My Dark Vanessa(117)

“I worried when it disappeared all of a sudden and you stopped coming to class,” he says. “I didn’t know what to think. I guess I still don’t.”

I ask him how he even found it and he says he can’t remember. Maybe he searched my email address, or some key words, he’s not sure. I imagine him hunched over his laptop at home late at night, his wife asleep in the other room while he typed my name into the search bar, digging until he found me. It’s the kind of thing I fantasized about all year, confirmation of my having invaded his life. Now faced with it being true, my stomach turns; I feel sick.

He says he read it to check in on me. He worried about me. “And because you seemed to have formed such a strong attachment,” he says, “I wanted to keep an eye on that, too.”

“Attachment to what?”

Henry cocks an eyebrow, as though to say, You know what I mean. When I only stare back at him, he says, “Attachment to me.”

I say nothing and he turns defensive.

“Was that wrong of me to assume?” he asks. “You came on so strongly. It overwhelmed me.”

I gape at him, at first baffled—hadn’t he singled me out as much as I had him?—but it dissipates into embarrassment because that probably is what I did. I’ve done it before.

“So that’s how you handle students who you think have crushes on you?” I ask. “You stalk them online?”

“I hardly stalked you. The blog was public.”

“What did you think I was going to do, run in here and force myself on you?”

“I really didn’t know,” he says. “After you told me about you and that teacher, I started to wonder about your intentions.”

“You don’t have to call him ‘that teacher,’” I say. “Clearly you know his name.”

Henry presses his lips together, spins in his chair so he faces the window. He stays like that for so long, staring out at the courtyard below, that I think he’s finished, but when I go for the door, he says, “I didn’t tell you this to embarrass you.”

I stop, my hand on the doorknob.

“I thought telling you might create an opening for us to be honest with each other. Because I think there are things you may want to tell me.” He spins back toward me. “And you should know I would hear anything you wanted to say.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Based on what I read,” he says, “I think you might want to tell me something.”

I think of the entries I wrote about him, my descriptions of craving him so badly my whole body ached from it, the comments that would show up sometimes in the middle of the night—from him? I swallow hard, my legs shaking, my hands. Even my brain shakes.

“If you already read it,” I ask, “why do you need me to say it?”

He doesn’t answer, but I know why. Because he needs to know I’m willing. Like Strane insisting I vocalize what I want to shift the burden of culpability. Talking this out, Vanessa, is the only way I can live with myself. I never would have done it if you weren’t so willing.

“You’re an enigma,” Henry says. “Impossible to understand.”

Again, I get the feeling I could touch him and he’d let me. If I put my hands on him, he’d spring forth as though released from a cage. Finally, he’d say. Vanessa, I’ve wanted this since I first met you. I see ahead to the next year, to me working as his assistant, the two of us shut in this office, the inevitable drawn-out affair. I still haven’t had sex with anyone other than Strane, but I can easily imagine what Henry would be like. His heavy body, labored breaths, and slack jaw.

And then the fog burns off, my view clears, and he’s repulsive, sitting there trying to pry a confession out of me. You have a wife, I want to say. What the hell is wrong with you?

I tell him I won’t be in Atlantica next year after all. “You should give that assistant job to someone else.”

Blinking in surprise, he asks, “What about grad school? Are you still going to apply?”

Looking ahead, I can see that, too—another classroom, another man at the head of the seminar table reading my name off the roster, his eyes drinking me in. The thought makes me so tired all I can think is I’d rather be dead than go through this again.



The day before graduation, Henry takes me out to lunch to say goodbye, gives me a Bront? novel, a reference to some inside joke we had, with an inscription he signs with H. After I move out of Atlantica, his name shows up in my email inbox every six months or so, my stomach lurching each time. Eventually, we add each other on Facebook and I get glimpses into the life I spent so long imagining: photos of Penelope and their daughter, of Henry’s graying hair and aging face, each passing year making him look more like Strane. Meanwhile time turns me cynical, suspicious. I strip myself of the fantasy, tell myself that when we met, Henry was bored and losing his youth; I was young and adored him. An older man using a girl to feel better about himself—how easily the story becomes a cliché if you look at it without the soft focus of romance.

One year he writes to me on my birthday, an email sent at two in the morning. I remember you as one of my best students, he writes, and I always will. I start to reply, Henry, what does that even mean? but I stop myself, delete his email, set up a filter so future ones go straight to the trash.