Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  recently about SUV crash testing. At less than highway speeds, they emerged relatively unscathed when they hit sedans. Was I supposed to take a paint sample or something?

  And even if I did, so what? That didn’t help the French much trying to trace the car that hit Princess Diana’s limo.

  12

  I found linens in a lavishly stocked closet near Juno’s bedroom, and used a set to make up the living room couch to spend the night. They were leopard-print, of course. Feeling suddenly dehydrated, I got a bottle of Evian from the kitchen and drank all of it down as if I’d been running a marathon.

  I was spending the night at Juno’s. On her couch. How bizarre. I kept flashing on disturbing images of Stefan and me helping her slip into bed, her breasts rich and full under her gown. I wasn’t perversely turned on by her suffering and sudden debility the way Nate was by Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor, in Sophie’s Choice, but I did feel a new level of physical intimacy that was inextricably linked with the visions of Juno as a one-woman parade when she strode down a

  hallway in Parker, and of water dripping from her lush body as she stood chatting with me in the pool at The Club.

  This was the first time I would be spending a night even a room away from a woman whom I could imagine making

  love with. When it came to women as a sexual possibility, I didn’t think I was much more advanced than those gawky lads in American Pie for whom their female peers were an alien universe. A lesbian friend had once proudly confided that she was “penis pure,” but I didn’t feel any sense of rectitude or accomplishment in being able to make the analogous claim for myself, mutatis mutandis. While I had never made fun of women’s bodies or bodily processes, I hadn’t ever ogled or even admired them except as elements of a performance or as evidence of personal chic; seeing Sharon do a fashion show once had been an experience that filled both those categories.

  Growing up in New York and going to the Metropolitan

  Museum of Art with my parents, I had loitered in front of mythological scenes to look at the gods, not the goddesses, who had been just as much decoration as the trees and clouds and whirling draperies. I saw composition, history, line, and color when I looked at those painted women—or sometimes personality. Looking at the male figures, I felt possessed.

  It’s what Julian Barnes says in Flaubert’s Parrot: “You do not choose. You are elected into love.” And Henry James wrote that it was art that makes life. Well, for me it was art that revealed my life to me, a life that had unreeled without a psychosexual hitch until now. Juno had burst out of

  previously static and unemotional categories for me and was forcing me to consider redefining myself, whether she cared about it or not.

  But that wasn’t the only blurring going on. Right then, the accident was so present for me that I felt plunged into that weird mix of sex and violence Faye Dunaway negotiates in The Eyes of Laura Mars as she photographs models in highly charged erotic tableaux of death around New York City.

  Remembering the Metropolitan Museum made me

  wonder how my parents would see Juno. I pictured the four of us dining together somewhere in New York, after an opera, perhaps. My very comme il faut mother and father would most likely not appreciate Juno, and would be mildly alarmed by her extravagance of voice and clothes, reading it as typically American, even though she was from Canada.

  Sometimes it amazed me that they could after decades in New York still draw back in discomfort from someone who’d make Madonna seem subtle, when all around them the city shrieked and roared like one of those movie aliens writhing in a pool of its liquefaction after the hero’s given it a death blow: cabs, construction sites, airplanes heading into LaGuardia and Kennedy, belching buses, car alarms, the whole extravagant, endless, maddening sound track. And what about the people my father worked with? Editors, publishers, agents, and authors were none of them especially known for their quiet dignity. I’d lived with a writer for a decade and a half—I’d listened to him complain about the denizens of that world, and had met more than enough of them.

  Stefan returned with Juno’s painkillers, which weren’t as expensive as I’d expected them to be, and asked if I wanted him to stay the night, too.

  “Your choice,” I said. “I saw a couch in Juno’s study— maybe it’s a foldout, and we could both use that.” We checked, and it wasn’t. Stefan opted to go home, which was fine with me. It’s not that I was planning on insinuating myself into Juno’s bed—or giving her a sponge bath! I didn’t need a witness for my discomfort.

  “We’ll have to do a sleepover some other time,” I said.

  “Popcorn and brownies, Babe—”

  “Knowing Juno,” he said, “it would probably be more

  like a rave. Call me as soon as you get up,” he said, and then, as if picking up on the unease I was trying hard not to betray, “You know, Nick, Juno isn’t Sharon. It was a car crash, not brain surgery. She’s hurt, but she’s not in danger of dying.”

  We stood by Juno’s front door, and he clamped his hands on my shoulders and fixed me with as serious a look as if he were a pope sending a crusader into battle.

  “You think I’m confusing them?”

  “I don’t know—you could be. It’s natural—two crises,

  two hospitals, it all blurs together.”

  I was so beat right then that all I could do was make a joke. I half-quoted from Ghostbusters: “Thanks, Egon, for that important safety tip.” Stefan got it, kissed me, and wished me sweet dreams. But after closing the door, I thought about what he’d said. If he was right, and my concern about Juno was actually displaced from worrying about Sharon, it wasn’t surprising. Sharon’s diagnosis and surgery had made me think about death and loss far more than the tragic events here at SUM over the previous few years, as if I’d been one of those lovely tourist islands in the Caribbean that had always before been just outside the swath of hurricanes: I felt brutally awakened, sick with the devastation and the loss of placidity.

  Disasters. My bond with Sharon was so close, we had

  often joked about being together in former lives—it was a good way to explain how we clung to each other like

  passengers fleeing a sinking ship. Perhaps we had even been exactly that, Sharon had often said, “though not on the Titanic! I’d never go anywhere with a Celine Dion sound track. Give me the Chemical Brothers any day.” Had images of disaster flitted through our conversation—even as jokes— in some kind of psychic foreshadowing?

  I stripped down to my shorts, turned off all the lights, and crawled into my makeshift bed, worried that I might not be able to fall asleep, but the very next sounds I heard were Turandot’s exigent barking and Juno’s voice croaking out, “I know, Turandot—you’ve never seen a man on my couch

  before without me on top.”

  It was Wednesday morning, and she was wearing black

  silk pajamas that made her face even paler.

  “Don’t say a word,” she warned, suddenly hovering over me, very film star-ish with a black towel wrapped turban-style around her hair. “I know I look like Death eating a sandwich, and I feel twice as bad.” She gingerly touched her ribs. “I found the pills, but they’re working slowly. Now, if I give you instructions, do you think you can do breakfast for us and Turandot? I can let her out into the yard, but that’s about my limit for the morning.”

  I assured her it would be okay. “French toast all around?

  With a ginger-Cointreau conserve?”

  “Hah. This is for you,” she said, handing me a man’s

  terry cloth robe. “Sorry there’s no logo on the pocket, but if you like it anyway, you can have it added to your bill when you check out. Everything you need is in the master bath.”

  Juno shuffled painfully to the kitchen. I donned the robe, which I assumed she kept for her male guests. It smelled of just-sprayed Obsession. I headed for her bathroom, which was as well equipped as she had promised: the black marble shower bristled with heads at all
heights and was large enough to do a number from Flashdance in. There were dozens of soaps, shampoos, scrubs, and brushes; I did feel as if I were in a very exclusive little hotel. It was so delicious in there I wanted to stay longer, but I knew Juno needed help, and the last thing I wanted to do was soap myself up one too many times in Juno’s shower, though I doubted mine would be the first personal libation.

  “Turandot’s breakfast first,” Juno said, leaning back in her kitchen chair, eyes closed, when I emerged. I knew where the kibble was from the night before, and Juno directed me to the organic vanilla yogurt and diced chicken in the fridge. She said it was okay that I hadn’t known about the mix last night, especially since Turandot ate anyway.

  Following Juno’s recipe, I mixed half a cup of kibble with two tablespoons of chicken and two of the yogurt. It actually smelled pretty good. Juno had me call Turandot in from the yard. The puppy bounded in, sat as Juno

  commanded her, and then advanced when given the okay. She ate with more deliberation than I would have expected, since I assumed most dogs gobbled. “Could you wet a paper towel and wipe her mouth and chin? Thanks.”

  Unlike our dinner, which had been tinged with Eros and danger, this whole scene was pleasantly domestic. I was seeing Juno without makeup, without her typical flash and fire, and instead of being disappointed or dismayed, I felt at ease. There was much more to her than the brass band. I could hear Sharon warning me that this insight made Juno even more dangerous.

  Turandot sat through my ministrations without

  squirming, stretched luxuriantly, and then burped. I chuckled, but Juno was so out of it that she didn’t seem to notice, and that helped me feel more comfortable, given that I was barefoot and wearing nothing under the thick robe.

  “That is an adorable dog,” I said.

  “Don’t say it too often—she may try to get an agent.”

  Juno moaned as if the joke had pained her. “Sweet Jesus, if I were a smoker, I’d have gone through half a pack by now, and I’d be licking the wrapper. You know, I remember a doctor with an odd name, and I have a vague recollection of some dark and dusky lad wheeling me to your car—was all of that a dream?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Wretched.” She paused. “Miserable.” She paused again.

  “No, wretched was right the first time.” Feeling comfortable in her kitchen, I put up a pot of coffee, then set out bowls of granola with blueberries. Juno had soy milk in her Sub-Zero, and I put that out, too, and sprinkled some slivered almonds across the top in each large white bowl. Juno slurped down her cereal, unashamedly noisy. I couldn’t tell if she was just hungry, or didn’t care what I thought, or was just glad to be awake and alive.

  I wondered what effect the accident would have on her.

  Contrary to departmental expectations, an irascible former chair of EAR had become even more cantankerous after his heart attack, his brush with mortality not reducing his general level of hostility at all. He had almost seemed determined to prove he wasn’t weak, diminished. Would Juno be like that, become even more outrageous in an effort to prove that the accident hadn’t shaken her? As she groaningly sipped from a French-size coffee cup, I thought it possible.

  “You didn’t say very much to the officer last night about your accident.”

  “Of course not! I was nauseous, I’d been connected to all kinds of—all kinds of tubes and whatnot, do you think I had time for a chat? I only wanted him to get the bloody hell away from me so I could go home. And it wasn’t an accident, was it?” Juno said after her second cup of coffee, while I rinsed the cereal dishes and set them in her dishwasher.

  I poured her another, grateful to be able to tend to her in some concrete way. “That’s what Stefan and I think.”

  “Because whoever it was sped up only after I pulled out of my space. He intended to hit me. Or she.”

  There was no point now in holding back my bad news.

  “You got a phone message yesterday, when Stefan was here.

  That it wasn’t over yet. Do you want to hear it?”

  She shook her head dejectedly. “I can wait. It’ll be the same crap as before. It’s poison, I don’t need to take that in right now.”

  “It was a man’s voice.”

  “Muffled?”

  I nodded, and then went back to what bothered me.

  “Why didn’t you tell the SUM officer you thought it was deliberate?”

  “Nick, there is no fucking way anyone would have

  believed me. Lying there in a hospital bed with all that commotion, right after a crash, I would have just come off as irrational. The only reason you believe me is because you’ve seen violence yourself.”

  Was that it, or did I also believe her because I was

  swayed by my attraction to her, and would it be possible to disentangle all the motives?

  “Rusty has a black SUV,” I said. “And he’s your

  husband.”

  “So you think I might be protecting him? The Battered Bitch Syndrome? Please.” That was the first time she had smiled since the previous night. “Rusty is just a spoiled little boy,” she said fondly. “He’s too much in love with himself to risk damaging his car or his hair plugs.”

  “They look real to me.”

  “He’s got the money for it.”

  “Why haven’t you divorced him?”

  Juno didn’t seem at all startled that I knew about the marriage, and she wasn’t remotely apologetic. She sat up a little straighter, wincing. “You know, Nick, for a gay man you have some very straitlaced ideas about life. Get a clue. Rusty and I are divorced emotionally. Who gives a fuck what the law does or doesn’t say? I don’t need his permission or anyone else’s to do what I want.”

  “Fine, be Walt Whitman. But it means you can’t get

  married again.”

  “Why would I want to make the same mistake twice?”

  I poured myself more coffee, feeling a Sally Jesse

  Raphael moment coming on, but unable to stop it. “Are you keeping him in reserve? Are you afraid to move on?”

  Juno gave me a rich Tallullah Bankhead laugh. “I’ve

  moved on and over and under any man I wanted to. That has nothing to do with Rusty.”

  “Maybe he thinks it does.”

  “And so he tried to kill me? Not possible. He’s in love with me—well, let me amend that. He’s as much in love with me as he can be with anyone. He’s an almost total narcissist so there’s not a whole lot of love left over for anyone else.”

  I suddenly saw myself and my friends back in high

  school air-guitaring to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,”

  one of the raunchiest songs we knew back in the dark ages before “Me So Horny” and the like.

  Juno was still smiling. “Rusty could never commit a

  crime when he has his career at stake, his reputation. He’s too wrapped up in being a guru.”

  “But committing a crime and going to jail is how his

  career got started!”

  “You don’t like him, do you?” She studied me, a little more color in her face than before. Maybe it was the

  painkiller. “He’s not very likable,” she admitted. “But all that ego is intensely entertaining—and besides, he’s very

  fuckable.” She shrugged. “These days, that’s a lot.”

  I could believe Juno’s version of “A hard man is good to find,” and wasn’t I drawn to her pizzazz? Why shouldn’t she find someone else’s pyrotechnics intriguing?

  Turandot curled up under the table and promptly fell

  asleep. Juno gazed down at her fondly.

  “Juno, somebody is trying to scare you and hurt you—”

  “—and doing a good job,” she muttered. “Of the second one, at least.”

  “Right. I don’t think you can dismiss Rusty as a

  suspect.”

  “Aren’t you leaving somethi
ng out? You were attacked, too. Someone’s after the both of us.”

  It was like that door opening in Close Encounters and all the extraterrestrial light flooding in. I had been so overwhelmed by the last twelve hours I’d actually forgotten my attack. It had all faded like brush strokes from one of those public-TV-catalog “Zen boards” where what you write disappears in a few minutes and you supposedly learn lessons about impermanence. None of it seemed real.

  “And while you may be able to cook up a motive for

  Rusty,” she observed, crossing her legs as carefully as if they might break, “Why would he want to target you as well?”

  “He’s homophobic.”

  “So it’s a two-for-one special? What did he say to you?”

  I told her how he’d insulted me and Stefan the previous night.

  “That’s it? He was just trying to score some cheap

  points. He was simply feeling protective. It’s rather sweet. He didn’t mean a word. I’d believe he was a homo hater if he were an insecure teenager, but he’s every inch a man.”

  Despite the seriousness of the moment, we both grinned at the pun, recalling our dinnertime conversation.

  “Nothing outlandish,” Juno added with satisfaction.

  “Though it does curve as sharply as a hat rack—”

  “Are you still sleeping with him?”

  Juno hesitated.

  “You won’t involve the campus police, you ask for my

  help—”

  “I offered to hire you,” she interrupted.

  “Fine. But you won’t tell me who you’re sleeping with.

  How can you expect me to even start trying to figure this mess out if you keep things secret?”

  “Everyone has secrets! It’s half of what makes people interesting.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “Hiding them, of course.”

  “That’s pretty good, but you’re stalling.”

  “Nick, I don’t see the relevance of discussing my love life.”

  I must have looked pretty disgusted, because she flared up: “Shall I give you an alphabetical listing? Geographical? By specialty? Ethnicity? Perhaps you’d like a flow chart!”