The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman Page B

rain. I’d know her, though, from the iron grip on my arm and the sheer force of her will propelling us along MacDougal Street. Chihiro Arita, my colleague in comparative literature, may be a good head shorter than me, and I hate to think how many pounds lighter, but she possesses twice my strength. She’s the one we call in the department to unstick file drawers and move the Xerox machine when something falls behind it. She’s also the one I call on when I need help navigating the internecine politics of the comp lit department. I’m not sure whether it’s her area of study—court poetry of the Heian era—or a childhood spent subverting her mother’s determination to raise her as a traditional Japanese girl in the suburbs of Boston that has given her the diplomatic skills of a courtier. She knows who’s had their last article rejected by the PMLA and who’s gotten a prestigious grant. Two years ago when we collaborated on a paper for the MLA conference on courtesan poets (“The [Court]Ship of States: The Poetics of Prostitutes”), she predicted each question we would get and who would ask it down to the last syllable and inflection. I’m lucky to count her as a friend; she’s never steered me wrong. Still, I dig in my heels at the corner of MacDougal and West Fourth Street to lodge a protest.
    “I need to go back to my apartment first—” I begin, but Chihiro only shakes her head, her dark hair whisking the collar of her bright yellow raincoat like a broom, and digs her fingers deeper into my flesh as she propels me across the street.
    “I wouldn’t advise being late for this meeting, Rose. It will give people a chance to talk.”
    “Talk about what?” I ask.
    “About you and Robin Weiss.”
    “What do you mean? There was nothing going on between us. You know that, Chihiro.”
    “I know that,” Chihiro says stopping in front of the Graham brownstone and giving me a reproving look that lasts long enough for me to take in her outfit: under the shiny yellow raincoat she’s wearing an orange T-shirt and a green vinyl miniskirt. (“You have your schoolgirl look; I have mine,” she is wont to say about our differences in style.) “But you spent a lot of time with him during his freshman year. People saw you together in Cafe Lucrezia—”
    “I go there with lots of my students; lots of professors do—”
    Chihiro pinches my arm so hard I yelp. “Those other professors weren’t seen in a clinch with a drunk student moments before he plummeted to his death.”
    “Who said we were in a clinch? Where are you getting this stuff from, Chihiro? You weren’t even there.”
    “I have my sources. The fact that Robin was whispering sweet nothings in your ear moments before he jumped from the balcony is on half a dozen student forums this morning. Also that Robin was accused of plagiarism. The prevailing theory is that he’d signed a six-figure—some say seven—deal with a Hollywood producer for a script that he’d written, and that you ruined it by telling the producer that Robin plagiarized the script. Some people think you wrote it—”
    “That’s ridiculous!”
    “But there’s also a speculation thread that the script was written by a handsome and mysterious Israeli who was at the party and who disappeared afterward.”
    “Orlando Brunelli. And he’s Italian.”
    “Brunelli? Isn’t that the name of your junior-year-abroad heart-throb?”
    “Yes, Orlando’s his son.”
    Chihiro rolls her eyes. “Thank God the shippers didn’t get hold of that connection.” I’m about to ask what a shipper is, but then I remember from a previous conversation with Chihiro that it’s when bloggers posit romantic connections—relation ships —between characters in TV shows. I’d thought it was a funny word for a romantic. “Now, about this plagiarism charge,” Chihiro continues. “Had Robin ever handed in a paper you suspected was plagiarized?”
    “Well, yes, there was an incident freshman