Queen of the Owls Read online

  “You could have it too, you and Ben.”

  “No. It’s either there or it isn’t. Candles, music, props—they don’t make the chemistry happen.” Elizabeth sniffed. “He actually went out and got this skimpy little negligee, can you believe it? Like if I put on a costume, everything would be different.”

  “Oh, Lizzie.”

  “He probably read it in some magazine. How to fix your wife.”

  “Look, he was trying,” Andrea said. “That’s a good thing.”

  No, it wasn’t. A man shouldn’t have to try so hard to desire his wife.

  Elizabeth dug her toe into the mat. “Anyway, none of this is about Ben. Yes, I want to change my hair back. And yes, I’m glad you and Michael patched things up.”

  “And yes, a little bit of schaden-whatever when you thought we wouldn’t.”

  “I suppose.”

  “But why?”

  Why? Because Andie got to be in The Nutcracker, dancing onto the stage without a hint of effort or doubt. Because she pranced through life, confident that boys would honk at her from their cars and fling her compliments and whisk her away for romantic weekends. Because, for Andie, charm solved all. And if that charm seemed to fail her, even briefly, what bookworm-sister could resist a flicker of satisfaction?

  “Oh, sibling rivalry, I guess.” Elizabeth extracted a strand of auburn hair from a crease in the cape. “Everything was so easy for you.”

  “Easy? All that stuff was agony. Times tables, French verbs—”

  “I don’t mean school,” Elizabeth interrupted. “I mean life.”

  “What’s that even supposed to mean? It’s all life.”

  “It isn’t. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Elizabeth’s voice hardened. “You always got the best, the first.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “You did. You got the silver tutu.”

  “The silver tutu?” Andrea let out an astonished hoot. “I got to wear a cheap little piece of netting and be in a crowd of kids around a fake Christmas tree. You got a story in the school anthology with your name on the damn cover. Mom and Dad kept the anthology on the coffee table. Me? I was in alphabetical order with eleven other kids at the very bottom of the program.” Andrea shook her head. “That’s how it always was. You were the one with the big future.”

  Elizabeth’s mouth fell open. No. Andrea was the star. It was her light that filled a room.

  “Seriously,” Andrea said. “You look like I just dropped a raw egg on your head.”

  “Good Lord, Andie.” There were too many years and too many incidents that proved Andrea was the sister who’d gotten the better gifts. The idea that Andie had seen it differently was too bizarre to believe.

  Elizabeth stretched the nylon across her lap, flicking away the curls of russet and silver that dotted the fabric like galaxies scattered across the night sky. Every researcher knew there were different perspectives. One set of data, but multiple truths. If Andrea’s truth was different from hers, then hers wasn’t the single immutable version of reality after all. There weren’t cubes and pyramids and spheres, each fitting neatly into its proper cutout in the shape-sorter bucket. There were other possibilities.

  Elizabeth the beautiful. Andrea the wise.

  “Andie.” Elizabeth sat up straight. An idea bloomed in her mind— so wonderful that her sister had to see it too. The solution to the terrible fight they’d had.

  She put her palm on Andrea’s. “You could go further, have a bigger future of your own. Go for that business degree, like we talked about.”

  Andrea made a face. “Like you talked about. I never said I was interested.”

  “But you could! It’d be so good for you. A way to improve yourself.”

  “I don’t want to improve myself. I’m happy the way I am.”

  “You could be so much—”

  Andrea cut her off, removing her hand. “That’s your thing, Lizzie. Not mine.”

  Elizabeth stiffened. Her idea had seemed so right.

  Then Andrea sighed. It was a complicated sound, weary and impatient and proud. “I don’t need to be everything. I’ve made my peace with being one thing, and being good at it, like I told you the other day. So please don’t badger me.”

  Not a magical solution after all. She’d miscalculated.

  Elizabeth grew quiet. Then, with a decisive flourish, she jerked the cape from her neck and tossed it on the floor. “On second thought,” she said, “leave the highlights. What the hell.”

  Andrea’s eyebrows shot up. “Lizzie?”

  Elizabeth rose from the chair. “It’s my hair. And I like it this way.”

  Screw Ben, who hadn’t even noticed.

  And Richard, who had.

  The next day was Wednesday. Tai Chi night. No doubt Richard would be back, Elizabeth thought, coming up for air. The pictures of her pretending to be Georgia were finished and hung, and his new series was still in the planning stage. He was too devoted to Tai Chi to stay away for long.

  As dreadful as Tai Chi had been without him, it would be worse with him back. Watching him next to Mr. Wu, in front of the class. Watching him get into the elevator and walk away. Or did he imagine they’d continue their flirtatious little cups of coffee? She had no idea what he imagined.

  The thought of going to Tai Chi made her ill. She wasn’t lying when she told Ben, “I don’t think I’m going to go tonight. I’m not really up to it.”

  He looked surprised. “I thought you loved Tai Chi.”

  Elizabeth’s cheeks burned. “I did. Do. I just don’t feel so great.” She put a hand on her abdomen. “My stomach’s off, that’s all.”

  Daniel, marching his plastic dinosaurs along the coffee table, turned to her with interest. “What a stomach’s off?”

  Elizabeth hadn’t known he was listening. “It means your tummy hurts.” She rubbed her stomach and made a face.

  “Not off and on. Like the TV.”

  Elizabeth couldn’t help smiling. “No, not like that. Just that it hurts.”

  Daniel banged the dinosaurs together. “Sometimes my tummy hurts.”

  “I know. It happens to everyone.”

  She felt a tug on her sleeve. It was Katie, her eyes round. “Mama sick?” She put a chubby hand on Elizabeth’s forehead.

  Daniel, not to be outdone, jumped up. “I’ll get some ice,” he shouted. “And a Band-aid.” Abandoning the dinosaurs, he raced to the bathroom, Katie at his heels. Within moments, they were back. Daniel had the box of Band-aids, the hot water bottle, and her deodorant. Katie held out an arm, offering her bunny.

  Elizabeth wanted to burst into tears. They’d forgiven her for missing their play. Their baby hearts so large and open, wrapping her in their astounding generosity.

  Did she dare to accept their forgiveness? To hope that life might go on?

  Surely, if she was patient, Richard would move on to another set of photographs. The origin of movement—he’d already told her what he wanted to work on next. Get them done, she thought. Quickly. Do a brilliant new series and put it up on Ventana’s wall.

  All she had to do was to survive until then.

  Twenty-Two

  Harold’s email was seven words long. “Please see me first thing tomorrow morning.” No word of explanation, no apology for the last-minute notice, no expression of hope that she could make herself available. Not even a salutation.

  Elizabeth ran through the list of reasons that Harold might need to see her. Someone else’s publication had preempted her idea about O’Keeffe in Hawaii? There was a problem with her class? It couldn’t be about the photographs. There was no way he could know about them, she was being paranoid. Anyway, they had nothing to do with her dissertation—even though, of course, her dissertation had been the reason for posing. The only way to truly understand O’Keeffe.

  Somehow she got Daniel and Katie dressed and settled at Lucy’s in time to knock on Harold’s pebbled glass door at 8:45. As so
on as she saw his face, she knew.

  “Congratulations,” he told her. “You’ve come up with a new infraction that’s not in the Graduate School Code of Ethics. Apparently we couldn’t foresee every stunt a doctoral student might pull.”

  Elizabeth couldn’t tell if he was disgusted with her or was inviting her to join him in a moment of sarcasm, a shared eye-roll at the university’s endless regulations. For an instant she thought of replying with a joke of her own. Then she saw the flatness in his eyes. No, he didn’t think it was funny. And there wasn’t a shred of doubt what he was referring to.

  “How did you find out?”

  He removed his glasses and cleaned them with a pale grey cloth. “It seems you have quite a fan club, Ms. Crawford. One of your students thinks you’re the only instructor around here with, I quote, balls.”

  Naomi. Elizabeth remembered the sly looks, the thumbs-up, the coy allusion to how she of all people should understand what it meant to invite others to notice your body. A bunch of students had been to the gallery to see the photographs, that’s what Isabelle told her on the staircase. But it never occurred to Elizabeth that any of them would tell the department chairman.

  “She went to you? To tell you about it?”

  Harold inspected the glasses for spots and then, satisfied, returned them to his face. “Hardly. She posted it on the student Facebook page.” He picked up a sheet of paper and read aloud, enunciating each word. “Finally, a professor who walks the walk instead of hiding, literally, behind the Emperor’s New Clothes. Crawford has more integrity than all the tenured professors put together. The hypocrites around here could learn a lot from her. The woman’s got balls.” He lowered the paper and regarded Elizabeth over the top of his newly polished glasses. “Followed by a couple of snapshots—her favorites among the portraits, I presume—and a link to the gallery’s website where, evidently, there are additional photos.”

  “She wrote that?”

  “Indeed. And a hundred and eleven other students have liked it.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “That’s the problem with social media. It’s impossible to contain something once people start to like it.”

  “You looked on the student Facebook page?”

  Harold sighed. “We have to monitor these things. We can’t have students posting material that might be construed as racist or revolutionary. You know, pornography, overthrow the government, that sort of thing. We try not to interfere unless it’s really egregious.” He pushed the paper to the side of his desk. “The dean’s secretary keeps an eye on the student Facebook page and lets us know if there’s anything we should be aware of.”

  “The student thought she was doing me a favor.”

  “The very definition of naiveté.”

  His dry tone, with its hint of humor, gave Elizabeth hope that it might be a matter of a pro forma reprimand and a pointed request to Naomi that she delete the post. She wouldn’t want to, of course. Harold might have to engage in a bit of censorship, which could provoke a reaction. But that wasn’t Elizabeth’s concern.

  “I know which student it is,” she said. “I’ll speak with her, ask her to remove the post.”

  “Ms. Crawford.” Harold cleared his throat. “It’s not that simple. Removing the post doesn’t remove its effect.”

  Like the photographs. The sooner they came down, the less damage they would cause. She drew closer, eager to explain that she hadn’t sanctioned the exhibit any more than she had sanctioned Naomi’s praise. “Dr. Lindstrom—” she began, but he stopped her.

  “There are two issues,” he said, “and it would be a mistake to conflate them. One is the student’s decision to compare your integrity to what she deems the lack of integrity in tenured faculty members— based, apparently, on the sole criterion of one’s willingness to pose naked. The other is your decision to pose in the first place. Without the latter, the former wouldn’t exist. But the former is the issue I have to deal with.”

  Elizabeth’s mind reeled. This was more complicated than she had thought. To Harold and the rest of the faculty, her worst transgression might have nothing to do with baring her breasts.

  That damn Naomi, admiring her for all the wrong reasons. And Richard, telling her that it was good for her to pose, that it freed her to feel her own beauty. Slick. Manipulative. The same kind of bullshit Stieglitz used on O’Keeffe to justify his affair with Dorothy Norman. Love enriches a marriage, he’d told Georgia, whether it comes from inside or outside the relationship. A nice rationalization for doing what he wanted.

  “You’ve put us in an unfortunate situation,” Harold continued. “As I said, you haven’t done anything that’s explicitly against university policy because there isn’t any policy that applies. Your activities may reflect bad judgment, but they’re not illegal.”

  Again, Elizabeth dared to hope. Was he implying that there wouldn’t be any consequences—other than, perhaps, the loss of his respect, which was bad enough? She searched Harold’s face but couldn’t tell what he really felt. Clearly, he was displeased. But she didn’t know if it was because he was disappointed in her, maybe even disgusted, because of the position she had put him in, as her mentor.

  She tried to explain. “Dr. Lindstrom, no one wants those photographs to come down more than I do. I’m not trying to make a statement about art or academic freedom or a woman’s right to her body, or anything like that.” It was the students, she wanted to tell him, who were projecting all that onto her. The same way that the art world, and then the feminists, had projected their own agenda onto O’Keeffe.

  “But you did consent to pose for them.”

  To pose, that was all. For Richard. She’d never thought beyond the photo sessions themselves—ignoring the fact that Richard was a professional photographer, dismissing the caution that any sensible person would have exercised. She’d been as naive as Naomi, and Richard had taken advantage of her trust. He’d let her unbutton her shirt and step out of her jeans, knowing very well that she assumed no other eyes would see.

  Oh, he was slick. He’d been careful to do nothing except watch and, once in a while, adjust her pose. She couldn’t accuse him of impropriety. She could only accuse herself of stupidity.

  She met Harold’s eyes. “Yes. I consented.”

  He nodded. “The issue at hand, even if there’s no specific policy against what you did, is that the university has standards to maintain. An image, if you will. If that image is sullied, everything we do and stand for is at risk.” He straightened his glasses. “That includes prospective students, alumni gifts, all of it. Like you, Ms. Crawford, we need to have integrity. We need to be impeccable.”

  “I understand.”

  “As impeccable as Marion Mackenzie.”

  Yes, that was how she would describe Marion.

  “Who won’t countenance your behavior.” Harold flattened his lips. “Marion’s withdrawn from your committee. You know how she feels about women’s scholarship. To her, what you did turns scholarship into a self-indulgent gimmick.”

  Elizabeth sat back, stunned. “That’s not what I intended.”

  “Nonetheless.” He gave a philosophical shrug. “If it had just been nude portraits, who knows? But it was the fact that you imitated O’Keeffe’s poses. To Marion, that was a mockery of the very topic you were purporting to study.”

  Elizabeth could hardly keep up with everything Harold was telling her. Losing Marion’s goodwill—and, clearly, the recommendation for a plum job that was no longer within her reach—was a blow she had never expected. Then she squared her shoulders. All right. If Marion’s support was the price she had to pay for her foolishness, so be it.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’d like to think she might give me another chance, but I respect her principles.” She drew in her breath. “Should I try to replace her on the committee?”

  Harold’s hesitation sent a spike of fresh alarm up her spine. “It goes a bit beyond that,” he replied. “I’m sure you can
understand that it involves more than a slight shift in the composition of your dissertation committee.”

  Elizabeth’s fear mounted. “What are you referring to?”

  He clasped his hands, right over left, and propped his elbows on the dark green blotter that covered his desk. “A compromise. Marion wanted you gone immediately. But I reminded her that there’s no legal ground to prevent you from finishing your dissertation and your degree. Plagiarism, failure to progress—we have policies for things like that. But not this.”

  Her pulse slammed against her temples. She could feel it coming, another blow.

  “We have to let you finish,” he said, “but we can’t have you standing in front of a class. Again, Marion wanted you removed right now, today, but one of the faculty members pointed out that it would only make you into a martyr, since the students are so intent on praising what you’ve done. Frankly, we don’t need a lot of turmoil that could inflate the whole thing into some sort of radical feminist, freedom-of-speech showdown. Make it into a political event, when it’s merely an act in bad taste.”

  Elizabeth yearned to explain. There hadn’t been anything political about the way she had bared herself to Richard. Yet the alternative that Harold was suggesting—bad taste—wouldn’t save her either.

  Harold opened his hands, laying them flat on the green felt. “I worked out a compromise. You can finish the term with your Feminist Art class, that’s the best way to keep things from escalating. But you won’t be rehired. And you won’t get a recommendation for another position.” There was a glimmer of sympathy in his eyes. “I’m sorry. It was the best I could do, given the factors at play.”

  Tears stung her cheeks. The years of classes and papers, the hefty tuition, the hours away from her children—all to prepare her for a future like Harold’s or Marion’s. It had seemed so certain, so close. How had her infatuation with Richard possibly led to this?

  “But I love teaching,” she whispered.

  “I’m sure you do. Your students’ admiration, albeit misguided, attests to that. Nevertheless.”

  Without a letter of recommendation, her chances of getting hired anywhere—never mind for a coveted job like the one at Marion’s former university—would plummet, dissolve. If she couldn’t teach, her dissertation was a stepping-stone to nowhere.