The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

  “Yes, I remember.”

  Landau knocked back a glass. “Ai-yi-yi!” he screamed. “Ai-yi-yi!”

  “What?”

  “Ai-yi-yi!”

  Some few seconds later he told her how he had spent the afternoon.

  “Are you fooling with me, Anthony?” she asked.

  “No, not about this I’m not.”

  “You need to speak to them then. To the mother and father. Announce yourself.”

  “I guess. But not now, with all this going on.”

  “Yes, maybe you’re right.”

  “They’d be completely terrified. They’d take out a restraining order against me. I would do the same.”

  Deena asked for a record of all his seminal emissions with Samantha Beevors. Landau struggled to answer.

  “She had a diaphragm,” he recalled, “she believed in it. Would slip it in matter-of-factly, you hardly noticed. She was very anti-pill, because she went on it one time and had an acne episode when she went off. Were we on top of every drib and drab, exercising supreme caution? No, I can’t say that. There was a certain devil-may-care-ness, especially when we were drinking all that good red wine in Argentina.”

  More silence.

  Then he told her about the Jad connection. He heard Deena draw in her breath.

  “Most unlikely,” he hurried to add. “Jad says no, but some things you just don’t tell your father, do you?”

  “Did Jad go with you over there?”

  “To Martinez? No. It would’ve offended him, to be part of that. He’s anti-fatherhood.”

  “He is?”

  “Yes, they don’t quite see the point, Karin and Jad. Although their friends are breeding now, some of them. Maybe some day they might even have an accident and give me a grandchild.”

  “Some people are not made for it, Anthony. Maybe they know something about themselves.”

  “Yes, I’m assuming that’s the case. But it seems selfish, even so.”

  He told her what Bill Beevors had told him about the adoption. That Samantha had wanted a family not that far away, willing to keep her informed about the child, and to permit some visiting. “The family name is Perry. I don’t know the girl’s name—she looks like an Ophelia to me, an Olympia, something starting with an O. The father may work for an oil company—a lot of Martinezans work for Shell. The mother looks like she was in a car wreck. I’m thinking Frida Kahlo and the streetcar, and afterwards, you know, she couldn’t conceive, she was all messed up.”

  “Do not be cultural. You are imagining too much on the shape of a nose, please.”

  “I know that. But I had a feeling when I saw her—a feeling of joy, actually, wild joy.”

  “What do you want? Do you want to stick yourself in their private business? Maybe you should leave them alone.”

  “Didn’t you just say I should announce myself?”

  “Yes, but now I’m thinking again.”

  It was good to speak with her, even if she was as baffled as he. And how did I not have a child with this woman, he asked himself. Think of that, a Deena look-alike daughter or son, maybe even a couple of daughters or sons. Ungainly, secretive, good at math. Bizarrely good at languages. One goes to Cal and one Princeton, or maybe they hate all things of the mind, having had intellectual strivers for parents. Become drug-users, self-tattooers, rage-music listeners. You try to understand them, but they seethe with resentment against you even so—you spend your whole life trying to bring them around, but it doesn’t work, it’s a mess. Families are so often a mess.

  “Deena, my inbox is too full, I can’t think about this now. Maybe I’ll write them a letter one day. I don’t know.”

  “Yes, no hurry.”

  “She looks like Jad did at that age, when he got that storky neck. She’s going to be a giraffe in that family—her mother’s more pony, and I bet the father’s also short, it’s just a feeling I have.”

  * * *

  Deena’s office, in Durant Hall, was soon to be decommissioned, and a new Asian Studies Center, with massive library, was rearing up on a nearby hillside. She had told Landau she was glad about that—she’d have more space over there. Her old office, however, with its double-hung windows and high ceiling, plaster walls above mellow oaken wainscoting, pleased her. It was very Old Cal, redolent of the university in its heyday, when neoclassical structures built of marble had expressed the salient California idea. A public university to stand with the best in the world; an American Sorbonne. Her parents, who had mocked America, and as they aged had mocked everything Californian even more, had not mocked that, not much.

  Weepy blue rain. She mounted her bike after work and set off gently downhill, the hood of her raincoat catching the wind, pulling back from her expressionless face. Messenger bag slung to strong, narrow back. At the northern edge of the campus she headed up Arch Street rather than Oxford, committing to a series of steep hills as she worked homeward, standing up in the pedals and going mildly sweaty within the first half block, because Arch Street was no joke, it was a lung-buster. The seat of her pants soaked through. The bike tire throwing rainwater against her, but she would be home soon, she would build a fire in the mead-hall hearth of her hillside house, it would be okay.

  Mother still annoyingly alive. Lived in an assisted-living in South Berkeley, the mother did, noisily unhappy there, but she had always been unhappy everywhere. Life in its every quotidian manifestation displeased her. Harold had said no to her coming to live with them, which had led to the most savage battle of Deena’s life with him, but she had been grateful to him in the end, had needed to be rescued from living with her imperious, unsatisfiable mother. Maybe Harold had understood that. Now she visited the mother two afternoons a week plus Sundays, was often queasy when she woke in the middle of the night, having failed to order Coumadin in her dream, or to renew her mother’s subscription to Sunset, which had long provided delicious entertainment for its cataloguing of California kitsch. The torment is to live out every trope of human decline, her mother had recently said, every page in the playbook, going from own house to internment cell to incontinent’s bed, until you aren’t even aware what a horror you’ve become. Then they can smother you with a pillow and you’ll thank them for it. You’ll really thank them.

  On Eunice she stood up in the pedals for two blocks, and a local driver heading home, a friend of Harold Blodgett’s from the gym, in fact, saw her from behind as he drove past, admired her damp derriere, was shocked when, passing, he saw who it was, Harold’s wife, that glum-looking but fetching woman who had long played a role in his interior sexual dumb shows. Shapely ass, and you don’t fool me with that Lotte Lenya deadpan: you’re a very sensuous broad, and I bet you can’t get enough of it. That night, after failing to read himself to sleep, he took himself in hand and while his own wife slumbered contentedly beside him, he thought of Deena Marjic in various poses, imagined her at one of her famous parties, leading him into the coatroom. Still wearing those damp trousers, and she puts his hand on her crotch. They fall onto the sofa covered with winter coats. Come on, hurry up, she says. Give it to me. I want you.

  Harold’s Lexus. But he wasn’t supposed to be home yet—this was the second Wednesday of the month, when he and his law school buddies had their poker game. Wednesday nights instead of Fridays, because Fridays encouraged excess, too much alcohol; they were conscientious law school fellows, hardworking, and Wednesday games tended to end on time, which Friday games did not. And yet: Harold’s car. The black Lexus.

  Light on in the kitchen downstairs, another on upstairs. Harold’s study was up there, on the second floor of their house on Keith, and something must have made him hurry home before the game, to check an important email on his home computer, perhaps, or to change something in a manuscript he’d been massively laboring over. He had three hundred law journal articles listed on his CV now—those were just the on
es he bothered to list. Among constitutional law scholars of his era he was the most cited, because opponents on the right routinely used him as a straw man, while comrades on the left invoked him as a near-deity, the deepest wisdom-speaker of the age. His prominence had sneaked up on him, he liked to say; incapable of brilliant leaps, a classic plodder, he had built an intellectual structure brick by brick, its usefulness sure to be short-lived but for the moment, the laurels were raining down, the celebration was ongoing.

  Deena put her bike in the shed. The house had discouraged her at first, being one of those modernist one-offs built in the sixties, with lots of deck and redwood siding going gray with age, not up to the high standard of Landau’s vanilla villa, for instance, nor of her parents’ snug Craftsman bungalow on Oxford close to Indian Rock. She was architecturally hypersensitive, like many veteran Berkeleyans connected to the university; you could tell you were at a Berkeley dinner party if the talk was all of equity loans for renovation, of master architects designing you a new pantry or bathroom, and Harold’s house, which he had bought with his first wife, would never impress anyone.

  They had been happy here, however. Lately she had come to feel in some ways profoundly satisfied, solidly married to a decent man, a kind and on most days a reasonable man. Small beer, but big to her. Children hadn’t happened for her. A career like her parents’ had never much attracted, not because they had convinced her that she was incapable of august professorhood but because rejecting that had been her way of settling accounts with them. Didn’t want to hurt them, had always lived dutifully within beck and call, but if she was to be anything it would not be what they had been, peevish, resentful, disappointed academics. Disappointed Serb academics: a vast cultural inheritance of peeve.

  “Darling? Are you up there already?”

  Deena left her coat in the hall and went to the hearth. They hardly turned on the furnace anymore, regardless of weather; Harold had installed an advanced heating system designed in Sweden, one that passed water in sealed nickel tubes through custom-made andirons then along the baseboards, and it was almost as good as having the furnace on, in fact in some ways it was better. But as with the house itself it had taken her a while to get with the new program—when Harold wasn’t home she turned the furnace on in secret, then built a fire in the hearth in the approved Swedish manner. She did this now, built a fire, getting a good one going. It wasn’t like building a campfire—it had to be done the right way, the Swedish way.

  “Darling, won’t you come down? Should I make dinner or are you going out with your poker boys later?”

  Ordinary happiness, that’s what it was. He bought her novels in Min Nan and she got him books on paleoanthropology, his secret obsession. They had no dog or cat or tropical fish to take care of, no children—he had two grown daughters, one a legal star in her own right, the other a digital-design whiz—which gave them plenty of time for cozy mutual amusements, cups of tea brought in at night, love notes under the pillow. They were still alive to each other. Harold had been smitten from the start, and for her part she found him better looking as the years passed, even as his hairline receded and his face grew gaunt from all the exercising. The talk of him being Lincolnesque had done something to his jaw—well, he looked rugged, didn’t he. Rugged but kind.

  Landau had tried to get close to him, but Harold would as soon Landau did not exist: anyone who had ever slept with her was an affront. They joked about how jealous he was, that his “forbearing temperament” did not extend that far, not that far. Possibly for that reason, he persisted in the idea that Landau might have committed some of the murders. If he had dared to touch Deena, then, who knew what he was capable of? Samantha Beevors, for instance, still seemed suspicious to Harold, not a mere medical event, a heart attack. His friend Raboy had said that the forensics had been slipshod, a big gift to the defense; the prosecutors had followed standard procedure, but you had to assume that someone like Landau was capable of advanced medical trickery, and they hadn’t gone the extra mile. Then, consider motive. The woman had set out to destroy him, root and branch. Harold had been around when Landau was going through the worst of it, winter of ’95–’96, and he’d warned Deena that her friend seemed on a dangerous edge—seemed almost suicidal. He’d seen other big-time professors when their privileged worlds collapsed—a failed romance was as nothing to the loss of prestige, and Landau had had both from Samantha, heartbreak and scandal.

  “All right, what’s going on up there?” she now called out. “Are you looking at pornography again, your favorite ‘Unshaven Girls’ site? I’m coming to get you.”

  She started upstairs with her messenger bag, then returned it to the foyer. When they had parties, people often drifted upstairs looking for a bathroom, although there were two on the main floor; it was more just nosiness, something about the breadth and curve of the staircase invited exploration, and little objects sometimes went missing from her bedroom or bath. A pair of socks. A hairbrush. Landau had bought her a brush in Prague one time, with bristles that were kind to her fine, oily hair. Maybe Harold had destroyed it in a fit of jealous pique. But no, someone had snatched it, a man, probably—so Landau, amused to hear of the theft, had theorized. Landau, who’d often told her that she was an object of fascination. For all the good it had ever done her, yes, maybe she was; she had a shape or smell or look on her face that made fussy professors go too far. The first had been a colleague of her father’s, a distinguished biographer of Kerensky. He had given her a quarter to take off her bathing suit top when she was seven.

  What a long, absurd comedy, her embroilments with men! But here, look at this, they had eventuated in this marriage, of all things—in ordinary human contentment. Now the prospect of spending her sunset years with Harold Blodgett quietly pleased her. He was set to retire in another two years, and she would stop working a little later, and then they would travel together. First on his list were the caveman sites in southwest France. He wanted to see what the tourists were still allowed to see, the paintings of saber-toothed tigers and woolly rhinoceroses on curvy cave walls. The deep past called to her Lincolnesque husband—for some reason, he couldn’t get enough of it.

  “Harold, darling? What giffs? Hey, what’s going on there?”

  Here he was. Poised at his built-in desk, with the recessed lighting in the Bauhaus-style cabinet above. Some Web site on his computer throwing light on his face. Normally he was a huncher, forcing out the brilliant thoughts by postural contortion, but today he was sitting erect. All right, leave him then. Let no priceless idea be lost because I interrupted.

  She took off her damp pants, then came to the doorway of his study again, when she failed to hear any keyboard chatter. The monitor had blinked off. She stood there holding her slacks upside down by the cuff, smoothing the creases. A raven honked out in the street. They were taking over the hills now, the ravens, chicken-sized birds that nested in the firs, in insolent glossy flocks. Drove out the blue jays, even—plus, all the little songbirds. Harold liked their vulgar toughness.

  “Hear that, dear? Is one of your raven friends, calling to you. Making that sound in the nose. Saying to stop your work already.”

  Something about his perfect stillness. A paralytic stroke—maybe a seizure. She rushed to his side, letting her silky slacks fall in a puddle on the floor. He was as if cast in concrete, blood all down one side of his face. Blood filled one eye socket, as if the eye had been gouged out. Oh God, oh no, no. In his lap a glistening blanket of something unidentifiable, no, not a blanket, not that, innards, his viscera, piled up. Gleaming transparent integument connecting the blue-veined lengths. Oh, no—no, no, no. This cannot be.

  “Harold!”

  She shook him. Roughed him up by the shoulders. The shaking caused him to list in his chair, and she made a mewling sound and let go. Slunk away fast. One of her stockinged feet drew a brushstroke of blood from beneath his chair. She woke up suddenly. This wasn’t happeni
ng, no, it was impossible, unallowable. She looked down upon it as if from a height, finding evidence of its unreality on every hand. This cannot count, I am not here, and he isn’t, either, Harold is not here.

  “Harold! Harold!”

  An arm around her waist pulled her away, and when she turned against it something was already in her mouth, pushed all the way to the back of her throat. She screamed making no sound, and as she raged and thrashed she saw a face she knew, the forehead knotted in concentration, her captor taking care to accomplish this simple but important task, subduing her, hugging her still, quieting her. There, there, be calm. Now the hand went over her nose as well as her mouth. There, be quiet, I’m with you.

  * * *

  Landau had to go to the bathroom again: twice a night now, as regular as clockwork. Whether he drank little or a lot, he was up twice in the seven hours, the second time often with the sky going light out the window. Dawn patrol. Aim carefully now, come on, be a big boy. Do your business.

  He returned to bed but could not fall sleep. Too many bumptious thoughts. Just what I need now, another child! A daughter, or a granddaughter! How do I make that right? It’s not as if she’s an infant, she’s half-grown, with the imprint upon her of other people. Again I have been remiss, but maybe she’s happy, maybe things are good enough as they are. To appear in her firmament now would not be a kindness, but an imposition. Better to remain in the shadows.

  But no—I have to make myself known. I have to because that’s who I am—I’m Landau, the one who goes too far. Not some stoical other, some distant benefactor out of a Dickens novel, pulling strings till the last chapter. What’s the fun in that, I ask? Where’s the contact, the warmth, the hurly-burly?

  He slept then, then a pounding at the door and a simultaneous ringing of his bedside phone awoke him. More police. Blank stares, icy ones. Byrum was back on the case, apparently, because here he was: he suggested that Landau come downtown with him, “downtown Berkeley” suddenly seeming as ominous as the Tombs, in Manhattan. From the useless literary memory bin came another scrap of prose, from Dickens’ ill-tempered book on America in the 1840s: “What is this dismal fronted pile of bastard Egyptian?” the great Londoner had inquired, upon being shown the Tombs, a risible bit of typical American vulgarity. Nothing about America pleased him, Dickens—it had all been done wrong.