My Dark Vanessa(116)
“He said you shoved him against the wall.”
“How could I even manage that? That man is enormous.”
“He said—”
“Vanessa, I barely touched him.”
At that, a lump forms in my throat. I barely touched him. I touched her, that’s all. Both boil down to me overreacting, determined to portray these men as villains.
To Henry, I ask, “Why didn’t you ever tell me about your wife? You must have known I’d figure out eventually that it was her who worked there.”
He blinks, thrown by the pivot. “I’m a private person. I don’t like to divulge my personal life to students.”
But that’s not true. I know plenty of personal things about him, details he’s offered up himself—where he grew up, that his parents never married, that his sister was hurt by someone older the same way Strane hurt me. I know his favorite bands from high school and his favorite bands now, that he was a burnout in college, one semester skipping twelve credits’ worth of classes. I know how long it takes him to drive from his house to campus and that when he grades papers, he sets mine aside for when his mind is exhausted and needs a break. It’s only his wife that I know nothing about.
“You know,” I say, “marrying one of your students is pretty fucked up.”
He hangs his head, takes a breath. He knew this was coming. “The circumstances were totally different.”
“You were her teacher.”
“I was a professor.”
“Big difference.”
“It is different,” he says. “You know it is.”
I want to tell him the same thing I said to Strane: that I don’t know what I know. Months ago, I wrote about how different it was with Henry, that I wouldn’t be taken advantage of this time. That difference now feels too subtle to locate. I need someone to show me the line that’s supposed to separate twenty-seven years older from thirteen years, teacher from professor, criminal from socially acceptable. Or maybe I’m supposed to encompass the difference here. Years past my eighteenth birthday, I’m fair game now, a consenting adult.
“I should report you for what you did to him,” I say. “The college should know about the type of people they have working here.”
That touches a nerve, his face flushed as he practically yells, “Report me?” and for a moment, I see the anger he must have let loose on Strane. But then, conscious of the voices passing by the closed office door, he lowers himself to whisper, “Vanessa, you knew what that man did to this other girl and you made me feel like an idiot when I mentioned it to you. Then you come in here, telling me that he’s harassing you, hurting you. What did you expect?”
“He didn’t do anything to that girl,” I say. “He touched her knee, big fucking deal.”
Henry’s eyes travel over my face and his anger fades. Gently, like he’s speaking to a child, he says he heard something else, that Strane did a lot more than touch her knee. He doesn’t explain further and I don’t ask. What’s the use? All of this is impossible to talk about, and trying to talk about it only makes you sound like a lunatic, one minute calling it rape and the next clarifying, Well, it wasn’t rape rape, as though that does anything but muddy the waters.
“I’m leaving,” I say, and Henry reaches for me but stops short of touching. He’s suddenly anxious—worried, maybe, that I might actually tell on him. Do I really want him to sign that course withdrawal form? I should just come to class. It’s only a couple more weeks. We’ll forget about the absences.
“I just want you to feel ok,” he says.
But I’m not ok. For days afterward, I walk around dazed, unable to shake the feeling of having been violated. During a meeting with my advisor, she asks how I’m doing, expecting my usual aloof response. Instead, I launch into a version of what happened. I try to be vague because I don’t want to implicate Strane, so the story comes out patchy and incoherent, makes me sound crazy.
“This is Henry we’re talking about?” my advisor asks, her voice barely above a whisper; the office walls are thin. “Henry Plough?” He hasn’t even been there a year and already he has a reputation for being a man of integrity.
Clasping her hands, my advisor labors over her words as she says, “Vanessa, over the years I’ve gathered from your writing that something happened to you in high school. Do you think that might be what you’re really upset about here?”
She waits, her eyebrows jumping as though prompting me to agree. This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction—once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.
My advisor smiles, reaches forward and pats my knee. “Hang in there.”
On my way out of her office, I ask, “Did you know he married one of his students?”
At first, I think I’ve dropped a bomb on her. Then she nods. Yes, she knows. She lifts her hands, a gesture of helplessness. “It happens sometimes,” she says.
I tell Henry I forgive him even though he doesn’t ever offer a real apology. For the rest of the semester, he wants it to be the same. He tries to rely on me in class like he did before, but I have nothing to say, and in his office I’m fidgety and evasive as he tests out different ways to pull me back. He tells me I’m the best student he’s ever had (Better than your wife? I wonder), that he did what he did to Strane only because of how much he cares about me. He shows me the letter of recommendation he’s already written for my grad school applications, two and a half pages single-spaced about how special I am. Then, on the last week of classes, he asks me to come to his office. Once we’re inside, he closes the door and says he needs to admit something: he used to read my blog. He read it for months before I shut it down.