Obedience

by Will Lavender

  “But what if nobody figures it out?” Williams asked, and the class went silent.

  “Why did you send me a photograph of my friend?” Mary said, cutting the silence sharply. She left out the part about the phone call from the campus police; she wasn’t sure what that was about just yet. She didn’t tell him that she and Summer had figured it out. The couch was in the basement of the Sigma Nu house.

  “It seems, class,” the professor said, smiling and swiveling his chair back behind the table again, “that Ms. Butler believes that this class is for her. That she’s the only student here. I got your note, by the way.”

  He said it loudly, aiming it right at the class. The message: Mary Butler is trying to get a leg up on you. She’s trying to sabotage you.

  What had she done that was so wrong? She had simply asked him a question about Summer McCoy. Wouldn’t everyone in the class, if they knew Summer like she did, feel that Williams had designed the e-mail specifically for them?

  “The picture was just a picture, Mary,” Dennis said. “It was just a photograph of a party. I think I know some people in that shot.”

  “When I send these clues,” Williams said, “I am not singling anyone out. We are all receiving the same information.”

  “But that was my…” She couldn’t go on. She suddenly felt awful, as if she’d been tricked not just by Williams but by everyone else in Logic and Reasoning 204 as well.

  “It’s not just about you,” Dennis said to no one in particular.

  “But he was with her,” Mary said quietly. “Mike was with Summer on that couch…”

  Oh God, oh God, oh God. What have I done? Why did I let it get this far?

  She felt herself getting up, walking toward the door. It was not fast; it was more of a methodical walk, determined, head down. Before she was at the door, Professor Williams rolled his chair in front of it. It was the closest she’d been to him. She looked at his scarred face, at his eyes, which were deep and whimsical, and in that constant state of enchanted amusement. She smelled him: cigarette smoke. “Stay,” he whispered. There was something stern in his tone, something rough. He was blocking the door fully, with his whole body. “Please…let me go,” Mary whispered through clenched teeth. She reached out and touched him. She did not mean to push him, she simply wanted to make him realize her discomfort, to let him know that she needed to get outside into the fresh air. But he was so strong that she could not move him. “Stay,” he said again, stricter. And though Mary did not want to, she returned to her seat. She felt all the eyes in the class on her, all the mouths ready to erupt with laughter at her expense.

  “Those pictures,” said Williams, “of course, were meant as artifice. Just to give you a sense of reality. Image makes us understand in a way that narrative cannot. That was the car of a student who is in the PhD program here at Winchester. It’s parked beside Highway 72. I wanted it to appear as real as possible. A road you knew, a place you’d seen.” He smiled broadly at Mary, trying to win her back, trying to change the tone of his lecture. “The other photo was in the Sig house on a Friday night. Just a former student of mine sitting on a couch. The girl—your friend, Ms. Butler—just happened to be there at the time. Coincidence, nothing more.

  “But I do want to apologize to Ms. Butler. I didn’t know that the photograph contained someone familiar to her. If I had known that, I would have never sent it.” He rolled back to the side, so that he could look at the class as a whole again. Seminary East’s light was on his legs and creeping up. “Now that that’s out of the way,” he continued, “an announcement: there will be a guest speaker on Wednesday.”

  It wasn’t until later, when she was back in her dorm room trying to read the middle section of City of Glass, that the thought came to her: But what is real and what isn’t? Was Polly’s father’s tattoo real? Williams had referenced it in class, so it must be part of the game. Why were some details meaningful and others mere coincidence? This was what Williams was doing to them. He was intentionally mixing them up, leading them far away from the true source of the crime, decoying them into believing certain things were in play and others were not.

  The mystery, then, would have to be figured out by a system of elimination. She must discard all that was false and focus only on the substance of Williams’s game. This would not be easy, as it all began and ended with Williams. She had to figure him out, to decipher his tendencies. She had to pay more attention.

  13

  The next time, to get away from the old man, they went to the Kingsley Hotel in downtown DeLane. Elizabeth had called ahead to reserve the room, told the girl at the desk that people were arriving in town to visit with Dean Orman. They know what you mean when you say “people,” she told Dennis. Dignitaries, professors, alumni. It was easy to conceal things in this town, she said: all you had to do was mention people, and things were veritably done for you.

  The room was impressive. Art nouveau, wrought-iron chandelier bending the light into every corner, Victorian upholstery in the sitting area, and, unfathomably, a flat-screen LCD television mounted on the wall. An impressive Monet replica across from it, hanging over the headboard. It was the nicest hotel Dennis had ever stayed in, and unfortunately the room was his for just three hours. He had a study group back at the Tau house at 8:30 p.m.

  Elizabeth was systematic, almost professional, with him. She turned around, still on top of him, and they watched themselves through the cheval mirror that stood at the foot of the bed. Their lovemaking was becoming more polished, less of a rush, and for the first time Dennis felt his mind wander as she rode him. For some reason he thought of Polly, the fake girl that would be murdered if he didn’t find her. What would it have been like to be with her? She was wild. She had piercings, Dennis remembered, all over her body. Or maybe she would have been submissive, weak. Vulnerable.

  Thinking of Polly, Dennis came in a spasm.

  “It wasn’t the same,” Elizabeth said later. They were lying on the bed, spooning each other, the ceiling fan softly looping above them.

  “No,” Dennis admitted. Again, that brutal honesty.

  “Maybe it’s over.”

  “Probably.”

  They lay there in silence, the cool air prickling their skin. Dennis thought of the British boy, the one who’d cried in the living room while Dean Orman watched secretly from upstairs. In some ways, he was glad that it had come to this. Ever since his conversation with the dean he had been thinking less of Elizabeth and more about Polly—and, strangely, he didn’t mind.

  “My mother did this,” Elizabeth said.

  “This?”

  “This thing. What we’re doing here. This sneaking around. Deception. Always hiding out, calling on the phone from somewhere and saying she would be late. My father knew about it. This was the sixties, you see. Free love. I once caught them having one of those parties. I was maybe seven years old. I walked downstairs and everyone was naked, all the women with their flabby breasts. Incense in the air. ‘Go back upstairs, Lizzie,’ my mother said. And I did, just as I was told.”

  “You’re lucky,” Dennis joked. “The wildest thing I ever saw was my dad scribbling equations on the windows. He said that he liked to see them from both sides. Mother disagreed.”

  “You don’t understand,” Elizabeth said. “It got completely out of control for my mother. She couldn’t contain it. She fell in love with an artist, a guy who did lithographing in San Francisco. Finally, she moved out there with him. A few years later, when I was in college, she came back. Broke. Dirty and damaged. She was a completely different person. And still married to Daddy. He took her back, of course. There really wasn’t any question. He still loved her, fiercely. He took her back even though my brothers and I warned him not to.”

  Elizabeth was turned away from him now, speaking into the pillow. Dennis felt her speech wasn’t for him. These were things, he knew, that she could never say to Dean Orman. He would look down on her for it, think she was low class, weak and disposab
le. So, Dennis realized: the same act—the covering of the ring, the omission of her name—had been played with Orman in Morocco. He thought of the dean and Elizabeth in the desert, the sandy wind sweeping across their tent, and all those half-truths being told.

  “And a few years later she was dead,” Elizabeth went on. “Cervical cancer.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dennis said.

  “Don’t be. If you had known her you wouldn’t have felt anything but a loss, like some sort of phantom pain. At her funeral, no one mentioned her years in San Francisco, those hippie parties. I never told anyone about what I had seen that night. It was just assumed that these things happen, you know. They happen. There is no randomness in the world. Everything falls into a certain pattern. My mother—she knew this. She called me once from the West Coast. She said, ‘Lizzie, I think I’ve been cursed.’ I didn’t say anything. I silently agreed with her, of course. She had been. Cursed with some sort of bitter disease. An obscene pleasure drive. An urge to fuck anything that moved. And it killed her. This is what I’ve inherited from her.”

  Dennis said nothing. The fan turned and whirred above them. Some children passed in the hall, laughing deliriously. Someone’s telephone rang in another room.

  “I was married before. Before I met Ed. I was studying at Cleveland State, working toward a master’s in psychology. My life was as good as it had ever been. I met this man who was unlike anyone I had ever met: sincere, loving. Magnificent. You would have liked him, Dennis.”

  “Would I?” Dennis said, just to fill up the space with his own words.

  “He was charming and sweet. Just like you. When he fucked me, it was for my pleasure, not just his. He didn’t want to come on my face or put his finger in my ass or watch me with another woman. He didn’t want to jerk off while I danced around in red leather. He was the type who spread roses over the bed. He took me to fancy restaurants all over Cleveland and introduced me to his friends at the office. I felt important, more than somebody’s decoration.”

  “Do you feel like a decoration when you’re with him?” Him: it was their code for Dean Orman.

  “Sometimes,” Elizabeth said, turning even farther away from Dennis. He couldn’t see her eyes anymore, just the back of her hair and the deep crease between her shoulders. He touched her there, wanting her to come back to him, at least so he could see her eyes, but she turned over onto her back and pulled the blanket up to her face. Now she was hidden completely.

  “We were married in just a few weeks,” she said, her voice muffled in the blanket. “It was nothing, just a civil service with a justice of the peace. We thought our love was above marriage, that it was just something you do, a commitment that was expected by a petty society. Marriage was reserved for the weakhearted, the suspicious. Mike wore blue jeans and I wore a summer dress. My father was there, taking pictures with one of those disposable cameras. We were so happy.”

  Mike, Dennis thought. He turned the name around in his mind, silently mouthed it.

  “Then, as it goes, things changed. Mike started working all the time. He became consumed with this project at work. Months and months of work. My mother’s curse would burn inside me, mock me, and for a long time I was sickened with myself. Disgusted by my own body. I dropped out of school and fell into a depression. I hated the fact of my own lust, absolutely hated it. When Mike was home I would ravish him, take him in my mouth and suck out everything he was, leave him raw and bleeding. Afterward, I would apologize and feel guilty about what I had done. But something had changed between us. There was some rift there, some sort of divide.”

  She turned and glanced at him. Her eyes were slick and wet. Yet something was in them, some hint of a deeper knowledge. What is she doing? Dennis wondered. What is this?

  “The job got to him,” Elizabeth said. “He was under pressure all the time to finish a project of some sort. I can’t even remember what it was, that’s how important it must have been. Something to do with an animal project.”

  “Animal project?” Dennis asked. “Like dog shows?”

  “No, not like that. Mike was in advertising. Now I remember what it was: Pollyanna Pet Food. There was a girl in the advertisement, this pretty blonde, and she was feeding her cats. The problem, if I recall correctly, was that Mike didn’t like her. He wanted her to be older, more set. A professional type. He didn’t want this bimbo selling his product. He used that word, bimbo. Are you still listening?”

  “Yes,” Dennis said. She had caught him drifting off. Mike. Even though it was a common name, he couldn’t stop tossing it around in his head. “Go on.”

  “He talked about her so much, this actress, that of course I got suspicious. I thought he was fucking her. By that time I was alone all day with nothing to do, and my imagination was free to go wild. Of course I realized how ridiculous it was for me to castigate him for something that may not have even been true.

  “But it swelled and built. Blossomed inside me. The hate for this girl I had never seen. The possibilities ran through my mind like a snuff film. Mike on top of her, Mike behind her, Mike in her mouth. It was eating me from the inside out.

  “Finally, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. When he got home one night I interrogated him about it. ‘I know you’ve been screwing that girl,’ I said. ‘What girl?’ he asked. ‘That actress, that bitch.’ He was flattened. He told me to calm down. Things escalated. He was hurt, I mean really hurt, by what I’d said. And his pain made my anger swell more, so that I was berating him and berating myself at the same time. His fake lust was my real lust, and I was scorning it, screaming at it to stop, to leave me be.

  “‘You should calm down right now,’ Mike said to me. At some point he changed, became abrasive. But I couldn’t calm down. I was crazed, maniacal. My mother, my sex drive, the girl in the commercial—everything was coming to a head and I was powerless to stop it. ‘Calm down,’ he said again. And when I wouldn’t, he smacked me. It wasn’t hard. It was just a smack, just a light smack in the face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mouthed afterward. We sat on the couch together, and he cried, and I cried, knowing that it was over between us. The artifice of who I was trying to be in our marriage had been broken, and he had discovered my awful curse.”

  “What did you do then?” Dennis asked. But he already knew. He had already beaten her to that point. Another graduate school, another husband, and now this. Now here, him, Dennis Flaherty, in the Kingsley.

  She said, “I went back to Cincinnati. My father was waiting for me that night, watching television. He held me and I went to sleep, and at some point he must have carried me to bed. I woke up the next morning and decided to change things, to change my life. I went to a therapist. The therapist urged me to go back to school, and I did. That’s how I ended up at Winchester studying behavioral psychology, and in my second semester here I had a class under Ed. The rest, of course—well, you know the rest.”

  It took all of Dennis’s strength not to say a word. He wasn’t even sure what he should say, but he knew there was more there. He knew that Elizabeth would go on if he wanted her to. But he just lay there silently, eyes closed, waiting for her to tell him that it was finally over.

  Afterward, she drove him back to the Tau house. It was early evening, a muddy twilight spreading across the campus. The Dekes were marching to the dining hall, the Sigs were out on the yard in their suits and ties, dates on their arms in glittering formal dresses, and the art kilns down the hill at the edge of Up Campus were glowing as they did every night at this time. She dropped him off at the corner of Winchester and Crane, so that the Taus would not see them together. She did not say good-bye; she didn’t need to. There was nothing more that needed to be said between them. It was just something that had happened, and now it was over.

  When he was back in the room, he thought about all she had said. Mike. Pollyanna Pet Foods. Her father waiting for her when she got home, and how he had carried her to bed. The way she had told him her story, as if she were…as if she had rehearsed
part of it. As if it were somehow an act.

  Dennis opened Word and began to type. He had a theory about Polly, one that had been given to him by Elizabeth Orman. It was really indubitable: he would be ready for Professor Williams.

  14

  Mary was thinking about Professor Williams’s teeth. They were yellowed and crooked and too short. She hadn’t noticed them when she was close to him, or rather she hadn’t acknowledged it if she had, but now those teeth were all she could think about. How he had grinned at her. Stay. Not so much a request as it was a command. His eyes amused and knowing. Testing her.

  In City of Glass, Quinn was sitting outside the old hotel by then, watching and waiting for Stillman to come out. It was the dawn of his obsession. He was about to lose control, Professor Kiseley had told them in class that week. Things were about to go off the deep end for Quinn.

  But what about Mary? How was she doing? She wasn’t about to go off the deep end like Quinn, but she…she wasn’t doing well. Because of her insatiable need to figure the thing out, to understand Williams and his methods, she had allowed herself to become—what had he said about that scientist, Milgram, that day in class? She had allowed herself to lose herself in the class. She couldn’t go out without wondering if she was missing something. She couldn’t do anything without thinking of Williams. He could do anything now, bend the rules any way he wanted, and she would follow the game.

  Now the danger, the adventure she had been craving when the class started was beginning to wear on her. She knew she had to find a way to scale it back, to tone it down, to chill out, as her mother would say. Or…

  Or what? Or she might turn out like Paul Auster’s Quinn? Or she might lose herself completely to Williams and become so obsessed with solving his puzzle that she would be able to do nothing else? Because that’s what it was about, wasn’t it? The need to solve it, to figure it out. To rest her mind.