Shabdkosh

About a decade ago I moved to a country. My friend was my boss, my boss my friend.

I could get sued for this because of the nondisclosure agreement, but fuck it, me and Rose McGowan.

Unlike Harvey, she, my harasser, was very pretty.

When I arrived, they were still putting the finishing touches on my house around the corner.  Or so I was told. In retrospect.... So I stayed with her. The way her house was set up, my bedroom was a respectable number of yards away from hers, but there was a back path between them that the staff couldn't see.

It gives me shivers to remember it.

We would have breakfast, then sit on the veranda underneath a spinning fan working Sudoku, swimming every 45 minutes, playing. ("Shep! You have a good body!") We would drink beer on ice beginning at eleven, and watch Bollywood movies in her bedroom, the shutters drawn against the perpetually 82-degree sun.

She taught me how to dance the men's parts.

By night, she would start touching me. People might have come by, or we'd have been out to a Western dinner with them, but the song remained the same. I didn't want to touch her, or to be touched, for many reasons. But I played a fool rather than walk the path back to my bedroom... until 7am.

I was attracted to her, which showed, in all of the ways it always does. But I was also a world away from any power I'd ever had, and behaved like a very dumb version of myself. At this point, I had decades of defending myself against comparable situations. Just not with bosses, nor women.

There was insistence that I spend the night in her bed. I was weak enough to do it a couple of times, strong and canny enough not to do anything but put my arm around her until she fell asleep.

None of this would have happened if I'd been Robert in New York. None of this would have happened if I hadn't abandoned that guy in search of experience that I erroneously determined would be good for me psychologically and professionally.

Elegant as I thought I was about it all... Catastrophe.

It took months to play out, but I did not have the job anymore once I made it clear that my arm was all that was available, my willingness to dance like Saif.

Every story that comes out about established power vs. striving power will make me think of Kemang. Understand that you don't think of yourself as weak, just sophisticatedly navigating an untenable situation. You. Are. Not.

Manners, disbelief, and self-respect conspire to allow it.

It is only afterwards that you see it for the insanity it was. It's only afterwards that you are sad.

Forget about your house of cards
And I'll deal you mine