“Take a shower,” Gregor said.
Mark bunched the clothes into his hands and stood up. He swayed when he got to his feet. For one nervous moment, Gregor was afraid he was going to fall over. Then he righted himself and began to walk across the room to the bathroom. He walked, Gregor thought, like an old man. Father Tibor, who was at least middle-aged and who had led a very hard life in the Soviet union before coming to America, was more steady on his feet.
Mark went into the bathroom and shut the door. Gregor waited to hear the sound of the shower going on. When he did hear it, he went around the side of the bed to where the phone was and took it off the hook. It was a good thing that it was almost impossible to hear human speech over the sound of running water. He got out his address book and flipped through it. He did not want to call room service right off.
The phone was picked up on the other end by a secretary, which he had been expecting. People like Elizabeth Toliver did not answer their own phones, especially in the middle of a working day when they were in their offices.
“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “If Liz is available, I’d appreciate it very much if she’d talk to me. Tell her I’m up in Windsor, Massachusetts, and I’ve got something to tell her about Mark.”
The secretary made all the right noises, and Gregor sat back to wait until Liz picked up. He hoped Mark was going to take a very long shower.
Chapter Three
1
Barrett House was a girls’ dorm, and under most circumstances Marta Coelho found it unbearable. Today, with classes called off and an edict come down from on high that they were all supposed to spend the afternoon in their offices “making themselves available” to “any student in need,” she thought it was a kind of haven. Marta did not like being in her office when she had no papers to grade. She couldn’t sit there reading the way some of the other faculty did, and she was no good at inventing activities for herself to do during office hours. Some teachers just forced appointments, calling out one student or the other and insisting that he had to show up and be seen, or scheduling makeup quizzes and exams so that they coincided with the time spent sitting at their desks. Still other teachers had students who actually wanted to visit. Marta didn’t know what to think about that. She had always expected to be a good teacher. She was very competent in her field. Even stuck here in the suburbs of Boston in this joke of a job she had written two papers and submitted them to conferences for the summer. She tried to keep out of her mind the fact that institutions mattered. No matter how good her papers were, they would be judged wanting next to papers from faculty at colleges and universities and even more wanting next to those from faculty at good collegesand universities. Academia was a hierarchy. It was no wonder that so many academics were obsessed with gender, race, and especially class. They lived in the only caste society in America. The stratification was far worse on campuses and among them than it would ever be in America at large. Marta knew because she had come from the bottom of that particular pyramid in the real world, and yet she had been able to negotiate it. There was no way to negotiate this. Judgment came down from on high. You were “placed,” and depending on where you were placed, you knew what you were allowed to expect. The knowledge made her skin crawl, but she could never completely suppress it. It wasn’t fair. That was the problem. That was the kind of thing that kept going through her head. It wasn’t fair—as if she were a four-year-old with a problem on the playground instead of a grown-up with a Ph.D. and a job, a life, and a future. She had to keep telling herself that. She had a future, even if it wasn’t a future she much wanted to reach.
The problem was this: it was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Ridenour Library was deserted. The campus was not much livelier. Marta was sure that if she went over to the Student Center she would find people in the cafeteria and the computer rooms, but they were not the people she wanted to see. They were students, or the kind of faculty who liked to prowl student hangouts and scold the people they found about wasting their time. Marta often felt the urge to scold herself, but she held back. She didn’t like to get into face-to-face conflicts with kids whose parents could buy and sell the endowment. She didn’t like face-to-face conflicts with anyone. Today she was particularly worried about face-to-face conflicts, or anything else, with Mark DeAvecca because Mark DeAvecca was making her feel guilty. Of course she never wanted face-to-face anything with Mark. He made her so angry; she had a hard time not spitting at him. Now, though, he could genuinely claim to be distraught. Anybody would have been distraught to find what he’d found in his room. Marta thought she herself would have been completely out of her mind for weeks. Sometimes she evenimagined it: Michael with his eyes bulging and his tongue hanging out. That was what people had been saying on campus for days. Of course none of them had been there, except for Mark and a couple of the students on his dorm floor, and the faculty houseparents, and the police, and the administrators. Christ Marta thought, there must have been a crowd. It wasn’t any of those people who were telling stories about what Michael had looked like though. Mark wasn’t telling stories. Mark wasn’t talking to anybody at all; and Marta had heard, from more than one other faculty member, that he had even stopped the restless roaming around campus that had driven them all so crazy.