At university, I said I hated Nate Moore.
It was an annoying-sibling hate, the kind exclusive to teenagers. I remember once we were in the living room of my and Jen’s townhouse-style dorm in the fall of my sophomore year, drinking Kahlua with coffee. We were debating: is porn demeaning to women? And Nate said,
“Dominating women is hot.”
We had debates every week, Nate and Jen and I and whoever else was around. Should abortion be illegal? Does the federal government owe reparations to indigenous peoples? Which is preferable, Keynesian or supply-side economics? We debated as if these questions were philosophical. Jack was around then. I can’t forget.
“So hot right now,” Jen said, laughing while I tried to form words.
Nate held up his hands. Even the gesture was patronizing: he couldn’t believe we weren’t giving him the benefit of the doubt.
“I don’t mean objectively hot.” His dimples basked in the ruckus he’d created. “This isn’t an ideal world. I mean our culture fetishizes it.”
Oh my god, I just hate him.
“Why wouldn’t you say ‘our culture fetishizes violence against women’?” I said.
“Because what I meant is it’s hot. As much as I’d never raise a hand to a woman, I’ve been turned on by fantasies of violence. Haven’t you?”
“Yeah, Krista,” Jack interjected, “you’ve never fantasized about being spanked?”
Nate put a palm on Jack’s chest. Jack was being too explicit. Nate preferred vagueness, which let him gaslight us. One reason he irritated me so much was because I think he really believed he was sharpening his rhetoric for a courtroom.
“I have,” Jen said mostly to Jack, with an innocent smile. Always baked; always the peaceable one. “I understand the appeal of being dominated—I’m conditioned the same way.”
“I think that’s it,” Nate said. “Conditioning.”
“So decondition,” I said.
“I’m trying.”
“Right. I’m sure you’re the model of integrity with your, uh, girlfriends.”
I was trying to rile him. Sometimes he didn’t like when I referenced his love life, a revolving door of four-week relationships. That day, though, he wasn’t perturbed.
“Ask around,” he said, and grinned.
That was before I knew that talking is one thing and action another.
After all, it was Jack who raped me, and it was Nate, I think, who killed him.
In the fall of our freshman year, Jen had found Nathaniel J. Moore in the Faculty of Law building, where she spent spare periods studying potential husbands. Of course he’d caught her eye: six-two, arms like baked hams, and what looked like twenty grand in orthodontic work (just good genes, he claimed).
It turned out that he was in his last year of a bachelor’s in Poli. Sci., and he was only for law school. He wasn’t the dynasty husband she sought, but a bursary kid who’d run away from a rural Mennonite family. He sold weed to his rich friends’ Upper Mount Royal moms and boxed
