My Dark Vanessa(33)

He stands, folds down the comforter, and, under his breath, goes, “Ok, ok, ok.” He says he’ll stay dressed for now, which I know is meant to soothe me, maybe also himself. On his shirt, dark circles spread out from his armpits, just like during the convocation speech the first day of classes.

I slide into bed beside him and we lie on our backs under the covers, not touching, not talking. The ceiling is covered in cream and gold tiles that form a swirling pattern my eyes circle around and around. Beneath the down comforter, my hands and feet are warmer, but the tip of my nose stays cold.

“My room at home is always cold like this, too,” I say.

“Is it?” He turns to me, grateful I’ve made this somewhat normal by speaking. He asks me to describe my bedroom, what it looks like, how it’s arranged. I draw a map in the air.

“Here’s the window facing the lake,” I say, “and here’s the window facing the mountain. Here’s my closet and here’s my bed.” I tell him about my posters, the color of my bedspread. I say that in the summers, I wake sometimes in the middle of the night to the sound of loons screaming out on the lake, and that because the house isn’t well insulated, ice forms on the walls in the winter.

“I hope someday I get to see it for myself,” he says.

I laugh at the thought of him in my bedroom, how big he’d seem there, his head brushing the ceiling. “I don’t think that’ll ever happen.”

“You never know,” he says. “Opportunities come up.”

He tells me about his childhood bedroom in Montana. It was cold in the winter, too, he says. He describes Butte, the old mining boomtown, once the richest place on earth and now a depressed brown basin cradled by mountains. He describes the abandoned headframes poking up between the houses, how downtown was built on the side of a hill and how at the top of that hill is a big pit of acid left over from the mining.

“That sounds horrible,” I say.

“It does,” he agrees, “but it’s the sort of place that’s difficult to understand until you see it for yourself. There’s a strange beauty in it.”

“Beauty in a pit of acid?”

He smiles. “Someday we’ll go there. You’ll see.”

Under the comforter, he links his fingers through mine and continues talking, telling me about his younger sister, his parents; how his father was a copper miner, intimidating but kind, and his mother a teacher.

“What was she like?” I ask.

“Angry,” he says. “She was a very angry woman.”

I bite my lip, unsure what to say.

“She didn’t care for me,” he adds, “and I could never figure out why.”

“Is she still alive?”

“They’re both dead.”

I start to say I’m sorry but he cuts me off, squeezes my hand. “It’s fine,” he says. “Ancient history.”

We lie quiet for a while, our hands linked under the blankets. Breathing in and out, I close my eyes and try to pinpoint the scent of his bedroom. It’s a thin, masculine smell, traces of soap and deodorant on the flannel sheets, cedar from the closet. It’s strange to think this is where he lives like a normal person, sleeping and eating and doing all the monotonous everyday chores of living—washing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry. Does he do his own laundry? I try to picture him hauling clothes from washer to dryer, but the image dissolves as soon as I conjure it.

“Why didn’t you ever get married?” I ask.

He glances over at me and I feel his hand loosen its grip on mine for a moment, long enough to tell me this was the wrong thing to ask.

“Marriage isn’t for everyone,” he says. “You’ll figure that out as you get older.”

“No, I get it,” I say. “I never want to get married, either.” I don’t know if this is exactly true, but I’m trying to be generous. His worry is obvious, about me and what we’re doing. The smallest movement makes him jump, like I’m an animal prone to bolt or bite.

He smiles; his body relaxes. I said the right thing. “Of course you don’t. You know yourself enough to understand what you aren’t made for,” he says.

I want to ask what I am made for, but don’t want to show I don’t actually know myself, and don’t want to push it now that he’s again holding my hand and tilting his head toward mine like he’s moving in for a kiss. He hasn’t kissed me since I got here.

He asks again if I’m tired and I shake my head. “When you are,” he says, “let me know and I can go to the living room.”

The living room? I frown and try to figure out what he means. “Like you’ll sleep on the couch?”

He lets go of my hand and starts to speak, stops, starts again. “I’m ashamed of how I first touched you,” he says, “back at the beginning of the year. That’s not how I like to behave.”

“I liked it, though.”

“I know you liked it, but wasn’t it confusing?” He turns to me. “It must have been. Having your teacher touch you out of nowhere. I didn’t like doing that, acting without talking it through first. Talking through absolutely everything is the only way to redeem what we’re doing.”

He doesn’t say it, but I know what’s required of me here—to tell him how I feel and what I want. To be brave. I roll toward him, press my face into his neck. “I don’t want you to sleep on the couch.” I feel him smile.