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The room was so quiet I might as well have been completely alone with my screaming thoughts. When I went to open my mouth, the only thing that came out was a strangled word that sounded like “No.”
“Let me see that,” Angela said, snatching the photo from my fingers. Seconds later, she slapped a hand over her mouth, her wide eyes meeting mine. She mutely passed the photo to Kit, who did the same thing. The game stopped at Pauline, who had never met Will and didn’t know why everyone was so shocked.
“Who’s this?” she asked.
“This recruit’s name is Will,” Matilda explained to Pauline. “He is … a friend of Cassie’s.”
“Friend?” I said, altogether too loudly. “He’s my ex-boyfriend. And my current business partner.”
Oh my god, am I going to faint? I’m going to faint.
“He’s also a man,” Matilda said to me, evenly, “who I think would suit our Solange perfectly.”
Is this really happening?
“Well, this is interesting,” Pauline said, spinning the photo into the center of the table.
“He came to me a few days ago,” Matilda continued.
Will? Came to her?
Matilda proceeded to tell the story of one man’s awakening, Will’s, which had happened after he almost lost someone he loved because of certain conscious and unconscious prejudices some people held about women and sex. I thought she was talking about Will losing me, but he had meant Claire, whose vicious slut-shaming had been equal parts baffling and infuriating to him. Matilda described how Claire’s victimization had left Will feeling utterly powerless. And it also exposed attitudes he hoped to correct in himself. He came to Matilda, she said, because he wanted help. He wanted to do something constructive, maybe make a donation to some of the charities highlighted at the event at Latrobe’s, the very venue he had stormed out of after fighting with me.
“And that’s when I suggested that he become a recruit, as a way to open his mind and to change his attitudes about women and sex.”
“You suggested this to Will?”
“I did, Cassie. I explained that our organization works to remove sexual stigmas from women, one interlude at a time. And we do that with one another’s help, but also with the help of a few good men who are also changed for the better by their involvement with us.”
“You asked Will to become a recruit?” I repeated, trying really hard to contain my anger.
“Yes, Cassie,” she said, matching my near-hysteria with an enormous amount of gentleness. “I asked him to consider it. And he said yes. If we’d have him.”
I harrumphed, my arms wrapped tightly around my torso, my chin down. I was the physical embodiment of teenaged poutiness.
“He does know that I’d find out, right?”
“Of course. I told him that in order to be considered he’d have to pass muster with the entire group, including you.”
“And he didn’t care?”
“Of course he cares, Cassie. Trust me when I say this, he cares a great deal. Especially about you.”
“Ha!” I said. That outburst was followed by the sickening sense of my own emotional limitations. But it was hard to see the altruism in all this.
And yet, the more Matilda talked about recruiting Will for S.E.C.R.E.T., the more the rational part of my brain began to light up and take over.
“Will made it very clear that if you were against this idea, he’d decline,” Matilda said. “He feels that this might be a way to make … amends. To us, to you, to women in general, I guess. That’s how he put it.”
I had to laugh. And so I did.
“The way he makes amends to me is by fucking some other woman? That is amazing.”
The approbation came swift and sure.
“Cassie Robichaud, that is not a reaction befitting a member of S.E.C.R.E.T. The ‘some other woman’ you speak of is our Solange, our sister in S.E.C.R.E.T. And last I checked, your romantic and sexual ties with Will were no more. And you, my dear, seem to be enjoying the many benefits of S.E.C.R.E.T. membership. Are you not? Besides, Will is going to start having sex again with other women regardless. What’s wrong with him starting here, where it’s just his body in the game and not his heart?”
I kept looking around the table for someone to side with me, but Kit, Pauline, Angela and the rest of them had slowly sunk in their seats, watching this like it was a tennis match on a big screen. My mind spun wildly, careening from anger to fear, to those darker places where rancid jealously brewed. Then clouds began parting on reason and a different thought occurred to me: If Will participated in S.E.C.R.E.T., saw all the wonderful things this crazy little institution offered, maybe he’d see that he’d been acting like a knucklehead all along. He’d see what sexual expression and liberation could mean to the soul. To be angry with Will was to be the hypocrite I accused him of being. To prevent his participation in S.E.C.R.E.T. because of some old fears was to admit I’d learned nothing. And it would be tantamount to admitting I still held out hope that there was a future for us. In fact, allowing him entry into S.E.C.R.E.T. fixed so many things between us: it evened out the playing field, it gave us a common experience, and i
