Consequences (3 page)

Then, about to be overwhelmed by his own helplessness, he threw the last of his strength into the battle, was reduced to clinging to a root with the tips of his fingers, and a loud tearing sound accompanied the toppling of the girl's body into the void.

“Hello?” a voice above his head cried out. “Hello there?”

He froze; his heart stopped beating.

“Hello?” said the voice again. “Anybody there? Everything all right?”

He pressed himself into the shadows against the side, bit his lip. Had to think fast. Make the right choice.

“Hey! Can you hear me? You all right?”

Suddenly he understood what he was dealing with. To keep hiding wouldn't do any good. This was the type of person who'd force a blind man to be helped across the street and was always mixed up with something that had nothing to do with him. Most of the leftie professors were cut from the same mold.

“A.O.K. It's all good,” he answered, emerging into the light.

“You sure?”

R
ichard Olso was head of
the literature department, and he was all that was missing: Richard Olso getting mixed up in this affair, even a little. The last thing in the world you'd want.

Had he seen something? Noticed anything?

“Marc? What are you up to down in that hole, old man? What the hell are you doing?”

The guy took his time studying you with those suspicious eyes of his.

“Same thing you are,” he answered, hoisting himself out of the crevice. “I had the same reaction you did. Thought I heard shouting, somebody calling out, but seems I was wrong, there was nothing there. My foot got stuck on the way back up. Anyway, I think everything's fine.”

“Then it must have been you.”

“Me?”

“Had to have been you I heard. I stopped when I saw your car and heard the racket you were making.”

“I really like taking walks here,” he answered, turning toward the woods, where the treetops sparkled in the orangey light of the sun. “This was our place in the old days. We covered every inch of it, Marianne and I. Our parents were into living in
the country; our mother was a vegetarian, among other things. I really like coming here around the first days of spring. Sometimes the light's fantastic.”

Richard's way of nabbing the directorship of the literature department amounted to a veritable scandal. He was younger than Marc, had less seniority at the school, and had only taught one shabby course in comparative literature. But Richard, and not he, had gotten the appointment, as sickening as that was.

The only thing that made their being under the same roof bearable and reestablished the balance, steadied the beam, was the popularity Marc enjoyed among female students, none of whom could stand Richard. “Especially since he grew a beard,” they'd snicker. “That little pointed jaw it gives him. Hee hee.” It really was that stupid goatee; they couldn't have been more precise. He agreed wholeheartedly.

“When I was younger,” Marc declared, as they walked down to their cars, “I was fascinated by spelunking. I guess it stayed with me.”

Because of having been shut up in the basement
, he thought to himself, as he avoided the sheets of ice scattered over the path. Or in the laundry, with the coal and potatoes—whereas other families had been heating their houses with electricity or gas for a long time. He shivered.

Marianne had lit a bunch
of incense sticks on the ground floor. It was her privilege since it was her territory; but as time passed, their musky scent occasionally gave way to a strong odor of church. She mocked his half-hearted complaints about it and seemed to take a wicked pleasure in tainting the house, all the
way up to the floor above, where he lived. There was a good deal of smoke floating in the air. Before he'd even hung up his muddy parka in the hallway, he'd started coughing.

She was in the living room. Afternoon was almost over; and light gilded the volutes. She was wearing one of his shirts, a striped one he'd looked for and couldn't find.

“Doesn't all this irritate your throat?” he asked.

Absorbed in examining some documents, which she was initialing with the speed of a submachine gun, she gave him a vague shrug.

“I ran into Richard,” he announced. “Don't know what that idiot was up to in the woods, but I ran into him. You'd think he was following me, had me under surveillance or something.”

“Yeah? Why would he do that?”

“Hmm? How would I know? Maybe he's thinking of giving me my walking papers? Trying to catch me in the act of something? Don't know if I'm going to put up with it much longer. They obviously want to downsize, get rid of people, that's no mystery. Why would this fucking campus ever want to buck the trend? Sorry. Excuse my vulgarity. But you know very well what I'm talking about. That little faggot Martinelli who's been president for the last year, the one who says amen to everything coming from Richard. I know, excuse my vulgarity. But it's true. Richard could easily have my head. He doesn't do it because you're here. That's the only reason. I don't have the slightest illusion about it.”

He screwed up his face in reaction to the acrid smell in the air. “I know you've heard about it. Don't play innocent.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” she answered, without raising her eyes. “I'm not responsible for that kind of thing.”

He let out a small snicker. “Pardon me. Don't tire yourself out,” he said.

She sighed. “Really, you're laughing at
me
?” She set down her pen. “We're talking about your little ploys, I assume. Do you think I'm deaf and blind?”

He studied her for a few seconds—long, heavy black hair; sparkling, determined eyes; pale lips; and he realized that he mustn't count on coming out on top. A few hours before he'd held the wrist—that shapely, white wrist—of Barbara's mother. The scene began replaying in his mind lewdly and made him lose track of the conversation—taking over suddenly, surprisingly, like a misstep hurrying toward the abyss.

Meanwhile, under the cloud of myrrh escaping from a handful of sticks stuck in sand and curling toward the ceiling, Marianne had gone back to her writing. “I know what I'm doing,” she declared. “I have my reasons.”

In the past, he'd go outside with her and show her there weren't any bad spirits hovering over the house; nowadays he didn't take the trouble. Marianne was a big girl.

He wasn't the only one who'd noticed this. Richard had started at the university two years before and had immediately gotten one unique idea into his head: becoming Marianne's lover, possessing her. From that time on, he'd never stopped stalking her. In that appalling way of his.

Which Marianne resisted, apparently, as far as he could tell. Until there was proof to the contrary. You didn't have to be a famous scholar to come to the conclusion that this guy was worthless; but sometimes women had baffling, inconsistent reactions—which it made sense not to trust.

He decided to change the conversation because the subject
had a way of making sparks fly. He told her about the interview in his office with the detective who was investigating the student who'd mysteriously disappeared.

“You know, I don't think the police are making any headway. That's my impression, anyway. That Barbara really seems to have, um . . . vanished into thin air.”

She looked up at him. He kept his unruffled demeanor. If he'd seemed nervous during the forty-eight hours following the death of the girl, he was going about it differently now, had gotten his cool back, could control every muscle of his face, and was constructing a mask that could confront anything without the slightest effort, whenever the situation called for it. “We could have done without that kind of publicity,” he went on, “don't you think? I'm talking about our image. I wonder if a hurricane hitting the campus wouldn't have been better.”

She began collecting her things. She had a meeting with Martinelli coming up and would try to find out more about that downsizing rumor—if he didn't mind getting out from underfoot and letting her prepare for it. This didn't prevent him from following her to her bedroom, although he did stop at the threshold. “I think you should talk to our union representative,” he went on, “and he'll tell you if it's something I'm imagining. Listen closely. It might even be edifying.” She let her trousers slide to the floor and slipped into a skirt. “But don't count on their scruples,” he added, his mind already elsewhere.

S
he'd married Barbara's father six
months earlier, around mid-September. They'd spent Christmas together before he left for Afghanistan, from which he rarely sent any news. “It wasn't that easy with Barbara,” she mentioned. However, both of them were making an effort, and the forecast wasn't all doom and gloom; each day added to a budding relationship.

“Listen, Myriam, it's obvious what you want to talk about,” he said assuredly. “It's easy to imagine what you're feeling. The incredible frustration.” This time, the cafeteria was jam-packed and buzzing like a hive. “But, whatever the case, I have something to tell you,” he went on. “I want to tell you she definitely would have made an excellent writer, I'm sure of it, and I mean that sincerely, and I owe it to myself to say it to you. We're going to miss out on something.”

He wasn't in the habit of making such pronouncements about a student; the occasions were so rare he'd ended up forgetting that they'd ever existed—but the poor woman seemed so in need of comfort. And there was no doubt about it: Barbara had shown talent as a writer. A good enough writer. “I'm not saying this to please you,” he added, touching her wrist again. “I absolutely must make that clear. You're going to see how competent
her writing was. You'll see the potential she had. How well put together it was.”

Myriam lived in the city, near the lake. He went by her place the next morning and slid about twenty sheets of paper into her mailbox—the last work Barbara had handed in, on a remarkable level for a woman that young. The trees were coming into bud above the sidewalks, and so were the hydrangeas; a few particles of pollen had begun spinning in the air. This girl would have reached greatness around 2020, he was willing to bet, because it wouldn't have taken her ten years to reach maturity, five or six, maybe. Becoming a good writer before thirty was pure fiction, with a few rare exceptions. Thirty's the absolute minimum, he'd explain right away to his students. Do you think a person learns to fool around with words in a day, or even a hundred, that the gift you'll need will suddenly fall from the sky? Listen to me, I'll be frank: figure on twenty years, twenty years before you start to hear your own voice, before you start going about it in some way. So, to put it briefly, if some of you nourish vague illusions in that respect, I'm happy to encourage them; but what I'm saying, my friends, is don't hope for anything serious, or expect anything powerful or staggering; in fact, don't expect anything that's really worth the trouble for the next twenty years—and don't forget it. We're talking two decades. Listen, those of you who have no affinity for sacrifice, just give up now. Good, I wrote my name at the top of the blackboard. Useless to look for it on Wikipedia. I'm not Michel Houellebecq. Sorry about that.

He found a note from Richard on his desk. About a spring assessment, totally informal and totally unrealistic; but Richard imposed such things on a regular basis. They were minor
vengeances, small, detestable punishments he inflicted on the brother of the woman turning him down. Pitiful.

He smoked a cigarette while taking a few notes for the drudgery to come—when it was a question of contemporary literature, Richard Olso's taste was the pits. Unbelievable, but true. Really. And this was the man who'd been appointed head of the literature department.

How could they have chosen an imbecile like Richard instead of him? How could he keep from asking himself such a question? “Can I smoke?” he asked, as Richard shook his head and pointed to a chair. He defied the interdiction and lit one up. Richard could have had him thrown out of his office by the campus guards but didn't do it; and holding back like that was, apparently, harmful to the health of Richard's stomach—judging by the number of blister-packaged tablets of Inipomp 40mg littering his path.

This time, however, it became clear quickly enough that the reason for Richard's summons had more to it than the exercising of his famous power. “Okay, who's this woman?” he came out with. “The redhead in the cafeteria.”

“Redhead? You see her as a redhead? Barbara's stepmother. Barbara, the student who disappeared.”

“I know who Barbara is. I think I know everything that happens here, old man. What does she want? Tell me what she wants . . .”

“Her husband's in Afghanistan. We've sent soldiers over there. It's obvious that the Taliban have taken back the country.”

“Fine, listen. Now listen to me. I'm asking you to keep your distance from her. We have to be careful. You have no idea the number of problems a mother, even a stepmother, can cause us.
All she has to do is throw a fit, start a scandal, and our rating could tumble, just like that. You know what it would mean for enrollment. Such a situation hardly lends itself to it, seems to me. We all have to fight to hold on to our professional positions.”

“I know. But let's make sure we understand each other, Richard. What a reputation you're inventing for me. You've gone too far in my opinion.”

“You're a charmer, Marc. You're nothing but one hell of a charmer, that's all there is to it. Don't tell me you're not.”

They looked each other in the eye. He shrugged, crushed out his cigarette. You couldn't have everything in life. Certainly a department head had a more comfortable salary, and the power that came along with it, especially in these uncertain times, had to be very enjoyable. Yet attracting women, turning the heads of widows, students, housewives, and holding on to that gift, appealing to these fucking women before you even opened your mouth, without putting the slightest effort into it—
well
, he said to himself,
now there was something that gave pause for thought.