The Death of a Constant Lover

by Lev Raphael

  Stefan nodded, but when he spoke I realized he hadn’t been listening to me. “Not a Michigan body,” he said. I knew from the gym that a Michigan body meant big on top but “no legs.” Supposedly that was because it wasn’t warm enough for long enough in Michigan for guys to concentrate on their legs, since they didn’t wear shorts as much as people do in California. Stefan did not have a Michigan body either; his legs were strong, though not overdeveloped.

  Looking down at Stefan, I could see that this guy was definitely beginning to put the pen in Stefan’s Lower Peninsula, and I wasn’t far behind.

  Michigan’s a pretty homoerotic state, if you think about it: those two big peninsulas pointing at each other? It’s a wonder Jesse Helms hasn’t tried to do something about it—like ban all maps.

  Just then Lucille’s husband Didier came bounding out of the house, bald head gleaming in the sun, his jeans, heavy boots, and white T-shirt making him look like the head of a work crew. He called something indistinguishable to the lawn avenger and went back inside.

  I watched the mystery man mow up and down the front lawn opposite our house, wondering where our new neighbors Lucille and Didier had found him. However it happened, I was going to have to see they were commended by the neighborhood association for setting such a high standard for yard workers. Personally, I think anyone paid to work in your yard should be fun to ogle; otherwise what’s the point of hiring him? You might as well do the weed whacking and other stuff yourself if the “technician” is overweight and has scraggly hillbilly teeth.

  “I feel like I’ve seen him recently.” I tried to remember where. “At the gym? No—it was with his clothes on. Someplace else.”

  “Of course you’ve seen him—he’s a grad student in American Studies. Don’t you recognize him? His name’s Delaney Kildare. You’ve probably run into him in Parker Hall.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, Lucille is his graduate adviser.”

  I shook my head. “I would remember someone like him, and he hasn’t come to the office when I was there. Is he new?”

  “Not really. He used to be in History. He transferred, maybe last year—?”

  “Jeez—someone like that should be making history, not studying it. But what’s he doing in our department? That seems just as bad. Why doesn’t he hire out as an artist’s model?”

  “Are you thinking of taking up a brush?”

  “Sure—in my spare time.”

  Just then, Delaney stopped the mower to pull a blue paisley kerchief from his back pocket to wipe the sweat from his face and neck. He looked up and seemed to be staring right at us.

  We jerked back as guiltily as Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Embarrassed, we quietly headed for the blue-and-gold sunroom at the back of the house to read our Sunday New York Times and go back to our Sumatra coffee, which waited for us in a carafe. Settling now into the News of the Week in Review, I thought it was true what Robert Plunkett says in Love Junkie: gay men can be as boy-crazy as teenage girls.

  We’d already read the Michiganapolis Tribune that morning, with its banner coverage of Jesse Benevento’s murder. Conservative state legislators were talking about cutting SUM’s funding. The governor had called for an official panel of inquiry. Pat Robertson had condemned SUM on his TV show for being “a nest of infidels,” denying the word of God and abusing his messengers. Even President Clinton had weighed in with some blather about the importance of free speech and the need to keep American education competitive in a global economy.

  The article made me try calling Angie, but there was no answer again, and I wished she were home to tell me what she thought had been going on with Jesse and why she’d run off.

  My cousin Sharon had phoned me from New York to find out how bad it had actually been, and urged me to be careful.

  “Sharon—you live in New York, and you’re telling me to watch out for myself?”

  “Sweetie,” she purred. “I’ve traveled all over the world, and I’ve never been involved in a riot or a murder.” There wasn’t much I could say to that.

  I told her the entire story of what happened at the bridge, and Angie’s disappearance. Sharon, a mystery buff, asked if I wanted her to fly out and do some “consulting.”

  “Nothing’s happened!”

  “Not yet,” she warned.

  Sharon, of course, was right. She’s the smartest person in our family, and the most well known because of her former modeling career. Though, given my own brushes with crime, I suppose I could have tried angling to host a talk show.

  The Tribune article had brought home to me again how close I’d been to death the other day, but it also made me think that there’d been something odd at the scene of Jesse’s death, though I couldn’t remember what it was.

  Stefan, going through the Times Book Review, suddenly made a noise back in his throat that would classify as a growl if he had four legs.

  I asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Tiara Duvet, her book’s on the best-seller list.”

  I shook my head. Tiara Duvet was the female George Plimpton. She’d done everything, been everything—a supermodel, a junkie, a race car driver, a flight instructor, a bricklayer, a PI, a shoe salesman; she had appeared in movies with each of the Baldwins, and was now an author of a feisty self-help book, Dare to Be a Diva, which Oprah had featured on her book club. Sexier than Iman, she was photogenic beyond belief and given to publicizing herself with charity functions, marathons, balloon trips across the Atlantic—anything to see the words “Tiara Duvet” in print. Dare to Be a Diva had been sold to Random House for two million dollars, and was going to be a movie starring Whitney Houston, with a script by Joe Eszterhas.

  “Stefan, no one’s going to read that shit fifty years from now. Hell, twenty. There’s nothing more dated than old self-help. Who even touches I’m Okay, You’re Okay now?”

  “I’d rather sell books now than be famous after I’m dead,” Stefan grumbled. It was an old complaint, made raw recently because his last novel hadn’t gone into paperback and he was waiting longer than usual to hear from his publisher about the new one.

  I shrugged.

  After a companionable silence in which Stefan continued leafing through the Book Review, he spoke up again. “I feel old,” he said.

  From the corner of my eyes I could see him sinking into his favorite chair, the one with the best view of the little gazebo in the backyard. He sighed.

  I peered up from the magazine crossword over my reading glasses. “Honey, you are old.” I was suddenly struck by how at that moment I must look very much like my mother, who also did the Times puzzles (which had sharpened her English), and had for years been putting on glasses to read her answers and her clues. Yet Stefan was only forty-five.

  “No, I’m not!” Stefan snapped, before he met my eyes. Then he smiled, relaxed a little, and shook his head at his own gloom.

  “That’s right,” I said. “You just feel old. Me, I am old.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you noticed my eyebrows? I’m turning into Brezhnev!”

  It was true. In the last year my eyebrows had started to sprout rogue hairs that seemed to want nothing more than to embarrass me. I was constantly having to trim my eyebrows to keep from having people predict the weather based on the caterpillars marching across my face.

  Stefan smiled.

  Outside, several huge noisy crows swaggered across the lawn in a ragged V as if surveying it for a house they intended to build. They seemed powerful and smug, the only birds I ever saw in our neighborhood who didn’t fly off as soon as you opened or closed a door, or even walked toward them. They eyed you, speculating their chances, I suppose, if they decided to attack.

  “Look at them,” I said. “They’re as big as chickens. Yuck.”

  “They’re just birds,” Stefan said.

  “Yeah, well, my folks made the mistake of letting me see The Birds by myself when I was a kid, and nobody’s going to tell
me those vultures out there are just birds. They’re evil, and they like it that way.”

  Stefan studied the crows as if trying to see them as I did.

  “Listen, Stefan,” I went on. “If you really do feel old, well, instead of teaching at a university where the average age is eighteen and everyone’s skin is so tight, why don’t we move to Florida, and you’ll be young again—really young, for a while, anyway…and don’t forget driving the freeways with all those Lincoln Towncars going twelve miles an hour! That’s guaranteed to make you feel like your metabolism will never slow down.”

  Stefan laughed. People like me laugh easily and all the time, but with Stefan, who was serious to his core, there was an exciting edge of abandon and surprise to his laughter. Making him laugh always made me feel good.

  There are some of our friends—not the closest—who bristle when I tease Stefan, as if love demands the seriousness and decorum of a state dinner, and any lightness, especially when tinged with good-natured poking fun, is vulgar and rude. These, of course, are not our Jewish friends, and generally not anyone we knew from New York, where most people are bilingual in English and Sarcasm.

  We had seen some people blush or turn away while we joked with one another, as if shocked and ashamed to see Snow White and her prince suddenly playing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They tried to change the subject or intervene in some soothing way, or just tensed their shoulders, eyes darting between us. This reticence, this incomprehension and even fear, made us feel superior, I confess, and relieved that we had command of more than one or two conversational tones.

  Relieved, too, that while we may have called each other “hon,” we could just as often call each other “toad”—and that these shifts didn’t mean that our decade and a half together was in danger of crumbling like a withered leaf.

  I guess the people we made nervous expected the day-to-day, moment-by-moment of love, of life together, to be as bland and unobjectionable as a strip mall.

  Lucille and Didier across the street loved to spar good-naturedly with each other, too, which was a good reason for liking them.

  Stefan sighed again, and I assumed we were back to his original complaint, though he didn’t say anything for a while.

  “Do you think my father looked okay at dinner Friday night?”

  I tried to picture Max Borowski. “Okay how?”

  Stefan shook his head. “I’m not sure. He just seemed quieter than usual.”

  “He’s always quiet around me and Minnie.”

  “True.” He looked down at his paper and then smiled. “She loves him. That’s good.”

  The way he said it made it clear he was done talking about his father for now, so I went back to my puzzle. I didn’t want to press him about how he felt seeing his father; Stefan could be very stubborn and tended to open up only when he was ready.

  And right then, I was happy to just sit there on this Sunday afternoon in our favorite room of the house. I could see us camped there when we really were old, elderly, ancient.

  When we’d moved in four years ago, it was just a ratty screen porch, but we had it enclosed, painted, added large windows and sliding doors, heated and air-conditioned it, had it painted French blue and gold, like the living room, and built on a deck, also painted French blue. It was cool, relaxing, hung with ivy, dotted with ferns on English-looking plant stands. The couch, chairs, and table were very solid and comfortable wicker.

  That renovation was the first major change we had made in the house, one we felt comfortable with after we both agreed it would probably be a long time before we left Michigan. Though now with my tenure looking doubtful for next year, maybe that dream was over….

  The grinding roar of the lawn mower across the street had faded, so I assumed Delaney had moved to the back of Lucille and Didier’s house.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, putting down my puzzle.

  “What?”

  “Lucille teaches in EAR, and she has an EAR grad student doing her lawn? Her advisee?”

  “What’s wrong with that? You know how kindhearted she is. Grad students are always broke, and he was probably complaining about it to her, so she wanted to help out a little.”

  I nodded. That made sense, but there was something about the arrangement that left me a bit uneasy. “That’s not inappropriate?”

  Stefan shook his head. “Why? It’s not like he’s a live-in handyman or anything.”

  I nodded. It stung a little that Stefan knew about Lucille advising Delaney, and I didn’t. Lucille Mochtar was my new officemate, but because she and Stefan primarily taught graduate students, they were colleagues in a different way than I was, at least so far, since I had no graduate classes.

  Lucille had joined the faculty this past fall and only moved into my office during the semester break, after the ceiling of her office a floor down had collapsed in sodden chunks after a downpour. It was apparently still leaking and unusable.

  I liked her because she was completely unpretentious, probably because she’d taken on the academic life late after a career as an editor in her thirties and early forties, and because she had an easy round laugh that was like a gift, especially in our department. The first time we met, I looked up to find her smiling that soft smile in the doorway, shoulder-length dreadlocks framing her honey-colored face like a headdress.

  She looked me over and said, “So you’re the one nobody wants to share an office with, huh? Well, you don’t look scary—and you don’t smell bad. You smell good. What’s that cologne you’re wearing, Paul Sebastian?”

  I grinned in reply. “Are you on Dionne Warwick’s ‘Psychic Friends Network?’”

  “Sorry—I can’t trust anyone with teeth that big. I’m an independent.”

  From that moment on, I enjoyed every conversation with her, so it was a double delight that she and her husband Didier were our neighbors. He was a burly, bald Québecois with the jaunty, rolling, arm-swinging air of a stevedore and no Canadian accent that I could detect, though he was given to exotic-sounding Québecois curses that Stefan and I had never heard before, and did sometimes end his sentences with “eh?” He and Stefan had taken to working out together at the Club adjoining SUM’s eastern border, which meant that there was less pressure for me to accompany Stefan and pretend I enjoyed what I was doing when it was mostly a question of keeping up with him.

  Before I could ask Stefan what else he knew about Delaney Kildare, the doorbell rang and we both started laughing.

  “It’s him!” I joked. “Asking if we need help with our lawn.”

  Stefan grinned and headed out to see who it really was.

  But I cringed when I heard the door open on a bright, reedy, eager voice: “Hi, neighbor!”

  It was Polly Flockhart, who lived down the street from us and felt perfectly free to drop by whenever the spirit—or spirits—moved her. It had started innocently enough when her bichon frise, Spartacus, had wandered into our garden one summer day and dug up a bed of continuous bloom lilies. Stefan calmly rounded up Spartacus, who like all bichons was a real sweetheart, and dealt with Polly’s effusive apologies when she tracked her dog down. Polly insisted on buying replacements and planting them herself, and as if having dipped her hands in our soil constituted some kind of bond, she seemed to have adopted us.

  Polly bounded into the sun room, grinning and waving as broadly at me as if I were on a cruise ship pulling out to sea and she were on the dock wishing me bon voyage. She was the chairman’s secretary in History, and considering that we worked on the same floor of Parker Hall, it was a miracle that we seldom crossed paths there.

  She swept up sections of the Times from a chair, dumped them onto the floor, and shuddered. “How can you read any of that stuff—it’s such a bummer!”

  I said, “Hi, Polly,” as politely as I could. Stefan sat opposite her with what I called his “Polly smile” on. He looked like an indulgent grandparent fondly watching a toddler wreak havoc he didn’t have to clean up.

  We
disagreed sharply about Polly. I thought she was intrusive and weird, that she was more ridiculous than her name. Conversations with Polly generally started on well-lit streets but invariably veered off into some back alley of astrology, conspiracy theory, extraterrestrials, or past lives. All of which made me gag. But Stefan enjoyed her as much as a travelogue of some exotic, unreachable spot, that you watch grateful for having journeyed there without any effort. I’d accused Stefan, “You’re just studying Polly so you can use her as a character in a novel!” And he’d shrugged as if that were obvious.

  Polly was nattering on now about how depressing the news was in general and why she avoided it. I watched Stefan drink her in, nodding and “uh-huh”-ing as if he agreed with every word, but he was just stoking her conversational fire.

  Fiftyish, slim, sandy-haired, perpetually tanned from golf in good weather and one of Michiganapolis’s Tanfastic Studios in bad, Polly dressed like a much younger woman and carried it off very well thanks to her excellent figure and her apparent lack of self-consciousness. She tended to wear camisoles, lacy tops, sheer tunics—much racier apparel than the other secretaries in History wore. Today, she was swathed in filmy, pajama-like cerise pants with a matching violet-and-cerise blouse that looked like a jacket.

  “Poor Dr. Benevento. He’s devastated. Crushed,” Polly was saying, and I woke up.

  “Who? What?” With a start, I realized I hadn’t been thinking about the riot and murder for a while, eased by the calm of our life and our home.

  “Dr. Benevento?” she said, sounding like a teenager going “Duh!” She went on. “Just devastated.” And her voice was so fond and concerned, I was convinced on the spot that she was a living cliché: the secretary hopelessly in love with her boss. Face tight with emotion, she said, “And still no progress on that horrible murder.”

  It was truly a puzzling case. With all those people on the bridge, the campus police inquiry hadn’t yet produced any witnesses as to exactly how Jesse had died. Because his skull was fractured and his face was bloodied and crushed, it was possible that he’d been stabbed first and then trampled in the rioting crowd after he’d fallen. That made the most sense, but the medical examiner was not releasing much information. A call for witnesses to come forward to the campus police hadn’t yielded any clues as far as we knew. I had been wondering if I should call and talk to Detective Valley, whom I knew from previous trouble on campus but wasn’t sure if I had anything to tell him.