Salvation Boulevard (7 page)

All free and open and happy, happy, happy.

I didn't buy it. I never had an ex tell me about her new love unless she wanted to hurt me. Or pick a fight, which is the same thing. Nor did I ever find an ex eager for me to say how, after our bed had grown cold and old and stale, I'd found someone who would make it bubbly, fresh, and fun. Maybe that's why she was coming on to me so strong. To get some of herself back, to show she could still compete, even on a campus of new, young treats, eagerly testing out how it was to be away from home. “Really?” I said, “so he told you he had a new girlfriend?”

“He didn't actually say it that way.”

“Oh.”

“He was talking about a girl in one of his classes. His own special angel who was ‘so bright,' she understood ‘how philosophy makes the real difference in peoples' lives.' All that gushing about understanding each other's
ideas.
It's the mating call of people who read.”

“I don't think you should work for a terrorist,” my wife said.

Gwen didn't yell but it sort of blurted out of her, like she'd been sitting on it all day, or for several days, and it had grown and now it was pecking its way out of its shell, poking its head out and cheeping.

“It's my job,” I said.

“Not to work for terrorists,” she said. Cheep-cheep.

“No, my job is to take investigative assignments from attorneys or sometimes other people, and sometimes they're bad people. Many times they're bad people, but that's not my call. My call is to do the job, find the facts, and let other people act on them.”

“I think it's wrong. We're all at risk here.”

“Look,” I said jovially, I hoped, “I'm the hunter gatherer, you're the cave keeper. That's how God organized it. So, you don't tell me not to hunt the big bison, and I don't tell you how to keep the home. We have our places, and knowing them and keeping them is what keeps us happy.” That was practically verbatim from the couples counseling we'd had from the Ministry of the Third Millennium before we'd gotten married—and heard repeated in a hundred sermons and at Christian couples workshops. And it had worked. It was something Gwen believed and that I had learned to believe, and it worked. We were happy.

“This is bigger than us,” she said. “This is not just a clash of civilizations. It's a war for civilization.”

I got angry. The talker inside me was ready to say to her, ‘Oh, you better not start this shit now. There's a woman right across town who wants to jump my bones in ways you've never even dreamed of, wants to rock me and roll me all night long. Don't pull this shit now.' Then I realized it was the devil talking. The devil finding a wedge—anger, dissatisfaction, lust, any weakness.

“God made the man the head of the family,” I said.

“He didn't say you didn't have to listen to me,” she snapped back.

“Listen to you?” Did she mean obey her?

“I meant, didn't have to listen to my concerns, to my thoughts.”

“I guess not, but not now, alright?”

“When, Carl?”

“I don't know when. I've been working all day, a long day. It was a twelve-, thirteen-hour day and traffic was terrible . . . I don't have to make excuses. I don't want to make excuses. It's my call, and I don't want to talk about this.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's my business, and I said so, and I'm in charge.” All damn day, you go out and play it the best you can and question yourself: Did I do it right? Did I do it the best way possible. And your employers question you: Could you get more? Why did it cost so much? And the people you're trying to ask questions of, they don't want to answer; they challenge your right to know, and people hold back records and tell tall tales. So when you go home, you don't want to answer more questions. You want peace, refuge, support, solace. And to give the same in return.

Gwen was both hurt and furious. She froze there. I wasn't sure if she was going to get her gun or start to cry. Then her eyes welled up.

Which made me angry. A woman's weapon. I was supposed to feel guilty for saying what I'm supposed to say, what the Bible says, that I'm in charge? I was supposed to feel bad because I didn't want to
talk about what she wanted to talk about when she wanted it? Anger—anger was the devil's trick. There is righteous anger, and there is a place for it. But anger between husband and wife, that's one of the devil's tools to work against God's way.

I took a deep breath. I said, “Let's pray together.”

“Yes, of course,” Gwen said.

“I will pray to control my anger,” I said.

“I will pray to find ways to . . . talk to you without defying you.”

The thing about prayer is that just by making the decision to do it, you're more than halfway there.

“That's a nice plant,” Esther Rabinowitz, the philosophy department secretary said.

“Glad you like it.”

“So, why'd you bring me a plant?” She looked to be of retirement age or a few years past it, but alert and feisty. “What do you want?”

“I came by yesterday, and you were out and I looked around and thought, this office could use a plant.”

“You're right. I had a plant. But it died.”

“They do that.”

“People do it too,” she said.

“Yes, they do.”

“We say things like that here in the philosophy department, even the secretary. We're deep here.”

“I believe you are.”

“But you do want something, don't you?”

“That's true too.”

“That's what we're all about, here in the philosophy department: truth!”

“Is that the department motto?”

“No, but it should be, don't you think? I think the department should have a motto. And maybe more parties. They need to recruit. It's a dying business, philosophy.”

“I didn't know that.”

“So, what do you want, young man?”

“I want to take you to lunch.”

“Me? I'm more than a quarter-century older than you. I know that anything goes nowadays, but this is more than I expected.”

“Mrs. Rabinowitz, I don't know that I could keep up with you.”

“I bet you could. But meantime, what do you really want?”

“To take you to lunch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And talk to you about the department.”

“You mean about poor Nathaniel.”

“Yes.”

“You a reporter?”

“No. No, I'm not.”

“Who are you then?”

“I'm an investigator,” I said. “I'm working for Ahmad Nazami's defense.”

“Show me. You got ID?”

“Yes. I do,” I said and showed her my PI license.

“Okay, what's your name again? Carl?”

“Yes. Carl.”

“You can take me to lunch, and you can call me Esther. It was nice, bringing me the plant. Nathaniel always used to bring me chocolates. For my birthday. He always got the date wrong, but he always brought them. Really, really good ones. You could put on five pounds just holding the box.”

 

“Nate was my favorite,” she said over a bowl of pea soup.

“Why's that?”

“At least you could understand him. These others . . . listen, do you know philosophy?” She was spooning the chunks of ham out of the bowl.

“Are you doing that because you're kosher?”

“Nah, I'm a vegetarian.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But not a religious one. I don't mind a little meat should touch my food, infuse it with flavor. Thomas Jefferson was like that. I just do it for my health. I want to live forever. I have grandchildren. You want to see pictures?”

“Of course,” I said.

She took a packet of photos out of her pocket book. “My daughter-in-law, an angel, e-mails me pictures every day.” I accepted them and made the appropriate cooing sounds of admiration. “I print them out myself,” she explained. “Sometimes I Photoshop them, improve them a little.”

“How adorable,” I said. “So, tell me about Nate.”

“Oh, oh, oh, poor Nathaniel. What a nice man. So much fun. We used to laugh. Who would want to kill such a man. Hah! As if I didn't know.”

“Like who?”

“Don't be so quick Mr. Investigator, Carl. I use it as a turn of phrase. In the circumstances, I shouldn't.”

“What about Ahmad?”

“Ahmad? Kill somebody? Why do you think I'm sitting here talking to you? If I thought it was Ahmad, I would say, Go away. Leave me alone. They got the killer.”

“Not Ahmad, then?”

“No. No, he and Nate were friends. Oh, how they used to argue.”

“They argued? But you said they were friends.”

“Oh, goyim. What are you, Irish?”

“No.”

“My late husband was Irish. Nice man. But his idea of an argument was to step outside and start punching someone. Argue, like philosophers. For them, that's like the joy of sex. For most of them. But there are some, they get so serious . . . factions, worse than Trotskyites. You don't know philosophy, do you?”

“No.”

“Nobody does. I'll give you a quick overview from the perspective of the departmental secretary and a grandmother who had a very
fine education herself at the City College of New York, back when it was one of the best schools in the country, almost as hard to get into as your Ivy League schools. And it was free. We all think we've come so far, but when I was growing up, an education, a fine college education, was free.

“Anyway, there are two main groups. They call themselves continental and analytic. Are you ready? You might want to take notes. This is going to be on the test.

“‘Analytic philosophers want to say only what they can be absolutely, logically certain about. As a result, there's practically nothing left for them to talk about. Definitely not anything important. The continental style, by contrast, is unconstrained by logic, science, common sense, or even experience. It produces work that seems like nonsense to outsiders. Because it is.' I'm quoting. That's Nathaniel's quick and handy definition.

“You can see, with people who take themselves seriously—and why shouldn't they; their livelihood depends on it—he could make them very, very angry.”

“So, were they angry?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Who in particular?”

“You want me to name names?”

“Well . . . ”

“I don't name names . . . but if you were to go talk to everybody in the department and ask if they liked Nathaniel, and they all said yes, they loved him, they adored him, they were his best friends, they would all be lying, except for maybe two of them. All right, three. And, if I were you, I would start at the top.”

“The top?”

“The chairman. And if he pretends to be nice, that quote I gave you, just toss it into the conversation. Ho, boy.”

“The one about . . . ” I tried to look at my notes.

“Analytic philosophy . . . can't talk about anything. That one.”

“What about students? Was he close with or did he have problems with any of his students?”

“Close with. Oh sure. There was a whole gang of them. Talk, talk, talk. Especially if you wanted to get God off your back, Nathaniel was the go-to guy.”

“Why would anyone want to get God off their back?”

She heard more edge in my tone than I intended. “Are you a Christian?” she asked.

“Would that bother you? I mean, most of the people in this country are Christians.”

“You know what I mean. Are you one of those megachurch, born-again Christians? You know, save the fetuses, kill the foreigners.”

“Yes, I'm afraid I am.”

“Oy, I put my foot in it.”

“Look, I'm a Christian working for a Jewish lawyer who's working for an Islamic kid to find out who really killed the atheist. It's America, right?”

“Yes, that's America. That's America the way it should be. Please God, we should keep it that way.”

I asked her if she could name some of the other students who were close to Ahmad or Nathaniel or both. She rattled off several of them. I wrote them down. Then I asked if she thought Nate was ever intimate with any of his students.

“Only grad students,” she said. “Undergraduates, it's against the rules.” She said it like that was just fine, like it made him an upstanding citizen of the university community.

“And his wife didn't mind?”

“Oh, that one,” she snorted.

“What does that mean?”

“She was too much of an intellectual and feminist to admit that she ever got jealous. At least, that's what I think. So instead, she tried to outdo him. Go after his friends and anyone he was close to.”

“Men and women?”

She shrugged. “I'm not an eyewitness.”

I looked down at my notes, at the list of students close to Nate. “I heard,” I said to her, “that there was an Emma or Emily, someone with an em sound in their name, who was part of the group or close to Nate? But she's not on your list.”

“No,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Wait. Not em. It's en.”

“That's a name?”

“An initial,
N
.”

“What's it stand for?”

“I don't know.”

“Isn't she registered for his course or something?”