Obedience (5 page)

Elizabeth began calling Dennis her buddy. There was a little sexual tension there, he had to admit, but it was fleeting. It would swell up, unannounced, and then taper off for the rest of the afternoon. Dennis would wonder, later, if he had simply imagined it.

It wasn’t until his third or fourth afternoon in the library that he learned who she was. And it happened by accident.

“Mrs. Orman,” a reference librarian whispered, sticking her head into the reading room where Dennis and Elizabeth were sitting. “Telephone for you.”

“Shit. Sorry,” Elizabeth said. “I have to take this.”

Orman, Dennis thought. Of course. Of course. That’s why she was given so much respect in the library. Why everyone smiled at her, stepped to the side for her, asked her if she need anything. She was the goddamn old man’s wife.

When she returned, he noticed her wedding ring for the first time.

“So,” she said. Was there shame in her face?

“So,” Dennis said. “Elizabeth Orman.”

She said nothing.

“I didn’t-” he began.

“I should have told you,” she said softly.

He wanted to say, Of course not, Elizabeth. I just would think that would be one of the first things you’d mention, you know, let it slip out that you were the wife of the most powerful man on campus. But he said none of those things. What he said was, “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

That stung her. She turned her face away from him, toward the window. She inhaled loudly, gathering herself.

“As a feminist,” she said, “that’s not how I announce myself. Do you walk around campus saying, ‘Hello, I’m Dennis Flaherty, Savannah’s beau’?”

Dennis thought it was interesting how she knew about Savannah Kleppers though he had never spoken about her. Very interesting.

Dennis stayed in DeLane over the summer and interned for a Republican congressman in Cale. He and Elizabeth met only occasionally for the next few months, but even on the occasions they did meet, Dennis had to admit that something was different. Their occasional sexual tension had disappeared altogether, and their conversations were much more antiseptic. She was a completely different person around him now that he knew who she was. Or, more specifically, now that he knew who her husband was.

Since the beginning of September, things had begun to falter badly. She had been distant, preoccupied. Ashamed, probably. The last time he had gone to the library, she hadn’t been there. He caught her in the hallway of the Gray Brick Building one day and asked, “Are you mad at me?”

“Of course not,” she’d scoffed, and pulled away from him. Then she disappeared down the stairwell.

But there clearly
was
anger in her voice. Dennis was pretty sure, however, that it was not anger at him, but at herself. For she had been deceiving him for those first few meetings, the ones that really counted in Dennis’s mind, and she knew it. She knew it and she felt bad about it.

The fund-raiser was a black-tie affair the Taus were putting on for the American Cancer Society. It was held in Carnegie Hall, Winchester’s administrative building and the most historic structure on campus. Usually Dennis was able to make it through, smile and grunt while the old men told their stories, but tonight he was feeling particularly out of place. He wanted to leave, but where was he supposed to go? What was he supposed to do? Standing there in Carnegie he pondered these things, wondered if he should just leave Winchester altogether. Maybe transfer to Temple, be closer to his father. Maybe he should…

But then he saw Elizabeth across the room. She was looking at him the way she had so many times across the table in the library: passively, almost quizzically, as if there was something about him she couldn’t figure out. She walked onto the dance floor. She smiled and he smiled back, the only gesture that he could think to use. It was a forced smile, almost crooked. Then they were dancing to something, some sort of slow waltz, and Elizabeth was saying, “Dennis, I want to have sex with you.”

“Yes,” he said stupidly. Like a boy.

“I’m sorry for what happened. I should have told you. But I thought you would get-scared.”

“Scared?”

“Of Ed. Of getting caught with me. Of what would happen if we were discovered.”

“Elizabeth, we were just talking. It was nothing. It was Alfred Adler and the eye.”

“Stop it, Dennis. You know it was more than that.”

“Know?” he choked. His heart was beating fast, thrumming in his chest. His face was hot, and he felt cold sweat on his chest.

“You know you want to fuck me.”

“No,” he lied. “Absolutely not.”

She was sulking now. He had felt her body stiffen, lilt away from him.

“Why haven’t you been there? In the library the last two weeks.”

“I’ve been busy, Dennis. It’s not only you. I have work, too. I’m writing my dissertation, remember?”

Over her shoulder, he saw the man staring at him. The inimitable Dean Orman: thirtysome years older than his wife, professor emeritus at Winchester. Orman was one of the most esteemed members of the psychology faculty, best known for his riveting lectures, even though he fumbled for words now and then and forgot his threads and themes. He had studied with Stanley Milgram at Yale in the 1960s, and word was that he had begun a book about Milgram that would redefine the man’s legacy.

The waltz finally ended, and Dennis broke from the woman’s hold and returned to the other side of the room, where the other Taus were waiting. “You going to screw her or not?” asked Jeremy Price. Price was wearing tuxedo pants and a T-shirt that was air-brushed with a vest, cummerbund, and bow tie.

Dennis said nothing. He wondered how much Price had heard, if he’d been listening in to their conversation.

“Here’s what you do,” Price said. He got close to Dennis, turned his back on the dance floor, pulled the other boy up by the lapels. “You get her alone and you just
ravish
her. Pound her like a jackhammer. Make it good for you and
horrible
for her. Ha! Pants at your ankles. Buttons skittering across the floor. Make her
hurt.”

“Dennis?”

Dean Orman. He was standing just behind Price, over the boy’s shoulder. Dennis had no idea how long the man had been there. “Huh…hello, Dr. Orman,” he said. He had met Orman only two or three times before, at similar fund-raisers, and for some reason was always nervous in the old man’s presence. Orman knew Dennis’s father, had said once of the man that he was a “pioneer in his field.” Dennis felt that the only reason Orman approved the use of Carnegie for the Taus was because of his father.

“It’s about time for us to be going.”

“Of course,” Dennis managed. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

“No,” the dean began. It was as if he wanted to say something more but could not. Price had slunk back into a dark corner somewhere, leaving Dennis alone with the old man.

The dean had been at Winchester since the beginning, when the school was split in half. He was the first provost of the school. Once, in the late seventies, he had coached its tennis team to a conference championship. He had seen the campus burn and had lived through six different presidents. It was said that any historical discussion of Winchester began and ended with Dean Orman.

But his legend was cemented with the marriage to the wife who was nearly half his age, a graduate student at Winchester he had met on a trip to Morocco. Dennis had heard the story, of course, but he had never heard the woman’s name. And now he was caught in something, trapped in this game with Elizabeth. And it
was
a game, Dennis knew that. Why else would she have hidden her ring? Why else would she have given him only her first name? She was seeing how far she could take him, hoping he would cross a line into a place that he couldn’t come back from.

Tonight, that line had been crossed.

“What classes are you taking this quarter?” the dean asked. It was just something to say, just filler. Another waltz had begun, and Dennis could see Elizabeth dancing with someone else. But she was looking at him.

“Economics and Finance. Philosophy and the Western World with Douglas. And Logic and Reasoning.”

“Logic and Reasoning,” said the dean. “Under whom?”

“Williams.”

Something changed in the dean’s eyes, then. He focused on Dennis more perfectly, let his scotch glass fall to his side. He might have even taken a step forward, closed the gap between them, but Dennis could not be sure.

“How’s that going?” he asked. His voice had changed timbre, become more bearing. Dennis realized he was under some kind of spotlight now, suddenly in a sort of interrogation.

“It’s…interesting,” he offered.

“Williams,” the dean mused, sounding as if he were thinking to himself now. “Williams is a funny character. I remember the terrible fracas over that book of his. All that mess.”

Dennis wanted to hear more. In fact, he badly wanted to hear more, not only because it was taking his mind off Elizabeth but also because he was interested in Williams and his strange class. It was so…

Elizabeth was suddenly there, touching her husband’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Ed,” she said curtly, glancing at Dennis. Dennis couldn’t read her look.

“Dennis, I’ll be seeing you,” the dean said. He had lost his train of thought, which was usual for the dean. Some assumed he had the early signs of dementia; most days he would lock himself away in Carnegie and take no visitors.

It wasn’t until much later, back in the Tau house with dawn spreading out across the sky and falling sharply on Up Campus, that Dennis remembered what Dean Orman had said about Professor Williams. Even though it was early in the morning and he hadn’t rested in nearly twenty-four hours, Dennis could not get to sleep no matter how hard he tried.

By Sunday, Mary had finally gotten her mind off Professor Williams and Polly. She and Summer McCoy had gone shopping at the Watermill Mall, and out to eat at an Italian place called Adige. As Summer dropped off Mary at her dorm late in the evening, logic class, and more specifically Professor Williams, was the furthest thing from Mary’s mind.

But now, two hours later, she was thinking about him again. What was he doing right now, for instance. He was so…mysterious. No office hours. No bio on the website. It was almost as if he, like Polly, needed a set of clues to go with him. Mary opened Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which she was reading for her only other class that semester, Postmodern Lit and the New Existentialism, which she hated. Mary was taking what the students called a “walk term,” which meant you took the minimum six hours.
Walk
came from the idea that with all your given leisure time, you might walk the campus grounds as Winchester’s founders had surely done, learning deep and profound lessons from nature. (Mary had noticed that most students, when they were on their walk terms, found their lessons through drinking beer and downloading music illegally.)

Mary lay down on her bed and propped Auster on her knees, trying to take her thoughts off Polly and her creator. Yet the novel’s words wouldn’t make sense. She would read a sentence and stop, float off somewhere, imagine Williams. She imagined him at home, walking barefoot across the wood floor in his pajamas, staring out a back window, drinking coffee from a cracked mug. She admitted it: she was fascinated by him. So curious, how he had refused to give them anything substantial to work with, how he had led them into those questions. There was something dangerous about it-and it was that danger, that adventure, that had been missing from her experience at Winchester since she and Dennis had broken up.

And this is what Polly’s disappearance is, Williams had said,
an intricate puzzle.

Polly. Williams had tried to make her more real by presenting those weird photographs in class. Mary imagined that transparent Polly standing on the grass, smiling playfully in her summer dress, holding out her arm to block the camera. Where was that grass? Who was the girl, the real girl in the picture? Someone Professor Williams knew? His daughter? And the red-eyed Mike. Mary thought she recognized that couch from somewhere on campus, but she couldn’t place it. Was “Mike” a student here? Had Professor Williams taken these photos himself and not told his subjects what they were for?

Mary went to the computer and ran a search. She typed in “Professor L. Williams” and got more than a thousand hits. There were Professor L. Williamses at Southern Oregon University, at DePaul, at East Carolina, at Bard College. She narrowed the search: “Professor L. Williams at Winchester University.” Forty hits. She got his bio again, that useless and broken link. She found a couple of program newsletters where he was mentioned as “Dr. Williams.”

It was getting late, past 10:00 p.m. now. Mary had an early class on Monday, and she knew that if she didn’t get to bed soon she would regret it in the morning. She browsed through a few more links, still only coming up with vague references to Williams by his title and not his name. She needed his name. She didn’t know why, but she needed it. She was certain it would help her with Polly’s case somehow.

On the third page of results, she found what she was looking for.

It was a press release for an article he had written in 1998. The article was called “The Components of Crime,” and the author was Leonard Williams.

Leonard. Mary said it aloud, registered the taste of it in her mouth. It almost made her laugh. Professor Williams was definitely no Leonard, yet there it was on her screen. Undeniable fact. If you would have given her a thousand guesses, Leonard would not have been one of them.

She returned to Google and searched it in full: “Professor Leonard Williams at Winchester University.”

Forty-five hits this time, and her heart nearly stopped when she read the title of the first result: “Distinguished Winchester Professor Accused of Plagiarism.”