by Juliet Dark
“The summers are great up here,” one of the women told me. “My partner and I have a place in Margaretville about forty minutes east. But the winters …”
The woman, whose name was Yvonne, proceeded to tell me about a couple who’d moved up here year-round and gone a little stir crazy, but then, she assured me, they’d always had “issues.” I laughed off the idea that I was worried about going stir crazy in the country and they all agreed that it was different because I was teaching at the college. When they left the house felt quiet and even emptier than before they had come with my meager belongings.
Before I could wonder if the first sign of going stir crazy was having strange erotic dreams, I threw myself into unpacking, figuring that the surest way to ward off melancholy was to make the house feel like my home. I hung framed prints and photographs in the library and parlor and unpacked my mismatched collection of mugs and dishes into the built-in china cabinets. It would be fun, I told myself, to find odds and ends in antiques stores to fill the house up.
After dinner—a pizza delivered courtesy of Mama Esta’s Pizzeria and a bottle of Shiraz from a local vineyard—I took a long-overdue soak in the claw-foot tub, pouring in the rose-scented bath oil that had come in a welcome basket from a store called Res Botanica (“May your new home be sweet!”). Then I put on a loose nightshirt and started unpacking my files and office supplies into the desk in the tower office while sipping a glass of wine. It was fun opening up all the little desk drawers. In addition to the robin’s egg I had found the first day I saw the house, I found a glossy black seedpod shaped like a horned goat’s head, a china doll’s head with one blue eye scratched out, and a bird’s nest. Only one drawer was locked. I looked for a key in the other drawers, but didn’t find one.
I left all the objects where they were and added my own collection of stones and shells, as well as pens and pencils, tape, stapler, a dagger-shaped letter opener I’d gotten as a souvenir at a Scottish castle, file cards, and notebooks. I unpacked the reference books I liked to have near me while I was writing—the abridged Oxford English Dictionary (a gift from my grandmother when I graduated college), the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Roget’s Thesaurus, The Golden Bough, From the Beast to the Blonde, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, and half a dozen other books on fairy tales and folklore. On one shelf I put my favorite novels, from The Mysteries of Udolpho and Jane Eyre through Rebecca and Dahlia La-Motte’s The Dark Stranger. When I’d placed my pens in my Oxford University mug (a souvenir from my junior year abroad) and emptied a handful of paperclips into a chipped Sèvres teacup, which was the last remnant (according to my grandmother) of my great-great-grandmother’s wedding china, I finally felt at home.
I sat back and looked up, meeting my own eyes in my reflection in the darkened windowpane. I’d tied my hair up in a loose knot for my bath, but tendrils had escaped and curled around my face; my auburn hair looked black against my white skin. My nightshirt, I noticed, was rather transparent. For a moment I imagined what I’d look like to someone looking in from outside—a maiden trapped in a tower like on the cover of one of Dahlia LaMotte’s Gothic romances. I had started to laugh at the idea—before long I’d be running in my diaphanous nightgown toward a cliff with a castle looming in the background—when a flicker of white out in the back garden caught my attention. Just because my bedroom faced the woods didn’t mean no one could be out there. Although classes didn’t start until next week freshmen had started arriving for orientation and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that the woods were a good place to get high and drink.
I pulled a Columbia sweatshirt over my nightshirt and leaned forward. There was something on the lawn just at the edge of the woods, a white shape that swayed in the breeze. For a moment I was sure it was a man in a white shirt and dark pants standing on the edge of the woods, looking up at my window. I could make out a pale face and dark eyes … and then the eyes widened and spread, devouring the rest of his face—I had the impression of eyes widening so far to see that they dissolved the rest of him—and then I saw that it was an illusion. The white shape was a plume of mist rising from the ground and dispersing on the breeze.
Great, now I was becoming like one of the heroines of the books I wrote about, jumping at noises and imagining faces in the mist. Violet Grey in the The Dark Stranger imagining phantom lovers in the moonlight—like the one I’d dreamt about last night. Only the dream I’d had last night hadn’t been of a romantic shadow lover. The flood of moonlight that had rushed into me had been an elemental force—urgent and impatient.
Because of how long you’ve waited for him, a voice inside my head whispered. Because of how long you’ve made him wait.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said aloud as I closed and locked the window. It was just being in a strange house, that’s all. And the house was already ceasing to feel strange.
Still, it took me a long time to fall asleep that night. I lay awake listening to the creaks and taps the old house made settling on its foundations and watching the moonlight cast jagged shadows as it shone through the broken glass in the window, unwilling to relax my guard against whatever might form out of the moonlight and shadow, afraid of a repeat of last night’s violent dream.
When I finally fell asleep, though, the dream that was waiting for me was completely different. Shadows stole softly across the floor, skirting the sharp blades of moonlight as if they were actually made of glass. The shadows slipped into my bed and wrapped themselves around me, murmuring words that I couldn’t understand but which sounded like the drone of the surf inside a seashell. The sound poured into my ears like warm oil and spread a feeling of contentment throughout my body. It was like being massaged all over at once. The shadows were everywhere, like a warm bath with fingers and lips, sucking on my mouth, my nipples, and between my legs. As if they were feeding on me and growing stronger with every orgasm they gave me.
I woke up the next morning feeling strangely refreshed, not sore at all from the heavy lifting I’d done the day before. I unpacked a dozen boxes before breakfast and then decided I might as well use all this energy to move into my campus office. The campus as I drove through it was relatively quiet except for the freshmen here for orientation. They were instantly recognizable from the way they walked in tight-knit clumps of four and six, as if the bucolic ivy-covered campus were a dangerous wilderness that could only be broached by group expedition. I remembered how in my first week at NYU all the kids from out of town travelled together in packs. A city kid, I’d been disdainful of their timidity and dependence, and stayed mostly to myself or socialized with city friends from high school. As a result, I hadn’t made a lot of new friends at college; then I met Paul and I spent most of my time with him or in the library. I supposed it had paid off when I got into Columbia (where the easy camaraderie of college had given way to the competition of grad school), but now watching these kids laughing and jostling up against one another under the stately autumn-colored trees I felt like I might have missed something.
I parked in front of Fraser Hall, a four-storied half-timbered faux-Tudor building which held the folklore department offices. It was named for Angus Fraser, a famous folklorist who had founded the Royal Order of Folklorists at the turn of the last century, written dozens of books on Celtic folklore, and taught at Fairwick a hundred years ago. My office was on the top floor and, I soon discovered, there was no elevator. On my second trip hauling boxes up the steep, winding stairs a pair of brawny arms relieved me of my burden.
“You sound like you’re going to expire of consumption at any moment.” I recognized Frank Delmarco, the American history professor who had sneered at the inclusion of vampire books in my curriculum during my interview. Now he was apparently critiquing my stair-climbing capacity.
“I’m … fine …” I huffed. “I’ve been … doing … a … lot of un … packing.”
“Yeah, I heard you bought the old LaMotte house. Isn’t that a little big for just
one person alone?”
For a split second I almost told him I wasn’t alone in the house. I felt my face go red recalling what company I’d found in my dreams. Luckily, Comrade Delmarco (today he was wearing a red T-shirt with pictures of Marx and Lenin wearing party hats that read JOIN THE COMMUNIST PARTY) would just think I was embarrassed to be hogging a big house to myself.
“I may rent out one of the rooms,” I said, although I had no plans to and I instantly didn’t like the idea of anyone else in the house.
“Really? That’s a good idea—” he began, but I cut him off.
“You know, it’s funny that someone who disapproves of ‘catering to the common denominator’ would be a socialist.”
“A socialist? I’m not a socialist,” he sputtered, dumping one of my boxes on the floor of my new office. “Do you have more boxes?”
“Yes, but please don’t put yourself to any trouble on my account.” I turned and headed down the stairs. He followed.
“No problem. We socialists like to help out our comrades. Geez, even if I were a socialist, I don’t see what despising commercial vampire dreck has to do with anything—”
“Dreck? What a snob! Have you ever read Anne Rice?”
“No.”
“Stephenie Meyer?”
“God, no!”
“Charlaine Harris?”
“Who?”
We continued arguing as he helped me bring up all my books and files. It took three trips, at the end of which we were both breathing hard and drenched with sweat.
“Sheesh, it’s hot,” he said, wiping the sweat off his brow with a red bandana. “Would you like a beer?”
“At ten in the morning?” I asked.
“Now who’s the snob?” he asked, throwing his hands up and walking out of my office.
I unpacked my books and files in a snit of annoyance that turned gradually into an insatiable urge for a beer and then into regret for not having thanked Frank Delmarco for helping me carry up all those boxes. I went out into the hall to find his office. I followed the sound of laughter around the corner and saw, through an open doorway, the profile of a young, pretty girl sitting in an office chair next to a large desk. All I could see of the man behind the desk was a pair of Timberland hiking boots propped up on a stack of books, but I recognized Frank Delmarco from his booming laugh. The girl joined in his laughter, tossing her waist-length shiny hair over her shoulder and crossing her very long, very bare legs. I suddenly felt like I’d had enough socializing with my new colleagues for the day and decided to go home.
When I stopped back in my office to lock up, though, I found I had a visitor. A student—or maybe a student’s kid sister, she looked that young—was perched on the edge of the straight-backed chair next to my desk, her shoulders hunched over, her medium-length hair—which was the color of weak, milky tea—obscuring her face. When I walked into the room she flinched and looked up. Her eyes were huge and the same milky tea color as her hair.
“Oh, excuse me, Professor McFay, I hope you don’t mind me coming in … The door was open and it was drafty in the hallway.”
It was eighty degrees in the hallway but this girl looked as if she could be blown away by a summer breeze. The reason her eyes looked so big, I saw now, was that her face was so thin.
“No problem,” I said, not sounding as if I meant it. I was tired and wanted to go home. “Office hours haven’t really begun yet …”
“Oh, I am so sorry!” She jumped up from her chair. She was wearing a soft blue peasant blouse that flapped around her rail-thin chest. This girl wasn’t just thin, she was undernourished. Anorexia? I wondered. “It’s just I come late to school and have not made the registration.”
I noticed her accent now. Eastern European, I thought. “It’s okay, please, sit down. I just wasn’t expecting any students today, but I’m new here and I don’t know the routine yet.”
“Me too. I am new, too!” She smiled. Her teeth had clearly not had the benefit of American dentistry, and the smile failed to brighten the pastiness of her skin. “I am … how do you say? Change student?”
“Exchange student,” I corrected her as gently as I could. She looked as if she might crumble under the slightest rough handling.
“Exchange student,” she repeated dutifully. Then she wrinkled her brow in confusion. “But that cannot be correct. Exchange means to trade one thing for another, no?”
I nodded in agreement.
“But I do not think Fairwick College will be sending an American student back where I am coming from.” She said this with such stolid gravity that I felt a little chill.
“Where exactly do you come from?” I asked.
She shook her head, making her lank hair whisk against her thin shoulders. I noticed the ends of her hair were split and damp—as if she’d been chewing them. “The borders change so often I hardly know anymore.”
When I’d walked into the room I had thought she looked younger than the average college student, but now, talking about her country, she suddenly looked much older. Where could she be from? I wondered. Bosnia? Chechnya? Serbia? But if she didn’t want to say which war-torn corner of Eastern Europe she came from, who was I to pry?
“What can I do to help?” I asked instead.
She gave me a snaggle-toothed smile and relaxed her shoulders. “I would like to take your class Vampires and the Gothic Imagination,” she said very carefully, as if she had rehearsed this bit. “But it is full.” She frowned, then smiled again (she was beginning to seem a little manic). “You are a very popular teacher! Everybody wants to take your class!”
“It’s my first semester here,” I reminded her. “So, it’s not because of me. The class is popular because vampires and the supernatural are popular right now. Is that why you want to take the class—because you liked the Twilight books?”
“I don’t know what this Twilight is,” she said. “I read the description of your class. It says that the heroine of the Gothic novel confronts evil—within and without—and survives it. That is what I would like to know, how one survives a confrontation with evil.”
The girl was leaning forward, her hands clasped in her lap, her pale tea-colored eyes wide and glassy. Her pupils were dilated, the black swimming over the light irises as if something dark were rising up inside her. For a moment, looking into them, I thought I caught a glimpse of the horrors they had seen. A wave of cold, like a current in the ocean, passed over me and I shivered.
“Of course you can take the class,” I said, wishing there was something more I could do for this girl. “Do you have something for me to sign?”
After I signed Mara Marinca’s add slip I decided I had to go home to take a nap. All the energy I’d woken up with had drained away. Moving boxes up all those steps had really worn me out. I felt as if I’d had that beer Frank Delmarco had offered—several, in fact.
On my way out of the building, I ran into a woman struggling on the stairs with two boxes. The boxes were uncovered and filled with newspapers and magazines that kept slipping out so that she had to stop every few steps and restack them. The boxes themselves looked as if they were coming apart at the seams.
“Here,” I said, taking pity on her predicament, “let me help you with those.”
“Omigod, you’re a lifesaver sent from heaven!” she declaimed dramatically, casting her big blue eyes upward. She was dressed for dramatic gestures—in a sweeping bell-sleeved kimono and a long flowing skirt—not for moving. Her wispy blond hair was pinned up in a clip that fell out twice before we made it up to her office with the collapsing boxes.
“Thank you so so much!” she said, spilling the contents of her box onto a pile of more newspapers and magazines spread out on her office floor. “I’ve been collecting all the journals and magazines that have reviewed my book this year and haven’t had a second to organize them all.”
“Wow,” I said, looking appreciatively at the pile. The New Yorker, People,
and Vanity Fair were mixed in with literary journals like The Hudson Review and Blueline and writing magazines like Poets & Writers and The Writer’s Chronicle. I looked up from the pile to a stack of books on her desk: multiple copies of Phoenix—Coming Up from the Ashes.
“You’re Phoenix,” I said, feeling a little odd using the single name, but like Cher or Sting, that’s all she went by. “I’ve read about your memoir.” So had most of literate America. A harrowing tale of growing up with child abuse and incest in a dirt-poor Appalachian hollow, Phoenix had been featured on dozens of talk shows and gotten a rave review from a New York Times critic who was better known for excoriating her subjects.
“Oh, have you?” she asked, batting her eyelashes. I heard the Southern accent now and remembered she was from North Carolina. “Everybody’s been so sweet. It’s very gratifying, you know, when you write something as hard to write as my book was and then people are affected by it. Some of the messages I get on my website just make me bawl like a baby!”
“I guess your honesty about your own travails encourages your readers to open up about their own hardships,” I said, thinking that while Sex Lives had gotten me a fair amount of publicity it at least hadn’t gotten me a string of confessional emails.
“Exactly!” Phoenix nodded her head eagerly. “You must be a writer, too, to understand that.”
I admitted I was and introduced myself. She claimed to have heard of my book, but not to have had a chance to read it since she’d been so busy touring for her book this year. She demanded I get a copy of my book from my office so we could exchange signed copies (“The truth will set you free!” she wrote, drawing a little picture of a plumed bird on fire beside her signature.) and that we make a date to “get good and plastered” the coming weekend before classes started. She was teaching a writing seminar. “I just know once I get involved with my students I won’t have a minute for myself—that’s just the way I am!”
