Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  On some level my difficulty in deciding which way to jump—to tell him or not tell him—reflected the state of that relationship. We had met at the new faculty orientation more than four years earlier, but nothing had happened, at least not right away. Then we ended up by happenstance as next-door office neighbors and spent a ton of time talking. It took more than a year, but, facilitated by a three-martini evening, we finally ended up in bed.

  The sex was hot, and the sex had stayed hot. We were a good match in other ways, too—both of us smart, curious about the world and willing to take risks and break rules. But somehow a deep emotional connection had never quite arrived. Maybe it was me, maybe it was him. Well, actually, I tended to think it was more him.

  Part of the problem was that Aldous wasn’t an emotional kind of guy. I’d never seen him break a sweat over anything, let alone cry about something or admit to even passing anxiety. He tended to confront problems, either solve them or fail to solve them and move on. He was pretty much the same with people. I sometimes had the sense that if I were run over by a truck, he’d just transfer his body to the next hot young professor down the hall. Maybe he’d stop first to put a flower on my grave. But only one.

  I was, by contrast, an emotional kind of woman, or at least I liked to think of myself that way, even if maybe it wasn’t obvious at all to other people. Which had to do with my steely-girl-with-steel-toed-boots reputation (in fact, Steel Boots had been my nickname in college). But inside, even if hardly anyone could see it, I was an emotional cupcake.

  So while Aldous and I had a lot of fun together—including a two-week trip to France the previous summer after I finished my treasure salvor cruise—in the last few months I’d had the growing sense that we weren’t going to last much longer. Staying in it just for the sex was tempting but didn’t seem the right way to go.

  I needed to talk to Aldous about all of that soon—not that we hadn’t talked about it already three or four times. I hoped in the end we would be able to transition to some kind of friendship. But hiding from him what the dean had just told me wasn’t going to help accomplish that.

  Lost in those thoughts, I reached the top of the hill, turned right and started to walk through the grassy quad at the core of the campus, bookended by the red-brick, neo-Romanesque performance hall on one side and the undergraduate library on the other, both among the first buildings constructed at UCLA when the campus opened in the late 1920s. As was often the case, there was a crew filming a movie or TV show, or maybe a commercial, in the performance hall’s colonnaded, arabesque walkway, which often serves filmmakers as a stand-in for somewhere in the Middle Ages or the Middle East.

  They had stopped pedestrian traffic for a few minutes while they completed a shot; everything stops in LA for the movies. While I was standing there, I continued turning the Aldous problem over in my mind and discovered at least a temporary way out. I would indeed tell Aldous what the dean had said. But I’d also tell him that he should fight for his tenure. We’d figure out who his enemies were—there had to be two or three senior people who were causing the problem—and figure out how to crush them. It might even be fun, and maybe it could help salvage our relationship, or at least help transition it to a better place.

  After a few minutes, they reopened the walkway, and I crossed the quad, walked the last two blocks to the law school and climbed the stairs to my office once again.

  CHAPTER 7

  On my way to my office, I noticed there was light coming out from under Aldous’s door. I knocked gently and heard him say, “Come in,” which I did.

  Aldous’s office is typical of academic offices. It’s lined with wooden bookshelves, has a big oak desk with a black leather desk chair behind it, two cloth-covered guest chairs with blonde wood arms and the required notebook computer and printer. Aldous was facing away from me, his hands behind his head and his feet up on the windowsill, looking out of the window at Murphy Hall, across the street. Murphy Hall is UCLA’s administrative office building—the place where the suits who run the university hang out.

  I stood there for a few seconds, waiting for him to turn around, and when he didn’t, said, “Earth to Aldous.”

  He dropped his hands, turned to face me and, on seeing who it was, got up and came out from behind his desk. “My God, Jenna, I just heard what happened this morning. Are you okay? Is the student okay?”

  “Actually, Aldous, I’m a bit shaky.” I realized I was tearing up, which was pretty rare for me.

  He closed the distance between us and hugged me, although enveloped me in his arms might be a better way to put it. Aldous, at age forty-one, is a six foot four, chisel-chinned former college linebacker. I’m not quite five foot six and on the thin side, even thinner than I used to be since I became more diligent about stripping carbs from my diet. I leaned into the hug, and we stood there for a moment, rocking back and forth, until he let me go. He pulled back slightly, looked at my face and used his finger to wipe away my tears. Then he went back to his desk, took a tissue from a Kleenex box that was sitting there and handed it to me.

  I wasn’t quite sure how to react to either the hug or the Kleenex—Aldous wasn’t normally a hugging kind of guy, and I’d never seen him go to the aid of anyone who was upset. It made me wonder if I’d been wrong about him. Maybe there was an untapped emotional well there after all. Or maybe the problem was that for whatever reason I’d been unable to tap it, despite a lot of trying.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s understandable that you’re a bit shaky. Who wouldn’t be? But are you basically all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. How’s the student? And who is it?”

  “His name’s Primo Giordano. He’s in my Law of Sunken Treasure seminar. I guess he’s okay. They’re keeping him in the hospital overnight for some tests.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever run into him.”

  “He’s a third year. Originally from Italy. I don’t think he’s cut a big swath as a student, so I’m not surprised you don’t know him.”

  “Well, it’s good he’s going to be okay. With your tenure decision coming up, you really don’t need the stress of dealing with a student death.”

  “Death? It never occurred to me that he might die, Aldous.” I was taken aback. People as young as Primo didn’t die unless they were hit by a car or drowned or something like that.

  “I guess it’s just my negative outlook on things, Jenna. Back when I did numbers, the guy who had the cube next to me died unexpectedly one day after drinking a soda. Now, whenever anything even slightly bad happens to someone, I automatically think they’re going to die.”

  I knew that by “back when I did numbers,” Aldous was making reference to the fact that, before attending law school, he had worked at a Wall Street investment bank, where he had been a quant—a guy who crunched reams of quantitative data to predict the price of obscure financial instruments. It had made him rich, and every once in a while I wondered if his wealth was the real source of my attraction to him. I couldn’t make up my mind about that. It was true that I sometimes missed my big salary at Marbury Marfan, but I didn’t think I truly needed the kinds of things Aldous’s money could buy—first-class travel, five-star hotels, the ability to buy anything you wanted just because you wanted it and all of that. On the other hand, it was a nice way to live, and if Aldous ever decided to start spending his money that way—despite the fact that he didn’t currently seem so inclined—I could work really hard to get used to it.

  I decided to change the topic. “So,” I said, “when I came in, you were staring out of the window. Daydreaming?”

  “No. I was looking out at Murphy Hall, wondering if I’d be happier as an administrator than as a law professor.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my academic performance is in question.”

  “By whom?”

  “Just a couple of people. But they’re important people.”

  “Name names.”

  “There�
��s not a lot of point in that right now. Let’s just say that the law review articles I’ve written over the last few years about unearthing securities law violations through metadata analysis haven’t exactly gotten a rousing reception, either around here or from the academic elite at other law schools.”

  “I thought they were good. What was wrong with them?”

  “Too quantitative. Too many numbers, not enough analytical text. ‘Still a quant, not really a law professor.’ Or something like that.”

  “I thought quantitative analysis was the rage these days. And in any case, I found them accessible.”

  “Thanks, Jenna. I appreciate your saying that. But two of our colleagues—who are most likely members of my Ad Hoc Tenure Committee—apparently found them otherwise. Or so the drums are telling me.”

  “The drums?”

  “Sorry, an obscure reference to the way certain African tribes used to communicate. Call it the gossip, if you like.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s really over. The decision hasn’t actually been made yet.”

  “I think in this case, Jenna, the decision’s all but made. The bottom line is that you’re going to get tenure this year, but I’m not.”

  “And that’s it? You’re just going to accept it?”

  “I think that’s the easier, more pleasant path. I can easily get a job at a lesser law school, or even go back to Wall Street.”

  “Out of Los Angeles?”

  “Probably.”

  “Shit, Aldous, I say you ought to stay here and fight. I’ll lead the charge, and God knows I’m good at that.”

  “Getting yourself involved in a fight on my behalf makes no sense for you. It could even impact your own tenure.”

  “I’ll get tenure no matter what.”

  “Maybe, but you don’t want to polish your rep of being difficult to deal with. So stay out of it. Once you get tenure here, if you work hard for a couple of years after that, you’ll have the cred to go on to Harvard or Yale or someplace like that. Or maybe Columbia, since I’ll likely be in New York. Or do you already have feelers from other schools?”

  “I do.”

  “So you might go to another city yourself.”

  “No. If I get tenure, I plan to stay right here.”

  “We don’t,” Aldous said, “have to be together in the same city to still be ‘us.’” He gestured at a photo on the bookshelf that I hadn’t noticed earlier. The photo showed the two of us in foul-weather gear, standing on his sailboat, heeled hard over in the wind, laughing into the camera. “One of the good things, Jenna, about being a law professor, is that you’ll have lots of spare time to do things with me, even if we’re in different cities for a short while.”

  As I listened to him talk, I realized that Aldous, despite our several conversations about it, didn’t really think that our relationship was in trouble. I tried to send a message. And a not very subtle one.

  “My God, Aldous, you have that picture on your bookshelf, right where everyone can see it. Even students.”

  “Jenna, what are you talking about? Everyone in this law school knows we’re an item. Even…students.”

  “Well, please take it down. Given the uncertainty of our relationship these days, it makes me uncomfortable.” It was a petty thing to say, but before I could take it back, Aldous had walked over to the bookshelf and turned the photo facedown.

  “There,” he said, smiling. “Photo evidence of relationship temporarily suppressed. Anyway, are we still going to dinner and the play tonight? We can go out afterward, have a few martinis and talk about how we can manage living in different cities.”

  I plunked myself down, heavily, in one of the guest chairs. “I say we skip the play, go out to dinner and talk instead about why you’re being such a pussy about this tenure thing.”

  “I want to go to the play—it’s about that pussy Hamlet. Afterward we can go to dinner and you can call me whatever disparaging names you like.”

  “Fine, we’ll go to the play. But pussy isn’t really disparaging.”

  He just looked at me.

  “Well, okay,” I said, “maybe it is.”

  “A typical Jennaism?”

  “Yeah, I know, Aldous. Confrontational Jenna. I’m trying to do something about that, but without a lot of success.”

  “No worries,” he said. “I find it charming.”

  “Thanks. I don’t think a lot of people around here do. It worked better in a big law firm. Anyway, change of topic: I had breakfast with the dean this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, he took me to breakfast deep in Westwood to tell me pretty much what you’ve already figured out.”

  “Interesting. Did he suggest you tell me?”

  “No, though I think he hoped I’d tell you and save him the trouble.”

  “The guy is a real piece of work.”

  “No doubt of that,” I said.

  “So were you,” he asked, “going to tell me?”

  “Of course I was going to tell you. Now you’re told, and I need to go back to my office and get to work on the new footnotes Stanford wants. Assuming I can put what happened to Primo out of my mind, which may not be easy.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said. “See you later, Aldous.” And with that I left.

  As I walked toward my own office, I wondered to myself how a guy who had recently suggested, despite what I saw as our ongoing difficulties, that we should get married—and it would all somehow work itself out—could be thinking about moving out of town. Did he think I would ultimately just follow him? Professor Jenna Sheepdog?

  CHAPTER 8

  When I reached my office, the door was open and George Skillings was still standing where I’d left him when I followed the gurney out of the door almost two hours earlier.

  “You’re still here, George?”

  “Actually, I just came back. For whatever reason, I’m suspicious of that coffee he drank.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just a gut feeling. Anyway, I was thinking I ought to preserve it, just in case.”

  I thought to myself that I really ought to object to his having let himself back into my office without my consent. Then I thought better of it. Given the circumstances, this was a good situation in which to practice being nonconfrontational.

  “Suit yourself, George.”

  “Do you have any plastic bags around, Professor?”

  “Sure. I have a small box of them in my desk drawer.” I walked around the desk, fished one out and handed it to him.

  “Thanks. As a precaution, I’m going to bag his cup—there’s a little splash of coffee left in it. Just in case there’s something wrong with it. Did you make it from beans?”

  “Yeah. I ground them yesterday before I left, and the pot went on automatically this morning, before I got here.”

  “Are the beans old? I’ve heard that weird toxic molds can grow on old coffee beans.”

  “Really? I’ve never heard that.”

  “I read it somewhere.”

  “George, do you really think it could have been the coffee? I’ve never heard of anyone getting sick from coffee. I read a lot of online coffee blogs, and no one’s ever even mentioned it. Not even the people most obsessed with quality.”

  “Yeah, well, but are the beans old, Professor?”

  I was beginning to think that George Skillings was some kind of nutcase, but I decided to answer his question anyway. “I don’t think they’re old. I just got them a couple of days ago from Coffee Chaos down in Manhattan Beach. This is the first coffee I’ve made from them. I brought the bag from home yesterday.”

  George extracted a vinyl glove from his back pocket, slipped it on his right hand and picked up Primo’s cup. He dropped it into the plastic bag and sealed it shut.

  “Maybe I should take some of the beans, too,” he said.

  “Help yourself. The bag is on the bookshelf over there.”
/>   “Got another plastic bag?”

  “Sure.” I got it out and handed it to him.

  He walked over to the shelf, opened the beans, which were still in their Coffee Chaos bag, and poured some into the second plastic bag.

  “What about sugar?” he asked.

  I pointed him to the drawer where I kept it, handed him another plastic bag and watched while he took a sample of the sugar.

  “Professor, did you drink any yourself?”

  “No. I got that call just as I was about to pour myself a cup.” I pointed to the empty coffee cup that was still on my desk, a supersized black one that says JENNA on it in big red letters. “So I hadn’t filled mine yet.”

  “Well, if I were you, I’d toss whatever’s left in the pot, and the beans, too. It’s unlikely the coffee’s the problem, but you never know, and you don’t want to risk making anyone else sick.”

  “Okay, I will. By the way, did you see a big red mailing tube around here, with white caps on the ends?”

  “No, why?”

  “The student had one with him when he got here, but I don’t see it anywhere.”

  “No, didn’t see it.”

  “Do you recall seeing it when we opened the door?”

  “No. But I wasn’t really focused on looking around the office.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Well, I have to go fill out my report,” he said. “To be candid, though, Professor, you look a bit stressed out, which is hardly surprising. Maybe you ought to take the rest of the day off, huh? You don’t need to be a superhero about this.”

  “I’m okay. And I’ve got work I’ve got to get done. But thank you for your concern.”

  “Be sure to toss that coffee,” he said as he left.