Fiction from The Literary Review
"Voice mail-a bureaucrat's best friend," she says, settling back into her seat. "So-Eleanor told me about your investigation. Where do you want to start?"
I flip open my notebook again, search for an appropriate question. The heat of the office feels suffocating. I realize I still have my coat on, but I am too self-conscious to take it off.
"I guess the first thing is just some more information on Daniel," I say. "Whatever you know."
"I'm not sure I can tell you very much about Daniel," Page says. "He was a freshman when I was graduating . . . "
"You went to Littleton?" I ask.
She nods. "Class of '93. Don't hold it against me, though."
"You don't like it?"
"No, I do. It's a good school, and I got a great education. But it doesn't have the most flattering reputation. I think the The New York Times called it 'the world's most expensive prep-school.' Anyway, all I know about Daniel is what's been in the papers. In fact, you'd probably do better to read those articles than trust my memory. I think I've got some copies in here."
She rummages through a stack of school newspapers in the back corner, comes back with five or six issues, yellowed, brittle.
"Most of these are related to the GLSU article," she says, handing them to me. "There are a couple about the tenure battle, but I'm missing some others. I'll see if I can get back issues from The Mill's office."
I flip through the newspapers briefly, stopping at a front-page article titled, "Outlanders: Littleton Gays Brave the Cold." A quarter-page black-and-white photo shows two gay men dressed in woolen pants, winter coats and scarves, standing beside a birch tree, their L.L. Bean boots buried in leaves. One man has his arms slung around the other's waist and is kissing him on the cheek, eyes closed. The other, smiling happily into the camera, is Daniel Vaughn.
"That's the article that started the whole controversy," Page says. "A lot of the students thought the photo was in poor taste; some-the most conservative ones-even thought it was pornographic. Those that weren't offended by the photo were alienated by the article. Daniel had a lot to say to about being gay at Littleton, most of it not very kind or flattering to the rest of the college."
"Is there a lot of anti-gay sentiment at Littleton?"
"Well, it's 1995, so things are better than they were. But Littleton is a conservative school and it tends to attract conservative students. Plus, there are a lot of jocks who, for one reason or another, feel threatened by homosexuality. And then there are what I call the 'pod people.' They come to Littleton because they're afraid of bigger schools, because they want to get away from big cities and large crowds, and because they can't deal with the fast pace and moral complexity of life in general. They want to hole up, and Littleton is the perfect place to do it. But when someone like Daniel Vaughn throws the gauntlet in their face, they get upset. They're not overtly prejudiced; they just find the whole subject disturbing and they don't want to be disturbed. So while the conservatives and jocks were screaming about how immoral and disgusting the article was, the 'pods' were arguing that Daniel and his friends had a right to their point-of-view but they should keep it to themselves, there's no need to subject the rest of the campus to these things, sex in any form is a private not public matter, etc."
"The 'don't ask, don't tell' philosophy."
"Exactly."
I point to the second student in the photo. "Was he Daniel's . . . ?"
"Partner? I don't know. His name is Arthur Seals. He's treasurer for the GLSU. I don't know if he and Daniel ever had any sort of relationship, though obviously a lot of people thought so, from the picture."
"Maybe I could talk to him," I say, writing his name down in my notebook. "Also, what about other friends, acquaintances?"
"I don't know any off-hand, but Arthur or someone else with the GLSU might be able to give you some names."
"Enemies?"
Page laughs. "You might have to include half the school in that list. He received a lot of threats after that GLSU article came out, and the biology department tenure battle didn't win him many friends among the faculty."
"But any that stand out in your mind?"
"Well, the most obvious one is Warning Bloomfield, chairman of the bio department. He took the brunt of Daniel's attacks, and was pretty vicious in return. I'm sure he wouldn't hurt anyone, but I doubt he's very sorry to see Daniel gone. Also, on the other side of the fence, you might want to talk to Jim Knopfler. He's the professor Daniel was trying to help."
I write these names down. "Anyone else?"
"Not that I can think of."
"What about the person who found the body?"
"Hal Broonzy. He's a sophomore, lives next door to Daniel."
"The papers said he was returning a printer he had borrowed?"
"Yes, but I haven't heard any more details."
The conversation stalls for a moment while I search for more questions. Page shifts in her seat, her knees now inches away from mine, and even though my eyes are firmly set on my notebook, all I can see are the pale shadows of her calves and thighs, the dark penumbra of her nylons disappearing like smoke into the hem of her dress. Desire hits me like a drumstick, a sharp, momentary blow that feels both painful and welcome, sensation returning to a dead limb, then disappears again.
When I finally recover, I ask, "Do you know who was the last person to see Daniel?"
"Officially, Dr. Townshend," Page answers. She does not seem to have noticed my distraction. "He went to check on Daniel around eight o'clock. Hal and some of Daniel's other neighbors saw him leave sometime before nine. Then, a little later, they heard Daniel arguing with someone else. Nobody knows who, but I guess it was a nasty fight-lots of shouting and crying."
"Isn't it kind of unusual for school psychologists to make dorm calls?" I ask.
Page smiles. "You don't know Dr. Townshend. If you jumped off a bridge, he'd follow you down and try to convince you to stop before you hit the water."
"Does he charge a hundred dollars a foot for that?" The comment is out of my mouth before I can stop it and I know immediately that it is a mistake. Page gives me a smile like a strained rubber-band.
"Sorry," I say, blushing. "It was a stupid comment. I didn't mean anything by it."
"It's all right," she says. "It's just that he's really well liked and respected at Littleton, and this whole thing has made everyone a little sensitive. It doesn't look good for the school psychologist to be the last person to see a student before he kills himself. And he's been getting a lot of flack from the lawyers and administration, especially for going to Daniel's room. Official school policy is for him to see students in his office, or the hospital, or the infirmary. But he's not known for his orthodoxy, and he's been known to meet students out in the middle of the football field if necessary. In Daniel's case, he was very concerned, Daniel wouldn't come to him, so . . ."
"Couldn't he just hospitalize him?"
"He was going to. That's why he went to Daniel's room. But Daniel managed to convince him he was okay, that he just needed to get some rest."
A man after my own heart, I think-keep it to yourself, keep your hands on the reins. Because once you tell them what you are really feeling, you lose all rights; your body becomes theirs.
My doctor used to make me "contract" with her constantly. All I had to do was look her in the eye, tell her I had no plans to hurt myself, promise to call her if I ever did. But underneath my sweatshirt, my arm would be covered with cuts and scratches. If you don't want them to know, it is easy enough to block their Freudian x-ray vision. It is only when you do-consciously or unconsciously-want them to know that it becomes impossible to hide. So it is easy for me to believe that Daniel could have fooled Townshend. Maybe he even fooled himself.
We discuss the case for a few more minutes, but it is clear that Page does not know much more. She promises to set up appointments for me with Hal Broonzy, Arthur Seals, Professor Bloomfield, and David Townsend, but I am aware that after my remark about Townshend, she might take her time getting back to me. She does not appear angry or upset, however, when we shake hands.
My subsequent interviews with Bob Gatton, head of Campus Security, and Chief Beck at the police station prove uninformative, the latter suggesting that Arlon and I stick to the courtroom side of the law. By the time I return to the office, it is after two. Arlon is at lunch with a client. Bridget is busy labeling and attaching checklists to our new files.
"Fucking Arlon," she says as I hang up my coat. "I ask him to give me some legal work, and look what he hands me: secretary's shit."
"You're welcome to my work," I say, thrusting the notebook at her.
"No thank you," Bridget says, shoving the notebook back at me. "If I had to talk to every git on that campus, I'd probably kill someone." But she is eager to hear about my morning rounds. I give her the dismal results.
"Not much, is it?" she says.
"I don't think there is much," I say. "Everyone except his mother thinks he did it. His mother hasn't seen him in three months. Everyone else saw him daily. You do the math."
I take my lunch and papers up to the loft on the second floor, plop myself down in one of the orange beanbag chairs Arlon keeps up there. I would rather unfold the green convertible couch and crawl into bed, but I am not quite ready to be fired.
As I am eating my lunch, I read the issues of The Mill that Page Reinhardt has given me. The first four are from the fall semester and are related to the GLSU article. The last three are from March and relate to the tenure battle.
I read the GLSU article first and quickly understand why it generated so much controversy. After a brief discussion of his "coming out," Daniel goes on to describe what he sees as an above average prejudice against gays at Littleton, insulting nearly everyone at the college in the process. He calls most of the heterosexual male students homophobes, refers to the fraternities as "dens of latent homosexuality, like little boys running naked around a campfire, erections waving," and says the religious organizations are nothing more than "neo-nazis who would sew pink triangles on us again if they could and send us off to the death camps."
The article then delves into gay life in general at Littleton-sex, dating, parties and dances, the GLSU's political causes, support groups. Most of this is innocuous, except for the discussion of sex, which takes up nearly a quarter of the article. In it, Daniel goes into intimate detail about what gays do and don't do, the different tastes and predilections, and how homosexuality is not synonymous with pedophilia. "'Homosexual,'" he says, "means desire for men, not little boys. Most heterosexuals seem to have trouble making that distinction." He is wrong about the etymology of "homosexual," but it's an understandable mistake for a biology major. Then he criticizes the heterosexual community for forcing gays to keep themselves quiet and out of sight. "Heterosexual couples can hug and kiss and hold hands in public. They can check into hotels as man and wife. They can have sex in their parents' homes. A heterosexual man can even come up to the breakfast table and say 'You'll never guess who gave me a blowjob last night.' But if gays do any of those things, they are chastised, ridiculed, threatened, thrown out, or, far too often, beaten to a pulp. Why? What's the difference? Why is our behavior more harmful to society than anyone else's?"
Asked if he thought things were better now than in the past, Daniel replied, "In some places, yes. Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, the marches on Washington-they made a difference in a lot of the cities. But here? No. Half the students here are trying to recreate some romantic vision they have of college as their parents described it to them. That vision includes fraternities, parties, pranks, politics, protests, drugs, alcohol, making lifelong friends and maybe even meeting the future wife or husband. It doesn't include gays and lesbians."
Reading the article, I am struck by the difference between this Daniel Vaughn and the one described to me by his mother. I had imagined a dark and brooding young man, a dormant volcano that was unlikely ever to release anything more than an occasional puff of smoke and brimstone. Yet here he was, ejecting enough anger into the atmosphere to turn the normally placid and apathetic hamlet of Littleton College into a political hotbed. He was an angry young man. Maybe every man is at that age. I was, but I never managed to channel my anger into anything meaningful or productive. I hated myself; I hated my classmates. I resented the professors for being difficult, or boring, or pompous, or just not in touch with the real world. Every assignment felt sadistic to me, as if there was a conspiracy among the professors to give us only useless, unimaginative, socially and academically irrelevant work. Maybe, if I had had something more definite to focus on, I would have started my own crusade. Maybe I could have written shrill letters to the campus newspapers demanding shorter class-times or free books or more interesting lecturers. But I have always been faithfully faithless, believing that change is nothing more than the exchange of one misery for another.
The subsequent editions of The Mill carry dozens of letters of protest. The Campus Fraternity Council called him "a Larry Kramer wannabe and Act Up reject, stuck in the shrill 'It's us against them!' mentality of the eighties." The Christian Student Alliance re-emphasized, in case anyone had missed it in the first two-thousand years, the "fact" that homosexuality was immoral and unnatural and therefore harmed society by degrading its moral constitution. But the majority of the letters were from individuals protesting Daniel's lifestyle, or his choice of words, or his lack of tact and understanding, or his exaggerated view of anti-gay sentiment at Littleton. One especially sensitive soul wrote, "For $30,000 a year, I shouldn't have to worry about dropping the soap in the shower. Get these perverts out of here!"
There were also, as Page Reinhardt had mentioned, plenty of letters from the "pod people" complaining of the distastefulness and invasive quality of the article. "It's not appropriate," they said, "for either homosexuals or heterosexuals to splash the details of their sex lives all over the campus newspapers. It's offensive, sophomoric, and quite frankly, boring. Do whatever you want in the privacy of your own rooms. But, please-don't tell us about it."
There were a few letters of support for Daniel, but most seemed to be from other gay or lesbian students, lauding his bravery and describing the attacks and harassment they had suffered at the hands of fellow students. One letter, unsigned, was from a faculty member. It said, "Though I could wish for more diplomacy from Mr. Vaughn, I confess that my trust in my fellow faculty members is little better. I have been at Littleton many years, and I remain in the closet to this day because it has always been made clear to me that to express myself fully and to live my life the way I would like, would cost me both my teaching position and the respect and support of my colleagues. The choice to remain silent is mine, but it is not a happy one. I am glad Mr. Vaughn has made a different choice."
I skim through the rest of the letters, looking for anything different. But they are all the same-seventy-five percent vilifying Daniel Vaughn, fifteen percent defending him, ten percent protesting the discussion in general. It amazes me that an entire campus can become so irate over the issue of sexual preference, and yet it still seems unlikely to me that an article alone would be enough to drive someone to murder. They would have had to have had a stronger motive, some personal grudge against Daniel. Also, if the article was the catalyst, why wouldn't they have killed him in the fall? Why wait until spring? It doesn't make sense. But the more I think about it, the more I am inclined to believe the question is not which of these people might have done it, or why they might have done it, but how did Daniel Vaughn, who by all accounts was not an emotional Rock of Gibraltar, withstand it? How did he last until spring?
My thoughts are interrupted by a phone call from Page Reinhardt. She has contacted Professor Knopfler and Hal Broonzy and is trying to set up interviews with them for me. I thank her, though at this point I would prefer a little less efficiency on her part.
Arlon returns and calls me into his office, eager to hear what I have found. I give him the details, minimizing the successes and trying, in general, to emphasize the futility of the assignment. But the message is lost on Arlon, who would not give up even if he was stuck halfway between the Moon and Earth with no spaceship, no food, no water, and only thirty seconds of oxygen left in his suit.
"Cheer up," he says. "The preliminary autopsy report is supposed to be ready tomorrow afternoon. Lenny Baxter said he would fax us a copy. And who knows-maybe something will come out of your interviews tomorrow."
I go back to my reading in the loft, smoldering a little over Arlon's attempts to cheer me up. It seems to be a human instinct to try to control other people's moods, to rob someone of his or her happiness or unhappiness simply because it does not meet our own needs at that moment. People are always trying to find reasons why I should not be so cynical or depressed, though they resent it when I propose equally valid reasons why they should not be happy.
The biology department tenure battle, and Daniel Vaughn's involvement in it, turns out to be more difficult to follow than the GLSU controversy. There are only two articles that actually discuss the issues and events, and they are very short. The rest of the information I have to glean from the letters to the editor, and I am missing two of the middle issues.
The story, as near as I can gather, is that Professor Jim Knopfler came up for his six-year tenure review last February. The Student Advisory Council, with Daniel Vaughn as chairperson, gave Knopfler an overwhelmingly positive recommendation, but the senior members of the biology department ended up giving him either a negative or neutral recommendation-it's not clear which. But since the administration bases most of its tenure decisions on the departmental recommendation, anything short of a positive recommendation is the kiss of death.
Enter Sir Lancelot, aka Daniel Vaughn. Daniel pressed the department to explain why they had turned Knopfler down. When the department refused to explain, he drew up a petition to have the decision reviewed. Most of the biology majors and a large percentage of the rest of the college signed the petition, but the administration turned down the request. The biology department, however, thinking that a little meat to the wolves would soothe things over, cited Professor Knopfler's weak record of scholarly publication as one of the main factors in the decision. Unfortunately, Knopfler had, in fact, published three books since he had been at Littleton. Two of them-a novel and a CD-ROM guide to toxic wastes-had not been scholarly but had been fairly successful. The third had been a massive and highly respected study on the effect of groundwater contamination on the native Vermont wildlife. But the department claimed that he had not published many journal articles or submitted any conference papers and therefore was not keeping current with the academic debates related to his field. Daniel, in his typical pitbull fashion, came up with a list of four other professors who had published less than Knopfler and were not leaders in their fields, but who had been given tenure anyway. One of them was the biology department chairman, Warning Bloomfield. The list was published in The Mill and Bloomfield and the other professors on the list blew up and threatened to sue the paper. The Mill was forced to print an apology.
Then, sometime in March, Daniel organized a rally. Nearly half of the student body showed up. Daniel and the other Student Advisory Council members had drawn up another petition and a list of questions, intending to put the biology department in the hot seat and force the issue, but they were outmaneuvered by Warning Bloomfield, who took the podium first and did not relinquish it for forty-five minutes. In that time, he managed to depict himself and the department members as reasonable, caring, dedicated professionals trying to make a difficult decision, and Daniel and the other SAC members as immature, radical, idealistic hotheads who were more interested in confrontation than communication. By the time Daniel took the podium, he was in the hot seat, and, out of frustration and confusion, lashed out at Warning Bloomfield, calling him "a corrupt, self-serving dinosaur who would have made a better politician than a professor." The rally quickly deteriorated from there. Most of the students left believing that a terrible misunderstanding had occurred and that the whole thing could have been avoided had Daniel and the SAC been willing to communicate more and attack less.
The sequence of newspapers is broken here. The letters to the editor in the subsequent editions indicate that Daniel Vaughn resigned from the SAC and stirred up more controversy in the process, but the debate is impossible to follow without his letter. The final consensus, however, seemed to be that Daniel Vaughn was a tactless, self-righteous muckraker who thrived on the attention his insensitivity generated, and the best thing he could do would be to remove himself from everyone's sight.
It is a relief when I finally reach the end of the story. I feel as if I have watched a man lob hand-grenades into a nuclear reactor. I wonder whether Daniel told his mother about these controversies, whether she knows anything about what occurred in the last six months of his life. Yes, there seem to have been a lot of people who might have wanted him dead. Yes, he could have been murdered. But, given the stress he was under, the accusations and recriminations and abuse he must have suffered, not to mention the long history of depression, could anyone have posed a greater danger to Daniel Vaughn than Daniel Vaughn himself?
I toss the papers into a loose pile on the floor, lie down on the couch, feeling tired, depressed, the image of Daniel Vaughn and the man kissing him suddenly hovering inside my closed eyelids, irritating, unwanted. After my break-up with Karen, I went through a long period in which I was afraid I might be gay. I even came to believe that Karen's disaffection was tied to some innate sense she had of my true self, a shadow that hovered outside the periphery of my vision but was clear to her. Obviously, I was not exciting enough for her, not masculine enough. I did not have that something that every true man has. And if that was so, then the next logical conclusion was that I was not a man-at least, not a heterosexual man. These thoughts filled me with panic. I could not imagine being homosexual and being happy. I could not see this kind of discovery as anything but a cruel trick, a final curse in a long line of curses I had already suffered. My life would be darker than it already was, full of fear and loneliness and cold, furtive encounters with people I could not love and who would not love me. That is how I imagined it, at least, though I could not say why I imagined it that way.
But beyond simple homophobia, there was another fear, something even more disturbing to me than what I liked or did not like in bed. I realized that if I did suddenly, after a lifetime of heterosexual behavior, discover I was gay, it would mean that I am much further removed from my feelings than I ever believed possible. And I already felt too distant from myself. But if I could not be sure of this one thing about myself, what could I be sure of? What could I depend on that was not inherently hidden and transmutable? So I discovered that I am not just a homophobe; I am an autophobe, too. I am afraid of what may some day crawl out of me.
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