I hear Pale Fire and all I can think of is S. giving me his own copy, telling me to turn to page 37. How it felt to find my own name on the page: My dark Vanessa.
And just like that, my mind draws a new connection between the characters. Sometimes it really does feel like a curse, the meaning I can attach to anything.
* * *
There are three bars in Atlantica: one where students go, with microbrews on tap and clean floors; a tavern with pool tables and jars of pickled eggs; and a bar-slash-oyster shack, perched on the edge of a pier, where drunken fishermen get into knife fights. Bridget and I only ever go to the student bar, but she heard the tavern has dancing on Saturday nights.
“We won’t know anyone there,” she says. “We’ll be free.”
She’s right; we are the only Atlantica students there and probably ten years younger than everyone else, though the lights are so dim it’s hard to tell. We do shots of chilled tequila and carry beer bottles onto the dance floor, swigging as we gyrate to Kanye, Beyoncé, Shakira. We’re so giddy that we grab at each other, red and honey hair falling over our faces and into our drinks. A man asks if we do everything together, and we’re having so much fun, we don’t act offended; we just laugh: “Maybe!” When the DJ starts to play techno, we leave the dance floor to catch our breath and sidle up to the bar, where more shots appear before us, paid for by a man in a Red Sox hat and camo jacket.
“I like the way you two move,” the man says, and for a terrifying second, it’s Craig, that creep from the bowling alley in high school; then I blink and see he’s a stranger with pockmarked cheeks and bad breath. He hovers over us until we go dance just to escape him. Toward the end of the night, when Bridget’s in the bathroom and I’m leaning against the bar, so much tequila in me my eyes won’t focus, the man reappears. I can’t see him but I can smell him—beer and cigarettes and something else, a rot that hits my face as he slides a hand across my ass. “Your friend is the pretty one,” he says, “but you look like you’d be more fun.”
I wait a second, two, three, gripped with the same senseless feeling I had at ten years old, when I jammed my finger in my mom’s car door and, instead of screaming in pain, I stood there thinking, I wonder how long I can stand this? Then I swat his hand away and tell him to fuck off: he calls me a bitch. Bridget comes back from the bathroom and takes out her keys, jangles her little bottle of Mace at him, and he calls her a crazy bitch. The whole walk home, she and I are giddy with fear, holding hands and looking over our shoulders.
Back at the apartment, Bridget passes out on the couch, her arm cradling a half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese. I shut myself in the bathroom and call Strane. It goes to voicemail, so I call again and again until he answers, his voice thick with sleep.
“I know it’s late,” I say.
“Are you drunk?”
“Define ‘drunk.’”
He sighs. “You’re drunk.”
“Someone touched me.”
“What?”
“A man. At a bar. He grabbed my butt.”
There’s silence on the other line, like he’s waiting for me to get to the point.
“He didn’t ask me. He just did it.”
“You don’t have to confess anything to me,” he says. “You’re young. You’re allowed to have fun.”
He asks if I’m being safe, tells me to call him in the morning, looks out for me like a parent, knows more about me than my actual parents, who I speak to only in generalities during our twenty-minute phone calls on Sunday nights.
On the tile floor, a towel bunched under my head, I mumble, “Sorry I’m such a mess.”
“It’s fine,” he says. But I want him to tell me that I’m not a mess at all. I am beautiful, precious, and rare.
“Well, it’s your fault, you know,” I say.
A pause. “Ok.”
“Everything wrong with me originated with you.”
“Let’s not do this.”
“You created this mess.”
“Baby, go to bed.”
“Am I wrong?” I ask. “Tell me I’m wrong.” I stare up at a water stain stretching across the ceiling.
Finally, he says, “I know it’s what you believe.”
During the class discussion devoted to The Tempest, Henry tells us all to pair up. Within seconds, everyone has figured it out through imperceptible gestures and glances. They drag their chairs closer together while I stand and look around for someone else without a partner. As I scan the room, I catch Henry watching me, his face tender.
“Vanessa, over here.” Amy Doucette waves her hand. When I sit, she leans toward me and whispers, “I didn’t do the reading. Did you?”
I give a shrugging nod and lie: “I skimmed it.” Really, I read it twice and called Strane to talk about it. He told me if I wanted to impress the professor, I should either refer to the play as postcolonial or make a joke about Francis Bacon having written it. When I asked who Francis Bacon was, he wouldn’t tell me. “I’m not doing all the work for you,” he said. “Look it up.”
Now, as I describe the plot to Amy, I see Henry making his way from pair to pair out of the corner of my eye. When he’s close to us, my voice jumps, unnaturally high and bright: “But it doesn’t really matter what the play’s about anyway, because Shakespeare didn’t write it, Francis Bacon did!”
Henry lets out a laugh—a real one, from the belly and loud.
At the end of class, he stops me on my way out the door and hands me my essay on Lavinia from Titus Andronicus. I focused on her torn-out tongue and torn-off hands, her subsequent silence, the failure of language in the face of rape.
“Great job with that,” he says. “And I liked your joke. From class, not the paper.” He blushes, continuing, “I didn’t see any jokes in your paper, but maybe I missed them.”
“No, there weren’t any jokes.”
“Right,” he says, the flush now all the way down his neck.
I’m so nervous around him, all my body wants to do is bolt. I shove the essay in my jacket pocket and throw my backpack over one shoulder, but he stops me, asking, “You’re a senior, right? Are you applying to graduate school?”
It’s such a sudden question, I laugh in surprise. “I don’t know. Haven’t planned on it.”
“You should consider it,” Henry says. “Based on that work alone”—he gestures to the paper stuffed in my pocket—“you’d be a strong candidate.”
I read over the paper as I walk home, scrutinizing first Henry’s marginal comments and then the sentences of mine he commented on, trying to find this supposed potential. I wrote the paper quickly, three typos in the first paragraph, a flimsy conclusion. Strane would have given it a B.
The first week in November, Strane makes a reservation at an expensive restaurant down the coast and books us a hotel room. He tells me to dress up, so I wear a black silk dress with thin straps, the only nice thing I own. The restaurant is Michelin-starred, Strane says, and I pretend to know what that means. It’s in a remodeled barn with weathered wooden walls and exposed beams, white tablecloths and brown leather club chairs. The menu is all stuff like scallops with asparagus flan, tenderloin crusted with foie gras. Nothing has a price.
“I don’t know what any of this is.” I mean it as bratty, but he takes it as insecure. When the waiter comes, Strane orders for both of us—rabbit loin wrapped in prosciutto, salmon and pomegranate sauce, champagne panna cotta for dessert. Everything arrives on enormous white plates, a perfect little construction in the center, barely recognizable as food.
“How do you like it?” he asks.
“Good, I guess.”
“You guess?”
He gives me a look like I’m being ungrateful, which I am, but I don’t have it in me to play the doe-eyed girl from the sticks, awed at a glimpse of the high-class world. He took me to a restaurant like this in Portland for my birthday. I acted sweet then, moaning over the food, whispering, I feel so fancy, across the table. Now, I poke at the panna cotta and
shiver in my summer dress, my bare arms broken out in goose bumps.
He pours more wine into both our glasses. “Have you thought any more about what you’re going to do after graduation?”
“That’s a terrible question.”
“It’s only a terrible question if you have no plan.”
I pull the spoon from between my lips. “I need more time to figure it out.”
“You have seven months to figure it out,” he says.
“No, I mean like an extra year. Maybe I should fail all my classes on purpose to buy some time.”
He gives me the look again.
“I was thinking,” I say slowly, twirling my spoon in the panna cotta, turning it into mush, “if I don’t figure something out, could I stay with you? Just as a backup plan.”
“No.”
“You’re not even thinking about it.”
“I don’t need to think about it. The idea is ridiculous.”
I sit back in my chair, cross my arms.
He leans toward me, ducks his head, and in a low voice says, “You cannot move in with me.”
“I didn’t say move in.”
“What would your parents think?”
I shrug. “They wouldn’t need to know.”
“They wouldn’t need to know,” he repeats, shaking his head. “Well, people in Norumbega would certainly notice. And what would they think if they saw you living with me? I’m still trying to get myself out from under what happened back then, not get sucked back in.”
“Fine,” I say. “It’s fine.”
“You’ll be ok,” he says. “You don’t need me.”
“It’s fine. Forget I ever mentioned it.”
Impatience simmers beneath his words. He’s annoyed I’d ask such a thing, that I would even want it, and I’m annoyed, too—that I’m still so devoted to him, still a child. I’ve come nowhere close to fulfilling the prophecy he laid out for me years ago, a dozen lovers at twenty, a life in which he was one of many. At twenty-one, there’s still only him.
When the check comes, I grab it first, just to see the total: $317. The thought of so much money on one meal is nauseating, but I say nothing as I slide the bill across the table.
After dinner, we go to a cocktail lounge around the corner from the hotel. The bar has darkened windows and heavy doors, dim lights inside. We sit off in a corner at a small table, and the waiter stares at my ID for so long Strane grows annoyed and says, “All right, I think that’s enough.” Beside us, two middle-aged couples sit talking about traveling abroad, Scandinavia, the Baltics, St. Petersburg. One of the men keeps saying to the other, “You need to go there. It’s nothing like here. This place is a shithole. You need to go there.” I can’t tell what he thinks is the shithole—Maine, America, or maybe just the cocktail lounge.
Strane and I sit close, our knees touching. While we eavesdrop on the couples, he slides his hand onto my thigh. “Do you like your drink?” He ordered us each a Sazerac. It all tastes like whiskey to me.
His hand slides farther between my legs, his thumb brushing the crotch of my underwear. He has an erection; I can tell by how he shifts his hips and clears his throat. I know, too, that he likes touching me next to the men his age and their old wives.
I drink another Sazerac, and another, and another. Strane’s hand doesn’t leave my legs.
“You’re all goose pimples,” he murmurs. “What kind of girl doesn’t wear stockings in November?”
I want to correct him and say, You mean tights—nobody says “stockings,” this isn’t the nineteen fifties, but before I can, he answers his own question.
“A bad girl, that’s what kind.”
In the hotel lobby, I hang back while he checks into our room. I inspect the empty concierge desk, accidentally brush a pile of brochures onto the floor. On the elevator up to the room, Strane says, “I think that man at the front desk winked at me.” He kisses me as it dings for our floor, like he wants someone to be waiting on the other side, but the doors open onto an empty hallway.
“I’m going to be sick.” I grab a handle, push down hard. “Come on, open up.”
“That’s not our room. Why did you let yourself get this drunk?” He ushers me down the hallway and into the room, where I make a beeline for the bathroom, sinking to the floor and curling my arms around the toilet. Strane watches from the doorway.
“A hundred-fifty-dollar dinner down the drain,” he says.
I’m too drunk for sex but he still tries. My head lolls against the pillows as he pushes my legs apart. The last thing I remember is telling him not to go down on me. He must have listened; I wake up with my underwear on.
In the morning, as he drives me back to Atlantica, the radio plays Bruce Springsteen. “Red Headed Woman.” Strane sneaks glances at me, smiling slyly at the lyrics, trying to get me to smile, too.
Well, listen up, stud
Your life’s been wasted
Till you’ve got down on your knees and tasted
A red headed woman.
I lean forward, turn it off. “That’s disgusting.”
After a few miles of silence, he says, “I forgot to tell you, that new counselor at Browick is married to a professor at your college.”
I’m too hungover to care. “How thrilling,” I mumble, my cheek pressed against the cool window, the coastline flying by.
Henry’s office is on the fourth floor of the biggest building on campus, concrete and brutalist, the eyesore of Atlantica. Most departments are housed there; the fourth floor belongs to English professors, open office doors revealing desks and armchairs and overstuffed bookshelves. Every single one reminds me of Strane’s—the scratchy sofa and seafoam glass. Whenever I walk this hallway, time feels flat, like it’s folded onto itself over and over, a piece of paper into a crane.
Henry’s door is ajar, and through the few inches I see he’s at his desk, watching something on his laptop. When I knock lightly on the doorframe, he jumps, hitting the space bar on his keyboard to pause the video.
“Vanessa,” he says, pulling open the door. There’s a timbre to his voice like he’s pleased to see me standing there and not anyone else. His office is still as bare as it was when I glimpsed inside before the semester began. No rug on the floor, nothing on the walls, but clutter has begun to emerge. Loose papers spread across the desk, books lie haphazard on the shelves, and a dusty black backpack hangs by one strap from the filing cabinet.
“Are you busy?” I ask. “I can come back another time.”
“No, no. Just trying to get some work done.” We both glance at the video paused on his laptop, a guy with a guitar frozen mid-strum. “Emphasis on ‘trying,’” he adds, and gestures to the extra chair. Before I sit, I gauge the distance of the chair from his desk—close but far enough away that he can’t reach over and suddenly touch me.
“I have an idea for my final paper,” I say, “but it would mean bringing in a text we didn’t read in class.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Um, Nabokov? How Shakespeare shows up in Lolita?”
During my freshman year, in a class on unreliable narrators, I called Lolita a love story and the professor cut me off, saying, “Calling this novel a love story indicates an unconscionable misreading on your part.” She wouldn’t even let me finish what I was trying to say. Ever since then, I haven’t dared bring it up in any of my classes.
But Henry just crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. He asks what connections I see between Lolita and the plays we’ve read, so I explain the parallels I’ve found: Lavinia from Titus scratching her rapists’ names in the dirt and raped, orphaned Lo scoffing at the suggestion she do the same thing if strange men offer her candy; how Henry IV’s Falstaff lures Hal away from his family the way a pedophile lures a wayward child; the virginal symbolism of Othello’s strawberry handkerchief and the strawberry-print pajamas Humbert gives Lo.
At the last point, Henry frowns. “I don’t remember that detail of the pajamas.”
I stop, mentally thumb through the novel, trying to recall the exact scene, if it’s before Lo’s mother died, or if it’s at the first hotel Lo and Humbert stay at together, at the very beginning of their first road trip. Then my body jumps. I remember Strane taking the pajamas out of a dresser drawer, the feel of the fabric between my fingers, trying them on in his bathroom, the harsh lights and cold tile floor. Like a scene from a movie I watched years ago, something observed from a safe distance.
I blink. From his chair, Henry watches me with gentle eyes, lips softly parted.
“Are you ok?” he asks.
“I might be remembering that one wrong,” I say.
He says that it’s fine and the whole thing sounds great, excellent, far and away the best paper topic he’s heard so far, and he’s heard from almost everyone.
“You know,” he says, “my favorite line in Lolita is about the dandelions.”
I think for a moment, try to place it . . . dandelions, dandelions. I can picture the line on the page, toward the beginning of the novel, when they’re in Ramsdale, Lo’s mother still alive. “Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.”
“The moons,” I say.
Henry nods. “Changed from suns to moons.”
For a second, it’s like our brains are connected, like a wire snaked out of mine and planted itself into his, both of us seeing the same image, seeded and full in our heads. It seems strange that his favorite line in the whole sordid novel is something so chaste. Not any of the descriptions of Lolita’s supple little body or Humbert’s attempts at self-justification, but an unexpectedly lovely image of a front yard weed.
Henry shakes his head and the wire between us snaps, the moment over.
“Well, anyway,” he says. “It’s a good line.”
November 17, 2006
My Dark Vanessa Page 29