Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  auditorium merely by clomping down the center aisle to the stage.

  President Littleterry blustered into the crowd, which parted theatrically. He didn’t say hello or even apologize, but he seemed harassed and unhappy to be there.

  Suddenly docile and quelled, people oozed into their

  seats, even Summerscale. Stefan and I took seats at the end of a row near the door, where it was moderately cooler, while Juno found a seat near the back. Littleterry’s stooges at the plaque table looked so relieved I wouldn’t have been shocked if they kissed his feet—or each other.

  Ill dressed and maladroit as usual, Littleterry tried adjusting the microphone at the podium when we were all sitting down, his forehead sweaty. It screeched with feedback for a moment, and he jerked back as if electrocuted while people complained from their seats as if growling at a broken play in the football stadium.

  “This is a great universe,” he finally began, then shook his head as if he had water in his ears after a swim. “A great uni versity.”

  His handlers eyed him with Nancy Reagan beatitude.

  “Our sports teams are nationally ranked year after year —”

  Mocking groans rose up across the room, as oddly

  hilarious as if walruses had been let loose at a tea party. But Littleterry, oblivious, blundered on. “And our faculty achievements have meaning, too. This is a great school with great professors who write great books. The words in these books are important, and that’s why we’re here to honor them.” He paused and blinked. “The professors, not the words.” Then he laughed. “Hell, it’s both, isn’t it?” he asked a bit desperately, like a comic dying in front of a late-night crowd. Then he beamed. “And here’s the provost to do the honors.”

  “That was all he had to say?” Stefan whispered to me.

  “Wasn’t it enough?”

  “Too much,” someone behind us said.

  Merry Glinka glided from the doorway up to the podium, shook Littleterry’s hand, and waved at us as cheerily as if we were her kindergarten class and she were about to hand out finger paints.

  Littleterry scuttled from the room as if pursued.

  Watching his retreat, you wouldn’t have guessed he’d been SUM’s aggressive, rude football coach. But ever since his assumption of power, he had seemed progressively more uneasy with groups of people who spoke English in complete sentences. All those years as coach had not prepared him for the challenge.

  Merry Glinka looked eerily like Sue Ann Nivens on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, though her smile had even less warmth because her eyes were always angry and cold. She was dressed that day like a 1980s businesswoman, that is, in bad male drag: charcoal gray pin-striped suit with a fussy bow at her neck. Its softness fit her oval face but not her glazed-looking, blond-streaked pageboy, whose tips seemed lethal.

  “Hello, everyone,” she sang. “I’m sorry I’m late! Busy, busy, busy!”

  “For a whole hour?” I said, leaning toward Stefan. “What a crock.” I couldn’t believe Glinka had the nerve to say it.

  What business couldn’t have waited?

  “I am so glad, so very glad, that I’m at a school that has been recognizing faculty with these receptions for—how many years?” She turned to the two minions, one of whom stage-whispered, “This is the first time.” Then he blushed.

  Unfazed, Glinka surged on. “What a wonderful university to honor its faculty in this splendid way—”

  “Some honor,” Summerscale heckled. “Cold coffee.

  Warm punch.”

  Glinka froze as people across the room murmured and laughed, turning to Summerscale, who was sitting tall and censorious but enjoying the attention. Then she said, “The publishing record at SUM is extraordinary,” looking down at an index card she’d slipped from a pocket.

  “And faculty salaries are the lowest in the Midwest!”

  Summerscale challenged.

  Glinka turned a bit to beckon over one of the two goons, whispered something to him away from the microphone, and he sped from the room.

  4

  BEFORE Glinka could continue, a very dignified-looking sixtyish woman in a long black wool skirt and cowl-neck sweater rose from the front row with a loud, disgusted sigh.

  “I’m fed up—this is impossible,” she said, and strode to the door. She turned there and called back to the provost, “Send me the plaque by campus mail.”

  She was saluted by spotty cheers. The steely-eyed Glinka clapped her hands together as if trying to quell unruly puppies.

  It didn’t help when she said, “People—people,” in the obnoxious tone of a junior high school teacher. “Now, I’m going to read out your names. Please come to the front and —”

  Glinka stopped when the missing lackey returned with a campus security guard, wearing the stupidly overbraided new uniforms Littleterry had instituted just that past week. Though a sober dark blue, they were almost as bad as the ones Nixon had tried foisting on the White House guards, to national ridicule. Glinka nodded her head, and the guard slowly but efficiently followed her goon around the back of the room to the center aisle and down to the row where Summerscale sat glowering, seven or eight seats in. The guard looked quietly ready for anything.

  “She’s going to eject him,” someone said with horror, as if witnessing the Defenestration of Prague. Hissing broke out in the crowd, along with catcalls. “Leave him alone!” “What about free speech?” “Nazis!” “Go back to Neptune College— we don’t want you here!” There were also a few cries of “Shame!” from people who had probably spent too much time watching British parliamentary debates on cable.

  It was ugly—it was thrilling.

  As the beefy, middle-aged guard approached

  Summerscale’s aisle, I experienced the kind of moment you read about in clichéd books: a hush actually fell over the room, and the air was filled with hundreds of professors’

  bated breath.

  “Sir,” the guard told Summerscale from the aisle, “I’ll have to ask you to leave.” It was said with remarkable kindness, as if the guard were a bouncer at a chic club trying not to embarrass or enrage a celebrity patron.

  “Go ahead,” Summerscale replied. “Who’s stopping you?

  Ask away.”

  A childish riposte from anyone else, perhaps, but

  Summerscale’s baritone carried it off beautifully, making the guard’s statement sound ludicrous. Hoots and more applause rallied Summerscale, who rose now to his very impressive height. He looked so belligerent that his battered tweed jacket might have been armor. For a moment I thought he was going to leave gracefully and turn his exit into a dignified demonstration of typical SUM injustice, but he faced the provost and stabbed a huge gnarled finger at her.

  “Madame Provost, you are unconscionably rude. You

  kept us waiting for an hour, for no better reason than your pride. It thrills you to make a room full of people wait. Even the president arrived before you did.”

  Glinka waved furiously at the guard to suppress

  Summerscale, to do something, but he didn’t move, as astounded as everyone else by Summerscale’s denunciation.

  Stefan grabbed my arm as if we were watching a John

  Woo action scene. This kind of confrontation, this display of truth being spoken to power, was a fantasy for most faculty on campus, and who knew how many staffers and students: the revenge of the subservient. It was so public it was amazing, and a little embarrassing, too, I thought. Then I realized that was the unconscious censoriousness of my parents working on me, the voices that had always urged fitting in, being dignified, never making a fuss. My parents were the epitome of the lines Edith Wharton had penned in The Age of Innocence about people who believed that “nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.”

  Summerscale rolled on: “And better still, Madame

  Provost, you get to remind the faculty of their lowly position.

  The plaques are w
orthless. The real message is your having come an hour late. Short of fire or flood, there’s no reason on earth to have kept us waiting. All it would have taken is saying to whomever you were busy with, ‘I have to address the faculty now.’ Seven simple words!” Summerscale crossed his burly arms. “Even if you were only making yourself busy,” he added, the sarcasm weighted with just enough opprobrium to feel not petty, but devastating.

  Glinka stared at him, her face curdled with rage.

  I had thought Summerscale a well-meaning blowhard

  earlier in the semester, when he had tried to recruit me in some sort of vague liberation movement aimed at changing things in EAR. Sure, I thought, count me in any time for SUM’s Taliban. But now I was impressed, and whether he was drunk or crazy didn’t matter. The result was brilliant, in the British sense of the word.

  Rusty Dominguez-St. John stood, a few rows behind

  him, and said in a smarmy bantering tone to Summerscale, “Hey, man, why don’t you cool your jets?”

  Summerscale roared, “Don’t talk to me like that, you

  punk! I’m not a simpering idiot attending one of your phony workshops. Peddle your snake oil somewhere else.”

  The gloves were off. Rusty shot back, “Fuck you,

  limpdick! You think anyone cares about that tired old politeness crap—who are you kidding? This place is a

  business, and if you can’t handle it, you should move on. You should have retired years ago. It’s geezers like you who hold this university back.”

  Eyes as wide as if they could flash thunder at Rusty, Summerscale retorted, “I love this school, I love what it used to be. You’re a cheap crook, even if they’ve put you on PBS.”

  Rusty seemed ready to thrash Summerscale, but easily

  half a dozen faculty held him back, and just as many across the room jumped up to shout at Rusty that he was a thug. One even called him a “Visigoth.” It made me wonder why the Ostrogoths had never gotten a bad rep—were they really that much nicer?

  Rusty sank back into his chair amid a growing frenzy of howls. I had no idea that he was so unpopular—as unpopular as Merry Glinka, it seemed.

  But this exchange was just a sideshow. At the front of the room, a cluster of faculty members from the first few rows was swarming around the table, bent on retrieving their plaques, however dubious the honor. It was the perfect picture of what the administration had reduced us to: bald men fighting over a comb.

  The second underling tried holding the faculty back and was soon tussling with one or two of them, seeming almost to be doing a funky kind of two-step. While he was occupied, a dozen more faculty members advanced on the table.

  “Stop it!” Glinka shouted from the podium, her face red.

  One of those dreadful brownies I hadn’t bothered to even taste went flying up from the audience to sail right past Glinka’s head. She ducked as if she’d been shot at. Others followed, like spitballs assaulting a substitute teacher.

  As the struggle intensified at the table, padded envelopes slid from it, and other faculty members rushed to rescue their plaques from possible damage. People were on their feet in the room, shouting, pointing, holding their faces in stagy postures of disbelief. Some were appalled, some were enjoying the show, some just stared in horror at the growing chaos that was beginning to fill the room with as much noise as a train roaring into a tunnel.

  Stefan and I were rubbernecking just like motorists

  passing a crash.

  “How badly do you want your plaque?” I asked.

  “We should get out of here.” But even though the door was less than ten feet away, we couldn’t move. I had

  witnessed a deadly riot last spring on campus, and had felt the same mix of shock and fascination. Both times were like the afternoon a few years back when there’d been a tornado in town. Just before the sirens went off, Stefan and I had stood in our backyard watching the greenish black sky start to twist and boil like a giant python curling in and around itself to suffocate its prey.

  “Order! Order!” Glinka called, pounding the podium, her voice turning shrill. Who did she think she was, Judge Judy?

  “Down with Whiteness Studies!” a woman shouted, and

  it might have been a good rallying cry, but it was somewhat premature, since the idea was only in the task force stage.

  Now people were barging up to the plaque table by the dozens and barreling into the crowd with the avidity of claim jumpers in a gold rush. Summerscale was shouting something I couldn’t make out, but it sounded like a mix of abuse and encouragement. He surged toward the back of the room, brushing past the security guard, who seemed utterly adrift.

  Summerscale advanced on the buffet tables with their

  measly refreshments, surveyed them, then reached down, grabbed the edge, and upended one, then the other. Coffee urns crashed to the floor, rolling, clanking, disgorging grinds and what was left of that cold coffee. Pitchers of inadequately iced punch shattered, and the blood-red liquid shot onto the pallid floor tiles.

  Then the lights went out across the room as people

  jostled and struggled near the wall switches, and the room was dimly lit from the hallway.

  “This is crazy,” Stefan said, and though we were holding our coats, still we didn’t move from our spot until chairs started falling over as panic sparked in the darkest half of the room and professors surged forward. Stefan grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me to the door just as the plaque table crashed onto its side in the midst of struggling, desperate professors. The crash sounded like an explosion as loud as the boom of the only earthquake I’d ever heard. And there was something else. I turned and saw that the books tables had been overturned onto each other, books pouring onto the floor. A woman shrieked.

  Stefan shoved me through the door, and we tore down

  one hallway after another, jammed with curious students who were pushing in the opposite direction to see what was happening.

  “That was a gun in there!” I said outside, catching my breath, amazed that Stefan had been able to retrace our path.

  “Some maniac fired a gun. The security guard? Why? Unless it went off by accident. But why would he even draw his gun?”

  “It’s not possible,” Stefan said. “It was one of the tables.

  Or somebody broke a window.”

  “No, the tables came first. And I think I smelled smoke, too. What else could it have been? Glinka may be a windbag, but I don’t think she was in danger of exploding.”

  “Oh, God—like that fat man in the Monty Python

  movie,” Stefan said, and we both started laughing in hysteria.

  Suddenly two campus security cars came screeching into the curved driveway in front of the center, disgorging half a dozen campus cops, who entered the building as grimly determined as if they were the muscle-bound heroes in Predator.

  “I’m telling you, Stefan, somebody fired a gun in there.”

  “You’ve got guns on the brain—it’s all those mysteries you’re reading for your course, and Juno’s Glock.”

  We looked at each other, and Stefan was obviously

  thinking what I was: “Juno. Juno shot someone in the melee.”

  That meant Stefan had decided Juno did have a gun. I did not point out that he was reading mysteries and thrillers, too.

  “Do you think anybody was hurt?” I asked.

  “We’re not going back there.”

  Word of the riot inside had apparently spread by cell phone; backpacked students were streaming to the glass-and-chrome doors nearest us from every direction. Stefan shook his head as if wanting to clear it of the entire afternoon.

  “Where’s your car?”

  I pointed. Stefan had walked over from his office at

  Parker Hall, so we took my car back to his.

  “I need a drink,” he said as we pulled into the treeless lot behind Parker, and I felt so cold and spaced-out it was a great idea. I thought his jaw might be trembling a bit.
r />   “Are you okay?”

  He shuddered a little. I wondered if the riot had triggered his secondhand memories of what his parents and Uncle Sasha had suffered during World War II when their city had been seized by the Nazis and they’d been forced into a ghetto.

  Sometimes a frantic crowd scene in a film disturbs him so much he can’t watch it, and has to leave the room. Stefan had refused to see Schindler’s List after reading a description of the terrifying half-hour sequence showing the liquidation of the ghetto. That was what impelled me to see the movie, but I hadn’t pushed him. It was not for me to say anything about how Stefan dealt with his family’s terrible past—at least not directly. With the help of his stepmother, I had tried to bring some Jewish observance into our lives to help heal his past, but sometimes I thought it was like trying to fix the Titanic with a wad of chewing gum.

  “I don’t think I could actually sit in a bar or anything right now,” he said, “and I don’t want to go home yet.

  There’s a bottle of Seagram’s in my office—and since we’re right here…”

  “Fine. Let’s go upstairs.”

  Ah, Parker Hall. Resplendent in its decay and desuetude, the shabby nineteenth-century building was all the proof anyone needed that the university had a low opinion of EAR, which camped out there. The building was grimy and

  ramshackle enough to be the setting for a second-rate slasher film: I Know What Class You Flunked Last Summer. Other departments had newer buildings or had been retrofitted with carpeting and air conditioners. Other departments had their offices painted more frequently. Other departments did not have to be regularly visited by exterminators and campus animal control. Other departments didn’t hear rumors that Parker might be torn down—even though it was one of

  SUM’s original buildings—because it was beyond renovation.

  But as writer-in-residence, Stefan had a gracious, large and airy corner office on the second floor, not far from EAR’s main office, with fairly new sturdy oak bookcases, file cabinets, and desk. Stefan had supplied the ocher-and-beige southwestern-style rug that filled most of the open floor space. The glossy beige walls were covered with matted and framed Sargent, Caillebotte, and Caravaggio posters from exhibits we’d seen around the country, but the real pictures were through the two giant windows that framed exquisite views of the oldest part of campus, a pleasing blend of quirky sandstone buildings, curving walks, mammoth oaks and