There are men who never turn into boyfriends, who peer behind the curtain and see the mess of me – literal and figurative: the apartment with a narrow path through the clothes and trash leading from the bed to bathroom; the drinking, endless drinking; the blackout sex and nightmares. “You’re kind of screwed up,” they say, at first with a laugh in their voice, an attitude of maybe this will be fun for a while, but as soon as I slur out the story – teacher, sex, fifteen, but I liked it, I miss it – they’re done. . . I learn that it’s easier to keep my mouth shut, to be a vessel they empty themselves into.
-Kate Elizabeth Russel, My Dark Vanessa
For anyone who hasn’t heard the buzz, My Dark Vanessa is a novel about a 15-year-old girl’s sexual relationship with her 42-year-old English teacher, Jacob Strane, and the long shadow it casts over her adult life. It jumps around in time: 2001, when the affair began, and 2017, where Strane finds himself implicated in a series of “Me Too” allegations from previous students that force Vanessa to come to terms with what really happened over the course of their relationship. It’s a study in manipulation, gaslighting, self-delusion, and the grey areas of consent, and is written with an honesty so fearless I could barely put it down.
Sometimes books feel like they’re a part of you. I think I saw Vanessa as an extension of myself. I connected with her isolation, the way she hobbled through her adult life, propped up by alcohol and pot, shuffling between jobs and men she didn’t like. I liked the way she saw the world, and how she could see through peoples’ bullshit. But more than anything, I connected with Vanessa, because like her, “I was the kind of girl that isn’t supposed to exist: one eager to hurl herself into the path of a pedophile.”
After my father died when I was 16, I hurled myself into their paths again and again. And like Vanessa, I liked it. At least, I thought I did.
I found them online. I didn’t think of them as pedophiles. I thought of them as sophisticated older men who had more to offer culturally than the boys in my isolated Central California cow town. I missed my father, but I also felt liberated to come into my sexuality because I didn’t have to be daddy’s little girl anymore. I liked that they were old. But I had always liked older men. The inside of my high school locker was plastered with photos of Vincent Price, Jeremy Irons, and Christopher Walken. One of the most potent sexual memories of my childhood involved me feeling extreme lust at the sight of the painting of Vigo in Ghostbusters 2 (just the painting, not the actor). If you intentionally seek it out, are you really a victim? Maybe.
I wanted a gothic boyfriend, so I frequented gothic chat rooms, looking for dark, academic types. My screen name was “Sugatis.” I chose it because a substitute teacher told me it was Latin for “you all suck” and I thought that was cool. But most of the pedophiles I met thought it meant “sugar tits.” We had cyber sex, we had phone sex, and I met up with some of them. When I met them in person they always looked nothing like their photos and I never communicated with them again. Things didn’t get serious until I met the cyber pedophile who actually knew what my screen name meant. He introduced himself by complimenting me on it.
He wasted no time. Within 20 minutes he had persuaded me to talk to him on the phone. I was nervous to talk so soon but I didn’t want to blow it by not seeming adult enough to handle it so I said yes.
It had never been so easy to talk to anyone. He was so smooth, never running out of questions to ask me while revealing interesting things about himself. How did I like high school? What were my favorite subjects? What did I want to study in college? Did I have a lot of friends? Were there any goths in my small town?
He was 32, spoke Latin, and loved The Sisters of Mercy. He was dark, smart, and literary, just like Strane. I swooned.
He lived all the way across the country, in DC, and by the end of the call he had already planted the seed to come visit him there. There were lots of goths there. I’d like it.
We talked constantly, all summer long. It was 1997, and the internet was still developing. There was no Facebook. No Tinder. No apps full of photos of people to give you a better sense of who they were and what they actually looked like. I had one photo of him that was so embarrassing I never showed it to anyone and barely looked at it myself. He was holding a cane and dressed in some kind of 1890s cosplay outfit. The photo cut off ⅓ into his midsection as if to hide the fact that he might be overweight. Everything was so heavily layered with bad ‘90s Photoshop effects that the image looked more like a graphic than a photo of a human being. It all seemed to come together to mask who he actually was, a blank canvas on which you could project anything you wanted. I erased the parts I didn’t like and filled them in to suit my fantasy. It was easy to do without admitting it to myself because I was young, naive, and so hungry to know what love might feel like that I’d do anything.
My friends and the mothers of my friends all told me to run from this man, that he was a pedophile. But I didn’t see how that could be possible. Pedophiles were rednecks who lived in trailer parks and drank Budweiser. They don’t read French poetry and speak Latin and listen to Prokofiev and send you running to the library to fetch Russian novels so you can discuss them over the phone in between jerk off sessions until 3am. Especially not Russian novels that might be easily misunderstood by a teenage girl and allow them to romanticize what they’re doing to you, like Lolita. Strane made the same play, giving Vanessa a copy.
I think I might not have had the intended reaction to My Dark Vanessa. The beginning of the novel documents the “grooming” stage of Strane and Vanessa’s relationship, grooming being the process in which a sexual predator establishes an emotional connection and sense of trust with the victim with the intent of sexual abuse. I could see from the beginning that Vanessa was being targeted, an eerie undercurrent permeating every interaction, but I also let myself fall for all his moves. You could argue that this is easy to do, the story being told from 15-year-old Vanessa’s point of view, and Strane’s character having likeable qualities, but I also think there’s still a sickness in me that wanted to believe that such a romance might be possible, a sickness that left me rooting for the romance up until the rape scene.
That scene hit me hard. I felt like there were so many parallels between my own experience and Vanessa’s, all connected by her going to his house for the first time.
I was supposed to go to my sexual predator’s house for the first time too. Vanessa had stolen her mother’s black negligee for her first night at his house, whereas my mother, who to this day expresses fantasies to me about being devirginized by a worldly older man, now had an opportunity to live that fantasy out through me. She took me to Victoria’s Secret to buy a sexy nightgown for my first night with him like it was a prom dress, complicit in his deflowering of me. The only difference between my situation and Vanessa’s was that my predator was all the way across the country, and once I got there, I would have been completely trapped. The weekend for our tryst had been chosen, the airline tickets had been selected. The only thing that stopped it was me.
All summer I let myself believe that I wanted to meet him, that I wanted to have sex with him, going along with the sexual scenarios he would describe over the phone while he jerked off, quieting the voice within me that often thought what he was saying was lame, continuing only because I was lonely, inexperienced, and curious. I can see now how I was the perfect target.
Now that the palpability of us meeting in the flesh was finally here, all that I had been projecting on to him began to blur as the reality of who he actually might be came into focus, and I had a feeling it was grotesque. I didn’t want to confront who he truly was – see his body and be expected to do things to it, to let it touch me.
I called him and said, “My Mom said I could come…”
He cut me off before I could finish, giggling and elated, “Oh my god, I can’t believe that! That’s amazing—”
“…but i don’t think I want to.”
There was a long pause, followed by a sharp intake of breath as he sneered, “Maybe you should stick to men your own age.” I burned with shame. In retrospect, I can see it was his last attempt to manipulate me into saying yes, while preserving his own ego.
I had the good fortune of being able to see, articulate, and enforce what I was and was not comfortable with. Vanessa did not. Reading the rape scene from her first night with Strane felt visceral and intense, a horrific preview of how things likely would have played out, and the bullet I barely dodged.
I finished High School lonely and sad, still clinging to who I imagined he was because it felt better than having nothing. I thought about him a lot at first, less and less over time. By the time I started college, I hardly thought about him at all, until I started getting phone calls in my dorm room from other teenage girls who were having relationships with him. One of the girls had found the number he used to call me on back in the day, and reached my older sister, who was still living at home with our mother. She passed my number on to her.
These girls had met him online, too. They asked me if he told me he was in love with me. I said yes.
He was in love with them too. He told them he had never felt this way before about someone so young, but they were so extraordinary he couldn’t help himself.
He told me the same thing.
YOUNG AND DRIPPING WITH BEAUTY
He’s always going to be old. He has to be. That’s the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.
-Kate Elizabeth Russel, My Dark Vanessa
The above is a reflection from 31-year-old Vanessa. Strane tells her that at age 15, she was “young and dripping with beauty, teenage and erotic and so alive.” The thought of it is still enough to fuel their problematic phone sex sessions 16 years later, making Vanessa climax.
One of the things I found particularly heartbreaking about My Dark Vanessa was that her sense of self-worth diminished as she aged. Strane gave her an empowering lens through which to see herself as a 15-year-old: she was a nymphet with hair the color of maple leaves and the power to rise and eat men like air. But as she grows older, that power disappears.
Though their relationship continues off and on throughout her 20s, it doesn’t work anymore. She’s “too old” to conjure his erection. 32-year-old Vanessa is haunted by the memory of her teenage self, staying awake untill dawn, swiping through photos of her teenage face and body. When she sees groups of teenage girls, she lingers, delusionally wondering if they can tell that “she’s really one of them.”
I wanted to create a dish that would help Vanessa find value in her 32-year-old self. This dish drips with beauty, but that beauty stems from the maturity of something that gets better the longer it ages: red wine. I also wanted to create something that evoked red maple leaves, and a violent loss of sexual innocence.
I think the poached pears are something that young Vanessa, with her lonely lunches of pie and black coffee might have liked, and that older Vanessa might like too. They are soaked in booze, after all.
ULTRAVIOLENCE
“I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that. Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?”
-Kate Elizabeth Russel, My Dark Vanessa
I often pair music with food for my projects for The Loving Belly, and while Vanessa’s favorite musician is Fiona Apple, Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence felt like a better fit for this project. And I imagine that young Vanessa would have liked Lana Del Rey. There’s a melancholy recklessness to her music, an attitude of “I know this is bad for me but I don’t care because part of it feels good.” Narratives of abuse that feel like love, young women lusting for older men, and the fetishization of Lolita-like characters appear throughout her work, as they do on the title track to this album. “Ultraviolence” features Lana’s voice mixed to sound like a dreamy choir of childlike girls sweetly singing:
This is ultraviolence
Ultraviolence
Ultraviolence
Ultraviolence
I can hear sirens, sirens
He hit me and it felt like a kiss
I can hear violins, violins
Give me all of that ultraviolence
One of the most difficult aspects of My Dark Vanessa is Vanessa’s lack of clarity about what her relationship with Strane was. I like the aggressive boldness of the word “ultraviolence” on the cover of the album in terms of labeling what Vanessa experienced. I invite you to listen to the song and think about it in relationship to My Dark Vanessa.
RECIPE: BOOZY MULLED WINE POACHED PEARS
Mulled wine poached pears are ubiquitous, so why make mine? Because I do 3 things nobody else does, and those things make them taste better:
1) I pre-infuse the wine with the mulling spices over low heat in the oven for 2 hours before simmering the pears so that the poaching liquid is more flavorful. I promise it’s worth the fussing. Go read a book while your home fills with the aroma of cinnamon, citrus, allspice, and cloves.
2) After the pears have finished simmering, I add an extra ¼ cup of uncooked wine to the pot before storing it in the fridge for 3 days to give the pears a more adult flavor.
3) Whereas most mulled wine recipes call for up to ¾ cups of sugar, there is no added sugar in my recipe. Just wine, spices, and pears. Don’t worry, I promise it’s sweet enough. Especially with the mulled wine reduction syrup that you drizzle over the pears to finish. And yes, it’s possible to make syrup without adding any sugar.
I like to serve mine over unsweetened, full fat greek yogurt. Greek yogurt has an inherent sweetness on account of the sugars that naturally occur in dairy, plus a refreshing tang. And you can’t beat the drama of the bleeding red pears surrounded by all that milky whiteness.
A few notes: plan to make this 2-3 days before you intend to serve the pears so that they have enough time to soak up the color and flavors of the mulled wine. Make sure your pears aren’t too ripe/soft or they’ll fall apart in the poaching liquid. Bartlett and Bosc work best. And don’t waste your money on an expensive bottle of wine – nothing fancy is needed for this. Peeling all the pears takes time and requires some concentration, so make sure you’ve got some good music going in your kitchen to keep you company. While I like to serve these pears with yogurt, they’re also fun on top of waffles or pancakes, and are delicious with cheese and bread. You could even bake the leftovers into an upside down cake. Follow your bliss.
Prep time: 20 minutes
Cook time: 2 hours 30 minutes
Resting time: 2-3 days
Servings: 12 pear halves
INGREDIENTS
1 bottle red wine
2 cinnamon sticks
3 cloves
4 allspice berries
Zest of 1 orange, peeled into wide strips
1 cup (237ml) water
6 medium, firm but ripe pears, such as Bartlett or Bosc. Don’t make this with under ripe pears just because they’re firm – it’s important that they’re ripe. Buy a couple of extra pears so that you can test for ripeness by taking a bite.
Preheat oven to 250 F (130C).
Pour the wine into a large saute pan with high sides, setting aside ¼ cup (59ml) for later. Add the spices and water and bring to a boil, then remove from heat, cover, and place in preheated oven for 2 hours.
Meanwhile, peel the pears, cut them in half, and core them. A melon baller is the easiest way to scoop out the core if you have one.
After 2 hours, remove the mulled wine from the oven, and place the pears into the liquid. Bring the contents up to a simmer, and loosely cover, placing the lid ajar so that steam can escape. Simmer for 10-15 minutes, being careful not to overcook them, because if you cook them for too long they will break apart. Remove from heat, and adjust the lid so it forms a complete seal over the pot. The pears will continue to cook in the warmth of the pot. Sneak into the pot after an hour and treat yourself to one of the warm pear halves – they won’t have soaked up much of the mulled wine flavor yet, but they are absolutely divine when warm. Put the lid back on, and try to resist the urge to eat another one. Once completely cool, pour in the remaining 1/4 cup (50ml) of wine, place in the refrigerator and store for 2-3 days to allow the pears to drink up the color and the flavors of the mulled wine.
About an hour before you want to serve the pears, prepare the mulled wine reduction syrup. Gently remove the pears from the large saute pan you’ve been storing them in, and set them on a large plate. Use a metal sieve to strain the mulling spices from the wine, and then simmer the poaching liquid in a large saucepan over medium/low heat until it starts to bubble and foam – this is a sign that it is done. It should take about 10-15 minutes. As the syrup rests, it will thicken up more.
Serve the pears over unsweetened, full fat greek yogurt and drizzle with the syrup to finish.
