7 Dark Roses - Free Audio ebooks

2006

It’s early September, senior year of college about to begin, and I’m cleaning my apartment with the windows thrown open. The sounds of seasonal transformation drift in from the downtown streets below, the loudspeaker from the trolley tours mixed with the moaning brakes of a moving van, the final wave of tourists in town for the last of the warm weather and cheaper hotel rooms. The center of town has shifted toward campus, and until May, Atlantica will belong to the college. Bridget, my roommate, is due to arrive from Rhode Island the following day and classes begin the day after that. I’ve lived here all summer, cleaning hotel rooms for cash and getting stoned and wasting time online at night—except when Strane comes over, which he’s done only a handful of times. He blames the long drive, but really he just hates the dingy apartment. The first time he visited, he took one look around and said, “Vanessa, this is the kind of place people go to kill themselves.” He’s forty-eight and I’m twenty-one, and mostly it’s the same as it was six years ago. The big threats are gone—no one’s going to get thrown in jail or lose their job—but I still lie to my parents about him. Bridget is the only friend who knows he exists. When he and I are together, it’s either at his house or in my apartment with the shades drawn. He takes me out in public sometimes, but only places where there’s little chance we’ll be recognized—the secrecy, once a necessity, now seems a product of shame.I’m in the bathroom wiping down the sides of the shower, something I only do when he’s coming, when my phone trills with an incoming call: JACOB STRANE.I hit “answer,” my fingers pruned from the cleaner. “Hey, are you—?”“Can’t do it tonight,” he says. “Too much going on here.”I move into the living room while he goes on about being reappointed department chair, his mounting responsibilities. “The department’s a mess,” he says. “We’ve got someone on maternity leave and the new teacher they hired is completely clueless. On top of that, they’re implementing some new school-wide counseling program, hired some girl barely older than you to instruct us how to handle students’ feelings. It’s insulting. I’ve been doing this for two decades.”I begin to pace the length of the living room, following the path of the oscillating fan. The only furniture we have is a duct-taped papasan chair, a coffee table made of milk crates, and my parents’ old TV stand. We’ll have a couch soon; Bridget says she knows someone getting rid of one for free.“But this was the last chance for us to be together.”“Are you leaving on an extended voyage I don’t know about?”“My roommate’s moving in tomorrow.”“Ah.” He clicks his tongue. “Well, you’ve got a bedroom. The door closes.”I let out a tiny slip of a sigh.“Please don’t sulk,” he says.“I’m not.” But I am, my limbs heavy, my bottom lip jutting out. I spent the whole morning clearing the empty bottles and coffee cups out of my bedroom, washing the dishes, wiping the hair out of the bathtub. Plus I want to be with him. That’s the real source of my disappointment. It’s been two weeks.Into the phone, I mumble, “I’m needy.” It’s the closest I can get to saying what I feel, which isn’t horniness, because it isn’t really about sex. It’s him looking at me, adoring me, telling me what I am and giving me what I need to get through the day-to-day drudgery of pretending I’m like everybody else.I hear him smile—the quick exhale, a soft sound from the back of his throat. I’m needy. He likes that. “I’ll get out there soon,” he says.Bridget arrives the following afternoon, dropping her bags in the middle of the living room floor. With shining eyes, she asks, “Is he here?” She’s anxious to meet Strane; I’m not sure she’s convinced he’s real. I told her a vague version of the story last spring at the bar after we signed our lease. She’s an English major, same as me, and we’d had classes together for three years, but we weren’t good friends. Living together was an arrangement of convenience. She’d found a two-bedroom apartment; I needed a place. Yet over the course of one night at the bar, I went from mentioning that I’d gone to Browick for “about a year”—usually that’s as close as I came to the truth—to giving her a disjointed history of the whole mess five drinks later. I told her that he singled me out and fell in love, that I was expelled because I wouldn’t betray him, but we ended up back together because we can’t stay away from each other, despite the age difference, despite everything. She was the perfect listener, widening her eyes at the most intense plot points, nodding empathetically at the difficult moments, and through it all showing no hint of judgment. Since then, she had never been the first to mention Strane, always followed my lead. Even now, asking Is he here? was only because I texted her the day before with an apologetic warning: I hope you won’t be too alarmed if a middle-aged man is in the apartment when you get here tomorrow. That was the first time I ever tried turning him into a joke and it felt good, surprisingly so.Is he here? I shake my head but don’t explain why and Bridget doesn’t ask.We move in the rest of her stuff, black garbage bags full of clothes and pillows and bedsheets, a trash can stuffed with shoes, a crockpot full of DVDs. We pick up the couch—literally pick it up—and carry it four blocks while cars pass by and honk at us. We rest halfway, dropping the couch on the sidewalk and draping ourselves across it, stretching our legs and shielding our eyes from the sun. Once we haul it up into the apartment, we push it against a living room wall and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking sugary wine and watching The Hills. We swig straight from our respective bottles, wipe our lips with the backs of our hands, and sing along to the theme song, episode after episode.When the sky darkens and the wine runs out, we go to the corner store for more to drink while we get ready for the bar. Rilo Kiley blares from Bridget’s bedroom on the other end of the apartment as I flat-iron my hair and line my eyes. At one point, she appears in my bedroom doorway with a pair of scissors.“I’m giving you bangs,” she says.I sit on the edge of the bathtub while she snips at my hair with the paint-stained scissors, her laptop open to a photo of Jenny Lewis for reference. “Perfect,” she says, stepping aside so I can look in the mirror. I look like a little girl, two big eyes peering out from beneath a blunt fringe.“You look amazing,” Bridget says.I turn from side to side and wonder what Strane will think.At the bar, I perch on a stool and guzzle pints, while Bridget is sidetracked by boys who pull her in for hugs as an excuse to lay their hands on her. She’s beautiful: high cheekbones and long honey hair, a gap between her front teeth that I’ve seen men go cross-eyed over. Meanwhile, I’m pretty but not beautiful, smart but not cool. I’m acerbic, salty, too intense. When Bridget’s fiancé met me, he said just being around me felt like a kick in the balls.

* * *

Atlantica College is morning fog and salt-drenched air, seals sunning their speckled bodies on the pink granite shore, whaler mansions converted into classrooms, a giant humpback skull hanging in the cafeteria. The school mascot is a horseshoe crab, and we’re all aware of how ridiculous this is, the bookstore stocked with sweatshirts that read got crabs? across the back. There aren’t any sports teams, the students call the president by her first name, and professors wear Teva sandals and T-shirts and bring their dogs to class. I love the college, don’t want to graduate, don’t want to leave.Strane says I need to contextualize my reluctance to grow up, that everyone my age is drawn to self-victimization. “And that mentality is especially difficult for young women to resist,” he says. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.” He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.I still feel different from others, dark and deeply bad, same as I did at fifteen, but I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of the reasons. I’ve become an expert of the age-gap trope, consuming books, films, anything featuring a romance between an adult and legal child. I search endlessly for myself but never find anything truly accurate. Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not—and it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I’ve never wanted to be, and if I don’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right? My freshman year roommate said that when I tried to stop her from going home drunk with some guy she met at a party. You can’t rape the willing. It’s a terrible joke, sure, but it makes sense.And even if Strane did hurt me, all girls have old wounds. When I first came to Atlantica, I lived in a women’s dorm that was like Browick but more fraught, alcohol and pot easily available, minimal supervision. Open doors lined the hallways, and girls wandered from room to room late into the night, confessing secrets, laying their hearts bare. Girls I met only hours before wept beside me on my bed, telling me about their distant mothers and mean fathers and how their boyfriends cheated on them and that the world was a terrible place. None of them had had affairs with older men and they were still screwed up. If I had never met Strane, I doubt I would’ve turned out all that different. Some boy would’ve used me, taken me for granted, ripped my heart out. At least Strane gave me a better story to tell than theirs.Sometimes it’s easier to think of it that way—as a story. Last fall I took a fiction writing workshop, and all semester I turned in pieces about Strane. While the stories were critiqued by the class, I took notes on what everyone said, copied down all their comments, even the stupid ones, the mean ones. If someone said, “I mean, she’s obviously a slut. Who has sex with a teacher? Who does something like that?” I wrote those questions in my notebook and then added my own: (Why did I do it? Because I’m a slut?)I left that class feeling battered and bruised, but it seemed like penance, a deserved humiliation. Maybe there’s a comparison to be made between sitting silently through those brutal workshops and standing in that Browick classroom as questions were hurled at me, but I try not to let myself linger on thoughts like these. I keep my head down, keep going.

The professor teaching my capstone lit seminar is new. Henry Plough. I noticed his nameplate on the office next to my advisor’s the other day, the door ajar, showing an empty room with a desk and two chairs. At the first seminar meeting, I sit at the far end of the table, hungover, maybe still drunk, my skin and hair stinking of beer.As I watch the other students filter in, each face familiar, my brain seems to spasm, a flash of light and wall of sound, an instant headache so strong I press my fingers against my eyes. When I open them again, Jenny Murphy is there—Jenny the former roommate, the fleeting best friend, the life ruiner. She sits at the seminar table, chin resting on her fist, her brown bobbed hair and the long line of her neck exactly the same. Has she transferred? My body trembles as I wait for her to notice me. How funny that neither of us has aged. I don’t look a day over fifteen, either, the same freckled face and long red hair.I’m still fixated on her when Henry Plough comes into the classroom carrying a textbook, a leather bag slung over his shoulder. Dragging my eyes away from Jenny, I take him in, this new professor. At first glance, he is Strane, all beard and glasses, heavy footsteps and wide shoulders. Then the revisions reveal themselves: not dominatingly tall but average height, his hair and beard blond rather than black, brown eyes instead of gray, glasses horn-rimmed not wire frame. He’s slimmer, smaller, and he’s young—that’s the last thing I notice. No gray hairs, smooth skin beneath his beard, midthirties. He’s Strane in the pupal stage, still soft.Henry Plough drops his copy of the textbook onto the seminar table and it thuds loudly, making everyone wince.“Sorry, didn’t mean to do that.”He picks it back up, holds it in his hands for a moment, unsure what to do, then sets it back down on the table carefully.“I guess I should get started,” he says, “now that my awkward entrance is out of the way.”From the start, his demeanor is all wrong—affable and self-deprecating; nothing about him strikes a chord of terror like Strane did on the first day, filling the blackboard with notes on a poem no one dared admit they hadn’t read. And yet as Henry Plough goes through the roster, his eyes moving up and down the length of the seminar table, taking each of us in, I am back in Strane’s classroom, feeling his eyes drink me in. A breeze drifts in through the open window, and the salt air smells of burned dust from the radiator in Strane’s office. The scream of a seagull turns into the Norumbega church bells marking the half hour.At the other end of the table, Jenny finally looks my way. Our eyes meet and I see it’s not Jenny at all, just a girl with a round face and brown hair who I’ve had classes with before.Henry Plough reaches the end of the roster. As always, I’m last. “Vanessa Wye?” It sounds so imploring on the first day of a new semester. Vanessa, why?I raise two fingers, too shaken to lift my arm. At the other end of the table, the girl I thought was Jenny uncaps her pen and the storm surge within me retreats, leaving behind garbage and tangled strands of rotten kelp. I feel a familiar fear: maybe I’m crazy, narcissistic, delusional. Someone so stuck in her own brain, she turns unwilling bystanders into ghosts.Henry Plough studies my face as though to memorize it. In his grade book, he puts a mark next to my name.For the rest of the seminar, I sit hunched in my seat, daring to look at him only in glances. My brain keeps drifting out the window; I can’t tell if it’s trying to escape or get a wider view. After class I walk home alone along a shoreline path, sea mist frizzing my hair. It’s a pitch-black night and I’m wearing my earbuds, music turned up so loud I don’t stand a chance against anyone who might want to grab me from behind—senselessly stupid behavior. I’d never admit to this, but the thought of a monster’s breath on the back of my neck gives me a thrill. It propels me forward, the epitome of asking for it.

Strane comes to see me that Friday night. I wait for him in front of my building, sitting on the stoop of the bagel shop that fills our apartment with the smell of yeast and coffee every morning. It’s a warm evening: girls in sundresses walk to the bars; a boy from my poetry class sails by on a longboard, drinking a beer. When Strane’s station wagon appears, it turns down the alley rather than parking on the street where it’s more likely to be seen. He’s still paranoid, even though there aren’t any Browick alums at Atlantica.After a minute, he emerges from the dark alley and grins under the glow of a streetlight, holds out his arms. “Get over here.”He’s wearing stonewashed jeans and white tennis shoes. Dad clothes. When weeks pass between visits, I get caught off guard and end up burying my face in his chest just so I don’t have to look at his ruddy nose and graying beard, stomach falling over his waistband.He leads the way up the dark stairwell to my apartment like it’s his place and not mine. “You have a couch now,” he says as we step inside. “That’s an improvement.”He turns to me with a smirk, but his face softens as he takes me in. Out on the street, in the dark, he couldn’t see how pretty I am in my sundress, with my new bangs, winged eyeliner, and rose-stained lips.“Look at you,” he says. “Like a French girl from nineteen sixty-five.”His approval is all it takes for my body to buckle and his ugly clothes to turn not so ugly, or at least not important. He’s always going to be old. He has to be. That’s the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.Before I open the door to my bedroom, I warn, “I didn’t get a chance to clean, so be nice.”I turn on the lights and he surveys the mess: the piles of clothes, coffee mugs and empty wine bottles on the floor beside my bed, a cracked eye shadow palette ground into the carpet.“I will never understand how you live in this,” he says.“I like it,” I say, using both hands to shove my clothes off the bed. That’s not really true, but I don’t want to hear his lecture about messy environments reflecting messy minds.We lie down, him on his back and me on my side squeezed between him and the wall. He asks about my classes and I go through the list, hesitating when I get to Henry Plough’s. “Then there’s that capstone seminar.”“Who’s the professor?”“Henry Plough. He’s new.”“Where’d he get his doctorate?”“I have no idea. It’s not like they put it on the syllabus.”Strane frowns, vaguely disapproving. “Have you given thoughts to your plans?”Plans. Postgraduation. My parents want me to move south, to Portland, Boston, beyond. “There’s nothing for you up here,” Dad jokes, “only nursing homes and rehab centers, because everyone north of Augusta is elderly or an addict.” Strane wants me to leave, too, says I should broaden my horizons and get out into the world, but then he’ll add something like, “Don’t know what I’ll do without you. Probably give in to my baser instincts.”I wiggle my head, noncommittal. “Eh, a little. Hey, wanna smoke?” I crawl over him, grab the jewelry box where I keep my pot. He watches with a frown as I go through the steps of loading a bowl, but he takes a long hit when I offer the pipe.“Didn’t anticipate having a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend meant a midlife round of substance abuse,” he says, his voice thin with an exhale of smoke, “though I guess I should have seen it coming.”I take a hit, inhaling so hard my throat burns. I hate how excited I get when he calls me his girlfriend.We smoke the bowl and drink a mostly full bottle of wine left on the floor next to the bed. I turn on my little TV, and for five excruciating minutes we watch a reality show about men getting arrested after trying to meet up with teenage girls from chat rooms who were actually cops in disguise. I put on a movie instead. All I have are films that hit equally close to home—both versions of Lolita, Pretty Baby, American Beauty, Lost in Translation—but at least they focus on the beauty of it all, frame it as a love story.When Strane takes off my dress and rolls me onto my back, I’m so high I feel blurred, like swirling smoke, but as he starts to go down on me, everything crashes into focus. I clamp my legs shut. “I don’t want that.”“Nessa, come on.” He rests his face against my clamped thighs, gazes up at me. “Let me.”I lift my eyes to the ceiling and shake my head. I haven’t let him go down on me for at least a year now, maybe longer. It wouldn’t kill me or anything, but it would admit a kind of defeat.He continues. “You’re turning down pleasure.”I tense every muscle in my body. Light as a feather, stiff as a board.“Are you punishing yourself?”My thoughts tumble down a wormhole, dulled edges and gentle curves. I see the night ocean, waves hitting the granite shore. Strane is there, standing on a slab of pink granite, his hands cupped around his mouth. Let me do it. Let me pleasure you. He keeps calling, but I’m out of reach. I’m a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so strong I can fly for miles. I’m the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.“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.