I don’t move; he exhales a sigh.
“Vanessa, I worry about you,” he says.
On the Friday before spring break, Bridget comes home with a kitten wrapped in a towel. Calico and green-eyed, a flea-dusted belly and crooked tail. “I found her in the alley by the bagel shop dumpster,” Bridget says.
I hold my fingers to the kitten’s nose, let her bite my thumb. “She smells like fish.”
“She had her head in a tub of lox.”
We give the kitten a bath, name her Minou. As the sun sets, we drive to the Wal-Mart in Ellsworth for a litter box and cat food, tucking the kitten into a tote bag Bridget carries over her shoulder because we don’t dare leave her alone. On the drive home, while Minou mews in my lap, my phone starts to ring over and over—Strane.
Bridget laughs when I hit “ignore” for the fourth time in a row. “You’re so mean,” she says. “I almost feel sorry for him.”
The phone buzzes a new voicemail and she gasps in sarcastic shock. We’re so giddy about the kitten, it makes everything seem up for grabs, like we could tease each other about anything and just laugh and laugh.
“You’re not even going to listen?” she says. “It could be an emergency.”
“I promise, it’s not.”
“You don’t know that! You should listen.”
To prove my point, I play it on speaker, expecting a thick-throated plea for me to call him back, upset that he hasn’t heard from me—did I ever get the package he sent? Instead, it’s a wall of garbled sound, wind and static overlaid with his voice, angry: “Vanessa, I’m on my way to your apartment. Answer your fucking phone.” Then a click, voicemail over.
Carefully, Bridget says, “That sounds like an emergency.”
I dial his number and he picks up after half a ring. “Are you home? I’m a half hour away.”
“Yes,” I say. “Or, no. I’m not home right this second. We found a kitten. We had to buy a litter box.”
“You what?”
I shake my head. “Nothing, never mind. Why are you coming here?”
He barks out a laugh. “I think you know why.”
Bridget keeps looking over, eyes darting between me and the road. Illuminated by the dashboard, I see her mouth: Everything ok?
“I don’t know why,” I say. “I have no idea what’s going on. But you can’t just decide to come—”
“Did he already tell you what happened?”
My eyes search the windshield, the tunnel the headlights make along the dark highway. I feel a prick on the back of my neck at how Strane spits out he. “Who?”
Strane laughs again. I can see him, eyes hard, jaw clenched, a bitter anger I’ve seen him direct only at other people. The thought of that anger turned on me feels like soft earth giving way beneath my feet.
“Don’t play dumb,” he says. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I try to point out that he just said he’s a half hour away, but he’s already hung up, the screen flashing CALL ENDED. Beside me, Bridget asks, “Are you ok?”
“He’s coming to the apartment.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did something happen?”
“I don’t know, Bridget,” I snap. “I’m sure you could hear the whole fucking conversation. He wasn’t exactly generous with details.”
We drive in silence, our easygoing camaraderie now sucked out of the car. From my lap, Minou mews, pitiful little sounds that would enrage only a monster—but that must be what I am, because all I want to do is clamp my hands over the kitten’s tiny face and scream at it, at Bridget, at everyone, to just shut up for a second and let me think.
Bridget says she’ll go out for the night so Strane and I can have the apartment to ourselves. Really, it’s clear she just wants to get away from me and my weird old boyfriend and the fraught cloud that constantly hangs over me. It’s like I heard her say to a guy she brought home a couple weeks ago: Oh, Vanessa is always in crisis mode, the kind of girl who attracts drama.
After she leaves, I sit on the couch, Minou on my knees and my laptop open on the coffee table. Every few minutes I lean forward to refresh, as though an email might appear explaining this all away. When I hear the building door open and heavy steps clomp up the stairs, I push Minou off, grab my phone. He pounds on the apartment door, the kitten disappears behind the couch, and my thumb strokes the keypad, the idea of calling 911 as much of a fantasy as the idea that an email from Henry might arrive in my inbox. Calling wouldn’t solve anything. Asking for help would mean answering the dispatcher’s unanswerable questions, demanding I explain the inexplicable. Who is this man banging on your apartment door? How do you know him? What, exactly, is your relationship to him? I need the whole story, ma’am. My choices: wade through seven years of this swamp and throw myself at the mercy of a skeptical third party who might not even believe me, or open the door and hope it won’t be too bad.
When I let him in, he’s out of breath and hunches over just inside the door, hands braced on his thighs, every inhale a wheeze. I take a step toward him, worried he’s about to drop. He holds up a hand.
“Don’t come near me,” he says.
Righting himself, he throws his coat on the papasan chair, looks around at the dirty towels spilling out from the bathroom doorway, the bowl crusted with mac and cheese on the coffee table. He moves into the kitchen, opening cupboards.
“You don’t have any clean glasses?” he asks. “Not one?”
I point to the stack of plastic cups on the counter and he shoots me a glare—lazy, wasteful girl—and fills one with tap water. I watch him drink, counting the seconds until his anger refuels, but when he empties the cup, he just leans against the counter, deflated.
“You really don’t know why I’m here?” he asks.
I shake my head as his eyes bore into me. I haven’t seen him since Christmas, when he told me about Taylor Birch. Over the months there’s been a change in him, his face somehow altered. I search until I find it: his glasses. They’re frameless now, nearly invisible. A pang hits my heart at the thought of him changing something so integral without telling me.
“I came here straight from a Browick faculty event,” he says. “Or a fundraiser. Hell, I don’t know what it was. I wasn’t even going to go. You know how I hate those things, but I thought another night sequestered at home might do me in.” He sighs, rubs his eyes. “Sick and tired of being treated like a leper.”
“What happened?”
He drops his hand. “I was sitting with some colleagues, including Penelope.” He checks my face for a reaction, notices how I suck in my breath. “See, you know what I’m going to say. Don’t act dumb with me. Don’t . . .” He slams his palms against the counter and takes a lunging step at me, hands out like he’s going to grab me by the shoulders, and then he stops short, clenches his fists.
The curtains are wide open, the need to protect us drilled into me so deeply it’s all I can think about—that anyone passing by on the street could glance up and get a clear view inside. When I move to draw the blinds, he grabs my arm.
“You told her husband,” he says. “Your professor. You told him I raped you.”
As he lets go, he pushes me. It’s not that hard but enough that I stumble backward into the trash can that belongs under the sink but has been sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor for god knows how long. I fall and the hood over the stove rattles the way it does on windy days. Strane doesn’t move as I scramble to my feet. He asks if he hurt me.
I shake my head. “I’m fine,” I say, even though my tailbone feels bruised. I look again to the window, the rapt audience of witnesses I imagine out there in the dark. “Why was she talking to you about me? The wife, I mean. Penelope.”
“She said nothing about you. It was her husband. Her husband who glared at me for an hour and a half and then followed me to the bathroom—”
There’s a tipping point within me, a sudden crash. “Henry was there? You met
him?”
Strane stops, caught off guard by how I say the other man’s name, the way I exhale it, like a sigh after sex. His face, for a moment, weakens.
“What did he say?” I ask.
And with that, he’s again hardened, furrowed brow and flashing eyes. “No,” he says flatly. “I’m asking questions here. You tell me why you did it. Why you felt compelled to tell a man whose wife works with me that I raped you.” His voice chokes on raped, the word so repulsive it makes him gag. “Tell me why you did it.”
“I was trying to explain what happened when I left Browick. I don’t know. It came out.”
“Why would you need to explain that to him?”
“He said something about having taught at a prep school, I said I’d gone to one, he said he had a friend who worked at Browick. It came up naturally, ok? I didn’t go out of my way to tell him.”
“So someone mentions Browick and you immediately start blabbing about rape? For god’s sake, Vanessa, what is wrong with you?”
I curl into myself as he goes on. Don’t I understand what that kind of accusation could do to him? It’s slander, a literal crime, enough to take down any man, let alone one who’s already hanging by a thread. If the wrong people caught wind of this, he’d be finished, thrown in jail for the rest of his life.
“And you know this. That’s what I can’t understand. You know what an accusation could do to me, and yet . . .” He throws up his hands. “I can’t wrap my head around it, the deceit that requires, the cruelty.”
I want to defend myself, except I don’t know if anything he says is wrong. Even if the word first slipped out by accident, I never corrected it. I kept the lie going, showing Henry the dozens of missed calls, letting him call Strane “deluded” and “beyond the pale,” all because I wanted to be wounded and delicate, a girl deserving of tenderness. But I think, too, of those memos Strane wrote to cover his tracks. I was oblivious back then, doing my best to follow his lead, and he saw no problem framing me as a troubled girl with a crush, knowing what it would do to me. If I’m deceitful and cruel, so is he.
I ask, “Why did you wait months to tell me about what happened with that girl?”
“No,” Strane says. “Don’t try to turn this around on me.”
“But that’s what this is all about, right? You’re mad because you’re already in trouble for groping another girl—”
“Groping? Jesus, what a word.”
“That’s what it’s called when you touch a kid.”
He grabs the plastic cup, turns on the faucet. “There’s no talking to you when you’re like this, determined to paint me as a villain.”
“Sorry,” I say, “it’s kind of hard to avoid.”
He drinks, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re right. It’s easy to make me into a bad man. It’s the easiest thing in the world. But that’s just as much your fault as it is mine. Unless you truly have convinced yourself that I raped you.” He tosses the half-full cup into the sink, braces himself against the counter. “Raped while writhing in orgasm. Give me a fucking break.”
I clench my fists, digging my fingernails into my palms, and will my brain to stay in the room, in my body. “Why didn’t you want to have children?”
He turns. “What?”
“You were in your thirties when you had a vasectomy. That’s so young.”
He blinks, trying to figure out if he ever told me how old he was when he had the surgery, how I could know this if he never did.
“I saw your medical chart,” I say. “When I worked at that hospital in high school, I found it in the archives.”
He starts moving toward me.
“The doctor’s notes said you were adamant about not wanting kids.”
He comes closer, backing me up into my bedroom. “Why are you asking me this?” he asks. “What are you trying to say?”
In my room, my calves hit the side of my bed. I don’t want to say it. I don’t know how. It’s not a single question, rather a haze of unspeakable things: not understanding why he touched another girl in the same way he touched me if he hadn’t wanted her the same way he wanted me. Why his hands shook when he gave me the strawberry pajamas, why it felt as though by giving them to me he was revealing something he’d spent his whole life trying to hide. When he asked me to call him Daddy on the phone, how it felt like one of his tests. I did it because I didn’t want to fail, didn’t want to be narrow-minded or scandalized, and afterward, he’d hung up as soon as he could, like he’d revealed too much of himself. I felt shame pulsate out of him that night. It had soared through the phone, straight into me.
“Don’t turn me into a monster because you’re looking for a way out,” he says. “You know that’s not what I am.”
“I don’t know what I know,” I say.
He reminds me of what I’ve done. It’s not fair to think of myself as blameless in all this. I’m the one who came back, showing up on his doorstep after two years apart. I could have forgotten about him, moved on with my life.
“Why did you come back if I hurt you?” he asks.
“It didn’t feel finished,” I say. “I still felt tied to you.”
“But I didn’t encourage you, not even when you called. Do you remember that? Your little voice coming out of the answering machine. I stood there, didn’t let myself do anything.”
He starts to cry then, as though on cue, bloodshot eyes filling with tears.
“Wasn’t I careful?” he asks. “Always checking you were ok?”
“Yes,” I say, “you were careful.”
“I wrestled with it. You have no idea how much. But you were so sure of yourself. You knew what you wanted. Do you remember? You asked me to kiss you. I tried to make sure you really wanted it. You’d get annoyed with me, but still I made sure.”
Tears run down his cheeks, disappear into his beard, and I try to steady myself through the softening that comes from seeing him cry.
“You said yes,” he says.
I nod. “I know I did.”
“Then when did I rape you? Tell me when I did that. Because I’ve been—” He sucks in a shaky breath, rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I’ve been trying and I can’t understand . . .”
He follows me down onto the bed, hides his face against me, wet haggard breaths against my chest until that feeling subsides and another takes over, his mouth moving to my neck, his hands hiking up the skirt of my dress. I let him do what he wants—remove everything, lay me across the bed—even though everywhere he touches hurts. He spreads my legs, buries his face into me, and there are tears in my eyes, on my cheeks. It’s my birthday in two days. I’ll be twenty-two. Seven years of my life defined by this. When I look back, I won’t see anything else.
In the middle of it, I hear the building door open and two sets of footsteps clomp up the stairs. There’s Bridget’s laugh rising up the stairwell, the sound of a stumble. “Are you ok?” a boy asks as the apartment door opens. “Do I have to carry you?”
“I’m so drunk,” Bridget says. Her laughter fills the living room. “I’m drunk, I’m drunk, I’m drunk!”
There’s the clang of keys hitting the floor, the boy following her into her bedroom, a door slamming shut. I try to hold on to the sound of her laugh, but she turns on her music so loud that even if I screamed, they wouldn’t hear.
As Strane works at me, part of me leaves the bedroom and wanders into the kitchen, where the cup he drank from lies tipped over in the sink. The faucet drips; the refrigerator hums. The kitten pads in from the living room, wanting to be held. Standing by the window, the broken-off part of me takes the kitten in her arms, gazes down at the quiet street below. It’s started to storm, a streetlight’s orange glow illuminating the sheets of rain, and the broken-off part of me watches it fall, humming softly to herself to block out the sounds coming from the bedroom. Every so often, she holds her breath and listens to check if it’s still happening. When she hears the metal scrape of the bed frame, the
slap of skin on skin, she holds the kitten closer, turns back to the rain.
In the morning Strane goes down to the bagel shop for coffees. I sit up in bed, holding my steaming cup and staring off into middle distance, while he recounts in detail everything that happened at the Browick event—parents, alumni, faculty, drinking wine and eating hors d’oeuvres in the auditorium. He noticed Henry glaring at him but thought nothing of it until he went to take a piss and found Henry waiting in the hallway afterward, like a drunk in a bar looking for a fight.
“He told me we have a student in common,” Strane says. “Then he said your name. He said he knew I was harassing you and shoved me against the wall. Said he knew what I did to you. Called me a rapist.” After saying the word, he presses his lips together, takes a deep breath.
I bring the coffee to my lips and try to imagine Henry so out of control.
“You really should set things straight with him,” he says.
“I will.”
“Because if he told his wife—”
“I know,” I say. “I’ll tell him the truth.”
He nods, takes a sip from his coffee. “I should also tell you that I know about that blog you’ve been keeping.”
I blink, at first not understanding. He says he saw it on my computer. I look around my room and don’t see it anywhere. It’s still out on the coffee table. Did he get up in the night? No, he explains. It was a couple years ago. He’s known about it for years.
“I know how driven you’ve always been toward confession,” he says. “And it seemed a harmless way for you to satisfy that need. I used to check it every once in a while, just to make sure you weren’t using my name, but truthfully, I’d forgotten about it until recently. I should have told you to take it down when that nonsense started back in December with the harassment complaint.”
I shake my head. “I can’t believe you knew and never said anything.”
He mistakes my disbelief for an apology. “It’s all right,” he says. “I’m not angry.” But he wants me to get rid of it. “I think that’s a reasonable request.”
My Dark Vanessa Page 34