by Lev Raphael
“You think Whartonites are bad? We’ve got Wharton wannabees. Profs who haven’t really written about Wharton except to include her in books or articles about other writers. They’re cashing in, getting a free trip.”
“To glamorous Michiganapolis,” Stefan said wryly.
“Listen. You and I both know that there are towns and universities in this country that make Michiganapolis and SUM seem like Paris and the Sorbonne.”
He nodded gravely. We’d both interviewed for jobs at such places, schools that had new libraries but hardly any books, or grim campuses that looked like a truck stop—without the ambience.
“Wait till I tell you what happened today. I mean, it’s not like there’s been an arrest, or another murder, but still—”
Stefan shushed me, poured the wine and served us each a slice of the mousse, and then led me out onto the sunroom, where the conference, and the world, seemed very far away.
Feeling protected and loved, I told Stefan all about the breakfast and Valley snagging me and mentioning the possibility of a serial killer; about the copy of Wharton’s The House of Mirth found at the murder scene; about Priscilla blaming herself but seeming evasive when I talked to her; about Serena’s confession; about how I thought Valley had followed me to Ferguson’s.
“Jeez, Priscilla’s book! I still haven’t looked at it.” I was about to race into the kitchen for the paperback in my jacket, but Stefan ordered me to stay put and finish filling him in. I did. And when it was all done, he looked almost as exhausted as I felt.
“All that happened in one day?”
“Not even one day—a morning and just part of the afternoon. This isn’t a conference,” I said. “It’s a marathon.”
“And Verity Gallup and Van Deegan Jones really yelled at each other at lunch? You’re not being dramatic?”
“Stefan, even the Dalai Lama couldn’t describe what happened today and make it sound peaceful.” I felt battered and dazed. “Was there any mail for me? Did I get any faxes or phone calls?”
“Forget about all that. You need a nap,” Stefan said, looking ready to admonish me if I argued.
I simply nodded, finished the glass of crisp wine and my slice of creamy mousse, and headed upstairs for our bedroom. Being taken care of felt wonderful, and I was glad that Stefan could put aside his hard feelings about the conference and my Wharton mania.
As I slipped off my shoes and climbed onto the bed, I was too tired to even pull back the quilt. Falling asleep, I imagined fleeing the conference and Michiganapolis with Stefan, driving north to Boyne City, and having dinner at its historic Wolverine-Dilworth Inn, a beautiful relic of the town’s roistering lumber days. Hanging from the lobby’s beamed ceiling were big brass chandeliers lighting up an unusual white tile floor spotted with tile flowers in orange, gray, yellow, black, and green. We’d have a drink inside first, since it’d be too cool to sit out on the porch, and then a simple dinner in the dark dining room: cherry-wine-soaked chicken breast with Michigan cherries. It was only four or so hours away…
I WOKE UP feeling released, as if a fever had burned off. My head was clear, my body felt lighter, and if I didn’t burst into song and gambol down the stairs, I certainly wasn’t feeling like the walking dead anymore.
Stefan had brewed a pot of Sumatra, and I thought, well, being addicted does have its advantages, like the rush I felt that very moment as the heavenly strong aroma grabbed me like a forklift.
“You’re in a good mood,” I noted, as Stefan poured me a mug of coffee and stirred in the warmed milk.
He shrugged. “That’s because the New Yorker came, and it didn’t bug me that I’ll probably never be in there again.”
“But you were, once, and how can you take that rag seriously any way? It’s so overrated. The Williams-Sonoma catalogue is much more fun, and the writing’s better any day.”
He grinned and shook his head. “I love you.”
“Of course you do. I’m pretty lovable.” And then my mood shifted instantly as I remembered what I had to do. “I think I should read Priscilla’s novel now,” I said, sipping from my mug and reveling in the jolt. “I’ll take it out to the sunroom.”
“How about some music?”
“Sure. You pick.”
He chose a Liszt piano concerto, which was appropriate, given the drama of what I discovered in Priscilla’s Dancing with Death.
I didn’t read it so much as skim to follow the plot. What I found was devastating. As I had feared or guessed, there was a situation in this mystery alarmingly close to the real-life one of Chloe, Vivianne, and Priscilla winding up at my party. The plot revolved around a triangle of three women in which one arranges for the other two to meet publicly when they’re very hostile. They argue and one of the two is murdered by the other that same night. The dead woman is wildly unpopular, so there are lots of suspects. Well, that wasn’t quite the case here.
None of the women were writers, two were dancers with small companies, one a choreographer. But that didn’t really matter because the general resemblance was clear.
Stefan emerged onto the sunroom after an hour had passed, with the strains of something quieter behind him. The Trout Quintet?
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“This is terrible.” I explained why. “If Valley finds out about the book, he’ll be convinced that Priscilla killed Chloe, unconsciously imitating her own mystery.”
“It’s too obvious. I still think Vivianne set it up to look that way.”
“But shouldn’t I tell Valley about the book? If I don’t, doesn’t that mean I’m withholding evidence?”
“If he’s been talking to people about the reception, Valley may al ready know.”
The idea of Valley working behind the scenes—though nothing out of the ordinary—chilled me.
“Let’s shower,” Stefan said. “For Shabbat.”
While I was asleep, Stefan had set the dining room table for Shabbat dinner, and it was time to start getting ready to enter that peaceful place. Late each Friday afternoon, we showered together to wash the week’s trouble away, and to relax. Then we set the table with a lace table cloth my mother had brought from Belgium and our good dishes, while the stereo played soothing Jewish songs or chants.
We lit the candles, said kiddush (the blessing over the wine), washed our hands, and blessed the challah as slowly and mindfully as possible, trying at each stage to leave the world further behind us, to draw closer to one another.
Once he had seen that observing Shabbat even minimally wasn’t a burden, but like going off on a retreat every week and emerging refreshed, Stefan had embraced it wholeheartedly.
Tonight, though, I found it difficult to unwind because I knew we weren’t staying home after dinner, but returning to the Campus Center, and eating another dinner—with a murderer.
I made the best of it, tried to drink the kiddush wine slowly, to let the sweetness spread through my body and sway my mind. Stefan had made something light since we’d be eating again soon, and the pasta primavera with grilled salmon was just right. I was lolling in my chair after we’d said a short version of the post meal prayers, thinking how lucky I was, when the phone rang.
“Should I just let whoever it is leave a message?” I wanted Stefan to decide, but he shook his head and told me I should do what I wanted to.
The mood seemed broken and I headed into my study, where I heard the clipped tones of Webb Littleterry’s secretary saying, “I have the president on the line, Dr. Hoffman.”
I snatched up the phone and said I was there.
And of course, I got the ritual, “Hold for President Littleterry, please.”
I marveled at the president’s secretary being in on a Friday afternoon after five. Stefan had wandered into the room and I told him it was Littleterry calling.
He slumped a bit, and I waved him to a chair.
Checking my desk clock, I counted a full minute of waiting, and then Littleterry’s gruff, nasal voice explo
ded in my ear: “What the hell’s going on with that conference of yours!”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s how you show this university cares about women? You kill one?
“I didn’t kill anyone, sir.”
“It sounds like criminal negligence to me. But don’t quote me!”
“The Campus Police are investigating—”
“Fuck your excuses! You’re making this university look like Bosnia! We’re overexposed!”
Seething, I asked Littleterry what I was supposed to do about it.
“You should apologize! It’s your fucking conference and your fault!” The president slammed down his phone before I could think of any thing to say. It was a rare moment, and Stefan watched me cope with my own speechlessness.
Finally, I found my voice. “Littleterry wants me to apologize. Because Chloe’s dead.”
“Apologize? To whom?”
I shrugged. “The Board of Trustees? The alumni? Who the hell knows?”
“But what for?”
“This is bad PR for SUM. It won’t look good in an annual report.”
Stefan sighed. “That man is a menace. He’s like what Winston Churchill said about Clement Atlee: ‘Every time he speaks, he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.’”
I nodded, unable to savor the quotation. “We should probably clean up and change for tonight.”
Fine.
I followed Stefan back out to the dining room, feeling certain that I would never get tenure at SUM now that the head of the Board of Trustees thought I was a pervert and the president thought I was responsible for a death that was tarnishing the university’s image.
Part Three
“…each evening had brought its new problem and its renewed distress…”
—Edith Wharton, The Reef
8
DRIVING TO THE Campus Center with Stefan, I felt a growing sense of despair. If I didn’t get tenure, I could go up for it second time, but that wasn’t usually how things played out. Being denied tenure was as much a warning as the grade of B was to a graduate student. Or more to the point, bloody footsteps in a haunted house: Get Out.
But I was sure as shit not going to stay in Michiganapolis without a teaching position at SUM. I couldn’t imagine the ordeal of looking for another job and hoping that Stefan would be able to land something at a school within commuting distance (since our finding jobs at the same university again was unlikely).
As we drove into the Campus Center’s banal concrete parking structure and began circling up its ramps in the hunt for a space, Stefan seemed to have picked up on my thoughts. He said, “We might be able to make it without your salary.”
“Yeah—for how long? We’d eventually have to sell the house and live in an apartment. And why would I want to stay here unemployed, anyway? For the rich cultural life? Please.”
Michiganapolis might have had scenery on its side, clean air and water, a low crime rate, and friendly people, but it was culturally dead—the kind of town where deluded provincial directors offered up stale theater as if it were daring. When was the last time anyone was shocked by Mrs. Warren’s Profession?
“And what would I do if I wasn’t teaching? Become your houseboy?”
Stefan grinned. “You look good in thongs.”
“Sorry—you’re the one with the great feet.”
Pulling into a space between two hulking Jeep Cherokees that made Stefan’s Volvo look like a VW bug, I didn’t ask Stefan to confirm the obvious: he, too was worried about my chances for tenure.
Well. My academic career might be about to implode through no fault of my own, but at least I had Stefan. And when he got out of the car, I couldn’t help feeling a slight lift, knowing (or at least hoping) that we would get through this new crisis together. After all, we’d managed to hang on through the terrible years he couldn’t get published, so surely there was hope for us, if not my job.
AT THE COCKTAIL hour, or half hour, before dinner, I found myself studying Vivianne Fresnel, maybe because she reminded me a little of my mother. They shared a European confidence, though my mother wasn’t quite as pretty.
As we all mingled around the set tables sporting yellow and purple Peruvian lilies, Vivianne seemed to be having a wonderful time, chatting amiably, posed with the haughty elegance of a ballerina. She was wearing a mid-calf clinging black dress and high-heeled black boots.
“Mikimoto pearls,” I said to Stefan, motioning to the unusual three-stranded necklace she wore. “Three thousand dollars.” The strands weren’t rounded at the bottom but formed a large V.
“How do you know?”
“I saw the identical necklace in a New York Times ad last week. And Jeez, look at the minaudière!”
“The what?”
“Her purse.” It was a glittering little objet like the kind you’d see in a shop on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré in Paris, pedestaled and lit like an icon, with an unbelievable price in script on a tiny, discreet tag.
Stefan wasn’t thinking about Vivianne’s jewels or her minaudière. “She’s not very upset for someone who’s lost her lover,” he observed quietly. “Even if they did argue a lot.”
It struck me that maybe Stefan was imagining what his life would be like without me. I felt warm, but a little on edge. Had he dreaded my walking out on him over Perry Cross, or afterwards? It was certainly possible for a while, and that had been the surprise. For weeks after the drama was over, I felt relief, but that ended abruptly the day I woke up so angry I wanted to kick Stefan right out of bed. For over a month, I called my cousin Sharon every day, sometimes twice a day, to complain about Stefan.
Each time, at some point in the torrent, Sharon had very sensibly, but very kindly, said, “Well, that’s over. So what do you want to do?”
It didn’t take long for me to decide that I wanted to stay, and try to heal.
“What are you thinking about?” Stefan asked now.
I didn’t lie. “Last year.”
He looked pained, but if he didn’t feel that, he wouldn’t feel anything.
Before he could comment, Serena sailed over, trailing chiffon and Chanel No. 5, which she once told me was the only perfume suitable for a woman “her age.”
“Haven’t seen you lately,” Serena purred at Stefan. “You look appetizing.” She held up her cheek to him for a kiss.
“Jeez, Serena, I forgot about the interview! How did it go? We didn’t catch the news.”
She grimaced. “Okay, but I got bumped. There was a big fire they covered instead. It was at a bowling alley—burned it to the ground—much more interesting. You were talking about Vivianne,” she said knowingly, eyeing the two of us.
“You read lips?” I asked.
Serena went on unperturbed. “She’s remarkably composed, don’t you think? You can’t even count her wearing black as a sign of mourning. They all wear black in Paris, even the infants.”
“So why isn’t she more distraught?” I wondered.
Serena had a quick answer. “Maybe she knows she’s inheriting Chloe’s money. Or is she the murderer and trying to act innocent?”
We all looked at each other, intrigued and a little embarrassed, I think. Here we were, making cocktail chat about a woman’s death. It was obscene, wasn’t it? But somehow very natural, and maybe even part of what made us human. I’m sure people stood around just like this in Nebuchadnezzar’s day, taking odds on who’d poisoned the vizier.
“You were wrong,” I said to Serena. “You told me all the wrong things to be prepared for. Flight delays. Lost luggage. Room reservations get ting screwed up. Not enough coffee or iced water in the seminar rooms. Microphones not working. None of that’s happened.”
Serena considered my outburst. “Nick, Nick, Nick. If I’d somehow known there was going to be a murder last night, and an intellectual food fight at lunch, what would you have done?”
She stumped me there.
“Are you blaming me, Nick?”
&nbs
p; I crumpled a little, and Stefan told her that President Littleterry was blaming me.
Serena drew herself up like an operatic heroine about to denounce her oppressor. “That’s absurd. The man’s just a mouthpiece for Joanne Gillian. Now there’s a real candidate for murder…. Say, maybe she was the intended victim. Joanne and Chloe look a bit alike, don’t they? And weren’t they wearing similar, rather unflattering suits last night?”
“I don’t remember,” I said, hoping Serena would drop the subject. But if she had put this together, perhaps other conferees had come to the same conclusion. That meant Joanne Gillian would, too, or at least she’d hear about it, and make another assault on the media.
Serena backed off by herself. “No, it couldn’t have been a mistake. Chloe’s even more unpopular than that wench Joanne.”
Stefan and I exchanged a glance I don’t think Serena caught.
It was almost seven and time to sit down for dinner, so we moved to a table. Van Deegan Jones, red-faced and looking distracted, sidled into the room just then, trying to be inconspicuous. It didn’t work because he was greeted by several colleagues. What was he up to?
Crane Taylor was sitting opposite me, but I couldn’t talk to him about Chloe because Serena and Stefan dominated dinner debating the merits of some Michael Cunningham novel. Serena thought it was moving and beautifully written, while Stefan called it pretentious pseudopoetry, and quoted many lines as evidence. The one that struck me most was something about a white bedspread teaching a woman “the patience of whiteness.” Inveighing against the idiocy of that image, Stefan sounded like me on one of my high horses, and that was certainly diverting, since he’s usually so serene.
It was also amusing to note that hardly anyone else at the table had even heard of Cunningham, who’d been reviewed in the New York Times. Wharton scholars, like most academic specialists, tend to know only their field, and even there, just a small part of it. I’m not sure that I would read as widely as I do if not for Stefan making constant recommendations of fiction and nonfiction that I couldn’t ignore.
