The summer between my first and second years of college, when I had just turned eighteen years old, I worked as a secretary at a law firm in order to save money for the next year’s tuition, and there was this lawyer there who ran the place. He was handsome and authoritative, a brilliant jurist, and he was also forty-seven years old and married. He acted awfully stern with me, never stopping to banter and charm as he did with the other secretaries, as if he actively disliked me, but the sterner he was the more he occupied my thoughts. At work my fingers struck like lightning on the typewriter while my eyes wandered around the office, following him wherever he went, craving some crumb of approval, wondering what on earth I’d done to earn his displeasure.

One Friday afternoon in early July, he had made all these notes on a brief and needed them typed up, and the other two secretaries—Patty and Laura—had already gone home. He said, I guess we shall have to wait for Monday then, and I said, Oh, I’d be happy to stay and type it for you. He said it was too much trouble, and I said it was no trouble at all. An hour later I was flat on my back on the Chesterfield sofa in his private office, blouse unbuttoned, virginal navy skirt up around my hips, married lawyer rocking away on top of me, and let me tell you it hurt like the dickens in more ways than one, but I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t, even if I’d had the physical strength for it. I was miserable and ashamed, and at the same time I felt this surge of anguished joy when he shuddered and shook and shouted, begged God and his wife to forgive him, collapsed on my chest and called himself a lost man, because I thought that must mean I had won not just his approval, but his adoration. I was loved! Then he lifted himself off and said what a whore I was, I should have stopped him. He said this even as he wiped my blood from his skin with his handkerchief. He swore me to silence, swore this could never happen again.

That night when I went home, I couldn’t even look at my mother or my stepfather. I felt this stain on me. I was so ashamed I wanted to die. In the middle of the night I went to the medicine cabinet and stared at the aspirin and wondered how much it would take to kill me, and if I hadn’t been scared of my mother finding me first, I might have done it.