All Fall Down: A Novel Read online

  “Later,” he’d whispered, and I’d sailed out the door, resolved not to think too hard about it, buoyed by this unexpected show of affection, by lust, and by the confidence that only a dose of narcotics could give me. Maybe everything was going to be fine. Maybe I’d go home and we’d make love (in my fantasy, Ellie had been whisked away, possibly by the Indomitable Doreen). Dave would tell me that he loved me, that he’d always loved me, and, more than that, that he was proud of me. He would tell me he was grateful that I’d kept us going during hard times. Then he’d tell me that he’d come up with another book idea, that his agent loved it, that the publisher loved it, that they’d given him another advance even bigger than the first one, and that L. McIntyre had been transferred to Butte, Montana.

  “No slutty,” said Cindy. Working quickly, she touched up my foundation, patted concealer underneath my eyes, glued a few falsies into my lashes, and ran a flat iron over my hair. “Put on more lipstick and lipgloss right before they start,” she said, handing me tubes of both. Beatrice and her clipboard were waiting in the hallway.

  “I’ll take you to the greenroom. You’ve got about ten minutes.”

  “Who else is on this segment?” I asked as we walked.

  Her heels clipped briskly against the tiled floor. “Let’s see. It’s you, Father Ryan of the Christian League of Decency, and, um, a parenting person. She’s a child psy . . . psychologist? Psychiatrist?” She frowned at her clipboard as if she were disappointed it wasn’t volunteering the answer. “A child something.”

  “Great. Can I ask you a quick question?” Without giving her time to mull it over, I said, “You guys know I’m not a sex worker, right?” The line between her eyebrows reappeared as Beatrice looked from her clipboard to my face, then down at her clipboard again. “So you’re not a sex worker.”

  I shook my head.

  “But you work in the sex industry?”

  “No, no I don’t. Really, the most accurate thing you could say is that I work for a website that sometimes addresses women’s sexuality.” Sarah, I thought. Sarah was Ladiesroom’s go-to sex-positive person, but she wasn’t here because this was Philadelphia, and I was the local girl.

  She scribbled something on her clipboard. “Got it.”

  I was unconvinced. But I said, “Okay, great,” and followed her pointing finger into another closet-sized room. This was the greenroom—painted, I noticed, an unremarkable beige. It had a conference-style table, a big flat-screen TV set to Channel 9, and a cart with three cans of Diet Coke, a bucket full of water I assumed had once been ice, and a black plastic tray covered in crumbs and two barely ripe strawberries. Father Ryan sat at one end of the table, with his Bible open and his head bent. At the other end sat a tiny, dark-haired woman in a red suit talking into a Bluetooth headset. “Mmm-hmm. That’s right. Have Dolly pick up the sushi on her way in. The flowers come at five and the caterers start at six. Right—oh, hang on.” She jabbed at her phone with one fingertip. “Hello, this is Dr. Carol Bendinger, how can I help you?”

  I took one of the cans of Diet Coke and found a seat. When neither of my fellow panelists acknowledged me, I pulled out a copy of my morning blog post and highlighted the points I wanted to make. Being sexually active is not an invitation to rapists, I’d written. True. The fact that a teenage girl chooses to have sex with someone doesn’t mean she’s willing to sleep with everyone. Also true. But rape wasn’t sex. Should I be making more of a distinction between a girl using her vibrator with her boyfriend (or girlfriend, I reminded myself) and what the boys at the party had done to her?

  I rummaged oh-so-casually in my purse until I found the Altoids tin. Flipping it open, I counted two, four, six, eight, ten pills. I’d taken those two pills less than an hour ago, but I was already starting to feel the familiar anxiety working its way through my body, nibbling at my knees, making them feel as if they were filled with air instead of flesh and blood and bone, and my brain was revving too quickly, flooding with thoughts of Ellie and Dave and Sarah and Ladiesroom and whether I really needed to start writing seven times a week and how I was going to get two hundred plastic eggs filled with school-approved treats before the Celebration of Spring on Monday afternoon. There was the mortgage that needed paying. The roof that needed replacing. The second car we needed to buy, and Ellie’s tuition, and summer camp, and had I ever made her a dentist appointment? I couldn’t remember.

  “Panelists?” Beatrice and her clipboard were back. “We’re going to mic you, and then get you seated during the commercial break.”

  I held still while a big, bearded man with delicate fingers clipped a microphone to my sweater collar and looked me up and down before hanging a small black box with an on/off toggle switch to the back of my skirt’s waistband. The Decent Christian got his clipped to the back of his belt. The parenting expert, evidently a TV veteran, produced her own microphone from her pocket. Then we were led onto the set that I’d seen a thousand times from my own kitchen and living room—the curving desk where the sports guy and the weather girl would banter with the anchorman, a map of Pennsylvania off to one side. The three of us were positioned on a raised platform, in armchairs grouped around a coffee table with a neat stack of books and a vase of flowers on top of it. As soon as the commercial break began, the Sunday anchor, a gorgeous woman named LaDonna Cole, came and took the seat across from us.

  “Pretend we’re all just sitting around talking,” she instructed as a woman with a blow-dryer in a leather holster around her waist sprayed something onto LaDonna’s hair and another lady brushed powder onto her cheeks. “Interrupt each other! Jump in if you’ve got something to say! Keep it lively, ’kay?” She gave us a twinkling smile. I studied her face anxiously. She was wearing a ton of makeup, even though, as far as I could tell, her skin was flawless. Should I be wearing more?

  “In three . . . two . . . one.” The bearded man behind the camera pointed two fingers toward LaDonna, who flashed her dazzling teeth again. “Good morning. I’m LaDonna Cole. It’s the case that’s on every paper’s front page, and all over social media. It happened in Akron, last Friday night, and almost everyone knows the details. A fifteen-year-old girl goes to a party hosted by an eighteen-year-old classmate, whose parents are away. There’s drinking. The girl passes out. Her ex-boyfriend, who’s seventeen, tells her friends that he’ll take her home. Instead, according to the girl’s testimony, he and three of his friends carry her down the street, to one of the friends’ basements, and sexually assault her, posting pictures and video of the assault to popular social media sites. And that’s where things get complicated.” Photographs flashed on the screen behind LaDonna’s head to illustrate her talking points—yearbook pictures of the accused, candids from the football field. “The ex-boyfriend, a popular athlete, says that she did, in fact, consent to their activities. He claims he had no idea that his friends were recording them. The other boys also posted pictures of a vibrator the girl allegedly had in her purse. The case has sparked vigorous debate,” said LaDonna, angling her body expertly to face a second camera. “Does the young woman have any responsibility for what allegedly happened that night? Is this a case of rape or, as some have said, a case of a girl who woke up with regrets the morning after? We’re joined this morning by Father David Ryan of the Christian League of Decency, Dr. Carol Bendinger, child psychologist and author of Online and On Guard: Keeping Our Kids Safe in a Wired World, and Allison Weiss, a popular blogger whose column at Ladiesroom.com deals with sexuality, marriage, and motherhood.”

  Okay, I thought. Not bad.

  “Father Ryan, let’s start with you.”

  “Of course, what happened last Friday is a tragedy, for all the young people involved—the young woman and the young men,” Father Ryan intoned. “None of them will emerge from this unscathed. The young woman’s had her reputation ruined, and the young men are now facing the possibility of prison time, and of having to be registered as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.”

  “And
you think that’s wrong,” LaDonna prompted.

  “I think it’s a tragedy, and I think that the young woman has to shoulder some of the blame.”

  “Why is it her fault?” I asked. All three of their heads turned toward me, and, out of the corner of my eye, I caught the camera’s motion. “She went to a party and drank. So did the boys. We’ve got a lot of he-said/she-said about whether she consented to sex. But the pictures aren’t ambiguous. The pictures don’t lie. And what the pictures show is a group of boys assaulting a girl who is clearly unconscious, a girl who is in no position to say yes or no or anything at all.”

  “The pictures also show how she was dressed,” Father Ryan said smoothly. “You can’t go to a party wearing little more than underwear and not realize that you’ve put yourself in danger.”

  “So she deserves to be raped for wearing a short skirt, and the boys who did it, and the ones who took pictures of their buddies, they don’t deserve to be punished at all?” I was surprised to find how furious I was, how easily I could imagine my own daughter wearing the wrong thing, downing a drink that was stronger than she’d known, letting the wrong guys walk her home. “What kind of fine, upstanding citizens go to a party and take pictures of one of their buddies having sex, and then put those shots online?”

  “Those boys were provoked,” Father Ryan said.

  “So she was asking for it?” I could feel my anger . . . but I could feel it from a distance, from behind the protective, warm bubble of the drugs, the invisible armor that let me be brave.

  “It might be a pleasant fantasy to imagine that women can dress any way they want to and nothing bad will happen,” said Father Ryan. “But we live in the real world. Teenage boys, teenage boys who’ve been drinking . . .”

  “. . . know that stealing is wrong. They know that arson is wrong. Yet these boys managed to get drunk without helping themselves to anyone’s wallets or setting the house on fire. It’s ridiculous to give them a free pass for sexual misconduct, to think that everything they know about what’s right and fair and legal goes out the window because they’ve had a bunch of beer and they see a girl in a short skirt.”

  “Let’s hear from Dr. Bendinger,” said LaDonna. Her widened eyes suggested that she might have gotten a more lively conversation than she’d envisioned.

  Dr. Bendinger said the case illustrated how social media raised the stakes of all of our actions; how no matter what you did, it would dwell online, forever.

  “And is that fair?” asked LaDonna.

  Father Ryan shook his head. “This was a youthful indiscretion,” he said.

  “This was a rape,” I replied.

  He shook his head again, looking annoyed, like I was a mosquito who wouldn’t quit buzzing. “A young girl goes to a party in a short skirt and a tank top. She gets drunk. She’s announcing her intentions to have sex. She’s got a vibrator in her purse . . .”

  “None of which meant it was okay for four guys to carry her down to the basement and rape her.”

  “So you don’t have a problem with a fifteen-year-old having a vibrator?” asked LaDonna.

  “I do not,” I said. “I think it’s better for a young woman to use a vibrator in a loving, committed, monogamous relationship, or to use it all by herself, in no relationship at all, than for her to participate in hookup culture, where she’s there to service a guy, where he gets off and she gets nothing.” Was I allowed to say “get off” on TV? Never mind. The pills were lifting me, buoying me, making me feel invincible, effortlessly witty, even cute. “Maybe vibrators are actually keeping girls out of trouble,” I said. “Maybe every girl should get one along with her driver’s license. A chicken in every pot and a vibrator in every purse!” I said. Father Ryan looked horrified. I, on the other hand, felt great.

  “With that, I’m afraid we’re out of time,” said LaDonna Cole, who looked more than slightly relieved. “Father Ryan, Dr. Bendinger, Ms. Weiss, thank you so much for joining us.” When the camera was off, we all shook hands; then, still glowing with triumph, I sailed out of the building and into my car. My phone was buzzing, flashing Sarah’s picture on the screen.

  “Hi!”

  “A chicken in every pot and a vibrator in every purse?” She sounded somewhere between bemused and grossed out. “Dude. You have got to write that and get it up ASAP.”

  “ASAP,” I repeated, and giggled. Oh, but I felt good! And a few more pills—two, maybe even three, why not?—would only make me feel better. I could surf this delicious, happy wave all the way home. I could write my next blog post, make love with my husband and fall asleep in the warmth of his arms, and then I’d get up, go to the grocery store, and buy the ingredients for his favorite coq au vin for dinner. While it was simmering, I’d call Skinny Marie and give her carte blanche and a blank check. My house would finally have furniture. My life would finally be okay.

  “Six hundred words. Quick as you can.” Then Sarah paused. This was uncharacteristic. Sarah was usually full speed ahead, without as much as an “um” to disrupt the staccato rhythms of her thoughts. “This is kind of awkward, but I need to ask you something.”

  “Ask away!” I said. Just like that, the delicious wave of joy collapsed underneath me, leaving me splayed on an icy shore. Suddenly I was terrified. She knows, I thought. Maybe I’d accidentally typed my work address at Penny Lane, and they’d delivered a package of Percocet or Oxy to the office?

  Sarah cleared her throat. Then, before I could beg her to put me out of my agony, she said, “There’s some money missing from the petty cash account.”

  “Oh!” Ladiesroom maintained the account Sarah had mentioned, a few thousand dollars that all writers and editors above a certain level could access if they wanted to, for example, pay for membership to a sex club without using their own credit card or having to wait for the expense reports to wend their way through the accounting department (which had been, we guessed, outsourced to some country where women would work for a dollar an hour).

  On Wednesday afternoon, sitting idly at my computer, I’d realized, with an unpleasant jolt, that at my current rate of consumption I would run out of pills by Sunday. Purchasing drugs online was a tedious affair that involved buying Internet currency on one site, then moving those coins to Penny Lane . . . and I saw, as my heartbeat sped up, that the checking account I used to fund my illicit activities was almost empty. I could transfer money in from a household account, or get a cash advance from one of my credit cards, then make a deposit . . . but what if Dave decided to look?

  Unable to think of a solution, feeling desperate and trapped, I’d taken a thousand dollars out of the petty cash account, moved it to my personal checking account, and then used it on Penny Lane. I’d planned on replacing the cash first thing Monday, as soon as I got paid, and hoped that nobody would notice.

  Except, of course, somebody had.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” I said, apologizing to buy time while I tried to come up with some kind of plausible explanation. “I meant to tell you. What happened was, I got caught short on my property taxes. I had no idea how high they’d be out here—I mean, obviously, I did know, at least at some point, but I must have repressed it. So my accountant called me last Wednesday and was, like, you need to pay this before the end of the workday, so I just moved the money, and I was going to e-mail you about it, and of course I was going to pay it back as soon as I got my paycheck Monday morning, but it must have totally slipped my mind. It was a really stupid thing to do, and I am so, so sorry . . .”

  I made myself shut my mouth. In the silence that followed, I imagined the cops showing up, Ellie watching as they snapped on the handcuffs and led me away. Sarah had every right to accuse me of stealing. Petty cash was for work-related expenses, not property taxes. She could turn me in to the cops, or to Ladiesroom’s bosses. Worse than that, she could demand to know why I really needed the money. My tale of property-tax woe sounded flimsy even to my own ears.

  Instead of asking more questions, th
ough, Sarah said, “Okay. I figured it was probably something like that. It wasn’t like you were trying to be sneaky about it . . . I mean, you didn’t exactly try to cover your tracks.”

  I felt like my internal organs were turning to soup, like my bones were caving in. I was shaking all over, sweating at my hairline and underneath my arms, struggling to keep my voice steady as I repeated how sorry I was, how stupid I’d been, how of course I would put the money back immediately if not sooner and how I would never ever ever do anything that dumb again.

  “It’s okay.” Sarah sounded a little stiff. My eyes prickled with tears; my cheeks burned with humiliation. Did Sarah have any idea what was really going on? Had I lost her respect and her trust? “Just get home and get to writing. ‘A chicken in every pot and a vibrator in every purse.’ I wonder if we can get T-shirts made?”

  On that happy note, I apologized some more, then unclenched one sweat-slicked hand from the steering wheel and shoved it into my purse. I didn’t have enough pills to calm myself down, to erase what I’d done and make it okay. When I was wound up like this, four or five or even six pills could barely take the edge off. But I had to do something to slow my racing heartbeat, to get rid of the sick, sinking feeling in my gut, the shame that had taken up residence in my bones . . . and this was the only thing I knew. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m done writing,” I said, and slipped my medicine under my tongue.

  • • •

  I paid close attention to the speed limit and kept a safe distance between my front bumper and the car ahead of me. I’d never been the most mindful of drivers even in my pre-pill era, and a fistful of Oxy did not do much to improve one’s concentration. More than once since I’d found Penny Lane, I had pulled out of our driveway with my coffee mug on top of the car or driven away from a gas station with the gas cap still dangling. I put on music, practiced yoga breathing, and tried to tell myself that everything was fine, that I’d dodged the petty-cash bullet, and that, as soon as I finished my blogging, Dave and I could pick up where we’d left off.