Little miss evil, p.14
Little Miss Evil, page 14
part #4 of Nick Hoffman Series
“Then why did you come?”
Juno grinned. “Because I love an occasion.” She whirled around like a model, and I said, “You are an occasion.” And at that moment it was as if the whole experience in the pool had never happened, and I could see Juno totally from outside, as a spectacle. I enjoyed her, without being moved and disturbed.
Sharon walked over, and having heard this last
interchange, she applauded. After quick introductions, the two women moved off to chat—apparently about each other’s clothes and hair, from what I could make out. But I was jarred by Juno’s reference to hell. Could Juno, who Stefan thought was wild and unstable, actually be persecuting me and slyly referring to Dante? But what for? What the hell for?
What would she be getting out of it? It just didn’t add up.
Stefan appeared with rum and Cokes for both of us, explaining that he’d been snooping in the other rooms. “Her stuff must be back East. This place is just a sweater she can slip on.”
I sipped my drink gratefully. “It may be a sweater, but it’s cashmere. With a Tiffany’s sweater guard.” Without saying anything about my attraction to Juno, I pulled Stefan aside and relayed our little interaction and my suspicions.
“Nick, Juno could probably burn down a mailbox just for fun, or a dare, or because it felt sexy. But leaving a Penguin paperback in your office mailbox? Too subtle.”
“That’s what I think.”
The noise level had risen around us with the alcohol consumption, and the dean, Cypriani, Serena, and Nina were now clustered in one corner in replay of the dean’s reception, while various levels of toadying swirled around them. I watched Nina gaze from Camille to the dean with Nancy Reagan eyes and felt my hands go cold. I remembered the scene in Desperately Seeking Susan where Madonna reads Rosanna Arquette’s diary and snaps, “This has to be code— nobody’s life could be this boring.” Nina was so innocuous, so sweet. Little Miss Evil?
I thought of my stupid confrontation with the dean last year. What if Nina had decided to take revenge on me? What would be cannier than waiting a few months or more? And who would suspect this demure, harmless administrator’s wife of a tiny terror campaign? The dean wouldn’t have had to put her up to it—the same wild loyalty that made her worship Camille Cypriani probably tied her to the dean and would make her want to defend him. If I was right, the question then was: How far would she go?
“The Forum,” Stefan said.
“What?”
“Julius Caesar. Can’t you see Camille surrounded by people with knives? Sinking in a sea of blood.”
The pianist started playing—of all things—“The House of the Rising Sun.” It took me a moment to switch gears from brooding about Nina Bullerschmidt and concentrate on what Stefan had suggested. “Is that a vision, or a fantasy?”
“Haven’t you ever thought of it? I mean, look at the murderers we’ve met since coming to SUM. They’re not on TV, they’re right here, people we know. They seemed normal enough, but they got pushed too far. We seem normal, too, but—”
“Don’t even joke about killing someone—that’s a terrible mistake. What if people overheard you?”
“You think I care anymore?” He shook his head bitterly, downing half of his drink. “For the sake of poetic reference, it should be Cash who strikes the first blow, since there may be plenty of brutes in EAR, but there’s no Brutus.”
I couldn’t tell if Stefan’s comments were fueled by depression, bravado, or sick humor, but I didn’t like it at all, and I waved Sharon over. But before I could enlist her support, Dean Bullerschmidt called for quiet. He got it.
With his orotund, low voice and unctuous manner, he could have been a nineteenth-century Central European mayor greeting a royal couple he loathed but had to welcome with poetry and praise. “I’d like to announce that Camille Cypriani, the newest and most valued addition to the College of Arts and Letters, has graciously and gracefully agreed to chair the College’s Task Force exploring the creation of a White Studies Program.”
Betty Malatesta pivoted away from the drinks table, spilling her wine. The news had somehow not yet reached the TAs, or at least her. Betty’s surprise told me how out of the loop she had become at EAR, and that probably made her angry.
“What?” she spat. “White Studies! You guys aren’t funding the programs you do have, and you’re going to add some bullshit racist propaganda passing itself off as a legitimate field of inquiry?”
“She must have been clipping articles, too,” Stefan whispered to me. Bill tried shushing her, but Betty wouldn’t stop berating the dean. “You can’t possibly support anything so bogus and anti-intellectual.”
Cash Jurevicius chimed in: “It’s disgraceful for Arts and Letters to even consider such a program. You’re betraying my grandmother’s ideals. You don’t care about anything human or decent or fine,” he said, and there was some surreptitious applause from people out of the dean’s line of sight. “You’ve torn apart my grandmother’s library. That was her office— that was her legacy to SUM. She loved this school, she loved the students, but you’re all hypocrites. And you’ve defiled her office by putting a has-been and a fraud in there.”
“You lousy sonofabitch!” Camille howled, pitching her empty whiskey glass at Cash. She was bracing herself to go for blood when she was held back by the amazingly strong Bullerschmidt, who just then looked as if he could have tossed her in the air and juggled with her.
“That’s it for me,” Stefan said, and he hustled us to the door like a Secret Service agent rushing his president away from gunfire. Outside he said, “Maybe they’ll all just kill each other in there and we can start over.”
We drove home quietly after that comment, Sharon
expressing her surprise in occasional bursts of disbelief. “How can people be as bitter as they are? So mean?”
“Well,” I said, “look at the up side. If outbursts like this become the norm at EAR functions, the parties are at least gonna be more entertaining. And then we also have a built-in excuse to leave early.”
“How can you make a joke about it?” Sharon asked.
“There’s nothing left but laughing at it.”
Stefan agreed. “Nick is right. This place has exhausted every other possible response.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Sharon warned. “That crew back there didn’t look like they’d be watching Comedy Central any time soon.”
11
I dreamed that night not about Manderley, but a doughnut shop. I woke up well before morning with the aroma of something baking wafting up from the kitchen, so I headed downstairs and found Sharon reading Vogue and waiting for the oven timer to buzz.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she explained. “I brewed some decaf and decided to bake some mocha brownies. Baking soothes me.” She showed me the recipe, one she had clipped from Saveur and brought with her.
“Yum.” The recipe called for brewed coffee, ground coffee, and instant coffee.
I shuffled over to the table and sat by her. Even with insomnia, she looked good, in slightly oversize azure silk pajamas that gave her a very 1930s air. Sharon poured me a cup of coffee and we took turns licking the batter out of the mixing bowl while we waited for the brownies to be done. We talked about White Studies, SUM politics, and Stefan’s moodiness, failing career, and possible chances for some reversal of fortune. It’s not that we hadn’t discussed these topics before, but we were like that couple in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, who were so close that “the circle in which they stood was bright with life and every question lived there as nowhere else.”
“You know, Nick, honestly, I wonder if SUM just isn’t the completely wrong place for you and Stefan. A wrong turn in the road. As much as you like Michigan—and your place up north when you get to it… Look at how painful life has been here for him, and for you. I know it hasn’t always been like that, it’s not nonstop, but you never dealt with being threatened or beaten up when you were in New York or Massachusetts. Nobody burned your mailbox. You were never a murder suspect—and you never saw a corpse before except on the news.”
“It’s all true.”
“Do you mind my saying that?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same things lately, about this place, but it doesn’t get me anywhere. Stefan’s damned lucky he was chosen for the writer-in-residence slot when he was. Those positions are plums, and right now, five years later, he’s not successful enough anymore to move someplace else. So he’s got the job for life. And if I got tenure and promotion, we’d be set.”
“Set for what? Crazy colleagues? Intellectual fraud?
Drowning in hypocrisy? The occasional murder?”
“It’s a life,” I argued.
“For how long?”
“It’s a life,” I repeated.
“Sweetie, you are in denial.”
“This is not denial—it’s a postponement.”
She stared down into her mug.
“Sharon, I hate academia, but I love teaching. I love working with students. I know it’s not exactly the Peace Corps or UNICEF, but what I do does change the world a little, just a little. Isn’t that important?”
“I know it’s important, but is it safe, is it healthy here for you? I don’t get it. Your colleagues don’t respect you because you’re just a bibliographer— you’ve been telling me that since you got here. As an archivist, I think your work’s much more important than the average academic tome, but so what? I’m not voting on your tenure, and I’m not here working with you.”
“Does anyone get respect at work?”
“I do, at Columbia. People take me seriously.”
I wondered if the glamorous modeling career she’d had before going back to school and becoming an archivist might not have something to do with that—the money she’d earned, the celebrity, and her looks and style, too. She had been able to change careers because she’d left school unfinished when she started modeling full-time, and always regretted it. But me, I was living my dream, there wasn’t anything else I wanted to do.
“Sharon, Columbia University, that’s not the real world.
It’s easy to tell me to leave, but how could we? Stefan’s stepmother gave us that great cabin up north, and look at this house—it’s terrific.” Even as I said that, I knew that people sold houses all the time and moved, and that five years wasn’t necessarily enough time to feel rooted.
“Sure, it’s a great house—until someone burns it down.”
I must have looked very ugly then, because Sharon immediately apologized for the remark. Then I apologized.
“But you haven’t done anything,” she said, wearily shaking her head and clasping my hands in hers. “I was the one who was out of line.” She let go of my hands gently.
I wanted to say that I should have been more
understanding of her nerves, but I didn’t want to patronize her. I knew Sharon was worried about the upcoming surgeon’s appointment on Monday.
As if she were following my thoughts, she started talking about it. “This doctor may be a midwesterner and educated at the Mayo Clinic, but let me tell you, honey, he doesn’t act any more human than the surgeons in New York and Boston that I’ve consulted. You should see the people around him— disciples, groupies practically. It bothers me to feel like Cinderella begging to go to the ball. And I wish he was older,”
she sighed. “He’s just too smart and good-looking and famous in his field. I don’t think he knows what it’s like to be afraid. I honestly don’t think he’s suffered. I saw the pictures on his desk—beautiful wife, beautiful kids. A dog—country home— a boat!”
“How can you tell he hasn’t suffered?”
“I just feel it. He’s so smug.”
The phone rang, startling both of us, but when I grabbed it, there was just a click, a strange click, and a mechanical hiss.
“What?” Sharon asked, reading my face when I set
down the receiver, shaking my head.
“Don’t laugh. It sounded, well, it sounded like a cigarette lighter. Remember the last note I got? It read, Next time it could be you. This was the next warning.”
“Nick, how could you tell anything about the call? It’s so late—you’re tired and upset. Are you sure?”
I nodded, wishing we had caller ID, but convinced that whoever was behind this harassment would have blocked it or used a public phone. “I thought it was over. I don’t know why. But I did. I thought when nothing happened today that —”
“—you were safe? I don’t think we’re ever safe. We just think we are. And every now and then something happens that makes it clear. Remember that line Stefan found someplace?”
I nodded, and quoted from a Polish Jewish writer I’d never heard of before until Stefan had told me about him, and whose name I always forgot: “Behind the stage of our life, concealed in the wings, great factories of suffering are at work.”
“Right now they’re working overtime for you guys.”
“But things have to change,” I said, not convincing myself. Even a brownie didn’t help, despite being hot and rich and sweet.
I kissed and hugged Sharon good night, hoping she’d be able to sleep at least a little, and headed back to bed. I lay there for a while, hoping too that I’d imagined the sound of the lighter, hoping it was a wrong number. Something.
Anything.
And then I idly found myself wishing I were back in that five-year period in which the thing that mattered most in the world was doing my Wharton bibliography. Life was ordered then, life had structure, life made sense. I lived in a welter of reading, photocopying, correspondence, filing, annotating.
Nothing really touched me then. Nothing hurt. Because I was too freaked out by the amount of work, the piles of photocopies, the constant record-keeping. It was armor—it was a crutch—it was a nightmare.
In the morning I felt the almost physical sense of oppression you get before a huge thunderstorm. At breakfast with Stefan and Sharon, I openly shared my sense of looming disaster. There was nothing either one of them could say that could dispel my dark thoughts.
But Stefan said I had to be wrong about the phone call.
“Nick, how could you know that specifically it was a lighter?
You were nervous, you heard something.” He shrugged, “Besides, how do you know it was for us or for you?
Remember that year we used to get phone calls for some Debbie? And that month when the fax rang once at about five in the afternoon every other day but never connected?”
After breakfast, I headed to campus for my mail, not even troubled by the ranks of students, the darting bicyclists, the traffic, the noise and commotion. On the second floor, though, I found trouble.
There was an enormous EAR sign opposite the stairs, with every professor’s name spelled out in plastic letters in horizontal grooves, accompanied by the office number. In that vast field of white on black, the letters for my name were discolored. As I leaned forward I saw that they were charred and brown, melted, dripping and drooping like rock poster letters did in the 1960s. I stared at them, feeling numb.
Nobody else’s name had been messed with. This was another message.
In the office, I complained to Dulcie Halligan, who looked only superficially upset when she promised to have the letters replaced as soon as she could get to it. I think she was enjoying my discomfiture, as if it were appropriate payback for having raised my voice and banged the office door the other day. Could she really be that petty? Yes, because she had the nerve to ask, “You’re sure they’re not just worn out, Professor?”
She wasn’t the only one who could be small. “Dulcie, I graduated college summa cum laude. Yes, I’m sure.”
It worked. She whirled away from me as if I’d spit at her. It was a cheap victory that I would eventually pay for, since even I knew that alienating a secretary was never a bright idea. But I had a big mouth. I was quip-happy. Call it what you like, it meant trouble.
With this cheerful experience behind me, I grabbed my mail and descended to Parker’s foul-smelling basement, which was quiet just then. But there was something different and disgusting in the air—not roach spray, or leaking sewage pipes, or mold from the boiler room. Fire? I didn’t see any smoke, yet I tensed up.
The plastic nameplate on my office door had been ripped off, and the door itself was as open as Oprah talking about her dysfunctions. And not just open. When I stepped closer I saw that it had been broken open. The lock was twisted and scarred, the splintered frame around it looking almost bitten or chewed on. Someone had used a crowbar or a mallet and chisel to break into my office. But there was nothing valuable there—what could they be after?
I stood there, staring, unable to enter the moment. It was so unreal, something out of a book or film, surely not my own life.
The thick overvarnished door looked otherwise
untouched. With the building pulsing quietly around me, I set down my briefcase and approached. The smell of something burned was stronger now. Did I expect to see someone lurking inside? Or a whirlwind of destruction? I wasn’t sure. I stood at the ruined doorway looking in, and there was nothing changed, nothing moved or disrupted—except my round black metal wastebasket. It was a few inches out from the side of my desk instead of right next to it.
Students passed by outside my office, their legs revealed up to their shins through the weird, barred half-window.
Preternaturally quiet myself now, I could hear Parker’s plumbing, the 150-year-old building’s general creaks and groans, and what might be rats in the thick walls.
Stepping back into the hallway, I scooped up my
briefcase and went back into my violated office. There was no ghost there, yet it felt haunted by someone’s rage. And when I peered at last down into the wastebasket, I couldn’t help gasping since I recognized its contents instantly—as I was meant to, of course.
It was a charred copy of my Wharton bibliography, and I picked it up mournfully, tenderly, as if it might cry out in pain.
I opened the blistered, blackened cover and leafed through the thick book. Someone had very deliberately burned the title page so that my name was destroyed, and then singed and scorched most of the rest of the pages. With a kind of furious objectivity, I studied the damage, guessing that it was done with one of those fire starters like the kind Stefan and I used to light Shabbat candles at home.
