My Dark Vanessa(112)

Bridget says she’ll go out for the night so Strane and I can have the apartment to ourselves. Really, it’s clear she just wants to get away from me and my weird old boyfriend and the fraught cloud that constantly hangs over me. It’s like I heard her say to a guy she brought home a couple weeks ago: Oh, Vanessa is always in crisis mode, the kind of girl who attracts drama.

After she leaves, I sit on the couch, Minou on my knees and my laptop open on the coffee table. Every few minutes I lean forward to refresh, as though an email might appear explaining this all away. When I hear the building door open and heavy steps clomp up the stairs, I push Minou off, grab my phone. He pounds on the apartment door, the kitten disappears behind the couch, and my thumb strokes the keypad, the idea of calling 911 as much of a fantasy as the idea that an email from Henry might arrive in my inbox. Calling wouldn’t solve anything. Asking for help would mean answering the dispatcher’s unanswerable questions, demanding I explain the inexplicable. Who is this man banging on your apartment door? How do you know him? What, exactly, is your relationship to him? I need the whole story, ma’am. My choices: wade through seven years of this swamp and throw myself at the mercy of a skeptical third party who might not even believe me, or open the door and hope it won’t be too bad.

When I let him in, he’s out of breath and hunches over just inside the door, hands braced on his thighs, every inhale a wheeze. I take a step toward him, worried he’s about to drop. He holds up a hand.

“Don’t come near me,” he says.

Righting himself, he throws his coat on the papasan chair, looks around at the dirty towels spilling out from the bathroom doorway, the bowl crusted with mac and cheese on the coffee table. He moves into the kitchen, opening cupboards.

“You don’t have any clean glasses?” he asks. “Not one?”

I point to the stack of plastic cups on the counter and he shoots me a glare—lazy, wasteful girl—and fills one with tap water. I watch him drink, counting the seconds until his anger refuels, but when he empties the cup, he just leans against the counter, deflated.

“You really don’t know why I’m here?” he asks.

I shake my head as his eyes bore into me. I haven’t seen him since Christmas, when he told me about Taylor Birch. Over the months there’s been a change in him, his face somehow altered. I search until I find it: his glasses. They’re frameless now, nearly invisible. A pang hits my heart at the thought of him changing something so integral without telling me.

“I came here straight from a Browick faculty event,” he says. “Or a fundraiser. Hell, I don’t know what it was. I wasn’t even going to go. You know how I hate those things, but I thought another night sequestered at home might do me in.” He sighs, rubs his eyes. “Sick and tired of being treated like a leper.”

“What happened?”

He drops his hand. “I was sitting with some colleagues, including Penelope.” He checks my face for a reaction, notices how I suck in my breath. “See, you know what I’m going to say. Don’t act dumb with me. Don’t . . .” He slams his palms against the counter and takes a lunging step at me, hands out like he’s going to grab me by the shoulders, and then he stops short, clenches his fists.

The curtains are wide open, the need to protect us drilled into me so deeply it’s all I can think about—that anyone passing by on the street could glance up and get a clear view inside. When I move to draw the blinds, he grabs my arm.

“You told her husband,” he says. “Your professor. You told him I raped you.”

As he lets go, he pushes me. It’s not that hard but enough that I stumble backward into the trash can that belongs under the sink but has been sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor for god knows how long. I fall and the hood over the stove rattles the way it does on windy days. Strane doesn’t move as I scramble to my feet. He asks if he hurt me.

I shake my head. “I’m fine,” I say, even though my tailbone feels bruised. I look again to the window, the rapt audience of witnesses I imagine out there in the dark. “Why was she talking to you about me? The wife, I mean. Penelope.”

“She said nothing about you. It was her husband. Her husband who glared at me for an hour and a half and then followed me to the bathroom—”

There’s a tipping point within me, a sudden crash. “Henry was there? You met him?”

Strane stops, caught off guard by how I say the other man’s name, the way I exhale it, like a sigh after sex. His face, for a moment, weakens.

“What did he say?” I ask.

And with that, he’s again hardened, furrowed brow and flashing eyes. “No,” he says flatly. “I’m asking questions here. You tell me why you did it. Why you felt compelled to tell a man whose wife works with me that I raped you.” His voice chokes on raped, the word so repulsive it makes him gag. “Tell me why you did it.”

“I was trying to explain what happened when I left Browick. I don’t know. It came out.”

“Why would you need to explain that to him?”

“He said something about having taught at a prep school, I said I’d gone to one, he said he had a friend who worked at Browick. It came up naturally, ok? I didn’t go out of my way to tell him.”

“So someone mentions Browick and you immediately start blabbing about rape? For god’s sake, Vanessa, what is wrong with you?”