Littleterry had previously advocated doing more with less under the rubric of “High IQ” (Improving Quality), a project that basically suggested replacing live professors with taped television classes. Then there was NAME (New Associates Making Excellence), which involved renaming professors as “learning associates,” administrators as “management associates,” secretaries and other support staff as “operational associates,” and students as “guests.” Neither plan went anywhere despite the ballyhoo and mountains of paperwork and press releases, so there was clear trepidation about what he was about to spring on this assembly. Whatever it was would doubtless involve a great deal of wasted effort. This was, after all, a university devoted to “strategic planning,”

  which meant (1) get as many people involved to give the administration feedback; (2) make them think their opinions matter; (3) get them to issue a massive report; and (4) do what you planned to do all along after thanking them for their time.

  “In response to customer demand,” Littleterry finally said portentously, “I am launching a task force to study the institution of a cutting-edge brand new program.”

  “As opposed to an old cutting-edge program,” Juno drawled softly, just for me.

  Of course, given all the budget cuts at SUM, this news was stunning, and Littleterry seemed to gloat at the attention and his power to command it, his smile an unspoken “Impressive, huh?”

  Stefan turned to me and quoted our favorite party getaway lines from Laura: “I cannot stand these morons any longer. If you don’t come with me this instant I shall run amok.” I didn’t argue. I nodded good night to Juno, and we threaded our way through the throngs of curious academics to the door. But before we reached it, we heard Littleterry announce that he was urging the foundation of a “Department of White Studies.”

  Stefan and I whirled around, and I’m sure if anyone had caught us on film, we would have been slack-jawed.

  “It’s time,” the president said, “that whites received the same critical study and scrutiny that other groups in this great and noble society have gotten.”

  The house erupted in a flurry of shocked comments and questions, some startled applause greeted by hissing, which in turn elicited catcalls. All the while, Dean Bullerschmidt bellowed, “Not White Studies, Whiteness Studies! Whiteness Studies!”

  Stefan and I escaped this mess, passing Cash Jurevicius, who was outside, smoking. He nodded, and I wondered how much practice in front of a mirror it took to make a nod so quietly supercilious. “Summerscale should be careful about calling so much attention to himself,” he said cryptically, and turned away when I asked what he meant.

  Nearby, Iris and Carter were getting into a car, but Iris stopped when she saw me and bustled over. “For your own good,” she said crisply, “you should stop hanging around Juno Dromgoole. That woman is a menace—and a whore!”

  There wasn’t any time for me to tell Iris to fuck off, because she dashed back to her car. Yet I felt my whole body vibrating with the fantasy of shouting at her, and the whole stinking university. It would have sealed my doom as far as tenure was concerned, but it would have been a cry of liberation.

  Stefan and I walked to his car while I cursed having to always hold back because of needing tenure, and how I had to be nice to people like Iris because of her role in my tenure application. God, I felt tainted by her and Carter’s hatred for Camille, for Juno—for the world. The whole EAR

  department, and SUM, was seething with as much resentment as a medieval crusade against heretics. Oh, there might not have been smoking ruins and eviscerated corpses left after they did their work, but it was close. And Iris and Carter were all too typical of EAR, and incapable of seeing how twisted they’d become.

  But then something else occurred to me: was anyone picking up my attraction to Juno—or would it have been so unexpected that no one would notice?

  I bitched about them as they drove past us, but none of this affected Stefan. I pulled out my keys for Stefan’s car, and he didn’t object when I opened the driver’s-side door and got in. He slumped next to me, drained, depressed, more miserable than even this afternoon when he’d talked about giving up writing forever. On the short ride home, he asked, “Is Littleterry out of his mind?”

  “No. Well, he may be, but this Whiteness Studies thing is for real. Not that I ever expected to see it at SUM.”

  “It’s not a joke?”

  “Whiteness Studies is the latest campus trend in the United States.”

  “No way.”

  “Way. It’s got roots in the memoir craze, pop culture studies, antimulticulturalism. People are nuts for anything new, especially if it’s extreme and controversial—kind of like the intellectual version of piercing.”

  “But Whiteness Studies is—What the hell is it?”

  “Anything. Lots of things. You can include white trash performance art, Elvis sightings, Bastard out of Carolina, whatever. More low culture than high, but not necessarily.

  Probably paintings on velvet. I’ve seen books about it, conferences, journal articles.” I laughed. “My favorite article title is ‘Tonya Harding: Victim or Vamp?’”

  “You’re making that up,” Stefan accused me.

  “Not one word is phony. Not one. Trust me. I’ve been clipping articles on Whiteness Studies. I’ve got them at home if you’re interested.” They were in the file drawer where I kept folders on ominous developments, feeling I had to be prepared, sort of like that Doris Lessing character in The Four-Gated City. I figure that if the Romans had been this organized, they might have staved off all those Goths.

  Wearily, Stefan said, “Everybody’s nuts.”

  “Whiteness Studies is hot this year. Last year it was Porn Studies that was big, before that it was Queer Studies and Madonna Studies. Hey—wouldn’t that make a cool

  interdisciplinary degree? The three of those?”

  Stefan seemed miserably sober now, and amazed. “How could I have missed this crap?” He sat up straighter as we pulled into our driveway.

  I didn’t give him the obvious answer: he’d been so lost in despair about his career he could easily have missed a nuclear war, so what was a new act in the perpetual academic freak show?

  Dreading more chaos at SUM and in the department, when we got home I said I was going right to bed even though it wasn’t very late, but Stefan wanted to stay downstairs for a drink. Just as I was about to tell Stefan he’d probably had enough to drink that evening, the doorbell rang.

  I went to see who it was: our Québecois neighbor Didier Charbonneau from across the street, who said he’d seen our light on.

  Stefan waved him in and poured him some single malt— Glenwhatsit.

  Bald and burly Didier was in his usual jeans and white Tshirt, looking like James Dean’s grandpa, and he settled down comfortably on the living room couch as if he expected a long night’s booze-up.

  Didier’s wife, Lucille Mochtar, an EAR faculty member with whom I’d been sharing my office on the third floor before I had to leave it, was guest-teaching at Duke that semester. Didier, a retired high school teacher, only visited her for weekends because he loathed anything south of Pennsylvania. Lonely, he’d been hanging out even more than usual with Stefan, his workout buddy at the Club. But they shared more than weights now: Didier’s much-heralded memoir about his infertility was clearly doomed. In the wake of a conglomerate buying his publisher, a low laydown had led his publisher to cancel a large tour and scrap the advertising campaign. Loud and usually cheerful Didier had fallen to pieces over the changing fortunes of his book, and wasn’t exactly the most life-affirming company Stefan could have right now. He too loathed Camille Cypriani, as he would any writer who’d been a success.

  I’d quickly grown tired of their contrapuntal whining and wasn’t interested in another evening’s dose, not to mention the obnoxious smoke from Didier’s Kohiba, which he was readying, so I left them downstairs. On the way to bed, I imagined what Lucille Mochtar might say when she heard about the Whiteness Studies initiative, since she was half black.

  When I closed the bedroom door, I sighed with a sense of ease. We’d bought a new bed over the summer—a

  romantic, king-size, cherry sleigh bed—which meant all new sheets. We’d chosen comforter and pillows in a burgundy, peach, and sage floral, with matching pillows and sheets in a beige and sage windowpane plaid.

  When Sharon spent a weekend with us over the summer, she’d recognized it instantly. “Oh. Eddie Bauer Home.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, it’s lovely—it looks just like the catalog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”

  Well, stagy or not, I loved the sense of safety and retreat.

  Getting ready for bed that night, I tried playing Massive Attack’s first CD, but it felt off, and I ditched it for Chaka Khan and Rufus’s Best Hits, because that night was a night I really needed someone to tell me something good. Listening to the album, one of my old favorites, I thought again how much something about Juno Dromgoole reminded me of pre-chunky Chaka Khan. They were certainly both big-breasted and brassy, but there was much more to the resemblance. To me, they shared an anarchic sexuality that was like the woman in one of Anaïs Nin’s books who makes a man looking at her for the first time think, Everything will burn!

  As I turned off the bathroom light and slipped into bed, I asked myself: Was feeling Stefan lost to me in his depression why I had been thinking so much about Juno? Or was it free-floating middle-age madness? If so, then why couldn’t I be fantasizing about a red Miata—or learning how to snowboard?

  Both of those would have been much less disruptive. Or I could even have become fixated on that well-hung waiter….

  Lying there trying to relax, it really bothered me again that I hadn’t found the right time to tell Stefan about the note on my car and the book in my mailbox—but I was so exhausted I couldn’t imagine taking him through each detail.

  And maybe I was overreacting and it was probably no big deal, so why bother.

  I fell asleep with my thoughts a hazy mix of Juno and the party. A few hours later, I woke up when Stefan crawled drunkenly into bed, saying that Didier had passed out on the living room couch.

  Pathetic, I thought, but while Stefan was out right away, it took me a while: I kept fantasizing myself and Juno across the street in Didier’s Jacuzzi. I did my own bed check, keeping my hands above the covers. I didn’t want to wake up surprising myself.

  7

  WHEN the phone shrilled through my dream, I was doing something really clichéd, like rubbing an ice cube (or maybe a whole ice tray) on Juno’s glossy lips. There was even background music, like one of those slow scenes in a movie that the director hopes will help sell the sound-track CD. It was Les Nubians singing “Embrasse-moi lentement, est-ce que ma bouge te mente? ” Yow.

  Struggling out of this interlude and back to

  consciousness, I almost batted the phone from the night table trying to get the receiver. In my confusion, I did push some David Handler and Ken Follett paperbacks off the edge but didn’t bother reaching for them.

  “Bad vibrations!” Polly Flockhart was screaming on the line. “I feel them—danger! Hurry!” And our New Age-y neighbor hung up, but what the hell was she talking about?

  I sat up, rubbed at the sleep crumbs in the corners of my eyes, and realized that her call wasn’t another one of Polly’s fantasy trips; I did feel vibrations—as if a huge truck were parked outside our house. Was I still dreaming? If so, I wanted to get back to Juno without any interruptions.

  It was just after 3 A.M. Stefan started to wake up.

  “What’s going on?” he drowsed. “Is there a fire?”

  His question made me think that I smelled smoke, faintly —but why wasn’t there any smoke detector buzzing in the house? Was I really awake? And it sure felt like the bed and walls were vibrating. I snapped on my light, shook Stefan fully awake, grabbed my robe, and we rushed downstairs.

  That’s when we heard a rumbling for real, and loud. The smell of smoke (or something) was far more intense, but, rushing around the downstairs rooms and turning on the lights, we found nothing.

  We’d been so intent on searching, we hadn’t bothered checking the front hall.

  “Nick—look.” Stefan pointed at flashing lights shining through the glass panel in the door. I tore it open. A fire truck and a Michiganapolis police car hulked down at the curb, looking as bizarrely out of place as a hippo in a rock garden.

  But that wasn’t all we saw.

  There was a smoldering stump where our wooden

  country-style mailbox used to be, and the unpleasant smell of burned and soggy wood was now as shockingly sharp and putrid as dog’s vomit.

  Stefan backed away from the door, but I surged barefoot down to the curb, with only the thin robe over my shorts. A Conan-type cop approached me and said they had just gotten there—a neighbor had called in the fire. Behind him a fireman was putting away the hose he’d used to douse what remained of our mailbox.

  Suddenly Polly, in thongs and an orange-and-purple paisley terrycloth robe, was rushing down the block to us.

  “Nick! Nick! Are you guys okay?” Closer, she started spilling her story out: “I called the police because I felt there was danger on the street, and when I looked out my front door, I saw your mailbox on fire.” She hugged me fiercely, and I let her, feeling grateful for the momentary comfort and for her warning phone call. I’d always been put off by her spaciness, but maybe I was wrong to mock her. I disengaged myself and thanked her several times, but she held on to my arms as if she feared I’d do something dangerous—or float away.

  She told the cop where she lived and said they could question her there if they needed to, made me promise to call her for any reason at any time, and headed back up the block.

  I stared at the remains of our mailbox, stunned, assuming that I was witnessing the escalation of whatever had started with the death-threat flyer on my windshield and the book left in my EAR mailbox. My question, What could be next? had been answered. And like a movie sequel, this brought back the terror of last spring when Lucille was the target of what looked like hate-crime harassment, some on campus, some at her and Didier’s home just across the street.

  My first thought was that someone at SUM, someone in my department, was really out to do more than just scare me.

  This wasn’t a note or a book—this was arson, violence. But why? What had I done? What had I said? I’d never been especially popular with the other faculty, so why would someone target me now?

  The cop asked if he could talk to me inside, and I said of course. I trailed back up to the house with its gaping front door, aware that lights were flashing on up and down the street and people were looking out windows and doors to find out what was happening. I felt exposed and very foolish in my shorts and robe—and chilled—but I tried to walk back inside with dignity, not “scuttle,” as Juno claimed I did in Parker Hall. Juno. What would she say if this had happened to her?

  As I closed the door and introduced Stefan, I watched the cop quickly check the two of us out and register that we were a couple, but I didn’t pick up even a bat squeak of hostility. He introduced himself to me (again?), and for the first time to Stefan, as Officer Decker Cholodenko. Great name, I thought, eyeing his massive chest and arms. If he couldn’t deck someone, who could?

  I led them both to the living room and waved Cholodenko to a chair. He sat and readied his metal report case and pen. I could clearly register what he looked like now that we were inside. He was about thirty, with close-cropped blond hair, around six-foot-five, muscular and handsome in a steely, blue-eyed Clint Eastwood way, though he had to have competed professionally as a bodybuilder—he wasn’t just big, he was lean. I gave him both our names again and told him how long we’d lived in the house.

  Stefan sat by the fireplace, looking lifeless in his CK sleep pants, but I realized just then that Didier wasn’t passed out on the couch, or anywhere in sight. “Didier went home?” I asked Stefan, who shrugged and looked around as if he’d just noticed, too. So that’s why the front door had been unlocked.

  Officer Cholodenko started to take notes, filling in a form, asking for us to spell our names, say how long we’d lived there. “Has this ever happened to you before?” His neutral voice was pleasantly raspy.

  “No.” I was answering all the questions because Stefan was too freaked out to talk.

  Cholodenko pointed to Stefan. “He okay? Does he need to see a doctor?”

  “I’m fine,” Stefan said, his weary, distant voice belying the comment.

  “Sir, are you sure?”

  I’d only dealt with SUM’s Campus Police Detective Valley before, and he was rude and homophobic, so Cholodenko’s businesslike neutrality seemed almost like warmth in comparison.

  “He’ll be okay,” I said.

  Cholodenko nodded, his eyes unblinking. “Have you had trouble with any neighbors recently?”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  He gave a massive shrug. “Trash, loud music,

  arguments, barking dogs, whatever.”

  “Nothing. Not in the four-plus years we’ve lived here.” I didn’t add that aside from Lucille and Didier across the street and Polly down the block, there were only a few neighbors we knew more than just to say hello to and chat about the weather, so the question was embarrassing. Maybe we had the native New Yorker’s general suspiciousness and a need of keeping some distance, but it suddenly seemed like an outmoded and inappropriate custom.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You really think neighbors could have done this?” I chewed on that. It was always possible that a neighbor might have torched our mailbox, and that was a worse prospect in some ways than a crazed colleague—or even a disgruntled student. But I’d never picked up any hostility in the neighborhood against me or Stefan. In fact, it was the opposite.

 

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