Burning Down the House

Home > Other > Burning Down the House > Page 4
Burning Down the House Page 4

by Lev Raphael


  He shook his head. “But you know, there are mystery

  elements in books I’ve always loved, like Hawthorne, and Poe’s one of the first mystery writers, too. And Henry James —there are mysteries his characters have to figure out.

  Strether doesn’t know about Madame de Vionnet, remember?

  And there’s the conspiracy in The Wings of the Dove.…”

  “Do you think I look at all like Cash Jurevicius?”

  “What?” Stefan frowned, clearly surprised by the switch from mysteries. “Cash?” He surveyed me through half-lidded eyes, as if conjuring up Cash’s image next to me. “In a general way, sure. Same height—build—coloring. Yes, I can see a resemblance.”

  “But he’s so skinny—don’t you think he looks like Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions—with darker hair?”

  “Nick, you’re much leaner now that you’re swimming.

  Haven’t you noticed? But if there’s a resemblance, it’s superficial. You’re not at all like each other down deep. He’s so arrogant, and he’s never cheerful—there’s something missing with him.”

  “What he’s missing is a tenure-stream appointment.

  Teaching as an adjunct year after year would turn anyone into a creep, even Princess Di.”

  “Why are you interested in Cash all of a sudden?”

  “I’m not, it’s just that Juno said we looked alike.”

  “She did? So how was your dinner? You haven’t

  mentioned it.”

  I described the evening lavishly, all the while conscious that I was leaving out the most important fact: I was drawn to her and wondered if it was mutual. The slightly mocking details of my account built up a wall between us behind which I could hide my confusion. Uncomfortably, I thought of Stockard Channing in Six Degrees of Separation complaining about turning life into a series of anecdotes and herself into a jukebox, spitting them out.

  And how much had Stefan picked up on my discomfort

  and my weird attraction? Was that why he hadn’t mentioned Juno until I spoke her name? Was Stefan quietly letting me follow this strange path without interfering?

  Stefan sat up and closed his book. “Juno threatened you if you don’t vote for her as chair? What’s she going to do?

  Toilet-paper our trees with leopard-print scarves? Rent a plane and bomb our house with all her shoes? Park a van outside and blast us with audiotapes of Robertson Davies books?”

  I remembered Manuel Noriega under stereo siege in

  Panama.

  “Wait a minute—you used to think she was crazy and

  dangerous. You used to think she was capable of murder.”

  He gave me a quiet “That was then, this is now” shrug.

  “Nick, Juno’s all talk and titillation.”

  I squirmed a little, like a grade-school kid hearing that last word for the first time and trying not to giggle. And I wondered if I should tell Stefan about Juno’s gun. But then I thought, What if she doesn’t have one? What if it was some kind of joke, and she’d just been testing me somehow?

  Stefan went on: “Juno is just like Merry Glinka. She talks tough, but she’s just fond of her own sound bites.”

  That last bit about our new provost seemed true.

  SUM’s last provost had decamped the previous month

  after an administrative scandal. As her replacement, SUM’s board of trustees—in a closed meeting—had quickly hired Glinka, who was in-state and supposedly scandal-proof, at a salary of $250,000. The big bucks were necessary to steal her away from wealthy, ultraconservative Neptune College in southern Michigan, where she’d been provost for a full decade. Glinka was given to Pat Buchanan-ish

  pronunciamentos, and despite the occasional malapropisms, they had gone down a treat at Neptune College. In the past, though, I had dismissed her fronting as an attempt to balance the silliness of her name: Merry Glinka sounded like an operetta, not a person.

  “Of course Glinka likes her own rhetoric. Who doesn’t?

  But it’s not just talk. She’s truly hard-core,” I said. “She probably thinks the NRA is full of pussies and that Charlton Heston is gay.”

  Mentioning the NRA reminded me of Juno’s gun, and I

  told Stefan.

  “Juno’s got a gun?” he asked, incredulous, and then

  started laughing. “It sounds like a musical.”

  “It’s for real.”

  “That’s completely nuts,” he said.

  “Why? What’s so crazy about wanting to protect yourself? How many people have been killed since we got here? Five? six?”

  He shrugged, as if counting were obscene. “We do live in a city,” he said.

  “Stefan, Michiganapolis will never be Detroit or Atlanta or Miami. This is an overgrown town that thinks it’s a city.

  But that’s not what I’m talking about. The murders have been at SUM— they’re not muggings or robberies or drug deals gone bad.”

  “So what are you saying? You want to be Mel Gibson?

  Arnold?”

  “I’m not saying I would ever buy a gun, but I do think it makes a lot of sense.”

  “Come on, Nick. You’ve never been pro-gun.”

  “I’ve never known anyone who was murdered either,

  right?”

  Stefan nodded. But the deaths we had witnessed or

  become involved in at SUM had not touched Stefan the way they had affected me. Over the past few years he had become obsessed with his fading career as a novelist—the declining sales, diminishing reviews, publishers uninterested in buying the paperback rights for his work. These conditions were industrywide for literary fiction, but being part of a trend didn’t take the edge off his suffering, and he saw what happened at SUM through a haze. More profoundly, though, as the child of Holocaust survivors, Stefan had a much darker vision of life than I did, and this worldview hadn’t been so much shaken as confirmed by events at SUM. “Et in Arcadia ego,” he had quoted to me once. Even in our bucolic college town, there was death.

  “We’ve never known any murder victims before,” I

  repeated. “And even though we grew up in New York before it was all safe and Disney-fied, neither one of us was ever threatened or attacked.”

  Stefan’s eyes dimmed at my reference to very painful

  incidents at SUM, one of which might have ended with my being killed if he hadn’t rescued me.

  “I’ve been wondering if I should take a self-defense

  class.”

  Stefan nodded. “Fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “But there’s something wrong with Juno’s gun?”

  Stefan laughed. “Nick—I think she was goofing on you.

  I bet she doesn’t have a gun.”

  I might have originally suspected the same thing, but without knowing why, I felt slightly oppositional. Stefan’s certainty sometimes brought that out in me. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Juno doesn’t need one. She’s the least

  frightened, least fragile woman in the department. She’s a ball-buster.”

  “She said she had one—she offered to show it to me.”

  “But did you see it? No? Well, then—”

  “She got a threatening phone call when I was there.”

  “Sure.”

  “Why would she lie about the call or the gun?”

  “Juno’s given to self-dramatizing.”

  “Bullshit. Juno’s her own Cirque de Soleil. She doesn’t need to invent any drama. And what’s so surprising about her being harassed? Look what happened to us last month.”

  But Stefan was not persuaded by my bringing up the

  alarming incidents of the semester, which had made me consider giving up my job at SUM and getting the hell out of Michigan. He rolled his eyes as if nothing that happened to Juno could ever compare to what we’d been through.

  “Why are you so suspicious of her?” I asked. “Why

  don’t you take her seriously? Why does s
he push your

  buttons?”

  “She’s too outrageous, like a bad drag queen.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “No—the hair, the clothes, the attitude.”

  “She’s a free spirit,” I argued.

  “She’s a banshee,” he countered. “A shrew. A virago.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Thesaurus.”

  “Well, why are you defending her so much? Why do you

  believe her?”

  “Stefan, I was there when she got the call—I saw her

  face. She wasn’t acting. Somebody’s harassing her, and you know that’s usually just the first step. So of course she bought a gun. And I don’t have to see it to believe it.”

  “Listen, if Juno has a gun, then Merry Glinka has a

  howitzer. And a humvee.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. SUM’s administration building looked like a cross between a temple and a fortress, and I had a sudden image of troops swarming up its steps.

  From Stefan’s lighthearted reference to our new provost, I knew he was still in a really good mood. He hadn’t even brought up the campuswide resentment about Glinka’s salary or the lavish buyout of SUM’s previous provost. Our university had a tradition of flinging cash like confetti at departing mugwumps, so if you were high up enough, being kicked out in disgrace could be very lucrative.

  “Glinka’s probably going to move on as soon as

  possible,” Stefan had reasoned. “Run for senator, governor.

  SUM’s just a quick step up.”

  That made perfect sense to me. A larger school would

  give her even more notoriety. To date, Glinka’s media fame in large part resided in having authored a smarmy book on her life in the Reagan administration as an undersomething, which earned her guest shots on MSNBC where she could bash Alan Dershowitz. Her political connections had guaranteed constant visits to Neptune by the likes of Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, Orrin Hatch, William Bennett, and other freethinkers. Her name and photo often popped up on the local news and in the Michiganapolis Tribune in connection with one of those dim luminaries. I’d always cringed as much at Glinka’s photos as her declarations: she had the hard, flat beauty of an android in Blade Runner. And now that she was entrenched at SUM, was it time to run screaming onto the highway, warning everyone about the pods?

  We had a glass of Vouvray and watched Shakespeare in Love on DVD. Once again, we relished the satire, which works on two levels, like Shakespeare’s plays, and ogled Joseph Fiennes, though I thought Stefan had more piercing eyes. But early on, I was disturbed by Gwyneth Paltrow’s rhapsodic desire for a love “that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.”

  Was that what I was unconsciously seeking after years of sanity with Stefan—immolation? What the hell for? Wasn’t my life at SUM tumultuous and unpredictable enough?

  Despite all the wine and scotch I’d had that evening, I wasn’t too sleepy, so after the movie, I headed to my study to check my e-mail before bed.

  Now, sometimes I can resist that particular nightcap, but most evenings I’m curious to know who in the widespread but insular world of Wharton scholarship might be contacting me with a question, request, invitation to a conference, or sometimes even a compliment—though I don’t get many of those. Most academics are as free with praise as they are with money for decent clothes.

  Stefan says I obsess about my e-mail and check it too often. But since I’m the world’s foremost Wharton

  bibliographer (and the only living one)—a status that carries weight everywhere but at SUM—I like logging on to feel important, if only in cyberspace.

  Of course Stefan admits that he’s obsessive about snail mail, as finely tuned to the sound of the UPS truck as a dog to a trainer’s high-pitched whistle, ready to race down to the curb if he’s at home when the mail arrives, so we’re both ensnared by our expectations. Stefan still talks about the transformation one little letter made in his life, the first time he had a story accepted after years of submissions that came back with form rejection slips.

  My study is a deeply calming room, and I needed it after the disturbing conversation with Juno. Sharon likes to gently mock it as overdone, but maybe that’s what I need to shut the world out. Soundproofed by heavy maroon drapes and

  oriental rug, the small room is filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The furniture is substantial, too—an Empire-style desk and chair, plus an overstuffed armchair and ottoman upholstered in a tapestry print of Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses. I feel comforted there, cocooned.

  I slipped Maurizio Pollini’s Chopin Ballades into the CD

  port and dialed up the university to access my e-mail. A quick glance revealed it was currently all SUM or EAR related.

  Much of what comes on e-mail from the university or the department isn’t remotely dramatic or interesting:

  announcements of lectures, policy changes, beheadings, that sort of thing. Like most departments at SUM, EAR has its own listserv so that you can send a message to everyone in the department, staff included, which means endless trivialities endlessly repeated, commented on, disputed.

  Usually I wade through all that inattentively, deleting messages without scanning too much past the subject lines because there’s so damned much of it.

  But I didn’t get far at all that night because Stefan followed me, came up behind me at the computer, and ran a finger along the nape of my neck, easing my fatigue and tension as if he were a shaman drawing evil spirits from someone possessed.

  “Boom, boom, boom,” he said softly. “Let’s go back to my room.”

  I turned, grinning. “Jeez, I haven’t heard that song in years. What was the guy’s name?”

  Stefan said, “Doesn’t matter. Come on.”

  I exited Netscape, shut down the computer, and followed him upstairs, where he’d filled our bedroom with musk-scented candles. He showed me the CD of golden dance oldies he’d put together as the evening’s soundtrack: Sylvester, Grace Jones, Heaven 17, ARC.

  “Wow. This music takes me back years, back to when

  we were gay.” I laughed, remembering our hot youth, as Byron called it. Stefan set the CD to play. There were enough candles burning so that with the lights off we could still see everything we were doing.

  And with the large mirror opposite the bed, it was quite a show.

  An hour later, I thought through a haze of satisfaction that it had been like the perfect swim: the plunge, the power, the surge, the wonderful exhaustion. And lying next to Stefan, I felt that sense of glowing protection you’d find in some guided imagery trip or meditation. I stroked his chest, which in the candlelight seemed as serenely burnished as a Roman legionnaire’s breastplate.

  This was my reality—my center—my home. We were

  soul mates. How could I even question that?

  The CD was playing over again, and Grace Jones was

  singing ominously about not being perfect. Was the song a warning, a plea?

  Stefan asked, “Do you miss those years when we first

  met?”

  “Well, we were both in grad school, so I’d never go

  back to that. Never. Graduate school is an exercise in being a worm. That’s why I try to be nice to grad students when I get the chance, because I’ve been through it.” But Stefan knew how I felt; there was no need to tell him. I was just surprised by his question.

  “No, not grad school—the rest of it, I mean. Being out and young in New York.”

  “Dancing all night? Recreational drugs? Recreational

  sex?”

  “Any of that. All of that.”

  I nodded, my head filled with visions of a life Andrew Holleran captured in Dancer from the Dance, his reworking of The Great Gatsby. Even though we had entered the gay club scene after the book came out, to Stefan and me, Holleran’s gorgeous, sad book had at times seemed more like a memoir or chronicle than a novel. We could
have written some of those pages, some of those scenes. Stefan had always been good-looking and popular, but I’d probably slept with as many men because I had what was almost as good as beauty then— I was young, and eager, and easily impressed.

  Given our histories, it was a miracle we were healthy.

  “So?” Stefan asked.

  The wild years before AIDS really exploded were not a time Stefan and I talked about much anymore, and I never brought them up with other people, even when pressed. I wasn’t denying it to myself, only to them, because I didn’t want to confirm stereotypes about gay men as promiscuous and drug-crazed. That time was like an ancient city lost to a flood, its color and life vanished beneath smooth and tranquil water. Stefan and I had settled down a very long time ago.

  Was that my problem, then; was I too settled? Had I ended up like D. H. Lawrence’s repulsive vision in Women in Love of couples “each in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy"?

  I said, “Don’t people always miss the time in their lives when things seemed more open?”

  Stefan waited for more.

  “Like Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost,” I said. “The world was all before them. We didn’t know where we’d end up, what our lives would be like. All those possibilities are gone. Come on, Michigan? As improbable as moving to Jersey when you grow up in New York. But it worked. It’s working —most of the time.” I mentally brushed aside the violence we’d witnessed. “There was no way of knowing. I don’t know.”

  Stefan eyed me thoughtfully because I was babbling.

  I tried to slow down. “Thinking back makes me—”

  “Nostalgic?”

  “Not at all. Nauseous. I get this sense of vertigo, like I’m looking over a cliff, down into my old life.”

  “So you don’t ever wish you were younger?” He softly

  wiped sweat from my forehead, absentmindedly licked his hand.

  “No way. That’s not it. What I really wish is that I had tenure. And that Sharon was completely recovered— now.

  And that nobody we know would ever get threatened or

  harmed or killed ever again.” I didn’t say that I also wished that my uncertainty about Juno would disappear. “And I want your film deal worked out and the movie to get made and be nominated for a Golden Globe so we can fly out there and chat up Daniel Baldwin at the awards.”

 

‹ Prev