Look Closer

18 Simon

“You wanted to see me, Dean?” I say.

“Oh, Simon, good. Come, sit.” Today, Dean Comstock is wearing a purple bow tie, matching the law school’s color. I’ve never worn a bow tie in my life. I hate bow ties.

He could come to my office. It wouldn’t kill him. But it would alter the dynamic. As if he doesn’t already hold enough power over me.

“I hope you’ve had a chance to think about what we discussed.”

Yeah, we discussed that you wanted me to go away quietly and let your benefactor’s son, Reid Southern, waltz into the full professor slot without opposition.

“I promised you I’d consider it carefully,” I say. “I am.”

And yet, I still haven’t withdrawn my name for full professor. I haven’t completed my application, haven’t submitted my materials, but I still could. I still have a few weeks left before the deadline.

Why, exactly, I have not officially pulled the plug is anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s my passive-aggressive protest against the dean strong-arming me, making him wait to wonder whether I will submit my materials at the last minute and defy him.

Or maybe I really am going to submit my materials. Vicky has made her opinion clear, and she has a way of moving the needle with me.

The dean apparently had something different in mind. He figured I would formally withdraw my name immediately after our talk before summer break. Who knows, maybe he promised as much to Reid Southern’s daddy, Mr. Big Bucks. Which means I am making him look bad. Can’t have that, can we?

“I hope you understand that I had your best interests in mind, truly,” says he.

I nod my head, because if I tried to give a socially acceptable response, I’d probably vomit.

“Simon.” With that, he leans back in his big leather chair. “I’m sure you can understand that these days, the law school has to be exceptionally careful about questions of character among its faculty.”

Then why are you here, Dean?

“Of course,” I say.

“These days, as you know, we have to be exceptionally careful not only about a candidate’s character but about his . . . his past.”

I blink.

Then I do a slow burn, as he watches me.

“Why, we’ve all seen examples of people losing their positions of prominence these days for things that happened as long as . . . twelve, even fifteen years ago.”

Twelve years ago. Fifteen years ago. He didn’t pick those numbers at random.

You’ve been busy, Dean.

“Particularly when the choice of candidates is so close, such as between you and Reid,” he says. “The smallest thing could make the difference.”

He’s smiling. He’s actually enjoying himself.

“Of course, if the choice were obvious, as it might be if you were to apply next time,” he says with that condescending ponderous look, “it might not be necessary to dig so deeply. Why, I doubt anyone would so much as inquire what a young fellow was doing with himself some twelve years ago.”

Some twelve years ago. Some twelve years ago.

“But in a close competition like this one . . .” I say, trying to keep my voice steady.

He opens his hand. “People naturally look for tiebreakers, for a slight edge to one side. They dig more deeply. They look into the candidate’s entire history. Even things that the candidate forgot to mention back when he first applied to the school.”

My jaw clenching so tight it hurts. My teeth grinding together. Black spots clouding my vision.

“I was under no obligation to disclose that,” I whisper.

“Understood, Simon, understood,” he says. “And the presumption of innocence, as well. Nothing was ever proven, obviously. I just wonder . . . how things will go for you if that were to be publicly disclosed? The whole court fight and everything.”

Yes, the whole court fight and everything.

“Which is why I say again, I have only your best interests in mind when I suggest that now might not be the best time to apply for the position.”

My eyes slowly rise to his. To his credit, he doesn’t look away. He holds that smarmy smirk, but he doesn’t look away.

“And if I withdraw my application?” I say.

“Well, then, there’s no need for anyone to be concerned with ancient history,” he says. “Which, as far as I’m concerned, is exactly what it is.”

19 Vicky

I get back from the day shift at the shelter—buying groceries, a group counseling session, trying to fix the broken A/C window unit in the dorm upstairs—near six o’clock. I pull into the alley behind the house and park in the alley garage. I walk through the backyard, the tall shrubbery and its privacy, and through the rear door of the house to the alarm’s ding-dong and sultry electronic female voice, Back door.

I don’t hear Simon banging around. Not downstairs in the den or upstairs.

“Hello?” I call out.

I put down my bag and wander toward the stairs. “Simon?”

Nothing. The shower isn’t running. I’d hear the water.

“Simon Peter Dobias!”

Maybe he’s not home. He said he would be. Maybe he decided to go for a run. That boy and his running.

I walk up the stairs. “Hello-o,” I sing.

I hear something. Something above. I go into the hallway. The stairs have been pulled down from the ceiling. He’s on the rooftop deck.

I take the stairs up, open the storm door, and step onto the wooden deck. Simon is sitting on one of the lawn chairs he’s put up here, gripping a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“Hey,” I call out.

He turns, waves me over. “Didn’t hear you,” he says, but he’s slurring his words.

“You okay?”

I sit in the other lawn chair but turn to face him. Yep, glassy eyes. He’s thrown a few back, all right.

I take the bottle from his hand. “What happened?”

“‘What happened?’” He pushes himself out of the chair, opens his arms as if preaching to the masses. “What happened? What happened is he knows, that’s what happened.”

“Who knows what?”

“Dean Cumstain, as you call him.” He raises his chin and nods. “Come to think of it, I’m gonna call him that, too.”

“Knows what, Simon? What does the dean know?”

“He knows.” He turns and stumbles. He’s not close to the edge of the roof, but he’s starting to make me nervous.

“Simon—”

“Twelve years ago, I believe it was!” he calls out like a circus announcer, whirling around to his audience in all directions.

Twelve year—

Oh, no. Oh, shit.

“The year of 2010! I believe it involved a grand jury looking into the murder of a prominent—”

“Hey.” I grab him by both arms, put my forehead against his. “Keep your voice down. Someone might hear you.”

“I don’t care—”

“Yes, you do,” I hiss, holding his arms as he tries to break free. “Quit acting like an idiot and talk to me. Let me help.”

“I am so fucked,” Simon says, slumped over the wooden railing of the roof deck, head in his hands. “The dean owns me now.”

I run my hand up and down his back. “You aren’t fucked. We’re gonna figure this out.”

“There’s nothing to figure out. He’s got me by the short hairs.”

“What does he have? That court opinion didn’t name you—”

“Oh, come on, Vick.” He turns to me, ashen, shaken. “It might as well have. It would take anyone with a brain about five seconds to figure out that the court of appeals was talking about me in that opinion. ‘A male family member,’ they wrote. Another place, they said the ‘family member’ was twenty-four years old. How many family members did my father have, period, much less a man who was twenty-four in May of 2010? Mom was dead, I’m an only child, and so was my dad. He didn’t have a wife, any other children, any brothers or sisters, nieces or neph—”

“Okay, okay.” I take his hand. “I get it. If anyone read the opinion and knew the context, they’d know it was you.”

“And they’d ask me, anyway,” he says. “If this came to the attention of the faculty and the tenure committee, they’d just come out and ask me to confirm that the subject of that judicial opinion was me. I’d have to say yes.”

“You wouldn’t have to.”

He shoots me a look. “Even if I were willing to lie about it, which I’m not—nobody would believe me. Then I’d be a liar, too, if being a murder suspect weren’t enough.”

“Oh, stop with this ‘murder suspect’ crap,” I say. “He’s been dead twelve years, Simon. I don’t see anyone putting you in handcuffs.”

“Yeah, and guess why? Read the opinion. I got off on a technicality—that’s what everyone will think.”

“You’re overreacting. You think a bunch of law professors, of all people, wouldn’t appreciate the importance of a therapist/patient privilege?”

“Sure, they would. They’d probably agree with the court’s decision, too. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t murder my father.”

I have no answer for that. He’s right. I’m trying to rally him, but he’s right. This judicial opinion has been lurking out there all along, for the last twelve years, talking about a subpoena issued by a grand jury investigating the murder of Theodore Dobias at his home in St. Louis, Missouri, where he moved after Glory died and Simon disowned him. It didn’t name Simon specifically, but it described a twenty-four-year-old male who was a member of Ted’s family—and Simon’s right, only he could possibly qualify.

The St. Louis County district attorney was interested in a phone call Simon made to his psychotherapist in the early morning after the night Ted was found dead in his pool, stabbed to death. The grand jury subpoenaed his therapist to testify, but she refused to answer on the grounds of privilege. Simon hired a lawyer and fought the case up to the court of appeals, which ruled in Simon’s favor. Nobody got to ask the shrink what Simon said to her that morning.

The police probably still think Simon killed his father, but realized, at some point, they couldn’t prove it. And Simon’s right. It will look like he was never charged because of a legal technicality. If the tenure committee hears about this, Simon is finished.

Simon has wandered into the middle of the massive rooftop deck, hands on his hips, looking around. “My mom and dad would dance up here,” he says. “I ever tell you that?”

I walk up to him. “No.”

“Oh, yeah, they’d come up with a bottle of wine and a little boom box and play music and dance. Sometimes Mom would sing. She was an awful singer, but boy, she didn’t care.” He gestures to the chairs. “Sometimes we’d have a little picnic up here, and I’d sit over in the chair with my juice box and sandwich while they danced. You should’ve . . .”

His head drops. He rubs his neck.

“You should’ve seen how she looked at my dad. I remember thinking how great it must be to have someone look at you like that.”

I touch his arm.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m . . . I’ve had too much to drink.”

I put my arms around him, put my face against his chest. “Dance with me,” I whisper.

We rock back and forth. I’m no singer, probably no better than his mother, so we sway to the street sounds below, kids playing and shouting, music from passing vehicles, some help from birds chirping nearby. He presses me tightly against him. I can feel his heart pounding.

Simon deserves someone who will look at him the way his mother looked at his father. He deserves more than I can give him.

“I don’t know what it was, why she was so taken with him,” he says. “When you’re a kid, you don’t realize—I mean, they’re just your parents. In hindsight, I mean, she was twenty times the person he was in every way, but God, she just swooned over him. He was everything to her. And then when he—when he—”

“I know,” I whisper. “I know.”

“It just broke her. Y’know? It just . . . broke her.”

It broke Simon, too, as it does now, as he chokes back tears.

I rub his back. “It’s all gonna be okay,” I tell him. “Everything will turn out fine.”

“I wish I was so confident.”

“Let me help you with this problem,” I say. “Let me help you with the dean.”

“No.” Simon breaks away from me and wags his finger. “No. Thank you, but no.”

“Why not? You said it yourself. The dean owns you. If you buckle the moment he raises your past, he’ll know he always has this over you. You’ll never get out from under his thumb.”

“I don’t care. I’ll . . . go to another school or something.”

“But you’ll obsess about this the rest of your life, Simon. I know you. You’ll obsess about Dean Cumstain and Reid Southern like you obsess over that high school jock Mitchell Kitchens.”

He picks up the bottle of Jack and takes another pull, the wind carrying his bangs. “I don’t obsess about him.”

“Ha!”

He looks at me and starts to reply but thinks better of it. Simon has often joked that he has Irish Alzheimer’s—he only remembers the slights, the grudges.

“This is different,” he says. “This is my career. This is what I’ve chosen to do with my life. I don’t want this to be . . . I don’t know . . . tainted, I guess. I don’t want to get this position because I turned the tables on the dean and blackmailed him or something.”

“You won’t get the position unless the faculty votes you in, unless you get it on merit,” I say. “All you’re doing is making sure the dean doesn’t sabotage you.”

He shakes his head, long and slowly. “No, Vicky. I’m not doing it.”

Simon heads off to bed drunk and depressed, and past his bedtime, given how early he gets up in the morning. I tuck him in and head down the hall to the office.

I told Christian Newsome I’d show him the trust language that restricts how Simon spends his trust—how it cuts his wife off from any access to the money until ten years of marriage.

I pull up the PDF of the amendment to the Theodore Dobias Trust that gave Simon his money, but with the string attached. I fix on that language, that wonderful little surprise that Ted left Simon on his death:

(a) In the event SIMON gets married to an individual (“SPOUSE”), the proceeds of this trust may not be spent in any way by or for the benefit of SPOUSE for a period of ten (10) years following the first day of SIMON’s marriage to SPOUSE. This restriction includes, but is not limited to, the following: (1) expenditures on anything that would jointly benefit both SIMON and SPOUSE, including but not limited to . . .

What an asshole, to do that to Simon against his wishes. Give him the money or don’t. But to do what he did, to hog-tie Simon like that, to put his foot on the chest of Simon’s marriage before it even starts? Talk about emasculating.

And, of course, there’s this:

In and only in the event that SIMON and SPOUSE remain married for the period of ten (10) years, and no petition for dissolution of marriage has been filed by either SIMON or SPOUSE within that time, the restriction on the expenditure of proceeds in paragraph (a) above shall cease to operate.

If you stay married to Simon for ten years like a good girl, “spouse,” and if nobody’s even filed for divorce within those ten years, “spouse,” then you can put your greedy, grimy hands on the money. Because then you’ll have earned it, “spouse.”

Why so cynical, Teddy? Not every woman marries for money.

Only some do.

In the corner of the room, the printer starts grinding and spitting out the pages of the trust. My phone rings, a FaceTime call from my nieces, the M&Ms, Mariah and Macy. I throw in my AirPods so the noise won’t awaken Simon.

When I answer, it’s only Mariah, the thirteen-year-old, on the call. As best as I can make out through the grainy image, she doesn’t look happy. No one can perfect a frown better than a thirteen-year-old girl.

“Hi, pumpkin!” I say, trying to keep my voice down, closing the office door.

“It happened,” she says.

It— Oh, right.

“Okay. Well, okay. We knew this would be coming, right?”

She nods, but her face wrinkles into a grimace.

“It’s okay, Mariah, it’s normal, perfectly normal. You put a pad on?”

She nods her head, tears falling. It’s emotional enough, getting your period the first time; not having your mother around, and having all that come back, too, doubles the fun.

“Great! So listen, did you talk to your dad?”

“No!” she spits out.

“Well, honey, you can’t keep this from your father. He knows it’s coming, too.”

Yes, her father, my ex-brother-in-law, Adam, knows that adolescent girls get their period. And without a wife, without a woman in the home, he’s been terrified of this moment. Men have no clue about the female anatomy.

“When are you . . . when are you coming?” she manages.

“I’ll come this weekend, honey, okay? I’ll come Friday night and stay the weekend.”

“Okay,” she whines, “but when are you coming for good?”

Oh, that. “November,” I say. “Remember, I told you—”

“But November’s over two months away!”

I take a breath. November’s more than two months away, yes, but it feels like it’s coming quickly.

“Mariah, honey, I will be here anytime you want to call me between now and November. I’ll come see you this weekend. I’ll spend the whole weekend. We’ll get milkshakes at that place you like.”

“Barton’s.”

“Barton’s. It’ll be fun. Really,” I say, “November will be here before you know it.”

When I’m done with Mariah, I walk down the hallway to check on Simon. He’s peacefully asleep, having drunken dreams about grand juries and law school deans.

I’m leaving in November, no doubt. It’s best for everyone, Simon and me both, and those girls need me closer. But I can’t leave Simon like this. Not with his future at the law school twisting in the wind.

Because that’s exactly where things stand. If Simon lets the dean hold his past over him, he might as well pack up now and leave. And that would kill him. He could teach elsewhere, sure, but he loves Chicago, and he loves his law school.

He’ll always have that look he had on his face tonight. The look of defeat, resignation.

No. I won’t let that happen. I’m done asking for Simon’s permission.

This dean is mine.

I pick up my phone and dial Rambo’s number.

“Miss Vicky!” he calls out from his speakerphone. “Isn’t this past your bedtime?”

“I need your services again,” I say. “When can we meet?”

20 Simon

I don’t “obsess” about Mitchell Kitchens. I just think about him sometimes.

There was the “Mini-Me” nickname, of course. He’d pick the most embarrassing times to use it. Coming off the bus every morning in front of the others. In front of a hallway full of students. Sometimes he’d find me in the crowd at a school assembly. He even said it once in front of my mother, on a day she had to pick me up from the principal’s office because I was sick, and we passed through the gym while Mitchell was working out with the other wrestlers on a mat. (The gym teacher was the wrestling coach, so while everyone else had a regular phys-ed curriculum, the wrestlers all had the same gym class and they just used it as a regular wrestling practice in addition to the one after school.)

Anyway, my mother and I were passing through the gym, and there’s Mitchell calling out, “It’s Mini-Me! Hey, Mini-Me!” I didn’t respond. I knew what that usually meant—he’d yell louder and keep at it until I acknowledged him, until he’d thoroughly humiliated me. But I figured that with my mother standing there, he’d back down. He didn’t.

My mother stopped on a dime and turned in his direction. She didn’t speak. I didn’t even see the look on her face, but I could imagine it. Knowing my mother and her wicked intellect and verbal skills, she probably had a dozen comments at the ready that would have left a Neanderthal like Mitchell mute. But she just stared him down, and then we kept walking.

She never brought it up. She must have known how humiliating it was, and she probably decided that she would leave it to me to raise it. I never did.

I wish it had stopped at the nickname. That was bad enough. But it didn’t stop there.

Not pleasant memories. So it’s a good thing I don’t obsess about him.

Anshu is just arriving at his office down the hall from mine, just fitting his key into the door, when I’m heading to my eight o’clock class.

“Professor Bindra,” I say. “You’re in early.”

“Meetings, meetings, and more meetings,” he says. “The perks of being a full professor. Hey, you should apply to be one! It’s not too late!”

“Don’t start.”

Anshu doesn’t know the full story. He knows the dean asked me to hold off and let Reid Southern apply without opposition. He doesn’t know about my second visit with the dean and the not-so-veiled threats. And he never will. That’s the beauty of what the dean did to me—he knows I can’t reveal it without revealing the story behind it.

I’m lucky the story didn’t come out at the time up here in Chicago. It was the locale, I think, that kept it out of the Chicago media. By the time he was murdered, my father hadn’t been a lawyer in Chicago for several years; he was then practicing in downstate Madison County, where asbestos litigation made a lot of lawyers rich and a lot of companies bankrupt, and living across the border in St. Louis. So the murder, investigation, and court fight happened in a different state altogether.

When the police up here searched my house, I was sure everything would spill out to the newspapers. But it didn’t. What spared me, oddly enough, was road construction on my block. The two squad cars and the forensics team truck had to park in the alley behind my house instead of out front. Other than my neighbors the Dearborns, who weren’t in town at the time, nobody could see the cops coming and going into the back entrance of my house. The Grace Park Police assisted on the search, but they didn’t leak to the press. A few of my neighbors probably wondered what the hell was going on, but if they did, nobody said anything to me. I was hardly around, anyway, commuting every day to school.

I kept waiting for some headline. Police Raid Home of Murder Victim’s Son. Grace Park Man Probed in St. Louis Murder. Something like that. But it never happened. For months, years, I held my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop and all of this to be exposed. When they tried to talk to Dr. McMorrow about our conversation the morning after my father’s murder, and I had to fight up to the Missouri Court of Appeals to keep that conversation confidential, I was certain this would all become news. But it never did. It did in St. Louis, but never up in Chicago.

I never disclosed it when I applied to be a professor. Why should I? What was there to disclose? I was kinda, sorta a suspect in a murder, but nothing came of it?

Well, I was more than kinda, sorta a suspect. But nothing ever came of it.

I’m not sure what the police expected to find in the search of my home. Did they think that a murderer would be dumb enough to leave a bunch of evidence lying around his house?

It was almost insulting.

“Do you really think, if I was going to kill my father,” I said to them, the cops, back then, when they hauled me down to St. Louis for questioning, “that I would pick the night before my last final exam in college to do it? What, I’d drive all the way from Grace Park down to St. Louis, stab him in the stomach, then drive another six hours back up, basically get no sleep, then take my last final exam at eight in the morning? What kind of sense would that make?”

“It wouldn’t,” said the cop taking the lead on the case, a detective named Rick Gully. “Which is why it’s the perfect alibi.”

It was hard not to smile.

I got an A on that final, by the way.

“Thank you, Maria,” I say, clapping my hands once. “So the majority held that the police can root through your garbage and obtain evidence of a crime against you without first obtaining a warrant. What did Justice Brennan have to say about that? Anyone besides Maria, who has admirably shouldered the burden so far?”

I dislike the Socratic method, calling on students and grilling them mercilessly. I hated the stress in law school, the anticipation, the dread as you sat in the class and the law professor looked up and down the roll call for the student who’d be put under the laser heat that hour.

Make no mistake, once they volunteer, I’ll work them over. They know that. But there are ways to do it that promote critical examination and debate, that hone and sharpen their focus, and ways that do not. Fear, in my mind, does not.

“Brad,” I say, when he raises his hand.

“Justice Brennan disagreed,” he says.

“Yes, Brad, that would be the very definition of a dissent, I believe, but thank you for that reminder. Could I trouble you to elaborate, kind sir?” I bow.

“He said that when people seal up their garbage, they expect it to remain private. We throw things out because we have to throw things out, but we don’t expect that someone will open it up and go through it.”

“But we expect garbage collectors to take it,” I say. “Do we not?”

“We expect them to take our trash and toss it in some landfill,” he says. “Not take it and open it and look through it.”

“But isn’t putting your trash out on the curb the very definition of abandoning your possessory interest in it? Aren’t you saying to the world, I don’t want this stuff anymore?”

“I mean, I guess so.”

“So once you’ve abandoned your property, why do you have the right to expect anything whatsoever from it? Why do you have the right to object to what happens to it?”

There are many answers to that question, many distinctions and subtleties—the lifeblood of the law, what makes it so glorious. The most important part of law school isn’t the ABCs but learning how to think, how to find those distinctions, how to advocate for your position, how to highlight your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. How to fight with passion and reason.

After my early class, I walk down from the law school to the Chicago Title & Trust Building and make it there by ten. Once in the lobby with my Starbucks, I insert the SIM card and power on my green phone. I text:

She replies quickly:

It’s become her standard start. My response:

She replies:

That brings a smile to my face. I’m not that tall, my hair is not all that dark, and “handsome” is overstated, but that’s good. I’m even willing to overlook that she didn’t use the Oxford comma. My phone vibrates again:

Nice of her to say so. But no, I’m strange. My phone vibrates again:

I breathe out a sigh. At least one thing’s going right in my life.

21

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

This is a joyous, thrilling ride, but the end is a cliff. Is this what it feels like to be addicted to a drug, to ingest something because nothing in the present is so important as the feeling that pill or powder gives you, even while you know that the course you’re on will lead to destruction? You do it anyway, because you No, it’s not enough to say that “you do it anyway”—you not only do it, but you want nothing more than to do it, you embrace self-demolition over all else. Does that mean, perhaps, that was the point of it all along, the self-destruction, but you can’t be honest enough with yourself to admit it, so you wrap it up in something superficially and temporarily pleasurable like the high from a pill?

I mean, if the point really is self-destruction, why not save everyone the time and just find a knife or a gun and end it all? You don’t do that, do you? No, because it’s not the end you want but the suffering, the pain, the decline, the growing ruin as your body breaks down or your bank account empties or you fail those you love, you want to see yourself slowly degrade. You want to punish yourself.

Is that what I’m doing with you? Are you my addiction, Lauren? Am I punishing myself, allowing myself to get wrapped up in you again and knowing that you’ll just leave me again? Am I barreling toward a cliff?

Sometimes I feel that way, when I’m lying in bed at night, thinking about what we’re doing and where we’re headed, plagued with this sense of disbelief that anything like this could be real. I question your love. I question your commitment. I convince myself that you will wake up one day, ask yourself what is so great about me, and not like the answer.

If that happens, I don’t know what I’ll do. Nothing else in my life makes sense right now but you.