My Dark Vanessa(46)

“Should I make you an appointment?” she asks.

I think of Strane pressing my hip, holding me down, his operation, a vasectomy. I shake my head no and Mom sighs in relief.

“I just want you to be happy,” she says. “Happy and surrounded by people who are nice to you.”

“I am,” I say. As the woods flash by, I venture further. “He tells me I’m perfect.”

Mom presses her lips together, holding back a bigger smile. “First love is so special,” she says. “You’ll never forget it.”



Strane is in a bad mood on the first day back, barely looking at me in class and ignoring my raised hand. We’re reading A Farewell to Arms, and when Hannah Levesque calls the novel boring, Strane snaps that Hemingway would probably find her boring as well. He threatens Tom Hudson with a dress code violation because Tom’s sweatshirt is unzipped, his Foo Fighters T-shirt on display. At the end of class, I try to take off with everyone else, for once having zero desire to linger. Before I reach the door, though, Strane calls my name. I stop and the other students move past me like a river current, Tom with his jaw set in anger, Hannah with her wounded expression, Jenny eyeing me as though she wants to say something, the words piled up behind her lips.

When the classroom empties, Strane closes the door, turns off the lights, and leads me into the office, where the radiator is on full blast, the sea glass window fogged over. He leans on the table rather than sitting on the love seat beside me, which seems deliberate, like he’s sending a message. Switching on the electric kettle, he says nothing for the time it takes for the water to boil and to make himself a cup of tea; he doesn’t offer me one.

When he finally speaks, his voice is clipped, professional. The mug of tea steaming in his hand, he says, “I know you’re upset over what I asked you to do during our phone call.” Except I’d practically forgotten about the phone call and what he’d asked me to say. Even when I try to recall it now, I can’t quite remember. My brain veers away from the memory, repelled by a force beyond my control.

“I’m not upset,” I say.

“Clearly you are.”

I frown. This feels like a trick; he’s the one who’s upset, not me. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Yes,” he says, “we do.”

He does most of the talking, going on about how the break gave him time to think about all the ways in which I’m still a mystery to him. How he doesn’t really know me. He’s begun to wonder if he’s been projecting himself onto me, tricking himself into thinking there’s a connection between us when he’s really seeing a reflection of himself.

“I even started to wonder if you enjoy making love, or if it’s just a performance you put on for my benefit.”

“I enjoy it,” I say.

He heaves a sigh. “I want to believe you. Truly, I do.”

He keeps going, pacing the short length of the office. “I feel so strongly toward you,” he says. “Sometimes I worry I’ll drop dead from it. It’s stronger than anything I’ve ever felt for any woman. It’s not even in the same universe of feeling.” He stops, looks at me. “Does it frighten you to hear a man like me talk this way about you?”

A man like me. I shake my head.

“How does it make you feel?”

I look up at the ceiling as I try to come up with the right word. “Powerful?”

After that he relaxes a bit, set at ease by the idea of him making me feel powerful. He says fifteen years old is a strange thing, a real paradox. That in the middle of your adolescence, you’re the bravest you’ll ever be because of how the brain works at this age, the combination of malleability and arrogance.

“Right now,” he says, “at fifteen, you probably feel older than you will at eighteen or twenty.” He laughs and crouches before me, squeezes my hands. “My god, imagine you at twenty.” He tucks a lock of hair behind my ear.

“Is that how you felt?” I ask. “When you were . . .” I don’t say the rest of the sentence, when you were my age, because it sounds too much like something a kid would say, but he understands anyway.

“No, but boys are different. As teenagers, they’re inconsequential. They don’t become real people until adulthood. Girls become real so early. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. That’s when your minds turn on. It’s a gorgeous thing to witness.”

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. He’s like Humbert Humbert, assigning mythical significance to certain ages. I ask, “Don’t you mean nine to fourteen?” I mean it in a teasing way, figure he’ll understand the reference, but he looks at me like I’ve accused him of something horrible.

“Nine?” He jerks his head back. “I would never. Jesus, not nine.”

“It’s a joke,” I say. “You know, like in Lolita. The age nymphets are supposed to be?”

“Is that what you think I am?” he asks. “A pedophile?”

When I don’t answer, he stands, starts to pace again.

“You take that book too literally. I’m not that character. That’s not what we are.”

My cheeks burn at the criticism. It feels unfair; he’s the one who gave me the novel. What did he expect?

“I am not attracted to children,” he continues. “I mean, look at you, your body. You’re nothing like a child.”