My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  I stare at the photos and try to see what he sees, but I look too weird in them—painfully pale against the unmade bed, my eyes unfocused, hair matted from sex. When he asks what I think, I say, “They remind me of that Fiona Apple music video.”

  He doesn’t look up from the Polaroids. “Fiona who?”

  “Apple. My favorite singer? Remember I had you listen to her once?” I also, a couple weeks ago, wrote some of her lyrics on a piece of notebook paper, folded it up, and left it on his desk on my way out of class. We were in the midst of a fight about me going away to college—I said I didn’t want to, he said I shouldn’t let myself be sidetracked, not by anyone or anything, including him, which made me cry, and then he said I was trying to manipulate him by crying. I thought the lyrics might help him understand how I felt, but he never said anything about it. I wonder if he even read them.

  “Right, right.” He gathers up all the photos. “Better put these in a safe hiding place.”

  He leaves the bedroom, goes downstairs, and I’m suddenly so annoyed I feel a burning in my chest, in my face and limbs. I pull the comforter over my head, breathe in the hot air, and remember how I said something about Britney Spears a few weeks ago and he had no idea who she was. “Is she some kind of pop act?” he asked. “I didn’t realize your taste skewed that way.” He made it seem like I was stupid when he’s the one who didn’t even know who Britney Spears was.

  Over April break, I turn sixteen. Babe goes to the vet to get spayed and comes home dopey with a shaved, stitched-up belly. I show my parents the list of colleges Strane picked out for me and we drive down to southern Maine to visit a couple there. As we wander the campuses, my father stares dumbfounded at the buildings, while my mother reads off information she found online: 40 percent of Bowdoin students participate in study abroad; one in four students continue on to graduate school. “What’s the price tag for this place?” Dad asks. “Did you print off those figures?”

  Halfway through the week, Strane comes to see me while my parents are at work, parking the station wagon in an overgrown boat access lane and hiking through the woods to our house. I wait in the living room, peeking around the doorway into the kitchen, waiting for him to appear in the window, and I let out a little shriek when he does, as though I’m scared, but I’m not really—how could I be? In his khaki jacket and clip-on sunglasses, he looks like someone’s dad, some nondescript middle-aged dork, mild as milk.

  As he cups his hands and peers in through the window, I grab Babe by the collar and throw open the door. Once he steps inside, she slips out of my hands. He grimaces as Babe jumps on him, her pink tongue flopping out the side of her mouth. I tell him to say no and she’ll stop, but instead he shoves her too hard and she falls onto her back, the whites of her eyes flashing as she sulks away from him into her kennel. For a moment, I hate him.

  He looks around the house, hands clasped behind his back like he’s scared to touch anything, and I suddenly see everything from his perspective, how the house isn’t clean like his, the layer of dog hair on the carpet, the old couch and its sagging cushions. Walking through the downstairs, he pauses at the little wooden houses balanced on the windowsills. Mom collects them; I give her one for Christmas every year. Strane stares at them and I imagine what he’s thinking—that they’re an ugly, stupid thing to collect. I think of the knickknacks on his bookcases, each one from a foreign country with a story behind it, and I think of what he said about my parents after their conference. Decent people, he called them. Salt-of-the-earth types. It reminds me of something I heard him say about another scholarship student, a senior in his AP class who was accepted to Wellesley but wasn’t going because it was too expensive. He felt awful for her, but what could you do? The poor girl doesn’t come from much, he said.

  “It’s boring down here,” I say, grabbing his hand. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  In my bedroom, he ducks as he steps through the doorway. He’s so big he dominates the whole room, his head brushing against the slanted ceiling, his eyes taking in the poster-covered walls, the unmade bed.

  “Oh,” he breathes. “This is such a precious thing.”

  Because of Browick, my room is frozen in time, more a representation of who I was at thirteen than who I am now. I worry it might seem too much like a little girl’s room, but that doesn’t seem to bother Strane. He studies the bookcase crammed full of middle-grade novels I’ve long outgrown, the dresser cluttered with dried-out bottles of nail polish, Beanie Babies covered in dust. Lifting the lid of my jewelry box, he grins when the ballerina pops up and begins to spin. He opens a drawstring bag and pours worry dolls made of brown paper and string into his palm. He treats everything so delicately.

  Before we have sex, he has me pretend to be asleep so he can crawl into bed and touch me as I feign waking up. When he pushes inside me, he clamps a hand over my mouth and says, “We have to be quiet,” as though there were someone else in the house. While he pounds into me, so frantic and fast it feels like my brain rattles around in my skull, my limbs go limp and my mind slips out of me, retreats downstairs where Babe whines in her kennel, still wondering what she did wrong. After Strane finishes, he takes another Polaroid of me lying in bed, posing me first, arranging my hair over my breasts and opening the window shade so the light drapes across my body.

  Later we go for a drive in his station wagon and cruise the highways that wind through the down east woods. His window is open; he lets his arm hang out. It’s warm for April, seventy degrees, buds on the trees, weeds starting to grow along the roadside.

  “I’ll come see you during the summer just like this,” he says. “I’ll pick you up and we’ll go for drives.”

  “Like Lolita and Humbert,” I say without thinking, and then wince as I wait for his annoyance at the comparison, but he only smiles.

  “I suppose that’s fair.” He looks over at me, slides his hand up my thigh. “You like the idea of that, don’t you? Maybe one day I’ll just keep driving rather than bring you home. I’ll steal you away.”

  The closer we get to the coast, the busier the roads become. Strane doesn’t seem afraid, though, so I’m not, either. We’re outlaws on the lam, a couple of brazen criminals driving all the way to the easternmost tip of the state, a fishing village of people who don’t bat an eye when we stop for sodas at the market and stroll down the pier discreetly hand in hand.

  “Sixteen years old,” he marvels. “Practically a woman now.”

  We set the self-timer on the Polaroid and balance it on the hood of the car. The photo comes out a little overexposed—Strane with his arm around me, the ocean a backdrop. It’s the only photo that exists of the two of us. I want to ask if I can have it but figure he’ll say no, so when he stops for gas I take it out of the glove compartment and slip it into my purse. I leave him the one of me on my bed. That’s the one he really cares about anyway.

  On the way home, he says he wants to kiss me a little while longer, so he pulls off the highway onto a dirt logging road. The station wagon rocks over the gravel, mud splatters on the windshield. We drive a few miles through dense woods until the trees thin and then disappear altogether, revealing a rolling blueberry barren, a carpet of green dotted with white boulders. He parks, cuts the engine, and undoes his seat belt, reaches over and undoes mine.

  “Get over here,” he says.

  As I climb over the console to straddle him, my back presses against the steering wheel and hits the horn, sending a spray of crows into the sky at the far edge of the barren. He cups my butt, the skirt of my dress hiked up around my waist, and a buzzing hums through the air. Out the car window, I see an apiary swarming with bees a couple hundred feet away. We’re miles from anyone and anywhere, free to do whatever we want, our isolation as safe as it is dangerous. I don’t know how to feel one without the other anymore.

  He pushes my underwear aside. Two fingers in me. I’m still all sticky from the sex in my bedroom, the insides of my thighs starting to rash. My forehead presses int
o the crook of his neck, hot breath against his collarbone as he tries to make me come. He says he can feel it when I do. Some women lie about it, he says, but what my body does can’t be faked. He says I get there fast. He can’t believe how fast. It makes him want to make me get there over and over, to see how many times in a row I can handle, but I don’t like that. It makes sex feel like some sort of game that only he’s allowed to play.

  As soon as it happens, I tell him to stop. I only have to say it once and he takes his hands off me like I’m something on fire. I move away from him, back over the console to the passenger seat, legs slick and chest heaving. He lifts his hand, the one that was working at me, and holds it to his face, breathes me in. I wonder how many times he’s made me come. Congratulations, I want to say, you did it yet again. Tipping my head back, I watch the bees swarm and the tops of the far-off conifers sway.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to handle being away from you this summer,” I say. I don’t even know if I mean it. During breaks I’ve been fine without him. He’s the one who says he can’t go a week without talking to me or seeing me. It’s just the sort of thing that slips out after sex, when I’m soft-belly vulnerable. But Strane takes it seriously. He’s sensitive to any indication that I’m too attached, that he’s affecting me in a way that might have long-term consequences.

  “You’ll be seeing plenty of me,” he says. “You’ll be sick of me by July.”

  When we’re back on the road, he says it again. “You’ll get sick of me.” Then he adds, “You’ll be the one to break my heart, you know. You’re holding me in your little hands.”

  Break his heart? I try to imagine myself having that power, holding his heart, mine to abuse, but even when I picture it pulsing and pumping in my hands, it’s still the boss of me, leading me around, jerking me this way and that with me clinging and unable to let go.

  “Maybe you’ll break me,” I say.

  “Impossible.”

  “Why impossible?”

  “Because that isn’t how these stories end,” he says.

  “Why does it have to end at all?”

  He looks from the road to me, back to the road, his eyebrows cocked in alarm. “Vanessa, when we say goodbye, it won’t be painful for you. You’ll be ready to be rid of me. The rest of your life will stretch out ahead of you. It’ll be exciting for you to move on.”

  I say nothing and stare out the windshield. I know that if I try to talk or move, I’ll start to cry.

  “I see so much in store for you,” he says. “You’re going to do incredible things. You’ll write books, traipse around the world.”

  He keeps prophesizing, says I will have had a dozen lovers by the time I’m twenty. When I’m twenty-five, I’ll be childless and still look like a girl, but at thirty, I’ll be a woman, no more baby cheeks, with fine lines around my eyes. And, he says, I’ll be married.

  “I’m never getting married,” I say. “Same as you. Remember?”

  “You don’t really want that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You don’t,” he says flatly, his teacher voice taking over. “I’m no one to model yourself after.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Don’t be upset.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. Look at you. You’re crying.”

  I hunch my shoulders away from him and press my forehead against the window.

  “It’s just how it has to be,” he says. “We aren’t always going to fit together the way we do now.”

  “Please stop talking.”

  A mile goes by, the roar of eighteen-wheelers, the slow curve of an esker and the boggy lake below, a brown-black mass in the distance that could be a moose, could be nothing.

  He says, “Vanessa, when you look back, you’ll remember me as someone who loved you, just one of many. I guarantee your life is going to be so much bigger than me.”

  I let out a shaky breath. Maybe he’s right. Maybe there’s safety in what he says, a chance to walk away unscathed and unbound. Is it really impossible to imagine that I might emerge from this worldly and wise, a girl with a story to tell? Someday when people ask me, “Who was your first lover?” the truth will set me apart. Not some ordinary boy, but an older man: my teacher. He loved me so desperately I had to leave him behind. It was tragic, but I didn’t have a choice. That’s just how the world works.

  Strane reaches for me as he drives, his fingers tracing my knee. He steals glances away from the road to check my face. He wants to make sure I like what he’s doing. Does that feel good? Does that make me happy? My eyelids flutter as his hand moves up my thigh. He lives to please me. Even if we end up apart, right now, he worships me—his dark Vanessa. That should be enough. I’m lucky to have this, to be so loved.

  * * *

  After April break, it’s all downhill momentum. Warm days bring classes held outside and weekend trips to Mount Blue. Daffodils bloom and the Norumbega River rushes high, flooding the downtown streets. Creative writing club starts up again when the new issues of the lit journal come back from the printers, and as Jesse and I are sorting through the boxes, deciding where to drop the copies, Strane calls me into the office and kisses me hard, his tongue filling my whole mouth. It’s reckless, bafflingly so; Jesse’s right there, the office door not even closed all the way. When I return to the classroom, lips stinging and cheeks flushed, Jesse pretends not to notice, but he doesn’t show for our next meeting.

  “Where’s Jesse?” I ask.

  “He quit,” Strane says. He smiles, seems pleased.

  In English, we start a unit where we compare famous paintings to books we’ve read that year. Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party is The Great Gatsby, everyone lazy and drunk. Picasso’s Guernica is A Farewell to Arms, the disjointed horrors of war. When Strane shows us Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, the class agrees that it’s most like Ethan Frome with its stark loneliness, the looming house on the hill. After class, I tell Strane that I see Lolita in the Wyeth painting and try to explain why—because the woman looks so beaten down with her skinny ankles, because the impassable distance between her and the house reminds me of the description of Lo at the end, pale, pregnant, and destined to die. Strane shakes his head and says for the millionth time that I assign too much significance to that novel. “We need to get you a new favorite book,” he says.

  He takes our class on a field trip to the town where Andrew Wyeth lived. We drive down the coast in a van so big that, sitting in the passenger seat beside him, the rest of the kids barely register. It’s thrilling to leave campus with him, even with the entire class behind us, oblivious captives. What if he and I decided to seize the moment and run away together? We could leave them stranded at a rest stop, Jenny’s hair whipping across her face as she watches us peel away.

  But it’s a bad time for a field trip, because he and I are in the midst of a fight over the idea of me spending another night at his house before summer break. He says we should hold off, not press our luck, and that I’ll see him plenty over the summer, but when I ask for specific dates, he tells me I need to stop building my world around him. So on the drive, I give him the silent treatment and do things I know will annoy him—fiddle around with the radio, stick my feet up on the dash. He tries to ignore me, but I note his clenched jaw, how tight he grips the steering wheel. He says there’s no reasoning with me when I get like this, when I act like a child.

  Once in the town of Cushing, we tour the Olson House, the farmhouse at the top of the hill in Christina’s World. The rooms are full of dusty, old-fashioned furniture and framed Wyeth paintings. But they aren’t real, the tour guide explains. They’re reproductions. They can’t hang real ones because the salt air is too harsh and would ruin the canvases.

  It’s sixty-five degrees, warm and sunny enough to eat lunch outside. Strane lays out a blanket at the bottom of the hill, looking up at the farmhouse, the same perspective as Christina’s World. After we eat, we do fr
eewriting as he circles around us, hands clasped behind his back. I’m still committed to my anger and refuse to play along, leave my notebook and pen untouched on the ground while I lie on my back and gaze up at the sky.

  “Vanessa,” Strane says. “Sit up, get to work.”

  It’s what he’d say to any other student acting out, but with me there’s a weakness in his voice, a pleading note that surely the others can hear. Vanessa, please don’t do this to me. I don’t move.

  When everyone else gets in the van for the drive to Browick, he grabs my arm and leads me around the back. “You’ve got to cut this out,” he says.

  “Let go.” I try to jerk away, but he’s holding me too tight.

  “Acting like this isn’t how you get what you want.” He gives my arm a shake so rough it nearly knocks me over.

  I glance up at the van’s back windows, feeling split in two, one part out here with him, the other inside with everyone else, clicking in my seat belt and shoving my bag under the seat. If any of them looked out the back window, they would see his fingers digging into the soft skin of my upper arm and it would be enough to make someone start to suspect—more than enough. A thought slaps me, stings my skin: maybe he wants someone to see. I’m starting to understand that the longer you get away with something, the more reckless you become, until it’s almost as if you want to get caught.

  That night Jenny knocks on my door and asks if she can talk to me. From my bed, I watch her step inside and shut the door behind her. She takes in the mess of my room, the clothes strewn across the floor, the desk covered in loose papers and half-drunk mugs of tea blooming mold.

  “Yes, I’m still disgusting,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You were thinking it.”

  “I wasn’t.” She pulls out my desk chair, but it’s covered with a pile of clean laundry from a week ago that I never put away. I tell her to push it off, and she tips the chair, spilling the clothes onto the floor.