“He didn’t do anything to that girl,” I say. “He touched her knee, big fucking deal.”
Henry’s eyes travel over my face and his anger fades. Gently, like he’s speaking to a child, he says he heard something else, that Strane did a lot more than touch her knee. He doesn’t explain further and I don’t ask. What’s the use? All of this is impossible to talk about, and trying to talk about it only makes you sound like a lunatic, one minute calling it rape and the next clarifying, Well, it wasn’t rape rape, as though that does anything but muddy the waters.
“I’m leaving,” I say, and Henry reaches for me but stops short of touching. He’s suddenly anxious—worried, maybe, that I might actually tell on him. Do I really want him to sign that course withdrawal form? I should just come to class. It’s only a couple more weeks. We’ll forget about the absences.
“I just want you to feel ok,” he says.
But I’m not ok. For days afterward, I walk around dazed, unable to shake the feeling of having been violated. During a meeting with my advisor, she asks how I’m doing, expecting my usual aloof response. Instead, I launch into a version of what happened. I try to be vague because I don’t want to implicate Strane, so the story comes out patchy and incoherent, makes me sound crazy.
“This is Henry we’re talking about?” my advisor asks, her voice barely above a whisper; the office walls are thin. “Henry Plough?” He hasn’t even been there a year and already he has a reputation for being a man of integrity.
Clasping her hands, my advisor labors over her words as she says, “Vanessa, over the years I’ve gathered from your writing that something happened to you in high school. Do you think that might be what you’re really upset about here?”
She waits, her eyebrows jumping as though prompting me to agree. This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction—once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.
My advisor smiles, reaches forward and pats my knee. “Hang in there.”
On my way out of her office, I ask, “Did you know he married one of his students?”
At first, I think I’ve dropped a bomb on her. Then she nods. Yes, she knows. She lifts her hands, a gesture of helplessness. “It happens sometimes,” she says.
I tell Henry I forgive him even though he doesn’t ever offer a real apology. For the rest of the semester, he wants it to be the same. He tries to rely on me in class like he did before, but I have nothing to say, and in his office I’m fidgety and evasive as he tests out different ways to pull me back. He tells me I’m the best student he’s ever had (Better than your wife? I wonder), that he did what he did to Strane only because of how much he cares about me. He shows me the letter of recommendation he’s already written for my grad school applications, two and a half pages single-spaced about how special I am. Then, on the last week of classes, he asks me to come to his office. Once we’re inside, he closes the door and says he needs to admit something: he used to read my blog. He read it for months before I shut it down.
“I worried when it disappeared all of a sudden and you stopped coming to class,” he says. “I didn’t know what to think. I guess I still don’t.”
I ask him how he even found it and he says he can’t remember. Maybe he searched my email address, or some key words, he’s not sure. I imagine him hunched over his laptop at home late at night, his wife asleep in the other room while he typed my name into the search bar, digging until he found me. It’s the kind of thing I fantasized about all year, confirmation of my having invaded his life. Now faced with it being true, my stomach turns; I feel sick.
He says he read it to check in on me. He worried about me. “And because you seemed to have formed such a strong attachment,” he says, “I wanted to keep an eye on that, too.”
“Attachment to what?”
Henry cocks an eyebrow, as though to say, You know what I mean. When I only stare back at him, he says, “Attachment to me.”
I say nothing and he turns defensive.
“Was that wrong of me to assume?” he asks. “You came on so strongly. It overwhelmed me.”
I gape at him, at first baffled—hadn’t he singled me out as much as I had him?—but it dissipates into embarrassment because that probably is what I did. I’ve done it before.
“So that’s how you handle students who you think have crushes on you?” I ask. “You stalk them online?”
“I hardly stalked you. The blog was public.”
“What did you think I was going to do, run in here and force myself on you?”
“I really didn’t know,” he says. “After you told me about you and that teacher, I started to wonder about your intentions.”
“You don’t have to call him ‘that teacher,’” I say. “Clearly you know his name.”
Henry presses his lips together, spins in his chair so he faces the window. He stays like that for so long, staring out at the courtyard below, that I think he’s finished, but when I go for the door, he says, “I didn’t tell you this to embarrass you.”
I stop, my hand on the doorknob.
“I thought telling you might create an opening for us to be honest with each other. Because I think there are things you may want to tell me.” He spins back toward me. “And you should know I would hear anything you wanted to say.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Based on what I read,” he says, “I think you might want to tell me something.”
I think of the entries I wrote about him, my descriptions of craving him so badly my whole body ached from it, the comments that would show up sometimes in the middle of the night—from him? I swallow hard, my legs shaking, my hands. Even my brain shakes.
“If you already read it,” I ask, “why do you need me to say it?”
He doesn’t answer, but I know why. Because he needs to know I’m willing. Like Strane insisting I vocalize what I want to shift the burden of culpability. Talking this out, Vanessa, is the only way I can live with myself. I never would have done it if you weren’t so willing.
“You’re an enigma,” Henry says. “Impossible to understand.”
Again, I get the feeling I could touch him and he’d let me. If I put my hands on him, he’d spring forth as though released from a cage. Finally, he’d say. Vanessa, I’ve wanted this since I first met you. I see ahead to the next year, to me working as his assistant, the two of us shut in this office, the inevitable drawn-out affair. I still haven’t had sex with anyone other than Strane, but I can easily imagine what Henry would be like. His heavy body, labored breaths, and slack jaw.
And then the fog burns off, my view clears, and he’s repulsive, sitting there trying to pry a confession out of me. You have a wife, I want to say. What the hell is wrong with you?
I tell him I won’t be in Atlantica next year after all. “You should give that assistant job to someone else.”
Blinking in surprise, he asks, “What about grad school? Are you still going to apply?”