Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  I turned and walked back to the lectern. Michaels didn’t move, but he did look to his pack for support. Everyone was suddenly averting their eyes from his and generally zoning him out.

  ‘We are all waiting for you to go, Mr Michaels,’ I said. ‘Or do I have to call Security – a call that will result in your immediate suspension from this university.’

  Another long silence. Michaels again looked to his cohort, beseeching them to back him up here. But they all stared down at their desks.

  ‘Mr Michaels, I am not going to say this again. There is the door. Use it.’

  His face was now full of rage. He grabbed his books and his backpack and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. I let the silence in the classroom hold for a good fifteen seconds. Then, in as mild a voice as possible, I asked: ‘Now where were we?’

  And I resumed the lecture.

  After class I returned to my office and typed up a Dean’s Report which detailed the event in the classroom and the reason why Michaels was evicted. A Dean’s Report was a reasonably big deal at New England State. I had read about it in the hefty Faculty Rules book that I had received from Professor Sanders last week and noted that it was ‘only to be used when a student breaches all rules of classroom etiquette and/or engages in actions that are disruptive and detrimental’. I read this statement again before writing up the report and actually incorporated it into my comments on Mr Michaels’s rude and ignorant behavior. Then I sent one copy to Alma Carew, the Dean of Students, and another to Professor Sanders. An hour after I had dropped them off, Sanders was knocking on the door of my office.

  ‘You’ve had an eventful first day,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not going to be bullied by a student, Professor.’

  ‘Word has it that you engaged in an act of physical force.’

  ‘Did Michaels tell you that?’

  ‘No, Michaels told his coach that. Just as he also told his coach that he was on Dean’s Report for the second time this term, which means an automatic suspension until next autumn.’

  ‘So he won’t miss the start of the football season.’

  ‘He’s a hockey player, Jane. The captain of the team – and a complete moron. The first Dean’s Report was for setting off firecrackers in the toilets of one of the girls’ dorms. Really classy.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t engage in an act of physical violence.’

  ‘But you did slam your fist down on his desk.’

  ‘That’s right. I did just that, in an attempt to get his attention as he refused to acknowledge me when—’

  ‘Yes, I heard all that from one of my spies in the class.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was under surveillance, Professor.’

  ‘Be glad that you are. This student backed you up and told me that Michaels deserved being tossed out.’

  ‘And this student’s name is . . . ?’

  ‘You don’t expect me to reveal my informants, now, do you? What I will say is that she . . .’

  So it was a ‘she’.

  ‘. . . was very impressed with the way you didn’t let him push you around. Michaels is the sort of oaf who’s always getting his own way because he understands the uses of intimidation. You called his bluff and I congratulate you for it. But there is nonetheless a problem now. Not only is Michaels the captain of the hockey team, but he is also “the lynchpin in their entire offensive structure” – and yes, that’s a direct quote from his coach. They have a big game against U. Mass this weekend. If the university has no choice but to enforce the second Dean’s Report then he is effectively suspended for the rest of the semester. Which means he can’t play in the game on Saturday. And if New England State lose because of this . . .’

  ‘I will look like the villain in the piece.’

  ‘Absolutely – and the English Department will also take the rap. According to the very jock-oriented trustees, we will have cost the university a big game, upon which hinges their ability to hoist some goddamn trophy that I don’t give two shits about. But it could be the stick they beat us with when we ask for nothing more than the maintenance of our current departmental budget next year.’

  ‘So you want me to rescind the Dean’s Report.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I want. That’s what the Dean of Students, the Director of Athletics, the Director of Giving and the university President want. Personally, I only care about this in so far as it has an impact on my – our – department.’

  ‘If I refuse . . . ?’

  ‘You won’t be doing me any favors. You will also be getting yourself off to a shaky start. However, I cannot influence your decision except to say that, quite frankly, I’d prefer it if you’d let the idiot off this time.’

  ‘I’ll need an apology from Michaels,’ I said. ‘An apology in writing.’

  ‘I’m certain that’s possible.’

  ‘I’ll also need an assurance that he won’t pull this sort of stunt again.’

  ‘That won’t be a problem either. I’m very grateful for this, Jane. It saves me a huge headache.’

  The apology arrived the next morning – a hastily scribbled letter, written on a half-torn piece of notebook paper and scrawled in such a way as to emphasize Michaels’s desire not to make amends. The penmanship was deliberately hard to read, but I still managed to decipher:

  Dear Professor Howard

  I apologize for my rude behavior in class yesterday.

  It won’t happen again, OK?

  Then he signed his name. I wanted to call in on Professor Sanders and toss the letter on his desk and tell him that this was the sort of payback you received when you let louts off the hook. But I decided it was best to let the entire matter drop.

  The next day my course in American Moderns went smoothly, as we dissected Stevens’s ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, honing in on the lines: ‘You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it.’

  ‘Stevens focused his attention on that most American of beliefs,’ I said. ‘Reinvention. Yet here he’s tempering it with the perception that, once again, how you look at something determines how it is for you. Or perhaps he is saying: the only way we can escape our given realities is by accepting that we have to somehow try to reinterpret that which we see every day.’

  The students in this class remained relatively animated and asked reasonable questions. But there was one student who immediately struck me as well above the intelligence quotient for New England State. She had remained quiet during my first lecture, but when I asked for questions at the end of my talk on ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, she raised her hand cautiously and asked me in a shaky voice: ‘Do you think that Stevens’s ultra-conservative professional life forced him into such experimental language?’

  Hey, a thinking student . . .

  ‘That’s an excellent question, Ms . . .’

  ‘Quastoff. Lorrie Quastoff.’

  She stared down at the floor as she said this.

  ‘Well, Lorrie, why don’t you tell me – and everyone else – what you think about that.’

  ‘No thanks,’ she said.

  ‘I know that’s throwing the ball back at you but that’s kind of what I’m paid to do. Just as Stevens was paid to . . .’

  Lorrie Quastoff continued regarding the floor, then looked up in horror at me when she realized I was waiting for her to supply me with the answer. I gave her a nod of what I hoped was encouragement, and she finally said: ‘Sell insurance. Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Actually, he didn’t do the selling. He was an executive in a big insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut – and he kept his poetry very much to himself. When he won the Pulitzer Prize for “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” it came as a total surprise to all his fellow executives. They had no idea that he did this in his spare time – just as, I guess, no one at the Charles Raymond and Co. insurance agency knew that Charles Ives also wrote music.’

  Good God, the kid is knowledgeable. But w
hy does she keep staring at the floor and rocking to and fro when she speaks?

  ‘Does anyone here know who Charles Ives was?’ I asked the class.

  A big vacuous silence.

  ‘Lorrie, would you mind . . . ?’

  ‘Charles Ives – 1874–1954,’ she said in a loud demonstrative voice, standing up to speak. ‘American composer noted for his use of polyrhythms, polytonality, quarter-tones and aleatorical technique. Notable works include “The Unanswered Question” (1906) and “Three Places in New England” (1903–1914). Was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947.’

  It was like listening to a talking dictionary, but I was immediately intrigued. When one member of the class – a very preppy guy, dressed in a cream crew-necked Ralph Lauren jumper – snickered at the automaton style of her delivery, I shot him such an angry look that he immediately blurted out ‘Sorry’ in her direction. Lorrie seemed oblivious to this.

  ‘That’s incredibly impressive, Lorrie,’ I said. ‘But besides making the connection between the fact that they both worked as insurance executives and both won the Pulitzer Prize, are there any other points in common between Stevens and Ives?’

  Come on, kiddo . . . show your classmates just how smart you are and knock this one out of the park.

  Again she wouldn’t make eye contact with me. Again she engaged in this swaying motion as she spoke, like an Orthodox rabbi at prayer.

  ‘They both were responsible for extending the possibilities of language. In Ives’s case, a musical language. With Stevens, a reductive abstractionism . . .’

  Reductive abstractionism! Way to go!

  ‘. . . which allowed him to speak of large metaphysical matters in a style that, though rich in metaphors, never tempts lushness.’

  Then she sat down.

  ‘That’s really brilliant, Lorrie – and you’ve really got it in one when it comes to Stevens’s language. But I’d like to return to your first question: whether you think that Stevens’s ultraconservative business life made him even more experimental in his poetry.’

  She stood up again.

  ‘It’s not what I think,’ she said. ‘It’s what you think, Professor.’

  ‘But I’m throwing the question back at you again – which may be unfair, but so it goes.’

  ‘What do I think?’ she asked, sounding so automaton.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  A long pause.

  ‘I think . . . I think . . . well, I really think that if you work at something really boring like insurance, you really need an escape hatch.’

  That got a big laugh from her fellow classmates – and Lorrie Quastoff, taken aback by such support, momentarily smiled. Then she sat right down again.

  I was hoping I could catch her attention at the end of class but she was gone out the door before I could motion her over for a chat. When I ran into Professor Sanders in the English Department corridor that afternoon, I mentioned how extraordinary Lorrie Quastoff was.

  ‘Yes, I meant to talk to you about her,’ he said. ‘She is rather special. As you can gather she is something of a savant—’

  ‘But not an idiot savant?’

  ‘We certainly don’t see her that way – but other people may do. You see, Lorrie Quastoff is something of a “special case” for us. Because she is a very high-functioning autistic woman.’

  Everything suddenly made sense: the monotone delivery, the inability to make eye contact, the rocking back and forth when she spoke.

  ‘We accepted her after much deliberation, not so much to do with her intelligence – which, as you have seen, is formidable – but about whether she could function socially in the university environment. So far she’s done reasonably well, though some of the jock brigade have engaged in a degree of mockery from time to time, and she doesn’t really have much in the way of friends. We’ve assigned one of the proctors in her hall of residence to be her minder and make certain she’s coping. As it turns out, she’s ferociously well-organized – the proctor told me her room is immaculate – and she has a capacity for pedagogy that is simply remarkable. She’s still just a freshman, but I have recommended her for a transfer to that place across the river in Cambridge . . . and I think Harvard would be mad not to take her.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do to help with that, let me know. I do know the Harvard English Department inside out.’

  As soon as that comment was out of my mouth, I regretted it. Professor Sanders worked hard at suppressing a smile.

  ‘I’ve no doubt of that, Jane. No doubt at all.’

  When I returned to my office and ran through the list of seventy-three students in my American Naturalism class, lo and behold Lorrie Quastoff was there. The course was so big – and held in such a large lecture theater – that I hadn’t seen her in the crowd. But when I arrived at the hall that afternoon, I scanned the rows of students and noted that she was sitting way in the back, off to the right, on her own. As I searched for her, I also saw Michaels sitting with his beefy acolytes and their blonde squeezes. As I caught his eye he made a face at me, mimicking a naughty schoolboy caught by the teacher. Then the bastard actually winked at me, as if to say: ‘Think you could get me suspended, did you?’

  I coughed to bring the class to attention, then wished everyone a good afternoon and returned to An American Tragedy, discussing the grim scene leading up to Clyde’s execution for a crime he didn’t commit. Having gotten their attention with the details of the electrocution I asked the class if anyone had considered which major work of fiction had influenced Drieser’s novel. No one answered. At the back of the class I could see Lorrie Quastoff wanting to raise her hand, but feeling intimidated.

  ‘Ms Quastoff,’ I said, ‘you seem to want to say something.’

  The moment I mentioned ‘Ms Quastoff’ I saw Michaels pull a monkey face at one of his chums. As he did this, Lorrie suddenly stood up. And in a far-too-loud voice she said: ‘Dostoevesky. That’s the answer. Dreiser loved Crime and Punishment and he used the same theme of self-recrim . . . crim . . . crim . . .’

  She’d gotten stuck on that syllable and kept repeating it. The titters from Michaels and Company got louder. And when I heard him distinctly mimic her – ‘Crim . . . crim . . . crim . . .’ he said in a loud whisper to the guy behind him – I pounced.

  ‘Mr Michaels,’ I shouted. ‘On your feet right now.’

  There was a long shocked silence – and Michaels was suddenly looking very worried.

  ‘I said: on your feet now.’

  Michaels rose to his feet, his eyes boring into me – a stare meant to intimidate but which I saw off with a caustic shake of the head.

  ‘What were you just saying?’ I asked.

  ‘I was saying nothing.’

  ‘That’s not the truth and you know it. You were mocking Ms Quastoff.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t . . .’

  ‘I heard you very distinctly, Mr Michaels. You went “crim, crim, crim” when Ms Quastoff had trouble with the word. Did anyone else hear Mr Michaels mock Ms Quastoff?’

  ‘I did,’ Lorrie Quastoff said. ‘And he’s always doing that to me. Always calling me “spaz” or “Rain Man”. He’s a big bully and he always does it to show off to his friends.’

  ‘I’m really sorry if—’ Michaels said.

  ‘You were sorry the other day as well when you insulted me during my lecture,’ I said, ‘and I let you off with an apology, which is why you are back in this classroom today. But to then go and mock a student with developmental challenges . . . there is no way that a simple apology is going to get you out of this one. You’re back on Dean’s Report, Mr Michaels, and this time the automatic suspension will stick. Now get the hell out of my class.’

  He didn’t look to his buddies this time for support. He simply bolted for the exit, then turned and shouted at me: ‘You think you’re going to get away with this, you’re wrong,’ and slammed the door behind him.

  After the class I asked Lorrie Quastoff to stay behind. Onc
e everyone else had left the lecture theater, she stood by my desk, rocking back and forth, her agitation showing.

  ‘They’re gonna get me now. Really get me. Make me pay. You shouldn’t have called on me . . .’

  Her rocking became so repetitive that I had to put a steadying hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Lorrie, I promise you, they will not get you if you do exactly what I say.’

  ‘And if I don’t do what you say?’

  ‘Well, that won’t be the end of the world. But it might not put an end to the teasing. This will, trust me.’

  ‘He’s going to be suspended?’

  ‘And more – if I have my way.’

  ‘You want me to write something?’

  ‘You’re ahead of me.’

  ‘Like Dostoevsky was ahead of Dreiser.’

  I went back to my office and wrote up my Dean’s Report. True to her word – as I told her I needed it within an hour – Lorrie slipped her own signed affidavit underneath my office door and was gone immediately. I stuck my head out the office door but before I could say her name she had turned a corner and vanished. I picked up her report. It was written with amazing fluidity and accomplishment and it detailed, at great length, the hectoring and intimidation she had received over the past term and a half from Michaels and Company. Immediately I revised the final paragraph of my report. It read:

  It is clear from Lorrie Quastoff’s signed statement that New England State University has allowed a coordinated and lengthy series of intimidations to be perpetrated on a young woman with learning difficulties. The very fact that Mr Michaels is a star athlete, and has been allowed to get away with his campaign of intimidation against a brilliant student who also happens to be on the autistic spectrum could be interpreted in the wider arena of general public opinion as an indication that the university is more concerned with athletic success than protecting the rights and dignity of a student who is so admirably overcoming the disability with which she was born. I am certain that the university would not want to stand accused of such a charge, as I am also certain that this runs contrary to all university policy.

  I knew these last couple of lines would provide the knockout punch I wanted to land, as they were veiled with the idea that this incident might turn into a media cause célèbre that could cost them dearly. I finished the report, read it through, signed it, and then called Professor Sanders to brief him.