The Drexel Publishing Group

May 12th, 2010
By Paula Marantz Cohen

“Shnoz? What the hell you doing? You daydreaming or something?”

The movie was unfurling. And now it was out of my head and I was in it for real.

“Shnoz?”

Phallic was waving his hands in front of my face. I stepped back. I knew what I had to do. I was trained to it, and I missed it, missed it more even than Ginny’s spiky caress.

“Don’t call me Shnoz,” I said to Phallic, my voice soft but even, brooking no dissent. “The name is Joe.”

It was about respect. It was about using what I knew and going back to what I wanted: That’s how I was going to solve this case.

“We need to get these Drexel students together,” I said, taking my time, letting him see that I knew what I was doing. “We gotta talk to them, hold what I call a seminar. You know what a seminar is, Phallic?” I drilled him with my eyes and he just shook his head. “It’s a special kind of class, an intensive class, where ideas get kicked around, where meaning gets made.” Phallic looked confused, but I didn’t care.

I didn’t ask Phallic about the seminar, I told him. And now here we were, around the table, ready to go at it. There were the majors and the minors, not to mention the interns and the writing tutors, even the screenwriting majors, big Abrams people, were there. “Have them all come,” I’d said. And they had — all those Drexel kids who knew how to read really, really well. There were more of them than I’d ever dreamed back when I was an adjunct assistant professor — the appellation sent a frisson through me. It had been fifteen years and it seemed like a lifetime — though, hell, Brebach looked the same. The man must be Dorian Gray.

I stood there at the head of the table and felt myself settle into that old posture, slouching but alert, that I’d copied from Dibartolomeo, master of coiled laxity. We were in good old 2020 Macalister, site of delightful, endless faculty meetings, still lit like a mortuary but as good a place as any to get things going. Sure, I’d tried police work, thought that’s what I wanted to get back to, and I’d tried the other kind of work, the holy grail of the Ph.D., slaving away on Latent Heterosexual Motifs in the Late Work of Henry James. But neither had satisfied that deeper, more primeval hunger to sit around a seminar table and talk.

“Hello people,” I said, looking over the sea of faces before me. God, they were beautiful, these kids, in their as yet untrammeled belief that literature mattered. “I’ve called you here today because I need your help. I need you to interpret a text.” I paused, letting the full force of it sink in. “It’s an important text, so I want you to give me your best close readings.”

“New Criticism — how passé,” sneered one of the cool interns, a lanky double for Eric Bana, who was holding a copy of Derrida.

“Good close reading never goes out of style,” I snapped. “You gotta do it first if you want to get the other stuff right.” I gestured disdainfully toward his Derrida, and he ducked his head. I looked around the room to see if anyone else wanted to show off. No one did. “Now listen up and listen good.”

The faces around the table were attentive now. Some had opened their laptops, prepared to google. They were ready.

“We’re trying to solve a murder here, and you’ve been trained, trained by the best there is, on how to read. I’m going to give you the story, see — the narrative, as I understand it– but you know about gaps and fissures and seams, and you’re gonna find them.

“Semiotic analysis!” cried one of the Philosophy majors — yeah, they had a Philosophy Major now.

“The figure in the carpet,” said another.

“You said it,” I nodded, pleased to hear reference to my old buddy James. “A bloody figure,” I added.

“’Start at the beginning:Tell me what you saw and exactly what it means,’” said a punkish girl in a party dress, one of big Abrams screenwriters — it was Grace Kelly’s line from Rear Window, and I gave her a look that said: smart allusion. Those film kids were good.

“Well,” I launched in, “we got a book burning and a murder right here at Drexel. But it’s happened before, you’ve read about it: fifteen times in total. Books burned, people killed. First it was great books: Dickens, Conrad, Hemingway — you know, the usual canonical suspects. But the last two were different. King’s The Shining, up in flames, and some hapless broad named King shot through the head. And now it’s the kiddie book, Harry Potter. And the victim’s a Drexel boy, name of Rowling, like the author. Found in a frat house watching TV. Magic wand through the neck.”

Some of the kids were scribbling and a few had their eyes closed, thinking hard.

“What was this Rowling’s major?” came a call from the end of the table.

“Finance,” I said.

There was a low groan — no love lost there. But even a finance major had a right to live.

“I see an intertextual thing going,” proffered one of the trash-talking majors. “TV watching, Finance, Harry Potter. All middle-brow sorts of shit. Might be the work of one of those neo-cons pissed about the way high art’s getting fucked.”

“Or could be the other way,” put in another major, showing he could read against the grain: “Could be the killer sees Rowling as a throwback to the bad old days: a threat to his beloved media culture.”

“Good thought,” I nodded. “Could be a book lover — or a book hater.”

“Irony,” someone threw out.

“Paradox,” piped in another.

A student with a row of piercings across his eyebrow that looked like exclamation points raised his hand: “Professor” — how I thrilled at the title — “do you think all the cases are connected?”

I told him I did, though I said that Phallic, who was standing beside me, properly cowed — he couldn’t have led a class to save his life — thought otherwise.

“Maybe it’s just, like, random,” said the pierced student: “we’re the ones seeing the pattern.”

“Reader response sort of thing,” I nodded. “We’re filling in our own elaborate theories when the killer really doesn’t know much about books.”

There was a murmur around the table. Most everyone they knew didn’t know much about books. Their parents, for example. “What the hell is an English major?” their dads asked. “You speak goddamn English already.”

“It’s a thought,” I acknowledged, “but my instinct tells me different. The shift in pattern to the non-canonical seems too calculated, the reversals too neat. Could be a copycat, but I think it’s the same guy. Killer wants to vary the content but can’t erase the form.”

“Style always betrays itself,” noted a confident redhead with cleavage. “There’s no mistaking a short story by Hemingway or a poem by Updike. Even working under a pseudonym, Oates, for example, can be spotted without much difficulty.” She spoke glibly and I noted that the guys were looking at her with a mixture of awe and longing. A girl with that kind of cleavage who could talk literature — hot! Too bad she was so full of herself.

“Character is destiny,” shouted out one of the minors.

I nodded. It wasn’t quite the right idea, but it wasn’t exactly wrong either. “One can parody a style, of course,” I mused. “Beerbohm did it well with James. The question is whether we’ve got parody or a simple change in direction. Killers, like writers, can get bored, you know.”

There was another murmur of assent. Everyone understood boredom. They’d read those critical essays in The Norton Anthology.

And it was during this momentary lull, as the group shifted, recalling being bored, that I saw her. I suppose I knew she was there all along. I’d sensed her presence, though camouflaged by a gaggle of scruffy Riggs-acolytes grasping their copies of The Hobbit. Maybe I’d caught a glimpse of her hair, gold with pink tips, or the glint of the dog collar around her neck, or, gazing among the sneakered feet, had seen the shine of her red patent leather stilettos. She’d moved into view now, Riggs’ group parting, Riggs himself showing obeisance with a sweep of his hand. I noted that her hair had grown and was caught up in a colorful scrunchy.

She had begun signing furiously. Mute she might be, but boy was she verbal.

Riggs began to translate. Was there a language that man didn’t know? Along with French, German, old English, a smattering of Italian and Japanese, not to mention the license in Bikram Yoga, massage therapy, and cartooning, he apparently knew American Sign Language. God I missed that guy.

“Maybe you’re concentrating on the content rather than the form,” Riggs translated Ginny’s furious signing with ease. “Maybe the books don’t have meaning for the killer. Maybe the killer chose them because they’re meaningful to someone else. –I should note” — Riggs interjected here — that the young lady placed a special emphasis on ‘ someone else’”. It was so like Riggs to want to capture the nuance of Ginny’s speech. Nor, I realized, was his gallantry lost on her. She gave him that seductive sidelong glance I remembered so well and fingered her dog collar. I had a sudden illumination that Ginny and Riggs were made for each other.

I must have looked blank as this epiphany swept over me, because the little redhead with the cleavage piped up: “She’s saying that the killer might have in mind someone who likes those particular books. That means the murders aren’t political; they’re personal.

“The personal is always political,” corrected Amato. But no one wanted a Marxist analysis now.

“You’ve been on this case since the beginning, haven’t you?” queried a small student, possibly a dwarf — English majors were often oddly shaped, so much of importance was confined to their heads — “that seems significant.”

“How so?” I queried. I saw, but I wanted it spelled out. I was beginning to feel queasy.

“Isn’t it obvious?” asked the precocious dwarf.

“You’re saying he –“

“He or she” — corrected the redhead.

I looked down at Ginny. It was hard to say how long her hair had gotten, seeing as it was caught up in the scrunchy. But it had gotten pretty long and, reflexively, my hand touched my breast pocket where the spork lay next to my heart. I thought back. Hadn’t I told her once that Stephen King was the modern Hawthorne? And hadn’t I waited on line for four hours for the third Harry Potter? No one knew how much I liked those books, how I’d read them secretly in my library carrel when I should have been ferreting out heterosexual motifs in Henry James — no one, that is, except Ginny.

Paula Marantz Cohen, Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel, is the author of four nonfiction books and four novels, including the forthcoming What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper.

Click here for Chapter 5 of Turning the Page. Its author is Scott Stein.