The Lesson of Her Death Read online

  The man he was thinking of was Leon Gilchrist, the professor for whom Okun worked. When Gilchrist joined Auden two years before, the horde of eager Ph.D. candidates seeking jobs as graduate assistants largely bypassed him. His reputation preceded him from the East--a recluse, a foul temper, no interest whatsoever in campus sports, politics or administration. While this put off most grad students it merely upped the ante for Okun, who was as intrigued by Gilchrist's personality as he was impressed by his mind.

  Any doubts that remained about the professor were obliterated when Okun read Gilchrist's The Id and Literature. The book changed Okun's life. He stayed up all night, zipping through the dense work as if it were an Illustrated Classics comic book. He finished it at exactly three-ten in the afternoon and by four was sitting in Gilchrist's office, being obnoxious, insisting that Gilchrist hire him to teach the seminar sessions of his famous Psych & Lit course.

  Gilchrist asked a few innocuous questions about the subject matter then grew bored with Okun's answers and silenced the grad student by hiring him on the spot.

  Okun, almost as quickly, regretted the decision. The professor turned out to be more reclusive and odd and aggressively prickish than rumored. Narcissistic and anal expulsive, Okun observed (he too, like Gilchrist, was dual-degreed: psychology and English lit). He gave the man wide berth and had to improvise his professor-handling techniques like a doctor developing new antibiotics to meet particularly virulent strains of bacteria.

  Gilchrist was impossible to outflank. Okun was not surprised to learn that he was more savvy than he seemed and had pegged Okun early as having designs on his job. But by now, after two semesters of continual jockeying if not outright combat, Brian Okun, chic, moody, himself brilliant, an enfant terrible of the Modern Language Association, Brian Okun had nothing but wounds to show from the run-ins with his scholastic Wellington.

  Today, for instance--the phone call.

  The professor had left for San Francisco last week to read a paper at the Berkeley Poetry Conference and had been expected back tonight, in time for tomorrow's lecture. Gilchrist had called however to say he would be staying another week to do research at San Francisco State. He abruptly told Okun to have another professor prepare and deliver his lecture tomorrow.

  The session was entitled "John Berryman: Self-Harm and Suicide Through the Poet's Eye." Okun considered himself a Berryman scholar and fervently wanted to deliver that lecture. But Gilchrist was on to him. He ordered Okun, with a tinny insulting laugh, to find a full professor. He used that phrase. Full professor, a painful reminder of what Okun was not. Okun agreed, extending his middle finger to the telephone as he did so. Then he hung up and the interesting philosophical dilemma occurred to him.

  Okun now paced--to the extent he was able to do so in a cluttered eight-by-eight room. As his mind leapt backward, zigzagging through time, he found he was picturing vague scenes of Victorian tragedy (Charles Dickens had given a lecture in this very building as part of his U.S. tour in the 1860s, a fact Okun had collected and cherished) but the image that he arrived at was not from one of Dickens's books; it was of a girl wearing a white layered nightgown, her long hair spilling like dark water on the pillow. A girl with a pallid face. Mouth open in relaxation, revealing charming prominent teeth. Lips curling outward. Eyes closed. Her name was Jennie Gebben and she was dead.

  At only one point since his graduation from Yale had Brian Okun ever doubted that he would be a Nobel Prize winner. There was some question as to whether he would win for nonfiction writing--some quantum-leaping analysis of, say, the relation between Yeats's haywire obsession with Maude Gonne and his art. Or whether he would produce a series of showy, anxious quote Updike Coomer Ford quote New Yorker novels ridden with quirky characters and heavy with the filigree of imagery and dialect-laden talk. Either was fine. Only twenty-seven, on the verge of doctorhood, Brian Okun felt mastery of his scholarly self.

  He also believed however that his right brain needed more life experience. And like many graduate students he believed that life experience was synonymous with fucking. He intended to fill the next five years with as many female students as he had the stamina to bed and the patience to endure afterward. Eventually he would marry--a woman who was brilliant and homely enough to remain utterly devoted to him. The nuptials would have happened by the time the Swedish girls, hair glowing under the blaze of the burning candle wreaths, woke him up in Stockholm on the morning of the award presentation.

  But these dreams were disrupted by a particular individual.

  Jennie Gebben had been a curious creature. When he'd first read her name in class he'd paused. His mind had tricked him and he misread it. He thought he'd seen Jennie Gerhardt, one of Theodore Dreiser's tragic heroines and a character that Professor Gilchrist discussed at length in his famous paper in which he psychoanalyzed Dreiser. Okun had looked at Jennie across the U-shaped classroom table and held her eyes for a moment. He knew how to look at women. After a moment he commented on the name error. Several people in class nodded in self-indulgent agreement to impress him with their familiarity with Naturalistic writing.

  Jennie gave a bored glance at Okun and responded brashly that she'd never heard of her near namesake.

  He asked her out three days later, a record in self-restraint.

  At a university like Auden, located in a two-cinema, four-screen town, inappropriate liaisons cannot proceed as they would in an anonymous city. Okun and Jennie spent their time walking in the woods or driving out to the quarry. Or spending nights in her room or his apartment.

  He brooded to the point of fetish. Why this fierce attraction? Jennie wasn't gifted artistically. She wasn't brilliant, she was a B-minus student with a solid Midwestern artistic sensibility (this meant that she had to be told what was valid and what was not). He was stung by these limitations of hers. When he inventoried what he loved about her he came up with shrinkage: the way she covered her mouth with her delicate hand at scenes of violence in movies, the way she let slip little murmurs from her throat as she looked at a chill spring wash of stars above them, the way she could drop her shoulder and dislodge a satin bra strap without using her fingers.

  Of course some aspects of Jennie Gebben he loved intensely: her suggestions when they were making love that she might like to try "something different." Did he enjoy pain? Would he please please bury his finger in her, no no not in my cunt, please, yeah, there all the way.... Did he like the feel of silk, of women's nylons? And she would bind a black seamed stocking tight around his balls and stroke his glans until he came, forceful and hurting, on the thick junction of her chin and throat.

  Several times she dressed him in one of her nightgowns and on those occasions he emptied himself inside her within seconds of fierce penetration.

  These were the bearings of their relationship and as impassioned as Okun felt, he knew they could not be trusted. Not when your lover was Jennie Gebben. The murmurs and whimpers had taken on too great a significance for him. Out of control he crashed.

  It occurred when one night he had blurted a marriage proposal to her. And she, less intelligent, a common person, had suddenly encircled him in her arms in a terrifyingly maternal way. She shook her head and said, "No, honey. That's not what you want."

  Honey. She called him honey! It broke his heart.

  He raged. Jennie was what he wanted. His tongue made a foray into the crevice of his lips and he tasted her. That was proof, that was the metaphor: he hungered for her. He cried in front of her while she looked on maturely, head cocked with affection. He blurted a shameful stream: he was willing to do whatever she wanted, get a job in the private sector, work for a commercial magazine, edit.... He had purged himself with all the hokey melodrama of mid-list literature.

  Brian Okun, radiant scholar of the esoteric grafting of psychology and literature, recognized this obsessive effluence for what it was. So he was not surprised when, in an instant, love became hate. She had seen him vulnerable, she had comforted him--this, the
only woman who had ever rejected him--and he detested her.

  Even now, months after this incident, a day after her murder, Okun felt an uncontrollable surge of anger at her, for her simpering patronizing Mutterheit. He was back on the Nobel path, yes. But she had shaken something very basic in his nature. He had lost control, and his passions had skidded violently like a car on glazed snow. He hated her for that.

  Ah, Jennie, what have you done to me?

  Brian Okun pushed his hands together and waited for the trembling to stop. It did not. He breathed deeply and hoped for his heart to calm. It did not. He thought that if only Jennie Gebben had accepted his proposal, his life would be so unequivocally different.

  The smell of the halls suggested something temporary: Pasty, cheap paint. Sawdust. Air fresheners and incense covering stale linens. Like a barracks for refugees in transit. The color of the walls was green and the linoleum flecked stone gray.

  Bill Corde knocked on the door. There was no answer.

  "Ms. Rossiter? I'm from the Sheriff's Department."

  Another knock.

  Maybe she'd gone to St. Louis for the funeral.

  He glanced behind him. The corridor was empty. He tried the knob and pushed the door open.

  A smell wafted out and surrounded him. Jennie Gebben's spicy perfume. Corde recognized it immediately. He lifted his hand and smelled the same scent--residue from the bottle on her dressing table at home.

  Corde hesitated. This was not a crime scene and students in dormitories retained rights of privacy and due process. He needed a warrant in hand to even step into the room.

  "Ms. Rossiter?" Corde called. When there was no answer he walked inside.

  The room Jennie and Emily shared had a feeble symmetry. Bookcases and mirrors bolted to opposite walls. The beds parallel to each other but the desks turned at different angles--looking up from a textbook, one girl would look out the small window at the parking lot; the other would gaze at a bulletin board. On one bed rested a stuffed rabbit.

  Corde examined Jennie's side of the room. A cursory look revealed nothing helpful. Books, notebooks, school supplies, posters, souvenirs, photos of family members (Corde noticing that the young Jennie bore a striking resemblance to Sarah), makeup, hair curlers, clothes, scraps of paper, packages of junk desserts, shampoos, lotions. Shear pastel underwear hung on a white string to dry. A U2 poster, stacks of cassettes, a stereo set with a cracked plastic front. A large box of condoms (latex, he noted, not the lambskin found at the crime scene). Thousands of dollars' worth of clothes. Jennie was a meticulous housekeeper. She kept her shoes in little green body bags.

  Corde noticed a picture of two girls: Jennie and a brown-haired girl of delicate beauty. Emily? Was it the same girl in one of the pictures on Jennie's wall at home? Corde could not remember. They had their arms around each other and were mugging for the camera. Their black and brown hair entwined between them and made a single shade.

  A clattering of laughter from the floor above reminded him that he was here without permission. He set the picture down and turned toward Jennie's desk.

  He crested the rise on 302 just in front of his house.

  Corde had ticketed drivers a dozen times for sprinting along this strip at close to sixty. It was a straightaway, posted at twenty-five after a long stretch of fifty, so you couldn't blame them for speeding, Corde supposed. But it was a straightaway in front of his house where his kids played. When he wasn't in the mood to ticket he took to leaving the squad car parked nose out in the drive, which slowed the hot-rodders down considerably and put a slew of brake marks on the asphalt just over the crown on the rise like a grouping of bullet tracks in a trap.

  Setting a good example, Corde braked hard then signaled and made the turn into his driveway. He parked the cruiser next to his Ford pickup, which was fourth-hand but clocked in at only sixty-seven thousand miles. He stepped out into the low sun and waved to Jamie, who was in the garage, lifting his bike up onto pegs in the exposed two-by-fours. In Jamie's hands, the bike seemed to weigh only a pound or two.

  The boy was fair-skinned and slight but he was strong as sinew. He worked out constantly, concentrating on many reps of lighter weight rather than going for bulk. He waved back to his father and headed toward the backyard, where he would pitch a tennis ball onto the crest of the roof and snag the fly with all sorts of fancy catches. The expression on his face was the same one that Corde had puzzled over for over a year until he finally recognized it as a look of Diane's--contentment, Corde liked to think, though also caution and consideration. He was proud of his son--quiet and easygoing, a devoted member of the freshman wrestling team, a B-plus student without trying, good in Latin and biology and math, the secretary of the Science Club.

  Corde believed his boy would grow up to be Gary Cooper.

  Detouring through the Rototilled earth of the side yard, Corde turned on the sprinkler, which began to saturate the patch of mud that the seed package had promised four weeks ago would be luxurious green in six. Corde watched the wave sweep back and forth for a minute, then walked toward the split-level house, aluminum-sided bright yellow. Corde had an acre of land, all of it grass (or soon to be, Ortho assured him), punctuated with juniper bushes and saplings that in fifty years would be respectable oaks. The property bordered the panhandle of a working dairy farm to the north, beyond which was a forest. Surrounding houses, all modest split-levels or colonials, sat on similar plots along Route 302.

  He heard a chug of a diesel engine. Up the road the driver of a White semi, hauling a Maersk Line container, started shifting down through his many gears as the truck rolled over the crest of the highway probably right on the posted speed. Corde watched the majestic truck for a moment then started toward the house.

  A motion caught his eye and smiling still he glanced to the corner of his yard. Something nosing out of the bushes toward the road. A dog?

  No!

  "Sarah!"

  His daughter stood up and looked at him in panic--a deer spotting a hunter. She turned and ran at top speed toward the truck, whose driver was oblivious to the girl.

  "Sarah, stop!" Corde shouted in astonishment. "No!" He ran after her.

  She was squealing with terror, running ahead of herself, tripping as her feet windmilled, her arms flailing in panic. She was aiming right for the truck's massive rear wheels, which were as tall as she was.

  "Oh, honey, stop! Please!" he gasped, and ran flat out, the Mace canister and a Speedloader falling from his Sam Browne belt, handcuffs thwacking his back.

  "Leave me alone!" Sarah wailed, and plunged ahead toward the truck's tires.

  She dropped the backpack and made a frantic sprint for the truck. It seemed like she was going to leap right for the huge thundering disks of tires, firing pebbles into the air behind the trailer.

  Sarah was three feet from the wheels when Corde tackled her. They landed, skidding, in a pile on the messy shoulder as the truck rumbled past them, the stack burping as the engine revved and the driver up-shifted, unaware of the struggle he left behind.

  Sarah squealed and kicked. Panicked, Corde rolled to his knees and shook her by the shoulders. His hand rose, palm flat. She squealed in terror. He screamed, "What are you doing, what are you doing?" Corde, who had spanked Jamie only once and Sarah not at all in their collective twenty-four years on earth, lowered his hand. "Tell me!"

  "Leave me alone!"

  Diane was running toward them. "What happened? What happened?"

  Corde stood. The panic was gone but it had left in its place the sting of betrayal. He stepped back. Diane dropped to her knees and held the child's face in her hands. She took a breath to start the tirade then paused, seeing the despair in her little girl's face. "Sarah, you were running away? Running away from home?"

  Sarah wiped her tears and nose with her sleeves. She didn't respond. Diane repeated the question. Sarah nodded.

  "Why?" her father demanded.

  "Because."

  "Sarah--" Corde beg
an sternly.

  The little girl seemed to wince. "It's not my fault. The wizard told me to."

  "The wizard?"

  "The Sunshine Man ..."

  This was one of the imaginary friends that Sarah played with. Corde remembered Sarah had created him after the family attended the funeral of Corde's father and the minister had lifted his arms to the sun, speaking about "souls rising into heaven." It was Sarah's first experience with death and Corde and Diane had been reluctant to dislodge the apparently friendly spirit she created. But in the past year, to the parents' increasing irritation, the girl referred to him more and more frequently.

  "He made Redford T. Redford fly out to the forest and he told me--"

  Diane's voice cut through the yard. "No more of this magic crap, do you hear me, young lady? What were you doing?"

  "Leave me alone." The tiny mouth tightened ominously.

  Corde said, "It's going to be okay, honey. Don't worry."

  "I'm not going back to school."

  Diane whispered in a low, menacing voice, "Don't you ever do that again, Sarrie, do you understand me? You could've been killed."

  "I don't care!"

  "Don't say that. Don't ever say that!" Mother's and daughter's strident tones were different only in pitch.

  Corde touched his wife's arm and shook his head. To Sarah he said, "It's okay, honey. We'll talk about it later."

  Sarah bent down and picked up her knapsack and walked toward the house. With boundless regret on her face, she looked back--not however at the ashen faces of her parents but toward the road down which the silver truck was hurrying away without her.

  They stood in the kitchen awkwardly, like lovers who must suddenly discuss business. Unable to look at him, Diane told him about Sarah's incident at school that day.

  Corde said contritely, "She didn't want to go today. I drove her back this morning and made her. I guess I shouldn't have."

  "Of course you should have. You can't let her get away with this stuff, Bill. She uses us."