Watching my face, his fingertips slide up my leg and keep sliding until they brush the crotch of my tights. Reflexively, my legs clamp together, trapping his hand.
“That was too far,” he acknowledges.
I shake my head, relax my legs. “It’s ok.”
“It’s not ok.” His hand slips out from under my skirt and he slides like liquid out of his chair and onto the floor. Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, “I’m going to ruin you.”
It’s the most unbelievable thing that has happened so far, more surreal than him saying he wanted to kiss me or his hand stroking my leg. “I’m going to ruin you.” He says it with obvious torment, a glimpse into how much he’s thought about it, wrestled with it. He wants to do the right thing, doesn’t want to hurt me, but has resigned himself to the likelihood that he will.
With my hands hanging in midair above him, I take in his details: black hair, gray at the temples; the smooth grain of his beard ending at a clean-shaven line under his jaw. There’s a small cut on his neck, slightly inflamed, and I imagine him that morning in his bathroom, razor in hand, while I stood barefoot in my dorm room, smearing makeup on my face.
“I want to be a positive presence in your life,” he says. “Someone you can look back on and remember fondly, the funny old teacher who was pathetically in love with you but kept his hands to himself and was a good boy in the end.”
His head still heavy in my lap, my legs start to shake, my armpits and the backs of my knees break into a sweat. “Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.
“Some days I sit in your chair after you leave class. I rest my head on the table like I’m trying to breathe you in.” He lifts his head from my lap, rubs his face, and sits back on his heels. “What the fuck is the matter with me? I can’t tell you this. I’m going to give you nightmares.”
He hefts himself back into his chair, and I know I have to offer something to convince him I’m not afraid. I need to match him, show he isn’t alone. “I think about you all the time,” I say.
For a moment, his face brightens. He catches himself and scoffs. “Like hell you do.”
“All the time. I’m obsessed.”
“That I find hard to believe. Beautiful girls don’t fall in love with lecherous old men.”
“You aren’t lecherous.”
“Not yet,” he says, “but if I make another move toward you, I will be.”
He needs more, so I give more. I tell him I write my stupid poems just so he’ll read them (“Your poems are not stupid,” he says. “Please don’t call them that.”), that I spent all Thanksgiving break reading Lolita and feel changed because of it, that I dressed up today for him, that I shut the classroom door because I wanted us to be alone.
“And I thought we might . . .” I trail off.
“We might what?”
I roll my eyes, titter out a laugh. “You know.”
“I don’t.”
Swiveling slightly in the chair, I say, “That we might, I don’t know, kiss or something.”
“You want me to kiss you?”
I lift my shoulders and duck my head so my hair falls over my face, too embarrassed to say it.
“Is that a yes?”
Behind my hair, I give a little grunt.
“Have you been kissed before?” He pushes back my hair so he can see me, and I shake my head no, too nervous to lie.
He gets up and locks the classroom door, turns off the lights so no one can look in through the windows. When he takes my face in his hands, I close my eyes and keep them closed. His lips are dry, like laundry stiff from the sun. His beard is softer than I expected, but his glasses hurt. They dig into my cheeks.
There’s one close-lipped kiss, then another. He makes a wordless hmm sound and then there’s an open kiss that goes on for a while. I can’t focus on what is happening, my mind so far away it might as well belong to someone else. The whole time all I can think about is how weird it is that he has a tongue.
Afterward, my teeth won’t stop chattering. I want to be fearless, to smirk and say something flirty and coy, but all I can do is wipe my nose on my sleeve and whisper, “I feel really weird.”
He kisses my forehead, my temples, the corner of my jaw. “A good weird, I hope.”
I know I should say yes, reassure him, give him no reason to doubt how much I want it, but I only stare off into middle distance until he leans forward and kisses me again.
I sit at my usual place at the seminar table, my palms flat on the tabletop to keep myself from touching the raw skin at the corners of my mouth. Other students filter in, unzipping their coats and pulling copies of Ethan Frome out of their backpacks. They don’t know what happened, can never know, but still I want to scream it. Or, if I can’t scream it, I want to press the heels of my hands against the table, break through the wood until the whole thing cracks apart and the splintered pieces fall in such a way that the secret spells out across the floor.
On the other side of the table, Tom leans back, stretching his arms behind his head so his shirt rides up, showing a couple inches of his stomach. Jenny’s chair is empty. Before Tom came in, Hannah Levesque said something about them breaking up, gossip that would have sent me reeling two months ago. Now it barely registers. Two months feels like a lifetime.
During class, as Mr. Strane lectures on Ethan Frome, there’s a slight tremble in his hands, a reluctance to look my way—or no, it’s ridiculous now to think of him as “mister.” But the thought of calling him by his first name seems wrong, too. At one point he touches his hand to his forehead, loses his train of thought, something I’ve never seen him do before.
“Right,” he mumbles. “Where was I?”
The clock above the doorframe ticks two, three, four seconds. Hannah Levesque makes some painfully obvious point about the novel, and instead of brushing her off, Strane says, “Yes, exactly.” Turning to the chalkboard, he writes in big letters, Who is to blame? and an ocean roars in my ears.
He talks about the whole plot of the novel even though we only had to read the first fifty pages for class. The allure of young Mattie and the moral conundrum the older, married Ethan finds himself in. Is Ethan’s love for her really wrong? He lives in desolation. All he has is sickly Zeena upstairs. “People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful,” Strane says, with so much sincerity in his voice there are ripples of laughter around the seminar table.
I should be used to this by now but it’s still surreal—how he can talk about the books and also about me, and they have no idea. It’s like when he touched me behind his desk while everyone else sat at the table, working on their thesis statements. Things happen right in front of them. It’s like they’re all too ordinary to notice.
Who is to blame? He underlines the question and looks to us for answers. He’s struggling. I see that now. It isn’t that he’s nervous to be around me; he’s wondering whether he did something wrong. If I were braver, I would raise my hand and say about Ethan Frome and about him, He didn’t do anything wrong. Or I’d say, Shouldn’t Mattie share some of the blame, too? But I sit silently, a scared little mouse.
At the end of class, Who is to blame? still stretches across the chalkboard. The other students file through the door, down the hallway, and out into the courtyard, but I take my time. I pull my backpack zipper, bend down and pretend to tie my shoes, slow as a sloth. He doesn’t acknowledge me until the hallway outside the classroom is empty. No witnesses.
“How are you doing?” he asks.
I smile brightly, tug at my backpack straps. “I’m fine.” I know I can’t show even a hint of distres
s. If I do, he might decide I can’t handle any more kisses.
“I was worried you might be feeling overwhelmed,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“Ok.” He exhales. “Sounds like you’re doing better than I am.”
We decide I’ll come by later, after faculty service hour when the humanities building is quiet. When I’m nearly out the door, he says, “You look lovely.”
I can’t stop the grin from taking over my face. I do look lovely—dark green sweater, my best-fitting corduroys, my hair falling in waves over my shoulders. That was on purpose.
When I return to the classroom, the sun has set, and there aren’t any window blinds so we turn off the lights, sit behind his desk, and kiss in the dark.
* * *
Ms. Thompson organizes a Secret Santa in the dorm and I draw Jenny’s name, which seems like it should hurt. Instead all I feel is a vague annoyance. I take the ten dollars I’m meant to use on a gift and go to the grocery store, buy her a pound of generic-brand ground coffee, and spend the rest on snacks for myself. I don’t even wrap the coffee; at the gift exchange I give it to her in the plastic grocery bag.
“What is this?” she asks, the first words she’s spoken to me since last spring on the last day of the year—the I guess I’ll see you around she tossed over her shoulder as she left our dorm room.
“It’s your gift.”
“You didn’t wrap it?” She opens the bag with the tips of her fingers, like she’s worried what might be inside.
“It’s coffee,” I say. “Because you were always drinking coffee or whatever.”
She looks down at it, blinking so hard that for a moment I’m horrified, thinking she’s about to cry. “Here.” She thrusts an envelope at me. “I got your name, too.”
Inside the envelope is a card and, inside that, a twenty-dollar gift certificate to the bookstore downtown. I hold the gift certificate in one hand and the card in the other, my eyes darting back and forth between them. Inside the card, she wrote, Merry Christmas, Vanessa. I know we haven’t kept in touch but I hope we can work on repairing our friendship.
“Why did you do this?” I ask. “We were only supposed to spend ten dollars.”
Ms. Thompson moves from pair to pair, commenting on all the gifts. When she reaches us, she sees Jenny’s red cheeks, the vacuum-sealed bag of cheap coffee fallen out onto the floor, the guilt all over my face.
“Mmm, what a nice gift!” Ms. Thompson says, so enthusiastic I think she’s talking about the gift certificate, but she means the coffee. “As far as I’m concerned, you can never have too much caffeine. Vanessa, what did you get?”
I hold up the gift certificate and Ms. Thompson gives a thin smile. “That’s nice, too.”
“I have homework to do,” Jenny says. She picks up the coffee with two fingers, like it’s something gross she doesn’t want to touch, and leaves the common room. I want to say more, to shout after her that the only reason she wants anything to do with me is because Tom broke up with her, and that it’s too late because I’ve moved on. I’m doing things now Jenny wouldn’t even be able to imagine.
Ms. Thompson turns to me. “I think it was a thoughtful gift, Vanessa. It’s not just about how much money you spend.”
I realize then why she’s being nice—she thinks I’m so poor that a three-dollar bag of coffee is all I can afford. The assumption is both funny and insulting, but I don’t correct her.
“Ms. Thompson, what are you doing for Christmas?” Deanna asks.
“Going home to New Jersey for a while,” she says. “Might take a trip to Vermont with friends.”
“What about your boyfriend?” Lucy asks.
“Can’t say I have one of those.” Ms. Thompson steps away to check out some other Secret Santa gifts, and I watch how she clasps her hands behind her back and pretends not to hear Deanna whisper to Lucy, “I thought Mr. Strane was her boyfriend?”
One afternoon Strane tells me my name originated with Jonathan Swift, the Irish writer, and that Swift once knew a woman named Esther Vanhomrigh, nickname Essa. “He broke her name apart and put it back together as something new,” Strane said. “Van-essa became Vanessa. Became you.”
I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.
He says the first Vanessa was in love with Swift and that she was twenty-two years younger. He was her tutor. Strane goes to the bookshelves behind his desk and finds a copy of the poem Swift wrote called “Cadenus and Vanessa.” It’s long, sixty pages, the whole thing about a young girl in love with her teacher. My heart gallops as I skim the poem, but I feel his eyes on me so I try not to let it show, shrugging my shoulders and saying in my laziest voice, “That’s kind of funny, I guess.”
Strane frowns. “I thought it eerie, not funny.” He slides the book back onto the shelf and mumbles, “It got under my skin. Made me start thinking about fate.”
I watch him sit at his desk and flip open his grade book. The tips of his ears are red, like he’s embarrassed. Am I capable of embarrassing him? I forget sometimes he can be vulnerable, too.
“I know what you mean,” I say.
He looks up from his book, light glinting off his glasses.
“I kind of feel like this whole thing is destiny.”
“This whole thing,” he repeats. “You mean what we do together?”
I nod. “Like maybe this is what I was born to do.”
As my words register, his lips start to tremble like he’s trying hard not to smile. “Go shut the door,” he says. “Turn out the lights.”
I use the pay phone in the Gould common room to call home the Sunday before Christmas break, and Mom says she has to pick me up on Tuesday rather than Wednesday, meaning an extra day of break, an extra day of no Strane. It’s hard enough getting through a weekend without him; I don’t know how I’ll manage to survive three weeks, so when she tells me this, it feels like the floor opens up beneath me.
“You didn’t even ask me! You can’t just decide that you’re going to pick me up a whole day early without asking me if it’s ok.” My panic gains momentum and I struggle not to cry. “I have responsibilities,” I say. “There are things I have to do.”
“What things?” Mom asks. “Good lord, why are you so upset? Where is this coming from?”
Pressing my forehead against the wall, I take a breath and manage to get out, “There’s a creative writing club meeting I can’t miss.”
“Oh.” Mom exhales like she expected something more serious. “Well, I won’t get there until six. That should give you enough time to go to your meeting.”
She takes a bite of something and it crunches between her teeth. I hate how she eats while she talks to me, or cleans, or has conversations with Dad at the same time. Sometimes she’ll take the phone with her into the bathroom and I don’t realize until I hear a flush in the background.
“I didn’t know you liked that club so much,” she says.
I wipe my nose with my sweatshirt’s dirty cuff. “It’s not about me liking it. It’s about taking my responsibilities seriously.”
“Hmm.” She takes another bite, and whatever it is rattles around in her teeth.
On Monday, when Strane and I sit in the dark classroom, I won’t let him kiss me. I turn away and twist my legs out of his reach.
“What wrong?” he asks.
I shake my head, don’t know how to explain. He seems completely unbothered by the upcoming break. He hasn’t even brought it up.
“It’s fine if you don’t want me to touch you,” he says. “Just tell me to stop.”
He leans in close, peering at me, trying to make out my expression in the dark. I can see the darting shine of his eyes because he’s not wearing his glasses—ever since I told him they hurt my face, he takes them off before we kiss.
“As much as I wish I could, I can’t read your mind,” he says.
His fingertips touch my
knees and wait to see if I’ll jerk away. When I don’t, his hands creep farther up my thighs, over my hips, and around my waist, the casters of the chair squeaking as he pulls me close. I sigh, lean into him, his body like a mountain.
“It’s just we’re not going to be able to do this again for so long,” I say. “Three whole weeks.”
I feel him relax. “That’s what you’re sulking over?”
It’s how he laughs that makes me start to cry, like I’m being ridiculous, but he thinks it’s the idea of missing him that’s making me so upset.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, kissing my forehead. He calls me sensitive. “Like a . . .” He stops and softly laughs. “I was about to say like a little girl. I forget sometimes that’s exactly what you are.”
I turn my face deeper into him and whisper that I feel out of control. I want him to say he feels the same, but he just continues stroking my hair. Maybe he doesn’t need to say it. I think of his head in my lap the afternoon we first kissed, how he moaned, I’m going to ruin you. Of course he’s out of control; you have to be careening to do what we’re doing.
He pulls away, kisses the corners of my mouth. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.
The ground outside is covered in snow, reflecting enough light into the classroom so I can see his smile, the wrinkles that appear around his eyes. Up close, his face is disjointed, enormous. On the bridge of his nose there are indentations from his glasses that never go away.
“But you have to promise not to agree to what I’m proposing unless you absolutely want to,” he says. “Ok?”
I sniff, wipe my eyes. “Ok.”
“What if after Christmas break . . . say, the first Friday we’re back . . .” He draws in a breath. “What if you came to my house?”
I blink in surprise. I assumed this would happen eventually, but this feels soon, though maybe not. We’ve been kissing for over two weeks.
When I say nothing, he continues. “I think it’d be nice to spend time together outside of this classroom. We could eat dinner, look at each other with the lights on. That’d be fun, right?”
My Dark Vanessa Page 9