The Edith Wharton Murders Page 5

  But how could I maintain my distance? Wasn’t Chloe DeVore the very avatar of manipulation and fraud in politics and business risen triumphant in the world of literature? And so, while Priscilla was intimately stung by Chloe’s success, for me the question was almost historical.

  “Chloe DeVore is a Disturbing Development,” I said aloud as I poured myself milk in the kitchen. Then I frowned. That much pomposity demanded an antidote. It was time to shovel the driveway. I changed into crummy jeans and sweatshirt, bundled into a parka, wool hat, and thick gloves, and armed myself with a shovel. I shoveled and scraped away all the snow that had drifted onto the driveway and walk overnight, enjoying the clang of metal on concrete. Then I swept snow off the front steps and felt as satisfied as if I were a shopkeeper laying out a pristine window display.

  I heard Stefan’s car in the driveway, but I didn’t move until he came up behind me. Softly, he said, “Oh, yard boy, how about something warm?”

  BOB GILLIAN WAS surprisingly sympathetic when I complained about the reception, perhaps because he had seen how much time I’d been spending on the Wharton conference. I found him surprisingly easy to talk to, and couldn’t help thinking, or hoping, that his marriage to Joanne Gillian was on the rocks, that they weren’t at all close, that he must loathe her politics. He just seemed so damned friendly—and he knew I was gay.

  “How’d the whole conference thing happen, anyway?” he asked one afternoon. “Are you doing it to make sure you get tenure?”

  “Didn’t you follow all the stuff in the fall about how sexist SUM is?”

  “I was on sabbatical.” He shrugged. “It was my consolation prize—they pulled some strings for me over in the Administration Building.”

  “Oh. Well, as if we haven’t had enough trouble with budget cuts, shrinking enrollment, and—” I almost added “conservative pressure groups,” but decided not to antagonize him. “There was lots of public criticism in the fall that SUM is insensitive to women’s issues.”

  Bob snorted, “Bullshit!”

  “What? You don’t think that’s true?”

  “Of course it’s true. This university is insensitive to everyone’s issues, period. People don’t count here and nobody higher up really cares about equity. Everything’s done for appearances. I bet the only reason there was any fuss was because somebody must have gone public about women being underrepresented in the faculty and administration. Gone public in a big way. Am I right?”

  Surprised at his insight, I said “Yes. How’d you know?”

  “It’s not clairvoyance. It’s experience. This university never changes unless it’s forced to. Somebody has to say or do something embarrassing and then the administrators rush to figure out how they can cover their asses.”

  “Well, what happened was that a few state legislators who’d been talking to women faculty here held a press conference.”

  “Don’t tell me the rest. I bet SUM’s been throwing women into highly visible positions. Kind of like a city that’s besieged and they’re filling the ramparts with teenage draftees. Qualifications don’t really matter. It’s all based on fear of lawsuits and meddling from the legislature.

  “You’re right on target. Every department was supposed to come up with an action plan.”

  Bob grimaced. “I know what that means! Do something showy but cheap to bail the university out. It’s standard operating procedure around here. That must be why your new chair—sorry, our new chair—is a woman.”

  “That’s part of it. Coral Greathouse got elected because she was a woman, but also because she wasn’t too threatening, and there’s no way she’s going to generate any scandal like the last chair did. They call her Moral Coral—behind her back, that is.”

  He smiled. And I briefly wondered if I should have told him that.

  “So anyway, we had a department meeting, and when the idea of a conference came up, I got picked to pull together a Wharton conference.

  “I hate department meetings. They bring out the worst in people when they’re about something minor—and whenever there’s some kind of pressure.”

  “It was gruesome, all right! Like—” I hesitated. “Like Bela Lugosi in The Island of Lost Souls. You know, the scene where he leads all those creatures shouting ‘Are we not men?’”

  Bob nodded, but I wasn’t sure he’d seen the movie. “Every few years at the Writing Lab they went through this big deal about making our services more accessible, staying open over the lunch hour, evenings, Saturdays. We’d do it and destroy everyone’s schedules. What happened? None of the students took advantage of the new hours, so we stopped after a year. But different administrators kept coming back at us with the same tired idea, and even when we’d show them on paper that it wasn’t a good use of our staff, they’d ignore us.”

  “What a waste of time.”

  “Well, look at it this way. The administrators have to justify their salaries, so they’re always coming up with half-baked plans and reports and studies that drive other people crazy.” Bob shook his head. “I’ve been at this university long enough to know that the shouting’s going to die down eventually. There’ll be lots of publicity, and bullshit about the university moving forward into a bold future, and they’ll come up with a fancy name for whatever they decide to do, issue press releases, cook up stupid slogans to badger us with, and guiding principles, and new acronyms you can’t remember that just rehash the tired old plans they tried before that never went anywhere, and then when we get a new president or a new provost, they’ll come up with something else to pretend they’re committed to.”

  “Wow.” It was quite a mouthful, and pretty accurate, I figured.

  “It’s like communism,” he said. “Designed to look like everybody’s benefiting, but really it’s about keeping a few people in power. Hollow. A complete fraud.”

  “Hey, at least the Soviet Union had the Red Army Chorus.”

  Bob chuckled and leaned back in his chair, hands locked together over his head. He stretched out his arms and cracked his knuckles.

  “Do you think all universities are the same?” I asked. “Or is SUM worse—and if it is, why would that be?”

  Bob considered that. “Some departments here do seem sick in a way. You know, departments are like cancers—they reproduce themselves. If there’s something sick at the core of a department, that’s how it grows.”

  I asked, “Well, how do you put up with it? I mean, you’ve been here at SUM over twenty years, right? Doesn’t it get to you?”

  “After a while it’s just routine. You keep your head down, you do your work as best you can, and help your students.”

  “Have you ever thought of getting out of teaching?”

  “Into what? The only thing this has prepared me for is urban terrorism.” He stood up. “I’m going for coffee. Want any? No?”

  I was dying to go home and tell Stefan how reasonable Bob Gillian was, how friendly, but he was in class, and luckily so, because a few minutes later, Bob revealed a much uglier side of himself.

  Just after Bob returned with his coffee, Jesse Benevento, a student from one of my honors composition classes, knocked on the half-open door and wondered if he could see me. Jesse was one of my quieter students, and a bit sullen looking: tall and lanky, usually in black jeans and cowboy boots, black T-shirt, with multiple piercings including half a dozen earrings in each ear, and his thin oval face overpowered by thick spiky hair dyed dead white.

  Jesse said very little in class, so I was somewhat surprised to see him of all people show up so early in the semester. Usually, most students avoid office hours unless they’re in trouble with a paper or a grade, or if they’re sucking up to you, or if you’ve specifically asked them to come in. I’ve learned that they would rather not talk to a professor without the protection of other students shielding them from the possibility of humiliation. They’re awfully afraid of being seen as stupid—and that’s for asking any kind of question—so they stay away. A similar question in
class could more easily be laughed off, but alone in your office, it would be too revealing. Who would change the subject? Who would back them up or explain what they “really” meant?

  It’s frustrating to know that students need help but are too ashamed to ask for it, and at the beginning of most semesters and even through the middle, I’ve sat in my office like the one kid no one picks to be on the softball team, waiting.

  Anyway, I waved Jesse in to sit by my desk in the comfortable well-padded armchair my students enjoy, whether they say it or not. At least they don’t squirm, and that’s a relief for me.

  “How can I help you?” I asked Jesse, leaning back.

  Quietly, as if put off by Bob Gillian working at the other desk, he said, “Well, it’s nothing, really. I wanted to talk to you about something you said last class about our next paper.”

  I waited for some harmless question, getting ready to reassure him. I assumed he was nervous about the assignment. But what he said shocked me.

  “Right at the end of class, Dr. Hoffman, when you told us to make sure we relaxed before starting on the paper, you said, ‘Go to the gym, take a walk, have sex, whatever.’”

  I smiled. “Did I? I guess I did. And?”

  Leaning forward a little, with his large, long hands clasped in his lap, he said, “Dr. Hoffman, sex is the most sacred thing that can happen between two people. It’s not something to be treated lightly. Never. It’s one of God’s gifts to man. It’s not a joke. I got together with some of the kids in class, and we figured you probably didn’t mean any harm, you were just joking.” And his silence seemed to add “this time.” He went on, “But we’re not like you, and we don’t want anyone pushing sexual immorality on us.”

  I stared at him, waiting for more, but he didn’t say a word, and I felt absurdly threatened and on the defensive. I managed to thank Jesse for coming in. I did not apologize, as he must have expected, and he rose with a dissatisfied frown on his pale, long face.

  “You should read this,” he said, handing me a shabby Xeroxed pamphlet titled “The New Chastity: Virginity in the 90s.” He left.

  When I assumed Jesse was far down the hall, I ripped the pamphlet up and turned to Bob Gillian. “Can you believe it?”

  Gillian shrugged, looking right past me as if speaking to a hidden camera. “You have to be careful with students.”

  “It was a joke, something to make them relax! You know how kids are anxious about their first big paper.” Just as Gillian had worked quietly at his desk while my student was there, helping me out in that unspoken understanding you have when you share an office, I had expected him to commiserate with me about Jesse’s arrogance. That was part of being a professor—the war stories, the anecdotes you traded as if you were old-timers rocking on a back porch describing some terrifying storm of fifty years before, or an almost forgotten train wreck. It brought you together in a community of survival and complaint; it made you appreciate who you were. But Gillian just peered at me, as if he had never played that game before and certainly wasn’t going to try it now, with me.

  “I guess he didn’t think it was funny,” Gillian brought out, with finality. “It’s not. Sex is serious business.”

  “But I wasn’t really talking about sex.”

  He frowned. “You were,” he said primly. “And you shouldn’t have been.”

  We both went back to work at the same moment, turning our backs to each other as if by plan.

  He was obviously a lot more like his wife than I had wanted to believe, and I had better watch what I said around him. Bob Gillian might be charming, but not someone I could trust.

  In the tense silence I thought, Wonderful. A fucking conference, a reception, and now Newt Gingrich’s spy in my office.

  It was worse than that, however, because Jesse’s father was the chairman of the History Department, which shared Parker Hall with EAR, and I could just imagine Jesse complaining about me to his father, who’d mention it casually to Coral Greathouse. Trouble.

  Bob gathered up his papers soon after and left, nodding good-bye. Was that a sign? Was he offended?

  It seemed that thousands of people were offended these days, on our campus, and across the state, which seethed with political and social pressure from the Christian right. Every other day there was news about a local school board trying to ban “un-Christian” books or activities—like yoga, which its opponents believed to invite the Devil to take over people’s souls.

  Self-esteem programs aimed at young children were being attacked for supposedly encouraging social anarchy and undermining family values because students taking them would think “too well of themselves.” A number of state legislators had come out in favor of an initiative overturning gay rights ordinances in the more liberal Michigan towns like Michiganapolis and Ann Arbor.

  The ferment on campus now was taking similar form. Rabid, snarling students on a local cable show regularly denounced gays, Democrats, environmentalists, and minorities in language that was as extreme and offensive as their outraged expressions. I couldn’t stomach more than a minute of watching, because in their braying I heard the flames and cheers of centuries of hatred and intolerance.

  There were a growing number of student letter-writing campaigns aimed at SUM’s Director of Libraries complaining about “obscene” books or magazines in its holdings. The campus paper was constantly being accused of a liberal bias, even though it was filled with letters that called for gays and lesbians to be put to death—by the government. Pat Buchanan had been brought in that fall as a speaker by Students for a Decent America, and his speaking fee came out of university funds, until there was an investigation and the money was withdrawn and made up by unnamed private donors.

  Several times now, there had been incidents that temporarily shut the newspaper down—vandalism, bomb threats. The university administration couldn’t do very much about any of it, because President Littleterry was a dishrag and Joanne Gillian didn’t seem to care whether we had a newspaper or not.

  I decided I needed to get as far away as possible from the conservative miasma, so I packed up and headed for a stop at the gym before going home. Surely I’d be able to escape there and forget about Joanne Gillian and everything she represented.

  3

  “BREATHE!!” THE COMMAND was husky and urgent. It came from somewhere off to my left.

  I got up from the chrome and black plastic bench on which I’d been trying to do bicep curls and studied the source. Two guys, as grotesquely muscled as Bluto in the Popeye cartoons but with vacuous and unrevealing faces, were doing bench presses with enormous amounts of weight. That is, one was on the bench and the other stood behind him, spotting. They almost looked like twins in their torn and sweaty gray T-shirts, black cross trainers, and baggy white Champion shorts.

  “Breathe!” came the command as the awe-inspiring barbell dipped and rose. I wondered if someone who needed that kind of reminder should be allowed to lift that much weight.

  “Focus!” said the spotter. “Don’t listen to your mind. It wants you to think your body’s tired. Come on,” he growled, with the kind of intonation I’ve only heard in gyms and porn movies.

  The adjurations kept spilling out: “Come on, yeah, it’s all you, do it, you got it.” It was oddly erotic. Maybe my shaky workouts would change with that torrent of grim encouragement.

  They switched places. The same motions, the same supportive chanting, the same red face, the same grunting and release.

  Finally the bar and weights were racked and they moved on, with the heavy drifting grace of whales idling underwater. They were the only other people working out this afternoon, and it was a pleasure to be alone in the neon-lit wilderness of free weights and Nautilus machines that rose about me like altars, tombs, and monuments in a crowded old cathedral, each battered icon with a history, a life of its own. I was not in a particularly worshipful mood, nor did I want to be drawn out of myself, exactly, I just wanted to escape SUM, and The Club was proving the
right place to be today.

  The Club is an enormous and startling facility perched on the eastern edge of campus, a sort of gateway to the exclusive suburb of Michigan Hills (which is completely flat, of course, in this flat central part of the state). A concrete and glass behemoth, The Club reeks of money and newness and is so lavish with space it seems like a sort of health mall. It’s built on several different levels and linked by wide, impressive staircases. There’s a large restaurant and equipment shop, a banquet/conference hall, an indoor track, and such a profusion of tennis and racquetball courts, aerobic studios, pools, and cardiovascular equipment rooms that I’ve seen friends from the East Coast practically quiver with envy, picturing their cramped little gyms back home where space is at a premium and you’re so crowded you can hear other people sweat. I imagine petty monarchs in the eighteenth century felt something similar when they first came upon Versailles.

  But for all the ostentatious use of space, there’s a stinginess of color—everything gray, black, white, steel blue—which for me heightens the air of fantasy. The “weight room” is so long and wide that it’s sometimes almost like being in a dream where you reach and reach across a table that always grows vertiginously beyond the length of your arms.

  I found it comforting, in a way, and it was certainly a good place to escape. Most SUM faculty members worked out on campus or at various area health clubs, and you usually only ran into students on the weekends, when I was least inclined to go. When I did work out, I wasn’t there to check anybody out, and I wasn’t there to meditate on my own perfection or even show off that I could afford the pricey membership, like the people who came no closer to exercise than the glass-walled restaurant on the main level, which was almost like a control tower with a dazzling and minatory view of most of the facility. Drinking beer there, you could watch other people grunt and sweat down in the weight room, on the basketball court, across in one of the aerobics studios, or in the room jammed with treadmills and Nordic Tracks. It was like watching a nature special where the side of an anthill had been cut away and you marveled at—and felt superior to—the ceaseless activity. The Germans have a word for enjoying the pain of others—Schadenfreude. I wish they’d invent one for enjoying other people’s workouts. We need one.