Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  “How do you expect me to help you?” she said curtly, after nodding at a chair set well away from her desk, as if I were contagious. I sat down and put the briefcase at my feet, wishing it held a bomb, or at least a poisoned apple.

  “Help?” Her question had completely thrown me a curve, even if it was meant to be rhetorical.

  Serena breathed in deeply as if she were a dragon

  preparing to incinerate a knight. “Your tenure committee needs reformulation after last month’s—” She struggled for a word to describe EAR’s most recent craziness, then gave up.

  “And I’m the one who makes the appointments. Don’t you consider that help?”

  “I didn’t realize that’s what you meant.”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t seem to realize. You can’t associate with rowdy students and involve yourself in a campus takeover—”

  “Whoa! What takeover? And they weren’t rowdy, not at

  first, anyway. And I wasn’t associated with anybody. I was on the way to my office.”

  She surveyed me with utter contempt, her overly made—

  up face clearly conveying her disappointment that I couldn’t supply a better excuse. I studied her while trying not to stare.

  Serena still favored a Midwest Mikado look, lacquered black French twist and circles of blush on a pale, almost white foundation, but her stint as acting chair seemed to have alerted her to the fact that rising in the power structure might require some changes. She seemed ever so slightly uncomfortable behind the administrative hauteur and the layers of makeup, which made me think of the stories about Queen Elizabeth I dying with an inch of the stuff on her face, though in her day it was supposedly made with egg yolks.

  “Serena, I always go to my office before classes.” It was true, but perhaps because it was the truth, it sounded lame.

  Now Serena folded her hands like a cynical judge listening to a call girl explain what she was doing at 4 A.M. in hot pants at a scummy intersection. Yet I felt strangely aloof from the inquisition. I didn’t need her—I didn’t need EAR or SUM.

  “And how can you call it a takeover? They were just

  demonstrating here at Parker. Don’t students have a right to free association?”

  “They don’t have a right to take hostages! They don’t have a right to destroy Dulcie’s tree, our tree, or tear apart Parker Hall—and that was just today.”

  Evidently Serena believed in some kind of academic

  domino theory: today Parker, tomorrow the entire campus would be swarming with vandals and Ohio State football fans ready to sack and burn.

  “You’re more concerned with that tree or a bit of

  stonework than with my getting beaten up, or Juno’s

  accident, aren’t you? Property over people.”

  Serena blithely ignored that. “This is a conspiracy to undermine SUM,” she said.

  “What?”

  “And you’re telling me that you had no connection with the demonstrators? None at all?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you, yes. Is somebody giving you a different story? Who?” I would say that her tightened lips looked like an asshole, but that would be a poor reflection on assholes.

  “Then why were you there?”

  “I told you already. Who’s been lying about me? That

  crazy Avis? Tyler?” It couldn’t be the bitter Malatestas, could it? I wasn’t going to mention their names, though. I was sure they were in enough trouble.

  “Nick, lower your voice. You’re in no position to be a bully.”

  That was it. I stood up, and leaned onto her desk with my fists, and she drew back. One for me. “Serena, even a freshman psychology major would know that calling me a bully isn’t just bullshit, it’s projection. Try looking it up. And try intimidating somebody else.” I grabbed my briefcase and left, not bothering with any of the niceties. She could help me, hinder me, or even fire me. I didn’t care, though in typical esprit de l’escalier, I wished I’d used Jack Nicholson’s line, “Sell crazy somewhere else.”

  Dulcie and the other secretaries raked me with their eyes as if I were King Kong and they were the airplanes, but their scorn seemed ludicrous. Unwilling to be driven off by their silent screaming, I deliberately slowed down to check my mail, then exited the EAR office feeling “blithe and bonny,” as Shakespeare put it, while behind me was a scene of woe worthy of Titus Andronicus.

  Happy and hungry, I strutted into the cavernous hallway and down the stairs as if I’d just bought Parker and had plans to tear it down. Even running into Valley in the parking lot didn’t faze me.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, as I was setting my briefcase in the backseat of my car.

  I turned and smiled. “What for?”

  “I want to ask you some questions.”

  “Call my lawyer—call my accountant. Call anybody you

  like.”

  He peered at me as if wanting to smell my breath for

  alcohol. “Why are you always around when there’s trouble?

  First the faculty reception turning wild, then Juno

  Dromgoole’s accident, now all this: abusing a university official and destroying university property.”

  I slammed the back door. “That is a stupid question. I’ve got a question for you, and it’s not stupid. Why are you always wasting my time? You think I’d want to start a student protest and handcuff some twit administrator to a door? To do what? To sabotage my career even further?”

  “Maybe. Maybe you know you’re going down in flames

  so you don’t care anymore.”

  “Let me ask you something. Do you know who started

  the riot at the Campus Center? Do you know who attacked me? Have you found who slashed Juno’s tires or crashed into her car? That wasn’t an accident, and she wasn’t just pushed at the reception—somebody shot at her, no matter what you think, and somebody’s after both of us.”

  He didn’t even touch the shooting question, just said, “Those investigations are ongoing.”

  “Those investigations are bullshit. You don’t know squat, and you’re not a real cop. A real cop would have found something out by now. Three crimes, and you don’t know shit! A real cop wouldn’t bother harassing me when he could be out doing police work.”

  Valley stood back as if I’d just challenged him to a fight in a bar, but instead of taking offense, he chuckled

  appreciatively. “I guess porking that babe is making a man out of you. Finally.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Yeah, and maybe if you got

  porked, it would make a man out of you.” In the time it took him to register exactly what I meant, I got in, started my car, and pulled away, not bothering to check his face in the rearview mirror. I didn’t care if he was angry or shocked or anything. I’d had enough.

  I drove home just dying to bitch out somebody else. It was clearly habit-forming. How long would it last? And was it more than just the shock of seeing the plummeting tree, then the sandstone chunk come down off the roof—both of which could have hit me?

  Stefan was home, unpacking some groceries from the

  health food store: soy milk, flaxseed oil, cashew butter. Chet Baker was playing low on the portable CD player.

  “Congratulate me!” I said, dropping my briefcase and

  tossing my coat onto a chair. “I’m going to get fired.”

  Stefan eyed me warily, waiting for the punch line.

  “I’m not kidding. Serena tried to blame me for what

  happened to Tyler, or implicate me, anyway. So I told her to go fuck herself, and ditto Detective Valley.”

  “Why him?”

  “Because he was nagging me in the parking lot, and I’m sick of it. He’s useless. He’s an idiot, and I’m his number-one suspect whenever anything happens on this campus. He

  probably thinks I beat myself up in the john. Shit, he probably thinks I’m behind global warming. He’s been working my last nerve, and I just blew up.
”

  “You told him to go fuck himself?”

  “Well, basically. Not with those exact words.” God, I hated temporizing! Why hadn’t I used those exact words? “He got the message, so did Serena. They both knew what I meant. I’m going to get fired for sure.”

  “How do you know?” He folded up a recycled brown

  paper bag as neatly as if he were doing origami and slipped it into the appropriate drawer. I looked around the kitchen, wishing we hadn’t spent so much money remodeling it:

  granite countertops, wine refrigerator, all new appliances, custom cabinetry.… We’d gone deliriously over budget, then had felt justified not simply by the picture-perfect results, but by the promise of Stefan’s advance on the film deal. But who knew where I’d be working next, and when?

  “Get me something to drink—no, I’ll do it.”

  “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  He frowned.

  “Stefan, don’t be prissy. You’re too buffed to be prissy.

  I need to celebrate.” And I needed to deal with everything else. I took the bottle of Stoli from the freezer, grabbed a shot glass, poured myself a shot, downed it, and sat at the counter with my liquid courage. Stefan sat on the other side of the counter, observing me. “Haven’t we talked about leaving, giving this place up?”

  “But that was talk. And I want to stay.”

  “Well, maybe I’m ready. Maybe I need to move on.” He looked stricken, and I grabbed his hand. “Not from you, from the U.”

  He smiled weakly at my pun. “But how do you know for

  sure you’re going to get fired?”

  “Come on, Stefan. I talked to Juno, and there are rumors that make me sound like the Chicago Seven and Dr. Moriarty combined. Avis was there, and she hates me, and Tyler accused me of setting things up. Somebody’s out to get me.

  Why wouldn’t they fire me? It’s moral turpitude or whatever they talk about in the faculty handbook as grounds for dismissal.”

  “You can’t be fired because of rumors and a

  misunderstanding. We’ll sue.”

  “Right, and use up your option money on legal bills in a few months—and then what?”

  He took my glass and poured himself a shot, downed it as if he were G. Gordon Liddy holding his hand over that candle flame. “You sound like you want to be fired,” he said.

  “I don’t understand. You love teaching, you love your students.”

  “Of course I do, but it’s wearing thin,” I said, reaching for the bottle to pour myself another shot. “It’s wearing pretty fucking thin. It costs too much. What’s that line from that spiritual you like? ‘I been ’buked and I been scorned.’ Well, that’s how I feel, and I’m tired of both. Sure, teaching here is better than being stuck in a civil war in Sudan or what have you, but so what? I’m tired of thinking of all the ways my life could be worse than it is. That’s no consolation. I don’t know if I want to be fired, but if I am, why fight it?”

  I half expected Stefan to complain or even freak out, but wise, calm introvert that he is, he simply nodded and chose a different tack altogether.

  “Well, it could be wonderful for you to be home. I’m not saying give up the cleaning lady and have you do the

  housework! I mean, you’d have more time to read, garden, swim, and”—he grinned—“have lunch with the girls.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Doesn’t Sharon call it the Countess Tolstoy life? You could take long walks, think about deep issues.”

  “Stop.”

  “Okay, seriously? Maybe you need the time off. It would be too bad if you didn’t get to teach that mystery class, but so it goes. You could do another bibliography or write a book about Wharton. You know more than anyone else about her.

  You’ve got to have a book in you somewhere. Or you could write a memoir, ‘Confessions of a Bibliographer.’ Or you could get a dog.”

  “You make it sound like retirement.”

  “Think of it as a long sabbatical until you figure out what to do next. So how about eggplant parmigiana tonight? And that Montevina Barbera that’s so good with tomato sauce?”

  “Terrific. You’re on. When do we start?”

  “No. I’m cooking. I’m done with all my errands today, and you’ve had enough to deal with.”

  Stefan prepared the eggplant dish but didn’t put it in the oven, so as to give us time for a salad of mushrooms, green beans, and Vidalia onions with cumin, parsley, and a Dijon/red wine vinaigrette. We had that while I filled him in on my talk with Juno, or at least her part of the conversation. This was so much of life, the reconnections, the reporting, going over what had just happened. Was that to make events more real, to keep them from slipping away? But they did, no matter how you tried to hold on. Wasn’t there a Talking Heads song where David Byrne crooned about staying awake because his memories couldn’t wait?

  “It’s on ‘Fear of Music,’” Stefan reminded me.

  14

  GIVEN that the end of the semester was coming and students would have escalating, nervous questions about their final papers, I expected that my Thursday office hours would be crowded, but the noise I heard roiling from the basement as I entered Parker Hall made it sound like a hot new club had opened down there. And in fact the atmosphere was more partylike than apprehensive. Easily fifty students were encamped in the basement, lined up down the grim low-ceilinged hallway as if they were waiting to buy tickets to Smash Mouth or Shania Twain. There were a lot of kids I didn’t recognize, and when I saw them, I assumed they were friends of my students who wanted to check me out, now that I was truly infamous.

  As soon as I appeared, there was a wave of applause,

  whistling, and cheers. What could I do? I bowed gratefully and headed to my office while someone took off his

  headphones and momentarily blasted a Moby song that I was also hearing in TV ads now that techno was so hot, and a few students did some hot rave moves (without the lights, of course). It wasn’t the theme from Rocky, but it would do just fine.

  Perhaps because I felt onstage, I was more aware of

  how decrepit the basement was, almost as if I were that TV

  ad party host discovering spots on her glasses just before company came by. The basement floor dipped and rose noticeably under the cracked and blackened shabby linoleum.

  Given Parker’s decay, that chunk of sandstone could easily have been dislodged by someone heaving the tree off the roof if the building was in such disrepair—it could have been an accident.

  Students waved the student newspaper at me, but I

  resisted looking at a copy, just as I had not read the Michiganapolis Tribune that morning despite Stefan’s chuckling at breakfast, and had refused to take any calls from local media the night before, not wanting to feel poisoned by rumors, distortions, and the grab-grab-grab of reporters.

  Given my confrontations with Serena and Valley, I

  couldn’t help feeling a sense of nostalgia in that crummy basement as I settled into my office, admiring the enormous pot of silk hydrangeas Sharon had bought me on her last visit to liven up the office. Where would I put them at home? This could well be my last semester working with students at SUM, and I felt a bit mawkish when I was able to help with transitions, illustrations, conclusions.

  Almost everyone who had come to see me wanted an

  override to get into my mystery class next semester, for themselves or for someone else. I didn’t have the heart to say I doubted I’d be around, so I just told everyone to check back with the department at the beginning of spring semester. I wasn’t sure what the procedure was, anyway.

  One of my students, Carter, who dressed in very preppy loafers, chinos, white T-shirt, and V-neck cashmere sweater, said, “You should go on TV, like to sell Mace or something.

  Or The Club.”

  I laughed. “I’m not well known enough.”

  “No way!”

 
; “Way.”

  Another who was a Sinead O’Connor clone and double—

  majoring in journalism and criminal justice wondered if I was interested in being interviewed for her thesis on campus crime. “I could write you in somewhere, since you’re so out there and everything.”

  I demurred.

  She shook her bald head. “My parents ask me about you all the time, and they live in Cheboygan!”

  Several students had screenplay ideas they either wanted my feedback on or collaboration with; in each case the story involved a serial killer.

  As I met with more and more students, many of whom

  had as much stargazing on their minds as questions about their work, the party atmosphere intensified out in the hallway. I could smell Domino’s pizza and Kentucky Fried Chicken (both places were right across Michigan Avenue from Parker). And students shared various food items with me over the course of my meetings, since I had forgotten to bring a lunch.

  After an hour and a half, there was a sudden shout in the hallway of “Qui-et!”

  Byron Summerscale, Captain of the Stentorian Guard.

  “This is a hall of learning, not a bar and grill!” His words resonated in the cavernous silence. Then he appeared at my open door with giggles foaming up in his wake, looking as large and hearty as some Norse sea god.

  “Nicky! I’m proud of you! I need you in my

  administration! A man of courage! A man of conviction! A man who speaks truth to power.”

  Byron flung his arms wide and waved them as if he were hoping to leave the ground. His tone was as wildly confident as if he’d already won the EAR election, which hadn’t even taken place yet; department bylaws required the campaigning to occur over breaks so as not to pollute the supposedly unpolitical semesters. But worse than the timing was Byron’s self-congratulation, because his praise of me was really directed at himself.

  The academic mind is a terrible thing to taste.

  My poor student cowered in her chair. Michiko was a

  shy and elfin Japanese exchange student (with fashionably dyed red hair) who must have thought the statuesque

  Summerscale was both hideously rude and essentially crazy.