Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  It all became too much. My mother had turned into a micro-manager – trying desperately to make certain I sidestepped as many potential pitfalls and mistakes as possible. By the time I reached college, I had became so much more private, so guarded, that the landscape between us had changed irrevocably. She enquired less about my life and checked herself whenever she was about to veer into the meddlesome. On the surface, we were still pleasant enough with each other – and I did let her in on the basic superficial stuff in my life. But she knew that we were no longer close.

  Yes, I felt terrible about this – especially as I knew that, for Mom, it was further proof that she could ‘do nothing right’.

  But perhaps the most telling exchange we ever had about all this was after the break-up with Tom. It was Christmas. I was back home in Connecticut, and I hadn’t mentioned anything yet to her about the phonecall I had received from him before Thanksgiving. Naturally, on my first night back, she asked me if ‘my future son-in-law’ would be arriving on December 26th (as he always had done in the past).

  ‘I’m afraid Tom will be spending Christmas with his future in-laws in Ireland.’

  Mom looked at me as if I had just spoken to her in Serbo-Croat.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Tom met someone in Ireland – a medical student. They’re an item now . . . and we’re not.’

  ‘And when did this happen?’

  I told her. She turned white.

  ‘And you waited this long to tell me.’

  ‘I needed time.’

  ‘Time to do what, Jane? If you haven’t forgotten, I’m your mother – and though you may have pushed me to one side—’

  ‘I call twice, three times a week, I show up for every major holiday—’

  ‘And you keep all the big stuff in your life hidden from me.’

  Silence. Then I said: ‘This is the way I have to do things.’

  ‘But why? Why?’

  We can rarely tell others what we really think about them – not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves. The gentle lie is often preferable to the bleak truth. So in answer to her demand, ‘But why? Why?’, I simply met my mother’s maimed gaze and said: ‘It’s my problem, Mom . . . not yours.’

  ‘You’re just saying that to keep me quiet, to let yourself off the hook.’

  ‘Let myself off the hook for what?’

  ‘For being such a closed book. Just like your father.’

  Dad. I so wanted his approval, his interest. But he always remained elusive, distant, beyond my reach. He was now living full-time in South America – and, from the sporadic, quarterly phone calls I received from him, I knew he was shacked up with a much younger woman, and little else beyond that. But I still adopted his closed-book way of dealing with the world. Maybe I was subliminally trying to please him – ‘See, Dad, I can be just like you . . .’ Or maybe the distance I kept between myself and others was simply a modus vivendi, because it kept so much chaos at bay and because it meant I knew how to guard against intrusion or prying eyes or even a cross-examination by my best friend.

  ‘You are impossible,’ Christy Naylor said.

  ‘So I’ve been told.’

  ‘You know what the big difference between us is?’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘I reveal everything, you reveal nothing.’

  ‘A secret remains a secret until you tell somebody. From that moment on, it’s in the public domain.’

  ‘If you don’t trust anyone, don’t you end up feeling lonely?’

  Ouch. That was a direct hit – a real right-to-the-jaw. But I tried not to show it and instead said: ‘Everything has a price.’

  But the harboring of secrets also has its virtues. Not a single person ever knew of my involvement with David Henry . . . and we were together for four years. We would have probably been together longer – in fact, I often think that we might still be together right now – had he not died.

  Three

  FOUR YEARS with David Henry.

  Considered now, it all seemed to pass in a fast heady rush. That’s the tricky thing about time. When you’re living it on a daily basis, it can seem impossibly slow – the routine grind making you believe that the distance between Monday and the weekend is a vast one, riddled with longueurs. But regarded retrospectively, it always appears hyper-charged. A click of two fingers and you have left childhood and are trying to negotiate adolescence. Click – and you’re in college, pretending to be a grown-up and yet still so wildly unsure of yourself. Click – and you’re doing a doctorate and meeting your professor three afternoons a week to make love in your apartment. Click – and forty-eight months have passed. Click – and David dies. Suddenly, randomly, without premonition. A man of fifty-six, without what is known as ‘medical issues’, goes out for a bike ride and . . .

  As David so often noted, the prosaic always forces its way into everything we do. We fool ourselves into thinking we are extraordinary. Even if we are one of the lucky ones who do extraordinary things, commonplace realities inevitably barge in. ‘And the most commonplace reality,’ David once said, ‘is the one we fear the most: death.’

  Four years. And because we were ‘operating in the arena of the clandestine’ (another of my favorite David quotes), we were able to sidestep so many banalities. When you set up house with somebody you’re bound to find yourself falling into the usual petty disputes about domestic minutiae and personal idiosyncrasies. But when you’re meeting the man you love from four to seven, three times a week – and are denied access to him at all other times – the hours you spend together take on a heightened reality . . . because, of course, they’re so unreal to begin with.

  ‘If we lived together,’ I said to David a few months after it all started, ‘the let-down would be huge.’

  ‘That’s a decidedly unromantic thing to say.’

  ‘Actually, it’s a decidedly romantic thing to say. I don’t have to find out whether or not you floss your teeth, or kick dirty underwear under the bed, or only take out the garbage when cockroaches start to crawl out of—’

  ‘“No” to all of the above.’

  ‘Delighted to know that. Mind you, judging from your near-perfect personal hygiene when you’re over here—’

  ‘Ah, but maybe I’m just on my best behavior during our afternoons together.’

  ‘And if you were with me all the time . . . ?’

  Pause. I could see how that question made him instantly uncomfortable.

  ‘The thing is . . .’ he finally said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I pine for a life with you.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’

  ‘But it’s the truth. I want to be with you every damn hour of the day.’

  ‘But you can’t, for all sorts of evident reasons. So why, why? Tell me that.’

  ‘Because I find it very difficult leaving you, leaving here, and returning to . . .’

  ‘All that you don’t want, but refuse to walk away from. Isn’t that known as a paradox? Especially as I handle the situation. That’s my pragmatism. And it bothers you, because I make no demands on you. Would you rather an insane harpy who lies in wait for you outside your house, who threatens to report you to the Dean of the Faculty if you fail to meet a liaison or decide to end things?’

  ‘I’d never end things.’

  ‘That’s nice to hear. But I might if you keep on talking about this – us – and how painful it is to say goodbye to me after our afternoons together. It simply makes me think you’re doing the usual male thing of trying to explain away your guilt and your need to vacillate. And David, the thing is: you’re smarter than that.’

  To his credit, he never brought up the subject again. Perhaps the reason why I got so harsh with him for talking about it in the first place was because I was so damn crazy about him. And knew if he continued to hint about wanting to end things with his wife and set up house with me . . .

 
Well, the sense of expectation would have been unbearable, coupled with the knowledge that, at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, he would have found a way of backing out of our life together. Because David could never come to terms with that which he wanted and that which he felt he couldn’t abandon.

  Four years with David Henry.

  We were very adept at divorcing our life outside Harvard from the one we had within the university. Whenever I came to David’s office for our weekly thesis meetings, it was business as usual between us. Though a knowing smile would occasionally pass between us, we both made it a point to treat these professional meetings as just that – and never even bring up the next rendezvous chez moi. Similarly, if I ever saw David at a campus event, I would always call him ‘Professor’ and behave in a relatively formal manner. Just as I was rigorous about getting him to cover his own tracks, so his wife wouldn’t get suspicious about all his absences. That’s when I suggested he tell her that he was writing in his office during our afternoons together – and invest in an answerphone that he would turn on before leaving for my place, but which he could access remotely. Having told Polly that he would be working for these hours – and that the answerphone was on – he had his alibi.

  This ruse worked. After plaguing him for a couple of weeks, Polly bought the lie. He was ‘moving forward’ on the novel he’d been threatening to write for the past decade . . .

  But, on one level, he was telling the truth. In order to cover his hours with me – and to prove to Polly that he was writing – he started getting to his office most mornings by eight and turning out a page of his book (he was a very slow writer) before his first class at eleven.

  It took him over two years to finish it. He never talked about its contents – except to say that it was set in the 1960s and had a somewhat experimental structure. He wouldn’t show it to me for several months after finishing the first draft. Even then, he seemed hesitant, especially as his agent was getting quite a number of passes from the major New York publishing houses to which it had been submitted.

  ‘They’re all saying it’s too damn out-there,’ he told me after the sixth rejection rolled in.

  ‘Well, any time you want an outside opinion . . .’ I said.

  ‘I’ll let you read it after it’s accepted.’

  ‘You know, David, it doesn’t matter to me whether some publisher has given it the thumbs-down.’

  ‘Let’s just see what happens,’ he said, sounding very much as though he didn’t want to be pressed further about it.

  Finally, after months of thumbs-down, a small but highly respected publisher, the Pentameter Press, gave David’s novel the thumbs-up. He showed up at my apartment that day with champagne and a wonderful gift: a first edition of H.L. Mencken’s A Little Book in C Major, which contained one of my favorite of his aphorisms: ‘Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that somebody may be looking.’

  ‘That edition must have cost you a fortune,’ I said to David, after telling him just what a fantastic surprise it was.

  ‘That’s my worry.’

  ‘You’re far too generous.’

  ‘No, you’re far too generous – on all levels.’

  ‘So . . . this novel of yours. Do I get to read the damn thing now?’ I asked.

  He hesitated for a moment, then said: ‘All right . . . but you must take the whole thing with a Lot’s wife-sized grain of salt.’

  He wouldn’t elaborate on this point, but it did raise my suspicions that he’d been writing some sort of a roman-à-clef, in which our relationship played a certain role. The very fact that he had been so tight-lipped about it heightened my concerns, as did the way he gave me the manuscript during our next afternoon together: literally pulling it out of his shoulder bag just before leaving, placing it on a kitchen counter and saying nothing more about it except: ‘See you Friday.’

  The novel was entitled Forty-Nine Parallels. It was quite a short book – two hundred and six pages of double-spaced manuscript – and quite a long read. Ostensibly it was the story of a man in late middle age – simply referred to as ‘the Writer’ – who is driving across Canada (hence the play on the 49th Parallel) to see a brother who’s had a nervous breakdown while doing some property deal in Vancouver. The brother is rich. The Writer teaches in a middling university in Montreal. He has a wife – referred to always as ‘Wife’ (no definite article) – whom he no longer loves, and who keeps talking about seeing ‘Visions of the Divine’. The Writer has been having an affair with a younger writer, known only as ‘She’. She is a young professor at McGill – brilliant, self-contained, willing to be his mistress, but unwilling to handle his ‘emotional dynamite’. The Writer adores her because he knows that, though he can ‘have’ her, he still can’t have her . . .

  Though the basis of the story might sound linear and conventional (adultery and disaffection among the intelligentsia), David’s narrative – or perhaps his anti-narrative – completely obliterated all accessible elements in the story. Instead what we had was a sort of extended interior monologue as the Writer points his ‘venerable, but fading’ VW Karmen Ghia in a westerly direction and negotiates the ‘Great Elongated Nowhere’ that is the Canadian Prairies. The Writer – suffering from guilt, depression, ‘the nihilism of the everyday, the illusory exhilaration of escape’ – drives and thinks about the two women in his life in an extended stream-of-consciousness way. There was a lot of tortured imagery, not to mention three-page-long sentences describing the ‘mesmeric nothingness of the plains’, and (now this was interesting) ‘the peach-compote tang of the cunt of She’.

  Working my way through it – and it was most definitely work – I didn’t have the shock of recognition that I feared. David did not reinvent our relationship per se. No, what surprised me the most about Forty-Nine Parallels was its inherent badness. It was deliberately obscurantist, making the reader struggle to maintain some sort of comprehension of the Writer’s stream-of-consciousness; his wild shifts in cognitive direction; his endless digressions on everything from Wittgenstein to Tim Horton doughnuts.

  To say that it was a curious experience reading David’s novel would be to engage in understatement. I was genuinely thrown by it. You think you know someone so well. Through all your conversations about life and art and the stuff that matters and the stuff that doesn’t matter – and through the intimacies of love – you think you’re pretty damn certain what is churning around in his head; how he reacts to things and sees the world. And then . . . then . . . he turns around and writes something so defiantly weird and unsettling . . . though, at least, it was somewhat of a relief to discover that She bore little relation to me.

  And now I was dreading our next rendezvous. Because he would ask what I thought – and there was no way that I was going to tiptoe around this one. It was too big, too primal to avoid. I had to tell him the truth.

  But when he showed up that Friday, he didn’t mention the book at all. Instead, we fell into bed. My ardor was even more intense than usual, perhaps due to the guilt I was feeling about so hating his novel. We lounged in bed afterwards and he talked at length about a new biography of Emily Dickinson which he had been asked to review for Harper’s, and how Dickinson’s rigorous virginity so informed her world-view, and how ‘After Great Pain’ remained one of the benchmark poems of American literature and . . .

  ‘Don’t you want to know what I thought of the book, David?’ I asked.

  ‘I know that already. In fact, I knew what you were going to think of it before you even read the first page. That’s why I was so reluctant to give it to you.’

  ‘So you wrote it knowing I would hate it?’

  ‘Do I detect a hostile tone in your voice, Jane?’

  ‘I’m just baffled by it, that’s all.’

  ‘I never knew you were such a creative conservative.’

  ‘Oh, please. Give me credit for a little more literary sophistication than that. Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury is easy to read. James Joyce�
��s Ulysses is hard to read. The thing that binds them together is engagement. It doesn’t matter how facile or taxing a novel is – as long as it engages the reader.’

  ‘Which mine obviously didn’t for you.’

  ‘Its density is overwhelming; its intentional ellipticism maddening. And then, when you write a line like ‘the peach-compote tang of the cunt of She’ . . . I mean, David, really . . .’

  ‘You know, Polly thinks it’s a masterpiece.’

  That comment landed like a slap on the face. He went on.

  ‘And, for some time, she’d been pushing me to make a radical break with traditional narrative structure.’

  ‘So, to her, it’s a phenomenal novel.’

  ‘Her praise bothers you, doesn’t it?’

  That’s because I didn’t trust it and because I sensed that Polly exerted pressure on David to go all hyper-modern as a way of curbing his success, holding back his once-brilliant career being one of her major preoccupations. Just as I sensed that David – guilty about her depression and about having a long-standing affair with yours truly – wanted to do something to please her. Since he was telling her that he was writing this book while actually making love to me three afternoons a week, well, why not assuage the guilt by doing her bidding and by scaling the thorny edifice of high literary modernism? The wife wins on all fronts. She’s gotten her man to reject popular success for aesthetic marginality. She can call herself David’s amanuensis. Best of all, she can damage him – because I knew that, once the book came out and vanished without a trace, David would have another crisis of creative confidence and wonder if he ever had it in him to write fiction again.