My Dark Vanessa(53)
He keeps prophesizing, says I will have had a dozen lovers by the time I’m twenty. When I’m twenty-five, I’ll be childless and still look like a girl, but at thirty, I’ll be a woman, no more baby cheeks, with fine lines around my eyes. And, he says, I’ll be married.
“I’m never getting married,” I say. “Same as you. Remember?”
“You don’t really want that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You don’t,” he says flatly, his teacher voice taking over. “I’m no one to model yourself after.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Don’t be upset.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. Look at you. You’re crying.”
I hunch my shoulders away from him and press my forehead against the window.
“It’s just how it has to be,” he says. “We aren’t always going to fit together the way we do now.”
“Please stop talking.”
A mile goes by, the roar of eighteen-wheelers, the slow curve of an esker and the boggy lake below, a brown-black mass in the distance that could be a moose, could be nothing.
He says, “Vanessa, when you look back, you’ll remember me as someone who loved you, just one of many. I guarantee your life is going to be so much bigger than me.”
I let out a shaky breath. Maybe he’s right. Maybe there’s safety in what he says, a chance to walk away unscathed and unbound. Is it really impossible to imagine that I might emerge from this worldly and wise, a girl with a story to tell? Someday when people ask me, “Who was your first lover?” the truth will set me apart. Not some ordinary boy, but an older man: my teacher. He loved me so desperately I had to leave him behind. It was tragic, but I didn’t have a choice. That’s just how the world works.
Strane reaches for me as he drives, his fingers tracing my knee. He steals glances away from the road to check my face. He wants to make sure I like what he’s doing. Does that feel good? Does that make me happy? My eyelids flutter as his hand moves up my thigh. He lives to please me. Even if we end up apart, right now, he worships me—his dark Vanessa. That should be enough. I’m lucky to have this, to be so loved.
*
After April break, it’s all downhill momentum. Warm days bring classes held outside and weekend trips to Mount Blue. Daffodils bloom and the Norumbega River rushes high, flooding the downtown streets. Creative writing club starts up again when the new issues of the lit journal come back from the printers, and as Jesse and I are sorting through the boxes, deciding where to drop the copies, Strane calls me into the office and kisses me hard, his tongue filling my whole mouth. It’s reckless, bafflingly so; Jesse’s right there, the office door not even closed all the way. When I return to the classroom, lips stinging and cheeks flushed, Jesse pretends not to notice, but he doesn’t show for our next meeting.
“Where’s Jesse?” I ask.
“He quit,” Strane says. He smiles, seems pleased.
In English, we start a unit where we compare famous paintings to books we’ve read that year. Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party is The Great Gatsby, everyone lazy and drunk. Picasso’s Guernica is A Farewell to Arms, the disjointed horrors of war. When Strane shows us Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, the class agrees that it’s most like Ethan Frome with its stark loneliness, the looming house on the hill. After class, I tell Strane that I see Lolita in the Wyeth painting and try to explain why—because the woman looks so beaten down with her skinny ankles, because the impassable distance between her and the house reminds me of the description of Lo at the end, pale, pregnant, and destined to die. Strane shakes his head and says for the millionth time that I assign too much significance to that novel. “We need to get you a new favorite book,” he says.
He takes our class on a field trip to the town where Andrew Wyeth lived. We drive down the coast in a van so big that, sitting in the passenger seat beside him, the rest of the kids barely register. It’s thrilling to leave campus with him, even with the entire class behind us, oblivious captives. What if he and I decided to seize the moment and run away together? We could leave them stranded at a rest stop, Jenny’s hair whipping across her face as she watches us peel away.
But it’s a bad time for a field trip, because he and I are in the midst of a fight over the idea of me spending another night at his house before summer break. He says we should hold off, not press our luck, and that I’ll see him plenty over the summer, but when I ask for specific dates, he tells me I need to stop building my world around him. So on the drive, I give him the silent treatment and do things I know will annoy him—fiddle around with the radio, stick my feet up on the dash. He tries to ignore me, but I note his clenched jaw, how tight he grips the steering wheel. He says there’s no reasoning with me when I get like this, when I act like a child.
Once in the town of Cushing, we tour the Olson House, the farmhouse at the top of the hill in Christina’s World. The rooms are full of dusty, old-fashioned furniture and framed Wyeth paintings. But they aren’t real, the tour guide explains. They’re reproductions. They can’t hang real ones because the salt air is too harsh and would ruin the canvases.
It’s sixty-five degrees, warm and sunny enough to eat lunch outside. Strane lays out a blanket at the bottom of the hill, looking up at the farmhouse, the same perspective as Christina’s World. After we eat, we do freewriting as he circles around us, hands clasped behind his back. I’m still committed to my anger and refuse to play along, leave my notebook and pen untouched on the ground while I lie on my back and gaze up at the sky.