The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (27 page)

“I've gotta go,” says Andrea. She fires the gun, watches as a stunned Ben presses a hand to a red leak that has exploded in his chest, then another in his stomach. “Daddy's waiting.”

The Creative Writing Murders

EDMUND WHITE

I
NEVER GO
anywhere without my iPod, which is usually rattling my teeth and every bone in my face. Today I'm listening to great rage-filled yelps by Vivaldi, a soprano biting off words over rapid, stormy, descending passages played by massed violins. The whole thing's called “In Furore Lustissimae Irae,” which I couldn't translate, though I did two years of high school Latin in Catholic school two decades ago and of course I speak Spanish. “In a fury of lusty—
very
lusty—anger?” Could it possibly mean that?

That captures my mood exactly. The two days a week I come out to Wilford College make me feel invisible and usually depressed. My undergrads seem profoundly incurious about me as a person, though a few of the senior boys check out my breasts, but only covertly, never brazenly. The boys and girls are all hooking up with each other, even if no one ever
courts
anyone else. That must be why they drink so much. Their only seduction method is to fall in a big sodden pile every Saturday and thrash around until they pair off,
in furore lustissimae irae
.

Otherwise the students are all obsessed by their homework and their infernal activities, because everyone here is expected to fence or row and work in a community literacy project and write editorials about Africa or Asia for the Will, as they call the weekly student paper. Everyone is busy and most of them seem wracked by obsessive-compulsive disorders. Nancy wrote a story about a kid who counts all the letters of all the words
spoken
in her presence.

web woof sing the song crazy brats prats rats kill them little fuckers oh baby you know you likah freaks

The poor crazed kid's brain was just one quiet adding machine. When I asked on a sudden whim, “How many other people in this room do this? Count letters?” four of the twelve students in the workshop raised their hands. Oh, yeah, and Kim, seeing the others, at last timidly raised her hand, too.

I didn't say anything. Since I'm the only Hispanic woman in the department my elderly white colleagues all prize me as if I were the last extant panda in a North American zoo. They would probably like me just as much if I were neurotic and resentful or frequently absent or if I insisted on organizing three-day Chicano festivals, but I'm not like that, which makes them even more grateful. I'm cheerful and prompt and I've got a book that Copper Canyon has promised to publish if I can just finish two more stories.

I went to Emory and then I was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. There was a missing year somewhere in there when things got a bit hairy, but hey, we're all artists, right, and sort of crazy. I had a leggy blonde roommate who moved out and created a scandal (I had to quiet her down). But otherwise my profile is impeccable and everyone here, I'm sure, is thrilled to have a polite, hardworking minority instructor on the staff. I organize the entire reading series, I introduce most of the speakers, arrange for their limos to bring them out from the city, pay them their lavish speaker's fee, and escort them to dinner in one or another of the dire ethnic restaurants in the vicinity. I can't help laughing when I think someone (Bert?) actually made the mistake of inviting Jhumpa Lahiri to the local Indian slop shop, Curry in a Hurry. I'm sure she's

you fuckers so you think you can oh yeah pretty girl get you in those garters fuckin fruit

told everyone on the East Coast that Wilford treated her to the most insulting repast of her life.

I can smile my way through tangled departmental politics, through constant student demands on my time, through the two-hour commute in a dirty, smelly train, through the tedious readings in a nearly empty hall that resembles a hot, murky, sleep-inducing aquarium, a tank where no one has changed the water in a year. It even
smells
like stagnant chlorine buildup. I just smile my way through dutiful perusals of six student stories a week that almost always repel the attention with Teflon efficiency—I can smile my way through all this because my real emotions, furious and frustrated, are being enunciated for me by Vivaldi. My iPod is like a neck gland that collects all the venom in the body. If I'm close to snapping I just listen to Cecilia Bartoli stuttering and shrieking her way through Vivaldi's
Opera Proibita
. That does the trick.

Of course I don't know why I bother to be cheerful and hardworking (strangely enough, the student evaluations never mention my cheer). They pay me only $32,500 a year and after all the deductions for taxes and the health plan and social security I take home just seventeen hundred dollars a month. My rent is seven hundred dollars a month and my train tickets are $120 and I'm still paying off that old credit card debt to the tune of two hundred a month. My poor mother is just barely squeaking by on her nurse's aid salary; it's a miracle she can stuff a ten-dollar bill in an envelope every month or two and send it to me with one of those stupid kitten cards she likes. Of course she does own her house in El Paso, which I'll inherit someday and sell for a hundred grand, big whoopty-doo. Sometimes I hate my colleagues, such spoiled brats. My mother always wants to tell me stories about her Mexican neighbors but I never let her.

My boss, an enormously fat dyed-blonde elderly gay man who writes genuinely depraved novels about drugged, homeless queers, is a tricky one. Bert. His books (at least the one I dipped into until, slightly nauseated, I had to put it down) might make you think he's a wild thing but in fact he's prissy and pedantic and a real stickler for the rules. Like most old queers he wants a woman to be a “lady,” and I lay it on thick—if I didn't restrain myself I might even bob a curtsy.

You'll look a lady my pretty with this thing up your ass and filthy old fucker why the hell are you shitting shitty, pretty

You can just see he thinks he's adorable and avuncular, his cataract-clouded eyes looking feebly out from over his half-moon glasses, but in fact he's cagey, an accomplished meddler, a born traitor. He doesn't have a “partner,” but occasionally he'll bring a twenty-year-old studly beauty to a campus function just to wow everyone—though I'm the only one who can see right away that it's just a hustler, uneducated, uninterested, and flipping out his cell phone every minute to message his next customer. Strictly eye candy. Of course I'm the only person at Wilford from the ghetto …

The tenured faculty teaching writing at Wilford is dim and ancient and “famous.” I always hang those quotes around their “fame” since no average person has ever heard of them despite their membership in the American Academy and their Guggenheims and National Endowment fellowships. They all have prestigious publishers like Knopf and FSG but they only lay one slim volume once a decade and it usually hatches right on top of the remainder pile.

I'm not better. In the last three years I've grunted out maybe five pages, two of which I've torn up and the other three I've rewritten fifty times. Of course I tell Crafty Bert the Boss that at last I'm in the home stretch and that it's Chicano all the way. I know he wants me to succeed since he's too lazy to seek out another minority woman, but he can't keep me after next year if I don't have a book, at least one scheduled for publication. Unless he made an exception. Unless he went to the president. Gave me the Woolcraft Award for distinguished classroom performance. But he'd never do that for me, a mere woman, only for a cute junior guy. Maybe if I really did write stories about Chicanos, but for me that Mexi stuff has about as much flavor as week-old tacos. I prefer my stories about clean athletic blonde women.

I have a little office without a window I share with two other adjuncts, neither of them a threat. One is Corbin, a young, handsome, but thickening white boy from Kentucky who writes poems (he's published a grand total of nine in various little magazines over the last seven years) and sings in a garage band. The resident playwright, Edgar, seems to have a crush on little Corbin; he's always hanging around during Corbin's office hours and smiling foolishly and raking his long white beard with his pale fingers and talking about Bob Dylan, as if that proves his interest in pop culture.

The other adjunct in my office is Adam, a balding Englishman (two novels) whose father owned a London tabloid. He's loaded but keeps his hand in to get the medical benefits for his wife and three children. He lives in Wilmington, a horrendous commute. He flits in and out for his one class a week and gets good student evaluations for some reason. No one dislikes him but then again no one ever exactly
remembers
him—and anyway both my officemates are too white and male to be tenured.

It seems everyone at Wilford has family money except me. There's Emily, a gaunt seventy-five-year-old poetess from the Philadelphia Main Line who won a Pulitzer in 1977 for her collected poems,
Elements
, fiendishly complicated forms like sestinas and double rondeaux about water and air and fire. Although she says she's a socialist, her father strip-mined coal in Appalachia (which she never, ever mentions). That's where her money comes from. She's anorexic and proud of it; we once had lunch and she said with a reproachful look, “We'll each have three lettuce leaves.” It's true I've been getting fatter and fatter, what with my midnight Ambien eating sprees.

Edgar, our prize-winning playwright with the hearing aid, created a stir in the sixties with a verse drama about Abraham and Isaac set in modern Scranton. He's a closeted gay and derides what he calls Bert's “flamboyance.” He has that billy-goat white beard and red-rimmed eyes and a portly partner who puts up store-bought cherries every fall in two-hundred-proof eau-de-vie and hands out the jars two months later as alcoholic Christmas presents. I think Edgar's lover played Isaac in the unsuccessful 1975 revival. Edgar's the one who hovers over Corby and talks about Dylan and snaps his fingers, as translucent as church tapers.

Our staff is so old that in a general department meeting they voted down screenwriting as too radical for such an august institution (forgetting that Wilford was just a girls' finishing school, good only for a laugh until 1972 when it went coed and got serious). The one holdover from that period is a snowy-haired New England gentleman, Alfred, who used to teach the girls to appreciate Keats and now teaches something called “life writing” in which the students are encouraged to tell all about their amateurish sex routs and predictably dysfunctional families. Alfred tells them all they're courageous and then at faculty lunches regales us with their confessions. He has a stageworthy way of slapping his knee and “guffawing,” which is strangely different from a laugh. He's famous for his lovely manners, which means he always holds your hand in both of his, looks you deeply in the eye, and says, “We must get together very, very soon.” I always want to snap back, “We're together right now. What was it you wanted to talk about?”

The first murder didn't surprise me. Or rather it seemed so unreal I scarcely reacted except to whisper, “Oh my God, it's happened,” which I immediately regretted.

I was in my Boro Park apartment, which I share with two other women. Neither of them was there—it was a Tuesday at noon and so disgracefully late to be awakening that I sang scales before answering to chase the sleep out of my voice. I suppose I was a little perky by the time I picked up. (I must be the last person who doesn't have a mobile—or what's it called? A “cell” phone?) The phone almost never rings. I don't have that many local friends and those I do e-mail me. I suppose we've all decided it's more polite than telephoning.

So I was half expecting a pollster or bill collector when I heard from Edgar, the closeted playwright, that our boss, Bert, had been hanged while wearing a girdle and makeup.

“What?” I shrieked, longing for a cigarette though I no longer smoke. “What did you just say?”

Edgar seemed to resent my alarm. I suppose he must have called me last, since I was the only one, he must have figured, who'd make a “fuss.” “This is hard on all of us, Manuela, as you can imagine.” He was clearly registering a reproach.

“But did you say Bert was hanged?”

“Yes,” Edgar sighed, then added, as if I was a bit stupid, “He's dead.”

I decided to behave more coldly—like an Anglo. “Murdered?” I asked, neither too callous nor too crisp, I hoped.

He hesitated, almost as if my question were a bit vulgar. “It's not clear.” He swallowed. “You know there's something called autoerotic strangulation?”

I couldn't believe this was old ofay Edgar talking. “You mean like when the dude gets hard—”

“Yes,” he said, cutting me off.

“I read about that in
Naked Lunch,”
I said. My literary reference checkmated him.

That night I had another call, this time from Alfred, the life-writing prof. Maybe because of his experiences with salacious collegiate confession, he went into a whole lot of detail. He went on and on, letting himself enjoy the lurid stories until he'd catch himself and remember to be solemn. “After all,” he'd say, more to himself than to me, “we
are
talking about the death of a colleague.”

“Do you think he was murdered?”

“I don't.” I could hear the loud dry snap of ice being twisted out of a plastic tray. “I think … ” first audible sip, “I think he just got a little carried away. After all, as Edgar points out, he was pretty much
in your face
, as the kids say.”