The Death of a Constant Lover Read online

  And their presence made me worry about SUM.

  See, no one was really in charge at the university right then, so we were a little like a former Soviet republic, drifting while various power centers prepared themselves to compete for control. The provost had left after a sexual harassment scandal, and there was fierce competition on campus to fill the plum position, even though there was a pro forma national search going on. My own chair, Coral Greathouse, was a front-runner in this race.

  There’d also been a shake-up on the Board of Trustees, and our moronic president, Webb Littleterry, was continuing to provide uninspired, uninvolved leadership. That wasn’t surprising, since he was SUM’s former football coach, and his election to the board had proven the scornful observation in some quarters that SUM wasn’t much more than a football program with a university attached. If only it were a winning program….

  I tried to relax into the day, tried to enjoy the life all around me here: toddlers waving and flapping at the ducks, gamely flinging bits of bread; students taking time off from classes to just sit and drink pop, chat, catch some rays; other students coming with more elaborate plans for picnics that included Frisbees, board games, and puppies. It was a combination park and town square, and if you stayed there long enough, you were bound to run into people you knew.

  Juno Dromgoole, the rowdy visiting professor of Canadian studies, dashed across the bridge toward Parker Hall, her chic black leather briefcase clutched under one arm like a large purse. Headed in the other direction was Polly Flockhart, an annoying neighbor of ours who was a secretary in the History Department.

  From the bridge now came what sounded like fierce quotations from Revelation or a Stephen King novel. I tried to block out the noise and the image of that angry pimpled face so that I could enjoy my thermos of Kenyan coffee and my smoked turkey breast on focaccia.

  The shouting died down a little.

  “Dr. Hoffman, hi! Want some company?”

  I looked up and grinned at Angie Sandoval, a former student of mine now majoring in criminal justice. She had helped me enormously each time I’d been unavoidably involved in murder at SUM. Perry Cross’s death was just the beginning: A year later murder stalked the Edith Wharton conference I had organized (under duress) at SUM. Buildings don’t burn down around me or anything like that, but I’m not exactly the luckiest man on campus.

  “Sure, Angie. Sit down.” I moved over on my step and she joined me, pulled out a can of Vernor’s, Michigan’s own ginger ale, from her pink knapsack, and popped it open for a slug.

  I owed a lot to Angie. She had clued me in to the importance of the county medical examiner in a criminal investigation, and she’d also explained that SUM’s campus police weren’t at all like security guards at a bank. They were real police, with all crimes at SUM under their jurisdiction, just as if it were a small town. And wasn’t it?

  Short, slim, apple-cheeked, with curly dark hair and a heart-shaped face, Angie was eager and bright and helpful. Whenever I’d run into her on campus this past year, I’d been surprised at how glad I was. Surprised, too, that I found myself thinking that if I had a daughter, I’d want her to be like Angie. I’d never before felt fatherly about any of my students. But then I’d also never been just over forty, either, and thus more than twice the age of most of my students.

  I asked Angie about her classes, and we chatted about them, enjoying the partly sunny day as hundreds of lunchtime idlers eddied and flowed around us. Suddenly, there was renewed shouting on the bridge. A bicyclist speeding by was yelling at the preacher, “The Bible is bullshit!”

  “You’ll burn in hell!” the pimply young man roared. “Burn in hell!”

  There were mocking cheers from students crossing the bridge, and a few catcalls.

  Angie sighed and drank some more pop. I wasn’t sure if she was religious or not, so I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t in the mood to be lectured about moral decay by someone barely out of her teens, no matter how pleasant her personality.

  “I hate the way things have changed around here,” she said. “Everybody’s mega pissed off! Like, nonstop.”

  “You’ve got that right.” Now it was my turn to sigh.

  The murders I’d been mixed up in had been among faculty and were unusual, since faculty members are more given to character assassination than the real thing. But the student body at SUM had seen intolerance of all kinds become commonplace, and violence was no longer rare.

  Angie and I chewed over the recent troubles on campus for a while.

  A black student had been set upon by a handful of white students on a dark campus path at night. They beat and kicked him and called him “nigger.” The rumor was that he’d been found facedown with his pants around his ankles and had either been raped or almost raped, but the student had vehemently denied it before taking a semester’s leave.

  The tiny office of the Muslim Students League at the Union had been broken into, trashed, and spray-painted with slogans like “Go Back to Iraq!” A car parked at Hillel, where Jewish students met, had been set on fire, and the gas tank exploded, causing thousands of dollars of damage to the building. Campus Young Republicans had received phoned death threats, as had members of SUM of US, SUM’s queer student group. Assaults were up, bicycle thefts were up, and more thefts and flashers were reported in the library.

  As a bibliographer, I found that particularly distressing, because it was bound to give students the wrong idea about research.

  “It’s like everybody’s just waiting for a chance,” Angie said, “to let go.”

  “Maybe it’s a plan,” I suggested.

  ‘What?”

  “Maybe we’re the target of a hostile takeover by the University of Michigan—and they’re doing everything they can to drive down the value of our stock.”

  Angie smiled dutifully but said, “I don’t think this campus needs any help looking bad.”

  She was right, and I thought the atmosphere among students was even influencing faculty. My new office mate, Lucille Mochtar, a minority hire, was generating some ugly comments from other faculty members. Mochtar had been hired right out of Berkeley’s graduate school at an amazing salary, without any publications. But she was part black, part Indonesian, and SUM pursued her with desperation and briefcases full of cash.

  I liked Lucille immensely and was pleased that she and her husband had bought the house across the street from me and Stefan. But I knew that resentment against her was simmering, and I wondered how it would affect me and my chances for tenure, since we got along so well. I tended to think of everything in terms of my coming consideration for tenure—it was impossible not to.

  “Mom and Dad want me to transfer,” Angie was saying. “Even though I’m a junior! They think SUM’s getting too dangerous.”

  “But you’ve been safe, right? Nothing’s happened to you?”

  Angie shrugged. “They weren’t happy that I was doing that investigating with you last year. But I did get extra credit from one of my professors.”

  I smiled. “Well, I’m glad you helped me out. You were great.”

  Angie thanked me, then she blushed. “My parents think you’re a bad influence, even though I took only one of your courses.”

  I shrugged. I could see nervous parents feeling that it was dangerous to know me, but the thought of not running into Angie on campus anymore made me sad.

  “I understand how they feel. President Littleterry still blames me for those people getting murdered at the conference last year,” I said. “Dean Bullerschmidt is pissed off, too, and my chair isn’t happy either. The conference was supposed to make SUM look good—instead we got into all the newspapers, Time, Newsweek, for all the wrong reasons. Alumni donations plummeted.”

  Angie nodded sympathetically. “You should write a book about it or something,” she suggested. “Then you could get rich, and it wouldn’t matter if they liked you.”

  I wondered what kind of book I could write at this point. How to Ruin You
r Academic Career? Just then someone behind us called, “Hi, Angie!” and we both turned. It was Jesse Benevento, a punked-out religious fanatic with dead-white hair who’d lectured me on sexual morality last year during office hours. His father was chairman of the History Department, which shared decrepit Parker Hall with EAR.

  Jesse nodded at me coldly, and he and Angie talked about some assignment they both had due. After registering that he now had a nose ring and pierced eyebrows, I tuned out. I didn’t like him. Jesse had criticized me for making a casual reference to sex in one of my classes, and I still felt uncomfortable when I ran into him on campus. I’d often wondered if he’d complained to his father about me, and if his father had mentioned it, even casually, to Coral Greathouse. Though she’d never brought it up, it could have happened, and since I didn’t have tenure, any prejudicial information could harm me, no matter how minor.

  Even though campus was enormous, I ran into Jesse enough times to wish he would just disappear. I sipped my coffee very thoughtfully, trying to be detached from the conversation without being rude.

  “Gotta bail,” Jesse finally said. “Meeting a prof.” He slowly moved off, heading up the path to the bridge, but his meeting couldn’t have been urgent; I saw him stop to chat with a guy in an SUM tracksuit I turned away.

  Angie must have picked up my discomfort “He’s pretty intense,” she said apologetically.

  “Are you two dating?”

  Eyes wide, she seemed too startled to laugh. “He’s just a friend. Jesse doesn’t date anyone—he’s always saying you have to avoid the near occasion of sin. I think that’s a quote from some pope.”

  “Saint Augustine.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Get out of here, asshole!” came a shout from the bridge. And the bridge was suddenly twice as crowded, swarming with students. I thought of army ants boiling over prey that couldn’t escape the flood of terror.

  From where Angie and I sat, I could make out some kind of scuffle. Flung up from the growling little knot at the center of this melee were shouts of “Stop it!” “Devil!” “Asshole!”

  I turned to say something to Angie, but she was gone, and when I looked around in surprise, I saw her twenty feet away, hanging up one of SUM’s emergency phones on its bright orange pole.

  “I called nine-one-one,” she said, rejoining me. Angie had told me last year that all 911 calls on campus went directly to the dispatcher for the campus police.

  “Has that phone always been there?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve taken night classes, and I know where every emergency phone is on campus.”

  Around us, students were on cell phones either calling the police or—more likely—describing the melee to their friends, imagining they were CNN reporters.

  Just like a tornado, swiftly, darkly gathering fury into itself, the swirling, roiling mass of students on the bridge grew larger and more violent as people threw punches. Alarmed, I stood up and saw several students knocked down. It was all very confusing—I kept seeing fists fly toward chests, stomachs, and faces, and students being grabbed by their crimson-and-gray SUM sweatshirts or jackets and flung about. But in the reeling, cursing, grunting mob, I couldn’t tell how many people were getting hurt—or how badly. Were students falling and being kicked, or was it simply that I couldn’t make them out anymore as they whirled or struggled away?

  “This is unreal,” Angie breathed, standing very close to me as if I could protect her.

  It was unreal, and hard to fathom. The seething, wild mass was almost bizarrely purposeful—as if enmeshed in some ancient, ugly ritual. I felt as distanced and confused as when I’d gone to SUM football games and had consistently failed, even with binoculars, to follow the ball from the line of scrimmage. Jesse was somehow in the middle of it all now—you couldn’t miss that white hair.

  “Jesse, no!” Angie shouted, mesmerized, but he couldn’t have heard her.

  At either end of the bridge, clots of students stood staring, pointing, gaping. Some had rushed into the fray, but now the rest just watched.

  And then that cardboard box of blood-red Bibles came hurtling over the side of the bridge into the shallow Michigan river. It landed with a thudding splash, splitting open. Outraged ducks went flapping and flying out of the river and up the grassy banks.

  Awash with water, the darkening box started to sink, its red-coated contents drifting into the current as if they’d been hatched and set free.

  Everyone near the Administration Building bridge on both sides of the river was standing up now, pointing, staring, amazed. It was one thing to tear down the goalposts at a football game, or get drunk and knock over parking meters in town on a Saturday night and break store windows, but this kind of outburst was beyond the pale.

  The preacher boy went berserk, flailing about him with the strength of a hooked shark fighting a deep-sea fisherman. So that’s what someone looks like when he’s apoplectic, I thought, astonished by the young man’s livid, contorted face.

  He leapt at the rail, trying to climb over and jump after his Bibles to rescue them. Several burly frat boys yanked him back, but it wasn’t easy, because he was so unexpectedly strong, and because other students were pummeling them in what was beginning to look like a drunken spring break brawl in Florida. I felt horribly rooted to my spot as the crowd grew thicker and more frenzied on and near the bridge.

  “Let him jump!” a girl called out from the crowd.

  Around me there was appalling laughter from some students, tongue clucking, and cynical comments about the whole thing just being “a stunt. ”

  Suddenly I heard the yowl of a campus patrol car. Students fled like startled, angry crows as the black-and-white car veered off a road and screeched to a halt on a wide path to the bridge. Its doors flew open, and two campus police emerged with the goofy speed of circus clowns popping out of a Volkswagen Bug.

  They waded into the mob with their batons swinging, and I winced each time one of them came down, feeling utterly helpless.

  Then there was a shrill, agonized scream, followed by unearthly silence.

  Angie and I raced for the bridge. Had a student been badly injured by a campus cop? Maybe it was more shock than pain. Pushing to the edge of the crowd of what now looked like hundreds, I could make out a small cleared circle in which the two cops were leaning over a prostrate, bloody-faced body.

  It was Jesse Benevento. Blood pooled out from underneath his head in a terrible slick halo, and his face was almost as white as his hair. I felt a wave of fear.

  “Trampled,” I thought. How horrible. A backpack lay open at his side, spilling notebooks, pens, CDs, and paperbacks out onto the unyielding concrete. One of them was a blood-spattered slim Penguin paperback of an old French novel I’d never read, Adolphe, by Benjamin Constant. The cover bore the portrait of a dark-haired young man whose enigmatic smile leered up incongruously at me from the midst of carnage.

  I closed my eyes to steady myself, feeling a rush of shame as strong as nausea. I’d been musing over how much I disliked Jesse just a few minutes earlier, and now he was hurt. And all I could picture was the terrible scandal about to hit the university. Religious frenzy—riot—department chair’s son gravely injured.

  “What is it?” Angie cried. “What happened? I can’t see.” I could hear Angie in the crowd struggling to get closer, and she popped up right behind me. I was blocking her view.

  In the circle, the young preacher was on his knees near Jesse’s body, arms wrapped around himself as tightly as if he was afraid he might burst apart Head down, sobbing, he rocked back and forth. He was moaning, “Oh my Lord Jesus Oh my Lord Jesus Oh my Lord Jesus.”

  Angie squeezed around me. “No!” she cried.

  “Call an ambulance!” someone shouted. But from the stolid, angry looks on both cops’ faces, and the stillness of Jesse Benevento’s body, I realized it was too late for that.

  Angie stared at the body, “Jesse,” she breathed, disbelieving. She turn
ed sharply away from the tableau of death, looking up at me, face frozen with surprise.

  What could I say? As I moved woodenly from the scene, with Angie trailing after me, I couldn’t help wondering how Stefan would react when I told him that trying to have lunch at the bridge didn’t seem to be the best way of helping me deal with my phobia.

  Angie and I edged through the crowd back to the bench where I’d dropped my thermos in the confusion. The coffee had spilled out, staining the concrete just as Jesse’s blood had darkened the bridge. I was loath to even touch it, but I forced myself to pick up the thermos, screwing the top back on and slipping it into the plastic SUM bookstore bag I’d carried it in.

  Angie scooped up her pink knapsack, hugging it to her chest as if it were a teddy bear that could heal the fatigue and outrage of a tearful bedtime. Her face was as stricken as I imagined my own was. “I knew something like this would happen,” she said through tears.

  I nodded—hadn’t we just been talking about violence on campus? But that’s not what Angie meant, because with a start of terror, she said, “I knew Jesse was going to get himself killed.” And before I could ask what she was talking about, she dashed off up the wide steps away from me, into the crowds that had gathered.

  And I couldn’t chase after her, because I had to head back to Parker Hall for a meeting with Coral Greathouse about my future at SUM.

  2

  The Great and Glorious Oz had smoke, flames, and a thundering voice to scare people with. Our chair, Coral Greathouse, was armed with a very different weapon: her composure. Bullies made me defiant, and boors made me crack jokes, but people whose silence left me feeling paranoid and exposed scared me, and Coral was in that dismal pantheon. So I had been definitely uneasy about my required pretenure meeting with her.

  Now, though, I was deeply shaken by the riot and Jesse Benevento’s death, not to mention Angie’s peculiar getaway. I was unsure what to do or say. Before the meeting I’d had a few minutes with Stefan on the phone to tell him what had happened at the bridge. He’d urged me to cancel my meeting, but I didn’t think anything less than civil war would be an acceptable excuse for Coral, so I kept my meeting and didn’t even mention it to her.