`A Whole Manhattan of Indifference'

My oldest son is a college sophomore in New York City, and one of his friends, a fellow student, was raped last week by a man she had met at an art gallery. They went barhopping and suddenly the police were at her apartment. The event is shocking only in its ordinariness. Abuse is casual, off-handed, as though it were a minor, easily given-up indulgence, like eating peanuts. Once we have children, all pretext of invulnerability evaporates. The world can hurt us now in ways we never imagined. Here’s a stanza from “Score,” a poem by Fred Chappell:

“The midnight of the needle
And the nickel. The fairway suburbs send
Their shaken daughters out to wheedle
The ominous stranger and habitual friend.
She delivers her snowy intelligence;
Her empty eyes declare
A whole Manhattan of indifference,
A whole Miami of despair.”

Chappell explicitly addresses drugs but the poem has another resonance. “Snowy” suggests both illicit powders and innocence. Strangers ominous and affable haunt the streets. Even the bottomless, enviable pride of youth is no protection. Predators deal in pride as though it were just another drug. Eudora Welty, of all people, spelled it out for us:

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”