My Dark Vanessa(101)

What he says is so at odds with what I’m expecting, I interrupt, “Wait, so this isn’t about anything I did?”

“No, Vanessa,” he says. “Not everything is about you.” He sighs, rakes his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he adds. “I’m nervous, though I don’t know why. If anyone’s going to be understanding, it’s you.”

He says there’s been an incident at Browick. It happened back in October, in his classroom during faculty service hour. He was meeting one-on-one with a student who had questions about an essay. She always had questions about everything, this girl. At first he thought she was merely anxious, a grade worrier, but as she started hanging around the classroom more, he realized she had a crush on him. Truthfully, it reminded him of me—her giddy demeanor, her unguarded adoration.

On this October afternoon, they were sitting at the seminar table, side by side, while he went over her essay draft. She was flustered, practically trembling from anxiety—about the grade, about being so close to him—and at some point during the conference he reached down and patted her knee. He meant it to be reassuring. He was trying to be kind. But the girl took that touch and twisted it into something ugly. She started telling her friends that he’d made a pass at her and that he wanted to have sex with her, that he was sexually harassing her.

I throw up my hand, cutting him off. “Which hand did you use?”

He blinks in surprise.

“When you touched her. Which hand?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Show me,” I say. “I want to see exactly what you did.”

There on the couch, I make him demonstrate. I scoot away from him, leaving a chaste distance, and press my knees together and sit up straight—the nervous pose my body remembers from those times I sat beside him at the very beginning of things. I watch his hand reach down, pat my knee. It’s familiar enough to make me gag.

“It was nothing,” he says.

I shove his hand away. “It’s not nothing. That’s how it started with me, with you touching my leg.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It’s not. You and I started long before I ever laid a hand on you.”

He says this so forcefully, I can tell he’s said it to himself many times before. But if it didn’t start when he first touched me, when did it? When he told me, drunk at the Halloween dance, that he wanted to put me to bed and kiss me good night, or when I began inventing reasons to talk to him after class so I could get him alone and feel his eyes on me? When he wrote on my poem draft, Vanessa, this one scares me a little, or on the first day of classes, when I watched him give the convocation speech, his face dripping with sweat? Maybe the start can’t be pinned down at all. Maybe the universe forced us together, rendering us both powerless, blameless.

“It’s not even comparable,” he says. “This student is nothing to me, the so-called physical contact was nothing. It was a matter of seconds. I certainly don’t deserve to have my life destroyed over it.”

“Why would this destroy your life?”

He sighs, sits back on the couch. “The administration caught wind of it. They’re saying they need to do an investigation. Over a pat on the knee! It’s puritanical hysteria. We might as well be living in Salem.”

I stare him down, try to get him to flinch, but he looks innocent—the lines in his forehead creased in concern, his eyes enormous behind his glasses. Still, I want to be angry. He says the touch was insignificant, but I know how heavy with meaning a touch like that can be.

“Why are you even telling me?” I ask. “Do you want me to tell you it’s ok? That I forgive you? Because I don’t.”

“No,” he says, “I’m not asking you to forgive me. There’s nothing to forgive. I’m sharing this because I want you to understand that I’m still living with the consequences of loving you.”

For a split second, my eyes start to roll. I stop myself, but he still sees.

“Mock me all you like,” he says, “but before you, no one would have jumped to conclusions like this. They never would have believed this girl’s word over mine. These are my colleagues, people I’ve worked with for twenty years. That history means nothing now that my name has been dragged through the mud. Everyone assumes the worst about me. I’ve got eyes on me at all times, constant suspicion. And an uproar over this! My god, a friendly pat on the knee is something I do without thinking. Now it’s evidence of my depravity.”

Exactly how many girls have you touched? The question sits hot on my tongue, yet I don’t say it. I swallow it, burning my throat all the way down, another stomach ember.

“Loving you branded me a deviant,” he says. “Nothing else about me matters anymore. One transgression will define me for the rest of my life.”

We sit in silence, the sounds of his house amplified—the refrigerator hum, the hiss of the steam heat.

I tell him I’m sorry. I don’t want to say it but feel I have to, like he needs to hear it so badly, he’s pulling the words out of me like teeth. I’m sorry you’ll never get out from under the long shadow I cast. I’m sorry what we did together was so horrific, there’s no path back from it.

He forgives me, says it’s all right, then reaches over and pats my knee, until he realizes what he’s doing, stops, and curls his hand into a fist.