by Lev Raphael
Except for that last remark, her sentiments were hard to disagree with, and I was often on the point of laughing, though I knew other EAR professors not only found her alarming but thought she was disturbed. How could anyone act like that in public? was the complaint. Well, the emperor had no clothes, and our department had no sense—that’s how.
Max shook his head. “Strange,” he said. “We’ve never had anyone like her at the U of M. Juno,” he said after a pause, as if marveling over parents who could choose such a name for their child.
“It’s better than Clytemnestra,” I said.
Max sniffed. “Not much.”
Minnie leaned forward with her tiny hands on both knees and said, “Isn’t it horrible what happened at SUM today! Such a young boy. Such a terrible way to die.”
Stefan and I exchanged a cautious shrug.
Minnie went on like that for a while about Jesse Benevento, replaying what little she’d caught on TV, shaking her head, sighing with that slightly removed compassionate contemplation we can give to disasters that haven’t affected us personally. I didn’t feel like telling her then that I’d seen it happen.
I could imagine tomorrow’s newspapers. This would certainly push Jack Kevorkian’s latest assisted suicide—of an entire bridge club—right off the front page. No doubt every account would exaggerate the chaos. But however the story played, it was sensational: antireligious bigotry, violent teenagers, one dead.
“He was a former student of mine,” I told Minnie now, sipping my drink. “Jesse was.”
Minnie stared at me, wide-eyed. “Really? What was he like? Did you sense he had a tragic fate ahead of him?”
I smiled, because I could just imagine Stefan thinking, Your fate is always ahead of you, but I knew he’d squelch his desire to point that out. If nothing else, around Minnie, Stefan was polite. Hey, he had to be. She’d given us her terrific cottage up north when we got to Michigan. Given it to us, because she wanted us to love Michigan as she did, and because her first husband had built it, and it stirred up too many memories for her.
Stefan had insisted we refuse the offer, but once we’d spent a weekend up there I’d been able to convince him to accept her gift. It was easy—we’d both fallen in love with the Traverse City area and the cottage overlooking the Big Lake.
“Minnie, I can’t say I sensed much of anything about Jesse Benevento,” I said. “He was kind of a typical student—at least the way he looked lately. Tattoos, earrings, nose and eyebrow rings—”
Minnie shuddered and said, “Feh.”
“I don’t think he had as many rings when he was in my class. But even then he wore black all the time and looked like a punk rocker. He was a capital-C Christian, I think. Once he came to my office to complain that I mentioned sex in the classroom, and he explained that sex was God’s gift to man, blah, blah, blah—And I shouldn’t push my immorality—that’s how he put it—on my students.”
Minnie slapped her hands together. “That’s outrageous! You should sue him! It’s harassment!”
“The boy’s dead,” Max pointed out dryly.
Minnie slumped. “Oh. Yes. Still….” She rallied. “I can’t believe he would say something like that.”
“Believe it,” I said. “Minnie, students nowadays will say anything. At least at SUM. They keep hearing this garbage from the administrators about the students being ‘consumers’ and how the university should be ‘service-oriented,’ so some of them end up acting like their professors are stupid salesclerks, and they’re complaining to the management.”
Stefan finished his drink, and Max leapt up to make him another. Stefan shook his head, and his father sat down as if defeated.
“Well, in my experience, it’s seldom students who harass their professors,” Max pointed out. “It’s usually the other way around, if it does happen.”
“No, Nick is right,” Stefan demurred quietly. “Students harass professors all the time. It’s passive-aggressive behavior. They turn in assignments late. They don’t pay attention when you explain the syllabus. They read newspapers during class, or talk on their cellular phones, or work on papers for other classes on their laptops. The worst harassment is not taking the class seriously.”
“Well—” Max began, but Minnie cut him off: “Dinner’s almost ready, boys. Nick, won’t you help me in the kitchen?” I followed her out. I loved the cozy room they had recently remodeled with granite countertops, mirrored backsplashes, and a skylight. I asked Minnie what I could do, and she said, “First, just sit. So. How do you think it’s going?” And she grinned like a conspirator. Shabbos dinners had been her idea of bringing Stefan and his father closer.
“It’s too soon to tell. Wait a year.”
She grimaced. “A year? We could all be dead by then! Nick—what did I say? You don’t look so good all of a sudden.”
I made some vague excuse.
Minnie had set a lovely table, with gorgeous Flora Danica dishes and St. Louis crystal, all relics of her first marriage to a wealthy realtor, and a small centerpiece of exquisite pink tea roses, baby’s breath, and one Stargazer lily throwing out perfume as if it were battery-powered.
We lit the Shabbos candles, blessed the wine and the challah, and dug in to a feast of spicy hot borscht, the leg of lamb and pommes Anna, and asparagus and red peppers vinaigrette. Max and Minnie didn’t drink much; Stefan and I had finished the Haut-Médoc we brought.
Max was evidently still struck by my comments about student rudeness. “There should be more respect for teachers,” he said, and I knew just what he’d been brooding about.
“I agree completely, Max. But students don’t seem to respect much of anything. They think everything’s a talk show. And why not? The only TV most of them watch is Jerry Springer, or Geraldo, or Jenny Jones. Hell, that’s where most of them get their information, if you can call it that. You can’t expect them to catch any references to books or movies or even television, unless it’s been on E.T. or something like that.”
Stefan nodded gloomily—and he taught graduate students!
Though we went on to discuss lots of things—the meal, the weather, Bosnia, with some detours back to the decline of higher education across the country—by the time we were having dessert back in the living room, we had returned to Jesse Benevento. I found myself thinking about what Angie had said before disappearing. Was it a mistake to have told Stefan? Would that endanger Angie somehow? Was she mixed up in something terrible—and was that why she’d fled the scene of Jesse’s murder?
I drifted in and out of these speculations, lulled by the wonderful meal and by Minnie’s Russian tea cakes and the Russian tea she ordered from Chicago, a rich and slightly fruity mix of Ceylon, Darjeeling, and black currant that she served, Russian style, in glasses set into silver holders with handles.
“I’ve been wondering something,” Minnie said to the room, casually, as if we were all tourists desultorily admiring a view. “This Benevento boy. What was he doing on the bridge?”
Stefan shrugged. “Going to class, probably. Why?”
Minnie pursed her lips, nodding carefully. “What if he was there for a reason?” Now she had our undivided attention, and we waited. “You said he was religious. Suppose he was there to help stir up some kind of trouble?”
Stefan noisily set down his coffee cup, shaking his head.
Minnie shrugged. “Why not?”
I seized the idea. “You mean that somebody was trying to stage an anti-Christian incident on campus to get sympathy, and it went wrong?”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
“Wow,” I said. Is that what Angie might have been involved in—or knew about?
Stefan was making noises of disbelief, and I stopped him. “Listen, Stefan, given how crazy people are on campus right now, anything is possible. The place is a snake pit, and it’s crawling with fanatics.”
Minnie nodded sympathetically.
Ever logical, Max chimed in, “Well, which side was the boy on?”<
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“He was religious,” I said. “Of course he was defending—” I stopped, because I couldn’t really tell what Jesse had been doing in that whirligig of struggling students. I said as much, and Max shrugged.
“Wait a minute,” Minnie said. “You were there? It sounds like you were there. What happened? What did you see?”
Reluctantly, I laid out my story for her, which she took in goggle-eyed.
“Thank God you’re all right, Nick!” Then Minnie seemed to shift gear. “Whatever’s going on, it’s an amazing story!” she enthused. “You should write about it. Not just this boy, but the other murders that happened to you last year, and the year before.”
I asked, “Who says it’s murder?”
“But of course it’s murder.” Minnie frowned. “They announced it on the radio just before you got here. I thought you knew. I assumed—didn’t you hear?”
I shook my head. On the way down, we’d played the CD. And when I got home from campus, I was so busy talking about my meeting with Coral and what I’d seen at the bridge while Stefan and I changed for dinner, neither of us had bothered to turn on the radio and check the news—I never did, except when we woke up.
Minnie nodded, savoring the impact of her revelation. “He was stabbed.”
“Stabbed!” Stefan looked outraged.
“I’m not making it up,” Minnie rejoined a bit primly, and she glanced at Max, who said reluctantly, “Yes, there was a knife wound.”
Minnie waggled a finger at him. “A knife wound means he was stabbed. He didn’t just fall on a knife that happened to be lying around.”
Stabbed. Someone in that chaos of angry, out-of-control students on the bridge had stabbed Jesse Benevento. Had stabbed a student I’d taught for a whole semester, a student I had run into on campus, a student who had emerged from the vast, dim, background of SUM to imprint himself on me for years to come. And that was before his death. I’d never forget his moralistic superiority and how it had unnerved me.
I sipped more of the hot, fragrant tea.
Even though it rarely happened, I did not enjoy being criticized by my students, though every semester there were always one or two students who disliked the things about me and my classes that the other students praised. I remember my first teacher evaluation by a colleague years ago had said I was a little too eager to please, too much of a performer. Both were true, because I had gone into teaching as a double major in English and theater, and being in the classroom did feel like acting. I had a costume—academic drag—a role to play, lines, the potential for great ad-libs, a captive audience; and even better, I was rarely upstaged. The set may have been dreary and predictable, but the performance never was. I felt as intensely alive and concentrated in the classroom as I had onstage. I enjoyed working with an audience I had great potential to influence, and while I couldn’t expect applause, I did expect to be appreciated.
“What kind of knife,” Minnie was telling Stefan, “the news said nobody knows because it hasn’t been found. Who cares what kind? Stabbed is stabbed. Hoodlums. Trash and hoodlums—that’s who’s going to school these days.”
Max shrugged. “That wasn’t my experience at the U of M.”
“You were lucky,” his wife snapped.
“Murder,” I brought out, coming back to the room. I’d been a witness to murder, sort of.
“Or manslaughter,” Stefan pointed out. “It could have been an accident.”
Minnie and I exchanged a glance as if to say that Stefan wasn’t being very imaginative.
“So who d’you think did it?” she asked me. “And why?”
Max was chuckling and stroking his chin. “Minnie, you read too many mysteries.”
“Life,” she intoned. “Life is a mystery.”
“That’s Madonna!” I said.
Minnie grinned at me, and nodded. “‘Like a Prayer.’”
“You listen to Madonna?” Stefan asked her, amazed.
“Of course! Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? She’s today’s Rosemary Clooney. But forget her. I think it was jealousy that killed that boy on the bridge. He must have been stealing someone’s girlfriend, and his rival followed him across campus, saw an opportunity, and plunged in the knife!”
Max frowned.
Before anyone could comment on that possibility, Minnie forged ahead. “Or maybe he was secretly gay and someone gay-bashed him.”
Max sighed. “Minnie, Minnie. First he’s a Romeo, then he’s—”
“Homeo?” I suggested.
Even Max and Stefan laughed, but Minnie didn’t. She was flushed, narrow-eyed, obviously playing out various scenarios in her head. “How about this. The boy was in a religious cult and trying to escape, and they wouldn’t let him. They had to kill him. No, no—he was killed because he knew somebody’s secrets. Drugs, maybe. A roommate was selling drugs. That’s it!”
Captured a little by her enthusiasm, Stefan asked, “What if it wasn’t really murder, but someone wanted to threaten him, or warn him, and it went too far?”
Minnie nodded vigorously. “That’s good, that’s very good.”
“We’re playing a parlor game here,” Max interjected sharply. “A parlor game with somebody’s death.”
Minnie took Max’s hand, and his face softened. “It’s natural to wonder when so much trouble has happened to the boys.”
“Well, it didn’t happen to us,” I said, feeling defensive. “It happened to the people who got killed. Stefan and I were just involved, sort of. And that’s even less true this time.” I was beginning to worry that somehow, because Jesse had been my student and I’d been at the bridge, I might get drawn into the murder investigation. I couldn’t afford any more scandal at SUM.
But what about Angie? She was a former student I cared about, and she had looked so frightened, as if whatever subterranean trouble had struck Jesse down might envelop her next. Had she expected he would be murdered, and did she think she might be too?
Minnie waved her hands dismissively at me. “Yes, fine, whatever you say. So it didn’t exactly happen to you. But you have to admit it’s just incredible that you’ve been surrounded by death ever since you started teaching at that school.”
What was I supposed to do if Angie was in trouble?
Max shook his head. “That’s an exaggeration, Minnie. They haven’t been surrounded by death.”
“Okay, Mr. Thesaurus, how about confronted? Is that accurate enough for you? They’ve been confronted with death and murder—and who’d expect such a thing on a quiet college campus? In the Heartland, yet?”
I laughed. “I don’t think SUM’s been quiet since the end of Prohibition.”
Minnie shook that off. “So. You should write about it.”
Stefan smiled wanly. “Me?”
“You, Nick, both of you.”
Stefan and I exchanged a bemused glance. We proofread and edited each other’s work but had never been interested in collaborating. He was a novelist, I was a bibliographer. I couldn’t imagine the kind of literary hybrid we’d produce.
“Boys, boys, boys. What are you making faces for? How can you pass this up? It’s a natural. But I have one piece of advice for you, okay? Whatever you do, please, please don’t write anything like Patricia Cornwell. I know she’s a best-seller and makes millions. But there are just too many corpses in her books!”
Since I’d read Cornwell, I thought it appropriate to point out that her heroine was a medical examiner.
“Even more reason to tone down the gore,” Minnie said triumphantly. “She shouldn’t wallow in it. Kay Scarpetta, I mean. The girls in my reading group agree. She should develop herself, get a hobby, go shopping.”
“Have a fashion makeover?” I asked.
“Don’t be fresh, Nicky!”
Minnie was the only person I enjoyed hearing that diminutive from, because it was always affectionate. My full name was Nick, not Nicholas. My parents had named me after Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway.
“Boys, you�
�d better start thinking about what you’re going to wear on Oprah. Your book is a natural! All the ladies in my reading group think so. And I came up with the perfect title.”
How could I not ask what that was?
“State University of Murder!” she crowed.
3
Stefan and I called the young men doing yard work in our neighborhood “lawn avengers”; sometimes they’d pop off a truck with such alacrity they seemed like horticultural warriors: mowing, trimming, sawing with great speed and accuracy, then sweeping off in quick triumph. Three of them could do an acre lawn in under an hour.
Lawn-care firms sprang up around town as quickly as you could say the words “pickup truck,” and faded even faster. Most of the guys in this shirtless, shifting army were current or former horticulture majors at SUM, and they tended to be tanned, skinny, and cute in their uniform of thick socks, work boots, and longish shorts.
The one across the street the Sunday afternoon after the fatal bridge riot wasn’t just cute. He was extraordinary, not least because he was alone and mowing very slowly. He was clearly not in a hurry on this wonderfully sunny day, nor was he trudging away as if bored.
Stefan and I watched him from the front window of the living room, gaping, I thought, like little kids at an aquarium tank.
“He looks like Peter Gallagher,” I said, and Stefan nodded.
I wasn’t exaggerating: There was the dark curly hair, the thick lips and thicker eyebrows adorning a fleshy, sexy face.
“A buffed Peter Gallagher,” I corrected. Because this guy’s shoulders, chest, and biceps were so well defined and large they seemed draped on his slim-hipped body like a woman’s thick fur stole.
“And look at that waist,” I said. It must have been what People magazine had once said was de rigueur for Hollywood hunks: 27 or 28 inches, looking even smaller given that his thighs were so meaty. “How come the aliens on TV shows are always skinny with big ugly eyes and little heads? Why can’t they ever be studs like him? Then people would enjoy being abducted.” After a moment, I answered my own question: “David Duchovny probably wouldn’t want to play opposite anyone really humpy.”