Holes in the Firmament

Part II

Raymond Stantz

Dr. Raymond Stantz, Dean of the College of Engineering at Columbia University, Ph.D. in Engineering, Applied Physics, and Parapsychology, with more letters after his name than in it, closed his eyes in frustration and concentrated on taking several long, deep breaths.

"It's a tie," he muttered. "It's just a tie, not a suspension bridge. If I can do one, I can do the other."

He opened his eyes to study his reflection in the mirror, and raised both hands to grasp the ends of the crumpled black silk hanging down the front of his shirt.

"Left over right, then around and-rats!"

"Oh, Ray." A moment later two pale and slender hands grabbed his and pulled them away from the mangled tie. For an instant Ray thought he might have heard a whimper of relief from the maltreated material.

Hoping to put off his premeditated strangulation a little longer, Ray grabbed his wife's hands in his own and waltzed her gently around the room. "May I say you look absolutely ravishable tonight?" he said, watching Janine's pale green eyes dance behind her glasses.

She did, he thought, look particularly lovely tonight, the heavy black silk of her long, off the shoulder gown made her pale skin glow and emphasized the fire in her hair. Once again, as he did every day, he wondered how he'd gotten so lucky as to have the former Ms. Melnitz cross his path. They would have met eventually, he knew, because she had been hired as the department secretary just a year before he had returned to academia from the commercial world.  He'd taken Columbia's offer partly out of nostalgia, instead of the more prestigious one offered by MIT, and once he'd met his new secretary, had never looked back.

"Raymond!" Janine's insistent tone brought him back from his thoughts.

"Yes, my dear one?" he asked, gently returning her to the dresser mirror with a final turn.

"Honestly Ray, you choose the most awkward times. Now here, hold still while I do this," she said, and pulled a fresh tie from its drawer, then looped it quickly around his neck. Dr. Stantz took the opportunity afforded by bending down for her to gently brush her lips with his own.

Janine held the neatly knotted silk and kept her husband's eyes level with her own while she took a good long look at him. "All right, buster, spill it."

Ray could feel the blood rushing to his face, flushing him the bright red color he always got when upset or bothered.  With his tattle-tale fair skin, it would be useless to try and get around her; after seven years of marriage she knew him far too well, and from the deepening frown on her face, the sooner he confessed, the better.

Seeing that Ray wasn't going to be stubborn about the issue, she let go of his tie and sat on the bed, patting the spot next to her. With a sigh, Raymond sat down, bounced on the edge of the bed as he always did, then ran his hand through his hair while he collected his thoughts.

"I'm worried about Egon," he announced after several minutes.

"Egon? What about Egon? What's wrong?" Janine's voice sharpened.  Before Raymond Stantz had dropped into her life along with four boxes of paperclips and a week's worth of filing, she'd had a fairly serious infatuation going for the physicist who split his time between teaching in the public sector and research in the private. At the time she hadn't understood why the tall blond seemed to go out of his way to avoid her, especially as a little more than a year later he'd become such fast friends with her Ray. Then she'd overheard a pair of giggly TA's voice the age-old complaint about all the good men being taken or gay, and the other shoe had dropped.

She knew for a fact that he wasn't taken.

Ray watched history flicker in his wife's eyes and waited for her to return to the present before he explained. It was fortunate that he knew that history, and that the two of them shared a deep affection for the other man; it would make what he had to say easier. He hoped.

"Egon's in love," he finally decided to start.

"With who?" a pair of voices chorused in amazement.

Ray and Janine looked at the bedroom door, and Ray waived one of his favorite students into the room.

Stantz had met Winston Zeddemore when he enrolled in college under the G. I. Bill, studying engineering to help his dad's construction company with some of their larger contracts.  Dr. and Mrs. Stantz had taken the stubborn black man under their collective wings, despite their being several years younger, and decades away in life experience. The vet, in fact, had announced he considered it his duty to keep 'The Lovebirds' as the campus faculty called them grounded in reality.  Shortly after meeting Dr. Spengler, a close friend of the couple, he'd extended his practical protection to the absent minded physicist as well.

The three of them, plus Winston's wife Winnie, had celebrated wildly when Dr. Spengler had been awarded the Nobel last year, and Winston had been vocal in his support of that night's dinner, considering it a long overdue recognition on the part of Columbia.

Discovering the brilliant scientist was gay has led to many hours of thought and soul searching, until the ever sensible Winifred has figuratively whapped him alongside his head and made him realize that Dr. Spengler was still the same man he'd always been, with just a little more color added. "And who better," she pointed out, "to understand people of another color, than people of another color?"

To hear that the celibate, or at least excessively discrete Dr. Spengler was embroiled in a romantic entanglement was hard to picture.

Ray whuffed out a lungful of air.  The initial statement had gone over well by all appearances, but he wasn't sure about the rest.

"Okay, you guys know that I first met Egon when I was a freshman taking my undergrad requirements. Well, the truth is that I was able to 'test out' of a number of them, and Egon was the proctor for some of the science ones." He looked at his audience; momentarily uncomfortable with the way they hung on his words. Give him a lecture hall full of students and he had no trouble sharing his enthusiasm for designing and building, but structuring words about his thoughts still gave him trouble, even with his Janine.

"Egon nearly got thrown out of the TA program because some of the professors thought I had cheated, and Egon either didn't catch me, or actively helped me. Fortunately the review board saw my high school records and test scores, which helped when I tried to convince them that neither of us cheated."

Ray looked like he'd tasted something nasty when he thought about that long ago review board.  All but one, maybe two, of the administrators had since left for greener pastures or retirement, but those couple could almost certainly be counted on to drag the whole thing out again if it should suit their nefarious purposes. The Dean rolled the word nefarious around for a second, happy with it; he liked the texture of the word and it certainly seemed to suit the two old cronies.

"Ray!" Janine said.

"Oh, uh, anyway, after all that happened, Egon and I became friends, and found out we were both interested in parapsychology. Egon says that's where he met him. The person he's in love with. That Egon's in love with, I mean."

"Oh, Ray, we know what you mean. But it's been what? Over ten years now, surely he's over it." Janine patted her husband on the arm then turned his hand over and held it.

"Yeah, man. But what happened with this dude? Did he like, dump Egon or what?" Winston wanted to know, so he could take retribution on Dr. Spengler's behalf if it was called for.

Ray shook his head vigorously. "No, no, this guy didn't even know Egon existed. They met in an advanced parapsych class, one that I wasn't able to get into.  From what Egon's said, he tried to talk to this guy several times, but the guy just brushed him off like, like lint!" Ray could feel himself getting angry now, that somebody should just reject his friend out of hand. Surely if the man had spent some time with the physicist he'd have seen what kind of man Spengler was. It had only taken Stantz half a day of testing to realize that Egon Spengler was one of the kindest, bravest, most loyal, trustworthy...why, words just couldn't encompass everything that Egon was.

"How awful."

"This dude is toast," Winston slammed his fist into his open palm to emphasize what kind of toast he meant, and it wasn't the kind with sugar and cinnamon.

Janine reached around Ray and hugged him tightly; Ray had always communicated most often through touch, and right now she was feeling an I-need-a-hug-cause-I've-done-something-that-might-be-bad tension in him. Not that her Raymond could ever do anything truly bad, he didn't have a mean bone in his body.  After a minute she eased back and turned to face him more fully. "Okay, Dr. Stantz, what's the rest of it," she demanded.

Dr. Stantz turned a shade of red Mrs. Stantz had last seen on their wedding night.

"You remember when we first heard that Egon had been awarded the Nobel and nothing would satisfy you and Winnie but that we all had champagne to celebrate, and Winston ended up in the little duck pond at the south end of Central Park? And I had to use your pantyhose to-"

Janine slapped a hand over Ray's mouth before he could go any further. "We remember, Ray, trust me, I don't think it's anything that any of us will ever forget." Mrs. Stantz leaned away from her husband once she was sure the point was made, and made a determined effort to will the redness out of her face.

Winston took a moment to thank the Lord for his own dark skin, grateful it didn't stain like Mrs. Stantz's did before he cut in. "I also remember we all swore an oath to never bring that night up again, but if it has some bearing on what you're talking about I'll forgive you this time."

Released from captivity, Dr. Stantz nodded vigorously. "Oh, it does! Right after the carriage driver dropped us off on the way to the police barn, and you guys remember that we all came in to dry off? Well, except for the police officer, but he was on his way to his station with the mink coat--"

"RAY!" Both of them yelled, at the end of their ropes.

"Anyways, Egon and I were in the kitchen and he was making cocoa and that's when I decided to find out why he'd seemed so sad lately and that's when he told me it was because he was in love but the person who he was in love with didn't know he existed and he wasn't sure how much longer he could hold on seeing this person occasionally but not being with this person and this person not doing or saying anything to give him any hope of it ever working out anyways and Egon was afraid he might do something drastic but I told him not to because I knew that it would work out and that's when Egon got that sad little smile he gets sometimes and then he just started crying and crying and I didn't know what to do so I just gave him a hug and he said thank you and that was the last time he ever mentioned it."

The uninterrupted flow of words suddenly stopped when Ray fell over on the bed panting, while the other two just looked on, momentarily stunned by the quantity as much as the content.

"That's great, Ray," Winston finally said, "but it still doesn't explain what's going on. Who is Egon in love with, and what does it have to do with the award banquet tonight?"

"Everything....  Just...give me...another...minute," he wheezed.

Janine had other plans, and rolled her husband onto his back, then climbed up the bed to glare down at him. Finally catching his breath, the engineer grinned up at his spitfire wife and fondly pushed her glasses back up her nose.

"I didn't know who it is exactly, but I'd been doing some asking around and checking, and I'd got the field narrowed down to three guest lecturers. So then I went to Andrea and asked her for help."

"Andrea? You don't mean Dr. Andrea Borshinski in the Math department, do you?" Winston was torn between being impressed and appalled. Dr. Borshinski had an odd reputation on campus, managing to get her way more often than was likely. Theories ranged from soul selling and witchcraft, to blackmail and Mafia connections. The middle-aged tyrant had a keenly logical mind and a nose for scandal that could put together wildly divergent facts and come up with answers that were the more outrageous for being right.

"Ray you promised me you'd stay away from her." Janine's feelings were far from conflicted on the matter.  If the dubious Dr. Borshinski took a dislike to Ray, dean or not, he was likely to be booted from his chair, to the severe detriment of the engineering department. On the other hand....  "What did she say?"

"She said I was wrong, that Egon's love was none of the one's I'd thought, and while she didn't know off hand who it was, she knew how to find out. And that's what the awards banquet tonight is all about."

Winston frowned down at his mentor and friend. "You mean the dinner tonight is just a way for Dr. Borshinski to find out who Egon's in love with?"

"Oh no," Ray said simply.  " She figured that out. The banquet tonight is to see if there's anything to it all, or if Egon's really doomed to unrequited love."

Winston wondered if Janine should really be turning that shade of red, and would it be safe to intervene or just let Dr. Stantz meet his fate.  No, he decided, he'd have to help her hide the body and then come up with an alibi, not to mention what the blood stain would do to the satin comforter he and Winnie had given the couple as an anniversary gift last year. And what was that sound she was making? "So who is it?" he finally asked, watching the redheaded woman carefully.

"A psychologist who graduated a year or so after Egon, named Peter Venkman."