by Andrew Lanh
He didn’t answer but offered a sheepish smile. “Sophia keeps saying the same thing to me.”
I walked away but turned back, stared into his face. “You know, Ben, I overheard you the other night. That nasty send-up with Dustin Trang outside your office. A little heated. It bothered me…”
I stopped because his hand flew up into my face. He blinked quickly, color rising in his cheeks. Jittery, his fingers crumpled the dollar bill I’d returned to him. “No,” he spat out. “It’s none of your business.”
That surprised me. Ben was a man who cultivated likability, the clown who told too many stale jokes in class, a man who liked to laugh. Yes, he could be biting with those who opposed him on academic and even worldly politics, but those exchanges were largely cerebral. He avoided ad hominem attacks, even as others hurled them at him at faculty meetings. David Laramie once called him a “butterball turkey with a clucking harem of adoring henhouse coeds.” Not nice, and reprimanded by the college.
Ben found the line hilarious and repeated it everywhere.
Now, realizing what he’d just said to me, he tucked his head into his chest. “Christ, Rick, I can’t believe those words came out of my mouth.”
“Forget it. But, Ben, maybe you do want to talk about it?”
He smiled thinly. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” He waited a heartbeat. “No, I’m lying to you, Rick, but it’s something I gotta deal with.”
“Are you in trouble?”
His eyes were tired. “Sort of.”
“Legal?”
He didn’t answer.
“Illegal?”
“Just…trouble.”
“Serious?”
A bittersweet smile. “More than I ever expected.”
Frustrated, I leaned in. “Does this have to do with Dustin Trang?”
He pulled his lips into a razor-thin line and gazed over my shoulder. When he looked back at me, his eyes were shrouded, dark. “You’re Vietnamese, right, Rick?”
“Yes, but…”
His lips trembled. “I’ll never understand what that war was about, you know.”
“Ben, what are you talking about?”
He laughed an unfunny laugh. “When I was young, like fifteen or sixteen, I marched in protests against the war. My father was a firebrand protester. I held up signs. ‘Hell no, I won’t go. Get out of Vietnam.’”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, America eventually did.”
His voice got sharp, hard. “But that war never ended, did it?”
“Not for a lot of folks, I admit.”
“You?” He locked eyes with mine.
“I have my own battles. Yes.”
A low rumble to his words. “After 1975 I never thought about it.”
“Until now?”
He glanced over my shoulder and shook his head. “No, it’s just meeting you.”
I plunged in. “Meeting Dustin Trang?”
A trace of anger. “He’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
He inserted the dollar into the vending machine but nothing happened. He banged on the glass, harder and harder, until a candy bar dropped into the slot. But he walked away without it. At the end of the hallway he turned and yelled, “You know what Plato said, right?”
“He said a lot of things.”
“He said: ‘Only the dead know the end of war.’”
***
Late that night my phone rang. I’d been sitting at my desk in my apartment, dreamily organizing files on the fraud case I was working on for Aetna Insurance, a routine bit of embezzling by some district manager whose felonious footprint was so obvious I considered it corporate suicide. I’d finished up, pressed SEND to the HR rep, and stared at the screen.
“Rick, you awake?” Hank’s voice sounded wary.
“Yes. What’s up? I thought you had a shift.”
“At midnight.” He put his mouth close to the receiver. “Rick, I wanted to tell you that I met Dustin when I left my seminar this evening. I walked to my car and saw him leaning against the old bucket of bolts he calls a vehicle.”
I waited. “And?”
“I surprised him, walking from the side. He didn’t see me until I was next to him. When he saw me, he let out this yelp and jumped into his car. He tore out of the parking lot like a bat outta hell, almost sideswiping a kid walking across the lot.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
“That’s my point, Rick. In the second before he slipped into the car, I noticed that he was shaking.”
“It’s cold out, Hank. It’s December. It’s—”
He interrupted me. “Rick, he was crying.”
Chapter Three
I was late getting to Ben Winslow’s apartment. I’d dawdled at home, contemplating where to hang a Joan Miro print I’d picked up at the local Salvation Army. I tried it over the fireplace mantel, then over a cabinet in the kitchen, its vibrant pop-out colors warring with the black-and-white linoleum of the old-fashioned kitchen. Finally, disgusted, I laid it on the coffee table, a project for another day—a piece of reproduced art that was nothing more than a feeble excuse to put off leaving my apartment. Ever since that brief, unhappy encounter with Ben in the hallway, despite his knee jerk apology, I’d avoided him. Echoes of his unhappiness might surface at the dinner Sophia Grecko made him agree to.
Ben’s apartment was on a side street in Unionville, the working-class corner of affluent Farmington, a street of modest homes that once housed mill workers. I stumbled up the steps to the front porch, the overhead light unlit, nearly dropping the bottle of chardonnay—“He likes Pioneer Valley brand,” Sophia has whispered when I asked her—and colliding with a bank of plastic Walmart webbed chairs covered with slick ice. A shabby wreath hung on the front door.
Ben answered the doorbell with a smile on his face, and gave me a hearty handshake. “You’re not late,” he said, though I’d said nothing but hello.
“What?”
“Sophia lives upstairs and she’s late.”
I trailed after him to the back of the apartment, an old-fashioned spread of rooms, high-ceilinged, warped floors covered with scatter rugs, thick dark walnut molding with ornamental scrolling. I’d been in his apartment a few times, and had marveled at the helter-skelter furnishings—a lumpy sofa, side chairs with broken springs, paintings hanging crookedly on the walls. What Ben cared about was school—the lives of his students, yes, but also books and his research. Stacks of printed sheets slipped off tables and chairs, a pegboard dangled over an unused upright piano from the Scott Joplin era, tacks holding in place jotted-down websites and phone numbers and reminders to: “LOOK UP BILLY GRAHAM Kansas 1956!!” That kind of memo jumped out at you.
At the back of the apartment was a space where folks gathered. I spotted Liz tucked into an overstuffed side chair, her body nearly lost in the folds of sagging cushions, one hand gripping a glass of wine. She smiled mockingly, and pointed to a chair next to her. “You’ll sink into oblivion.”
“I’ve done that before.”
“Yes, but we’re no longer talking metaphors, Rick dear.”
I slipped into a chair next to her and nodded to the other two guests in the room. Marcie and Vinnie were watching me with childlike grins on their faces. My closest friends on the faculty, dating back to my first years as a part-time instructor, Marcie was tenured English with a fascination for the 1930s proletarian fiction of the James T. Farrell sort—she’d done her thesis on Studs Lonigan—while her husband, Vinnie, was in the history department. They were childless, in their early forties, travelers, troublemakers; they fascinated everyone because Marcie was a fierce liberal and Vinnie the unapologetic Republican in a crowd of academics who viewed him with suspicion. They loved each other to death, though they squabbled and harangued each other
, the James Carville and Mary Matalin stand-ins at the college. They cared for me as though I were a refugee washed upon their charitable shores, a benevolence I found a little grating at times, but I mostly basked in the glow of their friendship.
Marcie was pointing to a newspaper on a table, and I’d obviously walked in during her discussion of an article she’d read. A small, chubby woman with a round pink face, she wore a simple diamond cross around her neck, a gift from Vinnie dating from their collegiate days. She constantly fingered it, playing with the gold chain, especially when making a point. “As I was saying…”
Vinnie grunted, “Marcie, we all read the article.”
A stocky man of medium height with a thin moustache over a large mouth that displayed a slight overbite, Vinnie now placed his palm down on the news article.
“Hiding it,” Marcie joked, “will not prevent me from giving my opinion.”
Liz interrupted. “Rick, the Bristol Press has an article on Ben’s new book.”
Ben’s voice was low, scratchy. “So it begins again.”
“Where’s Sophia?” I asked.
At that moment, with theatrical timing, the front door opened and shut, the clack of high heels scurried from the front room, and Sophia appeared, out of breath. She was carrying a lopsided cake that tilted dangerously, dark chocolate frosting seeping to the edge of the platter like molten lava. She grumbled, “Baking is not an artform.”
“It’s lovely.” Marcie squinted at it. “Very Tower of Pisa.”
Sophia placed the cake on a side table, frowned at it, and poured herself a glass of wine, settled into a straight-backed chair by Ben’s desk with the groans of an exhausted long-distance runner.
An unlikely couple, Sophia and Ben. Her real name was Sophie, we’d learned, but she’d appropriated Sophia because, she told us more than once, “it possessed a better rhythmic flow.” She always added, unnecessarily, “Keep in mind Diane Ross became Diana Ross.”
“So that’s where you got that beehive hairdo,” some junior faculty member once quipped. “An old late-night Supremes video from Ed Sullivan.” Unfortunately the remark, reported back to her, had some currency. At the next faculty meeting the hairdo was higher, ink black.
“What are we talking about?” she asked now.
Marcie pointed to the article. “The old story resurfacing.”
Sophia grumbled, “I know, I know. Lord, another religious war—like years back. The One Hundred Years War capsulated into a few protesters outside the college. ‘Burn in Hell.’ That was my favorite.”
Ben’s sociological interest was American evangelical religion. As a graduate student at NYU, he’d written his dissertation on the music employed by Kentucky snake worshippers—those fervent believers who take up serpents because of that curious bit in the Bible—and he’d spent time in the field. Most folks never realized that such religious frenzy had a soundtrack: strains of chanting, howling, tinkling banjos, and strumming fiddles. His study was revolutionary, though one night a maddened worshipper ran at him with a disgruntled, hissing rattlesnake, and Ben narrowly escaped an awful price to pay for doctoral scholarship. That study morphed into a study of American evangelical Protestantism, which included a popular essay in Hartford Magazine five years back on a mega church in nearby Bristol: The Gospel of Wealth Ministry, led by a charismatic, overfed minister in a white satin suit and a pompadour hairdo. Ben’s article, though based in history, was almost a tongue-in-cheek—some said an unforgiving satirical—look at the popular church and the bags of money that the Reverend Simms packed into the trunk of his Cadillac on the way to Bank of America. What followed—death threats, pickets, the faithful horrified by a cynical glimpse at a church they adored. The cause célèbre died down, of course, but now, five years later, the Bristol Press had revived the story. The Reverend Simms, it seemed, was richer than ever—and madder than ever.
Ben’s new tome, Evangelical Fury: Essays on the Reinvention of Protestantism in New England, just issued by the University of Massachusetts Press, would have been routinely reviewed in scholarly journals and then forgotten, but Ben had cherry-picked the Reverend Simms’ mega church as an example of his unflattering thesis, though his arguments were wrapped in scholarly jargon. The local press, always ready to skewer the bombastic clergyman, highlighted Ben’s new references in the book.
“Death threats,” Sophia said.
Ben sighed. “All over again. But stupid. To be ignored.”
Sophia wore an anxious look. “No one should ignore things like that, Ben. Nasty phone calls.”
Ben reached for the article and tucked it between some books. “That’s not why we’re here tonight.”
Sophia sighed. “To celebrate your book. Among friends.”
“A pre-Christmas dinner,” Ben corrected. “Okay?”
But it obviously was not okay, given the shadow that clouded his eyes.
“To Ben and Sophia.” Marcie raised her glass.
We raised our glasses, too.
Five years ago he’d been bothered by the unexpected attention in the local press, paced the hallways of the school, dropped some pounds from his round figure, and missed classes and faculty meetings. Back then, Sophia had been a saving grace, a new faculty member in the Art History department who suddenly discovered Ben’s charms. Ben, long resigned to a single life since his explosive divorce many years before, had moved into this apartment from the house on Avon Mountain that his ex-wife Charlotte kept. His meaningless fling with that graduate student ended messily, though Charlotte hammered at it in court and Ben bowed to her demands. Their two children, Martin and Melody, sided with their mother. A bad time for Ben, who then lost himself in his books and research and his students’ lives—until the flamboyant Sophia—she was still Sophie then—squired him to parties and dinners and her bedroom. Upstairs.
Ben slopped wine on his sweater, didn’t notice, his mind elsewhere. His hand trembled. Marcie asked him something about the book, but he didn’t answer. She repeated the question.
“What?” Ben looked up.
Sophia answered for him, a hint of concern in her words. “Ben had a visit from Martin earlier.”
Ben said slowly, “My son has never been happy.”
Sophia addressed us, not Ben. “He’s the prodigal son who returns to beg fellowship with his father, and then finds fault. Blames. Curses…”
“Stop.” Ben’s word filled the room.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s a thirty-year-old man. He acts like a pouting child.”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “He’s never forgiven me for my sins.”
“Sins?” From Sophia.
Ben frowned. “Sin. The original sin. Me, the atheist who devotes a life to religion, sinned.”
Marcie spoke up. “Charlotte is an angry woman.”
“A decade later?” Sophia sat back. “When the nonsense began with that faux minister in Bristol, five years ago, Charlotte was sympathetic, even calling Ben to give support. But when she found out that I was in his life—gossip provided by his roving-reporter daughter Melody who spotted us in town—all hell broke out.”
Ben grunted. “Could we stop this now?” A weary smile. “We’re supposed to be having a good time.”
Marcie sat up. “I am. I love gossip.”
Her husband touched her elbow. “The town crier.”
“I’m the psychologist,” Liz interrupted. “Does anyone want to hear my take on this?”
“No,” I said.
“I have one thing to say,” she went on, ignoring me. “Vinnie and Marcie, two people who don’t belong together but actually do—perfect. Ben and Sophia, both from different corners of the universe but together—perfect. And then there’s Rick and me. Two people who are the only ones in the world that everyone said belonged together but…” Her voice trailed off.
“Ended
up apart,” I concluded.
“And yet we still finish each other’s sentences.”
I reached over to squeeze her hand.
Marcie, flushed with too much wine, started to applaud.
When Ben left the room, banging around the kitchen, Sophia whispered, “Ben isn’t himself. For two days now he walks the floor all night long.”
Glancing toward Ben, Liz told her, “I noticed. Distracted.”
Sophia’s voice dropped. “It has to be Martin—or Melody. His grown children will be the death of him. I could hear Martin here today…yelling at him.”
“Why?”
She clicked her tongue. “Martin doesn’t need an excuse.”
We all knew the tiresome tale of Ben’s wayward children. Martin, at thirty, was in the middle of his second divorce and probably last year as a biology teacher at the high school in Southington. Long hours in therapy, explosive marriages that began in ecstasy and ended in court. Two years at the high school, on probation, he alienated the principal, which meant he’d be unemployed this spring. He blamed his father. A tired mantra—the adulterous affair years ago that detonated his mother’s fury and her civil war. “Dad,” he’d announced the one time we’d met, “never knew how to be a father.”
His younger sister, Melody, drifted from community college to nursing and secretarial schools—even a beauty academy. Then to California to be an actress. Crestfallen, a little scarecrow of a woman, she’d dragged herself back to Connecticut and now slept the days away in the bedroom of her mother’s house in Avon, the Dutch Colonial she’d grown up in when the family was intact. Charlotte blamed Ben for their daughter’s spaciness and movie-magazine listlessness. Melody agreed with her mother. “Dad was never there for us.” A snicker—I’m repeating Marcie’s words, heard first-hand—“He preferred the adoration of simple-minded students, especially when they had no clothes on.” So Ben salaamed his pain and hid away. He stayed long hours at the college exploring the animadversions of Cotton Mather as they resurfaced in the lower Connecticut hills. Until he met Sophia.
The doorbell rang. Ben rushed to meet a deliveryman. He’d ordered Indian food from Bombay Kitchen two streets away. We watched Ben shuffling around in his kitchen, emptying containers into bowls and onto plates. The tantalizing smell of chicken tikka masala, lamb saag. Curried goat. A huge pile of naan. The pungent aroma of curry, chutney, and saffron. On the counter were two six-packs of Kingfisher beer he’d taken out of the fridge. He never cooked, he’d told us—“I can scramble an egg”—and his refrigerator was covered with take-out menus from Chinese, Indian, Peruvian, and Japanese restaurants in the area. And pizza-delivery joints. A dozen of those. Maybe more.