Van Go Jenkins’s assault of Penelope Dalton is a turning point in the episode’s movement from an apparently practical act of getting her home to a deliberate abuse of her vulnerability. Penelope is heavily intoxicated, unable to stand unaided, and confused about who is with her. Though she asks to be taken to the pool house rather than into the main house, that request does not amount to consent to what follows. Van Go takes advantage of her condition and assaults her there, in a scene narrated through his own self-serving and callous perspective.

The Return to Penelope’s House

Van Go brings Penelope home after leaving Roger behind. It is almost dark, the house is quiet, and Penelope is drifting in and out of awareness. She cannot stand by herself, so Van Go helps her from the car and toward the front of the house. His narration dwells on his anxiety about making a scene and getting into trouble; Penelope, meanwhile, is babbling and singing. The contrast matters: he is alert to the risk of being discovered, while she is too impaired to manage her own safety.

At the house, Penelope asks not to be taken inside and directs Van Go to the pool house. He follows her instruction and nearly has to carry her around the side of the house. He puts her on a lounge chair. The setting is separate from the main house, and Penelope’s request places her in a space where she is dependent on Van Go’s help. Her impaired state, rather than any mutual intimacy, defines the circumstances of the encounter.

Van Go’s Perspective and the Assault

Alone with Penelope, Van Go describes a tangled mixture of resentment, envy, and attraction. He resents her money and her father and believes that she looks down on him; at the same time, he is physically drawn to her. The narration sets these feelings beside his awareness that she is drunk and unable to stand. That awareness makes his next action a choice to exploit her condition, not a misunderstanding about whether she can participate.

Van Go touches Penelope while she is on the lounge chair. When he hears someone approaching, his attention turns to the danger of being found with her. A woman calls Penelope’s name from beside the pool and comes to the pool-house door. Van Go recognizes that she has a white cane and is blind. He covers Penelope’s mouth to keep her from speaking; the woman does not discover him and walks back toward the house.

With the interruption gone, Van Go continues. Penelope calls him Roger, the man who had been with them earlier, and Van Go recognizes that she does not know who he is. Her confusion and incapacitation make the absence of consent unmistakable. He nevertheless assaults her. The scene does not present this as a romantic encounter or as a reciprocal relationship: Penelope is unable to identify her assailant reliably, and Van Go proceeds for his own gratification.

Concealment and Narrative Significance

The arrival of the blind woman briefly threatens to expose Van Go, but he responds by silencing Penelope rather than seeking help or stopping. The episode therefore turns on a sharp contrast between the appearance of assistance—Van Go has brought Penelope home and followed her request to go to the pool house—and the exploitation that follows. His concern about punishment is explicit in the narration, while concern for Penelope’s safety is absent from his actions.

The episode is told in Van Go’s first-person voice, whose bluntness gives the reader access to his rationalizations but does not make them reliable moral guidance. His attention to being caught, his contemptuous descriptions, and his willingness to act while Penelope is incapacitated reveal the gap between his self-interested account and the gravity of what he does. The woman’s mistaken assumption that Penelope is alone does not make the pool house safe; it allows the assault to continue unseen.

The excerpt closes the assault without narrating Penelope’s later response, any disclosure, or any legal or personal consequences. The following morning, Baby Girl wakes Van Go and urges him to answer the phone, but the passage does not establish what the call concerns or connect it to the assault. The event’s immediate significance is thus the violation itself and the reader’s recognition of Van Go’s capacity for calculated abuse, rather than a documented aftermath.