My Dark Vanessa(91)
From the start, his demeanor is all wrong—affable and self-deprecating; nothing about him strikes a chord of terror like Strane did on the first day, filling the blackboard with notes on a poem no one dared admit they hadn’t read. And yet as Henry Plough goes through the roster, his eyes moving up and down the length of the seminar table, taking each of us in, I am back in Strane’s classroom, feeling his eyes drink me in. A breeze drifts in through the open window, and the salt air smells of burned dust from the radiator in Strane’s office. The scream of a seagull turns into the Norumbega church bells marking the half hour.
At the other end of the table, Jenny finally looks my way. Our eyes meet and I see it’s not Jenny at all, just a girl with a round face and brown hair who I’ve had classes with before.
Henry Plough reaches the end of the roster. As always, I’m last. “Vanessa Wye?” It sounds so imploring on the first day of a new semester. Vanessa, why?
I raise two fingers, too shaken to lift my arm. At the other end of the table, the girl I thought was Jenny uncaps her pen and the storm surge within me retreats, leaving behind garbage and tangled strands of rotten kelp. I feel a familiar fear: maybe I’m crazy, narcissistic, delusional. Someone so stuck in her own brain, she turns unwilling bystanders into ghosts.
Henry Plough studies my face as though to memorize it. In his grade book, he puts a mark next to my name.
For the rest of the seminar, I sit hunched in my seat, daring to look at him only in glances. My brain keeps drifting out the window; I can’t tell if it’s trying to escape or get a wider view. After class I walk home alone along a shoreline path, sea mist frizzing my hair. It’s a pitch-black night and I’m wearing my earbuds, music turned up so loud I don’t stand a chance against anyone who might want to grab me from behind—senselessly stupid behavior. I’d never admit to this, but the thought of a monster’s breath on the back of my neck gives me a thrill. It propels me forward, the epitome of asking for it.
Strane comes to see me that Friday night. I wait for him in front of my building, sitting on the stoop of the bagel shop that fills our apartment with the smell of yeast and coffee every morning. It’s a warm evening: girls in sundresses walk to the bars; a boy from my poetry class sails by on a longboard, drinking a beer. When Strane’s station wagon appears, it turns down the alley rather than parking on the street where it’s more likely to be seen. He’s still paranoid, even though there aren’t any Browick alums at Atlantica.
After a minute, he emerges from the dark alley and grins under the glow of a streetlight, holds out his arms. “Get over here.”
He’s wearing stonewashed jeans and white tennis shoes. Dad clothes. When weeks pass between visits, I get caught off guard and end up burying my face in his chest just so I don’t have to look at his ruddy nose and graying beard, stomach falling over his waistband.
He leads the way up the dark stairwell to my apartment like it’s his place and not mine. “You have a couch now,” he says as we step inside. “That’s an improvement.”
He turns to me with a smirk, but his face softens as he takes me in. Out on the street, in the dark, he couldn’t see how pretty I am in my sundress, with my new bangs, winged eyeliner, and rose-stained lips.
“Look at you,” he says. “Like a French girl from nineteen sixty-five.”
His approval is all it takes for my body to buckle and his ugly clothes to turn not so ugly, or at least not important. He’s always going to be old. He has to be. That’s the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.
Before I open the door to my bedroom, I warn, “I didn’t get a chance to clean, so be nice.”
I turn on the lights and he surveys the mess: the piles of clothes, coffee mugs and empty wine bottles on the floor beside my bed, a cracked eye shadow palette ground into the carpet.
“I will never understand how you live in this,” he says.
“I like it,” I say, using both hands to shove my clothes off the bed. That’s not really true, but I don’t want to hear his lecture about messy environments reflecting messy minds.
We lie down, him on his back and me on my side squeezed between him and the wall. He asks about my classes and I go through the list, hesitating when I get to Henry Plough’s. “Then there’s that capstone seminar.”
“Who’s the professor?”
“Henry Plough. He’s new.”
“Where’d he get his doctorate?”
“I have no idea. It’s not like they put it on the syllabus.”
Strane frowns, vaguely disapproving. “Have you given thoughts to your plans?”
Plans. Postgraduation. My parents want me to move south, to Portland, Boston, beyond. “There’s nothing for you up here,” Dad jokes, “only nursing homes and rehab centers, because everyone north of Augusta is elderly or an addict.” Strane wants me to leave, too, says I should broaden my horizons and get out into the world, but then he’ll add something like, “Don’t know what I’ll do without you. Probably give in to my baser instincts.”
I wiggle my head, noncommittal. “Eh, a little. Hey, wanna smoke?” I crawl over him, grab the jewelry box where I keep my pot. He watches with a frown as I go through the steps of loading a bowl, but he takes a long hit when I offer the pipe.