Obedience

“And he’s going to kill her?”

“He thinks he’s protecting her,” she said.

“But Williams is saying ‘murder.’ What kind of protection is murder?”

“Have you wondered whether Williams is telling us the truth about everything?”

“Hell yes,” Brian said sharply. “He’s misdirecting us all the time. That’s a given. But there are rules, and that must be one of them. What good is the game if it doesn’t have rules. Williams said it himself. The kidnapper is the murderer.”

“I guess,” she sighed. Defeated.

“Anyway, that whole theory is crap,” said Brian, still looking away into the trees. “Mike’s the man.”

“Mike?” asked Mary playfully. This was her first discussion out of class with anyone about the case, and she found herself enjoying it. She wasn’t supposed to meet up with Summer and the Deltas for another hour. She had just been out on campus getting some fresh air and-she had to admit-thinking about Polly and Professor Williams.

“Yes, Mike,” Brian said. “Mike told the people at the party that he was going to sleep on the couch, slipped out when no one was paying attention, drove to Polly’s house. He broke into her room, took her to some distant location. You know how it is: drunk people can’t remember anything anyway. They thought they saw Mike on the couch, but was it really Mike?”

“Hmmm,” Mary said, placating him.

“Yeah. Hmmm.” He was still looking off at that fixed point.

They stood there in the wind with night falling around them. Some of the streetlights along Montgomery were coming on, casting half the viaduct in a blanched, angular white.

Finally Brian said, “I better get going. I’m off to the Deke house to get plastered.”

“Oh, yeah,” Mary said demurely. “I should be going, too.”

He turned to face her. She noticed his eyes: how red they were, how unsettled. It was as if the pupils had been shattered like a dropped plate, skimming off into a thousand different fragments. There was something in them. Disappointment, maybe, or hurt. He looked away. “So you like the Shins?” she asked him, noting his shirt.

“Yeah,” he said. “No doubt.”

“What’s your favorite song?”

He turned away from her again. He didn’t really know any of the song names. His roommate had the record, and he knew that he was supposed to like the band because a lot of kids on campus whose majors were the same as Brian’s liked them, but it all sounded like noise to him. “The one on the first record,” he said.

“‘New Slang,’” Mary said. “That’s a great song.”

“Yeah, whatever.” He said this going away, walking off into the wedges of pale light on Montgomery Street. Mary called after him, telling him that she would see him in class on Monday, but he must not have heard because he didn’t say good-bye.

5

He hated these fund-raisers. Hated them. The luminaries would all clump together near the wall and sip scotch, leaving the students out on the dance floor with the wives. It was a sort of social fiefdom, the lords away in money talks and the serfs left to tend the harvest. De

Her. Elizabeth Orman, the dean’s wife.

He’d met Elizabeth in the library that had been dedicated to her husband. He thought she was a reference librarian because she was old-older, she liked to correct him when they joked like that-and because she looked as if she knew where things were. He was writing a paper on Alfred Adler, and when he asked her where he could find Understanding Human Nature, she asked him what he wanted to know.

Turned out she was a doctoral student, and she knew a lot about Adler. He didn’t even need the book after talking to Elizabeth. They sat by one of the east windows and he wrote as she spoke. “Did you know,” she said, “that Adler was a neurologist before he was a social scientist? He was interested in how the eye worked, in how we see the world. That whole thing-seeing-he would later use in his theories about inferiority. But later, it was us seeing us, not us seeing others. The inward eye, the mind’s eye.”

And on and on like that. De

Elizabeth began calling De

It wasn’t until his third or fourth afternoon in the library that he learned who she was. And it happened by accident.

“Mrs. Orman,” a reference librarian whispered, sticking her head into the reading room where De

“Shit. Sorry,” Elizabeth said. “I have to take this.”

Orman, De

When she returned, he noticed her wedding ring for the first time.

“So,” she said. Was there shame in her face?

“So,” De

She said nothing.

“I didn’t-” he began.

“I should have told you,” she said softly.

He wanted to say, Of course not, Elizabeth. I just would think that would be one of the first things you’d mention, you know, let it slip out that you were the wife of the most powerful man on campus. But he said none of those things. What he said was, “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

That stung her. She turned her face away from him, toward the window. She inhaled loudly, gathering herself.

“As a feminist,” she said, “that’s not how I a

De

De

Since the begi

“Of course not,” she’d scoffed, and pulled away from him. Then she disappeared down the stairwell.

But there clearly was anger in her voice. De