My Dark Vanessa(107)
She waits, but I can’t say it. Him. He called me up to his desk and touched me while the rest of the class did their homework. I sat beside him, stared out the window, and let him do what he wanted. And I didn’t understand it, didn’t ask for it.
I exhale, hang my head. “I can’t.”
“That’s fine,” she says. “Take it slow.”
“I just feel . . .” I press the heels of my hands into my thighs. “I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to for so long. You know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?”
I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide-open empathy.
“It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
She stands over me as I say I’m sad, I’m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.
2007
Spring semester I start drinking again, a crowd of empty bottles on my nightstand. If I’m not in class, I’m in bed with my laptop, the fan whirring and screen glowing late into the night. I scroll through photos of Britney Spears in the midst of a breakdown, shaving her head, attacking paparazzi with an umbrella and caged-animal eyes. Gossip blogs post the same pictures over and over with headlines like “Former Teen Pop Princess Goes Off the Deep End!,” followed by pages of gleeful comments: What a train wreck! . . . So sad how they always end up like this . . . I bet she’ll be dead by the end of the month.
At night, I keep my phone on the windowsill next to my bed, and in the morning, the first thing I do is check to see how many times Strane has called. When I’m out at the bar with Bridget and feel my phone vibrate, I dig it out of my bag and hold it up so she can see his flashing name. “I feel bad,” I say, “but I just can’t talk to him.” I’ve told her about the investigation, called it a “witch hunt” as Strane did, made it clear that he didn’t really do anything bad, but that I’m still angry. Don’t I have the right to be mad? “Of course you do,” Bridget says.
I start checking Taylor Birch’s Facebook profile every day, clicking through her public photos, both disgusted and pleased at how ordinary she appears with her braces and stringy white blond hair. Only one photo gives me pause: her grinning in a field hockey uniform, kilt ending halfway down her tanned thighs, browick in maroon lettering across her flat chest. But then I remember Strane describing my fifteen-year-old body, how he called it fairly developed, more woman than not. I think of Ms. Thompson, her womanly body. I shouldn’t be so eager to turn him into a monster.
I don’t need the credits, but I take Henry’s gothic seminar anyway. In class, he turns to me when the other students drag their feet through discussions. A silence falls over the room and his eyes skim the rest of them, landing always on me. “Vanessa?” he prompts. “Your thoughts?” He relies on me to always have something to say about the stories of obsessive women and monstrous men.
After every class, there’s some pretense for me to follow him into his office—he has a book he wants to lend me, he nominated me for a departmental award, he wants to talk to me about an assistant job that’s available next year, something for me to do while I work on grad school applications—but once we’re alone, it devolves into talking, laughing. Laughing! I laugh more with him than I ever have with Strane, who I’m still ignoring, whose phone calls have started coming every night, voicemails asking me to please, please call him, but I don’t want to hear how he’s hanging by a thread. I want Henry, to sit in his office and point to a postcard tacked to the wall, the only thing he’s hung up, and ask for the story behind it and have him tell me it’s from Germany, that he went to a conference there and lost his luggage and had to wander around in sweatpants. I want to hear him call me funny, charming, brilliant, the best student he’s ever had; for him to describe what he sees in store for me. “When you’re in graduate school,” he says, “you’ll be one of those hip teaching assistants, the kind who holds her office hours in a coffee shop.” It’s a small thing but enough for my breath to catch. I can see myself at the head of my own classroom, telling my own students what to read and write. Maybe that’s what this has always been about—not wanting these men but wanting to be them.
In my blog, I document everything he says to me, every look, every grin. Fixated on the question of what it means, I tally it all up as though this will give me an answer. We eat lunch together in the student union, he responds to my emails at one in the morning, matching me joke for joke and signing his name “Henry,” while emails to the whole class are “H. Plough.” On my blog, I type it might mean nothing but it should mean something over and over until the lines fill the whole screen. He tells me about having memorized “Jabberwocky” for fun when he was ten years old, and I see him as a boy the way I never could with Strane. But that’s what he is, boyish, at least, if not an outright boy, grinning when I tease him, that flush taking over his face. He references Simpsons episodes in his emails, mentions some song popular in his grad school days. “You don’t know Belle and Sebastian?” he asks, surprised. He makes me a CD and as I scour the lyrics for clues, the version of me that lives in his mind reveals herself.