Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

The Facts of the Matter

the facts of the matter 21 ANONYMOUS “Fiction is a wonderfully flexible form, a capacious means of exploring psychology and possibilities, but when it comes to bearing witness to the troubled world in which we live now, I turn to nonfiction. When life grows stranger than fiction, nonfiction is hard to resist.” The Facts of the Matter Here is how it happened: the door to the suite was open that night when I walked past and saw her splayed across a couch, one foot on the floor, one leg hooked over an arm rest. I was coming in from a party. Two AM,or three.The fabric of her skirt curled around her legs like smoke or like the drapery in Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” which I’d seen just the week before in Vincent Scully’s art history class. I stepped in—to see if she was all right. That is what I told myself. Her head was canted back at a disturbing angle against the cushion, it looked as if her neck might be snapped. I touched her leg. Said something, maybe asked if she was okay. Got no reply. I set my hand on her calf, intending to wake her, but she didn’t wake and something about the smooth skin under my palm made me sit down and leave my hand there.And then,because I knew she wouldn’t mind, because I knew she wouldn’t know, I stayed. These are the facts of the matter: twenty years ago—because the opportunity arose, because no one would know, not even the girl unconscious on the dorm room couch—I took advantage of a girl I liked. At the time I didn’t think of it as rape—. I thought that things had gotten a little out of hand. There had been a party at the Taft Hotel that night, hosted by a popular history professor, and someone had seriously spiked the punch. We were all pretty smashed, in her case to unconsciousness. She was a gorgeous girl, someone I knew only slightly, from a huge art history lecture course and our residential college. We had not spoken at the party that night, though I’d seen her there; she was the sort of girl you noticed across a room, beautiful that way, what my Dad liked to call “a long tall drink of water.” In the convoluted logic of the drunken and ashamed, the fact that we had not spoken at the party made what happened seem more 22 anonymous acceptable,because it was more remote,not something I had anticipated or worked to further.The act itself was fast and furtive as porn. “Don’t tell me what you feel,” essayist Barbara Hurd has said, “tell me what you think.” So I am thinking about the facts of that night, and whether facts matter to a story such as mine. Were I to tell you details—her hair color, the color of the couch, its texture (which I still recall,as,curiously,I still recall the poster over the couch),would that matter ? Were I to tell you that we were both in Davenport College, known at the time for housing wealthy heirs to vacuum and candy fortunes, legacy kids,which I was not,would it change how you’d read this and me? Would this become a “class narrative,”an account of a scholarship kid’s misguided effort to exorcise his rage? Would it matter to know my name, my race, or hers, or is a piece of nonfiction more potent for not knowing who I am, for not being able to make this personal, singular, my problem not yours? Is it discretion not to reveal more of the facts, protecting her identity, or am I merely protecting my own? How telling is a factual tale, and how much telling is too much? (Does it matter that I’ve never told anyone this?) Twenty years later, I am a professor at a good writing program in the Midwest, and though I do not often think of it, I do—sometimes— imagine fucking one of my students. It happens only once or twice a year. I consider this a modest achievement. Friends at other universities —GW, Harvard—tell me about wanting to fuck their undergrads all the time. These are guys a decade or two older than I am, in their fifties and sixties, who mistake the innocent flirtation of nubile twenty...