Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  “I don’t know.”

  “None, because they all asked for incompletes.”

  I laughed.

  “How many linguists does it take?”

  “How many?”

  “None, because the word is not the thing. How many department chairs?” he went on.

  “You tell me.”

  He smiled. “None—it’s easier to stab someone in the back with the lights off.”

  And instinctively, we both turned to where Lynn Broadshaw was raving across the room about something or other, his lips flecked with spit. Stefan called him “Niagara,” because when he got excited, he could spray you from across a conference table.

  Bill and I shuddered a little.

  “How’s your dissertation going?” I asked.

  But Bill Malatesta was still looking at our chair. “I need help,” he said, fixing me with his intense blue eyes as if making me promise something, and then he walked away.

  Now that was the second person at this party to ask for my help. What was I, the United Way?

  I looked around for Stefan.

  Rose Waterman saw me and headed over, slowly pushing her way through the crowded room. She was the provost and so I couldn’t escape. At seventy, Rose was nearing retirement; in her many years at SUM she had inexorably risen from assistant professor to professor to chair to dean to her current position, where it was believed she ran the entire university, because our brainless president was all bonhomie and fund-raising. Since she had complete control of SUM’s financial affairs, she was of course widely disliked and even feared. She had an excellent memory and was relentless once she had decided on a course of action. It was rumored that she had taken a personal dislike to Stewart Green, chair of the old Journalism Department, and had punished him years back by arranging for the department to be demoted to a program within Communications, depriving Green of power as well as the salary supplement that department chairs earned. When Green committed suicide soon afterwards, his death was unavoidably linked with the way Rose punished him.

  I suppose the aura of power was why Rose had so many abusive nicknames like “The Terminator” and “Darth Waterman”—to make people less anxious when they mentioned her. Some people called her Smokey, because she smoked several packs of Marlboros a day (though mostly in private, it seemed) and everything about her stunk of smoke: her curly reddish hair, her small ringless hands, her breath, her clothes, her office, even the memos she signed.

  Stefan complained to me that the campus criticism of Rose was sexist, and that if she were a man, we would all applaud her power, her drive, the commitment that most nights kept her working in her office in the Administration Building well past midnight.

  Rose greeted me tonight with “How do you like it here at State?”

  “It’s been a year,” I said, puzzled.

  “Yes, I know that.” She looked as if she could have told me the exact date, even the hour of my arrival at SUM. She waited for me to say something. That was another thing about her I disliked: her silences. Somehow Rose Waterman managed to make people feel stupid without saying a word. And while you hesitated, you felt she was gathering information.

  So I turned it around: “How do you like it here at State?”

  She frowned. Junior faculty members obviously did not tease her, and I suddenly felt like Dorothy trembling in the Hall of Oz.

  “It’s home for some of us,” she said sharply. “Others are just passing through.” She smiled, revealing her tobacco-stained teeth.

  Did that mean me? Stefan had been hired as an associate professor with tenure, but I would have to go up for tenure in a few years, and even though I’d been assured it was pro forma, the thought made me nervous. Was Rose trying to warn me? I knew that’s how it was done—nobody said things directly, you were just encouraged not to be hopeful, not to plan to stick around. Was that why she had picked me out tonight to talk to? Usually at parties we just exchanged a few remarks and moved on.

  At the best of times, Rose stirred a visceral unease in me that had nothing to do with the way she looked or even her position at the university. It was her accent. Whenever I heard anyone in their sixties or older with a German accent, I imagined they might have been in the Nazi Party. I couldn’t help it. Hell, when I saw a dachshund, I wondered what its grandparents had done during the war.

  Behind us now, someone agitated was talking about the latest anti-gay incident on campus. A number of bridges had been splattered with painted slogans: “Hitler Was Right—Kill the Queers!”

  “Hah!” Rose muttered, looking disgusted. “As if that’s important.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?” 1 asked. “As an administrator it should. Homophobia is no different than racism or anti-Semitism—”

  “—Why do people say that?” Rose interrupted. “It is not the same. Homosexuals are not a minority group like blacks. It’s a moral choice, a moral question.”

  I was flummoxed by her lack of understanding, and that she would reveal it to me of all people. Usually Rose Waterman gave nothing away.

  “But don’t you think the homophobia on campus is connected to the anti-Semitism on campus, the swastikas on Jewish students’ dorm doors, the letters in the student newspaper condemning Israel at every opportunity, and the speakers who come to SUM to deny the Holocaust or blame Jews for everything from the slave trade to AIDS?”

  “No,” she said. “I do not.”

  “And what about the way black and white students don’t socialize here, how they sit separately in classrooms and the dining halls? And the black students getting hassled, abused, even beaten up? The university has to fight all of that at the same time, it has to encourage groups to act together.”

  Rose had flushed and seemed about to denounce me in some way, but before she could say anything, we all heard a sharp cry and Betty Malatesta came dashing out of the kitchen, her face red.

  People were crowding into the kitchen, where Mrs. Broadshaw was looking stunned.

  “She burned her hand,” somebody said, and first aid was mobilized.

  Rose was by her side while the ice was being applied, murmuring something that seemed to calm her down.

  Lynn Broadshaw was nowhere in sight, and the noise level rose as if everyone had decided at the same moment to pretend that nothing had happened.

  Maybe nothing had.

  I found Stefan on the patio, and I realized then that it was late. Everyone out there looked drunk and tired. I was, too.

  I waved Stefan over, mouthing, “Let’s go.”

  “I think I should tell you something,” he said as we were leaving. “It’s about Perry. Perry Cross.”

  I wasn’t really listening. I just followed Stefan out to his Saab, annoyed that he had apparently found Perry so interesting, and all night, too. It was cool and very clear in the sky.

  “I know Perry.” Stefan sounded stiff, tentative, like someone on a soap opera coming out of amnesia.

  “Perry? You know him! How?”

  “Let’s go home.” He started the car and we drove away down the maple-lined street.

  “Listen,” I said. “Just spit it out! Everyone I talked to tonight has been acting like James Bond. Enough! If the Jaguar prowls at midnight, don’t make me get my decoder ring, just tell me what it means!”

  Stefan said, “Wait,” but he didn’t look at me or take my hand or smile.

  4

  STEFAN INSISTED ON MAKING A FIRE when we got home even though it wasn’t really cold enough.

  “Atmosphere?” I asked. “This must be really bad.”

  Stefan pushed in some more kindling, lit it, and turned to me, still squatting. “No, it’s humorous, in a way.”

  “Remind me to smile at the funny parts.”

  I sat back in the large leather armchair, put my feet up on the ottoman. Stefan sat cross-legged near the fire, which was catching quickly.

  “Okay,” Stefan said, as if he were about to take medicine he didn’t like. “When I was i
n my first year as a graduate student at Columbia, Perry was at Yale. But he came down from New Haven to sit in on a writing workshop—that’s where we met. He was thinking about switching to our writing program.” Stefan shrugged. “And I wanted to get out of it, and switch to the regular graduate program in English.” He paused. “Everything started one night when Perry and I went out for drinks after a really degrading class. The professor bashed the stories like pinatas.”

  “Ouch.”

  “And there was a girl with us, too, Maggie. She was sweet and pretty and half in love with both of us.”

  “And confused,” I added. “Since you were both gay.”

  “Well—I wasn’t sure back then.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then went on. “It was safe,” Stefan said. “For all three of us.

  They did movies, he explained. Parties, dinners, shows and bookstores, always bookstores—around Columbia, along Fifth Avenue, in the Village. They were happy un-self-conscious refugees, fleeing what they must have thought were the wilds of sex and complication into something purer: friendship. They wound up trapped by their flight. At least Stefan did.

  “We were driving,” he said. “Up Broadway from Columbus Circle, from a movie. Maggie was sick, she didn’t go. It was late, very late. Perry put in a Bowie tape, ‘Aladdin Sane,’ and up past Seventy-Second it started raining. All these red reflections, tail lights everywhere, red lights clear uptown. And we stopped, and Bowie’s singing, ‘Gee it’s hot, let’s go to bed.’ And Perry says to me, “You’re gay, aren’t you, or at least bisexual?” I felt hooked, I felt… exposed. How could I lie to him, but it felt wrong to say it. So I just leaned over to kiss him. Perry said, ‘You’re not what I’m looking for.’ ”

  And the weeks of hiding what he felt from himself and Maggie and Perry were over for Stefan; he was lost, he was stunned. Because he had never been so thoroughly rejected before. He cut his hair, he tried new clothes, read different books, sought in desperate ways to fascinate and compel.

  But Perry could have been some ancient absolute ruler, watching with amusement while one of his vassals made himself ever more ridiculously humble to win favor from the unyielding suzerain.

  I found all of this amazing. Stefan was a calm and self-possessed man; I couldn’t imagine him in a relationship so murky and full of pain, one where he begged with words, with his eyes, with letters and gifts. “Why’d you waste time on him?” I asked. “Was it a challenge? A test?”

  Stefan shrugged. “I still don’t understand it, completely, it was like an opera or a nightmare. Or bad luck.”

  “At parties,” Stefan went on. “Or in a group, sometimes Perry used to smile at me, but the smile was different, more personal, like he was trying to get my attention, to make me notice he was smiling, and make sure I appreciated it, that he was giving me something, finally. And of course I thought it meant more—how could I not get excited, hopeful? And there we would be at some party or restaurant, and he might even touch me, like while he was talking, to make a point, and I’d be ready to explode, and then he’d head off with someone else, a guy, a girl. It didn’t matter. He wanted me to see how weak I was, how he could mock me. He made me come on to him when we were in the car that night, and then he used it against me.”

  They went to bed a few times, inconclusively, when Perry was very drunk, but there was always the sense of a marquise throwing coins to beggars from her carriage—speeding off in a whirl of creaking springs and driving hooves, leaving poverty and bitter gratitude behind.

  It dragged on for months, with Maggie struggling to make Stefan give Perry up or convince Perry to love Stefan—someone had to be happy if she wasn’t. It was even worse when Perry went back to New Haven after deciding he wasn’t really interested in Columbia’s writing program, and Stefan fired off letters, cards, and called—but Perry wouldn’t vouchsafe an audience, or even a reply. Stefan said he kept thinking of what Gudrun said to Gerald in Women in Love: “You waste me—and you break me—and it is horrible to me.”

  “Horrible. Until I met you,” Stefan finished. “At the MLA conference.”

  “What’s that mean? Until you met me?”

  Stefan hugged himself, eyes down.

  “I was the Red Cross after the hurricane? Blankets and hot soup? Great.”

  I wished then that Stefan had told me all this at the party. I could’ve gotten drunk and maneuvered Perry over to the grand piano and smashed his head with the lid, or pushed him into a bathroom and drowned him in the tub, or shoved his face into the Cuisinart.

  “Then all those times I talked about Perry in my office, you knew exactly who he was!”

  Stefan frowned. “I tried changing the subject.” Then he added, “When I heard he was one of the applicants for that new position, I said some good things about him. Maybe it helped.”

  I’ve always been suspicious of revelation scenes because the truth has seemed sneakier to me, less aggressive.

  That night, by the fire with Stefan, I was not just feeling threatened and betrayed, but scared by something new. I’d often worried about death and losing him that way, and though I sometimes got sarcastic if I saw him talking to a striking student of the male persuasion, I did not ever doubt my importance in the life we had created. This was different, unimagined, bizarre.

  “You helped Perry Cross get the position after the way he treated you? You must be crazy,” I said. “No—don’t tell me, you thought it would be wrong not to.”

  Stefan nodded.

  “Shit, Stefan! Join the Peace Corps if you want to help people so fucking much! Try Bangladesh!”

  “Let’s go to bed.” Stefan rose and came to my chair. I was too surprised to feel I could let go; I said I would stay up for a bit, with the fire.

  “Wake me when you come to bed.” Stefan leaned down to kiss me good night. Was I supposed to huffily pull away, or let him kiss me, or what? The whole situation seemed ludicrous, a cliche: The Confession Scene. The Astonished Lover. Maybe Stefan was embarrassed by that, too.

  I saw myself sneaking into Parker Hall at night and throwing Perry’s books and files out the window onto the lawn. Or I could send him anonymous threatening missives, put some road kill in his mailbox, leave shrunken heads at his door, fly over campus with a broomstick spouting smoky letters that spelled “Surrender Stefan.”

  See? The whole mess was partly like a stupid joke to me. I couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t believe that when Stefan and I first met, Perry had never come up.

  I met Stefan at a Modern Language Association conference in New York, at a session on psychological criticism—at least that’s what I thought it was about. But the very first paper destroyed my confidence, because I could not figure out what the hell the speaker was trying to get across. I could pick out nouns, verbs, and occasional transitions that made sense, but mostly it was gobbledygook. And all around me in the room of about a hundred, people were nodding, smiling—at what? Frustrated, I started writing down phrases picked from his talk at random. I got quite a list: “polysemy of manifest meanings,” “the hegemony of representationality,” “regimentation of reiterative temporality,” “locus of contradictoriness,” “identitarian metaphysics of presence,” “praxis of disposition,” “specious centricity.”

  Behind me a soft and sexy voice murmured, “You left out ‘reiterative exchanges and utterances.’ ” Whoever it was sounded as silky as a radio announcer for a classical station murmuring to you at night.

  Then I turned around and was hooked. He looked a lot like the Jewish runner in Chariots of Fire, with that same craggy sensual face, and he was smiling so sweetly I said, “Let’s get some coffee.” Out in the hallway I introduced myself. He was stockier and somewhat shorter than I had guessed, but not unpleasantly so, with a kind of grace that muted his muscularity; under the tan wool blazer I could see a tight but not too bulky torso.

  I liked the way he looked at me, openly, and his broad smile.

  We stood there chatting about the conferen
ce, and I took in the intensity of his deep-set brown eyes, the sheen of his thick and wavy hair.

  We took the subway down to his studio apartment on Hudson Street, and what I remember of the ride was the Hispanic guy hanging from the strap next to me, his coat and shirt gaping open, revealing one of the fattest, darkest nipples I had ever seen on man or woman. We drank two bottles of something, made love kind of wildly into the night, and then we both passed out. In the morning, we looked as haggard as just-released hostages. What was special the next day, what was remarkable was feeling as if we had slipped into somebody else’s comfortable and comforting life.

  In the morning we laughed about the awful panel. Though I suppose sitting in on it helped Stefan decide not to switch programs at Columbia, convincing him that regular graduate work in English would be the death of his writing. He needed to be plunged into something that alienating to see that his gifts required clearer, more direct expression. And so on our first morning together he seemed to have rediscovered the path that was the right one.

  Once he completely committed to writing, everything seemed to change. In my English Ph.D. program at NYU, we had liked to make fun of people doing MFA’s anywhere, even Columbia (perhaps especially Columbia). We derided their clothes, their egotism, their romantic chaos, as if they had no claim at all to the peaks of literature we had climbed and planted our little flags on. But even my friends at NYU who met Stefan admired him, and went to his readings.

  “He’s a diamond,” a Columbia English professor told me once at a department party in an Architectural Digest sort of apartment where the hors d’oeuvres were arranged to look like a Mondrian. “A diamond,” he repeated, drunk, confident, as if he were a refugee who had smuggled that gem in his coat lining across an impassable border. I felt momentarily jealous not to have thought of the term myself.

  But committing to his writing didn’t answer all the questions or ease all of the pain. Stefan’s gleam of expectation could not withstand the hundreds of rejections that followed us from New York to small and exclusive Adams College in western Massachusetts where we were lucky enough to get teaching jobs together after he earned his MFA and I earned my Ph.D.