Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  Stefan had asked if I missed the time when we met and were just coming out for real. Watching the undergraduates, I think I probably missed my college years, when everything I read and saw and felt in the realm of the mind seemed new and exciting. Graduate school had none of that magic for me —it was more like an obstacle course. Only when working for five years on my Wharton bibliography had I felt a sense of renewed intellectual excitement. And as much as I loved teaching writing, I had to admit that it wasn’t challenging enough anymore. Hopefully the mystery course next semester would provide what was missing.

  Two similar-looking girls in black leggings and

  minidresses strutted by, chewing gum, eyes hooded, one saying, “I really want to be, like, a talk show host. One of those chicks on The View. Not for the fan mail or anything. I would kill to have someone do my makeup and hair every day.”

  “And then you could be interviewed on Larry King Live.”

  I was for some reason thinking of Sharon when Serena

  Fisch strode by, apparently en route to the reception, with a hurried “How are you?” Sharon’s surgery had made me

  unexpectedly mawkish and confessional, and I told Serena I was worried about Sharon and why, but she kept moving, turning on her heels in annoyance and snapping out, “Oh, who cares about your cousin’s brain tumor?”

  Shocked into silence, I watched her stalk off. Dressing in 1940s retro and looking like one of the Andrews Sisters, Serena Fisch had always been given to catty or cutting remarks, but this unwarranted harshness was new. Perhaps it was connected to her running for EAR chair. Or perhaps it was simply that her elevation to acting chair had coarsened and hardened her. Either way, it still hurt. She could have just nodded and said, “That must be tough.”

  I was proud of myself for not feeling cowed or worrying at that moment about tenure. “Fuck you,” I muttered, thinking about Juno’s gun, wishing I had one. They might not make you safer, but I could already see how they made you feel more powerful.

  Faculty were streaming in by the bushels, many of them looking as if they needed industrial-strength makeovers. There were lumbering, fat men in sweaters that barely covered their bellies; others in worn and shabby tweed jackets, chinos, and loafers; and a large sprinkling of what I thought of as Senators: men with horrible combovers. I had told Stefan that if anytime in the next few decades he found me trying to disguise my balding hair like that, he should just slap me. “I may slap you even if you don’t,” he said.

  So where was Stefan? He was fifteen minutes late, and I didn’t have my cell phone to call him. If I got up to find a phone, I might miss him.

  Cash Jurevicius strutted in, wearing a long black leather coat like a Keanu Reeves Matrix clone—not that there was anything wrong with that, of course. He even had a black leather knapsack over his shoulder, with a Quality Paperback Book Club copy of The Name of the Rose sticking out of it; I had a similar copy at home. He was probably deconstructing it for some essay. But why was he here? Had he published a book I didn’t know about? Then I caught myself—wasn’t I being as obnoxious as Rusty had been, questioning his right to be there?

  It had to be jealousy of Cash and Juno. He was very

  handsome, and his feral good looks made for some hot

  pictures when I imagined him and Juno in bed. No—it

  wouldn’t be bed. They’d do a Fatal Attraction kitchen hump.

  Uncomfortable with this trend of thinking, I spotted

  Stefan rushing through the doors right toward me, cashmere coat over his arm. He’d bought the coat the day after hearing about his film deal. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I was meeting with Peter de Jonge, and it got heavy—” He shook his head, then plumped down into the chair at right angles to mine, looking reluctant to leave its dubious shelter. He looked good in his black Armani, but his face was flushed and tight. What had that graduate student said, or done?

  “We’ll be late for the reception,” I said carefully, not sure what was going on.

  “So?” he said wearily. He stared down at his watch as if it were something alien. “What?” he asked, even though I hadn’t said anything. Then he seemed to snap to attention.

  “I’ll tell you after the reception—it’s too complicated.” His face was so set there was clearly no point in insisting he let me know now. He rose, and we headed off into the throngs.

  It wasn’t noble of me, but I wondered if the handsome graduate student had made a pass at Stefan. Peter de Jonge was my age and married, but maybe he was having a midlife crisis of his own.

  As we neared the turbine-like thrum of status-hungry

  professors, all I could think of was escape, but we had taken so many turns to the room where the reception would be held that I could never have found my way back to an exit in an emergency. Standing at the door, I thought that the spectacle before me wasn’t quite ignorant armies clashing by night, but close enough. The heat bursting from inside was so intense it made me loosen my tie.

  The room was actually a series of bland, badly

  soundproofed, high-ceilinged lecture rooms whose shabby dividers had been opened to fit rank upon rank of back-knifing chairs. Hundreds of people milled around these cruel chairs, awkwardly holding paper plates and plastic cups, while dozens more clustered at the back of the grim mauve-walled room, near a bank of tables draped in cheap-looking paper tablecloths that were already ripping under faculty attack.

  Along the wall opposite the open door were two

  Formica-topped tables with rank after dispiriting rank of books. Rather than celebratory, this display struck me as funereal. The ugly steel-blue-and-black curtains, which appeared to be sewn by prisoners, didn’t help.

  Just inside the door where we lingered stood a square table piled high with thick beige pamphlets, apparently the program for today’s event. I leafed through one, which listed “remarks” by the president and the provost and then

  Presentation of Awards, followed by an infernally long list of faculty members and their book titles.

  I saw Rusty chatting up Serena, who looked imperious

  but charmed, as if he were giving her an amusing report of what he’d been up to while avoiding EAR. Cash Jurevicius loitered nearby, apparently eager to join the conversation but uncertain when to intrude.

  “Why’s Cash here?” I asked Stefan, despite having

  remonstrated with myself earlier for wondering.

  “He edited a book of his grandmother’s essays,

  remember? SUM Press did it a few years ago.”

  I drew a complete blank on the book, even though I

  knew Cash’s grandmother had been a highly respected chair of EAR in the 1950s.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Stefan said, watching me struggle. “I doubt more than a few people bought it anyway—for

  sentimental reasons. That is, if they heard about it. The SUM

  Press does a lousy job of promotion. Are you thirsty?” he asked.

  We started to push through the crowd to see what kind of reception goodies waited for us. I could make out urns, pitchers, and something uninspiring-looking on trays.

  “Don’t bother,” Juno said, appearing at my side in an eye-catching black pantsuit, high-heeled leopard-print boots, and matching toque, with a black Chanel bag slung over one shoulder. “The coffee is cold, and the punch is warm. Oh, yes, there are some miserable brownies.” Her perfume wafted over us as heavily as bus exhaust on a city street. I felt momentarily dizzied.

  “That’s it?” Stefan asked, mouth twitching on the edge of a smile as if he were expecting a punch line. “That’s the reception?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  Stefan plunged toward the table to verify Juno’s report, and I eyed Juno a bit warily. After all, she’d threatened me the night before. But she looked so ripe.

  Juno glanced around her with a lot less compassion than Princess Di visiting AIDS patients. That’s when I decided to tell her about what had happened when I left her house the previo
us night. “Someone might have been lurking in your shrubbery.” Despite myself, I almost choked at the phrase.

  “Excuse me?” she asked, cutting her eyes at me.

  “It’s like something out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel.”

  “As long as it doesn’t turn into The Shining, fine.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “I know, I know. It’s all so ludicrous, what’s happened to you, to everyone at this godforsaken hole of a place, that hysteria seems the only appropriate response. Threats, stalking, arson, murder—at a university? Unheard of!”

  “But do you honestly think someone’s after you?”

  Juno gave me a sultry grin. “Someone is always after

  me.”

  “No jokes.”

  She switched moods as quickly as someone coming out

  of hypnosis with a finger snap. Very soberly, she said, “I do, yes.”

  “Get out of the race for chairman? Get out of town?

  What? What’s it about? What are you being warned to do?

  Why is someone telling you to get out?”

  “You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

  “Not by choice. And there aren’t any clues, anyway.”

  “There are always clues if you look for them.”

  I was pondering that when Stefan rejoined us. “The

  brownies are gross,” he said. “Pure sugar, gooey, you can hardly get one down.”

  “It’s a plan,” I said, “to keep the faculty from saying anything. Gum up our mouths while Littleterry and Glinka blather on and on.” I’m not sure the brownies were making a difference, though, because the high-ceilinged room echoed like a mall during a post-Memorial Day Sale.

  My mention of the coming speeches made us all turn to glance toward the front of the vast, churning room, where an oak podium stood on a low black riser. We were supposed to be addressed by the provost and the president, but neither was in sight, and it was already after four-thirty.

  “Didn’t the invitation say ‘Reception, 4-6 P.M.’?” Juno asked pointedly.

  Stefan and I nodded.

  “This isn’t a reception,” I said, and both of them waited for me to explain. “A reception, that’s wine, cheese, fruit, something substantial.”

  “What would you call it, then?” Juno asked. “A

  de ception?”

  “That’s good,” Stefan said. “That’s really good.”

  “This is refreshments,” I said. “Crappy refreshments.

  Nothing more than that, and the invitation should have said it.”

  “‘Crappy refreshments,’”Juno repeated. “Enticing.”

  Talking louder than usual to make ourselves heard, we had gathered a number of listeners, who were muttering similar complaints about the food, the speakers’ lateness, and the venue. None of them looked especially familiar, yet they all had the weary, beaten-down air of so many faculty at SUM, the ones who weren’t bringing in huge grants or making big names for themselves or were simply worn out by teaching in a crazy-making environment where what they did and who they were was not valued, no matter how hard they worked.

  The Kinderhoeks, Avis and Auburn, waved and headed

  over to join us. I’d heard that after some sort of spiritual awakening, she had recently changed her name from Mavis to Avis, which had prompted departmentwide snickering. Even Stefan had said, “How’s that a name change? She just

  dropped a letter. It’s more like reversing a typo.” I had told him to think of it as an orthographic circumcision, but neither of us tried making any puns on rara avis.

  Juno growled now, “Give me a fucking break. Here

  comes Bore and Dumb.” She strode away, and I saw her

  heading back toward Rusty Dominguez-St. John, who held out his arms to her. They didn’t hug but kissed cheeks à la Belge: three times. It turned me on to see her in another man’s arms. Wait, not another man. She hadn’t been in my arms. God, was I jealous of other men with her already? That was completely crazy.

  The Kinderhoeks made hello noises and comments.

  Ostensibly part of the writing program, they’d managed to secure temporary berths away from SUM so often they

  seemed like visiting professors rather than permanent faculty.

  She was the poet, he was the essayist, and both were

  despised by students for cruel hectoring in the classroom.

  “Terrible,” Avis said. In her mid-fifties, so short and fat she seemed to have been squashed into her Capezios, she always wore clinging satiny-looking dresses that seemed like nightgowns.

  “Disgraceful,” Auburn agreed. He was just as short, but whippet thin and with the sleek, vacuous good looks of Dan Quayle. Both had vague southern accents that might have been acquired at Office Max—I was sure I’d once heard Auburn talk about a play that he pronounced as something like “Ee-Antony and Cleopaterer.” Pure Brooklynese.

  “Littleterry and Glinka keeping us waiting, you mean?”

  Stefan asked.

  “Gracious, no!” Auburn said, eyeing Avis with

  amusement.

  “The heat,” she said, fat cheeks flushed. Despite her age, she had a young-looking face (“Women like that always have good complexions—it’s all the fat cells,” Sharon had once explained to me).

  “The heat in this room,” Auburn explained, as if we

  thought his wife might have been talking about the weather in Somalia.

  Stefan and I nodded our understanding, and I could tell he wanted to escape, so I grabbed his arm and said, “There’s Margo—you wanted to ask her about the show.”

  He gratefully moved off with me, and when the

  Kinderhoeks sloped away, he said, “What show? And who’s Margo?”

  “Margo Channing—who else? And if you don’t know the

  name of the show, you’ll never be able to play Gay Trivial Pursuit.”

  Stefan smiled, and then asked, “What’s on that table?”

  We headed up the center aisle, nodding at those few

  faces we recognized. Up at the front and off to the side was a standard-issue long metal table stacked high with padded, labeled envelopes. It was guarded by a couple of sharkskin-suited, anxious-looking flunkies who stared at the door with wild eyes when they weren’t consulting their watches and muttering. I think they were trying for the aplomb of headsetted FBI agents, but they seemed more like testy supplicants at a shrine who had been promised a miracle.

  They glared at us and moved forward, so much alike that if not for their height difference, they might have been clones.

  “The plaques,” Stefan muttered.

  “You can’t take yours until your name is called,” one of the toadies shot at Stefan. “The reception hasn’t started.”

  “It started over half an hour ago,” I observed, silently adding, “Bitch.” But the adjuration surely meant that nothing truly began until SUM’s ersatz royalty arrived. And wasn’t he right?

  “What’s that about the plaques?” someone called, and the two suits drew together and back toward the table as if ready to defend its contents. Their well-manicured hands clenched.

  “Who do you work for?” I asked them.

  “The president,” they said. “And the provost.”

  “Not really. You work for the people of Michigan. This is a land-grant university, remember?”

  They sneered mildly at each other as if I were a harmless fanatic of some kind.

  “This is an outrage!” a voice boomed from the middle of the crowd. “This is a travesty!” It was rumbustious Byron Summerscale, the burly and Hemingwayesque former chair of Humanities, whose department had been hacked to pieces over the years until he alone was left to tell the tale. No doubt determined to crush his inveterate complaining about SUM’s hypocrisy and ill treatment of faculty and students or drive him off, the administration had reassigned him to EAR and given him an unrenovated, windowless basement supply

  cupboard as his office in Pa
rker Hall.

  But Summerscale was more Liberty on the Barricades

  than shrinking violet, and his handling had not tamed him in the slightest: last month he had drunkenly and dramatically insulted the president at a faculty party held by my dean.

  Towering over the professors around him now, he looked like a wizard about to unleash a terrible spell on his enemies or a thundering prophet, eyes glowing, long white hair as wild as if it had been plucked at by the Furies.

  “Who does his hair?” Juno purred, rejoining us.

  Professors fell back from Summerscale as if fearing he was flammable. “They’ve kept us waiting for almost an hour!” Summerscale roared. “It’s intolerable, unforgivable.”

  Voices in the crowd shouted back his words, egging him on and adding more abuse, though in less elegant language: “This sucks!” “I hate SUM!”

  “The president and provost should be ashamed of

  themselves,” Summerscale shouted. “They should be shot!

  Don’t they think we have lives, that we have something to do besides waiting around for them like servants expecting a Christmas turkey?”

  It wasn’t the most poetic image of humiliation, but it seemed enough for this crowd. “Fuck’em all,” someone cried, and vociferous yelling in favor of Summerscale was

  countered by shouts of “Shut up!” and “Hooligans!”

  A wide-shouldered, bearded professor I didn’t recognize, who looked like a Marlboro man in his jeans and plaid shirt, stomped up to the plaque table, announced his name,

  “Grassley!” and said, “This is bullshit. I have a class to teach and I’m going to be late. I’m not waiting anymore. Give me my plaque.”

  The two functionaries stared at him as if he were

  speaking gibberish. When they didn’t reply but moved toward him as if to block his access to the table, he shouldered between them, knocking them off balance, roughly sorted through the envelopes, which I assumed were alphabetically arranged, grabbed one, and left, cursing under his breath.

  The room, even hotter now, seemed about to burst into real violence—looting, sacking, general brigandage—when a shocking wave of quiet spread from the door. As it moved my way, I was transported back to a noisy assembly in sixth grade one Friday when our Frankenstein look-alike principal (with a clubfoot) had silenced an unexpectedly rowdy