The Realm of Last Chances (24 page)

He was perched on the coffee table with his mandolin on his knee, and Dave was sitting on the couch. The instrument he owned—a fifty-year-old Harmony Monterey—wasn’t worth much, but Cal said it had a nice sound.

“You really think so?” Dave asked. “Me, I can’t tell.”

“A lot of them actually improve when they get older. Once the lacquer develops a few hairline cracks, it frees the wood. Every year or two, I’ll make a tape using each of my instruments, and it’s amazing how the sound changes from one time to the next. And they all sound better here,” he said, “than they did in California. It’s bone-dry out there in the valley, and they need moisture.”

“That won’t be a problem around here,” Dave assured him. “Man, wait till you experience a New England winter. I just hope you won’t split.”

Cal had been wondering if he’d leave or not, swinging back and forth on a daily if not hourly basis. Sometimes, sitting on the daybed up on the third floor and looking out at the neighbors’ tree, now a leafless, twisted gray skeleton, he felt he could
never belong here, not least because the distance between Kristin and him had been easier to ignore when his days were busy and his surroundings familiar, back before the economic contraction sent them packing.

At other times, when he leashed Suzy and took her out for a stroll in the rolling hills of Cedar Park, he could almost imagine making a go of it here. The notion that every house had a history, that people had been living in most of them for well over a hundred years and in some instances double that, made the place seem permanent like California never had. You’d see peeling paint and rickety steps on a big Queen Anne with a Lexus or Mercedes in the driveway; the folks who lived there could obviously afford to repaint it, and probably every few years they would, but in the meantime they just let it stand, secure in the belief that it would weather whatever nature threw at it. And everybody seemed to know everybody else. He’d see neighbors talking to one another as they bent over in their yards bagging leaves, and while this didn’t include him he began to envision a gray-haired version of himself bending over in his own yard five or ten years down the road, gathering leaves and swapping pleasantries with Vico. He hadn’t had a real friend since Ernesto got electrocuted when they were building that mansion in Modesto.

“I doubt I’ll be leaving,” he told Dave. “For one thing, I don’t have anywhere to go. But you’re retired now. Ever think of taking off for a warmer climate?”

Dave opened his case and laid the mandolin back inside it. “Nah, not really. I mean, I’ve been to Florida a few times, and it’s a nice place to vacation. I even went to California several years ago, visited a guy I knew in the marines who lives in San Diego. But my brother’s up in Billerica, my sister’s down in Bridgewater, and I got grandkids scattered from here to the Berkshires. This is where I belong. What about you? Got any family besides your wife?”

“No,” Cal said, pulling the strap off his mandolin. “I was an only child. My mom’s been dead for years.” He bent over to place the instrument back in its case. “My father died in 1999.” While his head was down, he added, “Actually, he got killed.”

“In an accident?”

“No. In federal prison.” He sat up and laid his hands on his knees. “He’d been involved in a bunch of crooked land deals, and he built a lot of shitty houses that started causing health problems and falling apart, so plenty of people had reasons to hate him. The guy that did it wasn’t one of ’em, though. He was just somebody my dad shot his mouth off to. He had a little trouble adjusting to jail.”

“Most people do. I’ve known a few that breathed their last breath in Walpole.” Dave thought about his wording for a moment, then said, “Not that your old man was a perp, in the conventional sense.”

“But he was in the grand sense,” Cal said.

That made the ex-cop chuckle, so Cal did too. He tried to remember the last time he’d laughed, but couldn’t. It might have been a year. Probably more.

“Well,” Dave said, standing up, “at least you can say your pop didn’t lack ambition.”

“Nope. He wanted to own as much land and as many people as money could buy.”

Dave thanked him, and they agreed they’d have another lesson the day after tomorrow. Earlier, when his new student insisted on paying him, Cal said absolutely not, that he was doing it for fun and wouldn’t mind having someone to play with.

They were moving into the hallway when hinges creaked, the door swung open and Kristin stepped inside. He’d reminded her about the session this evening but assumed she’d forgotten, because she looked surprised: face flushed, even damp, though the temperature had dropped into the low thirties. She must’ve speed walked all the way from the station.

“Oh,” she said, “hello.”

Cal introduced them.

“Pleased to meet you,” Dave said. He stuck out his hand, and Kristin gave him hers. “Your husband’s a saint,” he said, “for putting up with the noise he heard tonight.”

“I’m sure you’re better than you admit.”

“No, I’m even worse.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” she said, stepping over to the closet and pulling off her coat.

Cal noticed a purple bruise on her neck, between her hairline and blouse, and intended to ask about it, but by bedtime he’d forgotten, and the next day it was gone.

north shore state
closed on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. She’d hoped to sleep in but woke around eight when Cal headed downstairs. She lay there alone for a few moments, waiting for the heat to come on. A rime of frost coated the windows, and the wind rattled them.

During the night she’d had a strange dream. She was back in the grocery store in her hometown, and Christmas music was playing over the sound system, though it seemed to be either Halloween or Thanksgiving. Pumpkins were piled up in the display window and were floor-stacked at the end of the aisle into which she’d pushed her cart. Just ahead of her was a blond woman with two small children. She could only see the mother’s back, but she wore professional attire: wool skirt and jacket, sensible shoes. The boy had on blue knee shorts, and the blue-and-gold scarf knotted at his neck identified him as a Cub Scout. The girl, however, looked like a character from the Walker Evans album of Depression-era photos that Philip used to haul out when he got to his second or third brandy.

The woman reached out to lift a can or jar off the grocery shelf, and drawing closer Kristin recognized she was Gwendolyn Conley. Her face was pale, as though she hadn’t slept for days, and her eyes were red. When she saw Kristin, her face turned red too. Kristin expected her to apologize, to explain or to beg for mercy, but all she did was look away. That is exactly what she herself had done when her provost in California, her boss and friend for ten years, had called her into his office and said, “Kristin, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

The journal that had published Conley’s disputed article was based at a large midwestern state university. The other
day she’d contacted the editor, and in a matter of minutes he’d progressed from skepticism to bafflement and then terror. His voice broke when he observed, “This could cost me my job.”

“
Your
job? You didn’t plagiarize the article.”

“No, but I published the goddamn thing. Listen,” he said, sounding as if he were about to choke, “could I call you back from my cell?”

“Sure.”

He didn’t phone for at least fifteen minutes. When he finally did, she heard traffic in the background, a barking dog. He explained that the state legislature had proposed a 12 percent cut that might well eliminate his journal. “This kind of mistake,” he said, “could be a strike against us. And so could the fact that it took this long for anyone to discover it. They’ll just say it’s proof almost nobody reads us anyway.”

She did her best to soothe him, promising to let him know before she took any further steps. In the meantime, she said, she’d send him all the information she’d collected, including JSTOR citations for the pilfered articles. He requested she use his Hotmail address.

When she reached the editor of the Canadian journal that had published Dilson-Alvarez’s piece, he sighed and said, “I was expecting your call.”

“You were?”

“From you or someone else. Where’d you say you worked—Shoreline State?”

She corrected him, then asked why he’d anticipated a call.

“Because,” he said, “just yesterday I received a little present from someone down there.” It had arrived in a regular manila envelope, he said, postmarked Bradbury, Massachusetts, and probably wouldn’t have been opened for several months, the editorial staff assuming it contained a submission. “Those lie around forever awaiting screening,” he told her. “But this was addressed to me, and since it looked like real correspondence,
the interns laid it on my desk.” Inside was a typed note informing him that the article he’d published by Robert Dilson-Alvarez had several plagiarized passages. “Whoever sent it to me,” he said, “was kind enough to list the articles he’d lifted stuff from, as well as the relevant page numbers.”

“Have you already compared them to the article you published?”

“Yes, I did that last night.”

“And?”

“And?” he said.

“I’m just wondering what your reaction was.”

“Doctor … I’m sorry, what did you say your last name is?”

“Stevens.”

“Dr. Stevens, my reaction was extreme weariness. I’m seventy-one years old. I should’ve retired at least ten years ago—although even that would’ve been too late for me to avoid becoming disgusted by the whole enterprise. I’m sick and tired of it. I even hate the word ‘profession’ because whatever it is we’re doing now, it is not
professing
. We may be provoking, we’re definitely proliferating, but mostly we’re prevaricating. We lie to the young, and we lie to ourselves. We’ve ceased to disseminate wisdom. So the discovery that your faculty member stole someone else’s words neither angers nor surprises me. He has simply recycled garbage. Would you be upset if you saw somebody raiding a stranger’s trash bin?”

Two or three years ago, she might’ve said that if he felt like that he should’ve quit right then. But she seemed incapable, lately, of even feigned outrage. People had flaws. They ignored the law, broke hearts and violated all norms of decency and ethics, engaging in academic misconduct, financial malfeasance, political chicanery, sexual transgression. Spending a good part of your life trying to stamp that out would exhaust anybody, especially if you were guilty yourself, and in some form or fashion who wasn’t?

Her conversation with the elderly editor had taken place on Monday. Then, just when she walked into the office yesterday morning, Donna told her that somebody named Julian Blatchford had called her half an hour earlier. “I asked if he wanted your voice mail, but he said no. He left you a number in London and said he’d be home until six his time.”

She took the slip of paper from her assistant, stepped into her private office and closed the door. Blatchford had been the editor in chief of the house that published Dilson-Alvarez’s book. Tracking him down had taken some doing. He apparently hadn’t landed another job and had an unlisted phone, but a former graduate-school classmate who worked for Oxford University Press in New York had helped Kristin locate him.

When she dialed the London number, a woman answered. Kristin asked to speak to Julian Blatchford, and a moment later he said hello. “You’ll be expecting a British accent,” he said, “but I’m actually a Yank. Born and raised in Brattleboro, Vermont.”

He sounded British to her. She thanked him for getting in touch, then asked if her friend at OUP had explained why she wanted to speak to him.

“Well,” he said, “she told me it concerned a highly confidential matter of academic integrity. Which made me suspect it involved Robert Dilson-Alvarez. So I poked around online and discovered he’s washed ashore there. That’s entirely too bad. For you and your school, I mean.”

During the few months she’d occupied her new office, she’d discovered that rotating her swivel chair so she could gaze out the window always produced a pleasant effect. The quad was a contained space, redbrick buildings visible on three sides, the green strewn with brittle leaves. Everything was where it should be, and the students strolling in twos or threes looked happy. Twenty percent of them might be clinically depressed, 15 percent probably had serious drug issues and a handful were most likely suicidal, but you couldn’t know this from looking out
the window. It was a great view, since you could see what you wanted to and miss what you didn’t.

Blatchford said Dilson-Alvarez’s book on Frantz Fanon and therapeutic violence was primarily the work of a Finnish academic. “I can’t recall the name of the press that originally published it because, as you might imagine, I’ve repressed a good bit of this. But I believe it was located in Tampere. Robert simply translated the text into English, inserted a few passages by other writers here and there, tweaked the title and submitted it under his own name. It would’ve been a fine book. We had great hopes for it and ordered a first printing of six thousand copies, which was a lot for us. There’d been a surge of interest in Fanon around that time, and we’d already secured distribution in the U.S. through Yale. It was actually someone there who alerted us it was stolen. It turns out a woman in their marketing department could read Finnish, and in researching the subject she came across some references to the original text that made her suspicious. So she tracked it down, and we managed to halt the release. Robert evidently did a magnificent job translating it. He’s married to a Hungarian woman and speaks that language, which is of course related to Finnish.”

“So you mean you didn’t actually publish it? One of my faculty members swears he’s seen a copy.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that. We’d sent Robert a carton of author’s copies, and he never responded to our request that he return them. I might’ve predicted what he’d do with them. We could’ve gone after him, but our solicitor said that would be costly. I just decided to let the whole thing go. And hoped I’d never hear his name again.”