The Lesson of Her Death

arm.
    The bank wasn’t the only site of a half-moon. Three hundred citizens punched in 911 that night (most of them for the first time in their lives) to report a half dozen of the graffiti moons. The callers were all pretty shaken up; the paint the artist had used was blood.
    This evening, Randolph Sayles, professor and dean, student of Union economics and apologist for the noble Confederate States of America, sat in his backyard smoking a cigarette and staring at the evening sky bright with moonlight. He held a drooping fax in his hand. Sayles tapped an ash to the ground in front of him and looked at it. Beside his muddy boots a tree root had grown out of the earth and then, only a few inches away, had returned underground as if even this short excursion into the world was intolerable. He heard footsteps. He recognized them.
    Joan Sayles was an angular woman with short-cropped blond hair and abrupt hips and long breasts. Tonight she wore a white blouse, tied in the front à la Lana Turner, and skimpy, baggy shorts. She sat beside her husband. Dimpled bands of white flesh hung from her upper legs.
    A full professor of sociology at Auden, she was one year older than Sayles and had an IQ two points higher than his, though they both fell in the ninety-ninth percentile. When they met, their last year of undergraduate school (on this same campus), one of them had been avirgin and it hadn’t been Joan. Even as a grad assistant she had professorial drive and an instinctive grasp of institutional politics. He appreciated these talents in her although he realized too late that she used these to pursue not only tenure but Sayles himself. She was successful on both fronts; they were married the day after he sat for his doctoral orals. And if he’d never felt a moment of resounding passion for her—nothing close in fact to what he felt when he stood at the lectern—that was all right. He loved her (he believed). Anyway he needed a wife (he was pretty sure), stability and a brainy spouse being Doric columns of Midwest university success.
    “What are you doing out here?” she asked, squinting in the violet moonlight. The gesture pulled the corners of her mouth up in a wet grotesque smile that Randy Sayles did not want to look at. She noticed a small muddy shovel next to him and her eyes dipped to his boots. “Moonlight gardening?”
    He imagined that her question, which sounded simply curious, was in fact laced with mockery.
    He thought:
What does she know?
    “Taking in the air,” he answered. “You had a meeting tonight?”
    “Completed.” She was holding a batch of white, stapled papers rubber-banded together. She had made many notes and marks on the first page of the top paper. He noticed
C/C+
. She was a bitch of a grader.
    “What are you doing?” she repeated. When he did not respond she asked, “Are you ignoring me for a reason?”
    He apologized with a sincerity that surprised them both, then handed her the fax. The state had rejected Auden’s application for an emergency loan.
    “Ah.” She handed it back and lit a cigarette. It hung from the side of her lips and this made her mouth even sloppier and more lopsided. Joan inhaled then lifted a long finger to her tongue and touched away a fleck of something. “I’m sorry.”
    Sayles squeezed her knee in response. She said, “Doyou know what one of my students wrote? The issue was whether a population center like New Lebanon had an inner city. He wrote that it didn’t. Rather, he said, it had a wrong side of the tracks. I gave him an A minus, solely for that.”
    Sayles said, “Clever.”
    “You know, if I had it to do all over again I’d pick something frivolous. Romance languages or art appreciation. No, I know. Russian literature.”
    She touched the side of her tongue again, probing, as if she wanted to make sure it wasn’t numb.
    He said, “The police want to see me.”
    “About that girl in your class? The one who was killed?”
    Sayles nodded.
    “You were sleeping with her?”
    This was not truly a question.
So she does know
.
    His silence was an answer she could read. “Did you enjoy it?” she asked.
    “On occasion.”
    “They don’t think you had anything to do with it, do they?”
    “Of course not.”
    How does she know?
    Joan finished her cigarette and dropped it on the ground. She did not step on it. After a moment she shuffled the papers in her hand and said, “You know, I’m astonished at how college sophomores cannot put