Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  “Meaning?” I wondered why he’d brought it up now.

  “I don’t know. It’s not just that he has his own life down in Neptune, that he’s older than most of the graduate students.

  It’s something else, something nebulous.”

  “Nebulous in Neptune—could be a musical.”

  “Not a very good one.”

  Though I felt refreshed after my shower and more

  coffee, the subject of Avis’s interview and whatever was or wasn’t going to happen in response to it already seemed weary, stale, and unprofitable.

  “Oh, shit!” I said. “I forgot to tell you that Valley came to Juno’s house this morning.”

  “Investigating?”

  “Accusing. He thinks she’s hiding evidence, that she

  knows more than she’s saying.”

  “He could be smarter than he looks.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Stefan, it was like those two-minute scenes you used to make fun of in Dynasty. Someone stalks into a room, makes an accusation, the charges fly, and then he or she marches out. Dramatic, but kind of pointless. Like most things connected to EAR.” I didn’t add that I’d gone to the Campus Center.

  Stefan drove off to do the grocery shopping, and I drove to campus. As I pulled up to Parker Hall, I had the strange sense of being at some kind of historical theme park. The ornate, crumbling red sandstone nineteenth-century building was eerily beautiful in the gray morning light. Rectangular, three-storied, and covered with ornate and fussy stone bands above each line of windows and along the roof line, it looked like a battered antique coin bank.

  Dutch elm disease had long since defoliated the area right around Parker, so the saplings at its perimeter made it look even more one-dimensional. Before I entered the parking lot, I could hear chanting from a group of several dozen students at the back of the building facing the lot: “Two, four, six, eight, White Studies Equals Hate.”

  But I was distracted taking a parking space in the ranks of faculty cars; Juno’s accident rushed back at me like a ravenous black bear attacking campers who’ve been foolish enough to leave food in their tent. I had to sit in the car with my eyes closed for a few minutes, telling myself it was over.

  Over? I could hear Sharon’s gentle, pitying voice asking “Really? How do you know?” Based on all my previous

  experiences at SUM, trouble was sure to follow in some new and dispiriting guise.

  Hell, as I took up my briefcase and got out of the car, wasn’t it there? Some twenty or thirty students in typical SUM motley circulated in an oval in front of the back door to Parker. Since the parking lot was at the back of Parker, this entrance was actually the most used, but from where I stood, I could see a smaller group off at the side door, and assumed another one was around the front as well. There were black, Hispanic, and Asian students primarily, and some gay ones I recognized from previous protests on campus, and with faces pierced like pincushions.

  Their sturdy-looking signs demanded Avis’s resignation, accused Arts and Letters and EAR of racism, and demanded more minority faculty and administrators—an old and

  perpetually unsatisfied complaint at SUM. Most of the signs did not seem slapped together that morning, so I wondered if this demonstration had been planned well in advance. The gay students glared at me, and I felt awkward. Stefan and I had resisted becoming representative gays at SUM, called in for any and all panel discussions no matter what the campus venue. While we were completely out, we did not relish becoming “homos on parade,” as people used to call them when we were growing up in New York. That job at SUM

  had been eagerly taken on by boring thirtyish Jurgen

  Pfefferblit, a diminutive professor in the School of

  Engineering whose glutinous conversation was swollen by stupefyingly dull statistics. Jurgen managed to reduce all questions about homosexuality to medians and percentiles, and had his own little ardent following on campus.

  If the professional touch to the signs was unexpected, I was even more surprised to see Bill and Betty Malatesta join the picketers. They were EAR’s star graduate students, blond, handsome, accomplished, but deeply disgruntled because they hadn’t found jobs and were stuck at EAR teaching as

  adjuncts. I would have expected them to stay away from such blatant criticism of the department, but they joined the picket line, unfurling white cardboard signs of their own: “White Studies Is Lite Studies.”

  Given that Betty was blunter than Bill, and he had the sense of humor, I suspected he’d come up with the very catchy slogan. As soon as they saw me approach, they broke away from the line and rushed up to me.

  “You’re not going in there, are you?” Betty demanded, looking unusually sweaty and disheveled in her corduroy jacket and jeans—like someone contemplating living up in a redwood to save it from loggers.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a picket line,” Bill said grimly. Usually he greeted me with a pun or a lightbulb joke, but he seemed to have lost his spark. It had to be the strain of living on an adjunct’s salary and hopes, though having been kicked out of his office and moved to a cramped one because of me might account for his tone just as much. He had a gold hoop in each ear, sideburns stretching down from under his dark ski cap, and had grown a tiny triangle of beard under his lower lip—all of which seemed like an attempt to achieve student solidarity, at least visually. But the effect on his clean-cut looks was as artificial as the black velvet patches aristocrats used to adorn their faces with in the eighteenth century.

  “You can’t cross a picket line,” Betty explained.

  “But you’re not auto workers, and this isn’t a factory.”

  Bill shook his head sadly. “Of course it’s a factory—we just do cultural production here.”

  I wanted to tell him to spare me the critspeak, but I didn’t. “So you’re telling me I can’t get my mail, I can’t go in to get ready to teach my classes?”

  Before he could answer, EAR’s shabby Three Amigos,

  Martin Wardell, Larry Rich, and Les Peterman—all of them looking just this side of homelessness—marched toward the picketers in a wedge formation, blaring “Out of my way!” and “Watch out!” Fat Wardell was on point, and he easily pushed through the startled demonstrators, who started reacting only when the doors shut behind the three professors. They shouted, “Racists!” but who could say what the weird trio had in mind with their act? They might simply resent being barred from their offices. After all, unlike me, they had aboveground offices that would not have been good settings for a Roger Corman film.

  Betty and Bill turned to me, eyebrows up, as if daring me to cause a similar disruption, and they rejoined the picket line, starting up the chant that was on their signs, alternating it with “White Studies Is Not-So-Bright Studies.”

  I stood there hesitating, unwilling to be intimidated by graduate or any other kind of students, feeling I owed my own students loyalty, though I also knew they’d welcome an excuse to have free time. Then a black BMW pulled past me and parked, and Tyler Mooney-Mauser emerged as briskly as if he were making an arrest. He was dressed for the part in a Nuevo Gestapo black leather trench coat, belted as tightly as his little smile of greeting.

  “Well, Professor Hoffman.” He half sounded like Olly

  telling Stan, “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us in.”

  “Well, what?” I snapped.

  “I hope you’re not here to lend support to these—these instigators.”

  “What are you here for?” I asked, trying to turn the attention away from myself. I’d be damned if administration pressure forced me to go into Parker—but I wanted to

  anyway, and felt caught.

  “The provost has asked me to note who respects the

  picket line and who doesn’t. If you have business in Parker Hall, I certainly hope you’ll go in. It’s one thing to respect student freedoms, another to let students c
reate a

  disturbance.”

  “Is this a disturbance?”

  His eyes dimmed at my questioning his assessment.

  “Are you behind this?” he asked. “Don’t lie. If you are, it’ll come out.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said recklessly. “I planned the whole thing.

  And in five minutes a crop duster is going to start spraying the campus with defoliant. We’ll have you by the balls.”

  Just then, Byron Summerscale lumbered out of the

  building in a shabby-looking raccoon coat he must have worn in college, stopped a few feet away from the demonstrators, threw his arms out wide, and launched into the “Marseillaise.”

  13

  I wished Stefan were there for the performance.

  Summerscale’s voice was hoarse, but his accent was

  credible, and he threw himself into the bloodier parts of the French anthem as if he were a cheerleader whose team was a field goal behind, with under a minute left in the game.

  The picketers hung back, staring at him, clearly not sure if his serenade was mockery, a tribute, or madness. Other students making their way across campus drifted over, drawn by the spectacle, and soon Summerscale had a crowd of fifty or sixty, constantly growing by two’s and three’s. I heard muttered questions around me, students wondering, Was this a theater department skit of some kind? Was Summerscale a nut like those Bible-waving preachers who hit campus in the spring and thundered about hell? Was he singing in Canadian?

  And, like, what was with that coat?

  But students who had either taken one of his classes or knew about his eccentricities were egging him on with a rhythmic disco-floor chant of “Go, By-ron! Go, By-ron! Go, By-ron!” An interesting musical counterpoint, and so much lighter in tone than the demonstrations I vaguely remembered against Nixon and the Christmas bombing of Cambodia that this could have been performance art rather than a protest.

  Tyler Mooney-Mauser was not remotely entertained by

  the display. If Summerscale were a crab, he’d be boiled by now, and Tyler would be cracking open his legs with grim satisfaction and scooping out the meat.

  Summerscale finished to spirited if generally

  uncomprehending applause and shouted, “Freedom!” before ducking back inside Parker. That was a clarion call that covered a lot of bases—would it be his campaign slogan when he ran for EAR chair? Or was it an ironic reference to Janis Joplin’s “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”?

  As the doors shut, I saw Peter de Jonge sidle around the side of the building and wondered if he were involved in the demonstration. It seemed a risky thing to do for a new graduate student, even if he did have a job in the outside world. Or was he just observing? If that was the case, why?

  He had to have some kind of connection, or he wouldn’t have called Stefan. Our eyes might have met, but I wasn’t sure. In any case, he ducked back around Parker Hall and disappeared.

  I thought of following, since he was acting so

  suspiciously, but just then my cell phone rang. I set down my briefcase and turned away from the crowd. It was Stefan, who said, “I tried your office phone but you didn’t answer— where are you?”

  “Outside Parker.” I quietly explained my dilemma,

  moving farther from the building and gawkers to get some privacy, nudging my briefcase along with one foot. Cars passing on Michigan Avenue were starting to notice the throng of students with signs and some were honking in support—unless it was just to make noise. Even some of the shop owners on the stretch of The Mile right across campus were in their doorways, observing this latest rumble from the SUM volcano.

  “Are you going in?” Stefan asked.

  “Shit—I don’t know—it’s not exactly like an afternoon at the beach out here, but—”

  “—you grew up in New York just like I did and crossing a picket line makes you uncomfortable.”

  “Yes. That’s it. Exactly.” How had I missed it? Standing there facing the demonstrators had triggered scenes from decades ago—and they filled me now with a sense of drama and unease. I didn’t want to feel like a scab, a word that had always sounded hideous and polluting to me.

  “So don’t cross it,” Stefan said. “You don’t really need to check your mail, do you? You could just go to Uplegger and teach, then check your mail another time.”

  I squirmed, and it wasn’t just at the mention of Uplegger, the cramped and malodorous building nearby where many EAR professors were assigned to teach (another example of their low status vis-à-vis other faculty at SUM). Stefan may have been right about just going with the flow, but I actually did want to cross the line, and not solely because the Malatestas had urged me not to and I disliked being bullied by anyone.

  I had some student papers in my office I wanted to

  return in class, and more inconsequentially, I had a routine of going back and forth between Parker and Uplegger when I taught. I was embarrassed to admit it even to myself, but Stefan seemed to read my silence.

  “So today won’t be as organized as usual. What can you do?”

  He was absolutely right. I laughed and told him I’d keep him posted. “If there are any arrests or fire bombings or whatever.”

  As I put the phone away, Avis Kinderhoek sallied up to me, her prim little mouth as tight as if I were a store manager and she had a complaint. “What’s going on here?”

  I gestured to the picket line. “Isn’t it obvious?” Why was she even talking to me after our confrontation at the faculty meeting? Wasn’t I the Antichrist to her?

  Her piggy nostrils quivered with disgust. “They should be thankful we let them in here at all, instead of biting the hand that feeds them!”

  “Avis, this is a university, not a zoo.”

  “Really? Tell that to the animals.”

  I didn’t know if she was targeting the students of color, students in general, or just hated anyone who disagreed with her—including me. Whatever her object, it was a repulsive attitude, and I was appalled she thought she could talk that way to me, as if I somehow approved. Her disdain made me mad, and I said, “SUM wouldn’t turn away a brick if it paid tuition.”

  Avis eyed me up and down as if to intimidate me, but

  given our respective heights, her stance had all the threat of a dog inspecting a pole before peeing on it. “You’re playing a very dangerous game,” she said, sounding like a villain in a bad spy movie.

  “There she is!” someone called. It might have been Bill Malatesta, but I wasn’t sure. Now cries of “Racist bitch!

  Racist bitch!” rose from the demonstrators, punctuated by the kind of hand-chopping fans do when their teams have Indian names. Why should SUM be any different from the rest of the country, where politics and entertainment are

  indistinguishable?

  Tyler Mooney-Mauser beetled over and laid a

  sympathetic hand down on Avis’s well-padded shoulder. “Are you all right?” He could have been a mourner at a viewing asking the widow how she was bearing up. Milking his

  sympathy, she shuddered.

  “This isn’t the place for you,” he said, and she nodded as daintily as she could. It was sick-making. Avis headed away from the growing tumult, and Tyler rounded on me as if I had been baiting Avis and had arranged the whole demonstration just to torment her. “Why don’t you leave her alone?” He stalked back toward the demonstrators as if the force of his disapproval could somehow silence them. Was there

  something about my personality, some kind of Kick Me aura that made people think they could say anything, accuse me of anything?

  Suddenly, with a faint cry of “Get him!” Tyler was up in the air as if the crowd had turned to a mosh pit. Did they know who this supernumerary was? How could they? It must have been the Malatestas who had identified him as the provost’s stooge and therefore worthy of harassment.

  Students gleefully passed Mooney-Mauser back and forth over their heads as he struggled and shouted inar
ticulate rage, objects falling from his pockets as he traversed the scornful, mocking hands, some of which may have been copping a

  derisory feel of his lean body or smacking at him.

  I should have felt sorry for Tyler; after all, I decried people being “passed up” at a football game. But I was glad to see him reduced from self-styled magnificence to the poor forked creature King Lear talks about.

  Now ancient, shuddering windows were being heaved

  open at the rear of Parker, and faculty and secretaries were peering out from every floor at the growing commotion.

  Dulcie Halligan was at one of the EAR main office windows, flanked by the other secretaries, looking censorious and concerned. EAR did not need any more bad press for the next decade or so, and a protest like this was bound to eventually attract cameras, reporters, and the kind of freelance troublemakers who could subvert any campus celebration and turn it into a riot.

  “Don’t worry!” Dulcie called down from the EAR office, where she had a perfect view of his humiliation. “The campus police are on their way!”

  Cheers rose from the mix of demonstrators and

  spectators, as if a Roman emperor had turned his thumb down in the arena and more glorious bloodshed was coming.

  Two years ago I had seen a fracas on campus turn into utter chaos that left one student dead, but I was able to watch this morning’s trouble with more than equanimity. I was in full schadenfreude mode, enjoying Tyler Mooney-Mauser’s downfall, or upfall, or something. As an agent of the provost, he was intent on making all of us feel powerless, and here he was, experiencing just that himself.

  I checked my watch. I still had time to decide about

  going to my office or not, without being late for my first class. But when I looked up, Tyler was disappearing—he was being dumped in the middle of the demonstrators, and I had a horrible flash of the movie Suddenly Last Summer and the scene where Sebastian Venable is torn apart in a crowd of starving Mexicans—and eaten.

  I hurried to intervene, trying to push through the crowd of students, which must have numbered well over a hundred by now, but then I heard clanking, and Tyler’s shout, “Let me go!”