When the coffees are gone, I follow him into the living room, feeling out of my body, out of my mind. Bridget’s door is still closed; it’s early enough that she won’t be up for hours. Strane points to the kitten curled up on the sofa. “Where’d that come from?”
“The dumpster in the alley.”
“Ah.” He zips his coat, shoves his hands in his pockets. “You know, to be fair, you probably touched a nerve you weren’t intending to with that professor. I imagine, on some level, his reaction was about his own marriage. Some unresolved issues there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Penelope was his student. College, not high school, but still. She’s only a few years older than you and he’s—what, pushing forty? I think she said they got together when she was nineteen. If I’d been more on my toes, I would have pointed out the hypocrisy. It probably would’ve shut him up.”
Maybe if he hadn’t just told me that he’d known about the blog for years, or if I didn’t feel so sickened and bruised from the night before, hearing this would shock me. But now, I’m so exhausted, I lean against the wall and laugh. I laugh so hard, it’s hard to breathe. Of course she was his student. Of course.
Strane watches me with his eyebrows cocked. “Is that funny?”
I shake my head. Through my laughs, I say, “No, it’s not funny at all.”
I follow him down the stairwell to the building door and, before he steps outside, ask if he’s still mad at me—for calling him a rapist, for running my mouth. I expect a gentle tongue click, a kiss on the forehead. Of course I’m not. Instead he thinks for a moment and then says, “More sad than angry.”
“Why sad?”
“Well,” he says, “because you’ve changed.”
I put my palm against the door. “I haven’t changed.”
“Sure you have. You’ve outgrown me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Vanessa.” He takes my face in his hands. “We’ve got to end this. At least for a while. Ok? This isn’t good for either of us.”
I’m so stunned, I just stand there, let him hold my face.
“You need to create a life for yourself,” he says. “One that isn’t so focused on me.”
“You said you weren’t mad.”
“I’m not mad. Look at me, I’m not.” It’s true—he doesn’t look at all angry, his eyes calm behind the wireless frames.
For two weeks, I stay in my apartment, camped out in front of the TV with Minou curled against me. I work through the DVD set of Twin Peaks, then go back and rewatch certain episodes again and again. Sometimes Bridget watches with me, but when I start rewinding the scenes of violence and screams, the ones in which the good man character is overtaken by a sadist spirit that drives him to rape and murder teenage girls, she goes into her bedroom and shuts the door.
During those weeks in the news, a fourteen-year-old girl named Katrina disappears out in Oregon. Pretty, white, and photogenic, her face is everywhere, the headlines blurring into the TV series. “Who Took Katrina?” “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” Both were last seen running for their lives, disappearing into a grove of Douglas firs. The obvious culprit for Katrina’s disappearance is her estranged father, who has a history of mental illness and hasn’t been heard from in weeks. Compared with the dozen pictures they have of Katrina, the news uses only one photo of her father, a disheveled mugshot from a DUI. Eventually, the two are found in North Carolina, living in a cabin without electricity or running water. When the father is arrested, he is quoted as saying, “I’m just glad this is finally over.” Later, more details emerge—how frail Katrina became while on the lam, that while living in the cabin, she resorted to eating wildflowers to survive. Alone in the living room lit blue by the TV, I mumble things too terrible for anyone else to hear, that I bet a part of her loved it and never wanted to be caught.
Bridget ventures out of her bedroom and finds me stoned on the couch, coughing up tears. She feeds the cat, picks up my empty bottles, leaves the electric bill on the coffee table, along with her half and a stamped, addressed envelope. She knows something bad happened that night Strane came over but gives me room to deal with it on my own. She doesn’t ask, doesn’t want to know.
* * *
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Seminar absence
Vanessa, are you ok? Missed you in class today. Henry
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Worried
I’m starting to get concerned over here. What’s going on? You can call if that would be easier than writing. Or we could meet off campus. I’m worried about you. Henry
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Serious concern
Vanessa, another absence and I’m going to have to give you either an F or an incomplete. I’m happy to give you an incomplete and we can figure out how you can make up the work, but you need to come by and fill out a form. Can you come in tomorrow? I’m not angry, just very concerned. Please let me know. Henry
When I appear in his doorway, Henry breaks out in a smile. “There you are. I’ve been so worried. What happened to you?”
Leaning against the doorframe, I stare him down. I’d expected a wave of apologies as soon as he saw me. It’s unfathomable that he hasn’t already made the connection. The night at Browick was three weeks ago, not long enough to forget.
I hold up a course withdrawal form. “Will you sign this?”
His head jerks back, surprised. “We should probably talk about it first.”
“You said I’m going to fail.”
“You haven’t been coming to class,” he says. “I had to get your attention somehow.”
“So you manipulated me? Awesome. That’s so great.”
“Vanessa, come on.” He laughs like I’m being ridiculous. “What’s going on?”
“Why did you do it?”
“Why did I do what?” He sways back and forth in his desk chair, watching me with put-on obliviousness. He looks like a child caught in a lie.
“You attacked him.”
He stops swaying.
“You waited outside a bathroom and grabbed him—”
At that, he jumps up and pulls the office door closed so hard it slams. He holds out his hands as though trying to calm me down. “Look,” he says, “I’m sorry. Obviously, I shouldn’t have done what I did. There’s no excuse for it. But I hardly attacked him.”
“He said you shoved him against the wall.”
“How could I even manage that? That man is enormous.”
“He said—”
“Vanessa, I barely touched him.”
At that, a lump forms in my throat. I barely touched him. I touched her, that’s all. Both boil down to me overreacting, determined to portray these men as villains.
To Henry, I ask, “Why didn’t you ever tell me about your wife? You must have known I’d figure out eventually that it was her who worked there.”
He blinks, thrown by the pivot. “I’m a private person. I don’t like to divulge my personal life to students.”
But that’s not true. I know plenty of personal things about him, details he’s offered up himself—where he grew up, that his parents never married, that his sister was hurt by someone older the same way Strane hurt me. I know his favorite bands from high school and his favorite bands now, that he was a burnout in college, one semester skipping twelve credits’ worth of classes. I know how long it takes him to drive from his house to campus and that when he grades papers, he sets mine aside for when his mind is exhausted and needs a break. It’s only his wife that I know nothing about.
“You know,” I say, “marrying one of your students is pretty fucked up.”
He hangs his head, takes a breath. He knew this was coming. “The circumstances were totally different.”
“You were her teacher.�
��
“I was a professor.”
“Big difference.”
“It is different,” he says. “You know it is.”
I want to tell him the same thing I said to Strane: that I don’t know what I know. Months ago, I wrote about how different it was with Henry, that I wouldn’t be taken advantage of this time. That difference now feels too subtle to locate. I need someone to show me the line that’s supposed to separate twenty-seven years older from thirteen years, teacher from professor, criminal from socially acceptable. Or maybe I’m supposed to encompass the difference here. Years past my eighteenth birthday, I’m fair game now, a consenting adult.
“I should report you for what you did to him,” I say. “The college should know about the type of people they have working here.”
That touches a nerve, his face flushed as he practically yells, “Report me?” and for a moment, I see the anger he must have let loose on Strane. But then, conscious of the voices passing by the closed office door, he lowers himself to whisper, “Vanessa, you knew what that man did to this other girl and you made me feel like an idiot when I mentioned it to you. Then you come in here, telling me that he’s harassing you, hurting you. What did you expect?”
“He didn’t do anything to that girl,” I say. “He touched her knee, big fucking deal.”
Henry’s eyes travel over my face and his anger fades. Gently, like he’s speaking to a child, he says he heard something else, that Strane did a lot more than touch her knee. He doesn’t explain further and I don’t ask. What’s the use? All of this is impossible to talk about, and trying to talk about it only makes you sound like a lunatic, one minute calling it rape and the next clarifying, Well, it wasn’t rape rape, as though that does anything but muddy the waters.
“I’m leaving,” I say, and Henry reaches for me but stops short of touching. He’s suddenly anxious—worried, maybe, that I might actually tell on him. Do I really want him to sign that course withdrawal form? I should just come to class. It’s only a couple more weeks. We’ll forget about the absences.
“I just want you to feel ok,” he says.
But I’m not ok. For days afterward, I walk around dazed, unable to shake the feeling of having been violated. During a meeting with my advisor, she asks how I’m doing, expecting my usual aloof response. Instead, I launch into a version of what happened. I try to be vague because I don’t want to implicate Strane, so the story comes out patchy and incoherent, makes me sound crazy.
“This is Henry we’re talking about?” my advisor asks, her voice barely above a whisper; the office walls are thin. “Henry Plough?” He hasn’t even been there a year and already he has a reputation for being a man of integrity.
Clasping her hands, my advisor labors over her words as she says, “Vanessa, over the years I’ve gathered from your writing that something happened to you in high school. Do you think that might be what you’re really upset about here?”
She waits, her eyebrows jumping as though prompting me to agree. This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction—once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.
My advisor smiles, reaches forward and pats my knee. “Hang in there.”
On my way out of her office, I ask, “Did you know he married one of his students?”
At first, I think I’ve dropped a bomb on her. Then she nods. Yes, she knows. She lifts her hands, a gesture of helplessness. “It happens sometimes,” she says.
I tell Henry I forgive him even though he doesn’t ever offer a real apology. For the rest of the semester, he wants it to be the same. He tries to rely on me in class like he did before, but I have nothing to say, and in his office I’m fidgety and evasive as he tests out different ways to pull me back. He tells me I’m the best student he’s ever had (Better than your wife? I wonder), that he did what he did to Strane only because of how much he cares about me. He shows me the letter of recommendation he’s already written for my grad school applications, two and a half pages single-spaced about how special I am. Then, on the last week of classes, he asks me to come to his office. Once we’re inside, he closes the door and says he needs to admit something: he used to read my blog. He read it for months before I shut it down.
“I worried when it disappeared all of a sudden and you stopped coming to class,” he says. “I didn’t know what to think. I guess I still don’t.”
I ask him how he even found it and he says he can’t remember. Maybe he searched my email address, or some key words, he’s not sure. I imagine him hunched over his laptop at home late at night, his wife asleep in the other room while he typed my name into the search bar, digging until he found me. It’s the kind of thing I fantasized about all year, confirmation of my having invaded his life. Now faced with it being true, my stomach turns; I feel sick.
He says he read it to check in on me. He worried about me. “And because you seemed to have formed such a strong attachment,” he says, “I wanted to keep an eye on that, too.”
“Attachment to what?”
Henry cocks an eyebrow, as though to say, You know what I mean. When I only stare back at him, he says, “Attachment to me.”
I say nothing and he turns defensive.
“Was that wrong of me to assume?” he asks. “You came on so strongly. It overwhelmed me.”
I gape at him, at first baffled—hadn’t he singled me out as much as I had him?—but it dissipates into embarrassment because that probably is what I did. I’ve done it before.
“So that’s how you handle students who you think have crushes on you?” I ask. “You stalk them online?”
“I hardly stalked you. The blog was public.”
“What did you think I was going to do, run in here and force myself on you?”
“I really didn’t know,” he says. “After you told me about you and that teacher, I started to wonder about your intentions.”
“You don’t have to call him ‘that teacher,’” I say. “Clearly you know his name.”
Henry presses his lips together, spins in his chair so he faces the window. He stays like that for so long, staring out at the courtyard below, that I think he’s finished, but when I go for the door, he says, “I didn’t tell you this to embarrass you.”
I stop, my hand on the doorknob.
“I thought telling you might create an opening for us to be honest with each other. Because I think there are things you may want to tell me.” He spins back toward me. “And you should know I would hear anything you wanted to say.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Based on what I read,” he says, “I think you might want to tell me something.”
I think of the entries I wrote about him, my descriptions of craving him so badly my whole body ached from it, the comments that would show up sometimes in the middle of the night—from him? I swallow hard, my legs shaking, my hands. Even my brain shakes.
“If you already read it,” I ask, “why do you need me to say it?”
He doesn’t answer, but I know why. Because he needs to know I’m willing. Like Strane insisting I vocalize what I want to shift the burden of culpability. Talking this out, Vanessa, is the only way I can live with myself. I never would have done it if you weren’t so willing.
“You’re an enigma,” Henry says. “Impossible to understand.”
Again, I get the feeling I could touch him and he’d let me. If I put my hands on him, he’d spring forth as though released from a cage. Finally, he’d say. Vanessa, I’ve wanted this since I first met you. I see ahead to the next year, to me working as his assistant, the two of us shut in this office, the inevitable drawn-out affair. I still haven’t had sex with anyone other than Strane, but I can easily imagine what Henry would be like. His heavy body, labored breaths, and slack jaw.
And then the fog burns off, my view clears, and he’s repulsive, sitting there trying to pry a confession out of me. You h
ave a wife, I want to say. What the hell is wrong with you?
I tell him I won’t be in Atlantica next year after all. “You should give that assistant job to someone else.”
Blinking in surprise, he asks, “What about grad school? Are you still going to apply?”
Looking ahead, I can see that, too—another classroom, another man at the head of the seminar table reading my name off the roster, his eyes drinking me in. The thought makes me so tired all I can think is I’d rather be dead than go through this again.
The day before graduation, Henry takes me out to lunch to say goodbye, gives me a Brontë novel, a reference to some inside joke we had, with an inscription he signs with H. After I move out of Atlantica, his name shows up in my email inbox every six months or so, my stomach lurching each time. Eventually, we add each other on Facebook and I get glimpses into the life I spent so long imagining: photos of Penelope and their daughter, of Henry’s graying hair and aging face, each passing year making him look more like Strane. Meanwhile time turns me cynical, suspicious. I strip myself of the fantasy, tell myself that when we met, Henry was bored and losing his youth; I was young and adored him. An older man using a girl to feel better about himself—how easily the story becomes a cliché if you look at it without the soft focus of romance.
One year he writes to me on my birthday, an email sent at two in the morning. I remember you as one of my best students, he writes, and I always will. I start to reply, Henry, what does that even mean? but I stop myself, delete his email, set up a filter so future ones go straight to the trash.
One of my best students. It’s a strange compliment coming from a man who once turned a student into a wife.
* * *
After graduation from Atlantica, Bridget moves back to Rhode Island and takes the cat. I apply to every secretary/receptionist/assistant job in Portland, and the State of Maine is the only one to call back. It’s a filing clerk job in child protective services, ten bucks an hour but really more like nine after union dues. During the interview, a woman asks how I’ll handle reading descriptions of child abuse all day every day.
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