by Lev Raphael
A kitchen timer rang, and I said, “Okay, time out on tirades.”
Lucille smiled, rising to go check the lasagna. At the kitchen door she turned and said, “Don’t apologize. What works my last nerve is all the call-in programs and programs with live audiences where all the fools in the universe get to show off how little they know.” From the kitchen she called, “I heard some girl saying last week—and I don’t remember where it was—that if Saddam Hussein was such a bad man, why didn’t the Iraqis just elect someone better? All this chat radio and chat bullshit has convinced the average person he has something to say. I know that’s not very enlightened, but it’s the truth, and it’s getting worse.”
“Hah! ” Didier cried. “That’s all drivel. My bête noire is these politicians who talk to the country about honesty but try to fool people into thinking they’re not bald by combing some pathetic strands of hair across the top of their pates! Who do they think they’re kidding and how can they expect anyone to take them seriously?” He ran a loving hand over his handsome bald head, grinning, and I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not.
We were soon seated around the chrome and glass dining room table (I was glad my shoes were polished) feasting on the rich lasagna and a caesar salad with home-baked croutons. The lasagna was succulent—there was no other word to describe it.
Didier fell on his portion with such gusto I thought of Byron’s line, “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.”
“I love this!” Didier crowed. “And I’m going to love working it off tomorrow,” he said with glee, wondering with Stefan how much time they should spend in the pool versus on the track, and which body parts to work on with weights. They had already developed dozens of different workout routines.
Silkily, Lucille said, “I’m not worried about the weight. At my age, as Kathleen Turner says, a woman can worry about her butt or her face. If she gets too thin, she’ll look old and drawn. If she stays plump, the wrinkles just don’t show.”
I couldn’t wait to relay this bit of advice to my cousin Sharon.
Though we moved on to talk about the day’s news, we drifted inevitably to Jesse Benevento’s murder. Didier voted for a gang slaying as the motive, but that wasn’t what interested him. “This is a TV movie dying to get made. Bucolic campus. Brutal crime. No suspects. And Skeet Ulrich as the kid.” None of the rest of us were sure who Skeet Ulrich was, and we spent ten very confused minutes mixing up half a dozen actors in their twenties. I was shocked to discover that Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney were different people.
Into our second bottle of a plummy 1994 Canoe Ridge Merlot, we continued idle speculation about the murder and its film potential when Stefan asked Lucille about the hate mail and if she thought it might be Juno Dromgoole, since Juno had been very public in her disapproval of minority hiring in EAR.
“No. She’s too active to sit down and send those cards to people.” Lucille shook her head quickly, embarrassed. “I mean those kind of cards. Card.”
“Cards?” Didier growled. “There were more than one?”
Lucille’s eyes were fixed on some point invisible to us, and slowly, reluctantly, she admitted that there’d been several such cards over the previous weeks.
Didier had turned red. “Calice! Why didn’t you tell me? You have to call the cops—this is ridiculous.”
Lucille demurred. “I don’t want to get any students in trouble. What if somebody’s mad at me for what I said to one of my undergrads working on a paper about slavery? He was shocked when I told him that it still existed in Africa, and that Arabs had played a leading role in the slave trade. And I’ve got some unhappy graduate students in my African-American Lit seminar because I dared to say Toni Morrison was a gifted literary writer, Terry McMillan was a popular writer, and E. Lynn Harris wrote trash.”
Stefan nodded, clearly aware of the coming complaint.
Didier said, “What’s wrong with that? I’ve read them, and it’s all true.”
“It’s wrong because you’re guilty of rhetorical neocolonialism,” I said, grinning, “by applying outmoded and oppressive, male-identified, Eurocentric, patriarchal standards that ignore black cultural experience—is that close?”
“You’re in the ballpark,” Lucille said, disgusted. “I’m not going to add anything to the nastiness at SUM,” she concluded, mind clearly made up.
“Fuck the students,” Didier rumbled.
“What if it was your brother?” I asked, more than a little drunk by now. Lucille glared at me, Stefan said, “What brother?” and Didier remonstrated with Lucille: “You think Napoleon could have done this? Tabernouche! When will you stop being so paranoid about my family?”
“Paranoid?” she sneered. “They hate me.”
“They hate all Anglos, it’s nothing personal. Napoleon would never send a card like that. It’s, it’s—” He struggled to find the explanation. “It’s just not his style!”
This struck me as so French I started laughing, and so did Lucille and Didier. Still confused, Stefan asked, “What brother?”
Then the phone rang, and Lucille rushed into the kitchen, over Didier’s insistence that she let the machine take the call.
“Delaney!”
It was just one word, but Lucille’s voice from the kitchen was so warm and caressive, I felt embarrassed and could sense Stefan’s unease at my side without even looking. But Didier was smiling and shaking his head. “That woman has such a big heart—she loves her students to death.”
Before any of us could launch into a conversation to cover up whatever Lucille was saying to Delaney, she was back, looking troubled. “They found the murder weapon, the knife that killed Jesse Benevento, on campus—in the river. One of those butterfly knives, but that’s all he knows.”
As if the call had ended dinner, we moved back to the living room for espresso and cannoli from Michiganapolis’s best Italian bakery, but we were all subdued by the intrusion of reality into our intellectual guessing game about Jesse’s murder. Soon after, the evening broke up.
Crossing back to our house, we saw a dark Jeep Cherokee pull out of a driveway down the street, and as it rushed by us faster than the 25 mph limit, I made out Harry Benevento’s large figure looming behind the wheel. “That was Polly’s driveway,” Stefan noted, as we let ourselves in. “Wasn’t it?”
“What was he doing down there this time of night? Do you think he’s having an affair with Polly? Oh, jeez, maybe that’s why his wife killed herself—or maybe Polly killed her!”
Stefan frowned at me, then headed off to his study, while I hung away our jackets and turned on some more lights. That was always his ritual—he needed to check for phone messages, e-mail, or faxes before he could settle down for the night.
I was puttering around in the kitchen, setting up for tomorrow’s breakfast, when Stefan walked in, a page in his hand that I could make out as a fax. “This was waiting for me,” he said dully, not moving forward. His face was so drained of emotion, of life, that I knew whatever he’d learned was horrible and doubtless connected to his writing. So horrible that I was afraid to ask, but I knew I had to. We’d entered a familiar and terrible household drama in which Stefan would quietly lay out his news as if reading tarot cards that forecast his doom. And I would be the bystander, helpless and trapped.
I moved to the kitchen table and sat down. “Tell me.”
“It’s from Peter.”
Peter was Stefan’s perpetually cheerful, but perpetually slow, agent—the kind of person who would see the sinking of the Titanic as a chance to make new friends. Or at least try to convince you that was the way to look at it. All that pep could be wearisome, as could the weeks, sometimes months, it would take to hear from him in reply to a phone call or a fax. Once an editor had called Stefan to ask, “Is your agent dead? He hasn’t returned my calls.”
“Peter tried calling, but we were out, and he didn’t want to leave a message. They dropped me. They don’t want the new book, or any b
ook, ever. I’ve got”—he looked down—“‘a pattern of declining sales.’ And Peter says it may be difficult to move me elsewhere right now—though he’s going to try.” Stefan breathed in, and I didn’t know if he was going to shout, or cry, or just fall bitterly silent. He shook his head.
I would have shrunk back into the wall behind me and disappeared if that were possible. Stefan had just experienced the most humiliating defeat an author can suffer: being dropped by a publisher as if he were something unclean that had to be quarantined or expelled. It had always loomed in the distance as a vague threat, but more often it had been a kind of mantra: No matter how badly a book of his had done, or how few reviews he got, or what the New York Times had said, at least he’d never been dropped. At least he had a publisher who’d brought out five of his books. But that basic security, that promise, was gone now, and he wasn’t as fortunate as a free agent looking for a new team—those sales figures made him damaged goods.
“If only I could stop writing,” he said acidly. “If I could stop wanting to write, wanting it so much. But I can’t stop,” he almost spat out, eyes darkened by self-loathing. “It’s my addiction. I have to write. I love to write. I love all the highs, not just from writing, but the feel of a new book, reading a review, getting fan mail, seeing my books in a bookstore, every single fucking little thing. And the more I get, the more I want, so how can I ever stop? It’s a blessing. And it’s a curse.” His voice was cold.
He was so stricken, so numb, I was hesitant to speak or even move in case I somehow made it worse. That was the easiest thing to do. Making it better, well, that was almost impossible. I knew; I’d tried cheering him up before, and he’d either snapped at me or stormed out of the room. This kind of news was not a boo-boo that could be soothed by the emotional equivalent of a kiss and a cookie. Or even mentioning the stirring end of one of my favorite stories by Henry James, “The Middle Years,” in which a dying, failed novelist says, “We give what we have—we do what we can—our work is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
“I’m going to bed,” Stefan brought out, eyes blind, and dragged himself out of the kitchen.
I didn’t follow right away. Like me, Stefan could usually force himself to fall asleep when he got bad news. It was only toward midmorning that he’d become restless, fighting to stay asleep as if his consciousness were a stubborn dog being yanked away from a tree by a demanding owner. He’d eventually lose and be dragged awake by whatever was troubling him. I wanted to give him the chance tonight to have at least a few hours of rest, since I assumed we’d both be up later, talking, talking, getting nowhere.
There was a special cruelty in life to watching someone you love suffer and being utterly unable to help.
More and more over the past few years, Stefan’s career had seemed to me like an archipelago of success in a sea of failure and disappointment, and those turbid waters had gotten choppier each year, more hazardous. He worked so hard on making his books the best they could be, and we’d spent a lot of our own money over the years on promotion, sending him on the book tours most people thought publishers routinely paid for. And what had it amounted to?
Last summer we’d seen an electrifying production of Death of a Salesman at the Stratford Festival in Canada that had left us and most of the audience in tears. When Willy Loman’s brother asked Willy, “What are you building? Lay your hand on it. Where is it?” Stefan had turned to me and whispered, “That’s me.” He was so hungry for success, notoriety, for the kind of attention he’d gotten when he started out, but there seemed little chance it would ever really come back.
Dispirited for him, anxious, I drifted into my study and turned on the light. This room always worked on me like a massage, with its thick maroon drapes, maroon-and-blue Persian rug, and ranks of books that all helped muffle sound from the street, which was why the faint beep of the answering machine—turned way down—startled me.
There was a single message, and when I played it a second time because I was so surprised, I settled down into my overstuffed armchair, wondering how I could possibly break this latest piece of news to Stefan.
7
Amazingly, I not only slept through the night myself but through Stefan’s waking up, getting dressed, and heading off to campus. When I stumbled down to the kitchen that Wednesday morning, belting my robe, I was sorry I had missed being able to talk to him this morning, but I was also relieved.
After we’d had some trouble in our relationship a few years back, Stefan had taken to leaving me little notes on the kitchen table now and then to wish me a good morning if he’d left before I was awake, but there wasn’t a note today.
While I made my egg-white omelet, cut up some strawberries and melon, and got coffee brewing, I mulled over last night’s message on my answering machine from Van Deegan Jones and our conversation when I’d called him back. One of the most prominent Wharton scholars in the country, Jones had not only quit his teaching job this year but wanted to divest himself of his last ties to academia and Wharton. He had a contract to do a Norton Critical Edition of Summer—Wharton’s erotic New England novel, which was like a pendant to the chilly Ethan Frame—and he wondered if I’d take his advance and take the project over from him. Jones had raised the possibility with the publisher and assured me that it wasn’t going to be a problem with them if I said yes. My name would be listed as editor, Jones’s as coeditor (it had to be there, since he was better known than I was).
The deadline was a year away, and I knew that this was a job I could not only do but enjoy doing. The bibliographer in me, the cataloger and organizer, had clicked on overnight, and I felt both competent and ready. I’d have to go through the text, annotate any difficult or obscure references, and gather a series of the best articles and book excerpts about Summer, along with any related letters of Wharton’s, plus contemporary reviews. There’d be lots of correspondence involved—all the letters asking for permission to get reprints—but compared to the years I had spent on the bibliography, it was a Caribbean cruise (without aerobics classes). Doing this edition of Summer would be limited, intensely focused work that could possibly help me get tenure, and there was something better. My bibliography was used by scholars and librarians and graduate students, but a prestigious and far less expensive paperback Norton Critical Edition would be used by many more students and readers, possibly tens of thousands over time.
It wouldn’t be an original work of scholarship, but it might influence my tenure and promotion review. Hell, some kind of book was better than none. And I didn’t mind the $2,000 and the promise of earning more on the book, though that was always speculative. In publishing, the only sure thing is an advance on royalties. You can’t ever completely trust a publisher, but you can always trust cash up front.
When I’d hung up last night after agreeing to take the book on and telling Jones that he was very generous, I’d realized that this great news for me could easily strike Stefan as cruelly ironic. He’d just been canned by his publisher, while I’d had a book project appear like Venus out of the sea foam. I was almost ashamed to have something wonderful happen after he’d been mauled by the publishing world, and ashamed to feel glad that something so positive had entered my life after seeing Jesse lying there dead on that bridge. Something I could turn to with confidence and joy, that might counter the helplessness and horror I’d been feeling wash over me like an unclean tide.
After breakfast and a shower, I called my cousin Sharon at work at Columbia University, where she was an archivist, to tell her the news.
“Nick,” she said softly. “That’s fabulous.”
Sharon was like a sister, a cheerleader, a patron, and a favorite aunt rolled into one. I could always count on her deeply felt enthusiasm, but today her resonant, actressy voice sounded strained.
Before I could even ask if something was wrong, she said she’d been thinking of going into therapy.
“You know how it’s the New York
religion, so I do feel left out when people complain about their shrinks at parties. Though—you’ll love this!—one of my gay friends said ‘Girlfriend, get real! There’s nothing wrong with you except that you live in the craziest city in the world plus you’re dating a musician. That’s asking for trouble.’ Maybe he’s right. But I hate when somebody tells me to ‘get real.’ I mean, honestly, Nick, reality and I have never been on the best of terms.”
She was right—what could be more unreal than having been a model? Which was probably why she now, as an archivist, lived in the world of the completely verifiable, the concrete.
“I did not like being lectured,” Sharon went on. “So I reminded him that straight people have feelings, too!”
We both laughed.
Sharon often complained about the city and her boyfriends and even the possibility of going into therapy, so I moved past all that to ask, “Have you been sick?”
“What?”
I repeated myself. “You sound different.”
She said, “Sorry, I had to switch the phone to my left ear. I’ve had a bad cold and my hearing’s not great.”
“For how long?”
She hesitated. “Oh, a while. And I’ve kind of had some dizziness.”
“How often?”
“A few times.”
“Are you taking anything? No? Then you have to get it checked out.”
She sighed. “I know, I know. I’m just so busy, and you know how I hate doctors.”
A former cover girl model (a perfect size 6 with “lingerie legs”) before she quit and headed to graduate school, Sharon had never been ill, or never admitted she was, working no matter what the hours were, but I couldn’t imagine she faced the same pressures at Columbia that she had doing photo shoots years before.
“Sharon, I don’t want to worry about you. Please?”
“Okay. I promise to call my doctor. Now, how’s Stefan’s doing?”
