Burning Down the House Read online

  department, where the average look was a sort of tag-sale cross between incoherent and bland.

  Trying to change the subject from her gun, I said, “I’ve never had foie gras as a main course.” I watched her at the counter.

  “I thought you’d appreciate something more refined than spaghetti and meatballs. Though I guess it would depend on the balls, wouldn’t it?”

  “Doesn’t it always?”

  She grinned. “Some balls depend, some don’t, or not

  much, anyway.”

  I confess it took me a few seconds to get the pun on

  “depend.”

  Until that moment, our talk hadn’t been remotely personal or risqué, just about classes and general end-of-semester complaining (and the gun, of course).

  Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching and always have.

  Especially since I teach composition, I can almost always see tremendous, heartening changes in my students over the course of a semester—that is, if they come to class and do the work. It’s one of the most important courses taught at the university, because in other classes, professors don’t pay enough attention to how students write.

  Devotion aside, however, you can’t just teach your

  classes and keep your head down; no matter how you try to avoid it, the quicksand of academic politics and administrative idiocy is always ready to suck you under. Shop talk quickly turns to war stories in that kind of environment.

  Like me, Juno was dedicated to helping her students,

  which was refreshing. Too many of our EAR colleagues acted as if office hours were an imposition and simple politeness to their students a crime. And after five years at SUM, it was clear to me that the university was a small-potatoes version of Russia’s current kleptocracy; it existed solely to enrich a small group of people: upper-level administrators, the president, and the sports staff. SUM’s athletic director, for example, not only earned $750,000 a year, but the university had bought him a Lexus and a BMW, a thirty-foot boat, and a vacation home on Beaver Island. And that’s just the largesse that had been made public. SUM may also have been supplying him with Rogaine, Viagra, and any other drugs he craved.

  But all those musings burned off like morning fog as I watched Juno at the stove, and I drifted back to the vision of her in the pool, shocked and excited to imagine myself standing up, slipping behind her to stroke her breasts and kiss the back of her neck. I pictured slipping a hand down from behind to spread her legs, rubbing against…

  I crossed my own legs, trying to act cool. I had never fixated on a woman like this before, and each time the vision hit me, I shook my head to clear it, but unsuccessfully. The disorienting sensation of fantasizing about her was almost like entering the love scenes I’d been seeing my whole life on film and reading about in books. Could that be what drew me to her? Some kind of crazed midlife longing to be like the majority? Great! Next I’d be seeking baptism and reading Stephen King.

  King made me think of Juno’s Glock again. Now that she’d mentioned it, would I ever be able to think of anything else? Maybe I should accept her offer to see it, I thought. I’d never been close to a gun before. And wouldn’t it help me teach my mystery class next semester to be at least mildly familiar with a Glock?

  I asked, “Who else in our department do you think has a gun?”

  Juno shrugged, unconcerned.

  “Because maybe you’re not the only one. The next

  department meeting could turn into a shoot-out. I suppose if I hit the floor in time, there wouldn’t be much of a downside.”

  Juno grinned, and I wondered if she saw herself as

  Sigourney Weaver laying waste to a host of aliens. No, too messy. Perhaps it would be Queen Elizabeth I calmly sending opponents to the block.

  I asked, “Why did you choose a Glock?”

  Juno rejoined me at the table, suggesting we wait a bit before she actually started the foie gras, and I refilled her wineglass.

  “The Sig Sauer has the smoothest action around, but I wanted the Glock nine-millimeter because of its stopping power, and because it’s light. You can throw it against the wall, and it won’t go off. You can dunk it in a bucket of water, and it still fires. Sixteen gorgeous rounds without reloading.”

  “You can take it swimming?”

  “Funny man. Have you ever heard of either of those?

  The Glock and the Sig Sauer?”

  “Of course. Both of them tend to be the big guns in mystery novels these days.” And before I could apologize for “big guns,” Juno said, “God—speaking of big guns—I had a lover from Vancouver, and God, Nick, he was just too

  damned big. Like what they say about that Matt Damon.”

  “They do?” I hadn’t heard that rumor, or noticed. But then I did fall asleep halfway through Good Will Hunting.

  “Or maybe it’s Ben Affleck. One of those boys. But

  anyway, Nick, it was awful. Take a photograph of it, fine. Or a plaster cast and use it as a towel rack. But fuck him? Please!

  I’d rather run a marathon. Or compare jewelry with some nitwit doctor’s wife at a day spa. Or read one of those dead-on-arrival Robert Ludlum books.”

  Embarrassed, intrigued, I asked the obvious question: “How big?”

  Juno rolled her kohl-rimmed eyes, and her voice

  deepened as if she were a husky-voiced cabaret singer declaiming about chagrin d’amour through a pall of disillusionment and cigarette smoke. “A freak of nature,” she summed up. “But even when they’re not quite that big, it’s just dreadful.”

  “Why?” I would have guessed that Juno was a size

  queen, so her complaint surprised me.

  Juno carefully considered my question. “Because it’s like having a ménage à trois when you don’t expect or want to: there’s you, him, and it. Those men are always so damned pleased with themselves for being inhumanly well hung, as if it’s an achievement, a talent, a skill. Hel-lo? How about luck?

  And they either show off or give it a name or expect you to ooh and aah. Or they do the opposite, which is rather slimy.

  They elaborately pretend as if they think it’s nothing special when they’re just dying for you to sink to your knees in awe.”

  I drank more wine, turned on by hearing her talk about sex, but unsure what to say. Was this all a kind of come-on, or was she just enjoying her own outrageousness? I could tell with no problem when a man was flirting with me, but I felt rudderless with Juno, adrift.

  “Nick, I was at the mall last week and I ran into the boy who used to cut my hair. Big, beefy, a soccer player type.

  With that edge of stupidity in the eyes that makes you know he can go all night, not that it was ever an issue, of course.

  We had coffee, I asked him what he was up to. He told me he was married, was studying law now, and that he and his wife were looking for ‘the third person’—as he put it.”

  “He wasn’t talking about grammar,” I said, feeling that I’d been hijacked into an episode of Sex and the City.

  “Not hardly. I told him I wasn’t interested, and I suppose to win me over he said just the wrong thing. He told me he had ten inches.”

  “So you said—?”

  “I said, ‘Get yourself some cheerleaders! I’m not

  dancing around any maypole.’”

  I set my wine down, laughing.

  She drained her wine and said, “Back in a flash,” heading to the bathroom, I assumed. Vivaldi was playing softly out in the living room, where Juno stopped this time to coo at Turandot, her sleepy West Highland White Terrier. Turandot had been to the vet for a shot that morning, Juno explained when I’d arrived, and was quite logy. The cute Westie puppy had barely acknowledged me when I leaned down to where she lolled on a tiny puppy-size damask leopard-print sofa next to the real sofa.

  I’d wanted to pick her up and pet her, but Juno said

  another time would be better—“The principessa divina will be happy to grant you an audience when she
’s herself again.” I was not an opera buff, so Juno had to explain the reference to Puccini’s opera Turandot. Once she did, I figured, what else would Juno call her dog? It was dramatic and ironic at one and the same time—a little white puppy with a regal name.

  Watching her with the dog, I saw a flash of something kinder, gentler—but I wasn’t sure if it was an act or not.

  I sipped some more Montbazillac. Ever since meeting

  Juno last year when she was a visiting professor, before she got a permanent position, I had been admiring her iconoclasm, her brio, her freedom to say whatever she wanted to without apparent consequences, and certainly without fear. Perhaps that was because I was untenured in a department where I’d actually been threatened for having made a joke. People were so sensitive and hostile in EAR you could think you were in Serbia or Austria-Hungary on the brink of World War I.

  But it wasn’t just the pettiness of academic life that had people baring their fangs, it was a deep split in the department that had originally been called English and American Studies.

  Over a decade ago, in a paroxysm of cost-cutting, the university had forced the independent Rhetoric Department to join it. The twin faculties were as likely to get along as cold fusion would be the power source of the future, and calling this mixed bag dysfunctional was an insult to neurotics everywhere.

  The craziness hadn’t ended there. Just that past

  semester, the shrunken and beleaguered Humanities

  Department had been finally, brutally dismantled, and its faculty ordered to join EAR or retire. Rather than join a unit that didn’t want them, most of the handful of professors left.

  But the bellicose and belligerent former Humanities chair, Byron Summerscale, had chosen to stay, creating a new source of tension. It didn’t help his mood that he’d been given a basement office that was formerly a supplies closet, and his tirades didn’t endear him to the department.

  Juno, however, wasn’t remotely intimidated by

  departmental pressures. “What a bunch of whiners and

  weasels,” she’d once snorted during a departmental meeting, loud enough for most people to hear. And while she wasn’t entirely right—there were a few hyenas in the department, too —it was satisfying to hear someone label EAR fairly honestly instead of repeating the clichés about dedication to learning, scholarly fellowship, caring about our students’ intellectual growth, and all that other high-toned propaganda that disguises the university’s venality and lackluster performance.

  I completely understood her simmering at departmental meetings. They’re one of the worst sides of the academic life, combining the effervescence of a serial killer’s family reunion with the intellectual depth and maturity you see on display in a U.S. Senate subcommittee’s inquisition of a governmental flunky. Juno would sit through these meetings like the precociously talented bad girl in high school called to the principal’s office, as defiant as if she has seen her future clearly revealed and knows she’s headed for success. She muttered, she gibed, she rolled her eyes, and if she’d been younger and blonder, she might even have contemptuously tossed her hair, hissing a flat “Whatever” or “As if!” Instead, she let out a rolling, guttural “Balls!”

  And me, I was the National Honor Society nerd

  determined not to get in trouble myself, but enjoying her subversion.

  Of course that wasn’t all I’d been enjoying. Beyond

  being attracted to her loose tongue, I had found myself more and more admiring her looks. No, not just admiring, ogling.

  When we’d first met a year before, I was impressed by the son et lumière she put on just by strutting down the stained old linoleum-floored hallways of decrepit, bat-infested Parker Hall, her Manolo Blahniks an indictment of the shabbiness around her.

  But ever since that episode in the pool, I had stopped feeling as if I were watching a glossy one-woman musical from a front-row-center seat. She’d broken the fourth wall, as theater folks say.

  Now, if I were writing an advice book for academics,

  I’d certainly suggest that untenured professors should avoid midlife sexual identity crises if they want to advance their careers. Too distracting. But hey, given that I’d been involved in a handful of murder cases in my five years at SUM, I suppose you could argue that by comparison, this wasn’t a big deal. Or was it?

  And how had I come to this surprising place in my life after almost fifteen years with my partner Stefan, SUM’s writer-in-residence, and another ten or so years before that in which I’d responded deeply only to men? As yet, I had not mentioned my unnerving thoughts about Juno to Stefan.

  Juno strode back in and headed to the stove, where in a few moments she began searing the slabs of foie gras in butter.

  “Tell me about your puppy.”

  Juno grinned. “I adore her! She’s smart, loving, feisty.

  It’s a wonderful breed, Westies. Are you thinking of getting one?”

  “Stefan and I talk about a dog. It’s just talk. A neighbor of ours has a bichon frise—”

  “Oh, those are just poodle wannabes. Westies are much heartier dogs than both of those breeds, and tougher, but still manageable. You should come by some time and play with Turandot, see what she’s like. I warn you, though, having a dog is a tremendous amount of work! Hours every day.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that. It would be a relief from SUM

  and everything else.”

  “Exactly—because they don’t send you memos, they

  don’t talk. It’s wonderful. What’s stopping you?” She peered at me. “Oh. Two men? A small white dog? Stereotype alert?”

  “It’s not that. I just don’t know if I’m ready for the responsibility.”

  She nodded, and then I asked her why she didn’t have a Christmas tree, even a little one.

  “You’re kidding, Nick, aren’t you? You think I’d be

  caught dead near anything that tacky and vulgar? Christmas in this country is awful, it’s obscene, not that Canada lags far behind these days, I can tell you.”

  “How about when you were back home, growing up?”

  “I was a good Catholic girl,” she began, smacking her bosom with her free hand as if sounding a battle cry of mockery. “Yes, it’s true. Until the day my mother asked me to cut some flowers in the garden to decorate a statue of the Virgin in our church, and I said I didn’t see the point of giving something that was alive to a statue that was dead. She smacked me, and that was it.”

  “The smack that launched a thousand quips.”

  Juno frowned and drew herself up. I know the term

  “heaving bosom” belongs to a romance novel, but her breasts were doing something very close to that. “I don’t make quips.

  I don’t take shit. And I don’t take prisoners.”

  “Jeez—you sound like Faye Dunaway in Mommie

  Dearest.”

  Juno laughed. “Too bad they made Crawford so

  mellow.”

  If I’d assumed we were well and truly done with the

  subject of penis size, I was wrong. Juno suddenly felt the urge to sum up what she thought about the issue: “You know, Nick, what it all comes down to with a man’s equipment is that I really like a manly man, but nothing bizarre.” I wondered if that was because, she herself was so colorful, she didn’t appreciate competition. In which case, did that mean her previous flirting with me meant I was ordinary? No, that couldn’t be true, because she’d said she admired my body, which she’d seen a lot of in the pool. “A man like you.

  Or Cash Jurevicius.”

  The comparison with EAR’s angriest adjunct professor

  startled me.

  “Well, you do look a bit alike, actually,” she said. “You and Cash. More than a bit. Haven’t you seen the resemblance?

  Your hair’s almost as long as his, too, though not as curly.

  I’m not sure which I prefer.…”

  I was flattered and flustered. Cash was a lean, handsome su
rfer type, ten years younger than I was. Had swimming this past year made that much of a difference for me? Perhaps I was so used to my old body image, dating back to junior high, that I had lost all objectivity.

  Juno was grinning, and suddenly it hit me. “You’re

  sleeping with him,” I said.

  “Am I? Why are you interested?”

  “But he’s an adjunct! I mean—”

  Juno laughed. “Nick—do you honestly think it makes a

  difference? Are you a snob?”

  I couldn’t figure what the hell I had been trying to say.

  Cash was a good ten years younger than Juno, but that wasn’t what made him seem unsuitable.

  “If you think there’s such a status difference, just chalk it up to what Huxley wrote about intellectuals in Point Counter Point, ‘High minds—low loins.’”

  “Okay, okay, sorry.” I felt embarrassed and jealous and confused.

  Juno lifted out the now-browned foie gras, deglazed the pan with Calabrian fig molasses and what she informed me was eighty-year-old Italian balsamic vinegar, reduced that, added some more butter, then poured the sauce over the foie gras on glass plates, topping it all with kumquat slices. At least she said that’s what they were; not having ever seen one, I couldn’t have testified either way. But the aroma was extraordinary, and the Montbazillac was the perfect choice to accompany the foie gras.

  We ate at her round white kitchen table, as quietly

  intimate as if we were lovers taking comfort in food after having devoured each other. It was all somewhat tense for me, especially with the image of Cash and Juno drifting through my thoughts, but deeply, mysteriously enjoyable.

  “This—is—phenomenal,” I said, savoring every little bite of the foie gras, determined to make the same meal at home, soon. Then I decided it might feel like a bit of culinary-based adultery to enjoy the same food with Stefan that Juno had made for me. Though would Stefan even notice or care? He’d gone from depression over his dead-end writing career to exaltation over Keanu Reeves’s production company optioning his long-out-of-print first novel for a movie. The deal was still in the works, but it looked like it was going to be very juicy, and Stefan spent most of his free time reading Variety and recontacting old writer friends to share his good news, aka brag. He expected to be in People any day now.