The Death of a Constant Lover Read online

  The meeting was crucial for her, too, because SUM was terrified of lawsuits, so administrators rigidly adhered to procedure at all times, and it was officially time for us to get together. Coral would tell me where I stood and what I needed to do as my application for tenure and promotion to associate professor lurched forward from now into next year. What could she say that I didn’t already know? I was in deep shit. And being told so would be a profound humiliation, yet it wasn’t one I could avoid.

  “Nick,” she said flatly, not rising from her chair behind the gunmetal-gray desk. She waved me to a matching chair that stood back from the center of her desk a good five feet. I suppose I was meant to be intimidated by the distance. I was.

  As always, Coral looked a bit owlish behind her red-framed Sally Jesse Raphael glasses. She had the flat, neglected, colorless look of an ex-nun, and except for several full bookcases, her office was almost as spartan as a cell. Did she mortify her flesh when the door was closed?

  “Nick,” she repeated, and I wanted to say, “Yup, that’s me, Nick.” But I was silent, trying to cross my legs in a dignified fashion and seem respectfully attentive when I was afraid, and images of blood and spilled coffee filled my head.

  “I suppose you understand how the tenure process begins. I’ve appointed a committee of three department members. I’ve chosen Iris Bell, Carter Savery, and Serena Fisch, who’ll be back from sabbatical at the end of spring semester.”

  So that’s why I’d seen Iris and Carter together at the bridge before. They were talking about me. It couldn’t be anything good, because neither one of them seemed to like me. And even though Serena was my friend, I didn’t think that would be enough to save me.

  But what was tenure anyway? At least I was alive, not like poor Jesse. What a vile way to die.

  I must have looked inattentive, because Coral raised her voice.

  “Nick. Your job now is to pull together your portfolio with dispatch. After the committee reviews it, they pass on a recommendation to the department’s Policy Committee, of which I’m the chair, and we then do the same, sending the portfolio and our assessment on to Dean Bullerschmidt.”

  Coral paused, and I knew it was in an effort not to reveal any aspect of the intense rivalry between herself and the dean for the position of provost. Becoming provost would be a triumph for Coral; it would mean not just more power, but tripling her salary and making it possible to leap to the presidency at another school when she was ready to move on.

  “The last stop,” she continued, “is the provost’s office.”

  Last stop was right, I thought, hoping I could keep looking optimistic. Last stop for me, anyway. Next stop for her. I was praying for tenure; she was probably praying to be in the provost’s office this time next year. Maybe we needed a prayer group.

  “Your student evaluations are superb,” Coral said. “Truly superb. Your students clearly think the world of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  She frowned as if I were stepping over a boundary by speaking up. Or maybe it was my teaching evaluations that bothered her. Most professors in our department were washouts in the classroom; I heard the details from my students all the time. Even though teaching was what we were hired to do, you could suffer in your department if students liked you. Somehow this got dismissed by other faculty as “pandering.” And given that I enjoyed teaching composition—the faculty’s least favorite course—good evaluations were more poisonous; they could be interpreted as implicit criticism of other professors.

  “But I think you know that in terms of service and publication—” She held out her hands and looked down at the lines in her doughy palms as if reading my fate there.

  Service was outreach to the community, an ideal at SUM because it was a state-funded school.

  “Nick, I think you’ve been somewhat…distracted, especially these past two years,” she went on, bringing her hands together almost prayerfully.

  If only she knew what I’d just come from! And why did I feel like I was back in junior high being talked to by an obnoxious guidance counselor who wanted to know if my poor test scores were connected to “problems at home”?

  “You have to buckle down, Nick.”

  I assumed that “buckle down” meant avoid even the whisper of involvement in anything that could cause more scandal for SUM—but wasn’t it already too late for that advice?

  Assuring me that her “door was always open” if I had questions about the process, Coral rose, signaling that my audience had come to an end.

  I thanked her, and just then her phone rang. She took the call peevishly, but as her face darkened, I bet that someone was informing her about what had happened on the bridge.

  I fled upstairs to my office on the third floor, avoiding everyone I met, convinced that they would look away from me in pity or disgust, as if I were a French aristocrat about to be loaded into a tumbrel. Surely everyone in the department, including the secretaries, knew there was no way I’d get tenure. Even if I could somehow write and publish a book in the next year, that wouldn’t be my ticket. I’d already done enough to deep-six my chances.

  As I stumbled into the cavernous, high-ceilinged men’s room to wash my face off with cold water, it hit me that Coral was protecting herself too by urging me to avoid scandal. It would look very bad for her as an administrator if her department was an academic version of the old Devil’s Night in Detroit.

  I washed my hands as if I were Lady Macbeth, enjoying the rush of cold, and splashed my face with vigor, losing myself in the sensation. Mildly refreshed, I turned from the sink to find myself confronted by Harry Benevento. The History Department’s main office was on this floor, but I didn’t see him often. Oh, God, I thought, he’s heard the news about his son. I stared, wondering how he’d come in without my hearing the door, and wondering what to say. Was he going to the bridge? Or was Jesse’s body at a hospital now?

  Benevento stared back at me, or just stared is more accurate. Hulking, six feet four, pear-shaped, and bald, he usually appeared a bit clownish in his well-cut suits—like a circus performer dressed up to get a bank loan. But today he looked utterly serious, and utterly drained.

  I struggled to say something about his son, but could produce only “I’m sorry.”

  I wasn’t prepared for the vulpine sneer. “Everybody’s sorry,” he said with weary finality, and I felt like an idiot.

  Benevento lumbered into one of the stalls, fell heavily onto the closed seat, slammed the door, and started to wheeze out great gusts of grief. I rushed out into the hall and hurried down to my office, hoping I wouldn’t run into any of the bats that occasionally swooped into hallways of Parker Hall, no doubt looking for Dracula.

  Once I was safely inside my office, the tenure meeting with Coral crashed back onto me, and I contemplated the icy inevitability of disaster. I would be trampled—administratively—as surely as Jesse had been.

  Sinking into my office chair, I closed my eyes, hoping I could fall asleep as I sometimes do when there’s nowhere else to escape.

  But the phone rang. It was Stefan, wondering how I felt.

  I snapped at him. “You sound like one of those reporters interviewing a flood victim.”

  “That’s not how I meant it,” he said.

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry—it’s my fault. This has just been a day from hell.”

  Stefan gently asked me how my meeting with Coral had gone.

  “She ate me alive,” I moaned.

  “Really?”

  “Of course not really. You know what Coral’s like. She’s a bureaucratic ninja—she leaves you flat on your back and you don’t know what hit you. She said my student evaluations were great—no surprise there—but that’s not enough. It’s usually considered good service to the university when you put together a conference, but you don’t get any points if it ends with body bags! I’m supposed to buckle down, and not get ‘distracted.’ That means stay out of trouble and publish my butt off. Well, I can avoi
d all the messes I want, but even if I published ten books this year, they’d still can me.”

  “Who’s on the review committee?”

  “Iris Bell, Carter Savery, and Serena.”

  There was a longish pause, and then Stefan said, “Serena will support you.”

  “But that’s not enough, and you know it. Iris and Carter have never liked me.”

  ‘We’ll figure something out,” Stefan said calmly. All I could think of was Lily Tomlin in Nine to Five, snapping, “I just poisoned the boss—you don’t think they’re going to fire me for that?” But I didn’t feel like arguing, so I just told Stefan I’d be home soon. Even the thought of getting ready to go down to Ann Arbor for Shabbat dinner with his father and stepmother later that afternoon didn’t cheer me in the slightest, and usually I welcomed Shabbat. It all seemed so pointless suddenly.

  BEFORE WE LEFT home, I looked up Angie’s number in the SUM student directory we had and called her dorm room, but there was no answer, and unlike most students on campus, she had no answering machine. Stefan insisted what she’d said about Jesse was due to shock, but then he hadn’t been there to see her face, so I didn’t contradict him.

  We had a very subdued fifty-minute ride down to Ann Arbor. We listened to Erykah Badu’s jazzy new album, and I drifted off on the drums and her voice, part Billie Holiday, part Eartha Kitt. Stefan considerately kept quiet, but then he was invariably quiet when we visited his father. We always brought a CD for the trip because local radio in Michiganapolis was a wasteland of top-forty and country-western stations and moronic DJs that made NPR—when we did catch it—seem like a visitation by aliens from a highly advanced civilization.

  Just before we were about to exit Route 23 and drive into Ann Arbor’s pretty downtown, Stefan broke his long silence: “I won’t talk about the bridge unless they bring it up.” I’d been thinking about the same thing, as often happened between us, and I was thankful for his sensitivity. When he mentioned the bridge, though, the scene rushed back on me, and I saw Jesse’s pale face and hair, the spreading blood, that Penguin paperback.

  “Which writer was Benjamin Constant?” I asked.

  “He was a journalist, mid-nineteenth century, young. George Sand’s lover. It was a pretty infamous affair. But all of hers were, I think.”

  “Hey—did I ever tell you the story of Henry James and Wharton visiting George Sand’s country home, and James asked which room she’d slept in, then answered it himself: ‘In which room did she not sleep?’”

  “I think I’ve only heard that twice.”

  Usually I’m energized by Ann Arbor’s density of culture, bookstores, restaurants, and general sophistication compared to Michiganapolis, but not that night. It all slipped right by me. Stefan’s father’s small stone house with gabled roof and mullioned windows was up one of Ann Arbor’s longer and prettier hills, and I thought it charming and romantic, though I knew Stefan still pictured it as a house out of a nasty fairy tale, fall of peril and pain.

  He had good reasons. This was where his father, transplanted from New York many years ago, had revealed the crushing family secret when seventeen-year-old Stefan was reluctantly visiting one Christmas. Still bitter about his parents’ divorce, almost ten years in the past at that point, Stefan had been convinced to come along from New York with his uncle Sasha only because his father’s health was bad.

  Terrified that he might die of a heart attack, Max Borowksi had told Stefan that not only was the family actually Jewish, but Stefan’s parents and uncle had survived concentration camps. Hoping to protect Stefan, they had razed their past and haphazardly tried bringing Stefan up as a Catholic. A Polish Catholic, since they were from Poland. It was not an entirely successful charade.

  For years after the revelation, Stefan told me, he had felt like Frankenstein’s monster down from the cruel lightning: grotesque and cobbled together. He was a freak, and he’d been utterly, completely betrayed. It had taken him decades to come to terms with being Jewish, to slough off the romantic identification with Poland.

  All of that made his parents’ divorce and their remarriages even harder to accept. Yet Stefan knew in his heart that the whole tangled mess of his upbringing was what had fueled his desire to write, to make sense of the world. And this very subject matter was what had made him stand out among a thousand other young novelists when he started getting published a decade ago. He’d had considerable success for a while—but at a terrible price.

  “Stefan, Nick,” said Mr. Borowski softly when he greeted us at the door. Short, gray-haired, plump, with precise, vaguely English-sounding speech, Max Borowski was always amiable with me and stiffly distant with Stefan, as if waiting for an attack. Taking the job in Michigan this close to his father in Ann Arbor had been difficult for Stefan. At least with his mother and her second husband, Leo, he had plenty of physical distance since they’d retired to Israel.

  Max Borowski looked us both over, nodding, and gave us a very pointed shrug, which I took to mean, “See what kind of school you both teach at? People get killed there.” But Mr. Borowski was too polite to say it. He, after all, had retired from teaching at the University of Michigan and wasn’t going to rub our faces in the U of M’s excellence. But I was sure he was thinking with satisfaction of his affiliation with a school that hadn’t turned into a house of horrors. Any scandal at SUM was a potent source of entertainment and satisfaction for its rival school, and sometimes it seemed to me that the U of M’s very identity was tied up with SUM being inferior.

  Maybe I was seeing everything through the filter of what had happened at the bridge. Perhaps Max was simply expressing his discomfort with Shabbat, a weekly refuge and set of observances that had been an inestimable treasure for Jews in their centuries of exile. It was a gift he’d withheld from Stefan, who had come to love its ritual and peace because of me. Could it embrace the two of them together?

  Minnie bustled out of the kitchen, grinning and throwing her arms wide. “My boys! You made it!” she cried, as if we had macheted our way across a jungle to reach her. Max’s second wife had no children of her own, which explained her joy in being with us. I handed her a bottle of wine, which she took with a grin, dashing off to set it on the dining room table.

  Then she trotted back and hugged me. “Good Shabbos!” she crowed, and I replied in kind, hugging her, but Stefan just let himself be hugged, and his Shabbos greeting was more subdued. I settled into a fat armchair in the cozy, gleaming living room. The entire house was filled with wonderful built-in cabinets, molding, panelwork, and window seats, all in the same gorgeous bird’s-eye maple that made it seem intimate to me and, probably, claustrophobic to Stefan.

  “Something smells great,” I said.

  Minnie winked at me. “Doesn’t it always?”

  Stefan and his father joined us, both silent. That was okay, because Minnie and I could talk up a storm. Given to bright green outfits that complemented her now-retouched wavy blond hair, Minnie looked like an aging Stella Stevens, whom I vaguely remembered from Hollywood Squares and maybe some Love Boat episodes as perpetually peppy. I loved Minnie’s enthusiasm, her eager smile, her warmth—all of which made her so different from my very correct, very formal European parents. Of course it was easy for me to get along with her, and even Max, since I had no history with either one of them. That grated on Stefan a little, just as his fluency in French with my parents annoyed me, and reminded me of my dismal subjunctive.

  “Something to drink?” Minnie asked brightly, and Max rose to the bar cart to get Stefan and me the Pineau des Charentes on the rocks we asked for. They stocked this delicious cross between a sherry and an aperitif wine just for us after we’d discovered it on one of our summer trips to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. Imagine—the best repertory theater in North America, less than a four-hour drive from little Michiganapolis.

  I could tell that Max was relieved to have a task, however minor. We’d had Shabbat dinner together only once before, and Max had
been distinctly uncomfortable, as if each blessing were an indictment of the way he’d brought up Stefan. I wondered if I’d ever work up the courage to ask Max what it had been like coming out as a Jew after all those years in hiding.

  Minnie said, “I’ve got a lovely leg of lamb up because I know you boys like your lamb!”

  “We do,” I said, enjoying being fussed over. Whenever I went back to New York, my parents took us out to dinner.

  Stefan tried to smile. Around Minnie, he was often like an insect desperately frozen on a leaf, hoping its camouflage would protect it from a predator. Minnie was a passionate and intelligent reader and had read all of Stefan’s books, but her enthusiasm seemed to irritate him. That, and her calling him “darling.” She had presumed familiarity with Stefan right from the start, with no sense of boundaries—in his words.

  I just thought Minnie was warm and loving, and determined not to get caught in the maelstrom of resentments churning just under the surface between Stefan and his father.

  “What’s new in your department?” Max asked us.

  I grinned as Stefan said, “We have a colorful visiting professor.”

  “Really? How so?”

  Stefan hesitated, and I wasn’t sure if it was the subject matter or his general discomfort talking to his father.

  So I dived in. “Her name is Juno Dromgoole, and she’s Canadian, but not like any Canadian I’ve ever met.” She was replacing Serena Fisch, a friend of hers who was on sabbatical, and I think Serena had championed Juno out of a finely developed sense of mischief, since Serena had a long grudge against EAR.

  Max asked, “What sort of name is that?”

  “You mean Dromgoole?” I asked. “Irish, I think.”

  “She’s loud,” Stefan said. “And rude.” Stefan described how Juno disrupted or at least subverted department meetings by muttering “Balls!” or “Bollocks!” when she disagreed. Or worse, “God, I hate America!”