Richard Jeffrey Newman

About a year and a half ago, as I walked home after work at about 11 PM, I passed a cou­ple talk­ing about thirty feet from the entrance to my build­ing. The woman was lean­ing with her back against the dri­vers side front win­dow of one of the vehi­cles parked on the street; her bag was on the car’s roof. The man stood in front of her, close enough that she couldn’t eas­ily move away, with his right hand planted firmly on the spot where the front and rear doors met. Clearly they were argu­ing, but his other hand was not raised and he did not raise his voice. Nor did she, in any imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able way, seem intim­i­dated, though they were stand­ing out­side the cir­cle of light cast by the street­lamp, so I couldnt see her face. They appeared to be, sim­ply, a cou­ple whod walked out of the restau­rant around the cor­ner from my house, which that night was host­ing some kind of dance party, to have an argu­ment. I passed by with­out giv­ing them much fur­ther thought.

As soon as I walked up the steps lead­ing to my build­ing, though, he yelled some­thing in Span­ish and I heard what sounded like his hand being slammed, flat and hard, against the roof of the car they’d been lean­ing on. I stopped and lis­tened for about fif­teen sec­onds. It was quiet. I peaked around the tree that was block­ing them from my sight and they were stand­ing more or less as they had been when I first walked past them. I waited a lit­tle bit longer, and, when noth­ing else hap­pened, walked into the lobby. Again, as soon as I did so – you’d think the tim­ing had been rehearsed – he started yelling at her again, and this time, from the sound of shak­ing metal, he was hit­ting as he did so the alter­nate side of the street park­ing sign that was right next to where they were standing.

I stepped back out­side just in time to see the two of them walk side-by-side past my building’s entrance. I stepped onto the side­walk to watch them. He had her purse in one hand and her upper arm in the other and the slump in her shoul­ders sure looked to me like she knew she had no choice but to allow her­self to be led away. Then, as if he felt my eyes on the back of his head, the man turned around, took a few steps towards me and said, the invi­ta­tion to pro­voke him into more than words more than obvi­ous in his voice, “What are you look­ing at?”

He was at least 15 – 20 years younger than I am, big, though maybe not quite as big as I am, and I have no idea what I would have done if he’d attacked me. It was late; I was very tired; my cell­phone bat­tery was dead; every light in my build­ing was off; and I knew my wife and my son were sleep­ing. The last time I was in a fist­fight, believe it or not, was third grade. No mat­ter how good a fight I might have been able to put up, in other words, there was no doubt in my mind that I would be on the los­ing end of it. So I didn’t say any­thing to him.

He took another step or two towards me, “Mind your own fuck­ing busi­ness, okay? This has noth­ing to do with you.”

Again, I didn’t answer.

“Look this is not between you and me,” he yelled, and I won­dered if he’d woken up any­one else in my build­ing. “It’s between us,” he said, lean­ing for­ward, push­ing his chest out towards me and ges­tur­ing with his hand towards him­self and the woman, who was stand­ing, silent and unmov­ing, a few feet behind him.

“Then you don’t need to hurt her,” I said.

“What the fuck? I’m not hurt­ing her.” He waved his hand dis­mis­sively. “Just go home.” It was an order he expected me to fol­low, not a reas­sur­ance that every­thing was okay; and then he turned back towards the woman, who turned with him, and he hung his arm over her shoul­ders, pulling her towards him and say­ing some­thing into her ear as they walked down the block, nei­ther of them look­ing back in my direc­tion. I watched them for about 20 sec­onds, went back into my build­ing, took the ele­va­tor upstairs and stood by the win­dow lis­ten­ing to hear if there were any fur­ther out­bursts, but there were none. So I made myself some tea and watched a lit­tle tele­vi­sion to unwind before get­ting ready for bed.

I’m not sure that I have much to say about this story, except that every time I try to tease some­thing out of it, I dis­cover that it’s quite a com­pli­cated lit­tle knot. On the one hand, I do not regret step­ping out into the street to be a wit­ness, even if the cou­ple was, sim­ply, a cou­ple hav­ing an argu­ment. Nor do I think the ini­tial assump­tion I made — that there was in him the threat of vio­lence against her — was wrong. It’s much bet­ter to be wrong about some­thing like that than not to do any­thing. On the other hand, though, if I was right, what good did I actu­ally do? Noth­ing had hap­pened that war­ranted call­ing the police; and if he had attacked me for “inter­fer­ing,” odds are he would have beaten me up. That might have got­ten him arrested for assault — if some­one saw it and called the cops and they were able to catch him — but it’s not at all clear that it would have made any dif­fer­ence to the woman he was with.

I real­ize that there’s an analy­sis of a sit­u­a­tion like this which says my pres­ence shifted the focus of vio­lence to where it “should” be in a male dom­i­nant cul­ture, between men — and, in the­ory at least, a part of me agrees with that — but I’m not sure that analy­sis does much good if I end up bloody and beaten and he goes home and takes his ire out even more force­fully on his female companion.

When I finally got into bed that night, I kept replay­ing the moment when he hung his arm over his companion’s shoul­ders and I real­ized I couldn’t tell for sure if the ges­ture was famil­iar, inti­mate, mean­ing some­thing like, Look, it’s over. Let’s go home, mak­ing his blus­ter towards me a sim­ple case male pos­tur­ing; or, if he was actu­ally putting her in a choke­hold, the mean­ing of which, I assume, is obvi­ous. So much of what hap­pened, at least as I remem­ber it, sug­gests the sec­ond read­ing is accu­rate, but I could not and can­not be sure. And that haunts me.

Tagged intimate violence, Masculinity, Violence Against Women