Too Close to Home

She put her hands over her face, like she was steeling herself for the rest of what she had to tell.

“I got in touch with Brett. All the students have these cubbyholes, so I left him a note, told him to meet me downtown the following night, at Kelly’s.” Where I’d had pie with Barry, where single mom Linda had last seen Sherry Underwood. “I was thinking we should meet off campus, where it was less likely we’d be seen. I said in my note it was really important that I talk to him about his book. He barely knew who I was, just that I’d been working with Conrad. We’d said hello a couple of times, but that was it. But I felt I knew this kid because Conrad had spoken about him so often, and when I saw him walk out of that office, humiliated and destroyed, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I felt, because I’d been having a relationship with Conrad, that somehow I was complicit, and I hated that feeling.”

“So you met?”

“I went to Kelly’s at nine, not knowing whether he’d show up or not, not even sure he’d seen my note. But about five after, he came in, carrying a small backpack and his laptop, and I waved because I wasn’t positive he’d connect me to the name on the note, but I didn’t have to, he knew who I was, and he sat down across from me in the booth.

“He looked terrible. He was such a sweet kid. Frail looking, as if a strong wind would carry him away, you know?” Now she was beginning to tear up. “He was such an innocent. I mean, the way he wrote, he was so mature, but he was still a babe in the woods, you know?”

Softly, I said, “Go on.”

“He took out my note, put it on the table, asked me how I knew about his book. And I told him that Conrad was a friend of mine”-she didn’t look at me when she said it-“and he’d told me about the book, about how good it was.”

“That must have surprised him.”

“Yeah, it did. He said, ‘Well, he sure didn’t tell me anything like that. He told me the book was a pile of shit.’ I told him it wasn’t a pile of shit. He said I hadn’t read it, that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and I told him that someone who did know what was good, a literary agent from New York, was very impressed with it. He was dumbfounded. ‘How did some New York agent get my book?’ he wanted to know. And I told him Conrad had given it to Elizabeth Hunt to read.”

“He must not have known what to make of that,” I said.

“He kept saying he didn’t get it. Why would Conrad crap all over his book if he actually liked it, and had shown it to an agent? And then it was like a switch got flipped, and he looked at me, his mouth half hanging open, like he’d figured it out but couldn’t bring himself to say the words.”

“You said them for him.”

“I said to him, ‘Brett, I think Conrad wants to pass your book off as his own.’ And then he started to argue with me, he said that was impossible. He said Conrad Chase was his favorite professor, the best professor he’d ever had, there was no way he’d do something like that. I asked him whether Conrad had proposed any sort of arrangement with him, maybe to help him write the finished version, a sharing of royalties, anything like that, because I thought, okay, I’ll at least give Conrad the benefit of the doubt, he had mentioned those things to me. But Brett said no, Professor Chase hadn’t discussed any of those things with him.”

“The son of a bitch,” I said. This time, Ellen didn’t give me a look to shut up.

“Yeah,” she said. “But Brett kept saying I must be wrong, that Conrad wouldn’t betray his trust. The whole reason he’d shown the book to Conrad was because he trusted him, trusted his judgment. But the longer we sat there, the more Brett started to realize he’d made a huge mistake, started to accept that what I was telling him was the truth.”

“At least,” I said, “he knew that his book wasn’t bad. That those things Conrad had told him, that he was lying, that he had his own agenda.”

Ellen nodded, half shrugged. “Yeah, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was so crushed, he couldn’t see the good news in all of this. He started to cry, and then he just started pouring his heart out to me, about how his father had died the year before, how it was just him and his mother, how he was so mixed up, that he was gay, that he couldn’t tell his mother about it, and how he thought he’d found in Conrad someone he could trust and talk to.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“And what I wanted to say, but didn’t, was that I felt some of that, too. That I’d been sucked in by Conrad, as well, by his personality, his supposed confidence, his intellect, and that I’d made a terrible mistake. That I’d put my marriage at risk for someone this shallow, this self-centered, this monstrous.”

“Would it have made you feel better,” I asked, “if you’d put your marriage at risk for someone better?”