That stung her. She turned her face away from him, toward the window. She inhaled loudly, gathering herself.
“As a feminist,” she said, “that’s not how I announce myself. Do you walk around campus saying, ‘Hello, I’m Dennis Flaherty, Savannah’s beau’?”
Dennis thought it was interesting how she knew about Savannah Kleppers though he had never spoken about her. Very interesting.
Dennis stayed in DeLane over the summer and interned for a Republican congressman in Cale. He and Elizabeth met only occasionally for the next few months, but even on the occasions they did meet, Dennis had to admit that something was different. Their occasional sexual tension had disappeared altogether, and their conversations were much more antiseptic. She was a completely different person around him now that he knew who she was. Or, more specifically, now that he knew who her husband was.
Since the beginning of September, things had begun to falter badly. She had been distant, preoccupied. Ashamed, probably. The last time he had gone to the library, she hadn’t been there. He caught her in the hallway of the Gray Brick Building one day and asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Of course not,” she’d scoffed, and pulled away from him. Then she disappeared down the stairwell.
But there clearly was anger in her voice. Dennis was pretty sure, however, that it was not anger at him, but at herself. For she had been deceiving him for those first few meetings, the ones that really counted in Dennis’s mind, and she knew it. She knew it and she felt bad about it.
The fund-raiser was a black-tie affair the Taus were putting on for the American Cancer Society. It was held in Carnegie Hall, Winchester’s administrative building and the most historic structure on campus. Usually Dennis was able to make it through, smile and grunt while the old men told their stories, but tonight he was feeling particularly out of place. He wanted to leave, but where was he supposed to go? What was he supposed to do? Standing there in Carnegie he pondered these things, wondered if he should just leave Winchester altogether. Maybe transfer to Temple, be closer to his father. Maybe he should…
But then he saw Elizabeth across the room. She was looking at him the way she had so many times across the table in the library: passively, almost quizzically, as if there was something about him she couldn’t figure out. She walked onto the dance floor. She smiled and he smiled back, the only gesture that he could think to use. It was a forced smile, almost crooked. Then they were dancing to something, some sort of slow waltz, and Elizabeth was saying, “Dennis, I want to have sex with you.”
“Yes,” he said stupidly. Like a boy.
“I’m sorry for what happened. I should have told you. But I thought you would get—scared.”
“Scared?”
“Of Ed. Of getting caught with me. Of what would happen if we were discovered.”
“Elizabeth, we were just talking. It was nothing. It was Alfred Adler and the eye.”
“Stop it, Dennis. You know it was more than that.”
“Know?” he choked. His heart was beating fast, thrumming in his chest. His face was hot, and he felt cold sweat on his chest.
“You know you want to fuck me.”
“No,” he lied. “Absolutely not.”
She was sulking now. He had felt her body stiffen, lilt away from him.
“Why haven’t you been there? In the library the last two weeks.”
“I’ve been busy, Dennis. It’s not only you. I have work, too. I’m writing my dissertation, remember?”
Over her shoulder, he saw the man staring at him. The inimitable Dean Orman: thirtysome years older than his wife, professor emeritus at Winchester. Orman was one of the most esteemed members of the psychology faculty, best known for his riveting lectures, even though he fumbled for words now and then and forgot his threads and themes. He had studied with Stanley Milgram at Yale in the 1960s, and word was that he had begun a book about Milgram that would redefine the man’s legacy.
The waltz finally ended, and Dennis broke from the woman’s hold and returned to the other side of the room, where the other Taus were waiting. “You going to screw her or not?” asked Jeremy Price. Price was wearing tuxedo pants and a T-shirt that was air-brushed with a vest, cummerbund, and bow tie.
Dennis said nothing. He wondered how much Price had heard, if he’d been listening in to their conversation.
“Here’s what you do,” Price said. He got close to Dennis, turned his back on the dance floor, pulled the other boy up by the lapels. “You get her alone and you just ravish her. Pound her like a jackhammer. Make it good for you and horrible for her. Ha! Pants at your ankles. Buttons skittering across the floor. Make her hurt.”
“Dennis?”
Dean Orman. He was standing just behind Price, over the boy’s shoulder. Dennis had no idea how long the man had been there. “Huh…hello, Dr. Orman,” he said. He had met Orman only two or three times before, at similar fund-raisers, and for some reason was always nervous in the old man’s presence. Orman knew Dennis’s father, had said once of the man that he was a “pioneer in his field.” Dennis felt that the only reason Orman approved the use of Carnegie for the Taus was because of his father.
“It’s about time for us to be going.”
“Of course,” Dennis managed. “Is there anything else I can get you?”
“No,” the dean began. It was as if he wanted to say something more but could not. Price had slunk back into a dark corner somewhere, leaving Dennis alone with the old man.
The dean had been at Winchester since the beginning, when the school was split in half. He was the first provost of the school. Once, in the late seventies, he had coached its tennis team to a conference championship. He had seen the campus burn and had lived through six different presidents. It was said that any historical discussion of Winchester began and ended with Dean Orman.
But his legend was cemented with the marriage to the wife who was nearly half his age, a graduate student at Winchester he had met on a trip to Morocco. Dennis had heard the story, of course, but he had never heard the woman’s name. And now he was caught in something, trapped in this game with Elizabeth. And it was a game, Dennis knew that. Why else would she have hidden her ring? Why else would she have given him only her first name? She was seeing how far she could take him, hoping he would cross a line into a place that he couldn’t come back from.
Tonight, that line had been crossed.
“What classes are you taking this quarter?” the dean asked. It was just something to say, just filler. Another waltz had begun, and Dennis could see Elizabeth dancing with someone else. But she was looking at him.
“Economics and Finance. Philosophy and the Western World with Douglas. And Logic and Reasoning.”
“Logic and Reasoning,” said the dean. “Under whom?”
“Williams.”
Something changed in the dean’s eyes, then. He focused on Dennis more perfectly, let his scotch glass fall to his side. He might have even taken a step forward, closed the gap between them, but Dennis could not be sure.
“How’s that going?” he asked. His voice had changed timbre, become more bearing. Dennis realized he was under some kind of spotlight now, suddenly in a sort of interrogation.
“It’s…interesting,” he offered.
“Williams,” the dean mused, sounding as if he were thinking to himself now. “Williams is a funny character. I remember the terrible fracas over that book of his. All that mess.”
Dennis wanted to hear more. In fact, he badly wanted to hear more, not only because it was taking his mind off Elizabeth but also because he was interested in Williams and his strange class. It was so…
Elizabeth was suddenly there, touching her husband’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Ed,” she said curtly, glancing at Dennis. Dennis couldn’t read her look.
“Dennis, I’ll be seeing you,” the dean said. He had lost his train of thought, which was usual for the dean. Some assumed he had the early signs of dementia; most days he would lock hi
mself away in Carnegie and take no visitors.
It wasn’t until much later, back in the Tau house with dawn spreading out across the sky and falling sharply on Up Campus, that Dennis remembered what Dean Orman had said about Professor Williams. Even though it was early in the morning and he hadn’t rested in nearly twenty-four hours, Dennis could not get to sleep no matter how hard he tried.
6
By Sunday, Mary had finally gotten her mind off Professor Williams and Polly. She and Summer McCoy had gone shopping at the Watermill Mall, and out to eat at an Italian place called Adige. As Summer dropped off Mary at her dorm late in the evening, logic class, and more specifically Professor Williams, was the furthest thing from Mary’s mind.
But now, two hours later, she was thinking about him again. What was he doing right now, for instance. He was so…mysterious. No office hours. No bio on the website. It was almost as if he, like Polly, needed a set of clues to go with him. Mary opened Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which she was reading for her only other class that semester, Postmodern Lit and the New Existentialism, which she hated. Mary was taking what the students called a “walk term,” which meant you took the minimum six hours. Walk came from the idea that with all your given leisure time, you might walk the campus grounds as Winchester’s founders had surely done, learning deep and profound lessons from nature. (Mary had noticed that most students, when they were on their walk terms, found their lessons through drinking beer and downloading music illegally.)
Mary lay down on her bed and propped Auster on her knees, trying to take her thoughts off Polly and her creator. Yet the novel’s words wouldn’t make sense. She would read a sentence and stop, float off somewhere, imagine Williams. She imagined him at home, walking barefoot across the wood floor in his pajamas, staring out a back window, drinking coffee from a cracked mug. She admitted it: she was fascinated by him. So curious, how he had refused to give them anything substantial to work with, how he had led them into those questions. There was something dangerous about it—and it was that danger, that adventure, that had been missing from her experience at Winchester since she and Dennis had broken up.
And this is what Polly’s disappearance is, Williams had said, an intricate puzzle.
Polly. Williams had tried to make her more real by presenting those weird photographs in class. Mary imagined that transparent Polly standing on the grass, smiling playfully in her summer dress, holding out her arm to block the camera. Where was that grass? Who was the girl, the real girl in the picture? Someone Professor Williams knew? His daughter? And the red-eyed Mike. Mary thought she recognized that couch from somewhere on campus, but she couldn’t place it. Was “Mike” a student here? Had Professor Williams taken these photos himself and not told his subjects what they were for?
Mary went to the computer and ran a search. She typed in “Professor L. Williams” and got more than a thousand hits. There were Professor L. Williamses at Southern Oregon University, at DePaul, at East Carolina, at Bard College. She narrowed the search: “Professor L. Williams at Winchester University.” Forty hits. She got his bio again, that useless and broken link. She found a couple of program newsletters where he was mentioned as “Dr. Williams.”
It was getting late, past 10:00 p.m. now. Mary had an early class on Monday, and she knew that if she didn’t get to bed soon she would regret it in the morning. She browsed through a few more links, still only coming up with vague references to Williams by his title and not his name. She needed his name. She didn’t know why, but she needed it. She was certain it would help her with Polly’s case somehow.
On the third page of results, she found what she was looking for.
It was a press release for an article he had written in 1998. The article was called “The Components of Crime,” and the author was Leonard Williams.
Leonard. Mary said it aloud, registered the taste of it in her mouth. It almost made her laugh. Professor Williams was definitely no Leonard, yet there it was on her screen. Undeniable fact. If you would have given her a thousand guesses, Leonard would not have been one of them.
She returned to Google and searched it in full: “Professor Leonard Williams at Winchester University.”
Forty-five hits this time, and her heart nearly stopped when she read the title of the first result: “Distinguished Winchester Professor Accused of Plagiarism.”
The phone rang.
Breathlessly, Mary picked it up and found herself saying, “Hello?”
“Mary?” It was her mother calling from Kentucky. The line, as it always did, scratched and tweaked across the miles. Mary often wondered if there was an electrical storm, perpetually firing off in the distance somewhere out there, nicking at her mother’s and father’s I love yous and I miss yous. Then a strange thought occurred to her: In a well. The girl sounded as if she was at the bottom of a well.
I’m here.
Mary closed her eyes, put her head down on the corner of the desk as was her habit when she was nervous about something. She managed to say, “Yeah, Mom. Are you all back home?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me,” said Mary. “It’s me, Mom.”
“You just…you don’t sound like yourself. It’s like—like you’re miles away.”
At the bottom of a well.
“I’m here, Mom,” said Mary, pressing her forehead hard into the desk, the pain spreading across her brow and over her scalp. She didn’t want to look at the screen, didn’t want to face it. She was afraid of what was there.
“Anyway,” said her mother casually. “Your father and I are home. We just got back. It…was…magnificent. Mary, you should have seen it. Key West is just beautiful in September. Thank God all those wild kids were gone. We went out to Fort Zachary Taylor and spent the day. We saw Hemingway’s home, all those six-toed cats. Anyway. You should get the postcard soon.”
“Mmmm,” Mary murmured, head still down, eyes shut tight.
“Tell me,” her mother said.
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“There’s nothing going on, Mom. Really. Seriously. Everything is fine.”
“I can tell by your voice. Something’s the matter.”
“It’s just—” Dennis, Mary thought. Lie to her. “It’s just that I saw Dennis.”
“He called you, didn’t he? He asked you out again.”
“Absolutely not. I haven’t really spoken to Dennis since freshman year. He’s just—” Mary stopped short. She didn’t want to tell her mother about Professor Leonard Williams and this strange class she couldn’t get off her mind. Her monitor blacked out into the screen saver, startling Mary for a moment.
“Except what? Tell me.”
Mary knew it was futile. Her mother was like a sort of leech for information, a kind of walking, talking, cooking truth serum. “Except he’s in one of my classes,” Mary said gently.
“That’s it!” her mother said. There was nothing her mother enjoyed more than bleeding secrets. Cracking codes. In that way, she was just like her daughter. She would search for kinks in your language, squeeze details out of you, break you across the static-laced distance. “That’s it. I figured it out. Harold!” She was calling for Mary’s father, who would be off somewhere in the house, getting back to whatever project he was surely in the middle of when they’d left for Key West: fixing the lawn mower, rebuilding the busted computer the neighbors had thrown out. “Harold, Dennis and Mary are taking classes together!” Then, “I feel really good about this, honey. You know I liked Dennis so much even though your father didn’t trust him. Tell him—tell him that I don’t blame him for what he did. That’s just what boys do when they get bored. Will you tell him that, please?”
“I’ll tell him, Mom,” said Mary.
“Anyway. I better get going. Have to get unpacked and all. Sweetie, listen. I want you to call me if you need anything. Please.”
There was silence on the line. It snapped and cracked and scratched l
ike a needle at the end of a record. “Okay,” Mary finally said, her eyes still down at the floor. She saw all the great wads of dust under her desk, balls of dirt and hair.
“Good-bye, honey,” her mother said.
“Bye, Mom.”
It was another minute or two before Mary could look at the screen. Slowly, her heart going mad inside her chest, she read the short article on Leonard Williams’s crime.
DISTINGUISHED WINCHESTER PROFESSOR ACCUSED OF PLAGIARISM
A Winchester University professor, in his fourteenth year at the institution, has been accused of plagiarism. Associate Professor Leonard Williams was accused of lifting multiple passages of John Dawe Brown’s famous 1971 book, The Subliminal Mind, and placing them, almost word for word, in the text of his published dissertation Tragedy and Substance: Logic as a Way of Figuring Out the World, which was first published in 1986. John Dawe Brown was the author of more than twenty books of philosophy. He taught at Yale University for thirty-five years, beginning in the early 1960s, and recently succumbed to colon cancer. His wife, Loretta Hawkes-Brown, has made no public comment on this incident. Professor Williams has been suspended by the university, with pay, until a special faculty committee can investigate the incident.
Mary finally could feel herself, her legs and knees and her mind, barely enough to make her way to bed. By the time she was there, it was after midnight and the chapters of City of Glass remained unread for tomorrow’s class.
What did it mean? Perhaps it didn’t mean anything. Her freshman year humanities professor had said that if you weren’t borrowing, then you weren’t doing serious work. He said it just like that: “borrowing.” But Mary knew there was a difference between that and what Professor Williams had done. He had stolen—“lifting multiple passages almost word for word,” the article said—entire chunks of text. Mary imagined him with Professor Brown’s book open, sitting at his desk and wondering, Should I? Or did he feel no compunction? Did Williams, like Polly’s father in Mary’s theory, act on impulse alone, the knowledge of his reward pressing more forcefully on his mind than the possible risk? Did he even understand the implications of what he was doing, sitting there with that old book open in front of him, holding it with two paperweights perhaps on each side of the spine so he could read the text and type at the same time?
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