A Person of Interest (13 page)

But he was fevered as well. He shook her off, with surprising force and with a sound of anger that was almost a bark. “I’m the last person who deserves to be treated so kindly,” he said, in the same barking voice, but which formed into words was for some reason uglier. They stared at each other a moment, Sondra frozen in an attitude of fright and Lee, he imagined, contorted like a madman. He sank into the chair, disgusted with himself. “I’m sorry, Sondra,” he said.

After a moment’s hesitation, Sondra said, in a tone not entirely certain, “You don’t need to apologize to me.”

“Yes, I do. I do because . . .” And here the spectacle of himself the past twenty-four hours—riven by insomnia, too tremored to shave, rehearsing phrases of wisdom and solace in an anxious whisper on his drive to the campus, as if any student would come to
him
seeking
his
help, when there were grief counselors and all-college assemblies and then of course all the Hendleys-in-waiting—rose up and smote him, with his deluded belief in his relevance. He knew he was about to grow maudlin, as if there were nothing to do in the face of his foolish-ness but to act like even more of a fool. “I do because I am ridiculous,” he said.

“Lee.”

80 S U S A N C H O I

“I am ridiculous,” he repeated, with more conviction.

“All right. You are.” Sondra went to her desk and returned pushing her own wheeled chair, which she settled on once she was opposite Lee. “You’re also in shock. I know you and Hendley weren’t the greatest of friends, but that doesn’t mean you’re not affected by this horrible thing.” Sondra’s voice, after she’d seated herself, had assumed a brisk, let’s-get-down-to-it tone, but with “this horrible thing” her voice started to climb, and her swollen pink eyes filled again. “I mean, I know he could be an arrogant son of a you-know-what some of the time; who knows better than me? But that was just
him,
that was
Hendley.
”

“What do you mean, not the greatest of friends?” It took Sondra a moment to be able to speak; she’d retrieved a hard, gray ball of Kleenex from inside her sleeve. “Just that you butted heads with him, thought he was full of himself—who didn’t? He was a young Turk, and he knew it. But we loved him.” She was crying again.

“I didn’t butt heads with him,” Lee protested. His gut was roiling again; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. “My work hardly overlaps with his! What would we butt heads about?”

“Lee, it doesn’t matter. What I’ve been trying to say is, even the kids here who never had him, who never
met
him, they need to talk to someone.
I
need to talk to someone. And you, you were right there—”

“I disagreed with him about Kalotay’s tenure,” Lee said. “Is that it?

But I was right! Everyone sees now we should have denied it, even Hendley should see it.” He realized he was repeatedly speaking of Hendley in the present tense, but Sondra did not seem to notice.

“Everyone in this department argues!” Lee cried.

“What I’ve been trying to say is, they’ve gotten grief counselors for
us,
particularly for us, who aren’t on that memo. For those of us who really . . . knew Hendley. And I’ve been waiting here. To see if you wanted to go.”

“Waiting?”

“I’m nervous for some reason.” Sondra scrubbed her eyes with the ball of Kleenex. “I just thought we’d walk there together.”

“No,” Lee said, abruptly standing up. The Grief Plan had let him briefly forget his dread of being scrutinized, so much so that he’d
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 81

begun to feel oddly left out of the collegewide program for grieving and healing. But for the past several minutes, with Sondra, he’d felt increasingly under a lamp. He’d never gone to the hospital, and she certainly knew this, she who had probably been there every day for the maximum number of hours allowed. She was looking at him with concern, but he could almost have said she was using the look as a mask, from behind which she was judging him sternly, and fi nding him lacking.

“I really think,” Sondra resumed carefully, “that you need to talk to someone.”

“No,” Lee said, “I need to teach class.” Except that his class had been canceled, and replaced by the memo he held. He thrust it at Sondra, with its official grief text—
It is with enormous sadness that
—

and picked up his briefcase. “Please, Sondra, make the announcement to my ten-thirty for me. I have to go home. I didn’t sleep well. I have to go home.”

“I’m going to call you later,” she said—threatened?—as he rushed off. “I’m going to check in with you. . . .” He encountered no one else down the length of the corridor back to the stairs, no one on the stairs, not even a sole wandering student on the fi rst floor in the lobby, where the stairway emerged beside the ele-vator bank and a bulletin board whose rectangular shape was entirely lost beneath the countless aggressively colorful banners of undergraduate life. It was twenty past ten, a time of the morning at which this lobby was usually lively with students running to ten-thirty classes. But Lee’s building belonged entirely to the kingdom of science; none of its four floors housed any branch of the arts or humanities, and it was the rare student of science, he reminded himself, who didn’t begin the day with an eight-ten or a nine-twenty. By now only a radically out-of-touch straggler would be left to be notified of Hendley’s death. Lee’s fl ight from his class hadn’t been necessary. Sondra was in his classroom upstairs adding layers of nasal lacquer to her ball of Kleenex, on the alert for footsteps, but there wouldn’t be any.

He had left the department without having gone to his offi ce; he hadn’t even turned the corner of the corridor that led to his offi ce, and which would have shown him whether crime tape still sealed Hendley’s door and whether a policeman was still posted there, dozing
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off in a chair. Lee suddenly felt something akin to the homeland longing of an exile for his office, with its impoverished décor that to the outsider must bespeak lack of personal feeling, but which for Lee was precisely the opposite. The very few objects Lee had placed in his office, the old lamp and the photos of Esther and her scuffed baby shoe—partner of the shoe in his desk drawer at home—were personal in the extreme, and the disproportion of their mass when compared to the ranks of generic-looking, unadorned mathematical textbooks; the gray metal utility shelves; the university-issue gray desk and bland bulletin board with its very few bureaucratic reminders dutifully displayed, all four corners secured by pushpins, did not, for Lee, render them atmospherically powerless but rather increased their potency to the utmost degree. For Lee the ordered space of his offi ce was indelibly stamped with significance; what did it matter that Esther’s decades-discarded, heroic little white shoe was concealed in a drawer?

It was for no one but him. He yearned to be in his office right now, with the door locked and that invisible atmosphere of his innermost heart sitting calmly around him, and at the same time he was newly aware of contamination. Hendley had been murdered next door. Lee would have to move offices, and while he had never felt sentimental about that particular junction of walls, floor, and ceiling—his offi ce was the lamp and the shoe and the outdated photos—he walked out of the building almost overwhelmed by his feeling of loss.

Outdoors was, perversely, the sort of pulsing spring day that could erase cluttered decades, pluck them out of his way and take him back, not to Aileen or even his first years in this country but all the way to boyhood, to that narrow collection of disjointed glimpses and pangs.

From his very early childhood, he recalled a pear orchard, and like someone emerging again in a past incarnation, he could see, for a moment, the hills of white blossoms descending to a faraway sea. This must have been the mid-1930s, before the arrival of war, even in its first form as a distant event to which his father made occasional reference. Lee no longer remembered where that orchard had been, to whom it had belonged, why he’d been there, alone, he feels, moving resolutely on very small legs, and he no longer had any way to fi nd out. Nobody to ask. An ocean of blossoms, in humped waves and boiling with bees, and in the distance the line of the actual sea, like the rim
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 83

of his warm silver cup. Perhaps in recollection the orchard was vaster, the hills steeper, the sea’s gleam more explicitly signaling
him
—in compensation for the plain diorama of American campus he’d occupied for the past three decades. The West Quad, which he crossed walking back to his car, was thinly scattered with students, but instead of walking or sprawling they stood huddled in small groups, as if holding councils. There was no trace of the immature, inappropriate, completely understandable attitude of celebration at classes’ having been canceled that Lee had expected, and even hoped for, in minute quantities. They were teenagers, after all—they were children! What should they care about death? But they were solemn as priests, gathered into their secretive huddles, and Lee was reminded abruptly of a different day, in a different season, the November day when he’d emerged from his library carrel his first semester in graduate school to find the quad eerily dotted with just such small, motionless groups. Then he’d noticed a noise, the compound drone of numerous, widely spaced tran-sistors, and realized that each group of hunched wool overcoats had formed around the small grain of a radio. Running up to the nearest, he’d heard low sobs as well and thought,
War.

“What is it?” he’d cried.

“Kennedy’s been shot,” someone told him.

He’d taken off running again, still thinking,
There will be war.

They’ve shot the president, there will be war.
But here today was only sun, delicious warmth to the breeze, and grave children—less trauma-tized, Lee decided as he passed them, than elevated by the sense of a drama in which they played roles. He recognized none of his department’s students, the only students he felt would be justified in any real demonstrations of grief, and even then he was aware he was fi nding the prospect of such demonstrations distasteful. For Emma Stiles it might be warranted. She had idolized Hendley, unfortunately. But for the students of Hendley’s persistently oversubscribed lecture, the hundreds of students who had watched him perform from a distance, who sat cross-legged and patient, a long line of them, in the hallway outside his office every week waiting for a bantering word with him, for the students who didn’t even have their laborious papers evaluated by him, but instead by his lackeylike teaching assistants—were these students suffering genuine grief? Wasn’t there something out of
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proportion, not just about the stricken solemnity of the student population but about the official solemnizations of the college itself? The collegewide assembly, the batteries of grief counselors, the suspension of classes all began to strike Lee, now that he was free of the chastising presence of Sondra, as sanctimonious and self-important, as if the single death of a popular professor of dubious talent, however inexplicable and unjust it was, was on the same level as the death of John F.

Kennedy. And he was not a victim of envy to think such a thing, although he was a coward, because he knew he’d never say it aloud, even to Fasano. It took moral courage to acknowledge that some humans merited more, were worth more alive—or more dead—than the rest of their kind. Kennedy’s life had been worth more than Hendley’s and would certainly be worth more than Lee’s, whatever miracles Lee might accomplish before the end of his days. And Hendley’s life had been worth more than Lee’s; since he’d talked to Fasano, Lee understood that with calm clarity. Someone, whether with reason or not, had found Hendley and Illich, and perhaps all the others Fasano had mentioned, more substantial, and hence more threatening, than Lee ever would be.

Somehow this self-diminishing acknowledgment helped him to think of Gaither’s letter, and his own swift reply, with some degree of internal composure. After long consideration he had mailed the letter to Gaither in a departmental envelope; though he had demanded Gaither’s telephone number, he hadn’t reciprocated. This wasn’t to preserve an advantage, as Lee knew he had none. Gaither could fi nd Lee at home as easily as he’d found him at school; he probably already had his number from the telephone book. But Gaither had initiated the correspondence to Lee’s school address, perhaps in sardonic hom-age to their shared past as students. Whatever the case, Lee expected Gaither’s reply, if there was going to be one, to find him at school, the way the first letter had.

By now he’d returned to the faculty lot again and caught sight of his car, parked diagonally with its left front and right rear bumpers almost touching its neighbors. Lee hadn’t been aware of this when he’d left the car forty minutes ago. In its crookedness his generic Nissan had been transformed into something extremely pathetic, like the scarcely driven old-model Chevrolets and Lincoln Continentals plied
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 85

waveringly to the grocery store by nearly sightless and hunchbacked owners and left in the lot as haphazardly as boats washed onto land by a flood. Apart from the college, this town possessed nothing to set it apart from the rest of the Rust Belt and as a result had grown gray and enfeebled; all its young people had left or succumbed to drug use. Living on the gown side of the town/gown divide, though, Lee no more felt a kinship to these town geriatrics than he would have to horses or cows. Academic life demanded that reflexive belief in exemption from sorry surroundings, as if being a tenured professor at a second-rate school were like being an American diplomat in the Third World—

unless you had luck, like Fasano, and got Cornell and UCLA, or unless you were actually brilliant, as none of Lee’s immediate colleagues had been since Donald Whitehead in graduate school. But what if twenty-five years in the same place had filled with time’s silt the dividing abyss, so that now Lee was less a grand Gownsman than another old Townsman who should give up his license? Approaching the car, he stopped short of the point at which any observer would see he was the owner and looked around anxiously, as if he’d run the car into someone’s front yard. University Station lay on the far side of the lot, and it was as much to restore distance between himself and his car as to pursue his vague instinct of having a letter that he resumed walking, in that direction. First delivery to individual departments rarely occurred before noon, even later on Mondays because the weekend’s backlog of mail took longer to sort. If the trundling mail cart, pushed along carelessly by a work-study student, were to emerge from the station right now, he could intercept it. He wouldn’t set foot again in his department or its mail room today.