by Lev Raphael
“Stefan, I’m in it, whether I like it or not. And so are you.”
We didn’t talk to each other again that night.
10
IN THE MORNING WE HEARD MORE NEWS on the radio about Perry. The report said that Perry’s blood alcohol level was three times the level established for drunken drivers, and the death was ruled accidental.
Having met with the Medical Examiner, I didn’t bother reading the Michiganapolis newspaper for a fuller version of the story.
“It’s over,” I said to Stefan, more to test his response than anything else. I didn’t feel finished with Perry’s death, but rather more burdened, now that I knew for sure that Perry was drunk when he died.
“I guess it’s over,” I said, suddenly possessed by the image of Perry stumbling around campus, bombed, desolate, maybe leaning over the Administration Building bridge to puke or cry, losing his balance, falling. It was as pathetic in its own way as William Holden’s drunken death, banging his head on a bed table. What a way to go, even for someone like Perry Cross.
And I wondered, gruesomely, if Perry had died instantly or had struggled against it, called for help or tried to. What would that have been like, lying there in the river with your life draining away, desperate for help, knowing no one would save you?
The thought made me shiver.
But it annoyed me that I was feeling more and more sorry for Perry. The hostility I’d enjoyed before he came to dinner, and all during dinner, was fading. In just a few days he was being absorbed into history, into the past, into my imagination. The process was new to me and disorienting. I wanted to still hate Perry, but it seemed pointless. If anything, it was now his influence on Stefan, his emotional residue, that was the problem. How could you combat that?
Stefan was sitting at the breakfast table, staring at the cabinets opposite him. He looked dazed and forlorn, like someone who had no idea where he was. And he cast quite a pall on what was on most mornings a lovely large warm room: with oak cabinets whose golden stain had streaks of blue in it, sky blue and gold counter tiles and kitchen carpeting, and wonderfully framed and matted Vermeer prints. I liked the prints especially because they were a less than typical choice for a kitchen, and for the way they each opened up to a serenely ordered and peaceful scene.
But Stefan was more like El Greco today.
I was tempted to shove his elbow to get his attention. But I just waited, because I knew he had heard me, it was just taking a while for the stone I dropped into his well to reach the bottom and splash.
“Wh … What?” He focused on me now, but with not more recognition than he gave his cereal.
“It’s all over now.” And then my phone rang.
Claire, Lynn Broadshaw’s secretary, told me that the chair wondered if I wouldn’t mind packing up Perry Cross’s “things” in the office. I was so surprised and grossed out by the idea that I agreed and quickly hung up.
“If you don’t want to do it, why’d you say yes?” Stefan asked me after I went on to gripe for a while. He was fully attentive now.
“Because I didn’t know what else to say. I wasn’t thinking!”
He nodded, and I found his silence insulting.
“Don’t agree with me!” I snapped. “Help me.”
“Just call back and say you changed your mind. What’s the big deal?”
I thought of Bill Malatesta telling me how impossible he had found it to say no to Broadshaw. Wasn’t I just as powerless in my own way? I felt trapped. Broadshaw was not the kind of man who forgot what he thought was a slight, and changing my mind like this would surely displease him. I’d once heard Broadshaw enraged by a graduate student who had contradicted something he said in a meeting: “Who the hell does he think he is! In my day—” And he went on and on about people needing to “know their place.” It was a fiery and depressing litany, and Broadshaw stomped around the department office for days. In case anyone wondered whether it mattered, the graduate student Broadshaw was mad at left the Ph.D. program, whether from fear or failure (or both) I didn’t really know. That’s how things worked in most graduate programs—students who couldn’t cut it, or who for some reason were unpopular, or made someone angry enough, tended to get squeezed out. They disappeared, and usually the circumstances were vague enough to strike terror into the hearts of the other students, who would be eager to show themselves off as superior, dutiful, accomplished in the wake of this disappearance. I suppose it was like the way police states used to operate when Eastern Europe was Communist. The stakes might not have been as high, but the feelings were the same, as were the parties: the captives, the bosses, the collaborators, the onlookers.
“I don’t want to go over there. I feel like somebody’s picked me to negotiate with terrorists.”
“Oh, Nick.” Stefan smiled. “ ‘Que vous êtes romanesque—vous voyez des drames partout.’ ”
“Did you just call me an arch? A Romanesque arch?”
“No, that’s from Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale. It means,” and he paused to translate, “ ‘You’re so romantic, you see everything as a drama.’ ”
That kind of exchange is an occupational hazard of living with a writer, but I was still annoyed. “Stefan, please don’t quote French to me at a time like this. It’s pretentious and your accent is far too good.”
Driving over to campus, I could not stop feeling intensely uneasy about going through Perry’s “effects.”
Broadshaw’s secretary, Claire, helped calm me down a little. That was her great gift. She could make you feel like you were the most fascinating guest at her party. And Claire never raised her voice, never lost a file or forgot to do something she said she would do. That conspicuous competence and breeding threw Broadshaw’s bluster into high and unpleasant relief.
I found her in her office adjoining the chair’s. It was something of an oasis in that bleak building—painted a sunflower yellow with a matching new-looking carpet. The room was hung with brightly colored samplers with dour admonitions, a large antique-looking Michigan map, and what I took to be her young grandchildren’s stick figure drawings. These were always changing, always exuberant and cheerful.
Today she was wearing a very stylish dark green suit, pearls, and a white blouse with flowing jabot; the subdued tones made her look not just serious but important, investing each line of her face with significance. She might have been a senator or a successful entrepreneur, and on a day like this she fitted my fantasy about her—that she was actually rich, and serving out some kind of private penance by working for an extraordinarily difficult man like Broadshaw.
“Thanks so much for your help,” she said. “I left some boxes for you in your office, Professor Hoffman.” She smiled up at me from behind her desk. It was teeming with dozens of family pictures in shiny gold and silver frames and tiny weird-looking cactus plants that didn’t look real.
“Who are they for? Has anyone been contacted?”
“Well, I don’t really know. We haven’t heard from anyone.”
The statement was softly regretful. “So we’ll just leave everything boxed until we know just what to do.”
“Isn’t there always someone listed in the personnel file to contact in emergencies? What about his ex-wives? Doesn’t he have a daughter?”
Claire smiled gently and said, “Well, I don’t really know about that.”
Which struck me as peculiar, because I doubted there was a thing in the department that Claire didn’t know. She’d been around for nearly two decades, had keys to every office, knew all the files.
But Claire didn’t say anything more, just kept smiling, which I took as my cue to leave. I had one more question, though.
“How about his course materials?”
“Oh, Professor Fisch already has everything. The grade book, the class lists, his notes, student papers.”
“Everything,” I repeated. Serena hadn’t wasted a minute! I pictured her triumphantly going through Perry’s desk and file drawers, scooping
up what she needed as if she were on a shopping spree.
“She’s very dedicated,” Claire said with finality, as if arranging the last flower for a centerpiece, smoothing down her skirt to await her guests.
Out in the hallway, I ran into Chuck Bayer, who came up to me with his usual driven smile.
“Need any help cleaning out Perry’s Cross’s stuff?” he asked.
I was still thinking about Serena Fisch in Perry’s office, well, in my office, so it took a while for me to register Chuck’s question. Then I focused on his wrinkled cheap dark blue suit and bland tie, his vague blue eyes, his carefully combed thin blond hair, as if he were on Star Trek and had suddenly beamed down to my planet.
“How’d you know that?”
He shrugged. “How do people know anything around here?”
“Well, it wasn’t in any department memo!”
“Hey, Nicky,” he said, sounding like a druggie. “Chill out.”
I just walked away, annoyed that I had to get advice from him of all people, and wondering why the hell he was so anxious about Perry Cross’s “stuff.” This was the second time he had mentioned Perry to me. I didn’t like it.
Upstairs, I saw that Perry’s nameplate had already been removed from the office door. I had not expected it to happen so quickly. I unlocked the door with hesitation, as if Perry himself might pop up from behind something, sneering, pointing his finger: “You thought I was dead! Surprise!”
There was a neat stack of liquor boxes at the side of Perry’s desk, and it looked incongruous, because I associated them with moving, with change and excitement. But I would be using them to clean up, to erase; each item that went into them further eliminated traces of Perry Cross from the world.
That should have made me happy, but instead I was creeped out.
I sat at Perry’s desk, wondering how and where to start. A line of reference books ran along the back of his desk between alabaster bookends, further held in place at one end by a very pretty clock, and at the other by what I’d thought was a tacky eight-inch bust of Michelangelo’s David on a square base I had taken to be marble. Looking closer, I wondered if the head weren’t carved out of ivory. When I reached for it, steadying the books, I realized the base was malachite, and that this was not some cheap Pier 1 type purchase. The little statue was surprisingly heavy. The base reminded me of a fabulous store in New York opposite the Plaza Hotel: A La Vieille Russie, whose windows were always filled with czarist objets—like enormous porcelain vases with gold handles and trim, extravagant mantel clocks crowned by lolling gilt gods and goddesses, Faberge eggs, and often, that czarist favorite, malachite, whether in tables, lamps, vases, torchères.
I got up to set the David head on my desk, where there was no chance I could break it. And I moved the silver clock too, whose face was marked “Tiffany & Co.” I had seen clocks like that advertised in The New York Times—they cost several hundred dollars. The clock and the David seemed expensive tchotchkes to keep in your office.
Perry’s reference books were nothing unusual: several dictionaries in English, French, and German; usage guides; dictionaries of literary terms; Oxford Companions to British Literature, American Literature, Classical Literature; various handbooks on etymology; an encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. It was almost too representative, too typical, I thought. But there were some odd exceptions: William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; a book about the Nazis and the German press; one on Vichy France; and a large German-English dictionary. What were they doing here? I leafed through all three books, looking for underlined passages or marginal notes. All I found was a series of three dates in 1944 written on the back inside cover of Shirer’s tome, but I had no idea what they could mean.
I hoped Perry didn’t have some gross fascination with concentration camps or something like that.
But then I figured I would find something to criticize in whatever I went through of his, so I piled the books neatly into a Seagram’s box, tightly closed the flaps, feeling oddly virtuous.
There. I had filled one whole box. I was making progress.
I wasn’t sure what to do with his blotter, pen cup, letter tray. They were all burgundy leather, I saw, stroking the grain, and I didn’t want to mess them up. I guess I could ask Claire for some newspaper or something to wrap and protect them with. Then there was the framed and matted Fragonard print over the desk; but that could wait until the end, I thought. I studied the print, remembering its power when Stefan and I had come across it in one of the vast, stifling red velvet and gilt galleries of the Louvre. I liked the painting’s energy, the way your eyes were swept across the disordered draperies of the bed to the swooning, struggling woman and up, up to the young man’s hand bolting the door, and then down (for me) to his taut, tensed buttocks and legs. It was phallic and a bit chilling.
Now it was time to open the desk, and I pushed back in his chair to make it easier, but I couldn’t. I felt awful. Why was I doing this—for Perry? Wasn’t there anyone else in the world who cared for him? Surely someone had been deluded enough to think he was a good man.
“Having fun?”
I jerked around to see Priscilla Davidoff peering at me from just outside the open door. She was obviously not teaching today because her hair was pulled back and she had on an oversized SUM sweatshirt and jeans tucked into fancy brown cowboy boots. She looked kind of sexy, I thought, a little disconcerted as always when I responded to a woman as a woman.
“I’m surprised they didn’t cart his desk away in the middle of the night,” she observed.
I realized then that we were on the same wavelength. “Right, like he never existed,” I added. “And we’d all wonder—”
“The Lady Vanishes, ” Priscilla said, nodding, and we both smiled, sharing our enjoyment of the Hitchcock movie.
I was not used to such a pleasant interaction with Priscilla, so I wasn’t sure how to go on. I hated what she had written about Stefan, but I think I would have preferred being able to chat with her like this, without rancor, instead of enduring our typical frosty exchanges.
“I was thinking of the way Communist countries used to be,” I said.
“Oh, I know what you mean! My grandfather was a Bolshevik and for a while he was in the Soviet encyclopedia, but he eventually got written out.”
That was Perry. He was being written out, expunged.
“Broadshaw wants me to do this,” I said, waving at the boxes.
“Better you than me,” she said, drawing back, and we smiled awkward good-byes. She edged off and then clomped over to her office.
Wait till I tell Stefan that Priscilla and I made nice a little, I thought, picturing how honestly pleased he’d be. He enjoyed the drama of my anger, my grudges, but I knew that he sometimes thought the emotional brouhaha was a waste of his time.
Perry’s desk itself was just like mine across the office: a hulking, scarred, battleship gray affair with no character at all. I pulled open the middle desk drawer, where I found neat trays and tray-lets filled with rubber bands, paperclips, pencils, pens, etc. It was almost a parody of order. Post-it pads were aligned by size—and even by color!
Nothing like my desk drawers here and at home, which were always sticking, since things crept to the back and got caught, mostly because each drawer was chaotically stuffed with more letters, envelopes, business cards, and just plain junk than was ever reasonable.
I reached over to the pile of boxes for a small one and started packing it with the contents of this drawer, trying for some kind of orderly arrangement, but failing. It seemed disrespectful to make such a mess, but I couldn’t help it.
I was almost done unloading the drawer of its contents when I found something underneath a fresh white legal pad. It was a piece of yellow legal pad paper scrawled over in red. It was face up, and when I read what was written on it, I decided that I’d had enough of sorting through Perry’s things for now, maybe forever.
It didn’t take much convincing to get
Stefan to cancel his office hours for the next day and drive up north with me to our cottage on Lake Michigan for a long weekend. It was a relief just to be heading away from Michiganapolis, from the university, from everything that had happened in the last week.
The four-hour drive gets more and more scenic and relaxing as you leave the flat area around the state capital, and north of Mount Pleasant you find yourself in what travel brochures would call “gently rolling” farmland. Then as you head northwest to Lake Michigan there are more and more lakes, the woods are denser, and you begin to feel transported, free.
Which was exactly what I needed, and why I loved the cabin that Stefan’s stepmother had given us when we moved to Michigan. Off a three-mile dirt road near Norwood just south of Charlevoix, it was right on the lake, with over two hundred feet of beach on a deep half-acre site that was well screened and canopied with poplars, white pine, hemlocks—and privacy fencing that did not let our neighbors on either side participate in the nude sunbathing we liked to do on the tiny deck. Well insulated and winterized, with reliable forced-air heat and a wood-burning stove as back-up (and decoration), our cabin was really a gem. We never had people up there because there were just two rooms: the larger one taking up two-thirds of the space was the open kitchen and living room; a cozy bedroom and a bath with a sunken whirlpool tub took up the remaining third of the cabin. Heavenly for two, and even in the summer we never stayed there long enough to get on each other’s nerves.
I also liked it in contrast to the summer home Stefan’s father and stepmother had south of us on Glen Lake. They had completely renovated a Victorian home, giving themselves all the comforts of this century with the style and swank of the last. Though I got along well with Stefan’s father and stepmother, their house intimidated me, and I never truly enjoyed staying there. Not that we ever had much chance. Stefan was still angry at his father for waiting until he was seventeen to tell him he was really Jewish. That was the reason we generally avoided going to Ann Arbor for anything. It was there, midwinter almost twenty years ago, that Stefan’s father had blurted out the terrible secret, and Stefan also heard that his parents and Uncle Sasha had been in concentration camps in Poland—the Poland Stefan had grown up loving and longing for because he thought it was his parents’ home.