by Diane Wald
“My kingdom,” she said, waving me through the door. Sarah’s place was small, but tastefully appointed and perfectly neat. There was a kitchen area extending into a small living room, and a large, old-fashioned bath off the hall. I saw another closed door, that must have led to her bedroom. The living area was dwarfed by a huge roll top desk, full to its very edges with books and papers, all in tidy piles. There was a radio in evidence, but no TV, and I wondered if she kept a set in the bedroom, conjuring up a cozy picture of Sarah with her hair combed out like a ’40s movie star, lolling in a pink bed-jacket while taking in the evening news with her dinner on a tray. While I washed my face and hands, Sarah fixed the hot dogs.
She soon presented me with a Heineken and a plate containing two frankfurters on toasted buns, a mountain of potato chips, a large slice of kosher dill, and, oddly, a banana. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“A banana?”
She didn’t seem to think it odd. “For dessert,” she sensibly replied. She kicked off her heels, peeled off her jacket, and settled into an old armchair across from the couch where I was sitting. Then she got up again and turned on the radio, low, to a classical music station. “For background noise,” she explained. “I find it difficult to unload on people in total silence.” The smile she gave me then made her look about twelve years old. She picked up her pickle and began to eat it daintily, first licking some juice off its side. The way she ate made me crazy. I had to look away.
I took a bite of the frank. “Delicious,” I told her, “Exactly right,” and then, “So what’s the problem?”
She giggled nervously, then sighed, then put her plate down on an end-table and tucked her legs up under her. She gripped the arms of the chair as if bracing herself for an explosion. “Jack,” she said, “I don’t think you’re going to like me much after this.”
“Impossible. Tell me.”
She took a very deep breath, as if there were not enough air in the world to satisfy her aching lungs. “It’s that slime, Wally Mussel,” she said. “I’m sleeping with him.”
I could do nothing but stare at her. I was utterly shocked and confounded. I waited for her to go on.
“I mean I’m sleeping with him, but it’s not my choice. He’d just left my place this morning when you arrived. He dropped in unexpectedly while I was cleaning: that’s why I looked the way I did. I wanted to get ready for lunch, and I couldn’t get rid of him. I even picked a fight and threw a chair at him—that’s when Grace called to ask what was going on.”
“Does he hurt you?” It was all I could think of to say.
“No, oh no, Jack, never. I mean, that’s not the problem, he doesn’t beat me up or anything. I threw the chair at him.”
“Good,” I said, idiotically. I still could not believe what I was hearing. Although I had not met the man, I remembered Sarah’s hatred of him, and I could not make the puzzle pieces fit.
“Jack,” she went on, “I want to explain. I can’t imagine what you think of me. I’m sorry. I’m such a mess. Look, Jack, he’s blackmailing me. If I don’t have sex with him, Wally’s going to tell the whole world that I had an affair with a student. I’d lose my job. And I’d probably never get another one.”
She began to sob. She reached out for her beer and sent it crashing to the floor. I went over to her and held her.
“Jack, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have told you. I must disgust you. I just can’t hold it in anymore, I feel like I’m going to go crazy, very quickly.” She cried a little more and then wriggled out of my arms and sat up straighter in the chair. She wiped her eyes on a Kleenex she’d retrieved from under a cushion. I remembered my mother stowing tissues in such places: women are always prepared for sickness or grief. I was perched on the arm of the chair.
“Poor Sarah,” I said, resting my chin on her head.
She laughed a little then. “Get up,” she said, “I need that beer.” I got her a fresh Heineken from the kitchen and she fetched a towel and sopped up the spilled one. Then we both went and sat on the couch.
“Better?” I asked her, when she’d had a few gulps.
“Yes, thank you.”
“So when did all this start?”
She looked at me dolefully. “Five years ago,” she said.
Five years! I had a sudden violent desire to vomit, but I held my breath until it passed. Five years. Sarah Bowe—this lovely, sweet, most charming and intelligent woman—Dr. Sarah Bowe had been raped repeatedly by a fat rat-maniac for five years. I tried to make myself calm so my voice would behave, but before I could speak Sarah took my hand.
“Jack,” she said, “I know this is shocking. Let me fill you in a little—it might take the edge off.”
“That bastard,” I said, shakily.
She gave me a shy look of gratitude. “Five years ago, there was a student in one of my classes who touched my heart. I was young and lonely, he wasn’t much younger, and before I could get hold of myself, we had a brief affair. Very brief—not more than two or three nights over a whole semester. Then I did get hold of myself, and I broke it off, and Jim—the student—quite wisely transferred to a west-coast school. I’ve never seen or heard from him since. I thought I’d gotten away with it, and I vowed it would never happen again.” She went back to her chair for her hot dogs and returned with them to the couch. She ate ravenously, all delicacy gone for the moment. “Jim was a sweet kid,” she said. “I hope I didn’t do him any harm.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I told her. “How did Mussel find out?”
“That’s just it, Jack, that’s the awful part: I don’t know. He must have spies. I have my suspicions, but no proof. There aren’t that many people who like him enough to be his snitch. All these years I’ve tried to get him to tell me, but he won’t. I should have called his bluff when he first approached me, but I was scared and inexperienced. Now it’s too late.” She shrugged. “How can I get out of it now, short of moving? And how could I get another job without the chairman’s recommendation? I’m stuck. It’s my own stupid fault. I’m the prisoner of a slimy little fuckhead.”
I had to laugh at her language, and so did Sarah. “We’re going to get you out of this,” I told her. “How often … I mean when …?”
“Whenever.” she said, shyly. “It’s not all that often anymore. At first it was horrible. He used to come here all the time. He used to try to get me to respond to him, but when that failed, he just did it quickly and left. I’d just lie there like a dead thing. For a while I even thought he was getting tired of me altogether, but recently he’s started up again demanding all this ‘response’ stuff and … God, Jack, it’s too embarrassing. You don’t know how I hate myself.”
I took the plate out of her hands and made her stand up. “That’s got to stop,” I told her. “I hereby appoint myself your personal shrink and knight in shining armor.” I wanted badly to make her laugh, because I felt so close to tears myself. I picked up the tray she’d used for our lunches and held it before me like a shield. “I shall beard the slimy fuckhead in his den,” I declared. “And bring you the head of Wally Mussel on a garbage-can lid!”
She was laughing and motioning for me to keep quiet. “Grace,” she sputtered, “Grace will call. Oh Jack, you’re crazy, stop it, stop …”
I stopped. “It’s good to see you smile.”
“Thanks, Jack, you’re a dear. And you don’t think I’m repulsive?”
“I think,” I said, “You are fabulous. You’re a victim, and that’s got to stop. You also break my heart with this story. I want to kill that asshole, but I’m going to think of a better plan than that. I’m glad you told me: we’re going to fix this. But for now, the question is, how do we protect you from Mussel until he can be stopped for good?”
“I don’t think he’ll be around for a while,” she said. “Today he said something about a trip.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll check on that. If he’s really out of town for a while we’ll have time to work on a plan.
As for now, I think I’d better go. Are you going to be okay?”
She gave me a brave grin. “Fine. I’l1 be fine. I can’t tell you how much you’ve already helped.”
I kissed her again. I had to. Then I made my way stealthily down the back stairs.
8. Don at Howard Johnson’s
I did not go directly back to Vermont after leaving Sarah’s. I went to a diner. I wanted to think. After three cups of coffee, I called the university and spoke to Mussel’s secretary, Dottie, who confirmed that the good doctor was off to a conference and would be gone all week. That cheered me a little; at least Sarah was safe for the time being. But how to help her? How to expose Mussel while saving her job and reputation? For some reason I started wondering about Dottie, the same person who had called to offer me the job. I had only met her once. She was a tall, slightly stooped, breathlessly stupid woman, probably in her forties, always on the verge of saying something you never wanted to hear. I had taken an instant dislike to her, based on nothing, and I was slightly ashamed of myself, although usually my first impressions proved to be correct.
Finally, I hit the road toward home, and on the way back I formed many a plan but rejected each of them. It was becoming quite obvious to me that this mess was a deeper one than my initial rage had allowed me to see. If only we had something on Mussel—something so appalling that not only could we force him to leave Sarah alone, but force him to vanish forever from the department. I also considered simply confronting him with the idea that if his blackmailing was made public, he’d go down in infamy, but naturally Sarah’s fate wouldn’t be too dissimilar to his, so that was no good. What I really wanted to do was punch his guts out. And I was slowly (how slowly, considering my own professional training, was truly surprising) beginning to admit to myself that Sarah’s real problems weren’t professional ones. Once this nightmare was over, once she no longer had to endure Wally Mussel’s unwanted attentions, she would have years and years of confronting her vanished self-esteem, her guilt, her fears, and her feelings for the entire male sex. It was promising that she had allowed me to get close to her so quickly, but I knew I had to tread carefully with her and forget any romantic ideas I might have had. She obviously saw me as some kind of brother or uncle, someone whose affections were safe, and that was how I’d have to treat her. I promised myself to put my galloping lust on a back burner, or to extinguish it completely, for Sarah’s sake. She was so warm, so sexy, so seemingly comfortable in the world—I was mystified by her double life. How was she able to control it? For one horrifying instant I entertained the idea that Sarah secretly got off on Mussel, but then I remembered the sincerity of her tears. I also found myself recalling her blush, and turned on the radio to distract myself from that image.
I called her from my study when I got home that evening and told her she could relax for the week. She was grateful and relieved. I promised to call her again in a couple of days. Then I looked up Donald Rath’s number and called him.
Dr. Rath, a young psychologist on the NSU faculty whom I had met briefly on my initial tour of the department, was a friend of a friend of mine, Paul Myers. I hadn’t known that until I got the job, but now I was counting on it to gain some entree into the secrets of departmental goings-on. I needed a viewpoint other than Sarah’s: I needed to assure myself that my infatuation with her hadn’t blinded me to some obvious loophole in her story. I did believe her, and it felt a little traitorous to think otherwise, but I had to, for both our sakes. After all, I was just a newcomer to this scene; I couldn’t just rush into this hurricane without some sort of raingear. My plan was to pump Rath a little and perhaps learn from him whom next to pump. My friend had given me reason to believe that Rath was a decent fellow.
He did appear to be one. He seemed pleased to get my call and pleased to learn I’d be joining the faculty. He wanted to get together for lunch, he said, whenever I was again in the area, but although I accepted his invitation warmly, I asked him if we might chat a few minutes on the phone. I told him I wanted to pick his brain a little on a possible problem I’d uncovered. Don, as he immediately asked me to call him, agreed instantly, but when I brought up Wally Mussel’s name (in a way that did not involve Sarah) he all but clammed up.
“Mussel,” he said. “Not one of my favorite people, but there’s not much I can tell you about him. Keep out of his way, that’s my advice, but that won’t be hard—he’s virtually a ghost in the department anyway.”
“So I’ve heard. But I’ve also heard he can be a formidable nay-sayer when it comes to special projects, and I’ve got some rather delicate research in mind. I’m worried that he’ll put up some roadblocks, and I want to be ready to deal with him.” I knew I was being ridiculously vague, but I was simply feeling out the territory.
There was a pause, and then Don said, “Listen, MacLeod, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you. I mean I believe you want to know about Mussel, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with your research. Am I right?” He gave a little half-cough, half-laugh—a unique sound, and something I would quickly identify as a signature noise of his.
I laughed myself. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. Paul told me you were perceptive. If this topic makes you uncomfortable, I’ll lay off, but I’d really like to hear what you know about Mussel.”
He told me then that he didn’t think we ought to talk about it on the phone, and we arranged to meet the next day in Connecticut, since Don was going there to visit his sister and it was a convenient halfway point between our two states. After I hung up, I wondered about all the secrecy. Was the telephone really that dangerous an instrument in this case? Was it because I’d called him in his office at the university? What were we dealing with here? I decided things were either a lot worse than I’d suspected, or that Donald Rath was a bit of a paranoid fellow. I really didn’t feel like taking another drive, but my curiosity was piqued, and anyway, I only had a week before Mussel got back within reach of poor Sarah.
I met Don at the Old Lyme exit on the Connecticut Turnpike and we drove, in both cars, to a nearby Howard Johnson’s. I loved the familiar orange and turquoise color scheme, which reminded me of going there as a kid with my parents, and also of taking my boys there for ice cream when they were small. Don and I ordered what we discovered to be a mutual favorite, HoJo’s greasy fried clams, and I sat back to take another look at Rath. He was shorter than I, somewhere in his early thirties, and impeccably dressed and groomed. I could not imagine going for an ordinary visit to one’s sister in a suit and tie, but that was what he was doing—and a very natty suit it was. Facially, with his little goatee and pleasant, though pointed, features, he resembled nothing so much as an actor portraying some modern-day incarnation of Mephistopheles. When he smiled, he showed small, uneven teeth. But he was so pleasant a chap, and so obviously eager to please, that we had little trouble beginning our conversation. Rath, in fact, started it off right on target.
“I hate Mussel,” he said, stirring his coffee energetically, “And don’t mind telling you so. You’ll come to hate him too—everyone does in time. But as for why I hate him, that’s pretty complicated.”
“Go on,” I said. I knew he would tell me everything if I didn’t push too hard.
“Well,” he went on, “Let me put it this way. If I were on the sinking Titanic and there was only one lifeboat left and there was only one seat on that lifeboat and it was next to Mussel, I would just stay on the Titanic.”
He then emitted one of his laugh-coughs, “I hated him, I’m ashamed to admit, on sight. I have this terrible thing about fat people, men especially. It’s irrational and stupid, I know, but there it is. I struggle with it. Most of the time I get over it as soon as I get to know somebody, but not this time. Heavy women don’t bother me all that much, but then again, women don’t bother me all that much in general. What I mean is,” he continued, fixing me with a searching stare, “that I love women, but I ‘like’ men. Maybe Paul didn’t tell you I’m gay?”
I said truthfully, “He didn’t mention it, no.”
“Well, why would he, I guess. And you’ve probably figured it out for yourself.” He smiled at me, charmingly.
“Okay,” I said, “It crossed my mind. But why tell me at all? Does it have some bearing on the Mussel story?”
“Absolutely. Mussel judged me instantly and made my early days at NSU a living hell. He’s like some vicious teenage devil. My first week I received a dildo, in the school’s colors, in the interdepartmental mail, with a note attached that said, ‘Not our boys!’”
“Good lord,” I said. “But what made you think it was Mussel?” Then I had to laugh. “And where the hell did he get a dildo in the school colors?”
“I don’t know,” Rath said, with a huge smile. “Isn’t it amazing? Maybe he commissioned it. Anyway, I can’t prove it was Mussel,” he went on, “but I just know it was. I got creepy phone calls too—vicious ones—and I easily recognized his voice, though he pathetically tried to disguise it. He assigned me all the worst classes, at the worst times, and continually ridiculed me at meetings and even in front of the students when he got the chance. It’s only because I survived those first months and managed to hang on all these years that he’s lost interest, for the most part, in torturing me. But I know he’d like nothing better than to get me ousted on some trumped-up charge, so I watch myself very carefully. I’ve lived with the same partner for the last five years, but Wally thinks I live with my mother—because,” and he paused here to laugh a very satisfied laugh, “I actually do live with my mother. She rents an apartment on the third floor of her house to me and Denny.”