Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  “It’s not me you’re angry at.”

  Juno snorted. “You’ve got that right. I’m angry at the fucking sonofabitch who rammed my car. God—where is my car? Is it a disaster?”

  “It was towed to the campus police station. It looked pretty bad.”

  “Shit! I have to call the insurance company!” Her

  shoulders drooped, and her chin fell. It wasn’t a plea to be rescued, but real fatigue.

  The phone rang, and we both jumped as if someone had

  been spying on us and was now going to tell us what he’d heard. Juno nodded at the phone, and I got it.

  “Nick—is everything okay?”

  I told Juno it was Stefan. Some of the tension left her face.

  “I’m sorry I forgot to call,” I said. “We were having breakfast, I had to feed the dog, and—”

  “Sounds cozy.”

  I think he was joking, but it made me nervous anyway. I filled him in on Juno’s condition while she winced or made faces to match my recital. It wasn’t quite mockery of me and Stefan, but it was close.

  “We’ve also been talking about her case,” I said.

  “Her case. Huh.” He paused. “You know what was on

  last night on the Mystery Channel?”

  “Suspect?”

  He laughed because right after we had signed up for

  digital cable, it had seemed that the Cher/Dennis Quaid movie appeared almost every night for a month or two on one channel or another except for the Italian Soccer League. “Not Suspect, no. Black Widow. With Debra Winger? She’s tracking the woman whose rich husbands keep dying?”

  “Okay, I remember that. And your point is?”

  “My point is the private investigator she hires in Hawaii.

  Remember him—the cranky guy? He ends up dead.”

  “And?”

  “Don’t be dense, Nick, you know what I mean. If

  somebody hates Juno enough to be harassing her and crashing into her car, that person might hate you more if you help her.

  You’ve already been warned.”

  I turned my back to Juno. Though she was absorbed in

  the newspaper, and had that I’m-not-listening air about her, I needed something between Stefan’s advice and her—if only my body. Juno wasn’t being helpful enough, and Stefan wanted me to back off completely. The way I added things up, those were two perfect reasons for plunging headlong into my own investigation. The hell with both of them.

  “—so you should be careful,” Stefan was saying.

  “Wait a minute—careful about what?” Was he still

  warning me off?

  He didn’t sigh, but he didn’t exactly not sigh either. “I was telling you about the protest, but I guess you were distracted. What were you doing? Helping Juno pick a new wallpaper pattern?”

  “She doesn’t have wallpaper.”

  “I said new, didn’t I?”

  “Okay, tell me, what protest?”

  “You probably haven’t seen the Michiganapolis Tribune today, right? I can’t picture Juno subscribing to it.”

  I asked Juno if she had the Tribune delivered.

  “Delivered?” She sounded as outraged as Lady Bracknell discovering that the rich young bachelor who wants to marry her daughter has no family background and was in fact abandoned as an infant at Victoria Station’s cloakroom.

  “Delivered? Deliver me from that dreck! I wouldn’t read the Michiganapolis Spittoon if it ran an obituary of my worst enemy.”

  A ringing non-endorsement.

  “So they interviewed Avis Kinderhoek,” Stefan

  continued, “because she’s the chair of the Whiteness Studies Advisory whatever.”

  “Avis?”

  Juno muttered, “Avis—Mavis—Davis—Save us.”

  “That’s right, Avis. Don’t ask me how she went from just being a volunteer to the big cheese. A reporter interviewed her about the whole idea of Whiteness Studies, and she said it was brilliant, that white people had for too long been made to feel ashamed of themselves, and that they were in danger of internalizing demeaning stereotypes and it could seriously damage their self-esteem—”

  Stefan stopped because I was laughing in outrage, and Juno demanded that I catch her up with the conversation.

  “That’s exactly what women and minorities have been

  saying,” she said. “To justify changing the canon. That roly-poly pygmy is co-opting their rhetoric!”

  Stefan heard that at his end and agreed.

  “But what protest?” I asked.

  “Peter de Jonge called me to say that the graduate

  students in EAR were going to stage some kind of

  demonstration at Parker. He sounded worried. He wouldn’t say why.”

  “But he’s always worried, isn’t he? And how come he’s a source, and why did he tell you?”

  “I would have to say, Yes, Don’t know, and Don’t

  know.”

  “Funny guy.”

  “Just trying to be efficient.”

  “So what’s the problem if there’s, what, picketing?”

  “I have no idea. When are you coming home?”

  “Soon. We’re going to make Singapore slings and watch Martha Stewart’s show first.”

  “Bullshit—you have classes to teach.” Stefan air-kissed his receiver, and we hung up. I filled Juno in, and she went from mildly alert to wide awake and ready to rumble. Well, potentially.

  “Avis Kinderhoek is a moron,” Juno said, holding out her cup for more coffee. I filled her cup and mine, and poured us both some water. “No, that’s too benign. She’s a virus. No brain, just deadly mindless activity. The only good news is that she’s so bloody convinced she’s right that she’s going to hurt her own cause by blurting out any idiocy that occurs to her. Whiteness Studies as therapy for poor dejected

  Caucasians! It’s sick-making. It’s ridiculous. Have you ever felt there’s anything inferior about being white?”

  “Inferior to whom? If I could be anything, it would be French. Maybe then I’d get the subjunctive right. But I’m the wrong person to ask, because I’m only an honorary white man.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” She frowned.

  “I’m only part of the patriarchy if I keep my mouth shut.

  As soon as I say anything about being Jewish and gay, I’m doubly demoted.”

  “Honorarily white? You love quotations so much, well

  here’s a little Hemingway for you: ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’

  You’re white, like it or not, so don’t try to score any minority points from me.” Then she smiled in a pre-accident way. “As for scoring, however—”

  But I wouldn’t be deflected. “In the nineteenth century, Germans didn’t used to be considered white in America, or Italians, or Poles, or Jews—”

  “Spare me the self-pity.”

  “It’s not self-pity, it’s history, damn it!”

  Juno mockingly rolled her eyes, then winked at me, and even as I was furious, I enjoyed her winding me up. But the image made me think of the connection between sex and clock-winding in Tristram Shandy and at that moment, with caffeine and contempt animating her, I wouldn’t have minded grinding a few gears with Juno. Tick, tock.

  Just then the doorbell rang, and with Turandot darting around our feet and barking, Juno waveringly headed for the door while I followed.

  “Wait,” she commanded, and the puppy obediently

  backed up several feet from the door and sat down, tongue lolling, practically vibrating with suppressed excitement.

  It was Detective Valley, dressed as shabbily as if he’d chosen his suit in the dark—the very first time. He eyed me with amused surprise, and glanced behind me as if expecting to see some sort of evidence of debauchery or crime.

  “I wanted to talk to you about last night,” he said,

  waiting for Juno to invite him in. She bristled and looked as if she wanted to slam the door in his face, but
hesitated.

  Weakness? Or guilt?

  “Oh, all right.”

  Valley marched in, and Juno compromised by shutting

  the door loudly. It was childish, and I would have done the same. I don’t know if I would have stuck my tongue out at him behind his back, though, as Juno did. Turandot followed cautiously, nose down as if following a trail, and hanging back from Valley. Was she picking up on Juno’s distaste for the man, or had she made her own canine decision?

  “I believe you’re withholding evidence,” Valley said with his back to us, surveying the living room as if that very evidence were hidden in plain sight, or perhaps waiting for us to produce it before we were face-to-face again.

  Juno made it to a chair and settled into it as unsteadily as if she were eighty. “Really?”

  I sat on the wide arm of her chair, feeling protective, concerned.

  “The officer who interviewed you in the emergency

  room believed you were holding something back.”

  “Well, I did think I was going to puke, if that’s what you mean.”

  Valley breathed in with all the impatience of a headmaster used to being subtly taunted by defiant, rude pupils. He sat down on the couch opposite us, looming there with the loony stiffness of a praying mantis.

  “You all think you’re clever,” he said, and I could feel Juno’s temperature start to rise as her body gave off waves of heated disapproval.

  “Canadians? Oh, no, we’re too nice to be clever. We

  leave that to the Americans. You’d never catch us trying to dazzle anyone with a bon mot.”

  “Professors,” he said, as if Juno hadn’t spoken. “You think you’re gods just because you have Ph.D.s, just because you write books and know lots of long words. You’re just like your students when they get drunk and run amok on campus —only you act that way when you’re sober. Reckless and stupid.”

  It was hard for me to completely disagree with his

  assessment of professorial lordliness and entitlement, but it was also limited, unfair. In my opinion, the administrators at SUM were the real thugs, the real menace. They were the ones who set the tone on campus in their hypocritical way, acting as if they were each and every one ruler of some petty authoritarian state obsessed with its own rituals and reputation.

  Now Valley took me in as if committing every detail to memory for later dissection. I tried not to shift under his hostile scrutiny, but it wasn’t easy.

  “Why are you two always together?”

  “Friendship,” I said. “You should try it sometimes.”

  Juno took my hand and held it to her cheek, which was as warm as her hand, but softer. “You can tell him the truth, Nick, I don’t mind.” Her voice was low and provocative, and Valley actually looked shocked for a moment, or equal parts vexed and nonplussed. Me, I tried not to blush, imagining what else Juno could be doing with her hand, and what I could be doing with mine. That is, without Valley watching. I may have been a closet heterosexual or bisexual, but I certainly wasn’t into anything kinky like voyeurism. Not yet, anyway.

  “Now, did you have a point in coming here?” Juno asked Valley. “What about finding whoever was shooting at me at the Campus Center?”

  I teach composition, and couldn’t help but notice that her choice of tense—the past progressive—made it sound like she’d been in a gun battle, or under sniper fire.

  “Nobody tried to shoot you,” Valley said disgustedly.

  “But we found—” I couldn’t finish because Juno squeezed my hand hard, then let it go.

  “Found what?” Valley asked, not missing any of this

  byplay. “Found what?”

  “Nothing,” Juno said. I echoed her denial, and sat there trying to make myself expressionless, and more, to blank my mind of any images that would betray me. Like most people, I tend not to believe in psychic communication except when around authority figures I feared could read my thoughts. It’s probably a holdover from childhood, when we all grow up in a land of omniscient giants, whose power only starts to fade in our teen years when it’s too late to change those searing first impressions.

  “It’s a crime,” Valley said, “to withhold evidence in a criminal investigation.”

  “What investigation? As far as I can tell,” Juno snarled, “the only thing you’re doing is harassing me, and I’m the victim!”

  Valley raked her with his clinical, contemptuous eyes—as if he were a nineteenth-century physician about to diagnose a woman as hysterical due to a “floating uterus.”

  “I’m getting out of here,” Valley said, eyes doing a Clint Eastwood squint. Turandot followed him to the door a few feet back, but Juno and I didn’t move. Valley expertly let himself out, as if he’d worked those exact locks before, and Juno and I both slumped.

  “I need a drink,” she said. “A triple vodka martini.”

  “I have to get home and change and get ready for

  classes. Do you need anything?”

  “A howitzer,” she grumbled. “And barbed wire and land mines.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should or even if I dared kiss her good-bye, but after what we’d been through that morning and the night before, something was required, wasn’t it? Juno rose and haltingly followed me to the hall closet, where I took out my coat. She tried helping me put it on, but groaned when she raised her arms.

  “I’ll kill him,” she gasped.

  “Valley?”

  “Someone. Someone has to pay for this.”

  I knelt and ruffled Turandot’s sides, surprised at how affectionate I felt toward Juno’s puppy—or would a

  psychologist have called it displacement?

  “Thank you doesn’t seem like enough,” Juno said

  throatily. “You’ve been wonderful.” She gave me a quick girlish hug, then slapped my butt as if we were football players, and I left, wishing I’d had the nerve to pull her close and feel her silk-covered breasts against my chest. But I was also glad I was a coward; who knew where that moment

  would have led, and what changes it might ineluctably bring with it?

  I didn’t go right home. I detoured to the Campus Center, parked, and hurried inside, trying to act inconspicuous as I waded through the shoals of students who looked like fans at a rap concert in their Tommy Hilfiger hats and FuBu attire.

  There was no one in the room where Juno had been

  attacked, and with as much trepidation as some adventure novel hero unmasking a veiled and jeweled idol, I walked over to the curtain and pulled it aside.

  But someone had been there before me. The small hole, whether created by a bullet or not, looked as if it had been enlarged by a hammer or chisel. Anyone else would think it was just random property destruction on campus, like the battered NO SMOKING signs or gouged bathroom stall doors. I felt stupid in that large airless room. I could have told Valley sooner what Juno and I suspected. I had let her determine what I said or didn’t say, and that was a big mistake.

  In novels or movies this was the kind of moment where you hear a sudden noise and dash behind the curtain and then overhear some incriminating or perhaps mystifying exchange, but I wasn’t that lucky. Conversations drifted in from the hallway, but they were random, and I headed back to my car dejected and annoyed. As I drove away I marveled, however, at the still-peculiar December weather—no snow yet, and temperatures often in the low fifties like that morning.

  “I would have made you breakfast,” Stefan said when he opened the door, “but—”

  And we hugged there with the cool air seeping into the house, holding each other as if I were a voyager in the tropics who’d been given up for lost. I felt all of that: battered, besieged, exhausted, and restored. And something else— intensely guilty for having imagined Juno in my arms not too long before. What would that be like? Stefan’s body was hard and lean and unyielding. Juno’s was athletic, too, but bounteous, resplendently fleshy. I thought of Glenda Jackson in Women in Love asking the half-naked coal mine
r bathing outside his grim home, “How are your thighs? I want to drown in flesh.” Juno would be a sensual noyade.

  And Stefan, who could finish my sentences and often

  said exactly what I was thinking, Stefan moved me inside and closed the door, kissing me now rapaciously. Without a word, we pulled at each other’s clothes like love-starved teenagers and did it on the foyer floor. Actually, we did several things, quickly, in increasing orders of complexity. Did I think about Juno while we grappled and groaned?

  There wasn’t time.

  “I have to shower again,” I complained, when we were

  standing again.

  “Better lock the bathroom door, or you’ll have to shower twice,” Stefan leered, and I broke away, put my coat on the rack, and climbed the stairs to clean up.

  After my shower, I settled down in the kitchen for a few minutes to read Avis’s interview in the Michiganapolis Tribune before driving to campus to check my mail and start my day of teaching. It was almost a puff piece that presented the task force as another example of SUM being progressive, forward-thinking, innovative—all the usual bunkum.

  Stefan sat opposite me, watching my reactions. Even

  strong coffee didn’t make Avis’s offhanded offensiveness palatable. She was quoted as saying things like, “You don’t hear white people whining about their rights when the country is changing and they’re going to be in a minority,” and, “We need to preserve our embattled culture.”

  But the short interview didn’t provide clues as to what the threat was exactly, and what was threatened.

  Shakespeare? Dolly Parton?

  “This is unbelievable,” I said.

  Stefan nodded. “But totally in character.”

  “Isn’t she going to get censured for shooting her mouth off like this?”

  “By whom? Serena’s staying neutral, and I don’t think the provost or anyone else really cares if anyone’s offended.”

  “You’re probably right—Glinka appointed her to the task force, so she must have official approval to blab.”

  “Unless she doesn’t, and she’s trying to drum up

  publicity for herself. Make some news and make some noise.”

  “You know, I have this impression,” he said, “that Peter de Jonge is more than a graduate student.”