Let's Get Criminal

From the beginning—even before the beginning—Stefan had said it was none of our business. He kept saying that, but he meant it was none of my business, because I tend to be too nosey.

Still, I thought that my new office mate, Perry Cross, had something to hide. He had just been hired as an assistant professor of Canadian literature, and everything about the situation was suspicious. For starters, given the terrible state of Michigan’s economy and the cutbacks at the State University of Michigan (SUM), where did the money come from for this brand-new position? And why was Canadian Studies suddenly so important at the university? And how come my department (English, American Studies, and Rhetoric), where Cross would be teaching, was filled with so many rumors about this guy and his job? I had not been on the hiring committee (I was too new), but people were saying the whole process had been interfered with at different points by the chair or perhaps the dean of the Humanities College. I also heard rumors that the decision to create the job in the first place and hire Cross had come from high up in the administration. There had been no talk about equal opportunity hiring, which was very strange, given that our department (EAR) was top-heavy with white Christian men. It was also strange that the strong "internal" candidate—Serena Fisch, who was already teaching in EAR—had not been seriously considered for the new position.

And I thought it was odd that I hadn't met Perry Cross until a week before the fall semester began. One day I came in and found some cartons stacked on the other side of my office, with a note from Claire, the department chair's secretary, saying they belonged to Perry Cross. Well, I knew he would be sharing my office, so that was no surprise, but I would have thought he’d want to get there early to settle in.

Then there was Perry himself. I wondered about him. I wondered about him a lot. I overheard him talking about Ann-Margret too much. It was apparently his little joke, how he’d always had the hots for her, seen all her movies, wanted to give blood when she fell in Vegas—remember, off that thirty-foot platform?—and when Perry was "free" (between marriages), she wasn't. Of course he thought she was the best thing ever to happen to Tennessee Williams when she did Streetcar on television. I suppose it's like being fourteen and saying, "Boy, if I had her" (fill in your own blank), and all your friends leer and shift their legs to give themselves some room. But a man in his thirties, a professor at a big Midwestern state school? It just didn’t sound right—it was a cover, and the two marriages were a cover. Perry had to be gay.

"Who cares?" Stefan asked, when I kept bringing it up.

"Material," I said. "It could be material for your writing. Flaubert said that all literature begins as gossip."

"He did not! That's just something you'd tell your freshmen and when they'd write it down, you'd laugh and admit you made it up."