Oink

by J. L. Newton

  “Professor Addams. Let me give the vice provost a buzz. Professor Addams is here,” she said into the phone.

  Lorna opened the door. Her office was not large but it held a heavy wooden desk and a round table with four upholstered chairs in a dull teal. There was nothing to make the space seem homey, no pictures on the desk, not even a plant to break up the dreariness.

  “Have a seat.” Lorna indicated the table. I took a chair and Lorna sat opposite, wearing a black suit with one of her ever-present scarves—this one black and red with a tinge of yellow. Black and red with a tinge of yellow? The combination seemed familiar. And then I recalled the red-winged blackbird I had seen on my walk with Wilmer, and for the first time it struck me that Lorna often dressed herself in the colors of migratory birds. Did she miss her former life? Was there a conflict in her that I had never recognized? Maybe I had failed to see the deeper meaning of her costumes.

  “What can I do for you?” Lorna asked brightly.

  “I know about the corn bread.” I was looking directly into Lorna’s eyes. I hadn’t planned to begin so abruptly, but the words blew out.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I watched as Lorna pulled the scarf slightly away from her neck. So it’s true, I thought. You did make the corn bread. I felt the anger stirring in my body.

  “I think you were the one who told the police to ask me about my corn bread.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Someone told me about the argument you had with Peter. This person heard you shout, ‘You said you loved me.’” Words were gusting from me like part of a gathering storm. “I know you had a relationship with him and I know that Callie gave you the recipe for my corn bread last spring.”

  “This is nonsense.” Lorna spoke with less conviction than before. She had grown unusually still in her chair.

  “You were angry about his relationships with Mei Lee and maybe Jenny Archer as well. And you must have known about the double dipping.” Bits of information swirled now like household furniture being shed by a tornado. “I found out about that too.” Lorna placed a hand on her scarf once more and then set it back, with some deliberation, on the table.

  “This is absurd. Where are you getting this information?” A reddish pink, the color of a rose finch, crept into Lorna’s cheek.

  “Women talk to each other on this campus.” Staff might seem invisible to those in power, but they had eyes and ears and consciences. It was because women did talk to each other that I’d found out about Lorna and Peter. “Callie still has the e-mail in which she sent you my recipe.”

  “That proves nothing,” Lorna said, but made no movement to show me the door.

  She can’t throw me out, I reasoned, because she knows it’s true and she wants to prevent me from telling anyone else. Still, confronting Lorna with a jumble of evidence had not gotten me very far, and, on an impulse, I tried a different approach.

  “You and Peter began at Iowa State, isn’t that true?” I said it in a gentle way, as if Lorna and I were friends or confidantes. “And then you became involved with him. That’s something I can understand. You must have been lonely. Many single people are. I know I sometimes am, and you were a woman in science. I understand that can be isolating.”

  I watched as Lorna’s face trembled and her body almost imperceptibly began to droop.

  “How did you connect?” I asked in a kindly way. “Was it on campus? Did your work bring you together somehow?” Lorna sat silent for a long moment. I inclined my head in what I hoped was an encouraging way. “Was it off campus, then?”

  Another silence, this one longer as Lorna’s body slumped back against her chair.

  “In a café in downtown Ames,” Lorna said, at last, as if talking to herself. “If I had walked my usual route, it might never have happened. I’d never have met him in that intimate way, might never have gotten involved.”

  “But it didn’t work out.”

  “He was married. He’s always married, but it never means a thing to him. Peter is a hungry man.”

  “And you left Iowa because of him.” I was guessing, filling in a story that seemed way too familiar. I remembered that Lorna’s parents had died young and that she’d been raised by a distant, old-fashioned aunt. Maybe that was why romantic love had played such a dramatic role in her life. I understood the need for love and family—all too well.

  “Yes, I took a different path. I became dean at Cornell and moved up the ladder. The top administration there were interested in seeing women advance—as long as the women did what they were told.”

  “And you came to Arbor State because Peter was here,” I continued.

  “That wasn’t the only reason.” Lorna pressed her shoulders back into her chair. “It’s a good job. I thought I could move up.”

  Did Lorna imagine that she could become chancellor? Women who’d been on campus for any length of time knew that such a move was highly unlikely. If women had been around for a while, they knew too much, harbored resentments, and men in power sensed that and were wary.

  “And you became involved with him again,” I prompted, “and then you found out about Mei Lee and maybe others.”

  “Peter was such a pig,” Lorna spat out.

  An insult to pigs, although pigs did fight each other for dominance, biting each other’s ears and tails until a hierarchy was established. But oughtn’t one to expect more from one’s human companions?

  “What about the double dipping? You must have known about that, too.” Lorna gave the door a quick glance.

  “When I found out about Mei Lee, I threatened to go to the Conflict of Interest Committee and to the Office of Research, but Peter said he would meet with the committee himself and tell them that I knew about the double dipping and didn’t report it. Peter could be vindictive if he was crossed. And in the end, the heaviest penalty would have fallen on me. It would have cost me my job. He was going to take that away from me too.”

  Along with your heart, I thought.

  “You knew who disagreed with him on campus because he told you. You knew about the panel because he told you about that, too, and you threw suspicion on other people by feeding the police anonymous tips. You were the one who suggested I was known for making corn bread with goat cheese and caramelized onions.”

  Lorna looked into the blank sky outside the office window. The rain had stopped.

  “I was only trying to buy time to think. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. And, in the end, I didn’t even mean to hurt Peter.”

  “But you gave him the corn bread.”

  Lorna breathed deeply, now openly tugging at her scarf.

  “I’d asked him to come to my house for a drink.”

  I pictured them in the grand hall of that sprawling home in Palomino Hills. I’d noticed the house seemed formal. Maybe Lorna had tried to make it homier by expanding her cooking repertoire. As everyone knew, one sure way to Peter’s heart was through food.

  “I made the corn bread, but I only used enough Furadan to make him sick so he’d miss the meeting with the committee while I thought about what to do. As vice provost, I’m responsible for reporting financial irregularities.” Lorna’s eyes looked glazed as though she were getting sick. “But, in the end, I couldn’t offer him the corn bread. I left it on the counter in the kitchen. Peter wouldn’t listen to me. He threatened me, told me to leave him alone. I was so upset, I ran upstairs and locked myself in my bedroom. The next morning I saw that some of the bread was missing. Peter must have helped himself on his way out. That was Peter, always eating, always sticking his fingers into things, carrying food around in his pockets.”

  I had a vision of Peter standing pink-faced in the corridor by one of the pens stuffing his paunchy self with pieces of corn bread, waiting for his estranged young mistress to feed his animals.

  “Peter deserved what he got,” Lorna said. “He was toxic, like Furadan entering the ecosystem.”

  I looked at Lorna in her bla
ck suit. Her scarf was awry. Tears had reddened her eyes. She seemed vulnerable, a wild bird, trapped. I felt sorry for her. Love, and then revenge, had trumped ambition. It was a familiar story, an age-old melodrama, a woman’s romance.

  “Did you ever follow Peter or send him e-mails?”

  “Never. And why would I follow him? What would be the point of that?”

  “None, I guess. You know I’ll have to tell the police everything I’ve heard.”

  Lorna looked as if she were facing a long migration. “Yes,” she said and that was all.

  * * *

  Pools of rain glimmered on streets and sidewalks as I walked from the administration building to the police station on the opposite side of campus. Best to tell this story in person, I thought, hoping that Sergeants Dorothy Brown or Gina Garcia would be there. As I walked through campus, a flock of geese passed over me, in their eternal V formation, honking noisily, necks extended before them, on their annual journey. The air was chilly in the late afternoon, and I shivered.

  I entered the low, squat, cinder block police station, went up to the window, and asked for Sergeant Brown. In a few moments she stepped through a side door.

  “Professor Addams, come on back.” Sergeant Brown led me to a small room furnished with a metal table and some chairs.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  I said I was fine.

  “I’ve been to see Lorna Vogle, and I need to tell you what I found out.” I felt no pleasure in what I began to relate.

  “What a story,” Dorothy said when I’d finished. “It’s almost like a romance novel.”

  “Yes, only there’s no happy ending for Lorna.”

  “We’ll check it out. In the meantime, there are two pieces of good news I can share. Professor Elliott’s come out of his coma. The doctors think he’s going to pull through.”

  I felt a rush of relief. Lorna wouldn’t be tried for murder. And then I realized I’d come full circle with her, this woman who’d secretly, and not so secretly, worked against the well-being, indeed the existence, of the Haven Hall programs. I puzzled for a moment over this transformation in my feelings. Strictly speaking, Lorna had tried to silence Peter to save her own job, but her collusion with Peter had come from sources more deeply rooted and, in their way, more tenderhearted. They’d come from longing, from a need for love, from the thrill of desiring a very wrong man. I was familiar with those feelings from my early days with Solomon. I looked around the bare office. Like me, Lorna had had passions and painful losses too, and though that hardly let her off the hook for having wanted to make Peter sick and for having threatened our community, they proved she’d had a heart.

  “Also,” Dorothy continued, leaning over the metal table, “we’ve traced some of the suspects in the vandalism case. It seems that the cornfields they destroyed had been sprayed with pesticides. Some members of Save the Fields must have gotten contaminated because there were three visits to the local emergency room about four hours after the attacks. Three young people came in with dizziness, vomiting, and blurred vision. We tracked them down and have picked them up.” Dorothy folded her strong-looking hands neatly before her.

  “Did one of them drive a dark blue van?”

  “How did you know that?” Dorothy cocked her head to the side.

  “Tess Ryan thought she was being followed by such a vehicle. It was a guess.”

  Now, maybe I did know what a member of Save the Fields looked like. I remembered my fierce, red-haired kickboxing colleague. They looked like everyone else.

  * * *

  Wilmer and I sat in the Café Giorgio, a smart, casual restaurant where customers ordered their meals from the chalkboard and carried their wine to the table. I chose my favorite meal—mixed greens with goat cheese and almonds and grilled salmon with brown butter and almond sauce. Even in Arborville’s downtown, you could eat very well. Wilmer and I settled into a table next to the open kitchen where we could feel the warmth from the pizza ovens and the grill. The aromas of roasting fish and melting cheese were concentrated in this corner, and I liked the coziness of the padded, rust-colored banquette. I settled into it and took a sip of sauvignon blanc.

  “So you see,” I said, “meeting Peter at that café changed her whole life. There she was studying migratory birds, thinking about ecological systems and biodiversity, giving value to the smallest kinds of life, and the next minute she was off to Cornell for a career in administration, which brought her to Arbor State where she’s been living the life of a corporate officer, maximizing profit and trying to get rid of what her bosses seem to see as unproductive units in a giant factory.” I paused for a moment to take a bite of the buttery salmon. “If she hadn’t walked down that street in Ames, Iowa, with the café on it, she might never have met Peter in a personal way. I wonder what her life would have been like.”

  “It’s an interesting coincidence,” Wilmer said.

  “Oh, is it like the Butterfly Effect? Does a chance meeting in Iowa set off a tornado in California?” I was thinking of my blustery encounter with Lorna. “Does a small change at one place precipitate a nonlinear result in another? I kind of understand it now.” I looked at Wilmer, who would undoubtedly have liked to revise my account of the Butterfly Effect, but instead gave me a broad country smile. I felt a sudden urge to kiss him. He looked back at me fondly.

  “You’re changing me,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Before I met you I’d never given a thought to inequalities on campus. Now I can’t stop seeing them. Now it matters.”

  I beamed at Wilmer and laid my hand on his from across the table.

  “I’m learning from you too.” That’s what a relationship could do. It could draw you into another person’s world, into another’s perspective. It could enlarge your mind and also your emotions. I studied Wilmer’s friendly face. Was there a future with him? He was smart, and intuitive as well, and I was beginning to see his humorous side. And now he had begun to take an interest in the causes about which I was so passionate. Only time would tell. I knew from my painful experience with Solomon that relationships, no matter how pleasing to begin with, didn’t always pan out.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said at last. “Three women—Mei Lee, Jenny, and Teresa—mentioned that Peter had undergone a change in the last few months. Teresa said he’d gotten distant, more secretive about his work, and imagined at times he was being followed. I don’t know what to make of it. Lorna hadn’t been following him, and there’d be no reason for Mei Lee or Jenny to have done so.”

  “It’s his research,” Wilmer said, as decisively as if he’d solved a math problem with black ink on white paper. “He might have gotten results that someone else was very interested in.”

  “That didn’t occur to me.” I couldn’t imagine anyone being overly invested in finding out about my essay on shrimp and grits. So things weren’t settled after all. There was more to the Peter Elliott case than I’d discovered.

  * * *

  The next day, Polly and I walked the streets of downtown Arborville, the sidewalks clogged with fairies, action figures, belly dancers, wizards, princesses, and cats. Polly was wearing her Bride of Frankenstein ensemble—a long black wig, white face, black mouth, and a long white gown we’d found in a secondhand store and which I’d shortened. It was a striking contrast. Ghoulishness in broad daylight on the prosaic sidewalks of a small town that prided itself on its down-home atmosphere.

  What was Halloween anyway? Even now, as I knew from Donna, some people believed the veil between the living and the spirit world grew thin as harvest approached, signaling a time of winter and the dying of leaves, the migration of birds, and the diminishment of the sun. For centuries, Halloween had been a time of placating harmful spirits who might have represented early people’s fears that the sun and growth and living things would never return. To ward off the darkness, people had taken embers from a common bonfire and placed them in lanterns made of carved turn
ips, precursors of the jack-o’-lantern.

  I looked into the gutter where brown leaves had been swept into piles. Halloween marked the end of harvest and served as a time of contemplating one’s own mortality and of ritually managing the dread associated with death. Community rituals asserted the continuation of life and the power of the community over the forces of darkness and despair. They helped assuage the haunting fear of mortality and were therefore vital to human life. I thought of Isobel before the fire, how the flames had seemed to draw us all together. It being late October now, I felt a chill.

  Everyone, it occurred to me, is haunted by something. Isobel was haunted by her nephew’s death, Alma, by her parents’ lives, and I, by the loneliness of my childhood and by the death of Miriam, along with the comfort and beauty she’d once brought to the world. Polly and I both were haunted by the unraveling of our family and by the loss of a security we’d once shared. But loss, I’d learned, is sometimes necessary. My marriage to Solomon had made me angry, unhappy, insecure, and worse. It had produced a noxious environment for Polly. So Solomon and I had divorced, and Polly dressed up as a witch, a black cat, a Bride of Frankenstein, to keep the scary void at bay.

  But where was Polly? I’d been so immersed in my reflections on Halloween that I hadn’t noticed she was no longer at my side. Had she gone into a store without me? I looked up and down the streets and into the dress shop just behind. She was nowhere to be seen. The sidewalks grew more crowded, but I stood fixed to the spot, not wanting to leave, so Polly, if she’d just wandered off, could find me again. Two men in black suits passed by. How odd. No one wore suits in Arborville, much less black ones. Were they in costume? Or were they using Halloween to make their way along the streets without provoking comment? Were there other men like them on the streets today, perhaps looking for vulnerable children? What kind of mother was I not to notice Polly’s absence? What if I didn’t find her? I hurried into the boutique behind me.