The Death of a Constant Lover

by Lev Raphael

  We raised our glasses, and Lucille suggested we toast Didier and Stefan: “To the Writers.”

  They were off in the living room, bitching about the publishing industry. That was ironic, since publishing had treated Didier very well. Ten years older than Lucille, and an undistinguished poet, Didier had retired from teaching high school English after getting a contract to write a memoir based on an essay he published in the New Yorker about his and Lucille’s fruitless attempts to—well, bear fruit. They’d tried for ten years to have a child, and nothing had worked. But the decade of frustration had given birth to the makings of a starkly titled book, Sterility, which had earned him a half-million-dollar advance.

  Stefan, on the other hand, had never made much money from his writing and was growing increasingly anxious about whether his publisher would like his new novel. Every editor these days seemed to want a Big Book, and Stefan wrote literary fiction that had a discerning but small audience which was steadily declining.

  “No news,” Lucille said again, shaking her head sadly, and I knew she was back to the bridge tragedy. It was disorienting to have been immersed in a story for a few days, and then suddenly be plunged back into normality, knowing all the while that there’d been no resolution.

  “I think this is turning into our version of the O. J. trial,” I said. “Trials,” I corrected.

  “How so?”

  “It’s all anyone can talk about on campus or in town, but there’s nothing new to say. It makes me think of when Lady Bracknell complains about the end of the London season in The Importance of Being Earnest. ”

  Lucille grinned. “And what’s that?”

  “‘Everyone has practically said whatever they had to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much.’” It was strange quoting that late-Victorian play in such a contemporary kitchen, which took its tone from the stainless-steel worktable and table and diner stools at its center. The walls were lined with open-backed freestanding stainless-steel shelves, and Lucille and Didier had equipped their kitchen very well, thanks no doubt to that huge advance: Sub Zero fridge, thirty-two-bottle wine refrigerator, chrome deluxe Cuisinart, convection oven, KitchenAid mixer, Dualit toaster, Gaggia espresso machine, Henckel knives, Calphalon cookware.

  “You’ve got a great memory for quotations.” Lucille smiled indulgently and raised her martini glass to me. I echoed the gesture with my glass. “Have you always been able to remember what you read?”

  “Since I was a kid. Can you stand another quotation? I feel like Anatole Broyard—he said that books were his weather, his environment, his clothing.”

  “That’s great,” she murmured. “Not enough professors love books anymore.”

  “You’re right. You know what Iris Bell said to me once?”

  “Iris.” Lucille almost shuddered. “She’s so strident.”

  “She’s a troll. We were chatting about something in the EAR office, and I quoted Updike. Iris glared at me and said that Edith Wharton was my specialty, not Updike, and why didn’t I stop showing off? You should have seen her face—she was so angry!”

  “Maybe she’s never read Updike, and you embarrassed her.”

  “Academics are either stuck in their narrow little specialties, or jealous, or nuts about criticism, or they’re just too burned out to care about anything. Or nursing a grudge against someone in their department, and plotting revenge.”

  “Like in EAR, I’m sure.” She shook her head. “Iris isn’t the only colorful faculty member there.”

  “Colorful? Be honest. Malignant is what you mean. But it’s the same everywhere, Lucille, at every school. And it’s a mistake when politicians attack higher education and complain about the professors being nuts. Of course—that’s the whole point, that’s why most of them are where they are. This society should be thankful that colleges and universities are keeping all these faculty members out of circulation. Can you imagine the kind of harm they could do if they were actually out in the world, working? It’d be like the 1970s, when mental hospitals began releasing patients back into the communities they were from.”

  “I think it’d be more like The Night of the Living Dead.” She crossed her legs, smoothing down her skirt. “If I’d known it could be this crazy, I might have considered staying in editing.”

  “So why did you leave?”

  “I decided to go into teaching to be like the professors who inspired me in college, the ones who made me feel excited about literature.”

  I wondered if she’d also switched paths from editing to teaching to somehow shake the misery of not being able to have a baby. A career change would at the very least have made her feel her life wasn’t stagnating, and besides, as a minority hire, she was making much more money than she would in publishing—and had summers off! Did not being able to have a baby account for the motherly way in which she’d spoken to Delaney in Parker Hall, and hired him to mow her lawn, taking care of him, really?

  “Didn’t you feel like that as an editor?” I asked. “Excited about books. And like Broyard? Didn’t you love books when you were in publishing?”

  Lucille shook her head. “Never. Well, maybe when I started. But it was a job, I was always behind, and there was never enough time to read for pleasure. I got sick of it. Ten years burned me out. You have no idea how many manuscripts come in every week. Like lemmings jumping off a cliff.”

  “And publishing’s the sea? No wonder Stefan gets nauseous sometimes.”

  “And you know what the worst part of it is was?” Lucille continued, as if she hadn’t been listening. “Writing rejection letters. The worst! Even a bad book takes work, and I always imagined some dazed author at the other end of whatever I wrote, and I’d have to make it short and unemotional to distance myself from that picture.” She frowned. “It’s an inhuman business.”

  “Then the card you got at EAR could have been sent by an angry writer.”

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you? It wouldn’t make sense to do that now, when I haven’t been editing for—” She thought “For seven years.”

  I shook my head. “Now’s the best time—it’s when you wouldn’t expect it.”

  She peered at me through half-closed eyes. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “Not completely. I never used to think of things like this—revenge, murder—until I moved to Michigan. Look at all that time I wasted growing up in New York when I could have been doing survival training and joining the NRA.”

  Lucille chuckled way back in her throat as if to say she was giving me one more chance to get real. I took it, asking, “Do you edit Didier’s work?”

  “I read it. As his wife, not his editor. How about you?”

  I smiled. “I edit Stefan’s stuff when he wants me to. And Stefan helped me proofread the Wharton bib.” Lucille frowned, and I explained, “We started calling my bibliography the ‘bib’ after the first few months.”

  “It makes me think of lobsters, or lettuce.”

  “That’s the point—‘bib’ makes you think of something pleasant. And when your life is filled with photocopying and phone calls and faxes and trips to out-of-the-way libraries to locate rare manuscripts, you need every positive association you can get.”

  Lucille nodded, but clearly something else was on her mind. “So. You don’t think we should talk about the bridge murder anymore?” she asked.

  “No, that’s not it at all. We can’t help talking about it, and chewing over the same facts and opinions. It’s not likely to get solved if nobody’s gotten anywhere by now. They know he was stabbed, but they haven’t found a weapon, there’s no known motive, and the trail is cold.”

  “What trail? You think the murderer headed out of state? I don’t. He’s probably right here in town. Or on campus.” Lucille set her drink down on the counter behind her and crossed her arms as if to warm herself.

  “Why say ‘he’? It could be a woman,” I pointed out.

  “I doubt it. A woman stab somebody that big? Jesse was tall, right?
Too risky. What if she missed, or just wounded him?”

  This speculation actually refuted my comparison to the O. J. trial, since neither one of us had ever puzzled over the murderer’s sex before. Then I told her about Minnie’s various suggestions for motive, and Lucille laughed: “Jessica Fletcher’s turned every elderly woman in America into a detective! Your mother-in-law’s a trip.”

  We took our drinks and headed into the living room, where Stefan and Didier were huddled over some book, grimacing.

  Didier was as improbable a figure as you could imagine for a former high school English teacher and part-time poet, with his enormous biceps, rolling gait, and booming voice. He typically wore chinos, loafers, and white T-shirts, as if he’d never gotten over his teen years in the 1950s amid all those images of Brando and James Dean. Stefan said that Didier’s air of complete self-satisfaction was due to his book advance, but I thought it predated that; he didn’t strike me as one of the nouveaux heureux.

  “You liked books when you taught, didn’t you?” I asked Didier, sitting opposite him on a pretty but not very user-friendly black leather Le Corbusier chair that matched the couch he and Stefan were on. Lucille sat on the other chair flanking mine, opposite Stefan.

  Didier flashed a big-toothed grin. “Hell, yes. Wild about ’em. Reading’s as good as sex, hell, better than sex. Nothing to clean up afterward.” He grinned at Lucille, who shook her head with the affection of someone long married who was used to a spouse making wisecracks that weren’t always funny. It was a look I’d seen on Stefan’s face. “Though I tell you, one more year of Ethan Frome, and I might have gone round the bend.” Didier grinned slyly, as if expecting me to be outraged in the name of all Wharton scholars and fans.

  But I stumped him. “That’s my least favorite novel of hers. What were you guys reading?” I asked, pointing at the book between them.

  Stefan held it up so I could see the cover: Family Affections. “It’s a novel by some kid, twenty-five, and it’s being advertised all over. Listen to this.” Stefan found a line and read it to us: “‘Maria’s hair was closely cropped to her head.’”

  I smiled. “Who edited that?” Then I noticed Lucille was looking down, eyes closed.

  “It’s one of hers!” Didier crowed, blue eyes gleaming. “Her publisher put it out. Sorry, ex-publisher. And it’s pure crap. How can your hair be cropped close to anywhere but your head? Don’tcha love it?”

  “It gets better,” Stefan chimed in, leafing through for another line. “‘Maria was never angry nor sad.’”

  “How does something like that get published?” I asked.

  Lucille cleared her throat “I’ll tell you. I know a little about this book. The author’s twenty-five, right? Just out of graduate school. Youth sells. And even better, he’s very good-looking, and it’s his first book. All that is great for off-book-page publicity. And it’s a thriller, so he might be the next big thing, since it has a good chance of ending up on the best-seller lists. Any house would throw lots of money at the book without hesitation. They’d expect coverage in Entertainment Weekly, People, everywhere.”

  “It’s a thriller?” I asked. “With a title like Family Affections? Aren’t thrillers supposed to sound ominous, like—like Absolute Evil or Jack of All Deaths?” But even as I said that, I remembered a line from a novel by Liz Benedict “The living room, the most treacherous country of all.”

  “Hey, it’s a sensitive New Age thriller,” Didier said, reading from the blurbs on the back of the dust jacket.

  “Okay, fine. But why’s it badly edited?” I asked Lucille.

  She leaned back in her chair. “Well, it’s probably better now than when it started—I’m sure the publisher hired an outside editor to make it at least marginally readable. You should see the stuff that used to come in. But if it’s a thriller and a first book, everyone’s afraid the author may be hot, so they don’t want to get known as the editor who passed on the next John Grisham.”

  “Here’s another great line,” Didier chortled. “‘Dear,’ Elizabetta Van der Veide’s booming voice thundered.”

  Lucille grimaced. “Frankly, for a book like that, the story’s what counts. The sales reps aren’t going to get hyped up about pushing a book because it’s well written. People who read for excitement aren’t going to pick apart the writing. So you don’t waste time on that, you put everything into marketing. The writing only has to be good enough to keep you turning the page.”

  Stefan and I exchanged a glance. This was the kind of cynicism we’d each expressed about publishing. Hearing it from an editor wasn’t quite as thrilling and depressing as discovering that Nixon really was a crook, but close enough.

  Lucille’s comments also meant something else, something more personal: she must have felt comfortable with us, because up until now she’d been reticent about her editing career before graduate school. And that comfort pleased me.

  Lucille held out her hand to Didier for the book, and he rose to pass it to her. She opened the rather bland black-and-red cover to look at the jacket copy and nodded. “See?” she said. “It’s an audio book and a Book-of-the-Month Club Featured Alternate. The same with the Doubleday Book Club. They’re pushing it hard.” She glanced up at Didier. “But why did you buy it?”

  He grinned. “Morbid curiosity!”

  Stefan was looking glum, and I knew that his original stance of mockery about this book had started to give way to that gnawing despair about his career, a despair that was his own personal El Niño, wreaking emotional devastation on a regular basis. Though he’d been well reviewed originally, and even had his work appear in the New Yorker, those days were over. Fellow graduates of his writing program had gone on to earn film deals and get interviewed on network television or at least CNN, but Stefan had never really taken off as a writer after his first splash, had merely chugged along from one increasingly modest success to another.

  And here we were, having dinner with Lucille and Didier, becoming their friends, when Didier’s first book had not only earned him a $500,000 advance but would surely be more widely advertised, distributed, and reviewed than all of Stefan’s books put together.

  I glanced up and realized that the room had fallen so quiet that you could hear every nuance from the CD player as Cassandra Wilson moaned out a languid version of “Old Devil Moon.”

  Didier was looking right at Stefan when he said, “I don’t have any illusions about my book either. It’ll be well written at least, but hell, there are lots of books out there that’ll be more beautiful. I know what my publisher wants: another Angela’s Ashes, another painful memoir that can sell like crazy. And it’s my first book, I’m older than most starting authors, and I taught high school—just like Frank McCourt. Okay, it’s not miserable poverty in Ireland, but why not a book about a couple who can’t have a kid even after trying everything? The perfect baby boomer topic. The ones with kids will read it and feel sorry for us, the ones who don’t have kids, or can’t, hell, they’ll feel my pain.”

  “Our pain,” Lucille corrected.

  “Yes,” Didier said, eyes down. “Our pain. Of course.”

  Now the room was really silent, and I wished there were John Philip Sousa playing. I headed for the guest bath off the living room, which was lined with gorgeously framed reproductions from the Louvre. Their home almost had the look of a very exclusive travel agency, since the gleaming white walls adorned with lovely crown molding were decorated throughout with travel posters, prints, and other souvenirs from their many trips to Greece, Italy, and France. These were the only real source of color or warmth; otherwise the furniture throughout was rather severe: all black leather and chrome, even in the bedrooms. I found it a bit odd being in Lucille’s and Didier’s house, since it was identical to ours on the outside (except for the color of their shutters), but utterly different inside.

  When I emerged, the three of them were arguing about the current state of English.

  “I feel assaulted,” Stefan said, “
every time I turn on the news or read a magazine or newspaper.”

  “Language always changes,” Didier argued.

  “This isn’t change, it’s ignorance. I have to write these things down because they’re so unbelievable.”

  Stefan wasn’t joking—he’d taken to keeping a pad in the kitchen where he’d inscribe each new linguistic indignity. He was passionate about it. Like the reporters who had poor subject-verb agreement, or routinely said things like “It’s a fundamental core issue” and “Looking back in retrospect” and “The likelihood is pretty unlikely” and “Something imminent is about to happen.”

  “Okay, so it’s ignorance,” Didier said. “What if something beautiful emerges, eh?”

  “Spoken like a poet,” Lucille observed.

  Didier nodded. “Yeah, like a poet who doesn’t have to teach horny little bastards how to write an essay anymore.”

  “Well, I don’t care what people say,” I announced. “I just can’t stand how they say it.”

  Together Lucille and Didier asked, “What do you mean?” and then smiled at each other.

  “My hobbyhorse is that nobody seems to know where the stress is supposed to be in a sentence anymore. So you hear the wrong words emphasized, and it’s weird.” I tried to recall some examples. “Okay, someone’s discussing a controversy and saying there’s ‘divisiveness over the issue.’ And talking about an upcoming segment and saying ‘We’ll bring that to you.’ Three men get arrested, and ‘one of them’ has a criminal record.”

  Stefan and Didier nodded. Lucille said, “Those are good reasons not to listen to the news.”

  “But it’s not just newscasters,” I said. “It’s everywhere. I hear my students do it, faculty members, cashiers, you name it. It drives me nuts to listen to it, and then I feel worse because I know I’m turning into a crank.”