Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  His face mashed against the door, he could hardly

  breathe, but he spit out, “Let me go, faggot.”

  I ground him into the door, wanted to crush him. I’d

  never felt such a blast of hatred and power before. I pulled on his arm, and he yelped. Good. He was every bully I’d ever known, and he was in pain. His cologne was mixed with something acrid I took to be fear. I pulled harder, thinking of Avis, Valley, Serena, Rusty.

  “Stop it!” Juno cried, surging up behind me, starting to pound on my back. “Are you crazy?”

  When I turned to elude her blows, Cash slipped away,

  scooped up the gun with his good arm and pocketed it, and yanked open the door. His face was bright red, and blood trickled down from each nostril. “You’re dead at SUM,” he said. “Dead.” He hurried down the driveway to—of course—a black SUV.

  Juno closed the door and icily asked, “Are you fucking out of your mind? He could have shot you.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  “You should have.”

  “You’re all show,” I said, feeling almost betrayed. “You brag about a gun, but you leave it in another room? You plan a trap, but you don’t execute it? You talk about revenge, but you wimp out?”

  “There was nothing we could do.”

  “We could have beaten the living shit out of him and

  taken the consequences. We could have claimed burglary, or attempted rape or assault—or something. A good lawyer would have gotten us off. Now it’s too late.” My breath was still coming fast, and I could feel heat in my arms and chest as if I had actually been swimming. I was all macho’d up, with no place to go.

  Juno said, “I need another drink. I need a million drinks.”

  “Fine. Drown in them. I’m sick of your games.”

  Disgusted, I got the hell out of there, but I had no illusion this was the end for me and Juno.

  I drove home with the windows cracked open, hoping that the stinging night air would calm me down. But it didn’t. Despite my explosion, or maybe because of it, I felt exhilarated by having for a few moments, at least, proved to Cash and myself that I wasn’t powerless and weak. I didn’t regret attacking him; if anything, I wish I’d had a chance to work him over, to pay him back even more for tormenting Juno and me—and bragging about getting away with it.

  I had heard him inveigh against the abuses of power at SUM, and here he was doing exactly the same thing. Selling his name, abandoning his principles, to establish himself higher up on the dung heap—and silencing me and Juno. It was revolting. He claimed to care about people and tradition, and he was ready to throw that all aside to become one of the pseudo-elite.

  I kept seeing him helpless against the door, writhing as I twisted his arm. It was an amazing rush. I felt as invulnerable as if I were drunk. Cash had threatened me, said I was finished at SUM, but what could he do now? Have me fired perhaps, but so fucking what? Sue me for assault? I’d tell my wild story in court, and we’d both go down in flames.

  Cash was a scab I had picked off, but Juno, she was a deep wound. I felt sundered from her, angry, contemptuous.

  She had been revving me up with her fulminations, but she was nothing more than a paper tiger.

  Paper leopard?

  The first thing Stefan said to me when I walked into the kitchen, where he was reading a copy of Poets and Writers, was, “Your phone was off. I tried calling you.”

  I took off my jacket and draped it on a chair, asked if the coffee he had made was decaf, and poured myself a cup when he said it was.

  “I guess I forgot to turn it on.”

  “What did you buy?”

  “Uh… nothing.”

  He nodded, and gave me a searching look I couldn’t

  evade. I sat across from him at the island and without a prologue told him everything about the evening. By the end of my narrative, I felt as sweaty and dazed as if I had been puking my guts out in college after a Friday-night binge.

  Stefan had heard some wild stories from me in the past, but this was for sure the wildest, and he stiffened several times during my story like a tied-up prisoner anticipating a blow. Then he closed his eyes and rested his hands on his knees, looking as serene and otherworldly as a seated Egyptian tomb effigy.

  If I had expected anything from him, it wasn’t silence. I waited. He sat. I finished my coffee, hearing the kitchen clock tick and the refrigerator hum, wondering if he had decided to give me the silent treatment or if he were so shocked and appalled he couldn’t speak.

  “I forgive you,” he said, finally, softly. “What you did tonight was stupid, and dangerous, and you could have been killed. But you weren’t.” He sighed deeply. “You weren’t.” He shook his head in quiet amazement. “You weren’t.”

  “And how was your evening?” I asked.

  He reared back the way you would if a bee had flown at your face. “You really think now’s a time to joke? What would have happened if you’d already owned a gun? I bet you would have brought it with you, and you could have shot Cash. You could have killed him.”

  “Wait—”

  “No, you wait. You could have killed him. You could have ended up facing a murder trial. Your life would be over even if you got off for self-defense. I’m not talking about the publicity, about being known as a killer, I’m talking about living with it, living with having taken his life.”

  “You’re exaggerating. I just roughed him up.”

  “That’s exactly my point. You’re not a thug. You didn’t used to be. But you attacked him. So what’s next?”

  “And you’re telling me you wouldn’t have done the same thing?”

  “Well, to start with, I wouldn’t have been playing cops and robbers with Juno Dromgoole, so it wouldn’t have

  happened. The woman’s a hysteric. No, that doesn’t even cover it. It’s like calling St. Peter’s a church. Juno is the mother of all hysterics, and she’s been making you a little crazy, too.”

  Well, that was true in more ways than Stefan realized and than I was willing to discuss. Even now, here, as angry as I was with Juno, I still thought she was hot, and I wanted to nail her. Being angry might have made me want her more; how screwed up was that?

  So it was my turn to be quiet. I went to the fridge, found the bottle of sweet-and-sour mix, bustled around the kitchen assembling the ingredients for sidecars, and poured them into the Deco silver cocktail shaker Sharon had given me. It felt very satisfying to shake it up and down, to make some noise, to be distracted by the quotidian.

  “If I’m going to be lectured,” I said, pouring out a drink for myself, “I need something better than coffee.”

  “You think this is a lecture? It’s a warning.”

  I thought of the moment in Death Becomes Her when Meryl Streep downs a magic potion, then is informed that there’s a catch to it and cries out, “Now a warning?” but I wisely kept it to myself. Stefan wasn’t in the mood for clever quotations. I sat back at the counter, but pulled my stool a little farther away. I held out the shaker, offering to pour a drink for Stefan, but he declined.

  “I don’t know why you’ve gone over the edge,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s to compensate for how murky your career’s been at SUM, or the Wharton conference turning into Halloween, or midlife crisis, or something. But this gun stuff, this playacting with Juno, it’s got to stop. It’s ludicrous and deadly.”

  “That’s not what you said before, not exactly.”

  “Because you weren’t acting like Agatha Christie in heat before. You weren’t making up freaky stories to lure someone into threatening you—and maybe worse. You weren’t beating people up.”

  “I didn’t beat Cash up. I knocked him against the door, I twisted his arm.” Put that way, it seemed completely

  unremarkable and uncommendable, a minor tussle at a bar, and I almost wanted to reverse myself and brag a little: “Yeah, dude, I jacked him up—you shoulda seen that bitch squeal.”

>   “Don’t mince words.”

  “You’d rather have me dice them?”

  “Stop it!” Stefan slammed his mug down on the granite, and it cracked in several pieces, a tiny bit of coffee spilling out around them. Stefan shook off his hand, grabbed for the paper towel stand, and ripped off several sheets, wiping and sweeping with the angry economy of a losing gambler fiercely throwing his dice. I didn’t offer to help.

  “Just stop it, okay?” Stefan said when he had pitched the mess into the garbage. He stood with his back against the sink. “You know what makes me sick? It’s not your palling around with that fruitcake Juno, or flirting with disaster, it’s how much you enjoyed the whole thing. You were trying to sound chastened, but you were smirking like George Bush.

  You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be? I helped expose who’s been

  harassing us, so now Cash is going to stop—he has to.”

  “But you made another enemy.”

  “Come on, Stefan, weren’t you listening to what I told you? Cash hated me already. I’m a one-man fucking Decline of the West to him. Nothing would ever change that. And my future here is so indefinite anyway, who the fuck cares?”

  “I do! I care, and I’m not talking about tenure or a job.

  You want to risk your life? That’s what you want? Then go rock climbing or bungee jumping or swim in Australia and dare the sharks to get you!”

  I shuddered a little. Stefan knows that Jaws is one of my least favorite movies in the world because its horror is so much more real than Scream or The Exorcist or Little Women.

  “Nick, I do not want you running around like this

  anymore.”

  “Oh, am I getting a curfew, Dad?”

  “That is a stupid and insulting thing to say.”

  “Then don’t talk to me like I’m a teenager. You can’t forbid me to do something I want to do.”

  Our voices were growing louder, and I could see the

  evening turning bitter with all the helpless fascination of watching a train slip from the tracks and plunge off a vertiginous cliff into a gorge far below. And I felt that surge of recklessness when you know you’re going to build toward a crescendo of accusations that are hard to take back, maybe even impossible, yet I wasn’t ready to retreat. Luckily I didn’t have to, because Stefan surprised me again.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I can’t make you stop. I think the only thing I can do is lie down in the driveway when you try to pull out your car.” He smiled, and when I didn’t respond similarly, he said, “I was trying to make a joke.”

  “It did have some vaguely jokelike features,” I admitted, and we both shrugged our way out of the tension. It was that simple, but perhaps only because we knew each other so well after fifteen years. We could disengage without shame, without negotiating a truce, without UN observers.

  “You’re sure you don’t want a sidecar?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  I made some more, and we moved to the living room,

  where Stefan had built a small fire while I was gone, since we had a frost warning for overnight. Up till now we’d had a surprisingly mild winter, but the snow was finally on its way from Canada or Minnesota or wherever it had been ravaging the countryside and tormenting the citizenry.

  “So what was it like?” Stefan asked after finishing his first sidecar.

  “Slamming into Cash?” The images came back, and there was something off-kilter about the memory, but I couldn’t identify what bugged me. Maybe I was just wrung out. “It was sweet, as my students would say. I never fought

  anybody as a kid.”

  He nodded in anticipation, waiting for me to dilate on that theme, and I did. I told him how, always fast-tongued, I had preferred to wiggle out of tight situations with a joke that would make my opponent either laugh and unhook, or look stupid so that the other kids would laugh and the guy wanting to throttle or hit me would give up. The latter result was riskier, since it could goad someone to more violence, but the strategy had worked until junior high, when a humorless blockhead, new to our neighborhood, had dared me to say something smart, having heard I was a real mouth. I told him I couldn’t think of anything, and he punched me, considering my admission enough of a wisecrack to deserve punishment.

  Stefan asked almost rhetorically, “Do you think we’ll ever get over the past? It’s like quicksand, you never know when you’ll be sucked under and drown in it. Here you are, over forty, and going ballistic because of something that happened in junior high school.”

  “It’s more complicated than that, and besides, Cash

  pushed me to it.”

  Stefan grinned and quoted the bizarre line we’d heard growing up that was supposed to make us avoid peer pressure and turn the other cheek. “Would you jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if he told you to?”

  “Of course not, I’d ask him to go first to show me how to do it right. Okay, now. This question is for real: how was your coffee klatch with Peter De Jonge? What did you guys talk about?”

  “You, mostly.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. He was really curious about the way you’ve been

  involved with crimes on campus. Sounds like he’s read about them, studied the newspapers. He asked a lot of questions. He sounded impressed, and he wants to talk to you sometime.”

  “Is he writing a book or something?”

  Stefan shrugged. “Doubtful. Maybe he’s just a crime

  buff.”

  “But that has nothing to do with his research. Didn’t it strike you as creepy?”

  “No. If it had, I wouldn’t have talked about you. Hey, it was all complimentary what he said. So what’s the problem?”

  I probably had no cause for suspicion, but Stefan’s calm question somehow made me angry again, at Cash, at Juno, at myself and the whole perverted university system. SUM was as unjust and autocratic as any medieval duchy waging war on its neighbors with foreign mercenaries while torturing its own people for heresy. And look what it turned us all into.

  Liars, blowhards, criminals—and paranoids.

  “People find you fascinating,” Stefan said. “It’s not just your students.”

  “The Typhoid Mary syndrome.”

  “No, it’s like Hitchcock, somebody ordinary getting

  involved in a tangle beyond the world they’ve always lived in.”

  “I’m ordinary?”

  I wished that were true, but we toasted to it anyway.

  “What’s gotten you so peppy today?”

  “I woke up and looked at you and realized you’re alive, almost despite yourself.”

  “I think there’s a loving remark in there somewhere,” I said.

  “Dig deep.”

  I took the plates to the dishwasher and, loading them in, said, “It bothers me that after everything I’ve seen at SUM

  and in our department, I expect people to behave better.”

  “Better? I expect worse.”

  “Well, what would be worse? Cannibalism?”

  Soberly, Stefan said, “Cash is worse. He’s felt oppressed and victimized so long he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s not thinking clearly—”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  Stefan nodded. “And he’s just grabbing for power, from what you say. He’ll end up regretting it.”

  “Regret isn’t enough. I hope he suffers. Remember that Talking Heads song?” I tried singing the first line of “Burning Down the House”—“Watch out, you might get what you’re after”—but Stefan stopped me with a mock karate chop

  aimed at my chest.

  “Stick to bibliographies,” he said. “And they’ll stick to you.”

  “That’s my problem. One of many. I’m a bibliographer. I can’t get no respect. I should start a support group.”

  “So are you and Juno planning any other fun activities this week? You could always join the war on drugs, or fight intern
ational terrorism if you have some spare time. I wish I understood your fascination with her,” Stefan said lightly, heading off to his study.

  No, you don’t, I thought. No, you don’t.

  The next day, I called the Records Department at the station where I’d applied for my permit, and was told it had been approved. Even though I knew I had no criminal record, I was relieved that some computer hacker hadn’t turned me into an Interpol-sought terrorist.

  I headed over. The Records office was blindingly bright: supernova neon lights blaring down on white walls, floor, and counters, with everything in sight looking as if it had been delivered and unpacked scant hours before. Even the youngish female clerk behind the glass partition looked as flawlessly turned out as if it were her first day at a new job she wanted to keep. She slid me the four-part pea-green permit form, checked my driver’s license, explained where to sign and how many days I had to purchase the gun and how to proceed once I bought it. Then she notarized the form, and I was off, wondering again at how easy this all was. No second test, no counseling, no instructional video to watch.

  As I drove up to the mini-mall where Mrs. Fennebresque had her gun shop, a 400-pound man in a white T-shirt and mammoth overalls came rolling out of her shop. He was bald and red-faced and looked every square inch a Bubba. I watched him surge toward a pickup truck with—what else?— a stars-and-bars decal and heave himself inside before I ventured from the car.

  Mrs. Fennebresque seemed even more out of place than

  usual in her red-and-green tartan suit and red reindeer-print turtleneck sweater. She should have been gift wrapping presents for charity somewhere, or staffing a holiday bake sale, not selling firearms. Her store was ablaze with Christmas decorations. She’d strung flashing lights along the counters and around the door frames, plopped little plastic trees on every available surface, hung stylized snowflakes and angel mobiles from the ceiling. The sound system was playing Perry Como Christmas songs.

  “Well, hello, stranger,” she trilled sweetly. “Where’s that pretty young lady friend of yours?”