The Lesson of Her Death (8 page)

She got the idea from a made-for-TV movie.

It had been a film about a thirteen-year-old girl, and her mother and stepfather
hated
her. Once, they locked her in the house while they went away to gamble and the girl ran away from home by jumping out a window then grabbing onto a freight train that went to New York City.

Sarah shut off the water running in the bathtub, which though it
was
filled with steamy water and fragrant violet bubble bath did not—as she had told her mother—contain her. She had run upstairs and taken a fast shower then dressed quickly. Now, wearing a T-shirt, overalls, Nikes and a nylon windbreaker—her traveling clothes—she listened to her mother fixing dinner downstairs.

In the film, when the girl ended up in New York she lived in the alley and had to eat bread somebody had thrown out and she smoked a cigarette and just before this big guy was going to take her up into his apartment and do something to her Sarah didn’t know what, the girl’s mom showed up and hugged her and brought her home and dumped the stepfather. And they showed an 800 number you could call if you knew any runaways.

What a stupid movie—about as real and interesting as a cereal commercial. But it solved a big problem for Sarah because it showed her how to save all of the wizard’s money and still get to Chicago.

She was thinking of the railroad train.

There were no railroads in New Lebanon. But there
was
a truck. It was a big one that looked sort of like a train and it passed the house every afternoon. The truck had a platform on the back that she thought she could hold on to, and it went past the house real slow. She could catch the truck easily and then climb onto the back and sit there. When he stopped for the night she could ask the driver where to find another truck going to Chicago.

Sarah packed her Barbie backpack. She took Mr. Jupiter her shooting star bank, pairs of Levi’s and sweatshirts and socks and underpants, her toothbrush and toothpaste, and a skirt and a blouse, her Walkman and a dozen books on tape. Of course Redford T. Redford the world’s smartest bear would be traveling with her. And she took some things from her mother’s dresser. Lipstick, mascara, fingernail polish and panty hose.

It was now five-thirty. The truck usually went past the house about six. Sarah walked around her room. She suddenly realized she’d miss her father. She started to cry. She’d miss her brother some. She thought she’d miss her mother but she wasn’t sure. Then she thought of the wizard telling her, “I’ll look out for you,” and she thought about school.

Sarah stopped crying.

She lifted the window, which opened onto the backyard of their house. She tossed the backpack out, hearing the coins in Mr. Jupiter ring loudly. She climbed out, hanging from the ledge, her cheek pressed hard against the yellow siding, then she let go and dropped the few feet to the soft ground.

W
hen he hung up the phone Brian Okun recognized a contradiction that would have made a tidy little philosophical riddle. As the black receiver started downward he thought,
He’s got no right to talk to me that way
. As it settled in its cradle:
He’s got every right to talk to me that way
.

Okun was lanky as a cowboy and his face was obscured by the strands of black beard that weaseled unevenly out of his wan skin. Inky Brillo hair hung over his ears like a floppy beret. He sat in his tiny cubicle overlooking the quad, his tensed hand still clutching the telephone, and developed his thought:
He has no right because as a human being I’m entitled to a mutual measure of respect and dignity. John Locke. He has every right because he’s in charge and he can do what he fucking well pleases. Niccoló Machiavelli cum Brian Okun
.

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.