Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  I tried calling my cousin Sharon in New York, but her office phone was busy and I didn’t feel like leaving a message for her at home. It was always frustrating not being able to get ahold of her, because she was my favorite relative in addition to being sensible and smart. She was also the first person I came out to, and I’ve confided in her ever since. Sharon was our family’s great success, something of a star. As a psychology major at Barnard in the early 70s, she had gotten an unexpected modeling job that continued after college. She ended up doing commercials, print ads, fashion magazine covers, traveling around the world and making a great deal of money until she eventually gave it all up at thirty-five.

  Unable to talk to Sharon about Stefan and Perry, I cleaned the house all day in a fury; it would puzzle Mrs. McCormick when she came on Wednesday. Then I cleared out the leaves that had started to collect in the gutters, raked what little had fallen in the yard, got a pile of leaves burning on the driveway, washed my car, and even contemplated reseeding a weekly patch under the kitchen window, but I gave up by the afternoon and settled for doing wash and grading all the papers I could concentrate on.

  What made me maddest about the thing with Perry was Stefan framing the whole problem ethically. He was on solid ground, laying everything out like someone setting tiles into a mosaic with a sure, responsible hand. He hadn’t gone off to screw Perry, or driven away to be by himself while I stewed and mourned, or manipulated me into blowing up so that he could feel blameless, cool.

  He was keeping me informed. It would be like having a crisis break on CNN news: I could follow it through each microscopic permutation, all day if I wanted. All night.

  I tried Sharon again later that day and got through. I told her all about Perry and Stefan, and that I had been feeling like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady.

  “If you want a role model,” Sharon said dryly, “why not Alexis on Dynasty?”

  That intrigued me. “Alexis?”

  “Better outfits,” she explained.

  “Yes! Remember those hats!”

  Then I told Sharon that Perry was having dinner with us.

  “Why?”

  “Stefan invited him.”

  “This part is a joke, right?”

  “It’s a nightmare.”

  “Oh, Nick….”

  “And Stefan asked me if I would cook. How could I say no?” There was a long silence on the other end, and I said, “You don’t think I need to see a therapist, do you?”

  Sharon laughed. “Sweetie, you don’t need therapy, you need revenge.”

  “God, you’re right! Dinner should be outrageous, eight courses of Baroque splendor—Truffles on a Tambourine, Pheasant under Tiffany glass.”

  “No. I’d go the other way. Make macaroni and cheese. Tater Tots, franks.”

  “What?”

  “To show Perry you’re not threatened and that Stefan doesn’t care what you eat because your love transcends food.”

  Well, laughing helped, and I hung up a few minutes later feeling much better, but it didn’t last.

  I saw Perry a few times in our office that week and everything I’d admired in him now aroused my contempt, especially when he said he was “looking forward” to dinner! I almost said, “Why don’t you bring Ann-Margret if she’s not busy?” But there wasn’t much point in sharpening my claws. Not now. Not yet.

  Serena Fisch drifted into my office one afternoon, sat on the edge of my desk like a torch singer about to launch into something moody and intense. “So you have a little cross to bear now? He’s coming over for dinner, I hear.”

  I flushed, and wondered if she knew about Perry and Stefan. “Who told you about dinner?”

  She grinned. “Angel child, I never reveal my sources. So tell me, what are you serving, arsenic and arugala salad? Strychnine soup?

  “Maybe you can lend me your cookbook.” And we looked at each other with embarrassing honesty. I realized that I hated Perry as much as she did—and it was frightening, like some conspiratorial moment from a Jacobean play right before a series of gruesome deaths. I certainly had the office for that scene. Parker Hall is one of the older and more dilapidated buildings on campus, an 1880s structure with enormous, inhumanly high ceilings and windows; sagging, heaving floors; exposed piping; more than occasional bats; and lots of dark and smelly corners. Even though my office had a gorgeous view of two big maples and was hung with bright Matisse posters, it always seemed cold and forbidding, like a hospital room that no amount of flowers and cheery hellos can make relaxed and inviting.

  “He is a nasty sonofabitch,” Serena said, crossing her legs and swinging one as if she were a gun moll on a gangster’s lap.

  “But you don’t really know him,” I said.

  “I know enough. I’ve heard enough. I don’t trust him.”

  I nodded.

  When Serena left, I started resentfully thinking about dessert. I make an excellent and attractive cheesecake: the colors and textures always look wonderful up on the glass-topped silver cake dish Sharon gave us on our first anniversary. I would buy a bottle of Baron Philippe Sauternes to go with it, solid but not flashy. Salad would be easy. Stefan loved Brie, so I would make a marinated tomato and Brie salad—the blend of olive oil, garlic, fresh parsley, and basil is almost hypnotic. Braised leeks with a pink peppercorn mayonnaise might be lovely after that, but what about the entrée? That evening I picked through our shelves of cookbooks for something new or reliable, I couldn’t decide, and Stefan seemed anxious when I hadn’t made up my mind by Saturday morning.

  “Listen,” I said. “You’re exploring your feelings, I’m exploring the menu.”

  “Let me help.”

  “Okay. Buy some flowers, tea roses, white, alstroemeria, purple. Clean the bathrooms, wash the guest towels, set the table with Sharon’s china. Trim your sideburns.”

  He didn’t have sideburns, but he got to work.

  I finally chose pasta shells stuffed with escargots, prosciutto, spinach, cream, parmesan, white wine, garlic, and Pernod. The Pernod decided me—it’s so Hemingway in Paris, so slutty and tough. I shopped for an hour and returned with bags of goodies to find Stefan lying on the bed, a hand over his eyes, the window shades down.

  “Are you sick?”

  “Maybe this dinner is a mistake.” He sounded like a medium unsure if she’s contacted the other side or not.

  “Stefan, if I’m a condemned man, I want my last meal to be a good one.”

  “Perry, having Perry over.”

  I asked him to open his eyes: “It’s like talking to a tomb effigy.”

  He didn’t open them. “I’m ashamed of myself.”

  I wanted to shout, Good! You should be! But I just went to unpack the groceries.

  Now, I’m a fine cook if I know what I’m doing, if I’ve made the dish before. Otherwise I get easily panicked, and that whole afternoon I kept rushing to the stove, to the sink or the refrigerator, shouting, “Oh my God! I forgot—”

  Stefan would peer in, ask what was wrong as I nervously stirred, poured, mixed, and I’d snap out a sullen “Leave me alone!” or “Shut up.” After an hour of that he said, “I’m not going to invite people over if this is what happens.”

  “How many ex-lovers did you have in mind? Let’s do a buffet next time!”

  “This would be easier if you weren’t so upset.”

  I was taking shots of Pernod every time Stefan made me mad, or when I even thought about why I was preparing dinner. Each shot I snapped back was like hurling a dart at his face on a wall poster. I began to stop caring how the escargots would turn out; at least the salad and cheesecake were fine. I would just have to keep myself from taking up the baguette and swatting someone.

  Stefan stayed out of the kitchen, but he radiated tension and disapproval the way only quiet people can.

  Showering, I imagined myself on the Riverwalk in San Antonio, or dancing in Key West rain, or walking the beach at Newport, with those mammoth houses gazing out to sea like th
e ugly touching monoliths on Easter Island. They were all places Stefan and I had discovered together.

  I think of this story as an academic mystery, but since some people with a more limited vision would call it “a gay narrative,” now’s the time for me to dry myself off in the mirror and admire my rock-hard chest and washboard stomach, bragging about how going to the gym changed my life. No way. Running, weights, aerobics—I can’t stand any of it now for more than a few months at a time. Then I stop, my clothes start getting tighter, and Stefan begins watching me intently as if his silence could force me into an aria of confession: “Yes! I gained seven pounds!”

  The point is that I hadn’t been heaving and grunting for months, and while I didn’t look awful, I sure wasn’t any slim Jim—and I needed a haircut. Getting dressed, I thought of the I Love Lucy Show: if she were faced with her husband’s old flame, she’d dress to kill, to annihilate, or dress like a hillbilly, blacking out some teeth, to embarrass Ricky.

  “You have a comic vision of life,” Stefan said to me once, in bed, after chasing me around the house while I went “Mee-meeep” like the Road Runner.

  “Is that okay?” I had asked when he didn’t go on. “Do you still like me?”

  “What’re you wearing?” I asked Stefan an hour before Perry was due.

  “Socks, underwear, shoes, pants. A shirt. Oh, a belt too.”

  I didn’t smile.

  “That was like a joke,” he said.

  “Like a joke, but not an actual joke.”

  “You win.”

  “Good, then let’s call Perry and cancel.”

  Stefan ended up wearing the red and blue Alexander Julian outfit—slacks, sweater, shirt—I’d bought him a week before, and he looked too good, too big and inviting, like an athlete turned model.

  Stefan hugged me in the kitchen in the large abstract way that sometimes bothers me because it feels like it has little to do with me. It was not the way I wanted to be held with Perry coming in a few minutes. I wanted one of those hugs that fills the world, I wanted everything.

  When Perry knocked and Stefan went out to the front door, I downed another shot of the Pernod, which was starting to taste vile. I was like a fat little kid stuffing donuts into his tear-lined face, thinking, That’ll show everybody, choking on hurt and rage.

  Perry had brought a bunch of tiger lilies.

  Cheerfully, I said in what I thought was an Irish accent, “He’s laid out in the other room and don’t he look marvelous?”

  Perry tried to smile.

  Great start, I thought, going off for a vase.

  Then I followed them through Stefan’s perfunctory house tour, deploring Perry’s somber dark blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He looked like a camera-conscious young senator, handsome, slick, as artificial as floral air spray. We looked out at the garden from the sun room running along the whole back of the house, but I did not want to share a single plant or shrub with Perry, and so I led us back inside.

  “This is great,” Perry said as we settled down in the living room for caviar.

  “Compared to what?” I asked.

  Perry smiled again, glancing at Stefan for a sign of complicity, but Stefan just sat back in the blue and sea green tub chair, eyes wide, as if expecting those feelings of his to show up at the door. Perry and I were on the full-armed sofa; I squeezed some lemon onto my caviar-heavy Carr’s biscuit and asked, “So what do you think your chances of tenure are, given the budget cuts?”

  Perry took that in, sipped his Southern Comfort. I bit into my cracker with all the verve, I thought, of Margo Channing’s “Fasten your seat belts.” I went on. “Since the department is so top-heavy with tenured faculty, I mean.”

  “I expect to stay here a long time,” he drawled, like a shifty claim jumper weighing his gold before it was even mined. “What about you?” Perry asked Stefan.

  “Stefan was hired with tenure, of course,” I answered before Stefan could. “But he’s doing so well, and now his agent has gotten him a contract with Knopf, so we might get better offers. We’re talking about someplace warm, where we can tan on the way to class.” Well, I had started, and I went on and on through dinner about every one of Stefan’s publications, quoting reviews, letters from fans and other writers who’d seen excerpts of his books in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Vanity Fair. It was all true. He’d been called “remarkable,” “stirring,” and even “brilliant.” I was cheating there, because almost every other writer reviewed nowadays gets called brilliant by somebody, if only in Entertainment Weekly.

  Stefan and Perry ate quietly while I rhapsodized about Stefan’s work, pointing out at least twice that he’d become successful after we met, not before. I was as inexorable as a proud grandfather launching into his grandchildren’s grades, school reports, accomplishments, and personal qualities like a fleet of hot air balloons. I was dizzied by my own praise, the Pernod, and the half bottle of Puligny-Montrachet I downed. They didn’t get a chance to talk about the past.

  Stefan said almost nothing. What could he say? I’d practically renamed several campus buildings in his honor, established a Stefan Borowski scholarship fund, given him a Pulitzer, an American Book Award, and a Congressional Medal of Honor. Perry nodded, smiled, said, “Wow” or “Neat” or “Really?” when I gave him the chance.

  But when I began to feel bloated and sluggish with wine and food, Perry said, “Something odd happened the other day.”

  Stefan asked what.

  “I was in the lot behind Parker,” Perry said. “You know there’s that long lane that goes straight out to Michigan Avenue? Well, someone driving along there slowly suddenly sped up. I had to jump out of the way. It was—” Perry shrugged, as if embarrassed. “It was almost like he was trying to run me down.”

  “Who was it?” I asked, wishing the driver hadn’t missed. Stefan was so right, I did wish that Perry was dead, and would have happily watched him spontaneously combust or keel over onto the table with terminal hauteur.

  “I couldn’t really tell. And I didn’t really see the car.”

  “Students,” Stefan said. “Probably drunk.”

  “It could have been fag-bashing,” I said.

  And now Perry looked offended, as if he could not possibly be perceived by a stranger as queer.

  I shrugged. “It’s been happening. And you can’t tell how much is real, how much is rumors. Like I heard a guy had been mugged in the library, in a men’s room, after somebody lured him in, but he was too humiliated to say anything about it.”

  “I heard that too,” Stefan said quietly, not looking at me or Perry. “Everyone says the Campus Police are homophobic, so that would keep anyone from reporting it even if it was true. If you’re a gay student and something happens to you, nothing seems to get done about it. The Campus Police are much more interested in damage to university property.”

  Perry sniffed. “What a snake pit.”

  “Wait a minute! This is a wonderful place,” I shot. “I love living in Michigan—people aren’t stuck up here, they’re friendly.” I cranked up my Chamber of Commerce speech, which always made Stefan grin because he enjoyed my partisanship, but tonight he was not looking pleased.

  Then I told a long and boring anecdote about our seeing the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco last summer, saying the word “gay” as often as possible, to strike Perry down for ever pretending to be anything else. For still pretending about it, or keeping silent. I interrupted myself to toss Perry a hand grenade. I innocently asked, “You don’t ever march or anything like that, do you?” and went on before he could answer.

  With dessert, I launched into something new: Stefan and me, how happy and productive we were together. I guessed that Perry didn’t have any kind of lover at the moment, and I was as cruel as those rebels in the Sudan preventing emergency flights of food into starving enemy-held villages.

  “We have a very full life,” I said, after talking about our various “travels” and our midsummer trips to the Shakespear
e Festival in Stratford, Ontario. “We’re very happy. We’re thinking of adopting.”

  Stefan stared at me and put down his fork. Nothing dramatic, no explosion, just that. I thought, It’s over, I’ve gone too far, and Perry’s won. I could see that Perry thought so too. He looked like a jackal on one of those nature specials about to dart between two squabbling lions to snatch a piece of the felled zebra.

  “It’s getting late,” Perry said. It was only ten. I managed to ask if anyone wanted more coffee.

  “I’m fine.” Perry thanked us both and rose from the table like a crown prince waiting for the inevitable news from the king’s sick room: gracious, thoughtful, posed. “Dinner was wonderful,” he said. “You’re a very good cook. And that cheesecake!”

  My consolation prize, I suppose.

  Perry shook my hand when he left and I turned back to the dining room. Surveying the littered table, I wondered where I would go now and what Stefan would say.

  He headed for the kitchen, opened the dishwasher.

  When I brought in the first dishes from the table, Stefan said, “You acted like a jerk tonight.” I piled the dishes on the counter near the sink. “A real jerk.”

  “Was dinner okay?”

  He turned. “I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “I’ve never been under the gun before! You set the whole thing up like—” But I couldn’t finish. I continued ferrying dishes in from the dining room as if each plate passing between us marked the end of our connection. When I pictured myself hurling them all onto the floor, I started crying, sat heavily at the kitchen table, wanting him to leave now, to not drag it out anymore.

  Stefan knelt by my chair. Here it comes, I thought.

  “What’s your opinion of Perry?” he asked.

  “Perry?” I reached for a napkin to blow my nose. “Perry? My opinion? Are we voting? Who breaks the tie?”