Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  It even hurt Stefan to get the kinder “Send us more” or “Try us again” rejections. By the time we were both teaching at Adams, it was no longer almost funny, no longer a fantasy of “Won’t they be sorry they rejected you when—” There wasn’t any “when.” Each manila envelope, each typed label, each trip to the post office was like the part of a painful empty-handed ritual. The man I loved was a prisoner of his dreams.

  One day in Massachusetts Stefan got five rejections in the mail. Five short story manuscripts came back, and I mistakenly told him that John Gardner had tried for fifteen years before getting his fiction published. Stefan yelled, “John Gardner’s dead!” and stormed from the kitchen. I heard the closet door and then the front door close.

  Stefan disappeared down our dark silent road at the very edge of town, past the condominiums stacked like children’s blocks, past the horse farm, trudging with angry hands jammed in his coat pockets. I followed for a bit, to apologize, but his stark striding figure looked so sad I trailed back to our Cape Cod to wait.

  Stefan’s failure had become like a curse in a fairy tale, a sentence we had no hope of escaping, and I felt almost guilty because I was doing so well. My parents had warned me not to go to graduate school in English because there were no jobs, but I couldn’t imagine a more satisfying life than teaching. So, there I was at Adams, enjoying my classes, with half a dozen scholarly articles already published or forthcoming, and a contract to do a secondary bibliography of Edith Wharton’s writing. My chairman said that tenure was assured.

  I felt almost guilty.

  While Stefan was out, I put everything away, turned on the dishwasher, and settled into the enormous ball-footed leather armchair he’d gotten me for our fifth anniversary, to read the draft of a colleague’s article on James Baldwin. In an hour Stefan stood opposite me, red-cheeked, solemn, coat still on.

  “I hate it when you’re sympathetic,” he said.

  “Should I make fun of you? Be mean?”

  Stefan peeled away his coat and came to sit on the wide chair arm. “In the movies you always see the writer typing, crumbling up the paper, agony, pacing, more typing, a sandwich. Part One.

  Part Two is the Letter, the phone call, success. We’re still stuck in the agony.”

  His sadness reminded me of a war memorial we’d seen in Stratford, Canada, the previous summer: a robed woman, head down, shoulders tragically slumped, battered sword at her feet, loss, terrible loss in every line of her face, her robes.

  I suggested Stefan go to bed.

  “Am I tired?”

  While he showered I thought about his work, which he rarely showed me. When he did, it was impossible for me to read anything of his without feeling for the hours he’d sat hunched over his desk, rocking as if to catch a troubling melody, face dark, fingers touching his shoulders, hair, his throat. The nights he worked hardest I wandered through the house, restless, straightening pictures, shuffling magazines, or stalking the evergreen-bordered half-acre behind our house, breathing in the silence and the night, hoping. Hoping he had discovered the words I would someday read in print.

  I couldn’t will his success. I could fill the house with white lilacs in May for his birthday, surprise him with newly published novels he’d forgotten saying he wanted to read, hide jokey little cards under his pillow, cook Julia Child dinners and wear my tux, call him from campus or the mall just to say “Hi!”—but I couldn’t fill the emptiness of continual rejection, which was more awful because so many people from the well-known writing programs like Columbia’s did get published. I suspected that it wasn’t entirely talent, but connections. Every time I opened up another uninspiring collection of stories by someone he might have gone to school with, I ached for Stefan to have that kind of success.

  Stefan was asleep as soon as he got to bed. I put some dishes away, cleaned up in the living room, and then found myself watering plants that weren’t dry. I was nervous. I felt drawn to his study, which I never entered when he wasn’t home.

  I slipped down the hall and into the study, turning on the light after I closed the door. It was a small room, painted a glossy forest green, full of file cabinets and books; but not even the peeling library table revealed anything about him. This room without decoration, pictures, and mementos disturbed me for the first time—what was he shutting out besides distraction?

  I settled onto the dull green carpeting and slowly pulled open the nearest file drawer. His stories were filed alphabetically by year, and each folder spilled out rejection slips, sometimes dozens. I read those along with ten or so stories and it all began to seem anonymous—the stories no different from the Xeroxed rejection slips.

  I had never read so much of his work at one time, and I didn’t like it. While I may have enjoyed individual lines, or scenes, or even characters, reading so many stories in a row I was disappointed. His work was clever, I guess, but empty, and I found myself thinking of our favorite movie, Dark Victory, of the scene where Bette Davis discovers her medical file in George Brent’s office and asks the nurse what the words “prognosis negative” mean. How had I missed this?

  I cleaned up, checked the bedroom to see if he was still asleep, and sat at the kitchen table with a shot of Seagram’s like my father did when he got bad news—the one drink saying he needed not to forget but to be strong. I was struck by how bland Stefan’s people were, and how none were even demonstrably gay or Jewish. His parents had at first wanted to disown him when they found out he was gay. They felt it was a personal attack, a way of hurting them because they had hidden being Jewish, had tried to raise him as a Catholic. His mother even wondered if the Nazis had somehow poisoned her in the concentration camp, changing her genes, and that’s why Stefan was gay!

  Stranger than the absence of gay characters, none of Stefan’s men or women were really Jewish either, which made even less sense. It made me feel invisible, as if he were ignoring that I observed the holidays, lit shabbat candles, and thrived on being with other Jews. I knew that Stefan didn’t get much out of the holidays or attending services, but we had been lucky to find a very liberal congregation near Adams with a woman rabbi and a few gay and lesbian couples. When we did attend or get involved, there was no sense of exclusion or embarrassment.

  Stefan’s fiction was so placid and unemotional; where was his rage at all of them for the years of silence, the years of lies? And because Stefan only found out when he was a teenager that his parents and uncle had been in concentration camps, and that they were Jewish, I was most deeply struck by the absence of any reference to the Holocaust in his fiction. We had certainly talked about it. Just that year we had watched a newly discovered British film of the liberation of Bergen Belsen. In it, British soldiers forced the SS guards to lift and carry corpses, drop, slide, stack them into four or five pits, “as punishment.” The film was silent, there was no creak of carts, no engines stirring into life, no shouted commands—just seven days reduced to black and white minutes on film. The civilized-sounding narrator talked of “graves”—which made Stefan furious. “Those aren’t graves—they’re garbage dumps!” I couldn’t believe the SS felt any different, felt repentant while dropping bodies like a gigolo flicking away the useless stump of a cigarette.

  “My parents were there,” Stefan reminded me. “But they won’t tell me about it. First they wouldn’t tell me I was Jewish, then they wouldn’t tell me what happened to them in the war. I had to read books about it, books describing the ghettos, the trains, the killing. Why do they keep shutting me out?”

  I tried to imagine the dazed and starved survivors wandering somewhere out of camera range.

  I woke up late that night, could feel that Stefan wasn’t sleeping.

  “They should have thrown the guards in,” he said in the dark. “Buried them alive.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  There was absolutely no trace of his anger or pain in Stefan’s stories. So much silence in his writing. Why was he censoring himself so heavily?


  A motorcycle tore by outside, and I wished then for a galumphing puppy I could scratch and rub and talk to. In all the time Stefan had suffered rejection, I had never doubted his work.

  “It’s late,” Stefan said at the kitchen door, squinting at my drink. His face was creased and red with sleep, his hair flattened. He rubbed his eyes, pulled his robe together, and came to sit by me. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was reading. In your study.”

  I expected him to blast me, but he just nodded, leaning back in the captain’s chair.

  He said, “It’s no good.”

  We had been at this place before, I dousing the flames of his depression with torrents of praise—reminding him of Columbia, his successful fiction readings there, like a court chamberlain comforting his monarch-in-exile. But tonight I couldn’t offer anything; there was only silence timidly filled by the humming fridge and vague grunts from the sink pipes. I felt we had come to the end of something and I was afraid. Our first years fragrant with discovery, helping each other finish the graduate degrees, the move to western Massachusetts, the trips to France, England, the Netherlands, renting and decorating this house, all of that seemed one-dimensional now, remote.

  Stefan reached for my glass and the bottle, poured himself a shot, and downed it.

  “You haven’t wanted to see,” he said.

  “What?”

  “To see my work.” He looked down. “You want me to be, I don’t know, famous, wonderful. ”

  “But isn’t that what you want?”

  “Not now, now I just want to write something honest. Something real.” He stroked my hands. “It’s not your fault, it’s nobody’s fault.”

  I pulled open the fridge and found some leftover veal stew and half an apple pie to heat up. Fussing at the sink and stove, I was unable to look at him. Stefan came up behind me, gave me a lingering, pleading hug, as if we’d just had some kind of fight.

  “I don’t have the courage to write about anything that hurts—my parents, finding out I was Jewish, being gay.…” He said this to my back.

  I felt ashamed then of all the times I’d raved about his writing, gone on and on thinking that I was being helpful, when I was just showing I loved him. It was a subtle form of contempt—I had not treated him as an equal, as an adult, but as a glamorous, talented, demanding child.

  “I never have,” he said. “Except once. It was something I wrote about my parents and my uncle, their past, their secrets. My secrets. Just a sketch, really, for an English class in college. I was down from Syracuse on spring break and my uncle Sasha found it—well, I left it out where he could. He went nuts. He said I was sick, I was crazy.” Stefan held me tighter, still talking to the back of my head.

  “What happened to it?”

  “He gave it to my mother, she gave it to my father, and I guess he threw it out.” Stefan broke away. “Wait, I want to show you something.” He went off to his study and returned with a deeply creased single sheet of pale blue stationery that had been crumpled up and then straightened more than once, I thought.

  “My father sent this after he read what I wrote.”

  I read the typed, undated note:

  When we were married your mother said we had to have children because of everything we had lost. I didn’t want to have any. Now I know I was right.

  “Your father sent this to you? What did you say?”

  Stefan shook his head, as if unwilling to remember. “I couldn’t say anything. I felt … repudiated.”

  Feeling suddenly brisk and sensible, I stood up and went to the utility drawer. “Isn’t it time for a reply?”

  He frowned, not following.

  I took the letter and a book of matches to the sink. “Come on.”

  I held out the matches. Stefan hesitated, came over, took one, lit it slowly as I nodded, and set it to the corner of the letter, dropping it into the sink when it started to flame. Little black specks floated up above us as the letter twisted in on itself, crackling, vanishing into black powder and dust.

  Stefan put his hands down in the sink and rubbed them in the ashes, turned on the tap, washing his hands clean.

  “Would it change things?” he finally asked, pale, drying his hands.

  “Change things if you wrote something real?”

  He nodded.

  Details in the kitchen suddenly seemed very clear to me: the Boston fern hanging over the sink, the brass cabinet knobs, the Sierra Club calendar near the stove. “I don’t know.”

  He smiled. “Well,” he said. “It wouldn’t mean I got published, but I’d be honest. Isn’t that a start?”

  I thought then of my favorite lines from James Baldwin’s Another Country, lines I had just read in my colleague’s article: “You’ve got to be truthful about the life you have—otherwise there’s no possibility of achieving the life you want. ”

  I said that yes, it would be a start. Stefan grinned and came to hug me.

  And I was right. Soon afterwards, Stefan started on something completely different: a novel about secrets, and he gave up short story writing. It was the best possible move. On the strength of just two chapters, he got an agent, a publisher, and a healthy advance.

  There were no lights on in our mid-Michigan home while I sat remembering all this, about Stefan’s haunted family, about our years in western Massachusetts, Perry Cross and the party, thinking about the past, worrying about our future—no lights, just the wavering fire I did nothing to keep going. Watching it, I began to feel like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady when she finally realizes what her husband is like.

  I had always thought that Stefan and I were happy together; ten years seemed to have passed with few lasting problems between us. But now I wondered if Perry Cross didn’t signify something dark and untameable in Stefan, some fascination with chaos and pain. It was like the wonderful sad passage in a Laurie Colwin story: “Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects.”

  What if at some level Stefan thought he had to suffer, so as not to betray what his parents had gone through? It didn’t have to make sense, it just had to fit together.

  I grabbed a pen and the TV Guide from the coffee table, and in the margins of yet another article on “Friends,” I wrote a list of my options.

  (1) I could eat everything in the kitchen.

  (2) I could drink until I passed out.

  (3) I could drive around aimlessly all night and come back bleary-eyed to haunt and rebuke Stefan.

  (4) I could call Perry and curse him out.

  (5) I could kill myself.

  (6) I could eat everything in Perry’s kitchen.

  (7) I could write a nasty autobiography, Stefan, Queerest, go on Jenny Jones, and wow America.

  (8) I could hire a hit man to take care of Perry.

  (9) I could cry.

  I stopped there and put the TV Guide down to face the possibility of great pain.

  5

  IN THE MORNING STEFAN TOLD ME he’d invited Perry to dinner. “Here?” I must have sounded like one of those commercials with a shocked housewife. Termites! Roaches! Rats!

  We were having breakfast, Stefan dressed for class, me in my bathrobe. I felt vulnerable, unprepared.

  Stefan said, “He’s had a pretty rough time.”

  “That’s what you talked about at the party all night?” I poured myself more coffee. “What is he, the Ancient Mariner?”

  Stefan shrugged. “There’s a lot to tell. Married twice, divorced, he’s got a little girl and his first wife won custody, he can’t see her at all, he can’t land a tenure track position anywhere, just these one-year, two-year shots, hasn’t really published.…”

  “We’re aiding the needy, is that it? Couldn’t I just send him some computer paper? A little check, perhaps?”

  “It’s different imagining him here, and seeing him.” Stefan was staring off behind me.

  “So it’s not over?”

&nbs
p; “He’s here.”

  It was a stupid question, I admit that. How could it be over if it’d just begun for me last night?

  “Why is he coming to dinner? Why did you help get him the job?”

  “I need to find out what I feel.” Now he looked straight at me, serious, solemn even.

  “Oh shit.”

  “Listen, people can stop for you but that doesn’t mean they end. I have to know.”

  “But Perry was years ago. And I love you!” It came out angry and inconsequential, an unimportant claim.

  “Then you want me to understand this.” Stefan sounded reasonable and warm. “If I’m not honest, what’ll happen to my writing?

  “Wonderful! Now I’m destroying your career! I hate this! I wish I were dead!”

  Quietly, Stefan corrected me. “No, you wish Perry were dead.”

  His accuracy made me feel as belligerent as if I were drunk. “That’s right, and I’m not wild about you either. Go to class!”

  The thought of Perry in our wonderful house absolutely sickened me. On a Michiganapolis dead-end street, it’s a fairly large center-hall brick Colonial, with pillars on either side of the front door, stone urns full of hydrangeas along the brick path, and a small but exquisite garden in the back that explodes with color from April into the early fall—obviously the work of a gardener far more talented than I would ever be. All the rooms in our house were large and airy, a perfect setting for our comfortable, overstuffed furniture, and I loved coming back there from campus, even from a short trip to the supermarket. Imagining Perry in this haven was like discovering scale on an orchid.

  But of course Perry was coming to dinner, no matter what I thought. I wasn’t just up against him, it was Stefan too, and Stefan’s mysterious feelings. After all I’d done for him, been his one-man ticker-tape parade, Stefan didn’t know what he felt! I was trapped. I had to be patient, wait this out, help Stefan decide whether he still wanted Perry or not—and what that meant. Can you see Mary Queen of Scots telling the executioner, “Let me help you sharpen the blade”?