The Lesson of Her Death

businessman. Wait! Wait …”
    Okun, who was lying naked between Dahlia’s dark smooth thighs, tensed for a moment, slipped his penis out of her and came generously on her black fur of pubic hair. He squeezed against her and lay still for a moment.
    He kissed her breast and said, “Are you okay?”
    By which he meant did she have an orgasm. When she said a hesitant “I’m fine,” he rolled off her and began reciting from memory the Stevens poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.”
    They had been dating off and on for a year when Okun fell in love with Jennie Gebben. After the breakup with Jennie, Okun and Dahlia continued to see each other on occasion and more rarely to have lethargic sex. Not a word was ever spoken about marriage, monogamy or even vaguer commitments.
    Although he was more frank with her than with anyone else at Auden, tonight she was unknowingly taking part in an experiment Okun was just about to commence.
    He turned on the overhead light and lit a cigarette. He stared at a flap of paint on the ceiling, a flap that for some reason always made him think of the severed portion of Vincent van Gogh’s ear. “I was in Leon Gilchrist’s office today.”
    “He’s off someplace, isn’t he?”
    “San Francisco. Poetry conference at Berkeley.”
    “He doesn’t seem like the UCB sort.”
    “I have no idea what sort he is. The strange sort.”
    Dahlia said, “He’s brilliant.”
    “Stating the obvious diminishes you,” Okun said, a homemade aphorism he used often.
    “He’s cute,” she said.
    “Cute? Bullshit.”
    “Well, I don’t know. Maybe not. He’s intense. I have trouble picturing him. He’s nondescript.”
    “Oxymoron. How can he be intense and nondescript at the same time?”
    She blotted her sable groin with his sheet. “I don’t know.”
    “He had a draft of my evaluation for the faculty committee in his desk.”
    “You went through his desk?”
    “Do you know what he wrote in it?”
    She asked, “How could you burgle his desk?”
    “He said he did not want to work with me next semester. And he recommended that my advisor look long and hard at my dissertation.”
    She was shocked. “He
what?”
    “He said I was arrogant and lacked sufficient depth to be a talented professor. He said if the school insisted on hiring me after conferring the degree, it should be as a librarian.”
    This was all true. When Okun had first read the words on Gilchrist’s evaluation form he had felt physically ill. He now had some distance, but reciting the professor’s scathing critique made his hands quiver with rage.
    “Brian! Why did he say that?”
    “He’s a vengeful prick is why. I’m as smart as he, I have more social skills and I want his job. He’s figured that out.”
    “Why were you going through his desk?”
    Okun barked, “I’m his graduate assistant. If I can’t have access to his desk, who can?” He then added coyly, “Can you keep a secret?”
    “Brian.”
    “It’s something I’ve been wrestling with. I’ve got to confide in somebody. It’s about him. Gilchrist.”
    “You’re dying to tell me.”
    “I shouldn’t.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Did you know that he and Jennie Gebben had an affair?”
    “The girl who was killed? Ohmagod!”
    “From almost the first week in September.”
    “No!”
    “He’s into S and M.”
    “I knew that,” Dahlia said, surprising Okun, who had fabricated this detail—as he had the fact of the affair itself. He asked where she’d heard this. She shook her head. “Don’t know.”
    Okun continued, “He used to tie her up and whip her tits. Oh and he’d piss on her. I think she pissed on him too.”
    “God.”
    Her wide-eyed expression of shock was delicious. Okun smiled then chuckled silently. Dahlia frowned across the pillow at him then grimaced and slapped his arm. “You’re making this up, you fuck.”
    He laughed hard. “I doubt Gilchrist knew Jennie from, excuse the expression, a hole in the wall. But you swallowed it raw.”
    “Prick. So you going to start a rumor, are you?”
    Okun said, “He’s not going to crater me with a bad evaluation. He’s dumped on the wrong person.”
    “But he could be arrested!”
    “Divorce yourself from simplicity, darling.… He was in San Francisco when she was killed. They’ll find that out soon enough. I don’t want him to go to jail. I just want to make him sweat.”
    “You know what I think?”
    “I’m vindictive and petty?” he asked, curious.
    “I think