The Death of a Constant Lover

by Lev Raphael

  I’m not sure how long I sat there mulling all this over, not making any progress, just spinning inside, slowly. Finally, sick of not getting anywhere, I decided this would be a perfect time to work out at the Club—it wouldn’t be crowded, so I could get in and out easily, and the exercise would help me unhook and clear my head. I grabbed my always-packed gym bag from the bedroom closet, left Stefan a message on the kitchen table, locked the front door, and drove off.

  Situated on an imposing ten-acre tract of land near campus, the Club was like a mall on several levels devoted to health, boasting an enormous weight room stocked with the newest equipment, two basketball courts, two pools, ranks of racquetball and tennis courts, and legions of aerobic exercise machines. It was plush, lavish, imposing, and the owners claimed it was one of the largest health clubs in the country. If you loathed exercise, I guess it was a fair approximation of hell.

  I was easily intimidated there by the hard-core lifters and aerobics junkies, but few of them were around midafternoon, and that had become my favorite time to go, alone. Stefan and I had tried working out together, but it wasn’t ever a success. Stefan was a great spotter, but he was in so much better shape than I was, and I often felt him holding himself back so as not to embarrass me. That may have been a loving thing to do—and I did appreciate it—but it wasn’t very sensible for him or comfortable for me.

  Didier and Stefan were well matched and could tear it up together, goading each other on like the cocky teenagers I remembered from gym class in high school. I’d never been a jock, but I’d had some natural ability in the pool that I’d never bothered to develop. All that seemed immeasurably distant to me now, with middle age creeping up and mirrors turning admonitory.

  Stefan was different; always handsome, he’d become better looking as he aged and was definitely fitter than he’d ever been, working out with a doggedness that sent off as much heat as his concentration when he was writing. He wasn’t arrogant at the gym in his tight little shorts, deep-cut tank tops, and sexy high-top Otomix workout shoes, just supremely comfortable in his body. I admired that, and wanted to feel at least a modicum of his ease. I was possibly en route. Last summer I’d finally crossed some kind of internal Rubicon and found myself working the Club into my schedule two, then three times a week. I ran, did the treadmill or Stairmaster and some weights, or took a spinning class, mostly when the place wasn’t crowded and I didn’t have to concentrate so hard on shutting everything out.

  The gleaming locker room was almost deserted that Wednesday afternoon, as were the halls leading to the vast weight room at the heart of the Club, every dumbbell and Cybex machine offering as magical an entrance to the world of fitness as the cake in Alice in Wonderland that read “Eat Me.”

  I nodded at one or two people working out who I ran into now and then, but didn’t have to say anything to them because they had headphones on. I headed upstairs to do my half hour of cardio and was soon back down in the over-brightly lit weight room, moving from the pec deck to a flat bench for some chest presses and then some whole-body shoulder work with light dumbbells. I liked the squatting involved, it made the lifting less boring.

  Back at the locker room, pairs and groups of high school students were drifting in, slouching along in the oversize banjee boy clothes that their upper-middle-class parents must have hated. I felt I’d gotten in a decent workout, but as always, I was even gladder to be finished. The large bright shower room of gray and pale blue tiles was completely empty except for a guy five stalls away, on the other side.

  His back was to me, and I couldn’t help but stare. His broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, muscular body made me think of a satyr. Dark hair just this side of ugly profusion curled from his ankles up his lean thighs and then stopped as if unable to climb his round hard rear, which seemed even more naked topping those hirsute legs. When he shifted position slightly, rinsing shampoo out of his lathered-up hair, I realized that it was Delaney, and I turned my back to him, embarrassed.

  But that passed as I soaped up some more and wondered about this. Did Delaney have a membership at the Club? How could he afford it as a grad student? I considered the possibilities: Maybe he’d bought a one-day pass. Maybe he had a guest membership someone else had given him, or maybe he somehow had enough money. But that didn’t square with his needing to mow Lucille and Didier’s lawn. And hadn’t he just told me he needed to TA for me for the extra money?

  Then something else occurred to me. What if Delaney was here because I was? What if he’d been following me, was showering for me? I couldn’t imagine he was actually trying to seduce me, but it wasn’t any less strange than his having come to my house to sell himself as a teaching assistant for a class I wasn’t even sure I was going to teach. Was I paranoid, or was it legitimately creepy?

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone pass on the way back into the locker room, toweling his hair dry. Delaney. I don’t know if he saw me and was pretending not to, but I saw a lot more of his lean and amazing body. From listening to Stefan and Didier talk about diet and vascularity, I knew that Delaney’s body fat was well below average for even a young man—that explained the sharp definition of his muscles, and how visible his veins were.

  And I knew that given his equipment, if graduate school didn’t work out, Delaney could always take up a career in erotic films. Unlike Marky Mark in Boogie Nights, Delaney didn’t need a prosthesis.

  There was no sign of him when I was back in the locker room after ten minutes in the sauna.

  I MADE A quick run to campus to meet with Jesse’s academic adviser, Carter Savery, who didn’t like me—not that I found him at all interesting either. He was one of EAR’s blandest professors, though I assumed that behind that round, blank face lurked the typical smoldering bitterness of all the ex-Rhetoric faculty. Like them, he’d been teaching composition for several decades and resented the trap the university had set for him. Originally, Rhetoric faculty were supposed to get the chance to teach their specialties in other departments, but nobody wanted them, and so they faced a lifetime of explaining comma splices and the passive voice. Savery was an expert in Byron, I think, but had never once taught a class in the Romantics.

  His office was stacked high with student folders, and every bookcase was crammed with writing textbooks, which may have been one of the unrecorded plagues God visited on pharaoh. Carter looked up from a pile of papers he was grading and nodded as if I were the last brick in a wall of misery the day had built around him.

  “Jesse Benevento,” he said flatly when I sat down on a barely padded, stiff-backed chair.

  “Was he doing well academically?”

  “Well enough. Some 3.5s, mostly 3.0s.” At that I smiled, because students at SUM had come to expect a 3.0 just for attendance. It was a meaningless grade now.

  Staring at me without blinking, Carter asked, “What’s your interest?”

  “He was a student of mine last year, and I was there near the bridge when he died.”

  “And—?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  Carter gave a mild snort, and I kept myself from snapping at him. He would be reviewing my tenure folder—it didn’t make any sense antagonizing him further, since he clearly thought I had all the significance of a manual typewriter.

  “Do you know if he was in any trouble?”

  Carter said, “You’re investigating again. Like last year. That’s not your job. We have people paid to do that at SUM. You’re not one of them.”

  “Will you at least tell me what classes he was taking this semester?”

  Sighing, Carter turned to his computer, pulled up a file, and scanned for Jesse’s name. “He was catching up. He dropped a few last year, some personal trouble. Oh, it was his mother—she killed herself, didn’t she? Anyway, lots of required courses. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, and a Forms of Literature class. Heavy reading load, and lots of papers to write.”

  Nothing French, I thought.

  I thanked Carter and left
, wondering if any of this information was important. I was familiar with the standard anthology used in all the Forms of Literature courses, so why had Jesse been reading that French novel if it wasn’t on any of his syllabi? If he had spare time, wouldn’t he be reading something religious?

  Only a few feet down the hall, I saw Detective Valley headed my way, lips tight. “Find what you were looking for?” he asked coolly, sailing on by.

  When I got home, there was something wonderful frying in the kitchen, and Bach’s triumphant double violin concerto was filling the air. “You’re back!” Stefan greeted me with an enormous hug that knocked the breath out of me and made me drop my gym bag. “Class was great—my students are great. I picked up a bottle of the Joubert Juliénas and I’m cooking a terrific dinner, so you’d better be hungry. Oh, I found the tapenade—thanks—it was great. What made you decide to make that today?”

  I followed Stefan into the kitchen, wondering at his effusiveness. By the stove, a cookbook stood open in a plastic protective stand, and every counter was covered with various ingredients in large and small glass bowls.

  I sniffed. “Lamb?”

  He turned from the cutting board slung across the sink, where he was carefully dicing something. “Bingo. That deep-dish lamb pie.”

  I groaned in anticipation. This was an amazing meal done in a quiche pan, with a crust of russet potatoes and celery root simmered in milk. The lamb, browned in olive oil, minced onion, and garlic, was mixed with minced acorn squash, minced apricots, cinnamon, saffron, cumin, chicken broth, mint leaves, coriander, cayenne pepper, ginger, lemon rind, and slivered almonds. It was a superb blend of flavors and textures, but it took a lot of prep time, and we’d always made it together before.

  Satisfied, humming, Stefan turned back to his work, expertly wielding the knife, and said, “I decided I don’t care if my publishing career’s going down in flames. And don’t try to make me feel good,” he warned. “I know exactly how bad Peter’s news is. Sales figures are never secret, and being dropped is much worse than declining sales. Everyone in publishing will know what happened. Everyone,” he repeated, sounding almost buoyant.

  He stopped, wiped his hands on the dish towel hanging over his shoulder, and shook his head. “So what the hell, what can I do? I can’t make anything happen that hasn’t happened already. After all these years. That’s Peter’s job, he’s the agent. I have to cut loose, and—” He paused.

  I couldn’t resist. “And?”

  Now he turned and leaned back against the counter, eyes closed. “I’m not sure.” Then he rolled his shoulders as if shrugging off a coat. “But I am sure about dinner—it’s going to be fucking amazing! That’s all that matters. Now. Tonight.”

  I thought of how Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway says it’s “dangerous to live for only one day.” This almost manic bounciness was very unlike Stefan. Usually he brooded for days after a fax like last night’s, and when he did finally dig himself out after a bombing raid of bad news, he was never energetic but always washed out, weary. And if the mood continued longer, he’d find his battered childhood copy of The Three Musketeers and plunge into seventeenth-century derring-do. He read it with the voluptuous satisfaction other people might feel gorging themselves with Twinkies when they’re depressed, and the book always worked to cheer him up, or at least take his mind off what had made him miserable.

  “How about some wine?” I asked, since he’d already started. And why shouldn’t he? What was so wrong about getting bombed after such awful news? It was certainly better and more refreshing than lurking around the house like a one-man Eugene O’Neill play.

  Stefan poured me a glass of the 1996 Domaine Joubert Juliénas, currently our favorite Beaujolais, an intense wine with good body and depth. “I have another bottle,” he said, moving to the stove. “And if this is denial, I want more.” He stirred the lamb, checking the timer, then rejoined me at the table, and once we’d mixed and passed the potatoes and celery root through a food mill, and ladled that across the top so it could bake, we proceeded to get drunk and very silly.

  Which I suppose is how we slipped back to recalling the time we visited Vaughan Michael, a writer friend of Stefan’s who lived in Los Angeles. Vaughan was a clammy-handed, anonymous-looking little novelist who spoke in a weighty undertone that gave authority to even casual remarks, the kind of man that women could project anything onto because he was so unrevealing. And apparently they did, since he’d been through four divorces. The last time we were in L.A., he was living with a porno star named Carynne who had come to one of his readings and moved in that same night. I couldn’t imagine a porno star reading one of his long, complex novels—like Dostoevsky without the fun parts—but Vaughan was so proud of Carynne that porn magazines in which she was featured sprouted like baskets of orchids everywhere you looked in his sepulchral black-and-gold living room: garish, hypnotic.

  From the kitchen where he was making us drinks before we went out to dinner, Vaughan had recommended we “take a look,” and like dutiful guests leafing through pictures from a baby shower where we didn’t know a single person, we did.

  “I was dying to say something!” I roared, remembering my shock, amazement, and of course, fascination. “Like: Carynne’s very limber. Or: She must have a way with animals.”

  “Thank God you didn’t—he would have put us in his next book—he has a bad habit of doing that, and with no real disguise. I would have been Steven, probably, and you would have been Dick.”

  “Dick?”

  We both laughed. Dinner with Vaughan afterward had been uncomfortable for me because I couldn’t stop imagining him as some lost traveler in a Shangri-la of extravagantly bountiful flesh. He was black-and-white, and Carynne was so Technicolor.

  When the lamb pie was done, and we’d finished it under the broiler, Stefan and I feasted on it at the kitchen table, completely abandoned to the taste and aroma, as if we’d been smoking dope and every sensation was sublimely intense.

  After dinner, we stumbled into the living room and dug out the cassette of that quintessential 1930s romantic comedy: Midnight with Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, John Banymore, Mary Astor, Francis Lederer, Hedda Hopper, and Rex O’Malley. It was a sentimental hit with us in part because it was set in Paris, but also for the witty script cowritten by Billy Wilder, with one of the best throwaway lines ever. After diffident Rex O’Malley remarks that he was always swallowing things as a child, he says offhandedly, “My parents were afraid to leave me alone in a room with an armchair.”

  Stefan had to stop the VCR because when he heard that line again he was bent over with helpless laughter, but I laughed with some wariness, sobered a little by watching him abandon himself like some 1929 stockbroker flinging himself out a window. God knows he needed to laugh, to forget himself, but I couldn’t help thinking of everything we weren’t talking about: his future, my good news, the peculiar conversation with Delaney, Sharon’s dizzy spells, and of course yet another murder in our otherwise idyllic world.

  But all that dissipated when we put the movie away and Stefan turned to me, quoting Sigourney Weaver’s immortal line from Ghostbusters: “Take me now, subcreature.”

  How could I say no?

  8

  When I arrived at the EAR office late that next morning, Thursday, there was a notice in my mailbox, on that hideous “goldenrod” paper, announcing that Coral Greathouse had called an emergency meeting for the afternoon to deal with the crisis over Jesse Benevento’s death. Had something new been discovered? I hoped so. I didn’t like the thought of his murder going unsolved, or feeling that there was nothing I could do about it.

  People around me groused about the meeting, perusing the memo with distaste. EAR was made up of neurotics and misfits who did not take well to meetings. These were all people who had minimal supervision in how they ran their classes or interacted with colleagues, and calling a meeting was like asking resentful ranchers and miners out west to submit to federal efforts at environme
ntal protection. And like some of those westerners, they read such attempts as a conspiracy to take away their rights. But then I’d also blame that distaste for meetings at least in part on the horrible room we had available for the purpose. Of course, horrible is a relative term in a moldy, bat-infested, sepulchral-halled building with cracked walls and sagging floors covered in cracked and peeling linoleum. Built of sandstone almost 150 years ago, Parker Hall looked perpetually on the verge of collapse, a kind of reminder of the architectural ooze the campus sprang from.

  Our conference room had been updated in the 1960s perhaps, so there was no dusty high ceiling, just crumbling ceiling tiles, rat-in-a-maze lighting, and tiny bolted-down chairs with barely functional attached desks that forced you to face forward. Turning around or even sideways, you risked performing ritual suicide.

  The prospect of being trapped in that room with my griping colleagues weighed me down even though I taught my classes well and the students seemed to be having fun. We were working in small groups that day, with me circulating among them as students critiqued each other’s papers, and each class went smoothly. But as I got ready for the departmental meeting, everything I’d held at bay came rushing back, and I felt even more reluctant to head downstairs to the conference room. Walking to the stairs, I passed Harry Benevento and was surprised when he smiled and nodded at me. He didn’t look nearly as crushed and emptied out as he had just a week ago.

  Downstairs on the second floor, I could hear a devilish buzz emanating from the conference room, and as I headed across the gloomy hall, Juno Dromgoole swooped down on me, shoving her arm in mine. “Sit with me!” she said. “Do!” Had I been adopted?

  “Where else?” I asked.

  Juno grinned. Today she was in black Manolo Blahniks, a tight black leather mini, black fishnet stockings, black silk blouse, leopard-print scarf flowing down her bosom, and an even denser cloud of perfume than usual.