My Dark Vanessa(96)

“That’s a terrible question.”

“It’s only a terrible question if you have no plan.”

I pull the spoon from between my lips. “I need more time to figure it out.”

“You have seven months to figure it out,” he says.

“No, I mean like an extra year. Maybe I should fail all my classes on purpose to buy some time.”

He gives me the look again.

“I was thinking,” I say slowly, twirling my spoon in the panna cotta, turning it into mush, “if I don’t figure something out, could I stay with you? Just as a backup plan.”

“No.”

“You’re not even thinking about it.”

“I don’t need to think about it. The idea is ridiculous.”

I sit back in my chair, cross my arms.

He leans toward me, ducks his head, and in a low voice says, “You cannot move in with me.”

“I didn’t say move in.”

“What would your parents think?”

I shrug. “They wouldn’t need to know.”

“They wouldn’t need to know,” he repeats, shaking his head. “Well, people in Norumbega would certainly notice. And what would they think if they saw you living with me? I’m still trying to get myself out from under what happened back then, not get sucked back in.”

“Fine,” I say. “It’s fine.”

“You’ll be ok,” he says. “You don’t need me.”

“It’s fine. Forget I ever mentioned it.”

Impatience simmers beneath his words. He’s annoyed I’d ask such a thing, that I would even want it, and I’m annoyed, too—that I’m still so devoted to him, still a child. I’ve come nowhere close to fulfilling the prophecy he laid out for me years ago, a dozen lovers at twenty, a life in which he was one of many. At twenty-one, there’s still only him.

When the check comes, I grab it first, just to see the total: $317. The thought of so much money on one meal is nauseating, but I say nothing as I slide the bill across the table.

After dinner, we go to a cocktail lounge around the corner from the hotel. The bar has darkened windows and heavy doors, dim lights inside. We sit off in a corner at a small table, and the waiter stares at my ID for so long Strane grows annoyed and says, “All right, I think that’s enough.” Beside us, two middle-aged couples sit talking about traveling abroad, Scandinavia, the Baltics, St. Petersburg. One of the men keeps saying to the other, “You need to go there. It’s nothing like here. This place is a shithole. You need to go there.” I can’t tell what he thinks is the shithole—Maine, America, or maybe just the cocktail lounge.

Strane and I sit close, our knees touching. While we eavesdrop on the couples, he slides his hand onto my thigh. “Do you like your drink?” He ordered us each a Sazerac. It all tastes like whiskey to me.

His hand slides farther between my legs, his thumb brushing the crotch of my underwear. He has an erection; I can tell by how he shifts his hips and clears his throat. I know, too, that he likes touching me next to the men his age and their old wives.

I drink another Sazerac, and another, and another. Strane’s hand doesn’t leave my legs.

“You’re all goose pimples,” he murmurs. “What kind of girl doesn’t wear stockings in November?”

I want to correct him and say, You mean tights—nobody says “stockings,” this isn’t the nineteen fifties, but before I can, he answers his own question.

“A bad girl, that’s what kind.”

In the hotel lobby, I hang back while he checks into our room. I inspect the empty concierge desk, accidentally brush a pile of brochures onto the floor. On the elevator up to the room, Strane says, “I think that man at the front desk winked at me.” He kisses me as it dings for our floor, like he wants someone to be waiting on the other side, but the doors open onto an empty hallway.

“I’m going to be sick.” I grab a handle, push down hard. “Come on, open up.”

“That’s not our room. Why did you let yourself get this drunk?” He ushers me down the hallway and into the room, where I make a beeline for the bathroom, sinking to the floor and curling my arms around the toilet. Strane watches from the doorway.

“A hundred-fifty-dollar dinner down the drain,” he says.

I’m too drunk for sex but he still tries. My head lolls against the pillows as he pushes my legs apart. The last thing I remember is telling him not to go down on me. He must have listened; I wake up with my underwear on.

In the morning, as he drives me back to Atlantica, the radio plays Bruce Springsteen. “Red Headed Woman.” Strane sneaks glances at me, smiling slyly at the lyrics, trying to get me to smile, too.

Well, listen up, stud

Your life’s been wasted

Till you’ve got down on your knees and tasted

A red headed woman.



I lean forward, turn it off. “That’s disgusting.”

After a few miles of silence, he says, “I forgot to tell you, that new counselor at Browick is married to a professor at your college.”

I’m too hungover to care. “How thrilling,” I mumble, my cheek pressed against the cool window, the coastline flying by.



Henry’s office is on the fourth floor of the biggest building on campus, concrete and brutalist, the eyesore of Atlantica. Most departments are housed there; the fourth floor belongs to English professors, open office doors revealing desks and armchairs and overstuffed bookshelves. Every single one reminds me of Strane’s—the scratchy sofa and seafoam glass. Whenever I walk this hallway, time feels flat, like it’s folded onto itself over and over, a piece of paper into a crane.