8

For a moment, it was like having an out-of-body experience and I could see the two of us sitting in my office, me trapped, him having pounced.

I felt weirdly, calmly distant from the scene, noting the surprisingly sharp cut of his suit, the gray above his ears that was starting to soften the coppery red of his hair. Valley waited for me to say something, trying to intimidate me further by his contemptuous silence. In his mind, professors were miscreants always on the brink of bad behavior, not much better than loutish students who ran wild if SUM teams won a major game and rioted if we lost.

I was dying to turn from the desk and get a Tassimo disc from the credenza behind me and make myself a cup of coffee (without asking if he wanted one, too), anything to not have to look at that smug, angry face. But I wasn’t going to let him see how rattled I was that he knew about the cops hitting our house, and turning away would surely prove I needed a time out.

“You look good,” I said.

He squinted so hard his eyes must have hurt. “What?”

“You’re working out, aren’t you? You must be. Your delts are definitely bigger. That suit does not look like the shoulders are padded.”

Now he was the one off-balance, since I had never complimented him before, and with some men, saying anything to them about their bodies feels invasive and threatening, whether you were gay or not. I had correctly guessed he was one of them, because he looked away, distressed or discomfited. That made me even more determined not to give any ground. I wasn’t the same person he had interrogated years ago. I was a full professor and my name was attached to a prestigious fellowship. I wouldn’t call myself a big shot, but I wasn’t a nobody, either. This wasn’t about speaking truth to power, it was about not being intimidated.

To my delight, Valley finally caved. “What do you know about this phone call?”

“Just what my assistant told me.”

He nodded skeptically, his narrow chin like a weapon. “Have you been getting other calls here?”

“None.” That was true, but only part of the truth, of course. And if he asked about other calls anywhere else, I would have to lie.

“Why would someone be threatening you?”

I explained the possibility of a rejected writer: “Authors live with constant disappointment, and it doesn’t take much to push one over the edge. Even a bad review could do it, so not getting the chance to earn $25,000 you feel you deserve and maybe even fantasized about spending, that could be a pretty strong catalyst.”

“You’re all crazy,” he said, upper lip curling in contempt. “So what about your … partner? Could he do something like that?”

I snapped at Valley: “You’re saying Stefan called the office to threaten me? Are you trying to turn this into a domestic dispute? That’s bullshit.”

He shrugged those newly sturdy shoulders of his and uncrossed his legs, folding his long hands in his lap. “You’ll have to report what happened to the phone company. And your assistant needs to fill out a police report at our headquarters. But I have to warn you, people like whoever called, they’re not morons even if they are wacko. They plan ahead. They watch the crime shows. They know what to do. So even tracing the call might not tell us anything. There are lots of ways to hide who they are.”

“Basically, you’re telling me it’s a waste of time.” I knew that already, but I didn’t want him to realize I’d already worked it out myself. I hope I sounded frustrated enough. It was very quiet in the office; the whole campus was quiet with most of the students gone. I could hear the ticking of the antique brass carriage clock Stefan had given me for one birthday, and the air whooshing through the air conditioning vents. I was waiting for Valley to come back to the SWAT team. I didn’t want to raise it myself. Not to him, not to anyone, and yet I was eager to find out how he knew.

That wasn’t going to happen. Not right then, anyway. He slapped his knees as if he was in a Western and rose. “You know what you need to do,” he said somewhat obscurely, and he left via Celine’s office. What did he mean? Despite trying to stay calm, I felt unnerved by his visit, and I wished I had some Valium in the office.

Celine bustled in, mimicking the stinkeye Valley always gave me. I laughed at her imitation of his glare, partly out of exhaustion. I didn’t care much about hiding the truth from Valley, but I liked and respected Celine. And I felt sorry that she had been harassed, even indirectly.

She cocked her head at me. “What’s with the stiff ?”

“We have a history.”

“I gathered.”

“And he’s not, shall we say, open to diversity.”

“He’s a bigot.” She shrugged. “Okay, then. Let’s get to work,” she said, as if offering me a vacation from trouble. We spent over an hour discussing some YouTube readings we’d both watched and were in agreement that the three writers I’d been considering this week were all duds. Their books were great, they were all personable enough, but they didn’t engage with their audiences and their Q&A sessions were dreadful. All three seemed profoundly uncomfortable even though they were well-known. Maybe because of that?

“Introverts,” Celine ventured. “I like being married to one. But I wouldn’t want to take a workshop with an ‘inny’ or sit there and try to listen to one—I’d go to sleep!”

“Can you get started on the letters?” I handed her my notes. Though I’d developed a form rejection letter, each one was always personalized with references to the author’s work I’d liked. And if I hadn’t liked any of their books, I made sure to mention an interview, a film adaptation, whatever I could come up with. It might not be much to soften the blow, but it was better than nothing. I’d lived with an author for over twenty years and I knew that rejection letters were likely to feel poisonous, so I tried to make mine as anodyne and even cheerful as possible. I know it was like going vegan to slow global warming, but at least it was something.

On the short drive home, I had the distinct feeling that the same black car from the stop sign was following me. I thought it was one of those new Cadillac XTSs with the distinctive grill, a car I’d seen a lot around town because it was made in Michiganapolis and very popular that summer. This one seemed to be following behind me for more than a few blocks, making every turn I did, but keeping far enough back so I couldn’t make out the driver’s face. When traffic (such as it was) cleared, and I slowed down to make a right turn, whoever it was sped up to make a left and screeched off too fast for me to be sure what had been going on or even if it was a Caddy. Michiganapolis was filled with bad drivers, so maybe it meant nothing at all, but with two ominous phone calls in a row and the threat at the stop sign, I was primed for the worst. Yet I couldn’t have told anyone for sure what make the car had been; I was too rattled and edgy to be a calm, reliable witness.

Stefan was out of bed and dressed when I got home. Good signs. He had started making dinner. Even better. But he hadn’t gotten very far. I could tell he had planned on Eggplant Rollatini, one of our summer favorites, since I saw eggplants, fresh basil, and the makings of tomato sauce on one counter. Stefan himself was sitting cross-legged on the floor, Marco in his lap. Marco wagged his tail hello, but didn’t move. Eyes dead, Stefan looked shell-shocked and was clearly the one who needed canine attention.

I apologized for being late and not having called. Then I asked, “How was Mass?”

Stefan looked away. “I didn’t go.”

Now that was a very bad sign, since Father Ryan was celebrating it that day. Stefan had become a regular at the weekday Masses, in addition to going Sunday mornings. He almost always returned calmer, usually talking about the homily. Sometimes he shared the intense feelings of gratefulness and connection he felt there, but not often. He didn’t have to. I’d read his memoir New Home and understood how for the first time in his life, he felt spiritually grounded, though I myself couldn’t identify with Jesus or anything connected to the Catholic Church. It hadn’t been something we spoke much about until he wrote the book, but we did when I read the early drafts, and I’d admired his courage. He was the son of Holocaust survivors, and yet he’d broken with his past, their past. And because he was well-known as a Jewish author, he had risked alienating his audience. Who knew he’d gain a much larger one with the memoir? Readers loved the cool, brainy prose that many reviewers compared to Joan Didion’s. I suspect they were surprised by his tone, given the controversial subject of his book—at least for some people. After all, according to some studies, fully a quarter of all Americans changed from their religion of birth to something else.

Before I could say anything now to lift Stefan out of his stupor, the doorbell rang and his eyes widened.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Remember Father Ryan? Repeat after me: They’re not coming back.”

He repeated it in a low voice, like someone heavily sedated.

I left him there. Waiting at the front door was one of our elderly neighbors, Binnie Berrigan, holding a domed Tupperware cake plate. Binnie went to Stefan’s church, was in her eighties, widowed, a raging progressive, and a devotee of hiking and biking vacations. She was short, lean, with a white braid down her back, and given to flowing Indian print skirts with matching tops and chunky turquoise necklaces. She’d been arrested many times over the years and was proud of her protests against Vietnam, the Cambodia bombing, nuclear power, the wars in Iran and Afghanistan. “As long as they keep electing idiots, somebody’s got to hold them to account,” she liked to say. “I knew Nixon was a chiseler from day one, and little Bush was a bum.”

It was a sign of how troubled Stefan was that Marco hadn’t trotted to the door, since he loved Mrs. Berrigan. Marco knew Stefan needed taking care of.

“Nick, dear, I won’t come in, but when I didn’t see Stefan at Mass today, I made you boys your favorite sour cream coffee cake.” She handed over the plate. Despite myself, I looked behind her, wondering who might be watching our front door. “You’re good boys, both of you, I know that. If police come to your house the way they did the other night, I know it’s a mistake or a lie.”

I breathed in deeply, trying not to tear up, and she patted my arm.

“Did they hurt you?” she asked.

I shook my head, and tried to say something, but she guessed it. “Yes, I know, it’s on the inside. I won’t tell you it’s going to pass, because nobody can know that. The first time I got dragged off a picket line I thought I was a hero, but after being roughed up and held in jail for forty-eight hours, I felt like a worm. Just take care of each other, okay?” She turned and strode down the steps and off along the street to her Cape Cod, the only one on our street. As I closed the door, I had the eerie feeling I was being watched, and I heard a car speed down our street, where the limit was twenty-five miles per hour. When I opened the door again, the car was gone. Paranoid, I thought. You will always be paranoid now, till the day you die. My beautiful, peaceful home had become a cul-de-sac of dread. But I had to suppress what I was feeling—right then, anyway, to deal with Stefan.

I brought the cake into the kitchen and relayed Binnie’s message. Stefan moaned, “Everyone at church will know! I can’t ever go back.”

I set down the cake on the table littered with opened sections of the New York Times, and crouched by his side. “Listen, they love you at St. Jude’s, I’ve seen it at the Christmas parties we’ve gone to, they all think you’re special. And even if they didn’t, church is the best place for you to go! You feel at home there. You wrote a book about it, remember?”

He smiled faintly, and Marco headed off his lap for a drink of water. “Is that Binnie’s coffee cake?” Stefan asked, sounding marginally more positive, and as if I hadn’t already told him. I nodded, and he rose to take off the dome. I brought out plates, forks, and a cake knife and we sat at the island to have dessert before dinner, which seemed a harmless reversal of order after what we’d been through the past few days. I needed to get my footing back, somehow. I wished I had some kind of large, detail-ridden project that could still my murky free-floating sense of panic and help me focus on something constructive. But all I had right then was a crumbly, sweet, coffee cake made with freshly ground cinnamon. It could have been worse.

Well, probably not, because I had to tell him about the call Celine had gotten, and that I’d had a brief interview with Detective Valley. He took that like a punch-drunk fighter. He sat there, playing with his fork, shoulders hunched, eyes drawn inward, so I fed Marco his dinner, let him out into the yard, and decided to make the eggplant dish myself. I cheated and used prepared sauce for the bottom of the baking dish, but went ahead and sliced and blanched the eggplants, pureed some cottage cheese, mixed in the Parmesan, mozzarella, garlic, lemon zest, nutmeg, pepper and salt. I talked to him about the rest of my time at the office, discussed the three authors, one of whom he’d been on a panel with.

I was surprised when he ignored the gossip and said, “Valley’s back? I hate that man. He should be shot.” He pronounced his sentence dully, as if talking about cleaning up a messy garage, not offing another human being. But strangely, that made me think of the gun shop I’d visited years ago, the feel of a pistol in my hand, the sense of threatening power and strength I hadn’t expected. What would I do if I had one?

Clearing the table of the Times, I noticed one section was open to a book review of something called Erroneous, and the author’s photo shocked me. It was Stone Castro-Hirsch, a mercurial, acerbic, foulmouthed essayist who edited a Jewish literary magazine called Nu? (Yiddish for “So what?”) He had once asked Stefan for an essay at a point in his career when Stefan had stopped writing “on spec”—that is, without a definite commitment to publish. Stefan was always happy to work with editors to get pieces where they needed to be, but Stone not only rejected the piece outright, he slammed Stefan in an email: “This is the worst shit I’ve ever read by any author living or dead. I can’t believe you thought I’d waste my time with something this hopeless.” I’d read the essay and it wasn’t Stefan’s best work, but Stone’s comments struck me as unhinged.

Stefan had fumed for a few days, composing and recomposing a blistering email reply which he wisely never sent. I urged him not to, since I assumed Stone was volatile and troubled, and definitely worth staying away from. He was the kind of person who couldn’t fart without mentioning it on Facebook and was notorious there for defriending people for the most trivial reasons, or none at all.

But despite Stefan’s silence (or because of it?), somehow Stone took a dislike to him and every now and then we’d hear he had trashed Stefan somewhere in print or even at a party of litwits. I skimmed the Times review now: the book was a collection of Stone’s own essays from Nu? with one written just for the book, called “Traitors.” It apparently singled out Stefan. There was a quote in the review about Stefan’s conversion to Catholicism as “shameful, cowardly, revolting, superstitious, and ignorant,” and Stefan himself was branded “one of the worst enemies the Jewish people have ever faced in their history, finishing what Hitler started.”

Stefan and his publisher had gotten a fair amount of hate mail a few years back when his conversion memoir came out, but the overwhelming response by reviewers and readers had been laudatory. Invitations to speak had descended from across the country and he had to hire a graduate student to help him keep track of all the requests and sort the ones he found most interesting. Most Jewish newspapers and magazines—including Nu?—had quietly ignored the book, not wanting to give him any more publicity than he was getting already, since it sold close to half a million copies in hard cover, and even more as an ebook.

Stefan came over to the table. “I heard last year that Stone told an audience I was the author he most detested. He said I was despicable and didn’t deserve to live.”

I was surprised he could be so casual about what sounded dangerously close to a death threat. “You never mentioned him saying that.”

Stefan looked exhausted. “Nick, it’s not important, he’s a crank, he’s a malcontent. He sees all these people around him in New York who are richer, more famous, better looking, who get better press, and he can’t stand it. But he doesn’t want to pick a fight with somebody there, so he takes shots at people like me outside his circle.”

The oven timer rang for the Rollatini and when I turned from the table, I said, “What if this essay was just part of his plan? What if he’s out to really hurt you, for whatever sick reason? What if he’s the one following me—” I stopped, mortified that I’d added to Stefan’s burden. He cocked his head at me and I told him about the car I thought was behind me earlier. But I didn’t give him a chance to react. “Stone is clearly obsessed with you, Stefan. If he’s the one stalking us, you’ve got to do something, call the police.”

As soon as I said those last words, I regretted my stupidity.

He grimaced sourly. “You’re kidding, right? You think I’d call the police for anything?”

“No, sorry. That was a reflex. I’m really sorry.”

Later that night, with Stefan snoozing in the living room in front of an NCIS episode on TV that we’d seen half a dozen times, I couldn’t help myself. I googled Stone, well aware that if he knew what I was doing, Stefan might hit me with one of his favorite Gospel quotations, “Who can touch pitch, and not be defiled by it?”

And after wading through five minutes of muck, I discovered that Stone was a lot closer than New York, ominously close. He was teaching in a summer writing workshop at SUM’s small branch campus in Ludington, just a few hours northwest of Michiganapolis.

We had a condo in Ludington.

I couldn’t believe this was a coincidence.