Women must be believed.
My wife is a woman.
Therefore, I believe her.
That’s not to say I don’t have questions.
But after everything we’ve been through in the last 24 hours, I’m just happy she’s okay. That she’s safe. That she’s lying beside me as I type this. Asleep.
I think she’s asleep.
Her back is to me and she’s making that little noise she makes just before she begins snoring.
After 18 years of marriage, I know all her noises.
I think.
It must feel good for her to sleep in her own bed tonight. Last night she “slept” in the hospital. I use air quotes because everyone knows that hospital sleep is fake sleep. But I suppose it beats the alternative.
I didn’t sleep a wink last night.
The last 24 hours have been a blur of waiting rooms, vending machines, and parking lots. First, the stadium security office; then the ER; then the police station. Stale coffee. Powdered creamer. Questions and answers. More of the former than the latter.
But it’s all over now.
I think.
And relatively speaking, we’re lucky. We get a happy ending. Not everyone gets that. She’ll get through this.
We will get through this.
Her mother will bring the kids over in the morning. I’ll pack their lunches. My first class isn’t until 11 on Mondays. I’ll let her sleep. Then maybe her and I can talk.
Talk talk.
About what happened.
What she remembers.
What she doesn’t.
Neither of us are big drinkers. I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve seen her drunk – weddings, class reunions, and the like. Her eyes glass over, she slurs a little, and she usually falls asleep before washing her face. I’d say she’s a cute drunk.
But yesterday was nothing like that.
I know now that my wife blacked out. That is, she was walking and talking but she was on some sort of autopilot. She swears she remembers nothing of the night. The last thing she remembers was bonging a beer with those strangers we met in the parking lot before the game. But so much happened after that. Some we know, much we don’t. It was like the camera was rolling but there wasn’t any film in the camera. For her, at least.
It wasn’t until after halftime, once the teams came back on the court for the third quarter, that I sensed there might be something wrong. She had gone to the restroom at some point during the second quarter and she never returned.
I thought maybe she got lost so I circled the concourse a few times until I began to get nervous. I feared something awful might have happened to her.
My intuition wasn’t wrong.
I approached a security guard in a bright yellow polo and provided a description of my wife – she was petite, I said. Blonde with green eyes. Mid 40s. Very pretty.
He stepped away and began speaking with someone on his walkie talkie. When he returned, he had a smirk on his face and I noticed he began treating me differently; not as a concerned spouse but more like a pupil, one who was about to learn a hard lesson.
He told me to follow him.
I thought maybe my wife had gotten into trouble of some sort; perhaps she had gotten sick and vomited somewhere. At that point anything seemed possible.
Well, almost.
He led me to a security office and from the moment I walked in, I knew I was entering unchartered territory. I heard my wife shriek:
“I’m the fucking victim here!”
It was unmistakably her voice, but it didn’t sound like something she’d say – it was as if she were auditioning for a play written by someone else.
My wife also does not swear.
Her voice was coming from somewhere behind a cinder block wall.
I looked at the other security guards – one of whom was a woman – and I noticed they were all looking at me strangely. I’m not sure how else to describe it.
“What happened?” I asked.
But no one seemed interested in touching that one.
Instead, the female security guard led me to her.
My wife was sitting Indian style on a karate mat in the stadium’s holding cell.
Her makeup was smeared. She looked awful.
She stood up when I walked in, but she didn’t seem to recognize me – not at first.
“Baby,” I said. “What is going on?”
She sat down and began to cry.
“What happened?”
I knelt beside her and touched the small of her back through the bars.
That’s when she used the “R-word.”
“Oh baby, these people are awful,” she said. “You gotta’ get me outta’ here. I was minding my own business when– I was raped.”
“Raped?”
The other security guards stood with their mouths agape.
“This is the first we’re hearing of it, sir.”
“Baby, what are you talking about? Tell me what happened. Who raped you?”
“They know,” she said. “They all know. But I’m the only one behind bars.”
I turned to the security guards for some sort of explanation.
“We couldn’t catch ‘em.”
“Catch who?”
“The guys she was with – they took off.”
“Guys? Like plural? What guys?”
“You got to help me,” my wife said. “None of these people believe me. They’re treating me like a second-class citizen. It’s reverse racism, is what it is.”
“Will someone please tell me what is going here?”
That’s when I got the overview. Apparently, my wife was discovered in a handicapped stall in one of the stadium’s Men’s Rooms engaging in “lewd and lascivious acts” with three men described as “juveniles.”
The three men or juveniles, as it were, were able to flee and evade security.
My wife’s invocation of the R-word (at that moment) was, according to the head security guard, the first time my wife or anyone else had characterized the incident as anything but a sexual act among consenting adults.
“Or juveniles,” as I pointed out.
“If they were juveniles, that’s probably not going to help her case,” he laughed.
“What case?” I asked.
They said the police were on their way.
“Let me get this straight. You’re saying my wife is the one in trouble here?”
I spoke with a very cool level-headed cop in the stadium parking lot as they wheeled my wife toward the ambulance. They were taking her to the hospital where they were going to perform a rape kit.
I did not get the sense they were going to press charges against her.
I asked the cop if they had any leads on her attackers.
“Not quite,” the cop said.
“I’m sure this whole place is wired with security cameras,” I said. “I know the campus is. I work here.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m an adjunct professor,” I said. “I teach Chaucer… Medieval Literature.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked at me sympathetically.
“You just need to pull the tape, right?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“My wife says she was dragged into the bathroom. Security cameras outside the bathroom would show that, at least. From there you could get the suspects’ faces…”
EMTs were transferring my wife from the wheelchair to the gurney when I noticed a group of guys from one of the school’s fraternities pointing at her. I thought I heard one of them refer to her as “the chick from the john.”
I immediately walked over there.
“Excuse me,” I said to the kid. “You say you saw what happened to this woman?”
“Oh bro, you have no idea. Chick was getting reamed out by these black dudes.”
“Black dudes?”
“Shit was better than the halftime show. Bro, it was raw.”
I was stunned. Black dudes? I knew I had to stay focused.
Here was a key witness. But when he saw the cop walk up behind me, he and his buddies scurried back toward the building and disappeared into the crowd.
I expected the cop to give chase but instead he gave me his card and said if anything came up, he’d call me.
Time passes differently in hospitals.
It was barely twelve hours ago, and I can barely remember anything about it other than the vending machine that refused every dollar I fed it and the stale coffee with that disgusting powdered milk that refused to dissolve no matter how many times I stirred it.
I don’t know why the detail about my wife’s assailants being black bothered me. Is it considered grammatically incorrect to capitalize the word “black” if the surrounding context is pejorative or based on antiquated racial stereotypes?
Like any Caucasian cisgender American male, I worry about these things.
You should know I’m probably the least racist person on earth. I voted for Obama twice and I donated (generously) to Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s murder.
In fact, I’m so not-racist that in the brief span of time where I pictured my wife being attacked, I never once pictured her assailants being black (Black?).
My wife isn’t racist either. Quite the opposite. She read White Fragility long before it was en vogue and her favorite movie is How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
Oftentimes, while watching TV, my wife would comment about certain Black men she found attractive. I can’t recall if she ever did that with any white, Asian Pacific, or Latinx men. I never found it the least bit threatening. I just accepted the fact that my wife found certain African American men attractive and that she loved the sport of basketball (I wouldn’t have gotten us the tickets to the game if she hadn’t asked).
But what did any of this prove…?
These were the things I thought about as I paced the sterile fluorescent-lit halls as she was undergoing her physical examination.
It was around that time when my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize. I usually don’t answer those calls – they’re usually telemarketers inquiring about my car’s extended warranty or special interest groups I’ve made donations to in the past.
But I’m glad I answered the call. It was the cop I had spoken with earlier. My stomach dropped when he gave me the news.
“We have located the three gentlemen from the stadium and they’re cooperating.”
“Cooperating?” I asked. “That means they’re there – they’re at the station now?”
“They’re not here now,” he said.
“Where did they go?”
“They left.”
“You just let them go?”
He paused.
“We let them go because… we’re not pressing charges.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve viewed the security footage from the stadium and, I hate to tell you this, Mr. [REDACTED], but… the video shows your wife, going into the bathroom… voluntarily.”
“Voluntarily?”
“She wasn’t coerced.”
“Patty Hearst robbed a bank,” I said, “that doesn’t mean she wasn’t coerced.”
There was silence on the other end.
“As I said, we’re not pressing charges.”
“I’d like to see the tape for myself. Is that OK?”
There was another long pause.
“If you think it will help… I can show it to you.”
I tossed my coffee cup in the trash.
“I’m on my way.”
The cop was right. It was all black and white. The security footage offered incontrovertible proof that my wife had gone into the Men’s Room with three African American males on her own volition.
He said two of the males were adults but one of the males was 17. The age of consent in our state is (surprisingly) 16, so no felony had been committed.
In that regard, my wife had been “lucky.”
It was probably for the best there were no security cameras inside the restroom. But my imagination has not spared me of what I think likely transpired in there.
It was halftime. The bathroom was full. It sounded as if there was an audience.
I wondered if there was cell phone footage of what happened floating around.
In 2023….? Of course, there was.
I thought of how it might make its way on to the internet. To porn sites. To the Dark Web, whatever that is. It would turn up somewhere and someone would recognize her. Someone on the faculty? One of my students? Maybe all of them. There goes tenure. It was a small campus, after all.
Maybe our children would see it one day?
What is the current half-life of humiliation in the digital age?
But what I found most upsetting about the security video – which I viewed twice in real time and twice in slow motion – was the look on my wife’s face.
How happy she looked.
The cop was kind enough not to mention it (he didn’t need to) but from the video, it actually appeared that my wife was the one leading these men to the rest room.
She was holding one of them – the tallest guy – by the wrist. It was unmistakably my wife in the video but everything about her was different. The way she was looking up at him, adoringly. I’ve never seen her smile like that, anytime, anywhere. Even her gait was different. She looked… I don’t know… light as a feather. She was floating almost.
When I told the cop I had seen enough, he patted me on the back and said the only thing you can say to a man who has just watched his marriage implode.
“Sorry, dude.”
I kept replaying that footage in my mind as I sat in the hospital parking lot waiting for her to be discharged. Because of her Blood Alcohol Level, they had given her an IV and kept her overnight. By the time she was released, the sun was already coming up.
I pulled the car around to where they told me to wait, and I watched as the nurse pushed her wheelchair out from under the hospital’s blue awning toward the car.
Though I didn’t feel very chivalrous, I got out and helped my wife into the passenger seat.
We didn’t talk much on the way home, which was probably for the best.
I told her we had won the game.
“That’s good,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, turning on my blinker. Looking both ways. “Go team.”
When we got home, I helped her into the house. She must have intuited that her mother had kept the kids overnight because she didn’t ask about them once.
I made her a cup of Sleepy Bear tea, but I don’t think she even touched it.
She slept most of the day. I think the only time she got up was either to use the bathroom or take a shower.
It was a very long shower.
She then slipped into bed, facing away from me, which I guess is the way she always slept.
I had never really noticed that before.
It seemed there were a lot of things I was noticing for the first time.
In bed, as she lay beside me, I continued the research I began while waiting for her to be discharged.
I wanted to know more about the subconscious. Specifically, what could drive a seemingly happy person to do something so out of character?
Or was it out of character?
Was she happy?
How well do I really know my wife?
I have so many questions.
Do I want the answers?
Without revealing anything, I reached out to a few old friends over text. These are friends who had all been serious drinkers at one point or another. I told them I had a thorny Chaucer issue, which I knew would prevent any further inquiry.
Nobody wants to talk about Chaucer.
I asked them about the state of blacking out. Had they ever done something profoundly regrettable or acted in a way that was completely out of character?
The responses varied.
But the consensus was that they wouldn’t do anything they hadn’t at least thought of when they were sober.
Alcohol lowers inhibitions but it doesn’t make you a different person. If anything, they said, it brings out who you really are.
So now, as I stare at my wife’s back and type this, and she begins to enter a dream state, I wonder who she is, and what she could possibly be dreaming about.
Because now I really to want to know.
I think.