“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.
“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.”