Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  I am so proud of you!

  Sorry I can’t be at your graduation.

  Buy yourself something nice with this.

  Love

  Dad

  Within moments of opening it, I was in floods of tears. I had never cried when Dad left us. I had never cried when he had to cancel so many of our planned weekends in the city after he’d relocated down there. I had never cried when he moved to Chile and kept telling me that, next year, he’d fly me down for a few weeks and never got around to it. I had never cried when his response to my straight As at Smith, my election to Phi Beta Kappa – all that damn striving to please him – was silence. And in an attempt to get some sort of recognition from him I wrote that letter. All it did was make me face the looming truth I never wanted to confront: my father always distanced himself from me. Buy yourself something nice. A hundred bucks and a five-line note to assuage his guilt . . . that is, if he even had any guilt. Yet again, he was brushing me aside – but this time, I couldn’t respond by trying to shrug off his detachment. This time all I could do was cry.

  Tom tried to console me. He kept telling me that my father didn’t deserve such a great daughter, that he would come to regret his dismissal of me, that my success undoubtedly unnerved him, because he himself had failed so badly in everything he had ever undertaken.

  ‘Of course he’s going to push you away,’ Tom said. ‘How else is he going to handle your brilliance?’

  ‘Stop flattering me,’ I told him.

  ‘You’re resistant to flattery,’ he said.

  ‘Because I don’t merit it.’

  ‘No – because you have convinced yourself that your idiot father is right: why should you merit your success?’

  But my sadness wasn’t just bound up in my father’s brush-off of me. It was also rooted in the fact that Tom and I were about to part. The terrible thing about this split was, we didn’t want to break up. But I was heading to Harvard and Tom was off to Trinity College Dublin for postgraduate work. Though neither of us wanted to admit it, we knew that once we were separated by the Atlantic, we’d be finished. What made this knowledge even more agonizing was the fact that Tom had been accepted by Harvard to do his Masters in History. But he had decided to take the offer of a place in Dublin – reassuring me that it would only be a year and then he’d join me at Harvard for his doctorate.

  ‘You can come over for Thanksgiving,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back for Christmas, we’ll spend Easter together knocking around Europe . . . and the year will pass before we both know it.’

  I wanted to believe his protestations. Just as I decided that I wouldn’t force his hand or use the sort of emotional blackmail (‘If you really loved me, you wouldn’t leave me’) that I had heard my mother use against my father in the years leading up to his departure.

  ‘Of course I don’t want you to go,’ I told him after he informed me that he was putting Harvard on hold and heading to Dublin. ‘Of course I’m not going to stop you.’

  That’s when the reassurances began. The more he uttered them, the more I knew he wanted to cut and run. On the day that my dad’s five-line letter arrived – and Tom tried so hard to comfort me – I blurted out the uncomfortable truth: ‘As soon as you get to Dublin, we’re finished.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said. ‘I’ve never intimated that—’

  ‘But it’s going to happen, because—’

  ‘It is not going to happen,’ Tom said, getting vehement. ‘I value you – us – far too much. And I understand exactly why you’re feeling so vulnerable right now, but . . .’

  But what you don’t understand is what I understand: men vanish when threatened.

  Well, he did head off to Dublin – and we did promise each other that love would see us through and all the other usual romantic clichés. The rupture happened right before Thanksgiving. He was due to come back to the States, with me then meeting him in Paris for Christmas. Fair play to Tom – he didn’t feed me a lie or keep me dangling while he said that, due to unforeseen circumstances, he wouldn’t be landing in Boston on November 21st. Instead he phoned me and came straight out with: ‘I’ve met somebody else.’

  I didn’t ask for much in the way of details – I’m no masochist – and he didn’t supply too many, except to say that she was Irish, a medical student at Trinity, and that it was ‘serious’. When he started saying: ‘It really did take me completely by surprise,’ I just said: ‘I’m sure it did.’

  A long silence followed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘So am I.’

  And that was that. The big central relationship of my life to date was suddenly no more. I took the news badly, withdrawing from everyone for around a week, cutting the lectures and thesis meetings I had at Harvard, and basically moping in my tiny studio flat in Somerville. It surprised me how deeply upset I was. We seemed so right for each other. But timing is everything and ours simply didn’t work out.

  Tom never returned to the States. He married his Irish medical student. He stayed on to get his doctorate at Trinity and eventually got a job at the university in Galway. We never saw each other after we broke up. Though I presumed he came home regularly to visit his parents, he didn’t look me up during the years I was living in Cambridge. There was only one communiqué from him: a Christmas card that arrived just a few years later, showing Tom and his wife Mairéad and their three very young sons – Conor, Fintan and Sean. They were standing in front of what looked like a suburban bungalow. The photo amazed me, as Tom was so adamant – like me – about never wanting children and always vowed never to live in the ’burbs. I didn’t feel a residual stab of sadness when I saw this photograph. Rather, all I could do was marvel at the way the narrative of life inexorably moves on – and how, having been so intensely involved with someone else, you can then simply vanish from each other’s lives. We lose things and then we choose things. Wasn’t that a fragment of a song I heard somewhere? Perhaps with Tom? Or maybe with David? And didn’t David tell me – shortly after we became lovers – that everything is just one big continual coming-and-going?

  I did reply to Tom’s Christmas card by sending one of my own. I kept the message short:

  You have a lovely family. I wish you every happiness for the coming year. All best . . .

  Of course I wanted to ask him dozens of things: Are you happy? Do you like your work, your new country, your life? And do you ever sometimes think of me, us, and how the narrative of our now very separate lives would have been so profoundly different if . . . ?

  ‘If.’ The most charged word in the English language . . . especially when coupled with ‘only’.

  As in: if only you hadn’t moved to Ireland, I wouldn’t have ended up for a while with David.

  But I wanted to end up with David . . . even if I knew from the outset that it had no long-term future. Because ending up with David helped me end things with you.

  Or, at least, that’s what I told myself at the time.

  Two

  ‘THIS IS DANGEROUS,’ David said.

  ‘Only if we allow it to be dangerous,’ I said.

  ‘If anyone else finds out . . .’

  ‘Is this your usual style of post-coital conversation . . . ?’

  ‘I don’t make a habit of—’

  ‘Sleeping with your students?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Never before?’

  Pause. Then: ‘Once. Back in the early seventies when things weren’t so—’

  ‘Politically correct?’

  ‘I’m not totally self-destructive,’ he said.

  ‘Is this self-destructive?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Have a little faith in me, David. I know what I’m getting into here.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘So besides the one student back in the still-swinging seventies,’ I said, changing the subject, ‘you’ve been completely faithful to Beth?’

  ‘Hardly . . . considering t
hat she stopped having sex with me back when Reagan was first elected president.’

  ‘And the longest affair went on for . . . ?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘I simply want to know everything about the man with whom I’m getting involved.’

  ‘You know a lot about me already.’

  That was true – as I had been working with David on my thesis for the last six months. At the outset of my time at Harvard, he showed himself to be a terrific advisor: sympathetic, but not touchy-feely; intellectually rigorous, but never pedantic; very clever, but someone who always avoided playing the bravura card. From the start, I was smitten. From the start I also knew that there was no way I would land myself in an involvement with my advisor. Nor, for that matter, did David flirt with me during those early months in Cambridge. In fact, up until Thanksgiving, our relationship was strictly student/teacher. Then I got the news from Dublin that Tom and I were no more. I vanished for a week, skipping classes, canceling my tutorials, venturing out only to buy food, and generally feeling miserable and sorry for myself. I found myself frequently bursting into tears in inappropriate places like the supermarket or while returning library books. I’ve never been someone who has been comfortable with the idea of becoming emotional in public. Call it a reaction to that morning after my thirteenth birthday, when Mom blamed me for Dad’s departure. Though I ran upstairs and hid in my room, I couldn’t bring myself to cry at the unfairness of her accusation. Was that the moment I started thinking that to cry was to lose control? Certainly, Dad preached a doctrine of always keeping everything that was eating at you under wraps, ‘otherwise people will see your vulnerabilities and prey on them’. I heeded that advice – especially when it came to all ongoing emotional transactions with Mom – but still privately grappled with a huge sense of vulnerability. In the face of a setback or a loss I would always try to constrain my feelings – fearing what others might think if they saw me in such a weakened state. But inside, the wounds never really cauterized – which meant that, when Tom broke it off with me, the sense of loss was all the more acute. If your father is absent and your mother finds you wanting, you search for some sort of personal ballast in the world. And when that’s taken away . . .

  Well, all I could do was hide for a while.

  So when I left a message calling off a third consecutive meeting with David, he rang me at home and asked if there was anything wrong.

  ‘Bad flu,’ I said.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not that sort of flu,’ I heard myself saying.

  I did make our next scheduled tutorial, in which we spent an hour discussing Frank Norris’s McTeague – which, as David noted, was an indictment not just of American cupidity, but also of early twentieth-century dentistry.

  ‘But you didn’t need a dentist last week, did you?’ he asked.

  ‘Just sleep.’

  ‘You sure you’re over it?’

  That’s when I lowered my head and bit my lip and felt my eyes well up. David opened a drawer under his desk and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and two glasses.

  ‘When I was in graduate school,’ he said, ‘my advisor told me that when I became a professor, I should always keep a bottle of whiskey in a filing cabinet . . . exactly for moments like this one.’

  He poured us each two fingers of Scotch and handed me a glass.

  ‘If you want to talk about it . . .’ he said.

  I did so want to talk about it – and the story came out in a rush that took me by surprise, given my refusal to speak to anybody about such things, let alone my thesis advisor. At the end of it I heard myself saying: ‘. . . and I don’t really know why I’m taking it so hard, as I knew six months ago that this is how it would turn out. In fact I told him this last spring, when he decided that Dublin was his destiny. But he kept telling me—’

  ‘Let me guess: “The last thing I want to do is leave you. It will only be eight months and then I’ll be back in your arms”?’

  ‘Yes, words to that effect. And the thing is, I wanted to believe them.’

  ‘That’s pretty damn understandable. If we don’t want to lose something . . . someone . . . we always want to believe the declarations of others, even if we privately doubt them. We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to . . . because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we’d rather not hear.’

  ‘I certainly didn’t want it to end.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you follow him to Dublin?’

  ‘Because I wanted to come here. And because I didn’t want to live in Dublin.’

  ‘Or be tethered to his career?’

  I felt myself tighten. David noticed this.

  ‘Hey, there’s hardly anything wrong with not wanting to be in the shadow of someone . . . though have you ever thought about the fact that perhaps your fellow didn’t want to live in your shadow? Take it from me, men are very uncomfortable when they realize a woman is more accomplished than they are.’

  I felt a blush spread across my face. ‘Please . . . I don’t take flattery very well.’

  ‘I’m not trying to flatter you. I’m just pointing up the reality of the situation. Maybe everything was commensurate between you when you were both at college. But graduate school is another matter, because everyone’s looking ahead to their careers and the atmosphere gets just a little competitive and cut-throat. Though, of course, at Harvard we really disdain competitiveness . . .’

  He shot me a mischievous smile, then added: ‘The hardest thing about a break-up is being the one who’s been left. It’s always better to do the leaving.’

  He then directed the conversation back to the work at hand. In the coming weeks he made a point of not asking me anything more about the situation. Rather he simply opened our tutorials with the question: ‘How are things?’ Though I could have told him I was still feeling extremely fragile about everything, I chose to say nothing. Because there was nothing more to say about it and I always hate sounding sorry for myself – even though it took several months before the sense of loss began to diminish.

  And the very fact that my involvement with David only began around six months after Tom sent me his kiss-off letter meant that . . .

  Well, what exactly did it mean? That David wasn’t an opportunistic sleaze who hit on me when I was feeling vulnerable and alone? That ours quickly became a serious relationship, as we had known each other for almost a year when we crossed that frontier between camaraderie and intimacy? Or that we both played a very long game with each other – as it was clear early on (to me anyway) that we were more than attracted to each other.

  But he was my professor, he was married – and I couldn’t even contemplate entering that realm of clandestine adulterous mess, or assuming the grim role of the Other Woman. Bar that one moment when he got me talking about the break-up with Tom, we stayed on neutral ground with each other.

  Until one late afternoon in mid-May – when we were in the middle of a tutorial discussion on Sherwood Anderson, and the phone rang. If the telephone started buzzing during one of our weekly sessions David would always ignore it. That day he tensed as soon as it began to ring, then reached for it, saying: ‘Have to take this . . .’

  ‘Would you like me to leave?’ I asked.

  ‘No need . . .’

  He reached for the phone, swiveled around in his chair so his back was to me, and started to talk in an agitated whisper.

  ‘. . . Yeah, hi . . . look, I’ve got someone here . . . so what did the doctor say? . . . Well, he’s right, of course he’s right . . . don’t tell me I’m bullying you when I’m just . . . this is all down to you not taking the meds and then having these episodes . . . there’s no need to . . . all right, all right, I’m sorry, I’m . . . oh, Jesus, will you please . . . yes, I am getting angry, fucking angry . . . and I can’t take this, you . . .’

  Suddenly he stopped talking – as if the conversation had been cut of
f. He sat in his chair, immobile, trying hard to keep his anger and upset in check. A good minute passed – during which David simply stared out the window. Finally I said: ‘Professor, maybe it’s best if I—’

  ‘I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have heard that.’

  ‘I’ll go.’

  He didn’t turn back towards me.

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  When I saw him again the following week, he was all business – continuing our discussion of Sherwood Anderson. But at the end of the hour, he asked me if I was free for a beer.

  Actually the ‘beer’ turned out to be a Martini in the bar of the Charles Hotel off Harvard Square. He drank his – gin, straight up, three olives – in around three gulps, and fished out a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘Yes, I know it’s a disgusting habit – and yes, Gitanes are about as smelly and pretentious as they get – but I keep it down to ten a day maximum.’

  ‘Professor, I’m not a health fascist. Smoke away, please.’

  ‘You must stop calling me Professor.’

  ‘But it’s what you are.’

  ‘No, it’s simply my title. David is my name – and I insist that you use that in the future.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, slightly surprised by the vehemence in his voice. So was David, as he immediately flagged down the waitress for a second Martini and lit up another Gitane, even though he already had one balanced on the lip of the ashtray.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘Sometimes these days I find myself—’

  He stopped, then started again: ‘Have you ever been through a time when you found yourself so consumed with rage that—?’

  Another pull on his Gitane.

  ‘I shouldn’t be talking about all this,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK, Professor . . . sorry, David. Talk away.’

  Another long drag on his cigarette.

  ‘My wife tried to kill herself two weeks ago. It’s the third time she’s tried to end it all this year.’

  That’s when I first found out that – for all his professional accomplishment and high academic standing – David Henry had his own private hell. Her name was Polly Cooper. They’d been married over twenty years, and from the 1970s photographs of her I’d seen in his office, she’d been the quintessential thin, willowy beauty back then. When he met her, she’d just published a collection of short stories with Knopf and had also done a big Avedon photo shoot for Vogue. Back in 1971, the New York Times profiled her, calling her ‘impossibly beautiful and impossibly smart’. When David hooked up with her – fresh off his National Book Award triumph and fantastic reviews for his first novel, and his appointment, at the age of thirty, to a full Harvard professorship – they were deemed a golden couple, destined for further greatness.