“She’s my daughter!” he was yelling, his voice cracking with emotion. “She’s seventeen! You seduced a seventeen year old girl! You son-of-a-bitch!”
The voice that answered him-calmly, smoothly-was also a voice I would never forget. Because it had whispered in my ear, lodged inside me, seducing me, too. He had the same impenetrable eyes as Gary Condit, the same measured, calculated responses, designed to be no response at all. Men like that are frighteningly similar. They are cold blue ice and hard edges. Long ago, they decided to not care.
Oddly, I don’t recall my teacher’s exact words that day, although I could hear them through the open window. I recall his even tone, like a ribbon of silk floating beneath his accuser’s hysteria. I’m sure his words gave away nothing, just as Gary Condit’s didn’t. My teacher was also married, with two children, who were very young then. On this day, they were gone, having been taken on “a vacation” by their mother. She did that often, ironically giving her husband even more room to indulge in the infidelity that was already ripping through their marriage.
For all the people who watched Gary Condit’s scripted answers in his television interviews, who wonder how he can feel no accountability, who are baffled at his refusal to apologize for his long silence, the answer is simple and stark. Men like him are never accountable. They don’t lie so much as they regard truth as a homeless vagrant whom they don’t choose to invite in. It’s a cold logic, and what keeps it in place is the soft hearts of young girls who keep diving down, certain there are warm currents beneath the ice.
Even learning what I had suspected all along, that day at the window - that I was not the only high school senior involved with this man - didn’t make me abandon him. Not then, not for another year. We had an affair, although he probably would never acknowledge it as that because our sex stopped short of actual intercourse. Bill Clinton was not the first man to decide that sex without intercourse didn’t constitute a sexual relationship. It’s a common rationalization among men who rely on rationalizations.
When I finally left him, and when I told my mother, she said that she had suspected. She didn’t get angry at me, or judge me for believing I would have a future with this man. She knew what parents of daughters have to learn-that young girls’ hearts are eager and stubborn, and can’t be dictated to. Chandra Levy’s parents knew that. Like all parents, they hoped her heart would learn, and grow, and survive. No one ever thinks it will come to this-a hole in the world, the lengthening shadow of fear, the scenario that you never wanted to imagine.
“I’m not going to tell your father about this,” my mother said to me all those years ago. And she never did. I thought then, and still think, about my classmate’s father-his unbridled anguish. Fathers are supposed to be able to protect their daughters. But there is no protection against men who reel them in with chilling expertise.
Tapes of Gary Condit’s interview should, perhaps, be passed around with the warning: Beware, young girls. This is what men who can damage you are like. Study the unblinking eyes, the dry, unemotional logic. Listen to how he skims the surface of every question; his answers are meant to glide, not plunge down. If he seems to be heartless, it’s because a long time ago he decided that the heart is a waste of time.
Men like that leave young girls lying awake in the dark, longing for what they can’t have and weaving a fantasy of the future they wish could come true. Men like that whisper outside window-sills; they own the night and leave before dawn. They are not just in Washington or other cities. They are not just in politics, or show business, or on Wall Street. They are everywhere, and they always will be.
Gary Condit told us nothing in his interviews-at least nothing that will help anyone find out what happened to Chandra Levy. But in a way, he did tell us something: This is how young girls get bruised, and crushed and horribly hurt. This is how young girls get lost.
