4

Stefan had actually begun to munch on a second donut when Vanessa said, “I need to warn you about something.”

I started laughing. She and Stefan both gawked at me as if they were afraid I was succumbing to hysteria.

“I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “That just made me think of that movie—you know which one!—where Isabella Rossellini gives people a potion for eternal youth and then right after they drink it, she says, ‘And now, a warning.’”

They both looked blank, but I kept going, even though I couldn’t remember the movie’s name. “And I think Meryl Streep or someone like that shouts ‘Now a warning?’”

No recognition whatsoever from either of them, so I backtracked and prompted Vanessa: “Okay, what do you want to warn us about?”

She sat down at the table, which I took to be a bad sign. Crossing her long legs, she said, “Well, you were lucky that the raid took place at night, because it apparently didn’t get into the paper—I checked—but it could show up tomorrow. And there’s a good chance it’ll be on local TV news tonight. So you could be facing a media shit storm. Whatever you do, do not talk to any reporters. Check your caller ID, and just smile and keep going if you’re out at the mall or wherever and someone tries to ask you questions. Don’t even say ‘No comment.’ That sounds guilty.”

“But we’re not guilty,” Stefan muttered. “We haven’t done anything. We’re victims.”

Vanessa sighed. “It’s a juicy story. I could write it myself.”

Me too. So many sensationalistic angles. Start with us being a gay couple—for some people that was story enough. Or faculty members suspected of nefarious activities. Then there was “Prominent Writer—Does He Have a Secret Life?” Or “College Town Scene of Raid.” And “Terrorists in the Midwest?” On and on and on.

Stefan surprisingly kept munching on his donut, but I couldn’t imagine eating anything right then. Marco edged closer to the table, gazing up at Stefan’s hand as intently as if he were willing a piece of the donut to fall to the floor. He wagged his tail a few times hopefully, even though we did not feed him table scraps.

“Will it blow over?” I asked Vanesa.

“Possibly,” she said.

The landline rang over by the Sub-Zero refrigerator, and we all stared at it. Even Marco. I got up and grabbed it because I was closest, and brought the receiver reluctantly to my ear.

“Hello?”

“This is Dean Bullerschmidt. I want to see both of you in my office in one hour.” He hung up. Typical. He hadn’t even asked—or cared—which one of us had answered. The dean was what my mother would have called “an ugly customer.” Pig-eyed and pig-headed, as fat as New Jersey’s Chris Christie, he had barely half that governor’s charm. He was power-mad, had never risen to provost or president, and exacted revenge for this failure on the faculty who crossed him in any way, real or imaginary. He’d been known to drive even male professors from his office in tears.

“Bullerschmidt wants to see us,” I told Stefan.

“Fuck.”

Vanessa raised an eyebrow and I explained who he was, and why we dreaded even random encounters with him. She frowned and then seemed to work it out: “Sounds like someone on the inside—a cop, I mean—contacted this dean of yours to make trouble for you, or how else would he know so soon? Boys, you must really have pissed somebody off, big-time.”

Her iPhone chirped, she jumped up to check the number, let the call go to voicemail, thumbed a quick text and said, “Gotta go. This could be a lead.”

I followed her to the door and thanked her again for last night, for rescuing us.

“I did what I always do,” she said nonchalantly. “First rule, defuse the situation and let them know they can’t steamroll you. I mean all of us. The cops, the prosecutors, and lots of judges hate defense attorneys more than they hate criminals and suspects. They think what we do is immoral—they think we’re worse than the bad guys. I stood up for you, but I also stood up for the criminal justice system, which they keep trying to smash.”

When I let her out, I was wary about returning to the kitchen. What was I supposed to say? How were Stefan and I supposed to conduct our everyday lives from now on? I’d never been through anything this traumatic, but Marco came trotting up to me, and I realized he would be part of the solution. Whatever had happened, he still needed to be fed, walked, let out into the yard, groomed, cared for, loved. There was no reason for him to suffer in any way because we had. Maybe the quotidian would be the light at the end of this miserable tunnel.

I picked him up and carried him into the kitchen, and sat by Stefan. Marco poked his snout in the direction of the donuts, snuffling in every stray molecule he could.

“We should get dressed,” Stefan observed. He looked funereal.

We cleaned up, showered and put on academic drag: blazers and ties. We gave Marco his command: “Time to guard the house,” and he trooped off into the living room to curl up in his dog bed near the fireplace.

“I’ll drive,” I said. Getting into my Lexus, I didn’t just feel like a schoolboy called to the principal’s office, but like a felon. And if I could have somehow driven out of our garage invisibly, I would have. As we pulled down the driveway and onto our quiet suburban-looking street, a sense of exposure and shame constricted my breathing so sharply that Stefan reached over, grabbed my arm and said, “It’ll be okay. What can he do to us?” I think he meant compared to what had already happened.

I drove off, saying, “He can make us feel like mice he’s going to feed to his snake, that’s what he can do.” Bullerschmidt excelled at intimidation; in that, he was a perfect administrator at a university top-heavy with these arbiters of policy who earned lavish six-figure salaries. The university was supposed to be a seat of learning and a place for collegiality, but it had become something very different during Michigan’s hard times. It was now more like an empire, ruled by despots who doled out favors here or there, and were more interested in prestige and fund-raising than education. As for faculty, we were meant to keep quiet no matter what outrage we saw committed.

SUM’s six-thousand-acre campus is amazingly green and gorgeous in spring and summer, but none of that touched me as we drove to the faculty parking lot closest to the dean’s office. He was housed in one of the oldest buildings: appropriately enough, a granite and sandstone Gothic Revival mini-castle bristling with turrets. But thanks to the current campus craze for remodeling, his office suite on the top floor was weirdly contemporary. It looked more like a high-tech kitchen than anything else: everything was white marble or brushed stainless steel. There was a plaque indicating which alumni had financed the extreme makeover, but I didn’t bother reading it on the way in. This was all part of an effort across campus to have offices and buildings subsidized by donations, since state funding had collapsed as part of the overall budget. Anything could be branded now by anyone, as long as their check cleared.

Things were so bad that if the administration could have sold SUM to China, the sale would have gone through. They could even have kept the same initials, SUM, and just made it Sino University of Michigan.

Bullerschmidt’s secretary, Mrs. Inkpen, generally neutral in clothes and attitude, didn’t even look up at us from her brushed steel desk, as if we were tainted. Her attitude was as frigid as the air conditioning kept the office.

Without shifting her glance from her Apple laptop, she said quietly, “Go on in, gentlemen.” We did.

Bullerschmidt had set his desk in front of a windowless wall and so there was no way you could be distracted by a view behind him. His stare was equal parts Medusa and Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, and he did not invite us to sit down. He tore into us immediately: “If you have any consideration for this institution at all, I would like you two to consider a leave of absence next semester. Paid, of course.”

This was unheard of—we’d just spent the year on sabbatical.

“Why?” I asked, glad there hadn’t been any attempt to lull us before the assault.

“It’s obvious,” he rumbled. “Your presence on campus would be a distraction. We have never had faculty disgraced in this manner.”

“I’d say it’s the police who disgraced themselves. We haven’t been charged with anything and whatever report they got that sent them to our house was obviously phony.”

Vanessa was right, I thought: someone clearly had it in for us. And that scared me because whoever it was had to be both malign and clever: setting a SWAT team in motion and creating separate hassles for us at the university. What other trouble could they foment?

I pressed him. “The whole raid was bogus—someone reported a hostage at our house. Pure bullshit. Or didn’t your source on the inside tell you that?”

He didn’t reply, and I said, “No, probably not. I think somebody is playing you for a fool, Dean Bullerschmidt.”

He flushed deep red from neck to forehead like some kind of chameleon instantaneously changing its color; it was alarming and grotesque.

“We cannot allow faculty to behave this way,” he rumbled.

“You mean be victimized? That’s nothing new around here.” I had never spoken to an administrator like this before, but then I’d never been manhandled by cops, either. I was mad as hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.

“Admit it,” I said. “You’re just worried about bad PR.” Universities loathe negative press as much as slugs hate salt.

Bullerschmidt did not concede the point. He just waited. But he’d picked the wrong tactic. Stefan was still so shell-shocked his normal responses weren’t operating. Besides, he was introverted at the best of times, so he couldn’t be bullied by silence. And me, I was enraged by what had happened, and that was quickly burning through my shame the way men in old French novels squander their inheritances on horses and whores.

So I didn’t just wait. I grinned. Evilly, I hope. And then I spoke up as curtly as I could muster, “If that’s all you had to say to us, an email or a text message would have wasted much less time.” I tapped Stefan’s shoulder and we turned to leave. At the door, I added, “We haven’t done anything wrong, and we’re not taking a leave.”

It wasn’t as memorable as Douglas MacArthur’s “I shall return” in World War II, but it seemed to rally Stefan, who looked at me with something less than zombie indifference. Bullerschmidt wasn’t letting go just yet, though.

“There’s something else we have to discuss,” he said darkly. “That book.” He made it sound like something loathsome, and both of us knew he meant Stefan’s work-in-progress.

A year ago, Stefan had caught a student of his, Casey Silver, committing plagiarism on one of his papers. It was grossly obvious: a steal of several paragraphs from an essay in The New Yorker; how could he have thought Stefan would miss it? He asked Casey to rewrite it, which was a very generous response, because most professors would have just given the kid a zero on the paper or even flunked him for the whole course. Stefan thought asking for a rewrite would resolve the situation, but it didn’t, or not in the way he expected. It turned out that Casey had suffered extreme bullying in high school, and being confronted even mildly about plagiarism had apparently triggered a cataclysmic shame spiral. The poor boy hanged himself. In Parker Hall, no less. From an exposed pipe running across the ceiling in the building’s lobby.

Stefan felt responsible, though I tried as hard as I could to convince him he couldn’t have known it would happen. His sabbatical had been coming up and instead of traveling, he decided to stay home and cope with his trauma by doing what he did best: writing a book. When it was still only a partial draft, his new agent quickly got him a contract for Fieldwork in the Land of Grief (which Stefan and I usually referred to as Fieldwork). Bullying, after all, was a hot topic. Signing the big-bucks contract made the local news and enraged Casey’s family who lobbied the administration to put the kibosh on Stefan’s project. Their pressure pushed SUM’s president and provost both to personally appeal to Stefan to give it up, but he refused.

“You cannot keep writing that book,” the dean rumbled now as if trying to sound as magisterial as Winston Churchill. “You cannot publish that book. It’s offensive.”

Stefan stepped forward, fully present now, chin up. “If I drop this project, I will never understand what happened and what it means.”

“You’re putting your personal feelings ahead of the family of that unfortunate young man, and ahead of the reputation of this noble university.” Wow, I thought, that sounded like something the dean had practiced for a press release or an interview.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Stefan said. “But you can’t censor faculty members and tell us what kind of books we can write.”

Bullerschmidt nodded sourly as if he’d imagined Stefan using just those words. “I will not be held responsible for the consequences of your recklessness,” he said. “Remember that. Whatever happens, I warned you. We’ve all warned you.”

I was stunned by this exchange, and grabbed Stefan’s arm to pull him out of there. But before we left, the dean stood, picked up a tooled-leather wastepaper basket and spit heavily into it. That’s what he thought of us.

On the way to our car, Stefan was muttering to himself, but I didn’t ask him to speak up. Driving home, I started to fulminate. “He’s a dictator!”

Stefan kept his thoughts to himself, and I wondered if he’d been intimidated by the dean. I knew that Fieldwork wasn’t all that far along; maybe giving it up wouldn’t be a major sacrifice, but how could I be sure? Stefan always showed me his books while he worked on them, but he’d been keeping this one so private it felt like he was either ashamed of it or he was afraid I wouldn’t like it, which seemed peculiar.

“Have you ever thought that writing this book might be a mistake?” I asked.

“You’re taking the dean’s side?” he snapped.

“No, nothing like that. It’s just …” I hesitated. “Is it right to profit from someone’s suffering?”

Stefan shook his head defiantly. “It’s my book. I have to write it.”

I couldn’t argue with that. He was a writer, I was only a bibliographer.

Traffic back from campus was nonexistent, since the tens of thousands of students were gone now that classes had ended, and we were home in less than five minutes. I was fired up now by more than just the coffee I’d been drinking for hours. I was outraged. We loosened our ties, took off our jackets, let Marco out in the backyard and sat in the gazebo watching him chase squirrels. We’d had the yard redone when Stefan’s memoir started selling like crazy and now it was much more private and lush. The oaks and maples had an understory of hemlocks and purple or white azaleas along the back fence, and we’d planted wildly fragrant viburnums along the sides of the yard.

I was relieved to see that Stefan’s color was starting to return and he seemed much less withdrawn. It probably helped being outdoors and being safe at home.

Safe? How safe were we really now? I wasn’t paranoid. Someone, somewhere was plotting against us. I didn’t say any of this aloud, I didn’t want to spoil the moment, because Stefan was more present each minute he sat there. I was sure that Bullerschmidt’s high-handedness had penetrated his fog, and maybe my speechifying had, too.

“You know, there’s nothing he can do to us,” I said fiercely. “We have tenure and they can only take it away and fire us for things like moral turpitude, or intellectual dishonesty. Having a SWAT team as house guests doesn’t fit either of those categories.”

Stefan almost smiled. “I can’t believe he accused us of not caring about SUM.” He shook his head. “Twice, really. Well, me twice and you once.”

“It was slimy. But he’d say anything to dump us, or dump the problem he thinks we represent.”

Stefan frowned as if he didn’t quite follow, and I’m not entirely sure I knew what I meant, but that was okay. He surprised me by saying, “Maybe we should have some lunch. We can’t just keep eating donuts. I can’t, anyway.”

I checked my watch and it was close to noon. “Let me take Marco for a short walk before we have lunch.” I went into the garage to get the leash, shovel, and plastic bag ready, then rounded up Marco and headed out, feeling oddly braver for having stood up to the dean. And somehow, being with Marco seemed so completely normal as we made our way to the small neighborhood park a few blocks off that I didn’t feel as self-conscious as I’d thought I would.

I was about to cross at the corner where there was a stop sign, when a car screeched to a stop only a few feet from us. I jerked Marco back from the road, almost falling as I did so. He yelped at being pulled so sharply and I crouched down to comfort him. That’s when I heard a car window glide down and the driver say, “Walk faster, or next time, I’ll hit you.”

He sped off so quickly that I wasn’t able to get his license plate or focus well on the car. I hadn’t seen his face, but I registered the menace in his voice.

This was no joke. And I was frozen. Those squealing brakes were like a broken neon sign, flashing erratically in my head.

Less than twelve hours after the raid, I was once again terrified for my life. He could have run me and Marco over. I’ve never fainted in my life before, but I came very close to it right then. I forced myself to keep walking, made it to the little neighborhood park planted with enormous weeping willows, sat down on one of the benches, with Marco at my feet. I was stunned by what had just happened, and by knowing I would have to tell Stefan.