by Lev Raphael
Wow. Bill—handsome, accomplished, successful—was jealous of Delaney. It struck me as sad and funny that our department’s star graduate student was so unnerved. But then graduate students lived in such a strange world; could anything seem certain to them? After all, most of the professors privately called graduate assistants “grad asses,” which said it all: They were seen as fools and beasts of burden. And trying to finish a dissertation was an exercise in sadomasochism. Most professors seemed to be unconsciously repeating a pattern. In hassling their advisees, they weren’t just enjoying their power; they seemed to be deliberately punishing innocence, creativity, and enthusiasm that hadn’t been blunted yet. Like old whores in a Victorian porn novel maliciously disabusing a kidnapped young girl of her illusions. Occasionally professors fought against this exploitation and harassment, but these were in the minority, and they could never change departments and a university that drowned them in a tide of bitterness and scorn.
I sighed. Some days campus was a toxic place to be, and I found myself wishing for the clarity and clear skies of northern New Mexico, anyplace untouched by all this ugliness. We’d vacationed in Santa Fe a few times, and I badly missed that dreamy ocher-and-gold town with its looming hills and secret-looking homes. I always felt so calm there. Stefan would of course remind me that New Mexico might look peaceful to me, but I was romanticizing it. There was plenty of hostility to go around, he’d note, ever the accurate historian, what with Mexican Americans still resenting the war of l848 that had chopped Mexico in half, and descendants of Spanish colonists feeling cheated out of the land they’d been granted by the Spanish crown; not to mention the native peoples who were there before everyone else. And all of them suspicious of the wealthy Californians who were turning the place into a high-priced curio.
I headed home, making a quick stop at Borders to buy a copy of that Benjamin Constant novel, curious to see what had interested Jesse, and tossed it into my briefcase in the car. When I pulled into the driveway, someone opposite in front of Lucille’s house darted down the block, not running but walking quickly away. By the time I got out of my car, he was gone. He hadn’t looked like any of our neighbors’ adult children (most of our neighbors were retired), and he certainly didn’t seem to have been strolling—so why the sudden rush?
Shrugging it off, I crossed the street to Lucille’s and Didier’s house, I wanted to touch base with her and apologize for not defending her. And maybe ask if she had told Delaney about my Mystery course. Because I didn’t know if I could pull it off even if I did get to teach it; I felt very protective of the course and didn’t want it discussed.
Didier yanked opened the door. Dressed in his regulation white T-shirt and chinos, he grinned and clapped me on the back. “Come on in! I’m done for the day. Man, have I been ripping up the keyboard! How about a Scotch?”
After the baroque EAR meeting, Scotch sounded great, though a dip in Didier’s and Lucille’s hot tub out back would have been better, followed by massage therapy and a three-day coma. I followed Didier into the living room, where he waved me to a seat on one of the cold black couches and fussed at a glass bar cart that looked new. So did the glasses—Baccarat, no doubt—that he filled with two fingers of russet-orange Scotch and several splashes of water.
“You’ll love this,” he chortled, handing me my glass. “Fifty percent alcohol, so it needs more water. Auchentoshan. Thirty-one years old. Smooth as hell.” He hovered in front of me, waiting, as proud as if he’d aged the stuff himself in its casks.
I tasted. Oh, yes, it was incredibly smooth. It should be: I’d read somewhere that it cost over $150 a bottle and was very hard to get because there was so little of it made.
Didier plunked down opposite me. Looking at him smack his lips over the Scotch, I thought of Mel Brooks’s line, “It’s good to be king.” And once again I found myself helplessly wishing for Stefan to have even half the success that had rained down on Didier’s life all at once. Publicity, money, and a chance to earn much more of both.
“If you’re looking for Lucille,” he said, “she’s out. She and Delaney went to the mall to catch a movie.” He nodded cheerfully. “They love movies. Delaney wants to be a screenwriter someday.”
“Oh.” Was that what Delaney had said, or had Lucille told that to Didier? And in either case, why, and was it true?
Didier breathed in over his glass. “Smell that,” he commanded. “Vanilla, honey, butterscotch, lilies. And violets. Definitely violets.”
I tried to make my nose as sensitive as possible, but I responded much better to wines than to Scotch, and more important, all I could think of right then was Lucille and Delaney sitting next to each other in a darkened theater. Particularly after what Bill Malatesta had just told me. As if aware of my discomfort, Didier said, “I’m so busy working on revising my book right now, I’m glad she has someone to do things with. They go down to Ann Arbor for concerts, they drive to Lake Michigan. It’s great!” He chuckled, as pleased as a young parent reporting his child had friends at play group.
Though I was trying to hide my surprise, I must have looked dubious, because Didier leaned back companionably as if he were about to tell me a travel anecdote. “You know, Nick, Lucille and I are very different. She’s quieter, and I make more noise, but she’s the one who needs the excitement. She always has. And she’s always had her own life—that’s how things work around here.”
He gave me a long, steady, blue-eyed look over the rim of his glass. Did it mean anything? Was I supposed to be filling in some blank? Was he actually telling me that Lucille and Delaney were having an affair—and that was okay with him?
Or was he just garrulous after a good day of work, and merely letting go, getting a little high, a little loose and careless with what he said? Maybe I was making too much of this—after all, I thought, as we sipped our Scotch, he hadn’t seemed to be confiding in me with the expectation that I’d share something private about me and Stefan. I certainly didn’t want to—I didn’t think I knew either Lucille or Didier that well, which might have accounted for my surprise and mild discomfort.
“Marriage is tricky,” Didier mused. “You do what you have to do, eh?”
I nodded dimly, uncertain where he was going, and trying to think of a way to head off any further palaver about his or anyone else’s intimacies. Right now, I wanted to unwind. I wasn’t ready to talk about relationships, real or theoretical.
Didier gave me another one of his wolfish grins, and I realized that he wasn’t making excuses; he was proud of himself, of Lucille, of whatever sort of private life they had built for themselves, and he wanted me to know it. I raised my glass in a silent toast, and he chortled. Clearly I had read him right, and he took my gesture as approval.
“It’s pretty remarkable that I’m writing a book after all these years,” he said. “Lucille was the one in publishing, I just taught English. But sometimes she’d show me a manuscript, and I’d think, Shit, I could do that a hell of a lot better. And when we started going to that fertility clinic—” Eyes slightly unfocused, he paused a moment. “Well, I used to think I was pretty romantic, but there’s nothing romantic about trying to rush crosstown in New York traffic with a bottle of your own sperm when you’ve got your schedules all messed up.”
“You could have put a ribbon around it,” I said. Didier laughed and rose to pour himself more Scotch. I signaled that I could use a refill, and Didier complied. My face was comfortably flushed, and every hard edge in my body, every knot, felt like it had been smoothed away.
“When you finish this book, will you—?”
“Write another? Hell no! I want to milk this book for everything I can. I want to spend the rest of my life doing interviews and talk shows and panels and speeches and columns. Who needs another book if this one’s a hit?” He closed his eyes. “The only other thing would be to run for office.”
I told him a little about the horror-show EAR meeting, and he urged me to write a roman à clef about the depa
rtment. “Make it really nasty—kill ’em all.”
“Didier, I’m a bibliographer. I describe, I don’t invent.”
“Then get Stefan to write it.”
I frowned, and Didier asked if Stefan was having trouble with his writing.
“No, it’s his publisher.” I refused to say anything more.
‘They’re all fuckers,” Didier said. “And boy, am I glad Lucille isn’t in that cesspool anymore, though I tell you, she sure helped my agent negotiate a great deal.”
I suppose if I had sold a book for a half a million dollars, I’d be dropping leaflets from the Goodyear blimp, but since I hadn’t, I found Didier’s blatant self-promotion a little hard to bear at times. “It’s time for dinner,” I said, getting up and heading somewhat unsteadily for the door.
“No!” Didier protested. “More Scotch!” But he couldn’t persuade me, so he said he’d have Lucille call me when she got back.
Making my way across the street, I wondered if he was really untroubled by Lucille’s friendship with Delaney, or if he’d raised it to see what I felt. And was he drinking tonight because he was pleased about his book, or trying to blur any speculations about Lucille?
When Stefan opened the door, he said, “You’re smashed.”
I admitted that he might be right, then sailed right past him to the kitchen for a large glass of water. Michiganapolis has some of the purest tap water in the country, though I only know the claim and not the reasons behind it. Stefan followed me.
I guzzled down a glass or two, realizing I’d left my briefcase in the car, but as I sunk into a chair, I decided it didn’t matter. Damned if I’d get any work done tonight.
“How was the meeting?” Stefan asked, his soft tone indicating he was sorry he’d been less than welcoming just before. I had never figured out why, but Stefan didn’t like the rare times I smoked something by myself or got drunk without him; he acted hurt, as if it were somehow directed against him. But it never was. From time to time I liked withdrawing from the world, and as an extrovert, I couldn’t just retreat within myself the way Stefan did so readily. I needed help.
Thirty-one-year-old Scotch was certainly quite efficacious.
“How was the meeting?” I echoed. “Indescribable. No—wait! That’s a cop-out. It was a cross between”—I fumbled for the right choice—“the Oresteia and Scream 2, only not as heartwarming. What smells so good?”
Stefan smiled. “I ordered pizza—I didn’t feel like cooking tonight.”
Well, the pizza was soon out of the oven, where he’d been keeping it warm, and onto the table, where I didn’t even bother with a plate. I gobbled as if I were stoned and had the munchies. Stefan looked on, alternately disapproving and amused, though whether it was my lack of table manners or my recounting between bites of what went on at the meeting, I couldn’t tell.
Then I told him about my talk with Didier, and the Scotch, but Auchentoshan didn’t interest Stefan at all. “Lucille went to a movie with her graduate advisee?”
His shock triggered instant opposition in me. “Okay, Cotton Mather, what’s so bad about that? It’s a movie, not Las Vegas.”
“He mows her lawn, he takes her on dates—”
“Who said it was a date?” I dropped a piece of crust into the box. “You’re exaggerating.”
“It’s one thing to be friendly, but—”
“But what?” I shot. And I could tell he knew I was thinking about our recent and painful past.
Stefan looked away. “You got a message before. From Delaney. I heard your machine. The dean’s approved money for him to TA the mystery course.” Now he rounded on me, looking hurt. “You never even said you’d decided you wanted to go ahead.”
“I didn’t! I told Delaney not to do anything—not to talk to Bullerschmidt.” But even as I said it, I marveled at the speed with which Delaney had gotten funding approved. What was his secret?
“When did all this happen?”
“There isn’t any all this. He came over yesterday to ask if he—”
Stefan was glaring at me now. “Delaney came over here? Why didn’t you tell me?”
I was beginning to feel cross-examined, and I shoved the pizza box away, hating myself for having enjoyed something he ordered. “Because there wasn’t time, and because you’re not a fucking independent counsel.”
“I don’t like Delaney, and I don’t want you working with him. Ever.”
“You can’t say that!” I pounded a fist on the table. It hurt, but the noise was very satisfying and spurred me to raise my voice. “You’re nuts!”
Stefan didn’t reply, but the superior, parental look on his face infuriated me. I sprang up from my chair and, banging against the table, accidentally knocked the box upside down onto the floor, splattering sauce and cheese from the remaining pieces.
Ignoring the mess, I said, “This course could be a chance to create my own identity in the department, to branch out, and you can’t stand that any graduate students would find me interesting enough to work with. You can’t always be the one getting attention!”
The shock and anger sweeping across his face pleased me, and I headed for my study, slammed the door, and dialed Sharon’s number. She was in, and I quietly raved at her for a while. When I finished my outpouring, she said, “Was the pizza any good?”
I cracked up. “No, not around here.”
“I’ll have to bring you a CARE package next time I come west.” She made it sound like it was hard to get a reservation on a Conestoga wagon.
“That would be great, even without the pizza. Michigan really isn’t dangerous anymore—they have the mountain lions under control.” We chatted about the possibility of her visiting, about work, and about New York’s Mayor Giuliani (who she’d just met at a charity function), and Sharon brought up having made a doctor’s appointment, without my nagging her. I felt relieved by that news, and by her assurance that she hadn’t had any more dizzy spells. Now she wondered if she had simply not eaten enough those days, a holdover from her years as a model when she never ate well and had skated close to anorexia.
“Sweetie, do you think it’s the shock of seeing Jesse’s body that’s getting to you, eating at you, and maybe that’s why you exploded? You have to shout at somebody, and it might as well be Stefan, since it’s safe. The best thing about marriage is it gives you someone to get mad at.”
I was silent for a while, thinking it over, and then I agreed. “That’s not everything, but it’s a lot. I feel like I should be finding out what happened, but I don’t know what to do. Angie’s the only student I know who was friendly with Jesse, and she’s gone. I’m down the hall from his father—he’s chair of the History Department—but I don’t think he’s going to want to talk to me right now about who might have wanted to kill his son.”
“Why not?”
I explained Jesse’s behavior in my class last year, and that I thought it might have prejudiced Benevento against me, if Jesse had told him.
“If,” she said.
“Sure—but all he has to do is say something terrible to Coral Greathouse, if he hasn’t already. I’m sure the department chairs all talk to each other.”
“When they go bowling?” she asked wryly. “Or on a trip to the local outlet mall to buy new overalls?”
I laughed. “It’s not that bad, Sharon. We do have indoor plumbing!”
“You know, Nick, I wonder if wanting to look for an answer might not just be a distraction now, something to keep you from feeling bad about the murder, and Stefan’s career trouble, and even tenure.”
How could I disagree when she was so sensible?
“And, sweetie,” Sharon continued. “What if the murder was a mistake? The bridge was total chaos, you said, so what if the wrong person got stabbed?”
“Wow. Or a thrill killing, or some kind of crazy initiation,” I said slowly, finding myself in tune with her doubts.
“Most murders don’t get solved anyway,” Sharon pointed out.
“But this isn’t Dallas or L. A. or Chicago—this is a quiet college town. At least it’s supposed to be.”
We gradually worked back to my argument with Stefan. Sharon gently urged me to apologize, and not go to bed angry—“Sweetie, you’ll hate it!”—but I felt too proud to let go of my indignation. “He was so bossy,” I griped. “What’s the matter with him?” My unspoken complaint was, “He should apologize,” but that was too pouty and juvenile to say.
“I think it’s cute. You said this student is handsome, sexy, right? So Stefan’s jealous—that’s really a tribute to you.”
“I thought tributes were supposed to feel better. And come with a banquet and speeches.”
“Nick, you’ll really feel better if you apologize.”
Sharon knew me very well, and she was, as always, sensible and right, like a salesgirl gently warning a customer away from a completely unsuitable dress. Outrage and grousing would not fit me as well as conciliation. Yet I resisted her advice, and I could tell she was sad when I hung up.
I stayed in my study, checking e-mail, reading, waiting to hear Stefan go up to bed. As always when he was mad, he played Poulenc CDs for some strange reason, and from the living room I heard the Aubade, the Concerto for Two Pianos, the Valse Musette, and more, until I was sick of all that inexhaustible French wit. It jarred me, seemed as obnoxious as the charm someone in Brideshead Revisited decries as “the great English blight.”
When the music stopped and I heard Stefan go upstairs to bed, I slipped from my study to check the kitchen. The kitchen floor was spotless, of course. Leaving any kind of mess was beyond Stefan, who had trouble settling down to a meal without making a stab at cleaning up a little. I often joked about his neatness, treasuring it as a lovable quirk, and I felt a sudden access of affection. If Stefan had been standing there, I would have grinned and held out my arms to him. As Ian McEwan wrote, “Love generates its own reserves.”
But Stefan was sound asleep when I got to bed, and it felt very awkward slipping under the covers next to him, just as Sharon had predicted.