The Death of a Constant Lover

by Lev Raphael

  THE FIRST FEW moments Friday morning, now a full week after Jesse was killed, were even more uncomfortable. When I staggered, squinting, toward the bathroom, Stefan was emerging, and we avoided each other’s eyes, abashed by the unusual hostility that had broken out between us the night before. But each moment that prolonged the tension worried me. How long would this estrangement last? Would we have to do couples counseling?

  In the kitchen we set out plates, bowls, and glasses, filled everything just like on a normal day of breakfasting together, but silently, as if in parody of some monastic order. We ate without talking, but read separate sections of the New York Times, having moved about the kitchen careful to avoid bumping into each other, as if even the slightest physical contact would reignite last night’s brawl.

  When the doorbell unaccountably rang, I said, “I’ll get it,” though not right at Stefan, and it was a relief for me to leave the table.

  Lucille was there, her face pained and drawn. I was about to apologize to her for not having been supportive at the EAR meeting when she put a finger to my lips and pointed across the street to her house. I saw to my amazement that her living room window bore a jagged slashing hole, which seemed even larger when someone driving by slowed down, clearly startled, to stare at it.

  “There’s been an escalation,” she said. “I guess whoever it was got tired of the Post Office. This time the message was a brick.

  9

  I grabbed Lucille and dragged her inside, slamming the door as if we were being pursued. That might not be how she felt, but I did. I was the one in sudden flight from the unwelcome rush of images that broken window had triggered. I was flooded with TV visions from my childhood of water hoses turned on civil rights marchers, firebombed churches, maddened German shepherds let loose on demonstrators. It all blurred together as Lucille and I hugged and I felt enveloped by the warmth of her thick arms and the patchouli in her dreadlocks.

  “Hey,” she said quietly, and I don’t know what it meant, but it seemed right for the moment.

  When I opened my eyes, Stefan was there, gazing at the two of us with such compassion—even though he couldn’t know what exactly had happened—that I said, “I’m sorry.” I meant for last night, and I’m sure he understood, because he nodded and said, “Me, too. We’ll talk later.”

  Catching some of this, Lucille broke away, though keeping her hands firmly at my waist. Looking from me to Stefan, she asked, “What’s going on?”

  Stefan shook his head. “That’s my line.”

  I pointed across the street and explained a little to Stefan while leading Lucille into the living room, happy to be able to shelter her at a time like this. “Coffee? Ginseng tea?” I didn’t know what else to say at that moment, and I almost felt as if I were in an English mystery where every crisis was greeted with a nice cuppa.

  Stefan was at the living room window, looking out. Wasn’t it just a few days ago we’d been staring at Delaney’s boldly displayed body in the sunshine? And now there was this.

  “Tea,” Lucille murmured, settling into the chair closest to the fireplace, even though the doors were closed. Maybe the idea of a fire was all she needed. “Thanks,” she said. Stefan nodded and headed for the kitchen.

  “Where’s Didier?” I asked her.

  “Sleeping.”

  “You didn’t wake him up?”

  Lucille smiled a little. “He was soused last night—I didn’t have the heart to wake him up. He could sleep till noon.” Her smile broadened with affection.

  “But you called the police, didn’t you? Aren’t they on the way?”

  She looked away. “Not yet.”

  I realized that, like victims of any kind of assault, she was ashamed, unwilling to call more attention to herself, dreading the exposure. I didn’t press her, because I knew how vulnerable she must be feeling.

  “I didn’t hear anything. I must have been asleep when it happened,” she said, almost as if speaking to herself. “At least that’s what I assume. It was there in the morning when I came downstairs to make myself breakfast. In the living room.” She pursed her lips, breathed in. “Not a big mess. The brick didn’t hit anything. It was just lying there in a halo of broken glass. It was scratched with a message: ‘Don’t forget.’ I have no idea what that means.” She smiled a little. “The brick’s pretty clear, I guess. Who needs more? Nothing like this has ever happened to me—not in New York, not in California. I’ve been lucky.”

  Of course, since our house’s layout was identical to Lucille and Didier’s, it wasn’t just easy for me to imagine the same violence done on our home; it was hard to feel it hadn’t happened to us, too.

  And there was more. I hate it when people say, “I know how you feel,” but once in graduate school someone ripped the mezuzah off the doorpost of my dorm room. I’d been stunned, angry, frightened, wondering for days who had done it, and why, and what was next. Was I being followed, studied for a personal assault? I did not report the incident at school or tell my parents. I hadn’t wanted to upset them, and I was afraid that any notoriety in the campus newspaper would strip me of privacy and make me more of a target. Haltingly, I told Lucille about that time, and she nodded firmly all the way through my recital.

  Stefan brought Lucille her tea and a coaster and handed me a fresh cup of coffee, ruffling my hair. That one gesture was enough to make me feel the connection between us was truly open again. We sat side by side on the couch, witnessing Lucille’s pain as she described for us her shock and surprise. I knew it was a moment that she’d relive as many times as she described it to others, and this telling was just the first.

  At one point Stefan interrupted. “When I was in first grade, I heard two girls in the playground talking about Jewish babies being thrown up into the air and bayoneted by Germans. They must have gotten that from their parents or TV—it was around the time of the Eichmann trial, I think. And when I asked my parents about it, they were devastated.” He paused, and I wondered if he would go on and tell Lucille everything. This was something we hadn’t discussed with her or Didier yet. “My parents were Holocaust survivors, but they tried to protect me.”

  “What did they do?” Lucille asked so quietly I almost missed what she said. But Stefan heard, or heard a question.

  “They bulldozed their past and pretended they weren’t Jewish. They used coming to America as a chance to start over, completely. And this was like a bomb.”

  Lucille shook her head. “I hear you,” she said.

  “It got worse,” Stefan went on, eyes half shut. “Some kids in my class had a club. It was called the No-Jew Club. When my parents found out—”

  He fell silent, too moved to speak. I took his hand but he pulled it away, not harshly, but as if he felt too bruised suddenly to bear anyone touching him. I understood. Lucille and I said nothing, and I’m not sure how long the silence went on, but Stefan was the one to break it.

  “Have you called the police?” he asked Lucille, and I winced at his unintentional blunder and his strange choice of transition.

  Eyes down, Lucille just shook her head. I whispered in his ear, “Don’t push her.”

  Stefan went on, gathering steam. “It looks bad, and you’re assuming it’s connected to the postcards, right? But it might not be about you, Lucille. It could be drunken frat boys wandering through town.” Was he trying to make her feel better? “Thursday night’s as big a party night as Friday now. Or middle schoolers on a sleepover—you always hear about them sneaking out in the middle of the night. You know how they can toilet-paper trees or egg cars? It’s happened before around here.”

  I wasn’t sure if Stefan really believed any of those possibilities, or felt he had to at least mention them so we could move beyond. But he was right. The major crime in Michiganapolis neighborhoods near SUM was vandalism, and the closer your house to the bars downtown, the more likely it was to be a target. We’d been lucky on our street until now.

  “What about Napoleon, Didier’s brother?�
�� I asked. “Is Didier right that you’re paranoid, or is Napoleon really a radical separatist?”

  “Maybe some of both,” Lucille said.

  “And even if Napoleon wanted to go to war with the Canadian government, why would he target you?”

  Lucille rolled her eyes. “Why not? The only time we ever talked about the issue, he had to be dragged away from the table, screaming. ‘Pitoune’ and ‘christ d’épais’ were some of the nicer things he said. I won’t translate, but trust me, they’re nasty.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got his goat by telling him I was in favor of an independent Quebec as long as it granted independence to its native peoples in the north.” She shrugged.

  “I saw someone walk by your house yesterday.”

  Lucille nodded. “Okay, and?”

  “He was walking, until I drove up and parked, and then he sped up.” Stefan and Lucille were both staring at me, confused. I couldn’t blame them. “Now I think that he looked like the picture you showed me of Napoleon, in your kitchen.”

  Lucille considered that. “Are you sure?”

  “I didn’t see him clearly,” I confessed. “But it could have been. Maybe he was casing your house.”

  “Maybe it was just somebody taking a walk,” Stefan said reasonably.

  “But I’d never seen him before.”

  “Come on, you don’t know all our neighbors.” He was right. Our lives were so centered on our jobs at the university that we really hadn’t made an effort to get to know people on our street or neighboring streets. Sometimes I regretted that; sometimes I thought that if Polly was a presage, we were better off not making anyone else’s acquaintance around here.

  Smiling, Lucille said, “You know the best ones, anyway.”

  I laughed and took advantage of her good mood to apologize for my cowardice at the EAR meeting, but I’d hardly said more than a few words when she cut me off, unaccountably energetic. “Nick! It was a free-for-all. Who’d have the presence of mind to defend anyone? I don’t blame you, not a bit.” She was even smiling now. “I just feel sorry for those poor counselors. They meant well.”

  I recalled Samuel Butler’s withering comment in The Way of All Flesh: “If it were not such a terrible thing to say about a person, I should say that she meant well.” I didn’t share it with her.

  “I’m not very popular in EAR,” Lucille brought out, evidently musing about the meeting’s hostility. “Not that I thought I would be. Individual people smile at me in the hallways, they chat in the coffee room, but boy, when you get them all together for a meeting—”

  “—it’s a lynch mob?” I asked.

  Lucille frowned. “I’m no Clarence Thomas.”

  “You know,” Stefan said carefully, “if it’s not kids or rowdy students who broke your window, and given what happened yesterday, I still think Juno Dromgoole may be out to get you, Lucille. She’s volatile.”

  “Volatile, yes,” I agreed. “Projectile, no. Cowards do things like throw bricks through windows and send hate mail. Cowards, and people who are chronically miserable and pent up. Juno is anything but pent up. Carter Savery or Iris Bell is more likely to boil over like this, to do something sneaky and vicious. Then Lucille gets hired at a great salary—it all adds up.”

  Stefan wasn’t convinced.

  “And they were hanging around when Lucille got her mail at the department—I bet they’ve been following her,” I said.

  “I’m right here,” Lucille said. “No need for third person.”

  “Following you,” I corrected. “Sorry.”

  “Or even Coral Greathouse,” I said. “She was there, too, and who’d suspect the department chair of sending hate mail to her own faculty member?”

  Lucille and Stefan both stared at me. “She’s the chair, right, and she was strongly behind hiring you when she thought you were Islamic, right? And now you’re not, and she must feel like an idiot. She’s probably been getting flak from the faculty—you can bet on that. Nobody ever talks to a chairman except to complain.”

  “Coral?” Stefan asked. “Coral?”

  I replied, “Why not? What do we know about her? She’s grim and quiet most of the time, and she’s dying to be provost, and here we have a screwed-up hiring in the department, which she probably got the blame for. What if that’s killed her chances of being povost?”

  “Coral’s been very nice to me,” Lucille said. “She had me and Didier over to dinner.”

  “Perfect cover,” I said. “I know it’s perverse, but that’s the way things operate at this university. It’s what Edith Wharton called ‘taking life without the effusion of blood.’ That way you avoid scandal.”

  “A good reason not to go public,” Lucille pointed out. “It’ll get twisted somehow and turned against me.”

  “I don’t believe any of that about Coral,” Stefan said to me. “What about your students?” he asked Lucille, and I remembered our having talked about students who might hold a grudge against her. “They’re becoming more polemical all the time—I can see how it might get out of hand.”

  Lucille put her mug down. “Hold on,” she said angrily. “I may not be a great role model, but I’m not doing anything reckless that could get anyone in trouble. Students always mouth off inappropriately about something. It’s not me or the course material or even what they think they believe. At their age, when they cause trouble in class, it’s family-of-origin crap. I’m an authority figure, a perfect stand-in for Mom or Dad. They’re just college students, they can’t help it. Look at that stupid pamphlet that comes out every year on campus, the one where they get to grade professors anonymously. Most of it’s garbage.”

  I winced, since the student-funded report “Does Your Prof Make the Grade?” had consistently given me and Stefan high marks as teachers.

  Lucille leaned forward, seized by an insight “That pamphlet is exactly the same. It’s hate mail—anonymous and nasty and just stupid.”

  “Then you know it’s a student who’s tormenting you?”

  Lucille acted as if I hadn’t said anything. “Students hassling faculty—it’s a psychodrama,” she insisted. “You can’t take it seriously.”

  “What if there’s more psycho than drama?” I asked. “Remember Jesse Benevento? Somebody killed him. It started for you with letters—then a brick. What if it’s a firebomb next time?”

  Impatient, Lucille waved the possibility away. “You’re being overdramatic.”

  “No, overdramatic is saying I was abducted by aliens who injected me with hormones that are turning me into Newt Gingrich. That’s overdramatic. I’m just being reasonable, and the police will see it the same way.”

  “They won’t see anything,” Lucille said a bit smugly.

  Stefan asked her what she meant.

  Lucille glared at us defiantly, chin raised. “I haven’t called the police, and I’m not going to. There’s nothing to show them.”

  “What about the window?” I asked.

  “What about it? A broken window doesn’t mean anything. I cleaned up the broken glass, I threw out the brick, and I called a glazier.”

  “That’s destroying evidence!”

  Stefan shushed me. “Lucille’s not a criminal.”

  “Thank you,” she said, sounding as prim as I’d ever heard her.

  I couldn’t believe that Stefan was siding with her. “You think it’s right to hide what happened?”

  “It’s not your decision,” Stefan chided me, gently.

  “But what if this is connected to Jesse Benevento?” I asked. “What if there’s a killer after you, Lucille?”

  “Please! Did Jesse get hate mail?” Lucille sipped her tea, looking disdainful, but her expression changed after a moment, and I guessed that she was opening to the unlikely possibility that what had happened to her was connected to Jesse’s murder.

  “We don’t know,” Stefan brought out “But—” He hesitated. “I can’t see how even if he did get hate mail, this would be th
e same, really. A stabbing’s different from a hate crime—”

  “Are you serious?” I shot. “Stabbing sounds like hatred to me.”

  “Well, Jesse wasn’t in any of my classes,” Lucille said. “He had nothing to do with me. In fact, the only connection I can see between us is you, Nick.”

  “What!”

  “You’re my officemate, and Jesse was your student.”

  “That’s just coincidence,” I protested.

  “It’s enough connection for that psycho you were talking about before.” Now Lucille looked almost cocky. Whether she was serious or not, she had a point.

  “I wish we knew more about Jesse’s death,” Stefan said.

  I offered to call the county medical examiner, Margaret Case. “She might tell me something that’s not in the papers.” I explained to Lucille that Case’s son had taken one of my classes and raved about it, so his mother had in the past been willing to talk to me where otherwise she’d probably just say “no comment.”

  Lucille and Stefan followed me into the kitchen, and they sat at the table while I called Case. Her secretary remembered my name from last year’s trouble and put me right through.

  “Dr. Hoffman?” Margaret Case asked with a chuckle, and I pictured her in the office filled with Michigan memorabilia, smiling ironically. She was a dark blond version of Janet Reno, just as large and imposing, but not at all dowdily dressed and definitely not plain. “Murder at SUM, and it took you a week to call? I’m surprised.”

  I was ashamed at not having called her earlier. “He was a student of mine. Last year. Can you tell me anything about his death?”

  “You know, Angie Sandoval called me with the same question.”

  “What? Angie called you? Where was she? When did she call?”

  Angie had dated Case’s son and was still close to the ME. Dr. Case paused, perhaps surprised by my emotion. “I don’t know. I assumed she was on campus. Why?”

  “Angie disappeared right after Jesse was killed, she fled the scene, but she told me she’d been thinking he was in trouble.”