Read “Abstract Faces” in Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s “Swarm to Glory” available from Wiseblood Books.
After Greg’s arrest, I searched my memory for clues, signs that I might have missed. I think we all did. Greg was nerdy—dressed a bit avuncular for a guy in his early thirties, cardigans and wide corduroy pants—but not so nerdy that you could consider that a factor. He had sharp eyes and an easy smile, though the space between his upper lip and his nose bowed in a way that gave him a slightly simian appearance, a goofy trait that softened the intensity of his eyes before the arrest, a somewhat sinister feature after.
Greg was a mathematician who had apparently held real promise in his youth. The newspaper account said that he had earned his bachelor’s from MIT, his Ph.D. from Stanford. The article also mentioned an important proof he had developed in his early twenties. Since I’m a painter, a portraitist, I know little of these things, but I vaguely remember hearing about it when he was hired. He was considered a good catch for our small Ohio college. We have a respectable reputation in the arts and some of the humanities, but math and science are not among our strong suits. The article on the arrest said Greg was 32, unmarried, and lived on McKinley Street (I know the block; located in what we call faculty ghetto—where the younger associate profs live—it is composed of smallish wood-frame houses, dormered windows on the slanted roofs, many with wide front porches and neat gardens).
He seemed skilled in conversation; not that I could recall actually engaging in a one-on-one with him (believe me, I have racked my memory) besides the usual perfunctory inquiries about one’s health. Though he was not in my department, we served on the college retention committee together before his arrest. One time he supported me in advocating for reduced class sizes even if it meant an additional class for faculty members, a somewhat unpopular issue. For this I felt grateful.
Our committee met at 8:30 am on Wednesday mornings and, as is the custom at our college for meetings scheduled before nine, breakfast items were served. I noticed he avoided the healthy fare (bran muffins and fruit) in favor of coffee and a single glazed donut. He had a slight paunch, a bulging above the belt, though he certainly could not be called fat. After the arrest, the image of his donut—the crusty glaze, the puffy central hole, sitting in the middle of the small white paper plate with fluted edges—acquired a sinister symbolism in my mind, much like the space between his nose and upper lip.
During the week the news broke, I was happy to leave campus right after my office hours each day. A van and a news crew had set up residence at the entrance to the parking lot. A few reporters had approached faculty. We received an e-mail from the administration asking us to refer questions to the media relations department. And though the spoken speculation among my colleagues was low-key, it was always present that week, right under the surface, a head-achy drone. We all had more questions than answers. How could he? What could possibly spawn such urges? We are generally a sympathetic bunch, liberal and compassionate, but it was difficult for anyone to muster more than a meager note of sympathy. I think we could have rallied a bit if his preference had been for teenagers, even adolescents. But toddlers and infants? I didn’t know such predilections existed. Even Stan Lebowsky, the most radical among us (who before the rubble of 9-11 stopped smoldering, already referred to the terrorists as freedom fighters) wasn’t able to mutter more than the word “tragedy”; though he did question the administration’s right to suggest we not answer reporters’ questions.
I didn’t see Rachel until Wednesday that week. When I got home from school, she was already in her room, the door closed. She had been at her father’s since Sunday night. Though I have primary custody, David and I have pretty much allowed her to spend her time at whichever house she wants since she turned thirteen, almost three years ago. The only real rule about relocating was that the parent in the home she left alert the other of her departure, and the other confirm her arrival. (I had received an e-mail at my office from David and would reply now that I heard the music wafting from her room.) We trusted her. She was a good student and seldom broke rules, though lately she had seemed secretive, going to her room immediately upon arrival, appearing distracted during dinner, and offering only a half smile and laconic response if I asked a question or relayed an anecdote from my day.
I wondered if I should have a conversation with her about Greg Campbell. Colton was a small town and an article had appeared in the Colton Courier that day (though at the college, we all had read the news in the Akron Beacon Journal on Monday).
I rapped gently on her door, and then pulled it open before giving her a chance to respond. I could see straight into her bathroom, where she stood over the sink, wearing just her bra, scrubbing a green item under the facet.
“Just thought I would check in and say hello.”
She jumped around and stood in a way that seemed to be blocking the sink, almost as if she was hiding something.
“What are you doing?” I asked, taking a step closer.
“Just washing my blouse. I spilled some milk on it.”
“Do you want me to throw it in the washer?”
“No, no, this is fine,” she said, still blocking my view of the sink. “Daddy told you I was coming, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he e-mailed. I was surprised you stayed so long at his house.”
His place was cramped and her room there was small, a curtained off section of David’s office. She rarely stayed there more than two nights.
Rachel shrugged noncommittally. She was a pretty girl, might even be a beauty some day. She had her father’s dark hair and eyes, but my pale skin, which she had not, as I foolishly had as a teenager, sunburned, tanned, sunburned, and tanned repeatedly, coating it with baby oil every hot summer day. Hers was alabaster and flawless. The girl had never even had a pimple. Her eyes had heavy, sensual lids—again, like her father—and her lips were full. She wasn’t frowning but her lips seemed farther down on her face, almost as if they were about to slip from her chin, and fall off. With her shrug, I noticed for the first time that her hair was longer than usual, hanging past her shoulders. (It was better shorter, framing her cheeks.) Even more startling was the realization that it seemed dirty, stringy and a bit greasy. She was usually meticulous regarding her appearance.
“Lorraine had to go out of town, so I helped dad with the twins.”
Lorraine was my ex-husband’s third wife. He had been married briefly after our divorce, when Rachel was seven, to Virginia, the woman who had broken up our marriage. He and Lorraine got together a year after that divorce. David and I had tried briefly to patch things up in between his two marriages but I couldn’t trust him. I had not had a clue about Virginia until the morning a gym membership for her arrived at our house. David had bought me the same Hanukah gift that he had gotten Virginia for Christmas—gym memberships—and the gym had confused the mailing addresses, including the personal notes from David that accompanied them. His message to her was sexual, and alluded to a “hot” time they had recently had at a conference. They were both in the Creative Writing Department (only six full-time faculty members). After their divorce they had remained friends, almost as if they had never had an affair, marriage, and divorce. Handling such a thing with such little contention is unusual at a small college. Liberal arts colleges often contain more adversarial relationships than other workplaces. I think that is because, unlike at most jobs, where an affair, a fight, or a political coup, results in one of the parties leaving, tenured faculty seldom leave. The golden handcuffs theory.
Of course that wouldn’t be the case with Greg Campbell. He would certainly be fired. The day after the first story appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal, all mentions of Greg disappeared from the college website. Reports said Greg had waived his right to an attorney, confessed to something. Hadn’t he seen any legal television shows? Guilty or innocent, you always asked for an attorney? Though exactly what he had done was a bit blurry; child pornography was mentioned, along with the word “infants.” Regardless, his confession made it even more difficult for the rest of us. We weren’t able to say “innocent until proven guilty” while we processed the story and came to accept it.
“That was nice of you. Daddy didn’t mention it, Lorraine leaving, I mean.” Why would he? It was an e-mail.
I thought, again, fleetingly about mentioning Greg, sitting down on Rachel’s bed and calling her over for a conversation. When she was young, David and I had prided ourselves on being progressive parents, able to discuss anything with our daughter. In fact, we had talked to her about pedophiles and sexual predators before she started kindergarten. But the story about Greg felt too disturbing. Infants. Rachel been mesmerized by David’s twins when they were newborns; she talked continually about the size of their fingers and toes. She found them less appealing now that they ran about and had little tantrums, yet she would connect them with the story. I didn’t want to plant the images in her head.
“I made some lentil soup over the weekend. I thought that we could have that tonight, along with some salad,” I said.
“That sounds good,” she said, still standing at attention in her bra, though she turned slightly, as if to suggest she wanted to go back to her scrubbing in the sink, thus signaling the end of our conversation.
“Do you want your door open or closed?”
“Closed, please.”
When had exchanges between us grown so formal? And hand-washing her own laundry? Usually, she stuffed it in the hamper without a second thought. Could excessive politeness or taking responsibility for her wash constitute warning signs? Ridiculous. For what? I told myself I should just be relieved that she had been at the sink rather than at her computer. Who knew what was skulking out there in cyberspace? The FBI had seized Greg’s computer. Apparently that was how he had exchanged photos with others with similar urges.
As I tore and rinsed the lettuce for the salad, I wondered about Greg Campbell’s parents, where they lived, whether they had heard the news on their own, if he had contacted them—or if they were still unaware. Joyce Smithers, my closest friend on the retention committee (actually at the college since Eve Robins was away on sabbatical at the time) said she thought he was originally from California. That didn’t mean his parents were still there or even still alive.
I hoped they were dead—of natural causes, of course.
•
That Friday there was an emergency meeting of the retention committee. We all rushed in late. Few of us taught Friday classes—so we came scurrying into the room at the last minute, scrambling to get off our coats and grab a little food before claiming our seats around the conference table.
The seats on either side of where Greg usually sat were empty. Apparently, people were even hesitant to associate with his former presence.
Kendall Iverson, chair of the committee, took his seat at the head of the boardroom table and called the meeting to order.
“As you all are undoubtedly aware, a member of our committee has left unexpectedly,” Iverson began. He did not mention Greg’s name, which I had come to see was protocol now; you were free to whisper about Greg in small groups, but not to mention him publicly. Just as his face and credentials had disappeared from the web site, his name had been banished from our lips. “The purpose of this meeting is to elect a new member to replace the one who will not be returning.”
“You called a special meeting on a Friday for that?” asked Joyce. “Why couldn’t it wait until Wednesday’s meeting?”
I liked that about Joyce. Her forthrightness. I wouldn’t put it past her to actually say Greg’s name aloud if Kendall didn’t watch himself.
“Joyce, if you don’t mind, we’re going to follow Robert’s Rules the same as we at any other meeting.” Kendall Iverson had a sparse, crinkly beard that reminded me of pubic hair, the way it curled against his pasty skin. “If you wish to make a comment, raise your hand.”
Joyce raised her hand. Kendall nodded in her direction.
“You called a special meeting on a Friday for that?” A few of us tittered. “Are there any emergency retention matters I don’t know about? Are students flocking from the college now in response to the unfortunate news?”
All right, so even Joyce could not say Greg’s name in a group.
“We have a number of important issues coming up and a new member can’t vote on them until he or she has heard them read at a meeting. Therefore, it behooves us to have that member in place now so we will be able to vote the following week,” said Kendall. His moist lips were almost unnaturally red and moved in strange shapes in order to firmly articulate the point he was making. As I watched them open and close, into circles and arcs and crescents and oblong squares, they looked almost obscene. A talking vagina. It was at that point that I noticed Joyce had a single glazed donut on her plate. She usually had a muffin. The room felt overheated. My sweater—though it was soft cashmere—itched.
What had Greg Campbell thought about as he sat among us in the retention meetings—smaller class sizes, learning groups, creating a greater sense of community or how he planned to satisfy his impulses? His exterior competently concealed what went on inside his head. The news had broken five days ago; we had had an entire workweek to absorb it, yet the information only seemed to be sinking deeper into our sub-consciousnesses—our secret thoughts of the secret thoughts of the man who had sat among us. I felt slightly nauseated and pushed my plate away. I had taken only one bite of my muffin.
It turned out that Kendall already had two recommendations for Greg’s replacement from the dean, both of whom (women, one with a baby and the other with grandchildren) had already agreed to serve if called upon. We elected the grandmother and were out of the boardroom by 8:40.
“Do you want to get a drink this weekend or see a movie?” Joyce asked. “Bob’s going to be in New York.”
A few years younger than me, Joyce had soft curly red hair and skin that had taken on a pinkish cast a year or two earlier, when she turned forty. It wasn’t an unattractive ruddiness. More like a mild sunburn that brought out her huge green eyes, which she framed in thick banks of false lashes, uncharacteristic of most English professors (or most non-celebrity women in the current century as far as I could tell). When she blinked, I was reminded of doll eyes. She and Bob had been our closest couple friends when we were married. They had stopped talking to David for a while when he was with Virginia. But now I felt certain that they got together with David and Lorraine, though Joyce never mentioned it.
“I don’t have any plans. Just let me check first with Rachel, see if she is going to be with me or David this weekend.”
I returned to my office to check my messages. An e-mail from the dean announced a special counseling session “for any faculty or staff members who have been adversely affected by the arrest of a former member of our community. A similar session will be held for students and announced on student sites.” The message irritated me in a jittery way, though I couldn’t say why. Certainly a counseling session was the responsible thing to do. David and I had gone before our divorce (when I learned of Virginia) and then with Rachel afterwards. Partly it was the lack of Greg’s name (again) and partly the wording. Did they think there were people who hadn’t been adversely affected? But my reaction was more complicated. I felt stumped by what, besides platitudes, counselors would say in such a situation. People are not who they seem; your colleague/professor was just a more extreme case than usual. Should people examine the images the news had conjured in their minds or banish them immediately? It was not like school, where the destruction was obvious. Greg Campbell’s crime was dark and secretive. It wasn’t even clear what exactly he had done: engage in physical acts or simply traffic in photos? We didn’t know the exact extent of the tragedy other than the fact that Greg Campbell’s life—at least as he had known it—was most certainly ruined. Whether he had hurt others, whether he went to prison or not, whether he killed himself or not, his life as a professor who sat on retention committees and ate donuts supplied by the college was certainly kaput. His acceptance at MIT, his years of work on his dissertation, his pride at the proof he had developed, all his little kindnesses to others, mattered not.
I lifted the phone to call David. I knew he wrote on Friday mornings, but always answered if Rachel or I called.
“What’s up?” he asked after obviously seeing my name on the phone’s display panel. I imagined his eyes were now trained back on the computer screen. He had had a long dry spell—six years since his last book, which had sputtered and died quickly.
“I just wondered if you knew Rachel’s plans for the weekend?”
”No, isn’t the ball in your court now?”
“If Lorraine is still away. . .”
“Lorraine? No, we came back last weekend.”
“You came back?”
“Didn’t Rachel tell you? Lorraine’s mother took a spill, so we all piled into the car on
Saturday afternoon. Lorraine just needed to get her set up with a helper. Got back Monday night … hey, if you’re upset that I left Rachel alone . . .”
“No, no, I must have misunderstood something she told me.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing, but, I was wondering … has she seemed different to you in some way lately?”
“How?”
“Oh, I don’t know, more secretive.” I felt silly citing her greasy hair and washing her blouse. And it might sound like jealousy if I questioned why she spent more time at his house recently. Telling him her lie about helping him with the twins seemed like tattling. So, I was left with no examples.
“Well, she was pretty shaken when Tom dumped her, but that was over a month ago,” said David.
“I never thought they were that serious.”
“Are you kidding? That kid practically lived at our house.”
This was news to me; he had only been to my house once or twice to pick up Rachel. Since Rachel has e-mail and her own cell phone, I had no idea how much they communicated other than that.
“Maybe, I’m just being overly sensitive,” I said.
“No problem… hey, how about that guy in the math department? What a creep! Did you know him?”
“We were on the retention committee together.”
“Man, what lurks in the minds of men. But what boggles my mind is how he thought he would get away with it, with all that shit on his computer?”
I was tempted to ask David how he had thought he would get away with his affair, with buying two gym memberships at the same gym in a small town, but I knew that would be an unfair comparison. More importantly, I didn’t want to sound as if his transgression was still foremost in my mind, as if I remained bitter.
“Yes, well, it’s certainly disturbing,” I said, making a mental note to search Rachel’s hamper for the blouse she had washed.
•
Rachel stayed with me until Saturday morning, and then announced she was leaving for her father’s. I called David to let him know. Lorraine answered the phone. David still didn’t have a cell phone, said he didn’t want to be in constant communication with everyone in the world. I could hear a screaming toddler in the background.
“Do you want a ride? It’s pretty cold outside,” I asked Rachel.
“No, I feel like the walk.”
David and Lorraine lived a few blocks from Greg Campbell, in the junior faculty ghetto. Right before his affair, David and I had graduated from that neighborhood and bought a Victorian in the full professorship ghetto (on the same street as the college president), a four bedroom in anticipation of our growing family. Large houses are relatively inexpensive in Colton. With manufacturing dying in neighboring towns, the college provides most of the employment besides service jobs. We had decided that for Rachel’s stability, she and I would remain in the house. David moved into Virginia’s house, but once he left her and married Lorraine (who had managed the Italian restaurant in town before the twins), he had had to return to the smaller frame houses in the slightly less fashionable neighborhood. Not that it was a bad neighborhood; besides student row, nothing in town was actually shabby, and no place was unsafe—or at least appeared unsafe on the surface.
The most direct route to David’s house passed right by Greg Campbell’s house. All this time, Rachel had been walking past his place with no idea of what was going on inside. As I realized this, I had a momentary glimmer of relief that Greg had liked infants, not adolescent or teenage girls. My thought was immediately followed by shame. If I was wishing, why not wish for him to like someone in his own general age group? To distract myself, I went up to my studio, the bedroom with the best southern light, to draw.
Over the Christmas holidays, I had begun a series on famous scientists associated with inventing bombs. I preferred working from live models, but I had had such success—even had a show in New York—with the series I did on radical women writers, all based on photographs, that I had decided that the overtly political might garner me more attention than the subtly political series, like unwed mothers, burn victims, and factory workers that I usually undertook. And, like David, I felt I needed more success. After all, I am over forty now.
Thumb-tacked black and white photos of scientists ran across the top of my bulletin board like a row of wanted posters in the Post Office. I plucked one of Edward Teller from a sixties issue of Life magazine, and clipped it to my drawing board. His eyebrows were his most interesting feature, like bird nests pasted above his lids, so many wayward twigs and wild weeds sprouting that it was surprising he could see. My initial pencil studies are always realistic, but when I do the final portraits in paint, they turn abstract. I knew that his eyebrows would somehow figure prominently in the abstraction but I wouldn’t know how until I began painting. I had done at least a dozen preliminary studies. He was the type of man that I felt I could sketch forever. Still, once I began I began drawing his full lips, I found my mind wandering, my drawing mutating—Teller’s lips metamorphosing, protruding, bowing out, turning into Greg Campbell’s lips.
I sighed. Why fight it?
I almost never drew from memory, but Greg Campbell was on my mind, his situation had struck a chord I was having difficulty quieting, so inevitably, he would land up on the paper. I turned the page of my sketchpad, and watched what I recalled of his face take shape, his mouth becoming more like a rictus, his eyes beady and birdlike. I worked until late afternoon, going back and forth between Teller and Greg, until the natural light faded and I realized I should get ready to meet Joyce. The second I pushed the tack back into Teller’s on the bulletin board, I realized I had not heard from David. My throat constricted in panic. I picked up my cell and quickly punched in his number.
“Hey,” he answered. “I was just about to call you.”
“She just got there? She left before ten this morning?”
“Hey, chill out, she’s fine.”
“David, you’re supposed to call me.”
“Come on, she’s sixteen. She probably stopped at a friend’s. I’ll give her the third degree as soon as we hang up.”
“No need for that, please don’t mention it, just call me as soon as she is ready to leave—and let me know if you and Lorraine are going out of town while she’s there. There’s no point in her staying at your place when you’re not home.”
“Yes, captain,” he said, one of the phrases he used to irritate me when we were married. I don’t think he had said it more than twice since we had divorced.
Before calling Joyce, I went into Rachel’s room and ransacked her hamper. I found the green blouse she had been scrubbing. The fabric on the shoulder appeared slightly darker than the rest of her shirt. If milk as she claimed, it would come out in the wash. I pulled out the rest of her clothing—an item at a time and found two other tops with stains on the shoulder, one had been hand-washed but the other contained dried crud. It smelled slightly of spoiled milk, or perhaps, vomit. I tried to recall the last time I had seen Rachel drink a glass of milk. Bulimia? Rachel had never worried about her weight. And part of the stain was actually on the back of her shoulder.
Garnett Kilberg Cohen is the author of three short-story collections: Lost Women, Banished Souls; How We Move the Air and Swarm to Glory (September 2014). She received a Notable Essay citation from Best American Essays 2011, the Crazyhorse National Fiction Prize (2004) and four Illinois Arts Council awards, including a 2001 Artist Fellowship award for prose. Her essays and short stories have appeared in American Fiction, Ontario Review, TriQuarterly, the Antioch Review, Brevity, Alaska Quarterly Review, the Literary Review, Descant, StoryQuarterly, the Roanoke Review, the Prague Revue, the Nebraska Review, the Gettysburg Review and many others. A former fiction editor of the Pennsylvania Review and Hotel Amerika, Garnett has served as review editor for several journals and was most recently Guest Nonfiction Editor for Fifth Wednesday. Cohen directs the Creative Writing–Nonfiction BA Program at Columbia College Chicago. She is at work on a memoir.