My Dark Vanessa. Kate Russell Elizabeth
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 in midair above him, I take in his details: black hair, gray at the temples; the smooth grain of his beard ending at a clean-shaven line under his jaw. There’s a small cut on his neck, slightly inflamed, and I imagine him that morning in his bathroom, razor in hand, while I stood barefoot in my dorm room, smearing makeup on my face.
“I want to be a positive presence in your life,” he says. “Someone you can look back on and remember fondly, the funny old teacher who was pathetically in love with you but kept his hands to himself and was a good boy in the end.”
His head still heavy in my lap, my legs start to shake, my armpits and the backs of my knees break into a sweat. “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.
“Some days I sit in your chair after you leave class. I rest my head on the table like I’m trying to breathe you in.” He lifts his head from my lap, rubs his face, and sits back on his heels. “What the fuck is the matter with me? I can’t tell you this. I’m going to give you nightmares.”
He hefts himself back into his chair, and I know I have to offer something to convince him I’m not afraid. I need to match him, show he isn’t alone. “I think about you all the time,” I say.
For a moment, his face brightens. He catches himself and scoffs. “Like hell you do.”
“All the time. I’m obsessed.”
“That I find hard to believe. Beautiful girls don’t fall in love with lecherous old men.”
“You aren’t lecherous.”
“Not yet,” he says, “but if I make another move toward you, I will be.”
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.
“And I thought we might …” I trail off.
“We might what?”
I roll my eyes, titter out a laugh. “You know.”
“I don’t.”
Swiveling slightly in the chair, I say, “That we might, I don’t know, kiss or something.”
“You want me to kiss you?”
I lift my shoulders and duck my head so my hair falls over my face, too embarrassed to say it.
“Is that a yes?”
Behind my hair, I give a little grunt.
“Have you been kissed before?” He pushes back my hair so he can see me, and I shake my head no, too nervous to lie.
He gets up and locks the classroom door, turns off the lights so no one can look in through the windows. When he takes my face in his hands, I close my eyes and keep them closed. His lips are dry, like laundry stiff from the sun. His beard is softer than I expected, but his glasses hurt. They dig into my cheeks.
There’s one close-lipped kiss, then another. He makes a wordless hmm sound and then there’s an open kiss that goes on for a while. I can’t focus on what is happening, my mind so far away it might as well belong to someone else. The whole time all I can think about is how weird it is that he has a tongue.
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.
I sit at my usual place at the seminar table, my palms flat on the tabletop to keep myself from touching the raw skin at the corners of my mouth. Other students filter in, unzipping their coats and pulling copies of Ethan Frome out of their backpacks. They don’t know what happened, can never know, but still I want to scream it. Or, if I can’t scream it, I want to press the heels of my hands against the table, break through the wood until the whole thing cracks apart and the splintered pieces fall in such a way that the secret spells out across the floor.
On the other side of the table, Tom leans back, stretching his arms behind his head so his shirt rides up, showing a couple inches of his stomach. Jenny’s chair is empty. Before Tom came in, Hannah Levesque said something about them breaking up, gossip that would have sent me reeling two months ago. Now it barely registers. Two months feels like a lifetime.
During class, as Mr. Strane lectures on Ethan Frome, there’s a slight tremble in his hands, a reluctance to look my way—or no, it’s ridiculous now to think of him as “mister.” But the thought of calling him by his first name seems wrong, too. At one point he touches his hand to his forehead, loses his train of thought, something I’ve never seen him do before.
“Right,” he mumbles. “Where was I?”
The clock above the doorframe ticks two, three, four seconds. Hannah Levesque makes some painfully obvious point about the novel, and instead of brushing her off, Strane says, “Yes, exactly.” Turning to the chalkboard, he writes in big letters, Who is to blame? and an ocean roars in my ears.
He talks about the whole plot of the novel even though we only had to read the first fifty pages for class. The allure of young Mattie and the moral conundrum the older, married Ethan finds himself in. Is Ethan’s love for her really wrong? He lives in desolation. All he has is sickly Zeena upstairs. “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 should be used to this by now but it’s still surreal—how he can talk about the books and also about me, and they have no idea. It’s like when he touched me behind his desk while everyone else sat at the table, working on their thesis statements. Things happen right in front of them. It’s like they’re all too ordinary to notice.
Who is to blame? He underlines the question and looks to us for answers. He’s struggling. I see that now. It isn’t that he’s nervous to be around me; he’s wondering whether he did something wrong. If I were braver, I would raise my hand and say about Ethan Frome and about him, He didn’t do anything wrong. Or I’d say, Shouldn’t Mattie share some of the blame, too? But I sit silently, a scared little mouse.
At the end of class, Who is to blame? still stretches across the chalkboard. The other students file through the door, down the hallway, and out into the courtyard, but I take my time. I pull my backpack zipper, bend down and pretend to tie my shoes, slow as a sloth. He doesn’t acknowledge me until the hallway outside the classroom is empty. No witnesses.
“How are you doing?” he asks.
I smile brightly, tug at my backpack straps. “I’m fine.” I know I can’t show even a