The Death of a Constant Lover

by Lev Raphael

  “First his wife, now his son,” Polly said, clucking her tongue.

  “What happened to his wife?”

  “Don’t you remember?” Stefan said. “She killed herself last year.”

  “Oh, yeah…vaguely. Wasn’t there a rumor that she was having an affair?”

  Polly glared at me. “Absolutely not!” But then she shrugged. “Dr. Benevento is very unlucky. There’s some bad energy there.”

  I froze, expecting her to launch into some wild story about former lives or channeling or something. For Polly, words like “energy” were her own little doorway into the Outer Limits.

  I was right to be wary; she nodded sagely and said, “I’ve had my darkness. But I’m all over that, now.”

  Hurray, I thought, she’s joined the Prozac Generation.

  Stefan said, “Really?” to Polly, as quietly as a therapist prompting a jittery patient.

  “Oh yes,” she assured him. “Oh yes. I was at the mall today, that’s why I came over, and that’s where I got this outfit.”

  Polly jumped up and curvetted like a dog angling for a treat, and just as suddenly plopped back down in her chair.

  “It was on sale for twenty bucks, can you believe it, I think because it has this stain”—here she crossed her legs and waved one. I could make out what looked like a small flaw in the material. “But outside Hudson’s this woman came up to me, real gnarled, you know, like an old apple tree, maybe ninety years old, and she started talking to me in a language I’d never heard, but somehow it was familiar and I felt like I was at home. Finally at home.”

  Stefan was eating this up, nodding, eyes right on her as if she were a painting at a museum and he was listening to the audio tour, determined to glean every bit of information he could to get his money’s worth.

  “And she placed her hand right on my forehead and told me I was healed.”

  Polly breathed in deeply as if reliving the moment.

  Eyes narrowed, Stefan said, “Did she mean you were healed already? That this was the end of a process? Or did she mean that you were healed right at that moment?”

  I gaped at Stefan. How could he humor Polly like this? She was consorting with lunatics at the mall, and he was taking her story as seriously as a news report.

  Polly frowned, considering the question. “A little of both, I think. But then she told me she and I were both from another planet.”

  Now, that I believed.

  “And that we had always felt lost, out of place, but we would be going home soon.”

  Please, I thought, real soon.

  “Where?” Stefan asked.

  “To a planet near the Dog Star, Sirius.” She pointed out the window, back toward the mall.

  At first I thought she was saying “the Dark Star” and she was “serious,” but as it sunk in, I was tempted to howl or bark or scratch for fleas.

  “That’s where we’re from,” Polly said. “That’s our home. Only, we have work to do here first on this planet. That’s why we’ve been sent. I can’t tell you what it felt like to feel so free, finally, to feel like I’m not alone anymore.”

  Stefan nodded, leaning forward, intent, captured. I wanted to yell at him—this was absurd. How could he indulge her like this? I kept waiting for something, some sign that he knew she was nuts, but he just kept nodding and smiling at Polly. He was reveling in her oddities, and I knew he kept track of her Michigan speech—the way she said “alls” for “all,” “grosheries,” “pop” for “soda,” “heighth” for “height,” and “I cracked a window” when we would say “opened.”

  I tried distracting Polly. “Hey—did you see that hunk across the street? Do you need some yard work done?”

  “I saw him,” Polly said quietly, completely out of character, and then with a rush started talking about her true planetary home again. What was her problem? Surely this space cowgirl wasn’t a prude?

  Rather than leave the room—it was my house, wasn’t it?—I decided to bring Polly in for a landing. Something she’d said before had intrigued me, so I interrupted. “Your chairman was really close to his son?”

  “Oh, no! They hated each other, at least that’s what I’ve heard in the office. One time he even kicked Jesse out of his office after they had some argument. They were screaming at each other, throwing things, and later on Dr. Benevento came out and apologized to us secretaries.” Given that Harry Benevento was such a large, bearlike man, I imagined his rage could be pretty scary.

  “So they hated each other—why?”

  Polly shrugged. “He was an honors student, but he didn’t work very hard at all. Some professors might have given him good grades because of his father.”

  I blushed, because I had felt some of that unspoken pressure myself, though in my class Jesse had completed every requirement and honestly earned his 3.5. “Did you know much about him?” I asked, wondering if Polly had heard anything that might explain his murder.

  “I’m not nosy,” she said, implying that I was. But then she burst out, “One of the things Dr. Benevento said to Jesse the time they argued, it was pretty awful. He told Jesse he was a disgrace, and he wished he was dead.” She blinked so rapidly I feared she was about to go into a trance.

  “But you said that he was devastated by Jesse’s death.”

  Polly looked at Stefan quizzically, as if asking was I always this prying and difficult. She drew herself up. “Of course he was devastated—he’s not a monster, for God’s sake! His son died.”

  I moved on. “How’d Benevento’s wife kill herself? I don’t remember the story.”

  Polly blinked a few times. “They tried keeping it quiet. It was a hanging. I mean, she hung herself, in their garage, from a bar her son used for pull-ups. It was very high up because he’s so tall, like his father.”

  “Was there a note?”

  Polly shook her head. “Not that I heard. It was a shock because they had a wonderful marriage, everybody said so. They were very happy together. But I do know that she left him pretty valuable real estate in her will. It’s land up on the Leelenau that she inherited from her family. On the Lake Michigan side. They had plans to build, but it never happened.”

  That was one of the prime vacation spots in the state, I knew, with almost no open lots left. A beautiful site could be worth over half a million dollars.

  “Hmm. First his wife, now his son,” I said slowly, as if trying to match a stranger’s face with a name.

  Polly cracked her knuckles and said quite sharply, “So?”

  “Nick.” Stefan swatted my knee with the section of the Times he was holding. “Benevento didn’t kill his son—he couldn’t have. You would have seen him there on the bridge.”

  “You were there,” Polly breathed. I nodded.

  “Unless he hired somebody. What if he killed his wife, and then had his son killed because Jesse discovered what he’d done?” This is what had changed in me from being around so many murders. All too easily, I’d start testing theories of what had happened. Just as Minnie had at dinner.

  Stefan frowned.

  “Unless it’s somebody taking revenge on Benevento by striking at his family,” I said. “Maybe it’s some kind of vendetta thing. What if that guy hawking Bibles was actually a hit man?” I knew that couldn’t be true; the Tribune reported briefly that the young preacher had been questioned and released. My guess was that he had disappeared into the murky Michigan underworld of religious fanatics, Klansmen, and militia members.

  “This is sick!” Polly said, looking disgusted. “How can you say things like that!” She barked out a quick good-bye and stormed out to the front door. Stefan followed, shaking his head at me. When he returned, he was frowning.

  “You did that on purpose, right? You don’t believe any of that. You made it up to get rid of Polly, didn’t you?”

  His face changed when I said, “No. Not at all. It all seems like too much of a coincidence to me. Don’t you think somebody’s after Harry Benevento or his family? And
that they’ve been having pretty good luck so far? Harry could be next.”

  4

  Monday morning, I was surprised—and a little embarrassed—to find Delaney Kildare standing outside my office door in Parker Hall. I spotted him down the hallway as soon as I opened the door from the landing, and in that sepulchral gloom his handsomeness gleamed like the gold of an icon in a dusky shrine.

  Dressed in jeans, Doc Martens, and a thin, clinging maroon turtleneck sweater, Delaney looked like a model posed as a student more than a real student. I wondered if he had seen us at our living room window ogling him when he was mowing Lucille and Didier’s lawn, even though the light was behind him there. My father had quietly mocked me as a child when I’d pulled my shade down during the day to change clothes. “Don’t you understand physics? No one can see you with the light shining into the room from outside.” What my father never understood was the physics of my discomfort.

  As I headed toward my office, Polly Flockhart came dashing out of the women’s rest room down the hall and flitted past me into the History Department office, a blur of chartreuse and aqua. I was grateful that though she felt free to drop by our house, she had never once ventured into my office.

  “Hi, Professor Hoffman,” Delaney called easily as I approached with my key out. He was as effusive as if we were old friends, and that annoyed me. I tried to remember if we’d ever been officially introduced, but I was sure we hadn’t.

  He held out his hand, saying, “Delaney Kildare,” as if he’d read my thoughts. I shook it, briefly. Up close, I thought that there was something excessive or fussy about Delaney, like a cartoon drawn with too much cross-hatching. His eyebrows were too dark and thick, his lips too full.

  “I have an appointment with Lucille—Professor Mochtar,” he corrected himself, smiling ironically. Graduate students knew they were expected to use titles when talking to faculty members and referring to other faculty. Still, something about his smile bothered me, but what? His teeth seemed too bright, too large, too regular—but there was something else….

  “Oh.”

  Delaney reminded me of the kind of guys I hated in high school: the jocks, the theater majors, the National Honor Society members. Everyone who was attractive, successful, zooming into the future like a high-speed Japanese train. I had never had their unconscious ease in my own body or their true lightness of spirit. Of course, Stefan wouldn’t say people like that had a light spirit, he’d say they didn’t have a very rich interior life.

  “I don’t mind waiting out here,” he added cheerfully.

  Before I could think about it, I blurted, “No. Why don’t you wait inside where you can sit down?”

  He grinned, and I felt subtly outmaneuvered. He’d wanted me to say just that. I’d been taken in, and it annoyed me that I’d responded with knee-jerk politeness because graduate students were treated so badly in EAR and I often felt the need to make up for that. I really just wanted to be alone in the office as long as possible before he and Lucille started their meeting.

  I let us both inside, ruefully hung up my jacket, put my briefcase by my desk, and waved Delaney to the chair near Lucille’s desk, but he’d already sat down, plopping his blue knapsack between his feet. His comfort made me feel oddly displaced, a guest in my own office.

  People like him unconsciously claimed whatever space they entered. Even my cousin Sharon, very warm and unpretentious despite her successful modeling career, had that same quality. As if the energy of all the staring eyes that had ever studied her, admired her, envied her, formed a force field she could never shake.

  Jeez—maybe I was really no better than other professors in my department. I might talk about how graduate students should be respected more, but when faced with one who didn’t cringe, I was uneasy. Like now, when I subtly positioned my desk chair so that I couldn’t see Delaney, even with peripheral vision. I did not want to be distracted, and I did not want him to know I could be. I took out a set of student papers to record the grades.

  Delaney brought a copy of SUM’s student newspaper out of his knapsack, unfolded it, and whistled. “It’s amazing,” he said.

  I had to look up, and when I saw the enormous upside-down headline, I knew what he was talking about: BRIDGE MYSTERY LINGERS.

  “What do you think he was doing there?” Delaney asked. “Did he help throw the box of Bibles over the rail? Or did he try to stop it?”

  We’d asked similar questions at Stefan’s father’s house. They were still good ones. Apparently some students had been arrested for assault, but the full story of what had happened wasn’t clear yet, and I doubted it ever would be.

  Almost to himself, Delaney said, “I wonder if he had a criminal record?”

  “Jesse Benevento?” I asked. Could that be what Angie had meant? But what was her connection with Jesse, and why hadn’t I been able to reach her? I’d called several times, but no one answered her phone; she apparently didn’t have a roommate. Should I call the director of the residence hall where she lived and say I was a faculty member concerned about her safety? Would anyone take me seriously, or would I be suspected of stalking or harassing a student? An unusual query like that could easily be misinterpreted these days, and I had no natural connection to Angie that would justify a call, since she wasn’t in any of my classes.

  Delaney said, “Why not? Son of a department chair, maybe he wants to rebel, it makes sense.”

  “You should be talking to the campus police,” I said.

  Delaney smiled. “I bet they’ve thought of all this already. It’s the first thing they’d check. But he sure was an exceptional student.”

  “Jesse? He was your student?”

  Delaney nodded. “Forms of Literature.”

  Exceptional? Bullshit, I thought. Jesse was not an exceptional student, but Delaney would have to say that because of Jesse’s father. And then I wondered about Delaney getting to teach such a plum course as a TA. Usually it was the more senior teaching assistants who taught that introduction to fiction, poetry, and drama.

  I went back to my papers, but I felt sure that Delaney was staring at me or studying me. After a moment or two, he said, “I truly admire your work.”

  I whirled around, bristling. “Is that a joke?”

  He flushed, the color rising into his face as if draining out of his maroon sweater. “Your bibliography,” he said. “I loved reading it.”

  “My bibliography?”

  “Of Edith Wharton.” Now he sounded strained, and I confess I was glad to see him off balance.

  “I know what bibliography it is. I’ve only written one. I’m just surprised, because nobody reads a bibliography,” I pointed out “People consult it.”

  Delaney’s flush was fading, and he shrugged. “I can’t speak for anyone else. But I did read it. I was thinking of working on Wharton and wanted to get a sense of the current scholarship.”

  “What’s your favorite Wharton novel?” I asked, like a grade-school teacher terrorizing kids with multiplication problems.

  He didn’t falter. “The Mother’s Recompense,” he said. “I think the later novels are underrated.”

  That was my opinion, too, but I’d never said it in print, so he couldn’t be conning me. I relaxed a little.

  Delaney nodded. “Everyone told me your bibliography was the place to start if I was interested in Wharton.”

  “Really?” It was hard to imagine that beautiful face poised over my endless series of paragraph-long descriptions of every article, essay, pamphlet, and book about Wharton ever written in any language. It was as incongruous as an angel in a Fra Angelico fresco reading an AAA Triptik.

  “I think you did an amazing job. It was very helpful and clear—especially with the four indexes. That’s the kind of work I’d like to do.”

  There was an odd insistence to his mellow tenor voice, and I had begun to notice that Delaney had a curious tic. He smiled the way a lizard blinks, mechanically, quickly, the corners of his mouth darting up with n
o clear connection to what he was saying. And his eyes never changed.

  “You like indexes?”

  Delaney shrugged. “Whatever it takes.”

  This kid had to be the biggest bullshitter I’d ever met. “You’d like to do scholarly work like that? What the hell for?”

  He leaned forward, fixing me with his dark, large eyes as if this conversation was a hunt and I were his prey. But my predisposition to think less of him because he was so good-looking kept me defended.

  “Your bibliography is truly important. It’s not one of those freaky monographs professors churn out just so they can get tenure, the kind of book someone writes to show how conversant he is with abstruse critical jargon.” And he glanced ironically around the office as if expecting a dozen such authors to leap out of hiding, lasso him, and make him submit to the law of the academic jungle. “Those people are so smug you want to throw a bomb into their lives to shake them up,” he said. “But your bibliography isn’t like that. It’s truly useful. It’s concrete. The kind of work departments should encourage and reward.”

  I was charmed by his use of the word “truly.” It seemed so awkward and unaffected. And I was surprised by his praise.

  “I bet your colleagues don’t take you seriously. They don’t think that spending a few years in libraries—”

  “Not a few. Five. ”

  “Five? Amazing!” He paused, considering that.

  Well, it was amazing. Truly. I had plunged into the bibliography with the single-mindedness of someone embarking on a thrilling affair and had emerged as many such people do: tired, cranky, dazed, and guilty for having ignored my partner, wondering if it was worth the effort.