He asks if I’m being safe, tells me to call him in the morning, looks out for me like a parent, knows more about me than my actual parents, who I speak to only in generalities during our twenty-minute phone calls on Sunday nights.
On the tile floor, a towel bunched under my head, I mumble, “Sorry I’m such a mess.”
“It’s fine,” he says. But I want him to tell me that I’m not a mess at all. I am beautiful, precious, and rare.
“Well, it’s your fault, you know,” I say.
A pause. “Ok.”
“Everything wrong with me originated with you.”
“Let’s not do this.”
“You created this mess.”
“Baby, go to bed.”
“Am I wrong?” I ask. “Tell me I’m wrong.” I stare up at a water stain stretching across the ceiling.
Finally, he says, “I know it’s what you believe.”
During the class discussion devoted to The Tempest, Henry tells us all to pair up. Within seconds, everyone has figured it out through imperceptible gestures and glances. They drag their chairs closer together while I stand and look around for someone else without a partner. As I scan the room, I catch Henry watching me, his face tender.
“Vanessa, over here.” Amy Doucette waves her hand. When I sit, she leans toward me and whispers, “I didn’t do the reading. Did you?”
I give a shrugging nod and lie: “I skimmed it.” Really, I read it twice and called Strane to talk about it. He told me if I wanted to impress the professor, I should either refer to the play as postcolonial or make a joke about Francis Bacon having written it. When I asked who Francis Bacon was, he wouldn’t tell me. “I’m not doing all the work for you,” he said. “Look it up.”
Now, as I describe the plot to Amy, I see Henry making his way from pair to pair out of the corner of my eye. When he’s close to us, my voice jumps, unnaturally high and bright: “But it doesn’t really matter what the play’s about anyway, because Shakespeare didn’t write it, Francis Bacon did!”
Henry lets out a laugh—a real one, from the belly and loud.
At the end of class, he stops me on my way out the door and hands me my essay on Lavinia from Titus Andronicus. I focused on her torn-out tongue and torn-off hands, her subsequent silence, the failure of language in the face of rape.
“Great job with that,” he says. “And I liked your joke. From class, not the paper.” He blushes, continuing, “I didn’t see any jokes in your paper, but maybe I missed them.”
“No, there weren’t any jokes.”
“Right,” he says, the flush now all the way down his neck.
I’m so nervous around him, all my body wants to do is bolt. I shove the essay in my jacket pocket and throw my backpack over one shoulder, but he stops me, asking, “You’re a senior, right? Are you applying to graduate school?”
It’s such a sudden question, I laugh in surprise. “I don’t know. Haven’t planned on it.”
“You should consider it,” Henry says. “Based on that work alone”—he gestures to the paper stuffed in my pocket—“you’d be a strong candidate.”
I read over the paper as I walk home, scrutinizing first Henry’s marginal comments and then the sentences of mine he commented on, trying to find this supposed potential. I wrote the paper quickly, three typos in the first paragraph, a flimsy conclusion. Strane would have given it a B.
The first week in November, Strane makes a reservation at an expensive restaurant down the coast and books us a hotel room. He tells me to dress up, so I wear a black silk dress with thin straps, the only nice thing I own. The restaurant is Michelin-starred, Strane says, and I pretend to know what that means. It’s in a remodeled barn with weathered wooden walls and exposed beams, white tablecloths and brown leather club chairs. The menu is all stuff like scallops with asparagus flan, tenderloin crusted with foie gras. Nothing has a price.
“I don’t know what any of this is.” I mean it as bratty, but he takes it as insecure. When the waiter comes, Strane orders for both of us—rabbit loin wrapped in prosciutto, salmon and pomegranate sauce, champagne panna cotta for dessert. Everything arrives on enormous white plates, a perfect little construction in the center, barely recognizable as food.
“How do you like it?” he asks.
“Good, I guess.”
“You guess?”
He gives me a look like I’m being ungrateful, which I am, but I don’t have it in me to play the doe-eyed girl from the sticks, awed at a glimpse of the high-class world. He took me to a restaurant like this in Portland for my birthday. I acted sweet then, moaning over the food, whispering, I feel so fancy, across the table. Now, I poke at the panna cotta and shiver in my summer dress, my bare arms broken out in goose bumps.
He pours more wine into both our glasses. “Have you thought any more about what you’re going to do after graduation?”
“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.