The Edith Wharton Murders Page 6

  It was also good being almost alone there that afternoon because sometimes I feel utterly foreign at the gym. I watch and listen to the trainers and their friends, people who call each other “Bud” and “Big Guy” un-selfconsciously, and marvel at how different a world they in habit. I live in the world of words—in and through books, magazines, newspapers, plays, films. I get restless when I’m not reading or hearing words, and often dream of glowing, crowded bookstores and libraries, always with fondness and affection. I mark stages in my life by whom I was reading: “That was my D.H. Lawrence time.”

  “I was just getting into Jean Rhys when I took my GREs.”

  But these men at the gym with their sculpted bodies and sculpted lives exist in a universe dominated by action. They work out, play tennis or racquetball, swim, golf, shoot hoops, play baseball in neighbor hood or business leagues, ski—and move through the year talking about and watching football, basketball, baseball, hockey. It’s not just another life, it’s another language, and their gym clothes match. I see them in a bewildering array of T-shirts, tank tops, shorts, biking pants, gym shoes, socks, caps. It’s a colorful, absorbing pageant full of display, symbols, tradition. And I feel there like I feel in France—I can get myself into a conversation, but usually get lost on the way out.

  More than once, Stefan had told me, “You think about all that too much. Forget about it. Just go and do your workout.”

  “But it amazes me. Those guys have been jocks since they were little kids. And they’re the real Americans. The real men, anyway.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Stefan shook his head, but looked suspicious, as if expecting me to grin and say, “Just kidding!”

  Having done some surprisingly good work on my arms and chest today, I went upstairs to spend some time on a treadmill, but didn’t get to one.

  Up on one of the Stairmaster machines, striding away and covering the platform and the moving steps with sweat, was Jesse Benevento. In a soaked T-shirt and running shorts that bared sinewy dark legs, he looked driven. Hell, he was driven. He was doing the Gauntlet with a ten-pound dumbbell in each hand. Jesse had headphones on, and because he was alone, he was singing loudly along with what seemed to be a rap song. Christian rap. I heard the words “victory in Jesus.”

  I fled for the locker room, showered, and went home to brood about the Wharton conference.

  Just in case I needed any more lessons, Joanne Gillian was on the evening news. In a surprise meeting of SUM’s Board of Trustees that afternoon, she had been elected chair, with the previous chair stepping down because Joanne “was more qualified.” It was obviously some kind of coup which showed that the radical right had won control of SUM’s board.

  That evening, Joanne was getting an award from the Michiganapolis Women’s Family Council. Stefan and I heard part of her speech: she called for women across Michigan “to use their pure spirits to fight depravity, indecency, and perversion.”

  I slept badly, troubled by Joanne’s new status, and her speech, so when the phone rang after one am, I grabbed it right away. A muffled voice answered my “What?” with “I hope you get AIDS” and the line went dead.

  Now I was completely awake. I put down the phone as if it were in danger of exploding, shook Stefan awake, and told him what happened.

  “It was that student,” I said. “Jesse Benevento.”

  “You recognized his voice?”

  “Of course not—it was disguised! But who else would it be? I told you he was at The Club. He’s harassing me.”

  “Coincidence,” Stefan said through a yawn.

  “Aren’t you upset?” I wanted to really shake him hard.

  With his eyes closed, he said wearily, “Nick, students do all kinds of things around here that are terrible.” His words came out slowly, as if he was under anesthesia. “You don’t even know the call was for you, or for us. But if it’ll make you feel better, talk to the police. If you think it’s worth the time.”

  Stefan was so calm I wanted to yell at him, but I knew he was right. The call could have been random, and even if it got into the newspaper, wouldn’t that encourage the caller to do it again?

  Stefan was snoring.

  Somehow, amazingly, his calm possessed me, and I fell back asleep as easily as he did.

  I DIDN’T NOTICE any hostility from the class Jesse was in the next time we met, not even from him. That made me wonder if perhaps he’d been trying to bully me in my office. Maybe there wasn’t anyone else in the class who was upset; maybe he was doing a freshman Joe McCarthy. And maybe the phone call was no big deal either.

  I forgot all about what he’d said, since the reception for Chloe DeVore was hurtling closer, and so was the Wharton conference, which was not getting enough registrants, even with official recognition from both societies.

  Serena tried calming me down.

  “Listen. People always send in their registrations late, as late as they can. It’s because they’re petty academics. They’re pushed around by more senior professors, by their chairs, their deans, especially administrators, so they take it out on whomever they can. On students, and any one who wants something from them.”

  Bob Gillian walked into our office just then, and I tried to shush her, but she went on. “When I organized my conference, half the people registered in the last few weeks. It was agony, but that’s the way it always goes.”

  Bob busied himself at his desk, acting as if he wasn’t taking in a thing, but I felt him recording each syllable for possible use against me.

  “How about some coffee?” I said, rushing out the door.

  Serena followed, amused, and grabbed my arm halfway down the hall. “Why are you letting him intimidate you?”

  “Because of Joanne Gillian—I’m sure he tells her everything. I don’t want her to know the conference has only a few dozen people registered!”

  Serena shook her head. “So what if Joanne Gillian knows?”

  “She hates gays, and she’ll turn it against me somehow, I’m sure.”

  Serena took my chin in her hand, and made me look her right in the eyes. “You have to relax,” she said. “It’s only a conference.”

  But it wasn’t. This conference was supposed to show how concerned EAR was with women’s issues, and so the department’s reputation was riding on its success. It had to be very successful, or I wouldn’t get tenure, and Stefan and I would have to leave SUM.

  “You can talk about relaxing,” I brought out heavily. “You’re a full professor. If it bombs, there’s not much they can do to you.”

  Serena looked away, embarrassed by the truth.

  AS IF I didn’t have enough to worry about, Joanne Gillian continued flying her broomstick. Somehow, she had gotten wind that a number of the critics registered for the conference were—in her view—perverted, having published papers like “Clitoral Rage in Ethan Frome.” She’d announced she was going to attend “to see how the university spends money supporting filth.”

  So I not only had to share an office with her husband, who I’d been deeply suspicious of ever since our talk about Jesse Benevento, but Joanne Gillian would probably be spying on me during the conference, ready to pounce on anything that would feed her hatred.

  She would certainly be spoiling for a fight. A few days after her election to chair of the Board of Trustees, gay student activists at SUM protested the university’s refusal to grant domestic partner benefits to gay and lesbian faculty and staff. SUM OF US, the campus radical queer student group, interrupted a Board of Trustees meeting at the Administration Building, chanting and shouting. The meeting couldn’t go on, and Gillian called the Campus Police to drag the protesters away. One of the gay students called Joanne a fascist. Under her orders, I assume, our nitwit President Webb Littleterry denounced the gay students as “vicious hooligans.”

  The next day, President Littleterry and Joanne Gillian got telephone death threats, which she publicized in
the Michiganapolis Tribune as “evidence” of the “deep moral rot” at SUM. Obviously, she claimed, these students were spurred on by gay and lesbian faculty and staff, which proved they couldn’t be good role models for SUM students.

  I was enraged by Joanne Gillian’s accusations and slurs, but there was nothing I could do. If I brought up the crank phone call I had received, to show there was intolerance on both sides of the issue, it would be dismissed as bogus because I hadn’t reported it right away.

  I fully expected Joanne Gillian to take out her anger about the meeting on me.

  And I was annoyed that Stefan wasn’t being more sympathetic. We’d argued about the conference more than once.

  “You didn’t have to take it on,” he said.

  “I’m an assistant professor without tenure! I can’t afford to say no. I don’t have that luxury.”

  Stefan shook his head. “You’re too accommodating.”

  “No—I’m too scared. And don’t get psychological on me. It’s not helpful.”

  Well, that set him off.

  We were sitting by the fire on a nasty wet February evening, and Stefan looked like he wanted to hurl his drink into the fireplace, or at me. But he got very quiet, like that moment in the jungle movies when the madly beating drums stop, and the silence is terrifying.

  “You know what?” he began. “I’m sick of Edith Wharton. You spent five years traveling around the country, faxing, photocopying, stinking up the house with all those photocopies, writing and calling all over the world to track down the tiniest mention of that second-rate writer in print—”

  “She’s not second-rate!”

  “Spare me. Virginia Woolf was a genius. So was Jane Austen. Wharton doesn’t compare. And I had to listen to you complain about archivists and librarians, complain about copying machines, complain about unhelpful scholars, complain about computer programs, complain about how expensive it was getting stuff translated from Indonesian and Czech, complain about doing the indexes.”

  I was chilled by his subdued, measured anger.

  “Four—fucking—indexes,” he said, eyes drilling me. “Did I ever say to you that I didn’t want to hear the plot of Wharton’s stupidest short story? Or hear about the time Wharton turned to Erik Satie and asked how his roses were doing? Or what Henry James told Bernard Berenson that Wharton told Stephen Crane about walking sticks? Did I ever complain about a single idiotic Wharton anecdote you told me—even when you told them to me twice?”

  Chastened, I brought out a hushed “Never.”

  “And it wasn’t enough for you to get books from libraries, you had to own everything that was in print on Edith Wharton. And then you started collecting her first editions.”

  Guiltily, I thought of the ranks of Wharton books in my study.

  “You spent thousands of dollars on that Wharton bibliography, and even if it’s a library best-seller you’ll never see a dime in royalties. I’ve been living with Edith Wharton for years. I’m sick of her and I’m sick of this conference.” Stefan stalked from the room and I didn’t follow.

  How could I argue with what he said? I loved Wharton’s writing, but devoting myself to working on her had been a tremendous financial drain and was turning into an emotional burden as well.

  I did not need anything coming between me and Stefan now. Last year he had helped an ex-lover, Perry Cross, get a job at SUM in our own department, because he was confused, wondering if he was still in love with Cross. While Cross was now out of our lives forever, he’d left plenty of damage behind him. Stefan mourned his having lied to me, and he easily slipped in and out of being depressed. On those days, I’d come home to find him listening to Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, or worse, lugubrious, android, synthesizer music by Gary Numan. He played one song—“Remind Me to Smile”—over and over, probably because of the line “This is detention.” I’m sure that’s how he felt.

  For me, sleep was still a problem. There were nights when I’d wake up thinking about Stefan and Perry. They hadn’t slept together last year, but they were ex-lovers from graduate school, and the idea that Stefan had been trying to choose between us haunted me. After all our years together, the idea that my contract might come up for renewal had never occurred to me!

  And though I knew that I had forgiven Stefan for bringing confusion into our lives, I wasn’t entirely sure I could trust him again.

  I wanted to.

  CHLOE DEVORE HAD sent word to SUM that she didn’t like “being social” before a reading, so on the evening of her reading, there was to be no pre-event dinner. Thus we missed the usual uneasy hour or so in which faculty members and large contributors to the university show off their culture while the writer is expected to be relaxed, funny, fascinating, and very human—all of it effortlessly, and without spilling any wine or dropping food on the floor.

  The guest writer is supposed to glow and inspire, like some relic unearthed for a yearly parade, but also to enchant and charm like a Victorian hostess at the tea table. Names of famous writers should be dropped, but lightly.

  What a burden. You have to be a star but not act like one, and also make everyone at the table feel important. No wonder some writers turn cranky or sullen at such dinners. Who needs the hassle?

  I guess I understood Chloe’s reclusiveness, but Priscilla held it against her.

  “A visiting author is supposed to be accessible to faculty, to students, to the whole community. And she’s playing Greta Garbo!”

  We were huddled over coffee in Priscilla’s office a week before the reading. The weather had turned brutal, with wind chills below zero, and given the howling winds and insanely rattling windows, Parker Hall felt like an unseaworthy ship in a gale. I had a brief fantasy of the building sinking, and the two of us fleeing to the roof, waving for help….

  I shook my head to get rid of the image and refocused my attention on Priscilla. I certainly wasn’t going to defend Chloe DeVore in any way, so I just sat there quietly while Priscilla ranted a little. Listening to her, I thought how lucky I was not to be mired in writer’s envy.

  I was the only living bibliographer of Edith Wharton, and scholars all over the world looked up to me, or at least they needed me. Every day brought letters, E-mail, even faxes from people working on Wharton who were trying to locate various articles, or had questions for me, or wanted my approval of their work. There was simply no one to compare myself to, no one whose success seemed to diminish or even challenge my own. I was king of a very small hill.

  “You know what I heard last week?” Priscilla asked, grinning. “Chloe was being photographed for some exhibit of foreign writers who live in Paris, and she was reading a book while she was being photographed!”

  I didn’t get it. “As part of the pose?”

  Priscilla chortled. “No. She wouldn’t talk to the photographer, so when he was in between shots, she picked up a book and ignored him. Is that arrogant or what?”

  I nodded, wondering how much of what Priscilla heard about Chloe was actually true and how much was apocryphal. I imagined there was a tremendous hunger for nasty anecdotes about Chloe DeVore.

  “YOU SEEM OKAY,” Stefan said to Priscilla warily, as the three of us drove to SUM’s Arts Center the night of Chloe’s reading in late February.

  In the back seat of Stefan’s Volvo, Priscilla shrugged. “It’s like that line Henry James said. You know, ‘Here it is at last, the distinguished thing.’”

  I objected. “He was talking about his stroke!”

  Priscilla’s head went down. “Oh,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know that.”

  Embarrassed for raising my voice, I reached behind me and tried to pat her shoulder sympathetically, but I missed as the car turned and I ended up poking her in the ear.

  “Ouch!”

  “Sorry—sorry!”

  I felt like we were at the beginning of a Feydeau farce, where energies are about to be unleashed that will send the characters hurtling across and after each other i
n a spiraling set of improbabilities.

  We parked and managed to leave the car unscathed. Outside, I felt suddenly energized by just being there. Our Arts Center is an amazingly beautiful Georgian-style little hall of fifteen hundred seats. Modeled inside on Carnegie Hall, it has the best acoustics and sight lines of any theater in Michigan, and is a plush jewel box of royal blue and gold, as improbable on this sprawling Midwestern agricultural campus as an opera house in a decayed Brazilian provincial capital.

  The three of us checked our coats and plunged into the mass of people dressed in the usual campus mix—everything from sequined jackets and flowing skirts to fluffy white socks, Birkenstocks, and jeans. Priscilla headed backstage.

  “Hi, Professor Hoffman!” I turned to smile at a former student, Angie Sandoval, who’d been tangentially involved in helping me investigate last year’s murders on campus. I was very fond of her.

  “Do you read Chloe DeVore?” I asked.

  Angie grinned. “Never heard of her! A friend gave me his ticket. Seeya!” She slipped off and before we moved on, I made a mental note to tell that to Priscilla. She’d love it.

  Stefan and I had dozens of quick conversations in the lobby as we pushed through to the lofty main hall, avoiding a sullen knot of ex-Rhetoric professors including bland Carter Savery and woeful Iris Bell.

  Our seats were almost dead center, twenty rows back, and while Stefan lingered to talk to colleagues, I waved and smiled once I’d gained my seat, knowing that I wouldn’t have much chance to sit down at the reception. I was relieved to know that the caterer was at our house right now, setting everything up.

  The hall was packed and noisy when Stefan joined me and I felt as indolent as an emperor waiting for a gladiator’s certain defeat. The evening started on time with the house lights dimming at eight o’clock sharp, leaving the stage and miked podium gracefully lit. Priscilla came out onto the stage and up to the microphone, glamorous in her deep green floor-length dress with a wide rustling skirt. She looked pale now, but otherwise handled the introduction beautifully, I thought, giving a smooth mix of Chloe’s reviews, awards, and career, but going light on her own commentary. Finished, she smiled as if inviting Chloe had been her own idea.