My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  “Ok, stop,” I say. “Stop, stop.”

  He recoils as though I kicked him away—sits back on his knees, still in his T-shirt and jeans, hair mussed and face shiny. “Did you come?” he asks. “Really, that fast?”

  I squeeze my legs together and my eyes shut. I can’t talk, can’t think. Was that fast? How long did it even take? A minute or ten or twenty, I have no clue.

  “You did, didn’t you? Do you know how special that is?” he asks. “How rare?”

  I open my eyes and watch him wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, then pause and hold that hand to his face, take a breath, and close his eyes.

  He says he wishes he could do that to me every night. Pulling the comforter up with him, he lies down beside me and adds, “Every single night before you fall asleep.”

  Him cradling me feels almost as good as him going down on me, his chin resting on top of my head, his big body curled around mine. He smells like me. “We won’t go further than that for now,” he says, and I turn liquid-warm at the thought of sex being nothing but him doing that to me.

  He reaches over and turns off the nightstand light, but I can’t sleep. His arm grows heavy across my shoulders as I replay in my head the way he said “oh no” when he saw me in the pajamas, the way he wrapped his arms under my legs to pull me closer to his face when he went down on me. The way he, at one point, reached up and held my hand in the middle of it all.

  I want him to do it again, but don’t dare wake him to ask. Maybe he’ll do it again in the morning before I leave. Maybe we’ll be able to do it after school in his classroom sometimes, or go for drives off campus and do it in his car. My mind won’t quiet. Even as I eventually doze, my brain still schemes.

  When I wake a couple hours later, it’s dark outside. Hallway light streams in through the bedroom doorway, across the floor. Beside me, Strane is awake, his mouth hot on my neck. I turn onto my back, grinning, expecting him to move his face down between my legs, but he’s naked when I roll over. Pale skin covered in dark hair from his chest all the way down his legs, and in the center his penis, enormous and erect.

  “Oh!” I say. “Ok! Wow. Ok.” Small, stupid words. When he takes my wrist and guides my hand to it, I say them again. “Oh! Ok!” He closes my fingers around it, and I know that I’m meant to do the up-and-down stuff, and my hand immediately starts pumping away, dutiful as a robot, disconnected from my brain. It’s loose skin sliding over a column of muscle, but rough, halting. It’s like a dog hacking up garbage that’s been sitting in its stomach for days, that violent, full-body gag.

  “Slower, baby,” he says. “A little slower.” He shows me what he means, and I try to keep the pace even though my arm is starting to cramp. I want to tell him I’m tired, to roll over and never look at the thing ever again, but that would be selfish. He said me naked is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. It would be cruel for me to counter that with disgust. It doesn’t matter that my skin crawls from touching him. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. He did that to you, now you do this to him. You can handle a few minutes of this.

  When he guides my hand away from it, I worry he’ll ask me to use my mouth next and I don’t want that, I can’t do that, but instead he says, “Do you want me to fuck you?” It’s a question, but he isn’t really asking.

  I can’t wrap my head around the change in him. Now I’m not even sure if he really said, We won’t go further than that for now, or maybe “for now” meant something totally different from what I assumed. Do I want him to fuck me? Fuck me. The crudeness of it makes me turn my face into the pillow. His voice doesn’t even sound the same, haggard and rough. I open my eyes and he’s positioning himself between my legs, brow furrowed in concentration.

  I try to stall, tell him I don’t want to get pregnant.

  “You won’t,” he says. “That’s impossible.”

  I move my hips away. “What does that mean?”

  “I had an operation, a vasectomy,” he says. He holds himself with one hand and steadies me with the other. “You won’t get pregnant. Just relax.” He tries to push in, his thumb digging hard into my pelvis. It won’t fit.

  “You gotta calm down, honey,” he says. “Take a deep breath.”

  I start to tear up, but he doesn’t stop, just says I’m doing great as he keeps trying to get it in. He tells me to breathe in and out, and when I exhale, he thrusts hard and pushes a little farther inside. I start crying, really crying—still, he doesn’t stop.

  “You’re doing great,” he says. “Another deep breath, ok? It’s ok if it hurts. It won’t hurt forever. Just one more deep breath, ok? There we go. That’s nice. That’s so nice.”

  Afterward, he gets out of bed, a flash of belly and butt before I shut my eyes. He pulls on his underwear and the elastic band snaps like a whip crack, like something splitting in two. As he walks to the bathroom, he coughs hard and loud and I hear him spit into the sink. Under the blankets, I’m raw and slick, my legs slimy all the way down my thighs. My mind feels like the lake on a calm day, glassy and still. I’m nothing, no one, nowhere.

  When he comes back into the bedroom, he looks like himself again, dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his glasses on. He slides into bed, curls his body around mine. He whispers, “We made love, didn’t we?” and I gauge the distance between “fuck” and “made love.”

  After a while, we have sex again and it’s slower, easier. I don’t come from it, but at least I’m not crying this time. I even like the weight of him on top of me, so heavy it slows my heart. He comes with a groan and a shudder takes over his body, radiating from his core. The feel of him trembling on top of me makes my muscles contract and squeeze him even tighter inside, and I understand then what people probably mean when they say that stuff about two becoming one.

  He apologizes for finishing too quickly, for being clumsy. He says it’s been a while since he was last intimate. I roll the word intimate around in my mouth and think of Ms. Thompson.

  After we have sex the second time, I go to the bathroom and peek in his medicine cabinet, something I wouldn’t think to do if I hadn’t seen women in movies do it when they spend the night in a strange man’s home. His cabinet is full of the usual Band-Aids and Neosporin, over-the-counter digestive stuff, plus two orange prescription bottles labeled with names I recognize from commercials, Viagra and Wellbutrin.

  On the dark drive back to campus, the streetlights flashing yellow, he asks how I feel. “I hope you’re not too overwhelmed,” he says.

  I know he wants the truth and that I should tell him I didn’t like being woken up by him hard and practically pushing into me. That I wasn’t ready to have sex this way. That it felt forced. But I’m not brave enough to say any of this—not even that I feel sick to my stomach when I think about him guiding my hand to his penis and don’t understand why he didn’t stop when I started to cry. That the thought I want to go home ran through my head the entire time we first did it.

  “I feel fine,” I say.

  He watches me closely, like he wants to be sure I’m telling the truth. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s what we want.”

  2017

  Text from Mom: Hey you. Listen to what just happened. Middle of the night, I can’t sleep, heard something outside, went downstairs and turned on the porch light, and there was a BEAR going through the garbage can!!! Scared the crap out of me. I screamed and ran upstairs and hid under the covers lol. Watching that British cooking show now to try to calm down. Lordy. Not much other news here. That woman Marjorie who lives on the other side of the lake has lung cancer. The one with the goats. Anyway, she’s on her way out. Very sad. My car got recalled because of that thing with the door. Going to take 8–12 weeks. They gave me some piece of shit rental. Ugh. Horror after horror. Anyway, just checking in. Call your momma sometime.

  Bleary-eyed and still in bed at ten a.m., I try to make sense of the text. I have no idea who Marjorie is, or what’s wrong with Mom’s car door, or what British cooking sho
w she’s talking about. Ever since Dad died, I’ll wake up to texts like these. This one, at least, has regular punctuation; others are rambling stream-of-consciousness thoughts linked with ellipses, incoherent enough to make me worry.

  I close the text, open Facebook, and check Taylor’s profile for anything new. I type into the search bar names I’ve looked up so many times they pop up with the first letter: Jesse Ly, Jenny Murphy. Jesse lives in Boston, does something in marketing. Jenny’s a surgeon in Philadelphia. In her photos, she already looks middle-aged, deep wrinkles around her eyes, brown hair laced with gray. Nothing posted about Strane in their profiles, but why would there be? They’re adults living actual fulfilling lives. They have no reason to remember what happened back then, or even to remember me.

  X-ing out of Facebook, I google “Henry Plough Atlantica College,” and the first result is his faculty profile with the same decade-old photo of him in his office, the beers he and I would later drink together unopened on the bookshelf behind him. He was thirty-four then, only a couple years older than I am now. The second search result is an article from the Atlantica student newspaper dated May 2015, “Literature Professor Henry Plough Receives Teaching Award.” It’s a prize given every four years, the recipient decided by a student vote. Junior English major Emma Thibodeau says students are thrilled with the result: “Henry is an incredible professor, so inspiring and you can talk to him about anything. He’s just an amazing person. His classes have changed my life.”

  I scroll to the bottom of the article where a cursor sits blinking in an empty text box. “Want to leave a comment?” I type, “Re: ‘an amazing person’—Trust me, he’s not,” but the article is two years old and Henry didn’t do anything that bad anyway, so what does it matter? I toss the phone across my bed, go back to sleep.

  Strane calls when I’m walking to work, stoned from the bowl I smoked while getting ready. My phone vibrates in my hand, the screen flashing his name, and I stop in the middle of the sidewalk like a tourist, oblivious to the flow of pedestrian traffic. I bring the phone to my ear and someone smacks my shoulder, a girl in a jean jacket—no, two girls in matching jackets, one black-haired, one blond. They walk with their arms linked, backpacks bumping against their tailbones. They must be from the high school, sneaking out during lunch period to roam downtown. The black-haired girl, the one who ran into me, shoots me a look over her shoulder. “Sorry,” she calls, her voice lazy and insincere.

  On the phone, Strane says, “Did you hear me? I said I’m vindicated.”

  “You mean you’re ok?”

  “I’ll be back in my classroom tomorrow.” He laughs as though he can’t believe it. “I thought for sure I was finished.”

  I stand on the sidewalk, my gaze still fixed on the two girls as they move down Congress Street, their undulating hair. Him back in the classroom, once again unscathed. Disappointment seeps into me as though I wanted to see him fall, a meanness that catches me off guard. Maybe I’m just stoned, my mind tumbling down a rabbit hole of feeling. I need to stop smoking before work. Need to grow up, let go, move on.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” Strane says.

  The girls disappear down a side street, and I exhale a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “I am. Of course I am. That’s great.” I start walking again, my legs unsteady. “I bet you’re relieved.”

  “I’m a little more than relieved,” he says. “I was making peace with the idea of spending the rest of my life in prison.”

  I stop myself from rolling my eyes at the exaggeration, as though he might somehow see me. Does he really believe he’d ever go to prison, a Harvard-educated, well-spoken white man? The fear feels unfounded and vaguely performative, but maybe it’s cruel to criticize. He’s been panicked, in crisis. He’s earned the right to some melodrama. I can’t understand what it feels like to stare down that kind of ruin. The risks he took were always greater than mine. Just be nice for once in your life, Vanessa. Why do you always have to be so fucking mean?

  “We could celebrate,” I say. “I can get Saturday off. There’s a new Scandinavian restaurant everyone’s crazy about.”

  Strane sucks in a breath. “Not sure that’s going to work,” he says. I open my mouth to offer something else—a different restaurant, a different day, to drive up to Norumbega rather than have him come here—but he adds, “I need to be cautious right now.”

  Cautious. I squint at the word, try to understand what he’s really saying. “You’re not going to get in trouble for being seen with me,” I say. “I’m thirty-two years old.”

  “Vanessa.”

  “Nobody remembers.”

  “Of course they do,” he says. Impatience sharpens his words. He shouldn’t have to explain that even at thirty-two years old I’m still illicit, dangerous. I am living, breathing evidence of the worst thing he’s ever done. People remember me. The whole reason he was on the brink of disaster is because people remember.

  “It’d be best if we keep our distance for a while,” he says. “Just until this all cools down.”

  I concentrate on breathing as I cross the street to the hotel, throwing a wave to the valet standing at the entrance to the parking garage, the housekeepers in the alley taking long drags from their cigarettes.

  “Fine,” I say. “If that’s what you want.”

  A pause. “It’s not what I want. It’s just how it has to be.”

  I open the lobby door and my face is hit with a waft of air thick with jasmine and citrus. They literally pump the scent in through the vents. It’s supposed to energize and rejuvenate the senses; the kind of attention to detail that makes this a luxury hotel.

  “It’s for the best,” he says. “For both of us.”

  “I’m at work. I gotta go.” I hang up on him without saying goodbye. In the moment, it’s enough to make me feel I’ve won, but once I’m settled at my desk the pit in my stomach takes root and blooms into humiliation—discarded again at the first opportunity, tossed aside like trash. The same thing he did when I was twenty-two, when I was sixteen. It’s a truth so blatant and bitter, not even I can sweeten it into something easier to swallow. He only wanted to make sure I’d stay quiet. He used me again. How many times? What’s it going to take, Vanessa?

  At my desk, I pull up Taylor’s Facebook page. At the top of her feed sits a status update posted less than an hour ago: The school that once promised to nurture and protect me has sided with an abuser today. I’m disappointed but not surprised. Expanding the thread of comments, one with a couple dozen likes shows up first: I’m so, so sorry. Is there any other course of action you can take, or is this the end? Taylor’s response turns my mouth dry.

  In no way is this the end, she writes.

  During my break, I go outside to the alley behind the hotel and dig a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the bottom of my purse. I smoke leaning against a fire escape, scrolling through my phone until I hear the scuff of shoes on pavement, a shush, a muffled laugh. Looking up, I see the two girls from my walk to work. They stand now at the far end of the alley, the blond girl clutching the black-haired one’s arm.

  “Go ask her,” the blonde says. “Do it.”

  The black-haired girl takes a step toward me, stops, crosses her arms. “Hey,” she calls. “Can we, um . . .” She looks over her shoulder to the blonde, who holds a fist against her mouth, grinning behind the cuff of her jean jacket.

  “Do you have an extra cigarette?” the black-haired girl asks.

  When I hold out two, they both rush forward. “They’re a little stale,” I say. That’s ok, they say. That’s totally fine. The blonde swings her backpack off one shoulder, pulls a lighter out of the front pocket. They light each other’s, cheeks hollowing as they inhale. They’re close enough for me to see the cat-eye points of their eyeliner, the tiny zits along their hairlines. When I’m around girls their age, the magic age Strane taught me to mythologize, I feel myself become him. Questions pile up in my mouth, ones designed to make them linger. I b
ite down hard to keep them from pouring out—what are your names, how old are you, do you want more cigarettes, or beer, or weed? It’s so easy for me to imagine how it must’ve been for him, desperate enough to give a girl whatever she wanted to keep her close.

  The girls thank me over their shoulders as they move back down the alley, their giddiness replaced with a languid cool thanks to the cigarettes between their fingers. Swaying their hips, they turn the corner, give me one last look, and are gone.

  I stare at the spot where they disappeared, the setting sun glinting off a stream of water leaking from a dumpster, the windshield of an idling delivery van. I wonder what those girls saw when they looked at me, if they sensed a kinship, if the reason they dared ask me for a cigarette was because they could tell that, despite my age, really I’m one of them.

  With an exhale of smoke, I pull out my phone and bring up Taylor’s profile, but I see nothing. My mind is gone, galloping after the girls, wanting to know what Strane would think of them with their bummed cigarettes and tough attitudes. He’d probably find them coarse, too confident, risky. You’re so yielding, he’d say as I let him move my body around. He made it a compliment, my passivity a precious and rare thing.