My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

“Neither of us would have survived him going to prison.”

  Ruby watches me and there’s a shifting of gears behind her eyes, the marking of a mental note. It’s more subtle than scribbling on a notepad the way a TV therapist might, yet still detectable. She observes me so closely, puts everything I say and do into a larger context, which of course reminds me of Strane—how could it not? How his eyes bore into me during class, constantly calculating. Ruby once told me that I’m her favorite client because there’s always another layer to peel back, something else to unearth, and hearing this was as thrilling as hearing, You’re my best student. Like Strane calling me precious and rare, Henry Plough saying I’m an enigma, impossible to understand.

  She asks then what I think she’s wanted to ask me all along. “Do you believe the girls who accused him?”

  I don’t hesitate in saying no. I flick my eyes to her face, catch her fast-blinking surprise.

  “You think they’re lying,” she says.

  “Not exactly. I think they got carried away.”

  “Carried away how?”

  “In this hysteria that’s going on,” I say. “The constant accusations. Like, it’s a movement, right? That’s what people are calling it. And when you see a movement with so much momentum, it’s natural to want to join, but to be accepted into this one you need something horrible to have happened to you. Exaggeration is inevitable. Plus, it’s all so vague. These terms are easy to manipulate. Assault can be anything. He could have just patted them on the leg or something.”

  “But if he was innocent, how do you make sense of him taking his own life?” she asks.

  “He always said he’d rather be dead than live life branded as a pedophile. When these accusations came out, he knew everyone would assume he was guilty.”

  “Are you angry with him?”

  “For killing himself? No. I understand why he did it, and I know that I’m at least partially to blame.”

  She starts to say no, that isn’t true, but I cut her off.

  “I know, I know—it isn’t my fault, I get it. But I’m the reason he had all these rumors attached to him in the first place. If he hadn’t already had the reputation of being a teacher who sleeps with students, I doubt Taylor would have accused him of anything, and if she hadn’t come forward, the other girls wouldn’t have, either. Once a teacher gets accused of this, everything he says and does is seen through a filter, to the point where even innocuous behavior is interpreted as something sinister.” I go on and on, parroting his arguments, the part of him left inside me suddenly risen and fully alive.

  “Think about it,” I say. “If a normal man pats a girl on the knee, no big deal. But if a man who’s been accused of being a pedophile does it? People are going to react disproportionately. So, no, I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at them. I’m mad at the world that turned him into a monster when all he did was have the bad luck of falling in love with me.”

  Ruby crosses her arms and stares down at her lap, as though she’s trying to calm herself.

  “I know how this all sounds,” I say. “I’m sure you think I’m terrible.”

  “I don’t think you’re terrible,” she says quietly, still gazing down at her lap.

  “Then what do you think?”

  She takes a deep breath, meets my eyes. “Honestly, Vanessa, what I’m hearing is that he was a very weak man, and even as a girl, you knew you were stronger than him. You knew he couldn’t handle being exposed and that’s why you took the fall. You’re still trying to protect him.”

  I bite down on the inside of my cheek because I won’t let my body do what it really wants—to contort itself inward, to curl so tight my bones snap. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”

  “Ok.”

  “I’m still grieving, you know. On top of everything else, I’m mourning the loss.”

  “It must be hard.”

  “It is. It’s excruciating.” I swallow down the tightness in my throat. “I let him die. You should know that, just in case you start feeling sorry for me. He called me right before he did it, and I knew what he was going to do and I did nothing to stop him.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Ruby says.

  “Yeah, you keep saying that. Nothing ever seems to be my fault.”

  She says nothing, staring at me with that same pained expression. I know what she thinks, that I’m pathetic, intent on creating my own doom.

  “I tortured him,” I say. “I don’t think you understand how much I contributed to everything. His whole life descended into hell because of me.”

  “He was a grown man and you were fifteen,” she says. “What could you have possibly done to torture him?”

  For a moment I’m speechless, unable to come up with an answer besides, I walked into his classroom. I existed. I was born.

  Tipping my head back, I say, “He was so in love with me, he used to sit in my chair after I left the classroom. He’d put his face down on the table and try to breathe me in.” It’s a detail I’ve trotted out before, always meant as evidence of his uncontrollable love for me, but saying it now, I hear it as she does, as anyone would—deluded and deranged.

  “Vanessa,” she says gently, “you didn’t ask for that. You were just trying to go to school.”

  I stare out the window over her shoulder, at the harbor, the swarming gulls, the slate-gray water and sky, but I only see myself, barely sixteen with tears in my eyes, standing in front of a room of people, calling myself a liar, a bad girl deserving of punishment. Ruby’s far-off voice asks me where I’ve gone, but she knows that it’s the truth that has spooked me, the expanse of it, the starkness. It offers nowhere to hide.

  2006

  It’s early September, senior year of college about to begin, and I’m cleaning my apartment with the windows thrown open. The sounds of seasonal transformation drift in from the downtown streets below, the loudspeaker from the trolley tours mixed with the moaning brakes of a moving van, the final wave of tourists in town for the last of the warm weather and cheaper hotel rooms. The center of town has shifted toward campus, and until May, Atlantica will belong to the college. Bridget, my roommate, is due to arrive from Rhode Island the following day and classes begin the day after that. I’ve lived here all summer, cleaning hotel rooms for cash and getting stoned and wasting time online at night—except when Strane comes over, which he’s done only a handful of times. He blames the long drive, but really he just hates the dingy apartment. The first time he visited, he took one look around and said, “Vanessa, this is the kind of place people go to kill themselves.” He’s forty-eight and I’m twenty-one, and mostly it’s the same as it was six years ago. The big threats are gone—no one’s going to get thrown in jail or lose their job—but I still lie to my parents about him. Bridget is the only friend who knows he exists. When he and I are together, it’s either at his house or in my apartment with the shades drawn. He takes me out in public sometimes, but only places where there’s little chance we’ll be recognized—the secrecy, once a necessity, now seems a product of shame.

  I’m in the bathroom wiping down the sides of the shower, something I only do when he’s coming, when my phone trills with an incoming call: JACOB STRANE.

  I hit “answer,” my fingers pruned from the cleaner. “Hey, are you—?”

  “Can’t do it tonight,” he says. “Too much going on here.”

  I move into the living room while he goes on about being reappointed department chair, his mounting responsibilities. “The department’s a mess,” he says. “We’ve got someone on maternity leave and the new teacher they hired is completely clueless. On top of that, they’re implementing some new school-wide counseling program, hired some girl barely older than you to instruct us how to handle students’ feelings. It’s insulting. I’ve been doing this for two decades.”

  I begin to pace the length of the living room, following the path of the oscillating fan. The only furniture we have is a duct-taped papasan chair, a coffee table made of milk
crates, and my parents’ old TV stand. We’ll have a couch soon; Bridget says she knows someone getting rid of one for free.

  “But this was the last chance for us to be together.”

  “Are you leaving on an extended voyage I don’t know about?”

  “My roommate’s moving in tomorrow.”

  “Ah.” He clicks his tongue. “Well, you’ve got a bedroom. The door closes.”

  I let out a tiny slip of a sigh.

  “Please don’t sulk,” he says.

  “I’m not.” But I am, my limbs heavy, my bottom lip jutting out. I spent the whole morning clearing the empty bottles and coffee cups out of my bedroom, washing the dishes, wiping the hair out of the bathtub. Plus I want to be with him. That’s the real source of my disappointment. It’s been two weeks.

  Into the phone, I mumble, “I’m needy.” It’s the closest I can get to saying what I feel, which isn’t horniness, because it isn’t really about sex. It’s him looking at me, adoring me, telling me what I am and giving me what I need to get through the day-to-day drudgery of pretending I’m like everybody else.

  I hear him smile—the quick exhale, a soft sound from the back of his throat. I’m needy. He likes that. “I’ll get out there soon,” he says.

  Bridget arrives the following afternoon, dropping her bags in the middle of the living room floor. With shining eyes, she asks, “Is he here?” She’s anxious to meet Strane; I’m not sure she’s convinced he’s real. I told her a vague version of the story last spring at the bar after we signed our lease. She’s an English major, same as me, and we’d had classes together for three years, but we weren’t good friends. Living together was an arrangement of convenience. She’d found a two-bedroom apartment; I needed a place. Yet over the course of one night at the bar, I went from mentioning that I’d gone to Browick for “about a year”—usually that’s as close as I came to the truth—to giving her a disjointed history of the whole mess five drinks later. I told her that he singled me out and fell in love, that I was expelled because I wouldn’t betray him, but we ended up back together because we can’t stay away from each other, despite the age difference, despite everything. She was the perfect listener, widening her eyes at the most intense plot points, nodding empathetically at the difficult moments, and through it all showing no hint of judgment. Since then, she had never been the first to mention Strane, always followed my lead. Even now, asking Is he here? was only because I texted her the day before with an apologetic warning: I hope you won’t be too alarmed if a middle-aged man is in the apartment when you get here tomorrow. That was the first time I ever tried turning him into a joke and it felt good, surprisingly so.

  Is he here? I shake my head but don’t explain why and Bridget doesn’t ask.

  We move in the rest of her stuff, black garbage bags full of clothes and pillows and bedsheets, a trash can stuffed with shoes, a crockpot full of DVDs. We pick up the couch—literally pick it up—and carry it four blocks while cars pass by and honk at us. We rest halfway, dropping the couch on the sidewalk and draping ourselves across it, stretching our legs and shielding our eyes from the sun. Once we haul it up into the apartment, we push it against a living room wall and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking sugary wine and watching The Hills. We swig straight from our respective bottles, wipe our lips with the backs of our hands, and sing along to the theme song, episode after episode.

  When the sky darkens and the wine runs out, we go to the corner store for more to drink while we get ready for the bar. Rilo Kiley blares from Bridget’s bedroom on the other end of the apartment as I flat-iron my hair and line my eyes. At one point, she appears in my bedroom doorway with a pair of scissors.

  “I’m giving you bangs,” she says.

  I sit on the edge of the bathtub while she snips at my hair with the paint-stained scissors, her laptop open to a photo of Jenny Lewis for reference. “Perfect,” she says, stepping aside so I can look in the mirror. I look like a little girl, two big eyes peering out from beneath a blunt fringe.

  “You look amazing,” Bridget says.

  I turn from side to side and wonder what Strane will think.

  At the bar, I perch on a stool and guzzle pints, while Bridget is sidetracked by boys who pull her in for hugs as an excuse to lay their hands on her. She’s beautiful: high cheekbones and long honey hair, a gap between her front teeth that I’ve seen men go cross-eyed over. Meanwhile, I’m pretty but not beautiful, smart but not cool. I’m acerbic, salty, too intense. When Bridget’s fiancé met me, he said just being around me felt like a kick in the balls.

  * * *

  Atlantica College is morning fog and salt-drenched air, seals sunning their speckled bodies on the pink granite shore, whaler mansions converted into classrooms, a giant humpback skull hanging in the cafeteria. The school mascot is a horseshoe crab, and we’re all aware of how ridiculous this is, the bookstore stocked with sweatshirts that read got crabs? across the back. There aren’t any sports teams, the students call the president by her first name, and professors wear Teva sandals and T-shirts and bring their dogs to class. I love the college, don’t want to graduate, don’t want to leave.

  Strane says I need to contextualize my reluctance to grow up, that everyone my age is drawn to self-victimization. “And that mentality is especially difficult for young women to resist,” he says. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.” He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.

  I still feel different from others, dark and deeply bad, same as I did at fifteen, but I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of the reasons. I’ve become an expert of the age-gap trope, consuming books, films, anything featuring a romance between an adult and legal child. I search endlessly for myself but never find anything truly accurate. Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not—and it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I’ve never wanted to be, and if I don’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right? My freshman year roommate said that when I tried to stop her from going home drunk with some guy she met at a party. You can’t rape the willing. It’s a terrible joke, sure, but it makes sense.

  And even if Strane did hurt me, all girls have old wounds. When I first came to Atlantica, I lived in a women’s dorm that was like Browick but more fraught, alcohol and pot easily available, minimal supervision. Open doors lined the hallways, and girls wandered from room to room late into the night, confessing secrets, laying their hearts bare. Girls I met only hours before wept beside me on my bed, telling me about their distant mothers and mean fathers and how their boyfriends cheated on them and that the world was a terrible place. None of them had had affairs with older men and they were still screwed up. If I had never met Strane, I doubt I would’ve turned out all that different. Some boy would’ve used me, taken me for granted, ripped my heart out. At least Strane gave me a better story to tell than theirs.

  Sometimes it’s easier to think of it that way—as a story. Last fall I took a fiction writing workshop, and all semester I turned in pieces about Strane. While the stories were critiqued by the class, I took notes on what everyone said, copied down all their comments, even the stupid ones, the mean ones. If someone said, “I mean, she’s obviously a slut. Who has sex with a teacher? Who does something like that?” I wrote those questions in my notebook and then added my own: (Why did I do it? Because I’m a slut?)

  I left that class feeling battered and bruised, but it seemed like penance, a deserved humiliation. Maybe there’s a comparison to be made between sitting silently through those brutal workshops and standing in that Browick classroom as questions were hurled at me
, but I try not to let myself linger on thoughts like these. I keep my head down, keep going.

  The professor teaching my capstone lit seminar is new. Henry Plough. I noticed his nameplate on the office next to my advisor’s the other day, the door ajar, showing an empty room with a desk and two chairs. At the first seminar meeting, I sit at the far end of the table, hungover, maybe still drunk, my skin and hair stinking of beer.

  As I watch the other students filter in, each face familiar, my brain seems to spasm, a flash of light and wall of sound, an instant headache so strong I press my fingers against my eyes. When I open them again, Jenny Murphy is there—Jenny the former roommate, the fleeting best friend, the life ruiner. She sits at the seminar table, chin resting on her fist, her brown bobbed hair and the long line of her neck exactly the same. Has she transferred? My body trembles as I wait for her to notice me. How funny that neither of us has aged. I don’t look a day over fifteen, either, the same freckled face and long red hair.

  I’m still fixated on her when Henry Plough comes into the classroom carrying a textbook, a leather bag slung over his shoulder. Dragging my eyes away from Jenny, I take him in, this new professor. At first glance, he is Strane, all beard and glasses, heavy footsteps and wide shoulders. Then the revisions reveal themselves: not dominatingly tall but average height, his hair and beard blond rather than black, brown eyes instead of gray, glasses horn-rimmed not wire frame. He’s slimmer, smaller, and he’s young—that’s the last thing I notice. No gray hairs, smooth skin beneath his beard, midthirties. He’s Strane in the pupal stage, still soft.

  Henry Plough drops his copy of the textbook onto the seminar table and it thuds loudly, making everyone wince.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to do that.”

  He picks it back up, holds it in his hands for a moment, unsure what to do, then sets it back down on the table carefully.

  “I guess I should get started,” he says, “now that my awkward entrance is out of the way.”