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.
When I reach that part of the play, I stop reading and grab Strane’s old copy of Lolita from my bookcase and thumb through until I find the section I’m looking for on page 165: Lo laughing at a newspaper column advising kids that if a strange man offers you candy, you should say no and scratch his license plate number on the side of the road. I pencil Lavinia? in the margin and dog-ear the page. I try to pick up Titus Andronicus again, but my brain won’t focus.
I open my laptop and bring up the blog I created three years ago. It’s technically public but anonymous—I use pseudonyms and google myself every few weeks to make sure it doesn’t come up in the search results. Maintaining this blog is like walking alone at night with my headphones on, like going to the bar with the sole intention of getting so drunk I can’t see straight, things I remember my Psychology 101 textbook referring to as “risky behavior.”
September 28, 2006
He mentioned Nabokov today, so I feel I should document this burgeoning thing.
I don’t know what to call it. Really, “it” is nothing, a narrative born of my own depraved brain—but how can I not jump to that familiar story when the characters, the setting, and so many of the details are the same? (In the classroom, the professor’s eyes drift to the end of the seminar table, to the red-haired girl whose voice trembles whenever she’s called on to read.)
This is absurd. I am absurd, projecting all this onto a man I know nothing about except what he looks like standing in front of a chalkboard and the most mundane facts anyone could scrounge up with a Google search. I feel like I’ve plucked him out of the classroom, like I’m doing to him what S. did to me. But isn’t the professor supposed to be S. in this scenario?
I’ve started dressing like I did at fifteen on the days I know I’ll see him—baby doll dresses and Converse sneakers, my hair in braids—as though the sight of me doing my best nymphet impression might make him realize what I am and what I’m capable of, which is to say . . . I am probably legitimately actually INSANE.
“One of my favorites,” he said today, about Pale Fire (not Lolita—can you imagine if he’d said that about Lolita?). Not a big deal. An innocuous comment. All English professors love that novel. But I hear this professor say it, the one I’ve decided is special, and suddenly it becomes revelatory.
I hear Pale Fire and all I can think of is S. giving me his own copy, telling me to turn to page 37. How it felt to find my own name on the page: My dark Vanessa.
And just like that, my mind draws a new connection between the characters. Sometimes it really does feel like a curse, the meaning I can attach to anything.
* * *
There are three bars in Atlantica: one where students go, with microbrews on tap and clean floors; a tavern with pool tables and jars of pickled eggs; and a bar-slash-oyster shack, perched on the edge of a pier, where drunken fishermen get into knife fights. Bridget and I only ever go to the student bar, but she heard the tavern has dancing on Saturday nights.
“We won’t know anyone there,” she says. “We’ll be free.”
She’s right; we are the only Atlantica students there and probably ten years younger than everyone else, though the lights are so dim it’s hard to tell. We do shots of chilled tequila and carry beer bottles onto the dance floor, swigging as we gyrate to Kanye, Beyoncé, Shakira. We’re so giddy that we grab at each other, red and honey hair falling over our faces and into our drinks. A man asks if we do everything together, and we’re having so much fun, we don’t act offended; we just laugh: “Maybe!” When the DJ starts to play techno, we leave the dance floor to catch our breath and sidle up to the bar, where more shots appear before us, paid for by a man in a Red Sox hat and camo jacket.
“I like the way you two move,” the man says, and for a terrifying second, it’s Craig, that creep from the bowling alley in high school; then I blink and see he’s a stranger with pockmarked cheeks and bad breath. He hovers over us until we go dance just to escape him. Toward the end of the night, when Bridget’s in the bathroom and I’m leaning against the bar, so much tequila in me my eyes won’t focus, the man reappears. I can’t see him but I can smell him—beer and cigarettes and something else, a rot that hits my face as he slides a hand across my ass. “Your friend is the pretty one,” he says, “but you look like you’d be more fun.”
I wait a second, two, three, gripped with the same senseless feeling I had at ten years old, when I jammed my finger in my mom’s car door and, instead of screaming in pain, I stood there thinking, I wonder how long I can stand this? Then I swat his hand away and tell him to fuck off: he calls me a bitch. Bridget comes back from the bathroom and takes out her keys, jangles her little bottle of Mace at him, and he calls her a crazy bitch. The whole walk home, she and I are giddy with fear, holding hands and looking over our shoulders.
Back at the apartment, Bridget passes out on the couch, her arm cradling a half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese. I shut myself in the bathroom and call Strane. It goes to voicemail, so I call again and again until he answers, his voice thick with sleep.
“I know it’s late,” I say.
“Are you drunk?”
“Define ‘drunk.’”
He sighs. “You’re drunk.”
“Someone touched me.”
“What?”
“A man. At a bar. He grabbed my butt.”
There’s silence on the other line, like he’s waiting for me to get to the point.
“He didn’t ask me. He just did it.”
“You don’t have to confess anything to me,” he says. “You’re young. You’re allowed to have fun.”