My Dark Vanessa(92)

“Didn’t anticipate having a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend meant a midlife round of substance abuse,” he says, his voice thin with an exhale of smoke, “though I guess I should have seen it coming.”

I take a hit, inhaling so hard my throat burns. I hate how excited I get when he calls me his girlfriend.

We smoke the bowl and drink a mostly full bottle of wine left on the floor next to the bed. I turn on my little TV, and for five excruciating minutes we watch a reality show about men getting arrested after trying to meet up with teenage girls from chat rooms who were actually cops in disguise. I put on a movie instead. All I have are films that hit equally close to home—both versions of Lolita, Pretty Baby, American Beauty, Lost in Translation—but at least they focus on the beauty of it all, frame it as a love story.

When Strane takes off my dress and rolls me onto my back, I’m so high I feel blurred, like swirling smoke, but as he starts to go down on me, everything crashes into focus. I clamp my legs shut. “I don’t want that.”

“Nessa, come on.” He rests his face against my clamped thighs, gazes up at me. “Let me.”

I lift my eyes to the ceiling and shake my head. I haven’t let him go down on me for at least a year now, maybe longer. It wouldn’t kill me or anything, but it would admit a kind of defeat.

He continues. “You’re turning down pleasure.”

I tense every muscle in my body. Light as a feather, stiff as a board.

“Are you punishing yourself?”

My thoughts tumble down a wormhole, dulled edges and gentle curves. I see the night ocean, waves hitting the granite shore. Strane is there, standing on a slab of pink granite, his hands cupped around his mouth. Let me do it. Let me pleasure you. He keeps calling, but I’m out of reach. I’m a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so strong I can fly for miles. I’m the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.

“You’re stubborn,” he says, moving on top of me and nudging my legs apart with his knee. “So stupidly stubborn.”

He tries to push in, and then has to reach down to stroke himself; he keeps going soft. I could help, but I’m still feather light, board stiff. Plus, it isn’t my problem. If a forty-eight-year-old man can’t get hard for a twenty-one-year-old girl, can he get hard for anything? For a fifteen-year-old, maybe. Sometimes at his house in Norumbega, we pretend it’s the first time again. You gotta relax, honey. I can’t get in if you don’t relax. Deep breaths.

He starts to move in and out of me, and I shut my eyes to watch the familiar images play on loop: loaves of bread rising, groceries traveling down a conveyor belt, a time lapse of white roots extending into soft earth. The longer the reel plays, the more my skin crawls. My chest starts to heave. Even with my eyes open, all I see are the images. I know he’s on top of me, fucking me, but I can’t see him. This keeps happening. The last time I tried to explain to him what this feels like, he told me it sounded like hysterical blindness. Just calm down. You gotta relax, honey.

I grab at my own throat. I need him to choke me; it’s the only thing that will bring me back. “Do it hard,” I say. “Really rough.” He does it only if I beg, a stream of gasping “pleases” until he relents, presses half-heartedly on my throat. It’s enough for the apartment to reappear, his face looming over me, sweat sliding down his cheeks.

Afterward, he says, “I don’t like doing that, Vanessa.”

I sit up, scoot down the bed, and grab my dress from the floor. I have to pee and don’t like walking around naked in front of him, and I also don’t know when Bridget’s coming back.

He adds, “There’s something very troubling about it.”

“Define ‘it,’” I say, slipping the dress over my head.

“This violence you want me to do to you. It’s . . .” He grimaces. “It’s awfully dark, even for me.”

Before we fall asleep, the lights out and Pretty Baby playing on mute, Bridget returns from the bar. We listen to her walk around the living room and then, stumbling slightly, into the bathroom. The water turns on full blast, not quite covering the sound of her puking.

“Should we help her?” Strane whispers.

“She’s fine,” I say, though if he weren’t here, I would check on her. I don’t know if it’s that I don’t want him near her or the other way around.

After a while, she moves into the kitchen. A cupboard door opens and there’s a crinkle of plastic from her hand reaching into a box of cereal. It’s the kind of night when she and I usually camp out on the couch and watch late-night infomercials until we pass out.

Under the blankets, Strane’s hand moves across my thigh.

“Does she know I’m here?” he whispers. His hand between my legs, he works at me as we listen to Bridget move through the apartment.



In the morning, I wake in bed alone. I think he’s left until I hear footsteps out in the living room and the bathroom door open. Then Bridget’s voice high with surprise, “Oh, I’m sorry!” and Strane’s rushed “No, no, it’s fine. I was just leaving.”

I listen as they introduce themselves. Strane calls himself “Jacob” as though he were normal, as though any of this were normal, while I lie frozen in bed, suddenly terrified, like a girl in a horror film seeing claws creeping out from under the closet door. When he comes back into the bedroom, I pretend to be asleep. Even when he touches my shoulder and says my name, I don’t open my eyes.