GRAY MATTER (28 page)

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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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The picture went dead.
While the crowd looked on in disbelief, Vanessa pulled herself free of her husband and walked out of the room without a word. Brad began to follow, but she waved him back and left.
“My God,” whispered Rachel to Martin. “That poor woman.”
Vanessa rode around for nearly two hours hoping to find her center again. She had no place to go, nor did she want to drive home and face her family. Although Lisa was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house and Julian would be doing his silent-troll routine (he couldn’t care less about her), Brad would want a full explanation.
In one stunning moment, she had been totally and permanently destroyed. And tomorrow, to forestall litigation, her publisher would publicly express embarrassment and apologize for the gross act of plagiarism and announce that it was halting distribution of her book, and that all fifty thousand copies would be taken off the market and destroyed—and that the twenty thousand scheduled for release in the UK and Europe next month would also be junked. The press would crackle with scathing indictments, contempt, and ridicule from colleagues and associates at Middlesex and other institutions around the country. Some would speculate on reasons—arrogance, entitlement, and academic pressure. Others would offer up the “death wish” theory, since this was such a careless, wholesale case of plagiarism.
The president would apologize while expressing concern for the kind of example this set for students and faculty alike, declaring something to the effect: “Originality like free expression is sacred in the academic world. This is an utter abuse of our trust as well as an affront to the academy and an example of intellectual corrosion.”
For the next several days, her telephone would ring off the hook with reporters scrambling for a statement—for the scoop on her ruination. There
would be an inquiry at the university; and in a few weeks she’d be relieved from her teaching post. Meanwhile, her publisher would demand reimbursement of the $70,000 advance and present a bill for another few hundred thousand dollars to cover the cost of the worldwide withdrawal and destruction of her books.
By this time next week, she, like her book, would be pulped.
As she drove around in the thick of the night, the reality of it all had hit her, rising up from that warm protected recess of her mind where she had packed it away for all these years. Joshua Blake was right: She was a plagiarist. She had stolen his work. And in the world of academic publications, that was the highest crime—tantamount to murder and suicide.
murder and suicide
She had taken his material not because it was so much better than hers, but because she was desperate to get the book into production and out in time for the 2003 George Orwell centennial. Adding to the pressure was her publisher’s insistence that the book had high sales potential—a promise, which realized, could reduce the enormous debt incurred by Julian’s enhancement and pricey education.
She had done it for him, she told herself. For Julian. She’d been on an unpaid leave of absence, racing to meet deadlines so he could nurture his genius. For her son. A mother’s sacrifice.
As for the actual plagiarism, she was certain she could have come up with Blake’s very insights. He had not made any conclusions of which she was incapable. In fact, she had felt entitled to them—more so for being his former advisor. And, yes, she had assumed he had disappeared and would never know.
Denial: the curse of the species.
And she had done it before. At Littleton College in New York where she had plagiarized a paper on Jonathan Swift in a graduate eighteenth-century course. At the time she was a doctoral student and a TA, and under tremendous pressure to excel at both. But she was young and foolish and for twenty dollars bought a paper on Jonathan Swift from one of those term-paper houses. Unfortunately, the same paper had been turned in the year before to the same professor. She had done stuff like that in undergraduate school, but this time she was given a term’s suspension—a permanent note on her transcript.
We are what we ever were, she thought. We never change.
murder and suicide
Vanessa’s insides were wracked with agony, but she did not go directly home. Instead she drove in the dark talking into her portable tape recorder, the one she kept in her car and used while working on her book. Her remarks were brief and pointed. When she was through, she drove to the home of the Whitmans and dropped off the recorder with tape in the glove compartment of Rachel’s Maxima. Luckily the car was unlocked.
She then drove home.
Brad had left the downstairs lights on, but the rest of the interior was dark. All but Julian’s room.
Shit
.
She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to see anybody. All she wanted to do was go into a deep sleep and not come out of it. Thankfully, Brad had probably given up waiting and gone to bed.
She looked up at Julian’s bedroom.
What the hell is he doing up at this hour? Christ, it’s nearly two.
She pulled the car into the garage. Julian’s skis were hanging up along the back wall. New parabolics that had cost over seven hundred dollars. They had been used once, on their winter vacation in Vail last year. He had no interest in skiing, and the entire week he spent inside the condo doing his pictures—stippling away like some crazed gnome. He had gotten soft and flabby, and given up everything physical. At school he was known as “Dots.”
She unlocked the door and pushed her way inside. Except for the hum of the refrigerator, the place was dead quiet. The only relief from the dark was the light strip under Julian’s door at the top of the stairs.
Vanessa climbed the stairs, feeling old and weary. On the landing she looked into the master bedroom. Brad was asleep. She then stopped just outside of Julian’s door and listened. Nothing. No CD, no television, no sound of some mindless video game. He had probably fallen asleep on his bed. Good. She’d just flick off his light and let him sleep out the night.
She tapped quietly. Although he slept little, he would occasionally pass out from sheer exhaustion. She tapped again, and still nothing. Gently she turned the knob and pushed open the door.
Julian was not in bed but at his workbench.
The halogen lamp glowed brilliantly over the tilt board. His back was to her and his head was hunched below his shoulders. For a moment she thought
that he had fallen asleep in place, because he did not move as she entered. But as she moved closer, she noticed his left hand.
“You’re still up.” She tried to sound pleasant, but the effort was strained. The public humiliation had its source in him; and at the moment it took every fiber of her being to feign civility.
Her eye fell on a photo of her and Julian at his music summer camp last year in the Berkshires. He had just finished his recital to a standing ovation. They were posed at the piano, she with her arm around his shoulder and smiling proudly, he standing limp and glowering at the camera with one of his pained grimaces. That photo was so much them, she thought: her needy pride, and his refusal to give. Such a pathetic symbiosis. To think what she had sacrificed to get him in that picture—the money and years, the leave of absence—just to be available to guide him, to drive him to his music and art lessons, getting him into one of the best prep schools in the country. And what does she get back at the height of his achievement? A fucking scowl. He had perfected the art of rejection.
The ungrateful little prick.
Looking at him frozen in that old-man hunch, she could feel her blood pressure rise. To think what he had put her through to raise him up from the quagmire of mediocrity. To think how she was ruined because of him. King Lear was right: “
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!
”
“Julian, I’m talking to you.”
Still nothing.
She took a deep breath. The only thing keeping her from exploding was a voice in her head:
He’s your son. He’s your own flesh and blood. Love him for what he is.
But another cut in:
Would this still have been my Julian?
The question was unanswerable.
“It’s rather late,” she said, straining to keep her voice neutral.
But Julian still did not respond—not even a stir. That was strange. Ordinarily he would tell her to leave his room. For whatever reasons, he never allowed her to see what he was working on. Even with a vacation school project, he’d lock himself in here, then wrap it up and take it back to school, never once allowing her a peek. That’s the way he was: self-absorbed and totally ungiving.
Only once did he let Vanessa see a work-in-progress. It was a year and a half ago when out of the blue he called her upstairs into his room.
“Well?” he had said in a flat voice, letting her look over his shoulder. Vanessa remembered her surprise at the subject matter: a bowl of fruit on a table by a curtained window. His subject matter back then—and still—had
been fantasy superheroes with massive bodies of rippling musculature, swords, gee-whiz weaponry, and disturbing bug-eyed alien heads, all done in garish color. While Vanessa had spurned the subject matter, technically his work was extraordinary, given that it had been done completely in pinpoint dots. So a simple bowl of fruit was a delightful departure. Maybe at last he was moving into his postimpressionist phase, she had thought.
“It’s beautiful,” she had said, tempering her praise so as not to take it away from him. “Is it a class project?”
He flashed her a hurt, truculent look. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, I don’t know, it’s just different from what you usually do. That’s all.”
“You mean, the usual
crap.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s your birthday present,” he said in a dead voice.
“Oh, Julian, how sweet of you.” She was taken aback and felt tears rise. “How considerate.”
“You don’t like it.”
“What do you mean? I love it. I love it. I’m telling you, it’s beautiful. Really. And I’m flattered, I’m touched.” And she was. This was the first time in years that he had even remembered her birthday, let alone given her something that he’d created. Last year she had to remind him, and he went out and bought her a key chain.
“Well, I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s stupid.”
“No it’s not.”
“It’s stupid!” And with that he slashed the drawing with his razor knife.
“What are you doing?” she had cried, trying to stop him. But he slashed and slashed the paper until it was hopelessly shredded.
Then without a word he pushed himself from the bench and went downstairs, leaving Vanessa standing over the torn-up picture, crying to herself.
“Do you know what time it is?” She moved deeper into the room. “Two-fifteen.”
Still nothing. Not even a turn of the head to acknowledge her presence. He was pulling his silent treatment on her again. She didn’t need this shit. She didn’t need his sour, precious fucking rejection routine. Not after what she had been through.
“Julian, I’m speaking to you.” She crossed the room.
He was wearing that awful black shirt with the hideous Roaring Skulls picture on the front and their disturbing slogan on the back: LIFE SUCKS
scribed in ghetto scrawl, as she called it. God! When the hell was he finally going to grow into his own talent? Here he was an accomplished musician who could play Shostakovich and Lizst, and he went around in heavy-metal shirts emblazoned with unseasoned nihilism. (Thank God Bloomfield had a dress code.) Moreover, his artistic talent was such that he could get into the finest art schools in the nation, and he wasted his hours on testosterone brutes. “It’s time you went to bed.”
He still did not respond, and she felt herself heat up.
You bastard.
“Lights out.”
She marched up to him. Still he did not turn or say anything, but continued stippling away. She glanced at the easel.
At first, she thought it was another of his fantasy characters. But as her eyes adjusted to the figure on the sheet, she felt a shock of recognition. It was a self-portrait, except that Julian’s face looked like that of a snake or lizard. The thing’s head had the same general shape as his own, just as the mouth and eyes were clearly Julian’s. But the features were all somehow stretched into a distinctly reptilian impression. The face was elongated, and there were scales covering its head and body. But it was Julian for sure. It was grotesque, but like all of his works it was precisely crafted.
What struck her was the color—reddish—brown, not black, his usual color.
He took out his mouth guards and laid them on a dish. “It’s a self-portrait,” he said. “Like it? I mean it’s not
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte
or anything, but it has a nice likeness, don’t you think, Mother?”
He had said
Mother
as if he’d spit something up. She was forming a response, when Julian slid back.

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