep shame, and sometimes cried. She used sex for everything else besides showing someone she loved them.

If she did fall into love, she did not want to act anymore, but could not bring herself to communicate the reasons for the sudden change, the what appeared to be coldness and unwillingness, fearing they would not understand. Of course, not having a clue as to what was going on inside Mimou's head, none of them did understand. Every single one of her relationships ended for this very reason.

She became convinced all men ever wanted was to fuck, they did not care about anything else, and whether the woman wanted to or not was incidental. She had the nicest men as her boyfriends, she had bad men, she even once tried to make a go of it with someone she found utterly uninteresting. It was the same, every time.

After twenty years of failed relationships, she once made an off-hand remark to Sally, while she was trying on sweaters at her shop, about the time when that one asshole raped her and how she had been stupid enough to let what happened influence her entire history of relationships with men ever since, and did Sally think the size was alright and what about the color? Then she saw the look on her friend’s face.

Telling her boyfriend two weeks after inadvertently telling her best friend Mimou felt absolutely no fear at all, only the familiar profound weight at the pit of her stomach. She had no idea whether this time there would be any difference whatsoever in how things turned out. For the first time though, she didn’t think about it at all. Making someone stay felt unimportant. Trying to be understood was secondary. It was the saying it that seemed most critical and essential. If it was the power of love, she did not know or question it. If it was Mimou healing after twenty-odd years, the better to leave it alone. Mimou just wanted to tell someone whom it may concern, finally.

The Girl Zone: Nine.

For Kate Beckinsale, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Asia Argento, Mira Sorvino, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, Rosanna Arquette, Léa Seydoux, Lysette Anthony, Lucia Evans, Rose McGowan, and all the others who have come forward recently. The story may be an old one, but that will never make it okay. Some monsters are real. Silence kills.

The hardest part is trying to see who the monsters are, and who are those that are just trying to love you.

First posted on this blog October 16, 2017