My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I loved the math of it, three times my age, how easy it was to imagine three of me fitting inside him: one of me curled around his brain, another around his heart, the third turned to liquid and sliding through his veins.

It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him. Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could talk to me, confide in me. Lurking deep within me, he said, was a dark romanticism, the same kind he saw within himself. No one had ever understood that dark part of him until I came along.

He loved me so much that sometimes after I left his classroom, he lowered himself into my chair and rested his head against the seminar table, trying to breathe in what was left of me.

Sometimes I marvel at how easily I deceive people, doing it without even trying.

Everywhere makes me antsy to be someplace else.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in response. It feels like I should laugh. I wonder if this is flirting, but it can’t be. Flirting is supposed to be fun and this is too heavy for fun.

“Because the last thing I want is to overstep.” Overstep. I’m not sure what he means by that, either, but the way he gazes down at me stops me from asking any questions. He suddenly seems both embarrassed and hopeful, like if I told him this wasn’t ok, he might start to cry.

I start to realize the point isn’t really whether I like the books; it’s more about him giving me different lenses to see myself through. The poems are clues to help me understand why he’s so interested, what it is exactly that he sees in me.

On a poem I wrote in the middle of the night, after waking from a dream set in a place that seemed a mix of his classroom and my bedroom back home, he writes, Vanessa, this one scares me a little.

I bite down on the inside of my cheek, mortified at the thought of him talking about me as though I were just another student.

No one has ever called me sexy before, and only my parents call me Nessa. I wonder if they called me that during the conference. Maybe Mr. Strane noted the nickname and tucked it away for himself.

When we reach Congress Street, where I turn left and he turns right, my chest aches from wanting to ask him to come home with me even though I’m nowhere near drunk enough, even though spending a half hour with him has already made me hate myself. I just need to be touched.

He sucks in a breath and stares at the ground, embarrassed at losing his temper. No one has ever frustrated him as much as I do. He used to say that all the time.

For years, I’ve imagined this—being in front of him again, within reach—but now that I’m here, I just feel outside myself, like I’m watching from a table across the room. It doesn’t seem right that we can speak to each other like normal people, or that he can bear to look at me without falling to his knees.

“You could spend the night.” At that, he stops, his eyes traveling over my face as he contemplates the idea. I wonder if he’s thinking of me at fifteen, or if he’s thinking of the last time we tried, five years ago, at his house, in his bed with the flannel sheets. We tried to re-create the first time, me in flimsy pajamas, the lights low. It didn’t work. He kept going soft; I was too old. Afterward, I cried in the bathroom, the tap running and my hand clamped over my mouth.

Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.

I’m forcing myself to suffer through this one because it’s been a week. A whole week since Mr. Strane touched me, since he put his hand on my leg and told me he could tell we were similar, two people who like dark things. Since then? Nothing. When I spoke in class, his eyes darted to the table like he couldn’t bear to look at me.

Thrusting the bottle back at them, I march out of the dining hall, willing Mr. Strane to notice, to understand why I’m angry and what I want. I wait outside to see if he’ll come after me but he doesn’t—of course he doesn’t.

I’m furious the whole way back to Gould, but once I’m in my room, the anger disappears and all that’s left is the dull-ache desire for meaning I’ve had for weeks now. He said he wanted to kiss me. He touched me. Every interaction between us is tinged now with something potentially ruinous, and it isn’t fair for him to pretend otherwise.

He says we shouldn’t feel uplifted by the poem, that Frost’s message is widely misunderstood. The poem isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about the futility of choice. He says that by believing our lives have endless possibilities, we stave off the horrifying truth that to live is merely to move forward through time while an internal clock counts down to a final, fatal moment.

He laughs—really laughs, like when I called Sylvia Plath self-absorbed. “Vanessa, how do you always manage to have the perfect response even to things you don’t understand?” I scowl at that. I don’t like the idea of him thinking there are things I don’t understand.

In big white letters across the legs: Lolita. I’ve heard the term somewhere before—an article about Fiona Apple, I think, a description of her as “Lolita-esque,” meaning sexy and too young. I now understand why he laughed when I asked if the book was illegal. “It’s not poetry,” he says, “but poetic prose. You’ll appreciate the language, if nothing else.”

Rolling my eyes, I say, “I know how to keep a secret.” That isn’t necessarily true—before him, I hadn’t ever had a real secret—but I know what he needs to hear. It’s like he said, I always have the perfect response.

I imagine him finding me now, all alone and deep in the woods. He’d be free to do whatever he wanted with me, no chance of getting caught.

While wind rattles the windowpane, I turn the pages and feel a slow burn within me, hot coals, deep red embers. It isn’t only the plot, its story of a seemingly ordinary girl who is really a deadly demon in disguise and the man who loves her. It’s that he gave it to me. There’s now a whole new context to what we’re doing, new insight into what he might want from me. What conclusion is there to draw besides the obvious? He is Humbert, and I am Dolores.

“Such a dirty mind / I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind.” I watch his fingers tap to the beat as the chorus comes around again. Does he even hear what the song is about, what he’s humming along to? “Get it up for the touch of the younger kind.” It’s enough to make me crazy, seeing these things that no one else ever seems to notice.

I stare down at my peanut butter sandwich and let myself detach, retreat into the ending of Lolita that I just reread, that final scene of Humbert bloodstained and dazed, and still in love with Lo, even after how much she hurt him and how much he hurt her. His feelings for her are endless and out of his control. How can they not be, when the whole world demonizes him for them? If he were able to stop loving her, he would. His life would be so much easier if he left her alone.

I’ve been wrapped up in my own frustration and impatience, never considering all that was on the line for him or how much he’s already risked touching my leg, saying he wanted to kiss me. He hadn’t known what my reaction would be to these things. What if I’d been offended, told on him? Maybe all along he’s been the brave one and I’ve been selfish.

It isn’t fair to expect him to be more vulnerable than he already has been. At the very least, I need to meet him in the middle, show him what I want and that I’m willing to let the world demonize me, too.

“she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.” I have power. Power to make it happen. Power over him. I was an idiot for not realizing this sooner.

Toward the end of the period, he tips back his head, closes his eyes, and recites the poem “Alone” from memory, his deep, drawn-out voice making the lines “I could not bring / My passions from a common spring” sound like a song. Listening to him, I want to cry. I see him so clearly now, understand how lonely it must be for him, wanting the wrong thing, the bad thing, while living in a world that would surely villainize him if it knew.

“So, what is it that you want to do?” he asks. It’s too big of a question. What I want depends on what he wants. “I don’t know.” He turns toward the windows, crosses his arms over his chest. I don’t know isn’t a good answer. It’s what a child would say, not someone willing and capable of making up her own mind.

“It’s not ok.” His hand slips out from under my skirt and he slides like liquid out of his chair and onto the floor. Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, “I’m going to ruin you.” It’s the most unbelievable thing that has happened so far, more surreal than him saying he wanted to kiss me or his hand stroking my leg. “I’m going to ruin you.” He says it with obvious torment, a glimpse into how much he’s thought about it, wrestled with it. He wants to do the right thing, doesn’t want to hurt me, but has resigned himself to the likelihood that he will. With my hands hanging

“Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.

He needs more, so I give more. I tell him I write my stupid poems just so he’ll read them (“Your poems are not stupid,” he says. “Please don’t call them that.”), that I spent all Thanksgiving break reading Lolita and feel changed because of it, that I dressed up today for him, that I shut the classroom door because I wanted us to be alone.

Afterward, my teeth won’t stop chattering. I want to be fearless, to smirk and say something flirty and coy, but all I can do is wipe my nose on my sleeve and whisper, “I feel really weird.” He kisses my forehead, my temples, the corner of my jaw. “A good weird, I hope.” I know I should say yes, reassure him, give him no reason to doubt how much I want it, but I only stare off into middle distance until he leans forward and kisses me again.

“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful,” Strane says, with so much sincerity in his voice there are ripples of laughter around the seminar table.

I smile brightly, tug at my backpack straps. “I’m fine.” I know I can’t show even a hint of distress. If I do, he might decide I can’t handle any more kisses.

She picks up the coffee with two fingers, like it’s something gross she doesn’t want to touch, and leaves the common room. I want to say more, to shout after her that the only reason she wants anything to do with me is because Tom broke up with her, and that it’s too late because I’ve moved on. I’m doing things now Jenny wouldn’t even be able to imagine.

I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.

“I kind of feel like this whole thing is destiny.” “This whole thing,” he repeats. “You mean what we do together?” I nod. “Like maybe this is what I was born to do.” As my words register, his lips start to tremble like he’s trying hard not to smile. “Go shut the door,” he says. “Turn out the lights.”

It’s how he laughs that makes me start to cry, like I’m being ridiculous, but he thinks it’s the idea of missing him that’s making me so upset. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, kissing my forehead. He calls me sensitive. “Like a . . .” He stops and softly laughs. “I was about to say like a little girl. I forget sometimes that’s exactly what you are.”

Immediately, I’m afraid. I wish I weren’t and, chewing on the inside of my cheek, I do my best to rationalize it away. I’m not afraid of him but rather of his body—the sheer size of it, the expectation that I do things to it. As long as we stay in the classroom, kissing is all we can do, but going to his house means anything can happen. That the obvious will happen.

He stares at me, the shine of his eyes moving back and forth. I gnaw harder on my cheek, thinking maybe he won’t be mad at me if I hurt myself enough to ignite a fresh round of tears.

“Listen,” he says, “I have no expectations. I’d be happy to sit on the couch with you and watch a movie. We don’t even have to hold hands if you don’t want to, ok? It’s important that you never feel coerced. That’s the only way I’ll be able to live with myself.”

I wonder if he really believes that. He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.

One of the straps falls down my arm and I imagine Strane, with his tender-condescending smile, slipping it back up my shoulder. In the morning, I stuff the nightgown into the bottom of my bag and can’t stop smiling the whole drive back to Browick, pleased with how easy it is to get away with something, with anything.

When I throw open the passenger door and slide inside, he pulls me close, laughing in a way I haven’t heard from him before—manic and gasping, as though he can’t believe this is really happening.

Holding up the tank top, I wonder why he chose this particular set. Probably because he liked the print—he’s said before that my hair and skin remind him of strawberries and cream. I picture him browsing a girls’ clothing section, his big hands touching all the different pajamas, and the thought fills me with tenderness, similar to how I felt a few years ago when I saw a photo of that famous gorilla cradling her pet kitten, the vulnerability of someone so big handling something so delicate, trying their best to be careful and kind.

I stop myself from rolling my eyes at the exaggeration, as though he might somehow see me. Does he really believe he’d ever go to prison, a Harvard-educated, well-spoken white man?