My Dark Vanessa(93)

“I know you’re awake,” he says. “I met your roommate. Seems like a nice girl. I like that gap in her smile.”

I bury my face deeper into the comforter.

“I’m leaving now. Can I get a kiss goodbye?”

I snake my arm out from under the covers and hold up my hand for a high five, which he ignores. I listen to his heavy footsteps move through the apartment, and when I hear him say goodbye to Bridget, I cover my face with my hands.

I open my eyes and she’s standing in my bedroom doorway, her arms crossed. “Stinks like sex in here,” she says.

I sit up, pulling the covers with me. “I know he’s gross.”

“He’s not gross.”

“He’s old. He’s so old.”

She laughs, tosses her hair. “Really, he wasn’t that bad.”

I get dressed and we go to the coffee shop downstairs for bacon and egg bagels and black coffees. At a table by the window, I watch a couple walking an enormous curly-haired dog, pink tongue flopping out of its panting mouth.

Bridget says, “So you’ve been with him since you were fifteen?”

I suck coffee through my teeth, scald my tongue. It’s not like her to pry. We give each other distance, refer to it jokingly as the “no-judgment zone,” the space in which I watch her hook up with guys despite her fiancé back home in Rhode Island and I do whatever it is I do with Strane.

“Off and on,” I say.

“He was the first you had sex with?”

I nod, my eyes on the window, still watching the couple and the curly-coated dog. “First and only.”

At that, her eyes bug out. “Wait, seriously? No one else?”

I lift my shoulders and suck down more coffee, burning my throat. There’s satisfaction in seeing my life contort another person’s face into shock and awe, but a second too long and their awe turns to gawking.

“I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like,” she says.

I try to hide how my eyes smart with tears. I shouldn’t be upset. This is nothing. She’s just curious. This is what having a friend is like. You talk about boys, your wild teenage past.

“Were you scared?”

Picking at my bagel, I shake my head. Why would I have been scared? He was so careful with me. I think of the public high school, of Charley and Will Coviello, who called her white trash and never spoke to her again after she gave him a blow job. How he came back into the bowling alley with that smirk on his face, so pleased to have gotten what he wanted. Being subjected to that kind of humiliation would have been scary. Not Strane, who sank to his knees before me, who told me I was the love of his life.

I flick my eyes to Bridget, stare her down. “He worshipped me. I was lucky.”



Fall comes on suddenly. The hotels close up and the visa workers go home. The trees turn the second week of September, clusters of yellow leaves stark against an overcast sky. Mornings are cold, wet with fog, and I wake with damp bedsheets twisted around my ankles.

At the end of September, in the lull before Henry Plough’s seminar starts, a girl I’ve had writing workshops with since freshman year takes her seat at the seminar table and sets down a pile of books. She wears cowboy boots and short skirts and sends her work out to lit journals, and my advisor once described her as “destined for Iowa.” On the top of the stack of books is Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov. I freeze at the sight of the novel. “Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed, / My dark Vanessa.”

Henry points to it. “Great choice there,” he says. “That’s one of my favorites.”

The girl grins. Her cheeks flush instantly from the attention. “It’s for twentieth-century lit. I’m writing a paper on it, which is”—she widens her eyes—“intimidating.”

The boy beside her asks what it’s about and I listen, thumping and hot, as she tries to explain and falters. Henry starts to speak, but I cut in louder.

“There isn’t really a plot,” I say. “Or, at least, that’s not how it’s meant to be read. The novel is a poem and footnotes, and the footnotes tell their own story, but the character writing those footnotes is unreliable so the whole thing is unreliable. It’s a novel that resists meaning and demands that the reader relinquish control . . .”

I trail off, feeling the swell of anxiety that comes whenever I talk like this—like Strane is channeling himself through me. Coming from him, this kind of talk sounds brilliant, but it just makes me seem like a bitch, haughty and harsh.

“Well anyway,” the girl says, “it’s not my favorite Nabokov. I read The True Life of Sebastian Knight and liked it a lot better.”

Quietly, I correct her: “Real Life.”

With a roll of her eyes she turns away from me, but at the front of the seminar table, as the rest of the class enters and takes their seats, Henry watches me with a faint smile, contemplating.



When I get home from class, I make myself dinner and read Titus Andronicus for next week, the start of the Shakespeare unit. It’s a brutal, bloody play of severed hands and heads cooked in pies. Lavinia, the general’s daughter, is gang-raped and subsequently mutilated. The men who rape her cut out her tongue so she can’t speak and cut off her hands so she can’t write. Still, she’s so desperate to tell, she learns how to hold a stick in her mouth and scratches out the men’s names in the dirt.