Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  “You think he’ll be in the movie?”

  “I’d take him or any of the cuter Baldwins.”

  “Me, I’m a Steinway man,” Stefan said, and it was so

  corny, even from someone who used to play the piano, that I couldn’t pretend not to get it.

  “What do you wish for?” I asked. “Or regret? Like, do you ever miss that woman you slept with? Madeleine?”

  “Marilyn. It was more than sex. It was—” He sought the words. “Discovery. Freedom. Opening up. I didn’t know how to talk about anything that was inside of me before I met her.

  She taught me that labels didn’t matter. She’d slept with women, I had sex with a guy, so it felt safe. Nobody was going to get judged. It didn’t matter what we were, except together.”

  Now that was a lesson I wish I had learned. I asked,

  “But do you miss her?”

  “Never. She was in my life, she changed it, and then she wasn’t.”

  “Don’t you wonder what happened to her?”

  He smiled reflectively. “Sometimes. I imagine the kind of life she has. Is she married? Did she move to a women’s collective? Is she a political consultant or a stockbroker? Did she join the Peace Corps and stay abroad? Does she have kids?” He smiled tentatively. “Once or twice I thought it would be interesting to write a book like that, about the different possibilities, the paths her life could have taken. But when I read Carol Anshaw’s Aquamarine—remember, where the woman has three completely different futures—I thought it was so good, why bother? People would just say I was copying her.”

  “But it wouldn’t be plagiarism—”

  “No. Not exactly,” Stefan said sleepily, starting to drift off. “Just inferior.”

  So his relationship with a woman came down to a

  question of material for Stefan. What had I hoped in asking him? That he’d admit thinking about women, or about

  Marilyn, a lot, and I’d have an opening to talk about Juno? It hadn’t worked, and even if it had, I just didn’t think I could do it. Telling him I thought I might have the hots for Juno— especially when he had a low opinion of her most of the time —seemed too raw, too humiliating.

  “Do you ever regret becoming a teacher?” Stefan asked, sounding even less alert. I knew this was a loaded question because he had no natural love for his trade, but had learned it. “You could have worked for your father.”

  “And been a drone. Well paid, but a drone. I never

  wanted to go into publishing. Never. So I guess the answer is, Non, je ne regrette rien.” I tried singing the defiant French assertion made famous by Edith Piaf. Stefan smiled benevolently, already half asleep, and he was completely there well before I was.

  He left me with some questions. What was behind all his probing about the past? Was he like Obi-Wan Kenobi picking up “a disturbance in the force"? Registering on some level what had been roiling inside of me?

  I felt like a coward. We had been through so much together, and yet I wasn’t confiding in him.

  It was as I fell asleep myself that I realized with faint relief that at least I’d stopped thinking about Juno’s gun.

  3

  BY the time I woke up Thursday morning, Stefan had already headed for campus, leaving me a welcome pot of Sumatran Mandehling down in the kitchen and a very unwelcome note: “See you at the reception this afternoon.”

  I’d been so obsessed about having dinner with Juno, I’d forgotten the SUM reception honoring faculty who had

  published books in the last five years.

  Not the last year, mind you, but five years. That turned what could be considered a mildly dignified event into a cattle call. At a university SUM’s size, there would be hundreds of faculty who’d come, determined to squeeze some joy out of their miserable academic lives. There would be a reception— plaques—and probably lip service about how important their contributions were, when in fact everyone knew that it was really the football, basketball, and hockey teams that the university cared about because their success was directly proportional to alumni donations.

  I made myself breakfast, trying not to think about the reception, trying to slow down, focus on my surroundings, make the moment last. Maybe someone should market

  Zenflakes. I know I’d give them a try if they offered some calm.

  I mixed chopped shallots and herbs de Provence into egg whites to start an omelet and sipped some grapefruit juice, thinking about Juno’s fear, and whether someone had actually been spying on her last night. I made a mental note to call her about what I’d seen—or thought I’d seen. I didn’t think she’d accuse me of being Chicken Little, since the sky had fallen for me and Stefan. My office had been broken into, we’d

  suffered arson—

  So why didn’t I own a gun? Knee-jerk New York

  liberalism that brands gun owning as savagery? Or just plain stupidity on my part?

  After breakfast I cleaned up in the kitchen, enjoying the smooth, cool feel of the new gray-blue granite countertops and thinking about the reception. SUM had never had one of these faculty receptions before, but was always throwing blowouts for winning teams.

  I imagined it would be grim: a horde of shabbily dressed geezers and geeks whose uninviting-looking and unreadable books would be on display. Deathless tomes on soil science; the evisceration topos in Bulgarian medieval epic; and various disquisitions on macro-, micro-, and velcro-economics.

  Spicing that visually and textually dull stew would be several handfuls of books that were both attractive and interesting to more than a small audience.

  I confess, my Edith Wharton bibliography could certainly be classed with all those publishing wallflowers. But that didn’t have to make me like the category. I’d published the book before coming to SUM, so I was actually going along as Stefan’s partner, and that had involved some murkiness, since Stefan’s call to the provost’s office to find out whether I could come with him had been very inconclusive. No,

  partners and spouses were specifically not invited, to keep numbers down. But they would not be excluded if they showed up.

  Lovely. Let’s honor the faculty and not invite their loved ones.

  It wasn’t as if Stefan was eager to go himself. His plaque would mention two novels, both of which had tanked, and on a bad day, the plaque would no doubt be a kind of visible reminder of their failure. Would he even hang the plaque up in his study?

  But given his excitement about the impending film deal, he felt armored enough. The money wasn’t in billions of dollars, the way everything seemed to be measured these days, but it was a lot: a $50,000 option payment against a purchase price of $300,000. And all that for a book that had just barely earned back its advance of $3,500.

  Nothing this wonderful and life-changing had ever

  happened in Stefan’s career before, which made it even more extraordinary. God, being a writer was like being some kind of invalid—you always needed protection, cushioning from anything that might depress you: reviews, another writer’s conspicuous interview, and just the plain sight of thousands of books at any of the book barns masquerading as stores, each one more than just a challenge but a punch in the stomach, reminding you that you were no one, nothing, just another piddling author.

  The only thing worse than not being published, Stefan was fond of quoting, was being published, and it was true enough for him.

  I suppose Stefan was also going to the reception because of a touch of morbid curiosity, and a vague search for material. Humani nil a me alienum puto, in Terence’s words.

  Rough translation: I’ve seen some pretty weird shit in my life.

  If EAR events were depressing, these large assemblages of SUM faculty were a special kind of grotesquerie. Perhaps because few faculty members knew professors in other

  colleges, people tended to eye each other with suspicion and hostility, as if they were rival claimants to a fortune and anyone else’s presence dimmed the luster of their future. It was perhaps a b
it like everyone crowding Count Bezhukov’s reception room in War and Peace, only nowhere near as colorful.

  Yet the smoldering envy was ridiculous, because other faculty members weren’t the enemy: the administrators were.

  They were the untalented smiling thugs pulling down

  enormous salaries while SUM faculty were among the lowest paid in the Midwest. With huge travel budgets, SUM

  administrators trolled around the country on fund-raising junkets or attended meaningless conferences in plush resorts, while most faculty had to beg their department chairs for travel money to legitimate conferences at distinctly

  unglamorous locales like Lincoln, Nebraska, as opposed to Montreal.

  And no doubt people would also be grousing about

  SUM’s latest lunacy: a task force to study the institution of a Whiteness Studies Program, housed in the College of Arts and Letters. Whiteness Studies was the newest fad in academia, including everything from disquisitions on Elvis to the fiction of Erskine Caldwell. Some people thought it was post-cutting-edge, others that it was a sick joke, and many branded it racism with a pretty face.

  Bringing Whiteness Studies to SUM was the brainstorm

  of our mooncalf president Littleterry, SUM’s former football coach. He had mistakenly dubbed the initiative “White Studies” when he lost the notes for the little speech announcing his intention and had to extemporize. Littleterry’s handlers usually managed to keep him from making such gaffes; as Winston Churchill had once said about a rival, “Each time he speaks, he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.”

  There had been one or two protest demonstrations on

  campus so far, and isolated outbursts from faculty, but no concerted opposition, since the task force hadn’t even had its first meeting yet. There was a general feeling that like most so-called innovations at SUM, this one would be responsible for a monsoon of memos and meetings, after which—in

  typical university fashion—little or nothing would happen.

  Paperwork was to SUM what incense was to the Byzantine Empire. And of course, given the ideological time lag at SUM, if a program was created, it would already be passé, and there would be pressure to create a Great Books track for all freshmen or something equally revanchist.

  I thought about all this on and off that morning and

  afternoon as I graded sets of papers that were generally very good. My notoriety on campus had swollen my enrollments, but the students weren’t all potato-heads. I was actually drawing a more insightful, mature set of students whose writing was above average.

  Though “average” was relative, of course. In the decade-plus that I’d been teaching, I’d seen command of the language slip and slide. Whether it was due to MTV, the Web, or global warming’s impact on neurological functioning, I couldn’t tell.

  Stefan said that even his graduate students seemed to be writing more pallidly, more imprecisely, and he was frequently shaking his head in disapproval and quietly pained surprise those rare times we graded papers together. Of course his classes were small, and his piles of papers matched, so his complaints didn’t last long, especially when I reminded him, “This is why we’re here. To help our students. That’s our job.”

  The reception was being held at SUM’s Campus Center/hotel, a featureless redbrick and concrete building that had grown since the 1950s rather like Michiganapolis itself: haphazardly.

  It was a building easy to get lost in, with its winding wide corridors and frequent cul-de-sacs camouflaged by hulking planters and chairs and couches made for lurking. Despite the glaring overhead lights and the recent remodeling, it gave you the murky feel of Blade Runner.

  The plus side was that, like many of SUM’s uglier

  buildings, it was well landscaped and set among enough old trees not to be a complete eyesore. Nevertheless, as I parked nearby and headed inside to meet Stefan, I cringed; not because of my aversion to the building’s decoration but because I’d avoided it ever since my Edith Wharton

  conference two years before—a conference that, foisted on me, had lost me as much sleep as Lady Macbeth (with only half as much fun) and had led to, as Juno said, “all those murders.” Just outside the wide chrome-framed glass doors, I hesitated, catching a glimpse of the dark blue, orange-flecked twelve-by-twelve granite tiles decorating the bottom half of each wall. Pretty in situ, but ugly when wielded by a vengeful hand, as someone had done a few years ago, when the center was being remodeled during my conference.

  Standing there poised to walk in, I felt the pull of noise and commotion—and memory. This building had been the

  scene of very ugly moments in my career. It was tempting at that moment to imagine saying to Stefan, “I want to leave Michiganapolis—I want to start over again. Somewhere, anywhere.”

  Perhaps, then, my attraction to Juno was nothing more than a warning, or an ache. My life had grown too restrictive, and I needed to break free.

  As I opened the closest door, no ominous thunderclap

  greeted me or warned me off; no frenzied birds whirled up into a Gothic sky. Nothing so corny. I heard a silky voice behind me: “Yo, Nick. Wassup?”

  It wasn’t a hip-hopper but Rusty Dominguez-St. John,

  one of EAR’s flashiest and most elusive faculty members, who dressed like Clint Black, except for the hat. Rusty followed me in, and we stopped at the edge of the center’s main hallway, with students eddying by in shoals or streams or whatever the technical word is for bunches of

  undergraduates. There was so much bustle and noise we could have been standing at one end of an airport people mover.

  “Looking sharp, my man,” Rusty said, surveying me

  with fake good spirits. Everything about him struck me as fake, especially his supernova smile: it was too broad, too welcoming, too indiscriminate, too much of a sales pitch.

  Perpetually tanned and built like a heavyweight wrestler, Rusty was graced with the furry brush cut, sharp jawline, and raspy voice of a TV sportscaster. He had the sportscaster’s overempathic body language, too, that made you feel he wasn’t just invading your space, he was colonizing it.

  Rusty was a professor of popular culture who had

  earned his master’s and Ph.D. while serving twelve years for aggravated assault somewhere in Minnesota. He rarely

  attended department meetings or lingered at Parker Hall because he spent most of his time flying around the country doing Recovering Criminal seminars that plugged his book, videotape, CD-Rom, and cassette series, Breaking the Bars That Imprison You.

  Though only half Hispanic, he’d been hired as an

  affirmative action candidate and for the PR value he would supposedly bring with him, but he had been a disappointment; he was never visible enough on campus to be bragged about or exhibited as a Person of Color and Recovered Criminal.

  People magazine had profiled him once, but there hadn’t been any photographs of the university, and some alumni even protested his hiring and canceled regular donations. Another hiring success for the department, which could have done just as well contacting Monster.com.

  “I never see you!” he said, as if we were old pals.

  I nodded. Rusty and I rarely crossed paths, but that was fine with me, because he always left me with a twisting feeling in the pit of my stomach. He was as bright and loud and phony as one of those late-night ads for exercise machines that promise amazing results in only five minutes a day, a perfect example of a phenomenon Stefan and I loathe equally because it’s become so common in the United States: a man making a fortune off crappy books that do little more than repackage other people’s research and theories.

  “You headed to that reception thing?” Rusty asked, as if delighted at the prospect. Then he added with far too much cheerfulness, obviously masking dubiety, “You published a book lately?”

  “No,” I said, “but I have two in press.” They were edited books, so the statement was partially true, but it bugged me to be interrogated. “I’m
waiting for Stefan.”

  “Oh, right. He’s published a couple of books in the last five years.”

  Whether it was meant that way or not, it felt like a

  zinger.

  Rusty wasn’t done. “But I thought this reception was

  just for—I didn’t know you could come if you’re just

  someone’s—ah—”

  “Partner?”

  He grinned and held out his arms in an I-love-the-world-it’s-so-crazy shrug. “Hey, man, I can’t say that word. Makes me think of business.”

  “What would you prefer me to call myself, Stefan’s

  bitch? I mean, since you’ve been in prison.”

  “Whoa! Chill!” He reached forward to tap my cheek as if I were a sulky little boy who needed calming down.

  I backed away, but didn’t leave; this was where I’d said I’d meet Stefan. And I could imagine my highly civilized parents eyeing me with disapproval for being so rude. As if they were there admonishing me, I resentfully eked out a question. “What are you writing now?”

  Rusty cracked his knuckles and rocked back on the heels of his cowboy boots. “Just published a new one—it’s on the bestseller charts with a bullet: Healing Your Inner Crook.”

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  You know that weird moment when you’re driving on

  the highway late at night, and you check your rearview mirror, and it’s blank—all the cars have suddenly fallen away behind you? That’s how I felt looking into Rusty’s eyes at that moment—entering a darkness that stretched way, way back.

  “Funny guy,” he said, with the hint of a threat. He

  checked his twenty-pound Rolex and said he’d see me at the reception.

  Relieved, I sat down in one of the square, blocky chairs, which was as uncomfortable as it looked, and peeled off my leather car coat. Because the center’s main hallway bisected the building and was so wide, the building was used by many students as a thoroughfare between different parts of campus.

  I was amazed at the sheer number of them, most hunched forward under the weight of their backpacks and listening to CDs on headphones.