Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  “Avis and Auburn must have amazing connections,”

  Stefan mused. “And they must write good grant proposals, because look how they travel and get excused from teaching here.”

  SUM was full of academic freeloaders like the

  Kinderhoeks. “From the way they were sucking up to Serena and dying to get on that task force, I bet they’re angling for administrative posts. They’re probably just what Glinka wants —they’re from Grand Rapids, too, and as conservative as Pat Buchanan.”

  “He’s not conservative—he’s rabid.”

  The chili was terrific, perfect comfort food to take our minds off the meeting, for a while at least. We talked about books and the weather and Stefan’s workouts at the gym and my swimming. We opened a second bottle of the Sangiovese.

  When the phone rang, Stefan said, “I bet it’s Juno, for you.”

  He was right.

  “Nick, you’ll never guess who I’ve been spending the

  evening with. Detective Valley!”

  “On a date?”

  “Don’t make me gag. Of course not on a date. I worked in my office after the circus, and when I tried to go home, I couldn’t drive away. Someone slashed my tires. It’s like a bad movie. All four of them. I called the campus police, and I swear that moron thinks I did it. He asked me if I had any sharp instruments with me, and I’m sure he wanted to check my purse.”

  Where he would have found her gun, no doubt. That

  would have made quite a scene. “Why would you slash your own tires?”

  Stefan looked alarmed as he handed me a mug of coffee.

  “Is she all right?” he asked softly. I nodded.

  “Why would I send myself threatening notes? Why not?

  After all, I’m a hysterical woman. Excuse me, that’s a tautology. I’m a woman. It must be my time of the month.”

  “Valley isn’t very sympathetic.”

  “He’s the fucking Grand Inquisitor!”

  “But did he examine the car? Did he make a report?”

  “Yes. So what?”

  “Who do you think—”

  “It was someone at that meeting, I’m sure of it.

  Someone who doesn’t like me. Serena, Avis, maybe even that creature Summerscale. If he runs for chair it will be a disaster.”

  Out of some fifty people in the room, the number who

  didn’t like Juno was surely larger than three.

  “Those were new tires!” Juno wailed. “It’s a new car!

  I’ll kill the asshole who did it.”

  I held the phone away from my ear while Juno ranted on in a similar vein, threatening death and destruction, but of course she was powerless to wreak vengeance, and she knew it.

  Calming down some, she said, “This destroyed my entire evening. After that so-called detective, I had to deal with a smelly fat man from the AAA who dropped my car off and then took me to my house. He was a nightmare, telling me how he’d timed every single traffic light in Michiganapolis, and then he proved it. I had to hold his stopwatch.”

  I tried not to laugh, which was easier when Juno said, “And I think someone followed me home, followed me from campus to the garage and then home. It was dark, but the same pair of lights seemed to be behind us all the way. I couldn’t make it out for sure.”

  “You have to call the Michiganapolis police, since it happened off campus.”

  “They’ll believe me even less than Valley did!”

  She was probably right there, since faculty had a poor reputation in town for arrogance and airheadedness masked by a large vocabulary.

  “Nick, don’t worry about me, I have my Glock and I’m

  going to use it.”

  I was worried about her safety and about her using her gun.

  “Nick, we have to get right to work and find whoever is doing this to me. I’ll hire you!”

  “Juno, that’s ridiculous.”

  “No, it’s not. If you track this sonafabitch down and prove it, you’ll deserve a reward.” Then she gave a lurid chuckle. “Of some kind.” And she hung up as abruptly as she’d launched the conversation.

  “Okay, Nick, let’s go through everything you know

  about what’s happening with Juno,” Stefan said with no trace of skepticism, so I took him at his word. After my summary, he said, “So what can you do that Valley can’t? He’s a trained investigator—he’s a cop.”

  “But he doesn’t believe Juno. He thinks she’s just

  spouting hormones.”

  “That’s an image,” Stefan said. “I’d love to hear what you bibliographers sound like when you’re all together.”

  “We’re very quiet. We’ve all been through library hell and understand what it’s like. We drink lots of seven and sevens.”

  “Okay. You believe Juno. Then what?”

  “I guess I could stake out her house….”

  “You’re going to sit there with cold coffee for hours?

  Are you kidding? You’d probably end up getting arrested for loitering.”

  “Well, I should interview her to get more facts and then start asking questions.”

  “But who else do you interview? It’s not like she’s

  Mother Theresa and widely loved. You’ll have a hundred suspects.”

  “Stefan, crank phone calls, threatening mail, lurking outside her house, slashing her tires, following her car, doesn’t that sound like—”

  “A jealous lover? Like I said, you’ll have a hundred

  suspects.” Then he switched direction. “No, that’s the obvious way to go. Too obvious. It’s got to be professional jealousy. She storms into the department last year, is supposed to be here just as a visitor, then she gets a permanent position? And now she’s running for chair? Think how pissed off people must be. And she didn’t make any new friends at the meeting. What the hell was that about anyway, putting on makeup?”

  “I thought it was great! It was mockery. It was

  performance art.”

  “It was dumb.”

  “If I wore makeup, I would have done the same thing.”

  “If you wore makeup, you wouldn’t be teaching in EAR, that’s for sure.”

  “Who knows if I’ll be teaching there much longer, after what I said.”

  “You did the right thing. Avis had to be confronted.” He pushed his plate away. “That meeting—”

  “Avis isn’t the only one like that in the department— she’s just the most vocal, at least right now. I don’t understand why Serena didn’t stop her. Isn’t she afraid of a harassment lawsuit or something?”

  “Serena’s hard to figure out. She’s always been hard to figure out. Opaque and prickly. Why did she even help you with the Wharton conference? What did she get out of it?”

  “She bossed people around. That’s something.”

  “But she should have taken control of the meeting today and kept things in order.”

  “Stefan, trying to control our department is like running with the bulls at Pamplona—you’ll get gored or trampled. I guess Serena decided to get out of the way.”

  “Unless she’s got her own agenda and doesn’t want to

  come off as a heavy.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the last chair moved up to provost. Why not

  Serena?”

  “That was Moral Coral—everyone thought she was

  blameless. Even though Serena’s trying to be subdued and normal, there’s something rebarbative about her.”

  Stefan frowned. “Rebarbative? The only person I’ve ever seen use that word is Anita Brookner. Why couldn’t you just say ‘repellent’? And how do you have time to read her novels when you’re supposed to be reading mysteries?”

  “Guilty as charged. I have to read Brookner now and

  then—the reviewers always say she’s the novelist Henry James would be reading if he were alive, so I figure Wharton would, too.”

  Stefan laughed. That kind of review was one of
his pet peeves.

  “But if Serena was up to something, what about Byron?

  Have you ever seen Summerscale that subdued and rational?

  First he’s a one-man rave, then he’s an easy-listening station.”

  “Why does he have to be up to something?” Stefan

  wanted to know.

  “Of course he is! These people can’t be at the university for decades without soaking up all that scheming and

  treachery.”

  8

  ALL the next day I wondered about the future, and mulled over more immediate concerns, though they connected with our future, of course. I was worried about Juno’s gun. She was so combustible, and if she was attacked or felt under attack, wouldn’t she use it? While I wanted whoever was harassing her to stop, I didn’t think the person’s being wounded or murdered was the right answer. I didn’t want to see Juno plunged into scandal or danger. Yet she was facing some sort of threat, unless she and I were both delusional.

  Stefan called it a folie à deux. If that were true, we’d be the last two people to recognize it.

  And what was going to happen next in EAR? With Juno,

  Serena, and Summerscale all planning to run for chair, could anyone win except a write-in candidate? The three of them could not have been more unpopular, each in deep and abiding ways, despite some clusters of fans. And why was the

  provost spying on all the departments—or was that even happening university-wide? Perhaps Merry Glinka suspected that EAR alone was rife with subversion. As for the

  Whiteness Studies Task Force, last month I’d hoped it was dead, cremated, and the ashes scattered over open water. But it was back, flourishing, and recruiting. What the hell could be going on in the minds of the upper administrators to even countenance such a plan? As the new provost, Merry Glinka could have canned it, giving any number of respectable-sounding reasons, or simply acted arbitrarily and given none at all. I couldn’t believe that our lunkhead president Littleterry had that much influence at the university; he was just a jovial fund-raiser, glad-handing and getting drunk and replaying old games, someone who would never intimidate a potential donor to SUM because he simply wasn’t swift enough to be

  intimidating. I’m sure he made even alumni who’d graduated with borderline grades feel superior. Could something so implausible have sprung from his imagination alone?

  After dinner that evening I found an e-mail from a

  student asking if I’d gotten the paper he’d left for me at Parker, and since he must have dropped it off after Stefan and I had gone home, I decided to drop by Parker Hall, pick it up, and check my mail. Stefan came with me, after we did

  Havdalah, the lovely short set of blessings that bids farewell to Shabbat.

  At night, and in the winter, with the leaves gone from the deciduous trees, the SUM campus is eerily beautiful—almost a stage set with the gleaming security lights strung along its winding paths, reflecting off the ranks of evergreens and on the stone, brick, and concrete buildings with slate tile roofs and mullioned windows that all seemed more dramatic than by day, framed by the darkness. With few students around, the bare tree branches seemed to create a hush of privacy and privilege.

  There were a few cars behind Parker Hall, but they could have been anyone’s, since the lot was open all weekend, though we did see some lights on across the building. Stefan got out his key, and we entered the hulking silent building that some people say looks like that cake left out in the rain in “MacArthur Park” thanks to its crumbling sandstone and Romanesque ornamentation, which I’ll admit in certain lights does look like a kind of architectural icing.

  As we entered through the back door, Parker’s inimitable stench hit us: equal parts crumbling file folders, roach spray, and stifled teeth-grinding resentment. Stefan headed up the wide stairs lit by light streaming in from a nearby lamppost, and I headed down into the basement with a casual, “Can you get my mail? Let’s meet back at the car.”

  “Five minutes, tops,” Stefan called down to me, and

  once again, as his steps receded, I was reminded of the immense status difference between us at EAR.

  Someone had left the lights on in the basement hallway, which made it look less like a crypt than usual. Still, I moved along to my office quickly, as if one step ahead of grave robbers afraid of being discovered. Parker may not have been gothic in style, but it certainly provoked gothic thoughts. Who knows what works of genius Mary Shelley could have written there if she’d lived long enough?

  With the building creaking like a pile of logs about to tumble over, I unlocked my office and flicked on a few lights, trying not to dwell on its innate grunginess (it had only a half-window, for instance). I rounded up several sets of papers and stuffed them into a large manila envelope, checking around to make sure there wasn’t anything else I needed, and also, shamefacedly even though I was alone, to make sure nothing had been tampered with. My office had been broken into before, and I was always preparing myself for the shock of discovering mute violence: a battered-open door, shattered lamps, rifled files, torn-apart books, graffiti-smeared walls.

  What had actually happened wasn’t quite as bad as any of that but had quickly blended with my fears, and I almost felt as if it had—just as the dangers Sharon had faced with her

  surgery, though they were over, had somehow been

  subsumed by what actually did happen to her.

  I shut off the lights and locked the door carefully, aware as I did so that if someone wanted to get in, a lock made no difference, even though the solid-core door looked sturdy.

  Shaking off the paranoia, or trying to, I headed for the stairs to go out and meet Stefan at the car, but realized as I opened the door to the stairwell that the contentious Diversity Tree was just two flights up in the main office, to which I had a key, like every other faculty member.

  I hurried up the echoing stairs, which were probably

  metal under the worn brown linoleum. On the second floor, I could see that Stefan’s office door was closed, so he had to be waiting back outside already. Talking to myself, I said, “Just a quick look.”

  There was enough light streaming in from windows

  facing the parking lot for me to see my way to the main door, and I unlocked it, flicked on the line of switches, and the office jumped into life—or rather, was revealed in all its deathly dullness. It had the worn, gritty, crowded, sloppy feel of a police office in some very poor urban precinct. Files teetered on aging file cabinets, and desks were boiling over with folders, flyers, memos.

  And there on the high counter that separated the secretaries from supplicants was the tree. Or shrub, really, since it was only three feet tall. You could call it darling if it was Be Kind to a Plant Day, but it was actually pathetic, especially since it was festooned with the unlikeliest bunch of ornaments you could imagine. Amid the angels and reindeer I made out an ankh, several wooden Buddhas, a plastic cow, a little piece of what I think was kente cloth or an imitation, a Maltese cross, and other ornaments whose significance perhaps only a magpie or shoplifter could guess.

  Studying it, I felt almost embarrassed to have said

  anything at the meeting. The tree was so pitiful, so

  unredeemably stupid looking, how could anyone take it seriously enough to be insulted? But then, was I supposed to apologize to the department, or slink through the hallways with a penitent look on my face? That didn’t make sense either.

  I closed the lights and left, locking this door carefully, too, and decided to make a quick stop in the men’s room down the hall.

  I was holding open the heavy door with my left hand,

  reaching for the light switch on the wall to my right, when I went flying across the room; only as I fell and started to gasp for breath did I realize I’d been shoved hard in the center of my back. In the dark the room seemed cavernous and cold, and I recoiled from where my face and hands touched the floor, but someone incredibly strong was straddling me, shoving
my shoulders down, holding a hand over my mouth.

  My arms hurt, and my left cheek hurt, even while my body seemed very far away and I wondered why I felt unable to shout or speak even through the stifling hand that smelled of some kind of aftershave. The word shock drifted across my mind like a pennant flying behind a plane at a football game.

  I tried to get up, but whoever was atop me wasn’t going to let that happen.

  “Leave it alone.” The voice was a man’s, as heavy as the hands pinning me to the floor. And then he was gone. The men’s room door yanked open, then glided closed, its

  susurration oddly fascinating and slow. I lay in the damp dark room, waiting for the pain that was surely about to burst inside me as exigent and crazed as a July 4 sale crowd pressing against a department store’s glass doors. Would they shatter? Would I?

  I must have passed out or slept, because when I heard Stefan shouting my name from somewhere, it seemed from a very great distance. Was I awake? Was that me calling, “Here?”

  Light exploded along with Stefan rushing to my side. I squinted at him as he scooped me up.

  “Nick, you’re bleeding! What happened? Why didn’t you come to the car? Are you okay? Did you pass out? I looked for you downstairs! Why were you up here?” Stefan

  examined me, feeling around for broken bones, I suppose. I watched him with amused affection, as if I were in a hospital bed and he were a brand-new orderly gamely trying to arrange too many flowers in too small a vase.

  “Someone attacked me,” I said, the words sounding so

  outrageous and melodramatic I felt ashamed to have spoken them.

  Stefan almost dropped me, he was so surprised. “What? ”

  If my head didn’t hurt, it would have been funny. Or

  was it even my head?

  “Let me sit up,” I said, and Stefan moved me back

  against the wall. He rose and turned on the sink, cupped some water in his hands, and held it out for me to drink. It tasted metallic, but good. He took out a handkerchief, squatted down, and started to dab at my bloody cheek, which felt very hot. Maybe that was what hurt.