From the start, his demeanor is all wrong—affable and self-deprecating; nothing about him strikes a chord of terror like Strane did on the first day, filling the blackboard with notes on a poem no one dared admit they hadn’t read. And yet as Henry Plough goes through the roster, his eyes moving up and down the length of the seminar table, taking each of us in, I am back in Strane’s classroom, feeling his eyes drink me in. A breeze drifts in through the open window, and the salt air smells of burned dust from the radiator in Strane’s office. The scream of a seagull turns into the Norumbega church bells marking the half hour.
At the other end of the table, Jenny finally looks my way. Our eyes meet and I see it’s not Jenny at all, just a girl with a round face and brown hair who I’ve had classes with before.
Henry Plough reaches the end of the roster. As always, I’m last. “Vanessa Wye?” It sounds so imploring on the first day of a new semester. Vanessa, why?
I raise two fingers, too shaken to lift my arm. At the other end of the table, the girl I thought was Jenny uncaps her pen and the storm surge within me retreats, leaving behind garbage and tangled strands of rotten kelp. I feel a familiar fear: maybe I’m crazy, narcissistic, delusional. Someone so stuck in her own brain, she turns unwilling bystanders into ghosts.
Henry Plough studies my face as though to memorize it. In his grade book, he puts a mark next to my name.
For the rest of the seminar, I sit hunched in my seat, daring to look at him only in glances. My brain keeps drifting out the window; I can’t tell if it’s trying to escape or get a wider view. After class I walk home alone along a shoreline path, sea mist frizzing my hair. It’s a pitch-black night and I’m wearing my earbuds, music turned up so loud I don’t stand a chance against anyone who might want to grab me from behind—senselessly stupid behavior. I’d never admit to this, but the thought of a monster’s breath on the back of my neck gives me a thrill. It propels me forward, the epitome of asking for it.
Strane comes to see me that Friday night. I wait for him in front of my building, sitting on the stoop of the bagel shop that fills our apartment with the smell of yeast and coffee every morning. It’s a warm evening: girls in sundresses walk to the bars; a boy from my poetry class sails by on a longboard, drinking a beer. When Strane’s station wagon appears, it turns down the alley rather than parking on the street where it’s more likely to be seen. He’s still paranoid, even though there aren’t any Browick alums at Atlantica.
After a minute, he emerges from the dark alley and grins under the glow of a streetlight, holds out his arms. “Get over here.”
He’s wearing stonewashed jeans and white tennis shoes. Dad clothes. When weeks pass between visits, I get caught off guard and end up burying my face in his chest just so I don’t have to look at his ruddy nose and graying beard, stomach falling over his waistband.
He leads the way up the dark stairwell to my apartment like it’s his place and not mine. “You have a couch now,” he says as we step inside. “That’s an improvement.”
He turns to me with a smirk, but his face softens as he takes me in. Out on the street, in the dark, he couldn’t see how pretty I am in my sundress, with my new bangs, winged eyeliner, and rose-stained lips.
“Look at you,” he says. “Like a French girl from nineteen sixty-five.”
His approval is all it takes for my body to buckle and his ugly clothes to turn not so ugly, or at least not important. He’s always going to be old. He has to be. That’s the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.
Before I open the door to my bedroom, I warn, “I didn’t get a chance to clean, so be nice.”
I turn on the lights and he surveys the mess: the piles of clothes, coffee mugs and empty wine bottles on the floor beside my bed, a cracked eye shadow palette ground into the carpet.
“I will never understand how you live in this,” he says.
“I like it,” I say, using both hands to shove my clothes off the bed. That’s not really true, but I don’t want to hear his lecture about messy environments reflecting messy minds.
We lie down, him on his back and me on my side squeezed between him and the wall. He asks about my classes and I go through the list, hesitating when I get to Henry Plough’s. “Then there’s that capstone seminar.”
“Who’s the professor?”
“Henry Plough. He’s new.”
“Where’d he get his doctorate?”
“I have no idea. It’s not like they put it on the syllabus.”
Strane frowns, vaguely disapproving. “Have you given thoughts to your plans?”
Plans. Postgraduation. My parents want me to move south, to Portland, Boston, beyond. “There’s nothing for you up here,” Dad jokes, “only nursing homes and rehab centers, because everyone north of Augusta is elderly or an addict.” Strane wants me to leave, too, says I should broaden my horizons and get out into the world, but then he’ll add something like, “Don’t know what I’ll do without you. Probably give in to my baser instincts.”
I wiggle my head, noncommittal. “Eh, a little. Hey, wanna smoke?” I crawl over him, grab the jewelry box where I keep my pot. He watches with a frown as I go through the steps of loading a bowl, but he takes a long hit when I offer the pipe.
“Didn’t anticipate having a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend meant a midlife round of substance abuse,” he says, his voice thin with an exhale of smoke, “though I guess I should have seen it coming.”
I take a hit, inhaling so hard my throat burns. I hate how excited I get when he calls me his girlfriend.
We smoke the bowl and drink a mostly full bottle of wine left on the floor next to the bed. I turn on my little TV, and for five excruciating minutes we watch a reality show about men getting arrested after trying to meet up with teenage girls from chat rooms who were actually cops in disguise. I put on a movie instead. All I have are films that hit equally close to home—both versions of Lolita, Pretty Baby, American Beauty, Lost in Translation—but at least they focus on the beauty of it all, frame it as a love story.
When Strane takes off my dress and rolls me onto my back, I’m so high I feel blurred, like swirling smoke, but as he starts to go down on me, everything crashes into focus. I clamp my legs shut. “I don’t want that.”
“Nessa, come on.” He rests his face against my clamped thighs, gazes up at me. “Let me.”
I lift my eyes to the ceiling and shake my head. I haven’t let him go down on me for at least a year now, maybe longer. It wouldn’t kill me or anything, but it would admit a kind of defeat.
He continues. “You’re turning down pleasure.”
I tense every muscle in my body. Light as a feather, stiff as a board.
“Are you punishing yourself?”
My thoughts tumble down a wormhole, dulled edges and gentle curves. I see the night ocean, waves hitting the granite shore. Strane is there, standing on a slab of pink granite, his hands cupped around his mouth. Let me do it. Let me pleasure you. He keeps calling, but I’m out of reach. I’m a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so strong I can fly for miles. I’m the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.
“You’re stubborn,” he says, moving on top of me and nudging my legs apart with his knee. “So stupidly stubborn.”
He tries to push in, and then has to reach down to stroke himself; he keeps going soft. I could help, but I’m still feather light, board stiff. Plus, it isn’t my problem. If a forty-eight-year-old man can’t get hard for a twenty-one-year-old girl, can he get hard for anything? For a fifteen-year-old, maybe. Sometimes at his house in Norumbega, we pretend it’s the first time again. You gotta relax, honey. I can’t get in if you don’t relax. Deep breaths.
He starts to move in and out of me, and I shut my eyes to watch the familiar images play on loop: loaves of bread rising, groceries traveling down a conveyor belt, a time lapse of white roots extending into soft earth. The longer the reel plays, the more my skin crawls. My ches
t starts to heave. Even with my eyes open, all I see are the images. I know he’s on top of me, fucking me, but I can’t see him. This keeps happening. The last time I tried to explain to him what this feels like, he told me it sounded like hysterical blindness. Just calm down. You gotta relax, honey.
I grab at my own throat. I need him to choke me; it’s the only thing that will bring me back. “Do it hard,” I say. “Really rough.” He does it only if I beg, a stream of gasping “pleases” until he relents, presses half-heartedly on my throat. It’s enough for the apartment to reappear, his face looming over me, sweat sliding down his cheeks.
Afterward, he says, “I don’t like doing that, Vanessa.”
I sit up, scoot down the bed, and grab my dress from the floor. I have to pee and don’t like walking around naked in front of him, and I also don’t know when Bridget’s coming back.
He adds, “There’s something very troubling about it.”
“Define ‘it,’” I say, slipping the dress over my head.
“This violence you want me to do to you. It’s . . .” He grimaces. “It’s awfully dark, even for me.”
Before we fall asleep, the lights out and Pretty Baby playing on mute, Bridget returns from the bar. We listen to her walk around the living room and then, stumbling slightly, into the bathroom. The water turns on full blast, not quite covering the sound of her puking.
“Should we help her?” Strane whispers.
“She’s fine,” I say, though if he weren’t here, I would check on her. I don’t know if it’s that I don’t want him near her or the other way around.
After a while, she moves into the kitchen. A cupboard door opens and there’s a crinkle of plastic from her hand reaching into a box of cereal. It’s the kind of night when she and I usually camp out on the couch and watch late-night infomercials until we pass out.
Under the blankets, Strane’s hand moves across my thigh.
“Does she know I’m here?” he whispers. His hand between my legs, he works at me as we listen to Bridget move through the apartment.
In the morning, I wake in bed alone. I think he’s left until I hear footsteps out in the living room and the bathroom door open. Then Bridget’s voice high with surprise, “Oh, I’m sorry!” and Strane’s rushed “No, no, it’s fine. I was just leaving.”
I listen as they introduce themselves. Strane calls himself “Jacob” as though he were normal, as though any of this were normal, while I lie frozen in bed, suddenly terrified, like a girl in a horror film seeing claws creeping out from under the closet door. When he comes back into the bedroom, I pretend to be asleep. Even when he touches my shoulder and says my name, I don’t open my eyes.
“I know you’re awake,” he says. “I met your roommate. Seems like a nice girl. I like that gap in her smile.”
I bury my face deeper into the comforter.
“I’m leaving now. Can I get a kiss goodbye?”
I snake my arm out from under the covers and hold up my hand for a high five, which he ignores. I listen to his heavy footsteps move through the apartment, and when I hear him say goodbye to Bridget, I cover my face with my hands.
I open my eyes and she’s standing in my bedroom doorway, her arms crossed. “Stinks like sex in here,” she says.
I sit up, pulling the covers with me. “I know he’s gross.”
“He’s not gross.”
“He’s old. He’s so old.”
She laughs, tosses her hair. “Really, he wasn’t that bad.”
I get dressed and we go to the coffee shop downstairs for bacon and egg bagels and black coffees. At a table by the window, I watch a couple walking an enormous curly-haired dog, pink tongue flopping out of its panting mouth.
Bridget says, “So you’ve been with him since you were fifteen?”
I suck coffee through my teeth, scald my tongue. It’s not like her to pry. We give each other distance, refer to it jokingly as the “no-judgment zone,” the space in which I watch her hook up with guys despite her fiancé back home in Rhode Island and I do whatever it is I do with Strane.
“Off and on,” I say.
“He was the first you had sex with?”
I nod, my eyes on the window, still watching the couple and the curly-coated dog. “First and only.”
At that, her eyes bug out. “Wait, seriously? No one else?”
I lift my shoulders and suck down more coffee, burning my throat. There’s satisfaction in seeing my life contort another person’s face into shock and awe, but a second too long and their awe turns to gawking.
“I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like,” she says.
I try to hide how my eyes smart with tears. I shouldn’t be upset. This is nothing. She’s just curious. This is what having a friend is like. You talk about boys, your wild teenage past.
“Were you scared?”
Picking at my bagel, I shake my head. Why would I have been scared? He was so careful with me. I think of the public high school, of Charley and Will Coviello, who called her white trash and never spoke to her again after she gave him a blow job. How he came back into the bowling alley with that smirk on his face, so pleased to have gotten what he wanted. Being subjected to that kind of humiliation would have been scary. Not Strane, who sank to his knees before me, who told me I was the love of his life.
I flick my eyes to Bridget, stare her down. “He worshipped me. I was lucky.”
Fall comes on suddenly. The hotels close up and the visa workers go home. The trees turn the second week of September, clusters of yellow leaves stark against an overcast sky. Mornings are cold, wet with fog, and I wake with damp bedsheets twisted around my ankles.
At the end of September, in the lull before Henry Plough’s seminar starts, a girl I’ve had writing workshops with since freshman year takes her seat at the seminar table and sets down a pile of books. She wears cowboy boots and short skirts and sends her work out to lit journals, and my advisor once described her as “destined for Iowa.” On the top of the stack of books is Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov. I freeze at the sight of the novel. “Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed, / My dark Vanessa.”
Henry points to it. “Great choice there,” he says. “That’s one of my favorites.”
The girl grins. Her cheeks flush instantly from the attention. “It’s for twentieth-century lit. I’m writing a paper on it, which is”—she widens her eyes—“intimidating.”
The boy beside her asks what it’s about and I listen, thumping and hot, as she tries to explain and falters. Henry starts to speak, but I cut in louder.
“There isn’t really a plot,” I say. “Or, at least, that’s not how it’s meant to be read. The novel is a poem and footnotes, and the footnotes tell their own story, but the character writing those footnotes is unreliable so the whole thing is unreliable. It’s a novel that resists meaning and demands that the reader relinquish control . . .”
I trail off, feeling the swell of anxiety that comes whenever I talk like this—like Strane is channeling himself through me. Coming from him, this kind of talk sounds brilliant, but it just makes me seem like a bitch, haughty and harsh.
“Well anyway,” the girl says, “it’s not my favorite Nabokov. I read The True Life of Sebastian Knight and liked it a lot better.”
Quietly, I correct her: “Real Life.”
With a roll of her eyes she turns away from me, but at the front of the seminar table, as the rest of the class enters and takes their seats, Henry watches me with a faint smile, contemplating.
When I get home from class, I make myself dinner and read Titus Andronicus for next week, the start of the Shakespeare unit. It’s a brutal, bloody play of severed hands and heads cooked in pies. Lavinia, the general’s daughter, is gang-raped and subsequently mutilated. The men who rape her cut out her tongue so she can’t speak and cut off her hands so she can’t write. Still, she’s so desperate to tell, she learns how to hold a stick in her mouth and scratches out the men’s names in the dirt.
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br /> When I reach that part of the play, I stop reading and grab Strane’s old copy of Lolita from my bookcase and thumb through until I find the section I’m looking for on page 165: Lo laughing at a newspaper column advising kids that if a strange man offers you candy, you should say no and scratch his license plate number on the side of the road. I pencil Lavinia? in the margin and dog-ear the page. I try to pick up Titus Andronicus again, but my brain won’t focus.
I open my laptop and bring up the blog I created three years ago. It’s technically public but anonymous—I use pseudonyms and google myself every few weeks to make sure it doesn’t come up in the search results. Maintaining this blog is like walking alone at night with my headphones on, like going to the bar with the sole intention of getting so drunk I can’t see straight, things I remember my Psychology 101 textbook referring to as “risky behavior.”
September 28, 2006
He mentioned Nabokov today, so I feel I should document this burgeoning thing.
I don’t know what to call it. Really, “it” is nothing, a narrative born of my own depraved brain—but how can I not jump to that familiar story when the characters, the setting, and so many of the details are the same? (In the classroom, the professor’s eyes drift to the end of the seminar table, to the red-haired girl whose voice trembles whenever she’s called on to read.)
This is absurd. I am absurd, projecting all this onto a man I know nothing about except what he looks like standing in front of a chalkboard and the most mundane facts anyone could scrounge up with a Google search. I feel like I’ve plucked him out of the classroom, like I’m doing to him what S. did to me. But isn’t the professor supposed to be S. in this scenario?
I’ve started dressing like I did at fifteen on the days I know I’ll see him—baby doll dresses and Converse sneakers, my hair in braids—as though the sight of me doing my best nymphet impression might make him realize what I am and what I’m capable of, which is to say . . . I am probably legitimately actually INSANE.
“One of my favorites,” he said today, about Pale Fire (not Lolita—can you imagine if he’d said that about Lolita?). Not a big deal. An innocuous comment. All English professors love that novel. But I hear this professor say it, the one I’ve decided is special, and suddenly it becomes revelatory.
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