Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  And perhaps she was also thinking about the maelstrom of meetings that would threaten to drag her under if she were chair of EAR. Like most people, she probably had imagined only the benefits of what she desired, ignoring the problems and commitments involved. Power, even the limited power of a department chair, would come with enormous hassles that could easily overshadow the joy of claiming the office. It was like moving into a new house and suffering the automatic crash and depression many people go through afterward, the sense of dread: “What have I gotten myself into?” Stefan and I had both suffered after moving to Michiganapolis from western Massachusetts, and that dislocation was more than the genetic suspicion New Yorkers have of the untamed lands to the west of the Hudson River.

  Walking alongside Juno, I was thinking of our nascent investigation, and Stefan warning me to stay out of any involvement with Juno. For better or worse, I was committed, and not just because of my unprecedented

  attraction to Professor Dromgoole. In part, it was the same stubbornness that had fueled my five-year work on the Edith Wharton bibliography, a project far more complex and

  frustrating than you’d imagine if you were leafing through the finished book, which covered everything Wharton had ever written and everything ever written about her.

  There were days I spent trying to track down journals or newspapers that had changed their names. Or obituaries that Wharton had written about people whose names meant

  nothing to me and were incredibly difficult to trace. Or articles written in Urdu or High Mandarin or Locust Valley Lockjaw that meant finding a reputable translator, always harder and more expensive than I expected.

  Then there were the surprising mysteries: articles that had been cut out in library after library. At first I had thought it was just coincidence, but then I discovered that a number of contemporary Wharton critics had something to hide. They had been quoting much earlier reviews or articles without attribution, or claiming discoveries that they had never made —but only I knew the truth, since I had followed the documentation through every year, every decade. It was no joke to say I knew where the bodies were buried in Wharton studies, which was doubtless one reason everyone in the field was nice to me.

  None of this activity was exactly fighting overpopulation, but it demanded doggedness, following clues, and piecing together evidence.

  It was barely noon when Juno and I returned to

  crumbling Parker Hall, its nineteenth-century sandstone pillars and steps looking even duller than usual in the cloudy light. I felt depressed, as I often did facing that gloomy pile. It was the kind of characterless but mildly sinister menacing building that Vincent Price could have presided over in some tacky 1950s horror movie, brooding and cackling.

  “We should have lunch,” Juno proposed. “I brought

  enough for two.”

  I looked up the wide stairs to the incongruously modern front doors that reduced heat loss and increased ugliness.

  “Maybe another time.”

  “But don’t you want to see the miserable Diversity

  Tree?”

  I told Juno I could wait and circled the building, found my car, and drove home, feeling as if something embarrassing had passed between me and Juno, and we needed distance from each other right away.

  I felt tired even though I had the afternoon off—all of my students were supposed to be working in the library—so I took a nap, finally waking from a sleep that was so deep I not only felt disoriented but almost dematerialized, as if my dim consciousness were simply floating in the room with no connection to my body or anything around me. It was as if someone were trying to drag me back from an abyss. And when I did start to feel present in my body, I realized I was sweaty and suffering from cottonmouth.

  I dragged myself to the kitchen to gulp down a few

  glasses of water, thinking that the darkness I’d emerged from, well, that must be like death. Except you didn’t come back— unless you were on a Discovery Channel special and the reentrance was accompanied by flashing lights and eerie music.

  I woozily cleaned up in the kitchen, the habitual motions at the island, the counter, and the dishwasher slowly bringing me back to full awareness of myself and my surroundings, though I still felt logy enough to pop some Tylenol. The clock on the double oven read 3:15, and that’s when I remembered the meeting. I tore back upstairs to shower and change, since I felt as if I’d been sleeping in my clothes for days in a ditch somewhere.

  Down in my study, feeling almost completely awake

  now, I checked my messages. There was one from Stefan: “I tried you again after my class, but you didn’t answer. And your cell phone’s off. Are you okay? I’ll be in my office—call me, please.”

  I called him, and his relief at hearing my voice was the last piece I needed to complete my return to awareness.

  “Nick—what’s been going on—where have you been?”

  I explained, briefly, and was glad he didn’t criticize my expedition to the Campus Center. I left out the bullet hole.

  “Is that all? God, I was imagining the worst—a car

  accident—a heart attack—”

  “I’m too young for a heart attack.”

  “And Sharon’s too young for a brain tumor,” Stefan said grimly. “Why don’t I wait for you at my office, and then we’ll go to the meeting together, okay?”

  “Fine.”

  The EAR secretaries must have sent up enough flares,

  because when I hit the second floor of EAR for the meeting, the sepulchral hallway was jammed with dozens of faculty members, everyone looking as surly and put-upon as Bourbon Street revelers who’ve just been told there’s no more beer.

  I pushed through to Stefan’s office just as Peter de

  Jonge was on his way out. He looked away when I said hello, as if avoiding attention, and disappeared. He wasn’t how I remembered him. Though he was over forty, he had the

  sideburns, close-cropped goatee, and Caesar haircut of a college student, and the clothes to match: white T-shirt under a baggy flannel shirt and baggy jeans under his parka. It looked almost like a disguise.

  “What was his hurry?” I asked Stefan, who gave me a

  big welcome-to-my-country hug at the door and pulled me inside.

  “Who knows? He wasn’t here long and didn’t say very

  much.”

  “Didn’t you tell me he was on the staff at Neptune?

  Counselor or something? Is he dressing like that to connect with the students?”

  Stefan shrugged.

  “He’s good-looking,” I said. “I sort of forgot.”

  “Of course he is—he looks like you.”

  “Oh, stop it—you think everyone looks like me. He’s taller.”

  “Not much.”

  “And his hair’s lighter.”

  “Not very.”

  “He’s got sideburns and a beard!”

  “They’re light.”

  “And he looks Dutch.”

  Stefan held up his hands. “You win.” Stefan moved to

  the open door and peered out into the crowded dark hall. “I still think he’s got a real problem he wants to tell me about, tell somebody about.”

  “So ask him.”

  Stefan turned back to me. “Not my style.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t mean anything critical—you know that.”

  I nodded. “Just kidding.” And we exchanged what I’d

  read once some psychologists call “extended mutual facial gazing.” It was very nice.

  “You know, when I couldn’t get a hold of you, Nick, it made me think about that time you got lost driving from the airport.…”

  Our first semester at SUM, I’d been heading home from a conference in San Diego, but Northwest’s last flight from Detroit to Michiganapolis had been canceled, and I rented a car rather than stay overnight at an airport hotel. The hour-and-a-half drive took four hours because I got lost several times, first in
Detroit, having never driven the route before. I had no cell phone back then, and every time I stopped somewhere to get directions and to tell Stefan where I was, the nearby pay phones were either busy or out of order.

  Assuming I’d been the victim of a carjacking or in an accident, Stefan had panicked and was only a few minutes away from calling the state police when I finally drove up to our house, totally frustrated and crazed myself.

  Stefan had grabbed me and whirled me around that night as if we’d been separated by years, not hours, and by a war rather than misdirection.

  “That was a nightmare,” I said, thinking, And only the beginning.

  I smelled Juno’s perfume before I saw her. “Jesus

  H.Christ, it’s the Night of the Living Dead out there,” she growled, standing in the doorway of Stefan’s office. “Bring your wooden stakes and a mallet. Unless you have a

  flamethrower?”

  Stefan locked up, and he and I followed Juno as she cut through the stream of faculty members heading to the

  departmental conference room, a dismal, claustrophobic former classroom that had been remodeled by a sadist. As if the hideous beige Venetian blinds and painted-over

  wainscoting weren’t ugly and depressing enough, someone had installed too many buzzing neon lights in a lowered ceiling and added some fifty butt-tormenting small chair-desks that were immovable because they were bolted to the floor. Sitting in one of them for more than a few moments was like being in an outtake from Clockwork Orange, and they were only easy to extricate yourself from if you were a double-jointed expert at the lambada.

  Stefan and I sat in the far corner near the back. I wasn’t used to going to a meeting with him because he avoided them and got away with it as writer-in-residence. Juno sat nearby, but in the last row, as if she wanted to have her back to a wall so she could survey everyone who walked in. I watched her and realized it was true—she was scanning the room as if expecting to unmask her persecutor. Her small shoulder bag sat in her lap, and looked overstuffed; I assumed she had brought her gun.

  As the room filled up, I felt both comforted by Stefan’s great relief that I was okay, and troubled by what his reaction might be to my discovery in the Campus Center. He’d asked me not to go detecting with Juno, and that’s exactly what I’d done, risking my career in the department and at SUM, a career whose end result I saw all around me in the faces of the older faculty. Tenure and decades at the university had done nothing to sweeten their dispositions; they looked sour, bitter, or sneeringly contemptuous. The ghost of Nick Hoffman future.

  Serena arrived right at 4:00, with as much ceremonial stiffness in her walk as if she’d been borne in on a palanquin.

  Her dense geisha-black hair was rolled into Princess Leia buns, and with pounds of silver bracelets at each wrist and a dark blue, wide-shouldered, double-breasted suit that looked like a uniform, she had a weirdly hieratic chic.

  She stood at the front of the room and clapped her hands together like a magician. It worked. People rushed to fill the remaining seats, and she smiled knowingly at her success.

  “Thank you,” she said softly, and it felt rather snide. I expected Juno to make one of her typical undercutting stage-whispered asides, but she was oddly silent.

  “Thank you for coming at such short notice. And I owe a special thanks to the department’s secretaries for contacting everyone so expeditiously. I’m sure we all appreciate the hard work they do.”

  I wondered if that was meant for me, since I’d had a

  run-in with Dulcie Halligan before.

  “Now, there are a number of issues we need to address immediately.”

  My day had been so strange that I’d never thought much about why the meeting was being called. After all, as Juno had noted, we were addicted to meetings at SUM, to the

  appearance of movement, activity, and progress. It seemed just standard operating procedure, but I was wrong about that afternoon’s gathering of the clans, because Serena had a surprise for us.

  “In my discussions with the provost,” she began

  confidingly to the packed room—and there was a rustle she clearly enjoyed as people registered that she’d been

  communing with SUM’s Kubla Khan—“it has become clear

  that we need better lines of communication between the faculty and the administration. To further that significant goal, the provost has appointed ambassadors to each college who will liaise and create and promote a deeper level of

  understanding.” She sounded like a memo, not a person, and there was something Alice in Wonderland-like about not mentioning the recent riot.

  “This program will be named LOCK: Lines that are Open Create Knowledge. And there will be mission statements in your boxes soon. The highlight is that the provost intends to be regularly in touch with our needs and concerns. Right now I’d just like to briefly introduce the new ambassador to our college.”

  Serena waved a lordly hand, and a man stood up in the front row. It was one of the thugs who’d been at the

  reception riot, defending the plaque table—either the shorter one or the taller one, I couldn’t tell which. He bowed his head modestly as if about to say grace, and Serena introduced him: “Tyler Mooney-Mauser.”

  “I’m looking forward to working together,” Tyler said, smiling unctuously, and he sat down to a profound silence. He was much milder than he’d been at the reception.

  Serena went on in the mildly rhapsodic accents of a

  decades-old World’s Fair documentary about the glories of future living. “Tyler will be attending all department meetings and regularly consulting with the provost to keep lines of communication open and free. This is a wonderful

  opportunity to increase understanding across the university, and I hope you’ll all make him feel welcome.” And then, in another tonal change, she asked, “Are there any questions?”

  with the bored chirpiness of a waitress asking if you’d made your beverage selection.

  People shifted as much as they could in the torturous chairs, shuffled their feet, cleared their throats, scratched— everyone apparently waiting for someone else to take the lead.

  Stefan looked at me quizzically and then bugged out his eyes. With difficulty I kept myself from laughing, hoping that we weren’t being noticed at the back of the room, which was already too hot.

  “LOCK?” Stefan whispered. “Can you believe it?” I

  shushed him with a shake of my head. I wasn’t surprised by SUM’s latest purchase from Acronyms R Us, but it did seem ridiculous just the same.

  Byron Summerscale raised his hand in a parody of a

  good little schoolboy. Serena nodded reluctantly at him, and he asked, “Since open communication is so important, does someone from EAR get to sit in on all of the provost’s meetings?”

  Serena frowned, patently disappointed that EAR’s new

  rabble-rouser had asked the first question, but probably relieved he wasn’t shouting. “Of course not.”

  “Then the knowledge flows only one way. Which means

  these ambassadors are nothing more than spies.”

  Summerscale’s reasonable tone paradoxically made the charge even more outrageous—and more believable.

  The word spies triggered muttered conversations across the room, but no one else’s voice rose enough to be

  distinguished. But maybe they were also commenting on the fact that his fires were banked; the raging bull of the faculty reception was curiously subdued.

  “This, shall we say, ambassadorial oversight seems an unwarranted intrusion into academic affairs,” Summerscale went on, almost as if talking to himself. I thought his formality sounded loony but appropriate. I mean, whose idea was it to call the provost’s flunkies “ambassadors” anyway?

  How pretentious!

  Serena looked torn between wanting to disembowel Summerscale and wanting to impress Mooney-Mauser with how well and patiently she ran things at EAR. Looking as frozen and tense as Gene
Wilder when he stabs himself with the scalpel in Young Frankenstein, she said, “Thank you for your opinion, Professor Summerscale. Are there other comments?”

  “We don’t need better communication, and we don’t

  need the Gestapo watching what we do and say at meetings.

  We need higher salaries,” said Cash Jurevicius.

  Professors turned and stared at him or leaned in to one another, everyone muttering like actors backstage saying “Peas and carrots, peas and carrots” to simulate crowd noise.

  People’s faces were wide open, and I could read agreement with Cash’s complaints wrestling with anger that he had spoken up. After all, he was only an adjunct professor despite his connection through his grandmother to EAR’s grand past, and if he got more money, it could mean less for other people.

  “My grandmother would never have agreed to such a

  totalitarian step,” Cash insisted, his pretty, pouty head held high.

  I watched Juno fumble with her purse, and for a moment I thought she was going to whip out her gun and plug Serena (or even the ambassador), but she dug out a black-and-gold sequined compact, set it down on her desk, opened it, and unostentatiously proceeded to touch up her makeup. It was a magnificently quiet gesture of contempt for the whole discussion. Her gestures were so soft and elaborate she might have been a mime. She was certainly richly costumed enough.

  But why was she ignoring Cash, too? Shouldn’t she have been seconding his remarks? Perhaps I was misreading her, and she was trying to hide her relationship with him.

  “Your grandmother isn’t chair of this department

  anymore,” Serena pointed out to Cash with a sickly sweet smile. Making nice must have been killing her. “I am.”

  “Not for long,” Juno murmured, putting her makeup

  away. The stone-faced remark spread plenty of ripples through the room, and Serena bristled. I doubted whether she’d heard exactly what Juno had said, but like a substitute teacher facing a class dotted with troublemakers, she could tell where the disturbance was emanating from. She glared at Juno, whose shoulders rippled as if she were limbering up for an attack.