Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  Juno brought out Belgian chocolates and Belgian cherry ale for dessert. “In honor of your heritage. The Belgian part, anyway.” I was Jewish, so I suppose she could have

  produced rugelach or New York cheesecake for dessert if that had been her chosen theme.

  As Juno brewed coffee, we chatted about our plans for the winter break and Stefan’s recent good luck. When the coffee was done, Juno’s mood turned somber. “Nick, we have to talk about the department. After all the scandal this semester, it needs firm leadership. You know that.”

  What it needed was an exorcism, in my opinion, or

  possibly napalm. And it would only get worse: Juno was planning to run against the current acting chair, Serena Fisch.

  Former friends, both of them were unpopular in EAR for different reasons. And either one of them could screw up my chances for tenure, since the chair’s approval was the second step in getting tenure after the tenure committee made its report.

  “Don’t you think I’m the one to take charge in a time of flux?”

  I drank some coffee. Then I temporized. “You’re a very strong woman.” It didn’t work.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Nick. Serena Fisch is a strong

  woman. Me, I’m a bitch. And that’s what EAR needs. An alpha bitch. A top dog.”

  “I’ve always thought of you more as the czarina type.”

  Juno laughed. “You’re quick with your tongue. But

  someday it might get bitten off if you’re not careful.”

  I winced, but tried to make a joke out of it. “A killer salad, foie gras and Montbazillac, chocolates, Belgian ale and coffee, threats. Nice menu.”

  She grinned wolfishly. “With your sense of humor,

  maybe you should run for chair.”

  “I should just run.”

  But Juno was serious again. “I know what you’re

  thinking, Nick. You owe Serena because she helped you organize the Edith Wharton conference. Not that it was a raving success with all those murders.”

  “Two murders—just two!”

  “Fine. But you don’t like Serena, not really.”

  Even though Serena was something of a friend of mine

  and Stefan’s, or at least friendly to us, there was truth in that.

  But then you couldn’t say I actually liked Juno, either. I enjoyed her. I was fascinated by her. I seemed to have the hots for her. Not exactly the same thing.

  “And I don’t believe you trust Serena. Maybe you don’t trust me, either.”

  I kept silent.

  “But I’d be a better chair, Nick, and a worse enemy.”

  “What do you mean?” It couldn’t be that she had a gun and Serena didn’t.

  Juno leaned back in her chair and surveyed me de haut en bas. “Serena’s too self-obsessed to cause anyone real trouble. But nobody should ever fuck with me, Nick. Serena would have nothing on me when it came to getting revenge.

  And I’ll get it, on everyone who won’t support me. I want to be chair of EAR. Nothing’s going to stop me. Nothing—and no one.”

  Though she didn’t speak about herself as “Juno

  Dromgoole,” she sounded as confident and quietly crazed as some twenty-something Web tycoon who’s never known

  failure. And that struck me as bizarre—here was someone who justly criticized EAR, saw how shallow its rhetoric was, how meaningless its gestures were. Yet she wanted to be in charge of this low-rent circus sideshow. What was the point?

  The evening’s free-floating eroticism had completely

  dissipated, and the air around Juno had a distinctly lunar chill.

  I was ready to go, and invoked Stefan as my excuse:

  “Stefan’s waiting for me.”

  “So am I,” Juno said menacingly, as I rose, headed for the coat rack at the front door, and bundled into my down parka to escape.

  2

  I walked down Juno’s driveway to my car, parallel to a giant, overgrown row of yew hedges that ran from down near the curb back past Juno’s house, blocking most of the

  neighboring ranch house and its lawn from view. Looming over me, the hedge was easily twice my height, and I heard what must have been birds skittering around inside it, encouraged by the relatively warm weather. And something louder, either inside or behind it. A cat stalking winged snacks? It would have to be a very big cat.

  I stopped, and there was a rush as if something

  (someone?) had moved deeper into the shrub, or away from it entirely. I didn’t feel as if eyes were staring at the back of my head, the hair on my neck didn’t tingle—none of those novelistic clichés. But by the time I got into my car, I was mildly spooked, convinced someone had been lurking inside or behind the hedge, and I drove off quickly. The person who had called Juno before?

  As soon as I was a block away, though, the specter of someone watching me—or more likely Juno and her house— had vanished. My brain reverberated with the chorus of some reggae song where the chorus was, “I’m like a cutting razor, I’m dangerous, I’m dangerous.” That was Juno, all right: rhythmic, sensuous, and volatile. To get the song out of my head, I slipped a Nona Hendryx CD into the car stereo, finding some relief in the fiery voice and surging music of the first track, “Busting Out.” I might be stuck, but it was heartening to hear someone sing about freedom.

  I had not wanted to think too much about the

  consequences of being caught between Serena and Juno in an EAR election campaign. It seemed that the only way out of such a dilemma was a hostile takeover of EAR by another department and a subsequent rash of layoffs, or a sinkhole opening up under Parker Hall. Of course, Parker was built of sandstone and visibly crumbling, but its collapse wouldn’t come fast enough to save me.

  The scenario played out in my head like some tangled

  episode from a medieval chronicle: factions, charges, oaths and imprecations, alliances and threats, and slaughter—of a kind.

  At the first stoplight, I pounded the wheel. It wasn’t enough that I had no tenure and wasn’t even sure if I wanted to stay at SUM anyway, and that my tenure committee was all screwed up, and that whoever I chose to vote against for chair would undoubtedly ferret out my betrayal and try to punish me somehow.

  No, it was worse than all that. I hadn’t even touched Juno—or her Glock—and already I was having castration anxieties! Why the hell else had I even thought about that reggae song?

  I kept coming back to Juno’s Glock. Was it real? God, Juno with a gun—it was a terrible prospect. We had moved as a nation past men going berserk in post offices or public places; now teenagers were shooting up their high schools. So there was nothing at all unlikely about college professors using each other for target practice. The revenge of the powerless.

  So what was Juno planning? An announcement at a

  departmental meeting? Flyers in faculty mailboxes? A memo on the EAR e-mail listserv? Leaflets dropped from the Goodyear blimp? Or would she try to get the Michiganapolis Tribune to profile her and go for citywide publicity? I could see the photo: Juno looking fierce and bursting out of a Diana Rigg Avengers-type jumpsuit, a gun to her lips. Local readers who hated the university (or the “college,” as they called it) would eat it up. Here at last was a professor who knew what was really important in life: not books but bullets. Juno would even be able to parlay the publicity into a radio talk show or run for state office if she became an American citizen.

  It could spark even more craziness on campus. The

  return of ROTC. Gun clubs. Firearms Studies. A Wild, Wild West halftime show at home football games. Marksmanship awards at graduation. An NRA-sponsored endowed chair

  complete with gun rack. Anything ridiculous was possible at SUM, a place that made Alice in Wonderland seem like a documentary. If parents only knew the kind of lunacy and corruption their tuition dollars were supporting, they’d be less impressed by the university’s PR.

  Brooding about Juno and her gun, I drove through town, which had undergon
e its Christmas makeover, trying to screen it all out. The holiday season is always uncomfortable for me as a Jew. It starts with the endless wishes of “Merry Christmas.” It intensifies with the culturewide ubiquity of Christmas advertisements, whether on TV or people’s hand-

  knit sweaters. And it explodes in a blizzard of wreaths, garlands, bows, Santas, trees, angels, and green and red ornaments and ribbons on every possible surface in every conceivable space: supermarkets, the post office, banks, light poles, mailboxes, car antennas, backpacks, garbage trucks, dogs.

  Then there’s the Christmas music on every radio station, and even when you’re put on hold; the Christmas specials on every TV channel; and the blizzard of cards from people you barely know. Here in Michiganapolis, it was worse than back in New York, because the decorating was totally unironic.

  Growing up in New York, I had found the fuss somewhat entertaining. There, it was proof of how extraordinary we were in the city: the whole world wanted to see the tree get lit at Rockefeller Center; reporters from across the country extolled the crowds on Fifth Avenue and particularly at FAO

  Schwarz. New York was big, brash, excessive—and tough.

  Shopping amid the Christmas hordes was a rite of passage.

  But here in Michiganapolis it was all for real.

  I especially disliked socializing at so-called holiday parties, which were the same old Christmas parties politically corrected with some halfhearted decorative attempts to please Jews and Muslims and Native Americans and anyone else who might conceivably take offense and start a lawsuit. EAR

  had renamed its Christmas parties “end-of-term parties,”

  which was fine by me, not that I particularly wanted to attend any gathering of my colleagues.

  Overexposure probably altered your DNA as much as it

  did your mood.

  I drove around town a bit aimlessly, musing once again over my tenure dilemma. I was in a tenure-track position, I had a home here, Stefan was EAR’s writer-in-residence, so of course I had to get tenure. Tenure was the ineluctable goal once you had your Ph.D. and your job. Yet the more I

  struggled for it, worried about it, and feared I wouldn’t get it, the less desirable it seemed. I wonder if the great explorers felt this way, reached a point where nothing they discovered could be worth the emotional treasure they’d squandered to find it.

  But it felt crazy to be questioning a lifelong goal, the capstone of my love for teaching. My head was starting to feel as full as if I had sinusitis. God, this was like the David Bowie character singing that his brain “felt like a warehouse with no room to spare.” I wished I could talk to Sharon, but since her surgery, she had found it hard to hear anything on the phone or to even concentrate long enough to have a conversation. E-mail wasn’t any easier because the glowing screen bothered her eyes and the letters blurred. I kept track of her recovery through her parents and mine, but that wasn’t a real connection.

  Home, I found Stefan sprawled by the fire, immersed in reading Michael Connelly’s Blood Work. Sade’s Diamond Life was playing, and Stefan wore dark blue sweats and heavy black wool socks. Stefan looks a lot like a stockier, shorter version of Ben Cross, the Jewish runner in Chariots of Fire.

  Watching him, I thought this was a Norman Rockwell scene reinterpreted by Bruce Weber, the wholesomeness overlaid by beefcake, with a soupçon of the Eddie Bauer catalog.

  Was that my problem? Had I been with Stefan so long I had stopped experiencing him, and instead saw him as a picture? Was that why I was drawn to Juno—a hunger for a more visceral connection? It didn’t make sense to me. The longer you lived with someone, I thought, the deeper the intimacy.

  Without asking about my dinner with Juno, Stefan

  launched right into a complaint about Connelly’s book. “Don’t you think the clue about the killer’s identity is too obvious?”

  “Which one?”

  He leafed back through the book, found it, and told me. I agreed.

  Stefan shook his head. “I liked Pulse better. Better atmosphere, and the story moved faster.” Both books featured heart transplants, which was why Stefan was reading them back-to-back—at my recommendation, of course.

  “Really? So you think Edna Buchanan can write, huh?”

  He looked abashed. A literary novelist, Stefan had long been critical of mysteries and thrillers, and the fact that crime and murder had entered our lives in bucolic Michiganapolis had not eased his prejudice. He complained that besides being indifferently written, most of the mysteries he came across were formulaic, the same old genre song-and-dance in book after book, with few surprises. I agreed, to a certain extent.

  “Listen,” Stefan said. “I’ve been thinking about

  something.”

  “Always a dangerous sign in people over forty.”

  “The mysteries that are usually the worst are the ones with murders right away. Why not create tension differently and have the murder come late—or maybe not at all?”

  “But people expect a murder,” I insisted. “Readers and reviewers.”

  “That’s my point—play with expectation, tension,

  menace. The threat of a crime. It’s like the difference between horror and terror. Horror blasts you, grosses you out; terror scares you because you’re not sure what’s next, or even if there is something to be afraid of.”

  “You can guest-lecture in my mystery class.”

  He smiled.

  Of course Stefan’s dislike of the predictable wasn’t

  helped by the fact that he was the kind of writer who would pick up a mystery or thriller, leaf through it, and somehow stumble across the most ridiculous line in the whole book, like the one he’d found last year in a romantic thriller: “Marla heaved a gusty sigh that sent the breasts in her silk shirt atremble.”

  We both had cracked up at that one, and Stefan said he wondered if the breasts were sent FedEx or UPS. Then he added gloomily that, given the general decline of literacy in the United States, most people would think there was nothing wrong with that description, and many would consider it vivid and strong. The slide was irreversible; the quality of freshman writing I worked with had declined every single year that I’d been teaching. And there were always students who didn’t understand—in a composition class, yet—why they were

  graded down if their ideas were good and their writing wasn’t.

  Despite all the bad writing, over the past six months Stefan had been seriously sampling books I’d been considering for my next semester’s mystery course, and now that he had a potential film deal in the works, he seemed even more relaxed, freer of his old prejudices. Stefan was not at all averse to reading bestselling authors like Connelly now, whereas before, he had always seen that kind of status as a counterrecommendation. If too many people read a book, he assumed, it couldn’t be good, though somehow his bias excluded Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Angela’s Ashes.

  Of course, literary writers aren’t the only snobs. I’ve read some interviews with mystery writers who sneer at what they consider literature: books “where not very much happens to people who aren’t very interesting.” And they dubiously trot out Joyce or Proust or Virginia Woolf as examples. I hate that anti-intellectualism. Give me a writer like Scott Turow who enjoys both mysteries and classics, and is proud to say so.

  “Back to Pulse,” Stefan was saying, sitting cross-legged now. I joined him on the hearth rug. “Don’t you think Buchanan’s book is better?”

  I nodded. “It’s shorter, too. I don’t mind spending over five hundred pages with an author I know has something significant to say. Like Balzac. But I like shorter mysteries unless we’re trapped at an airport—then it’s Nelson DeMille time.”

  “I’ll take Ken Follett. His prose is juicier. At least in The Man from St. Petersburg and Lie Down with Lions.”

  I laughed, since writers like Follett would never have entered Stefan’s conversational orbit before, and it always gave me a charge now to hear evidence o
f his turnaround.

  After all, I was a big mystery fan, and Stefan’s former contempt for the genre had always irked me. Now he was reading and enjoying Robert Barnard, David Handler, Ngaio Marsh.

  “So you still think you’d never want to try writing a mystery?” I said.

  Stefan frowned. “What kind? I don’t know anything

  about police work, and those are the ones that seem most realistic. Amateur sleuth books are a joke—how many real people stumble across bodies?”

  “Hel- lo. What about the last five years of my life?”

  He shrugged. “Okay—you’re an exception. No—if I ever

  did branch out, the only thing I could imagine writing would be like Diane Johnson’s books. You know—a literary novel but with a killing, some light terrorism. Crime, but no heavy mystery plot.”

  This was new. Until the last year, his contemporary idols had been Gina Berriault and Andre Dubus, “writers’ writers”

  who’d only become mildly popular recently; both were as far from crime fiction as you could get. Stefan had even seemed a bit disappointed when they gained wider audiences, as if somehow they were fine goods being handled by the hoi polloi.

  On a pedantic note, I should say that Stefan often

  reminds me not to say “the hoi polloi,” since hoi means “the”

  in Greek. He also corrects my French, which is a sore point, since my parents tried raising me bilingual in English and French, but it wasn’t quite a success. And sometimes Stefan even points out that I don’t use “whom” consistently. Well, I feel like Henry James’s Isabel Archer about matters like that: I always want to know the difference between what’s correct and incorrect—not to do the former, but to have a choice.

  “Stefan, did you ever think you’d be reading so many

  mysteries and enjoying them?”