Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘So what I think is: you’re good, sweetheart. The original tough cookie. And you’ve kicked ass in a way that most of us lifers here can only dream about.’

  ‘I’m glad I’ve won myself a fan.’

  ‘You’ve got yourself a boyfriend now?’

  ‘What a personal question.’

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘No, I’m flying solo.’

  ‘You interested in one? On a part-time basis, of course.’

  I laughed. ‘You really do hit on everyone, don’t you.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Thanks for the drink, Professor.’

  Back at the apartment, I called Christy in Oregon and explained how I had squandered all chances of promotion at New England State.

  ‘Personal morality – how to play things – is an ongoing dilemma and often agonizing,’ she said. ‘Do the right thing and you get punished for it. Don’t do the right thing and you get punished for it – especially by yourself. Not that you’d ever engage in such self-flagellation.’

  ‘Why is everything in my life so damn contradictory?’

  ‘“We do not what we ought/What we ought not, we do/And lean upon the thought/That chance will bring us through” . . .’

  ‘Browning?’ I asked.

  ‘Close, but no cigar. Matthew Arnold.’

  ‘Who the hell quotes Matthew Arnold these days?’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘And my advice to you, madame, is to consider yourself in a form of internal exile. You go to the university, you teach your classes, you do brilliantly with – and by – your students. You make certain you’re there for anyone who needs you. You keep long office hours if students need to drop by. You get your book published. Unless called upon to attend a meeting or give an opinion, you politely ignore your departmental colleagues and the honchos in the administration. You’re there, but you’re not there – if you catch my drift.

  ‘And the other thing I would do if I was in your position and with all that funny money in the bank – is to spend some of it. Preferably not on anything sensible.’

  I took Christy’s advice. When I returned to New England State on Monday, I took my classes, did my office hours and vanished from view. I maintained this narrow-focused approach for the rest of the week – concentrating my efforts on being accessible to my students, doing my best as a lecturer, and acknowledging my colleagues in assorted corners of the campus with a polite but distant nod.

  As I was consolidating this professional modus vivendi, I was also dealt a lucky card. My book The Infernal Duality was accepted for publication by – wait for it – the University of Wisconsin Press. And they say that America is an irony-free zone. I kept quiet about the news. But when I attended the departmental meeting two days later, Professor Sanders kicked off the proceedings with: ‘I got a phone call from a colleague at the University of Wisconsin yesterday who informed me that Professor Howard’s book will be published by their press this year. I’m certain we all want to congratulate her on this achievement.’

  Then he moved on to other business.

  Stephanie Peltz came up to me after the meeting ended and said: ‘Oh, my God, your book’s been accepted! And by Wisconsin! Wisconsin . . . Oh, my God, that’s one of the top ten university presses in the country.’

  Top twenty is closer to the truth. Still . . .

  ‘Oh, this is amazing, Jane. Why on earth did you keep it all to yourself?’ she asked.

  I said nothing, except to thank her for her good wishes. Then Marty Melcher pulled me aside.

  ‘You really are an operator,’ he said. ‘Just like everyone who’s ever gone to Harvard.’

  Yeah, Marty – that’s what they teach us over there in Cambridge: how to be a smarty pants.

  But I simply replied to his comment with a nod and a smile.

  And that was the last time anyone in the department mentioned my book again. Life at New England State carried on. I taught my classes. I met with my students. I left the university as soon as the business of the day was done for me. I lived below the internecine radar.

  I also took Christy’s second piece of advice and spent some of the money that was gaining interest in my bank account. But I didn’t use it frivolously. No, my ultra-sensible side guided me in the direction of several real-estate agents in Somerville. Within four days I had agreed to pay $255,950 for a one-bedroom apartment on a leafy street right off Davis Square. The flat was located on the top two floors of an American Gothic house dating from the 1890s and very Grant Wood in its baroque flourishes. The apartment had been owned by a recently deceased Professor of Philosophy at Tufts, a lifelong bachelor who lived with his books and a long succession of cats (the ingrained smell of feline urine was everywhere). The kitchen was Nixon-era, the bathroom dated back to Eisenhower. But there was a huge living room with a balcony that overlooked the street. The bedroom was spacious and there was an alcove that would make an ideal study. The floorboards – though in need of painting and staining – were solid. And the surveyor who examined every damn crevice of the place let it be known that the walls were damp-free and ready to be replastered.

  The entire place needed an overhaul – and one which a local builder estimated would cost me an additional fifty thousand. ‘Once you put the money in, the place’ll be worth four hundred and fifty K immediately,’ he told me with the authority of a man who speculated in Somerville and Cambridge property all the time. I did some fast calculations and knew that I would be able to buy the place outright, but would still need to take out a loan of $75,000 to pay for the renovations and taxes. As someone who always feared debt it made me nervous borrowing this amount, even though the mortgage broker who set up the loan told me that, on my annual salary from New England State, this wasn’t an excessive amount. But say I can’t find work again after I’m shown the door in a few years’ time? Still, I comforted myself with the thought that an apartment was always a saleable item and that I would now actually possess that most magical of commodities: equity. As Dad always used to say: You’re finally an adult when you’re in hock to a bank for the roof over your head.

  So I called Mr Alkan and told him I needed his services again. ‘No problem,’ he said and took care of all the paperwork. I approved the $50,000 budget with the builder and chose kitchen cabinets and bathroom sinks and wall colors, and then dropped another $15,000 buying a bed and sofas, and a great big turn-of-the-century roll-top desk for myself, and a new stereo and plates and cutlery and . . .

  I agreed to teach the summer term at New England State. By the time mid-August came and I’d submitted my grades and even managed a few days at a friend’s family place on the Cape, my apartment was ready to be occupied. It looked wonderful – freshly plastered white walls, maple-stained floorboards, a Shaker-style kitchen, a modern bathroom, tasteful light wood furniture, that wonderful desk in the alcove that would be my study, and a huge king-sized bed which suddenly felt very empty and only seemed to emphasize something I had been dodging for a very long time: I was lonely.

  When you have a need, you fill it. Within a few weeks of moving into the apartment, I had someone sharing the bed with me. I told myself it was love.

  And, perhaps, at the time, it was just that . . . for a little while anyway.

  Three

  THEO MORGAN LOVED movies. Check that: Theo Morgan was fanatical about movies. ‘A certifiable cinephile’ as he described himself. Since the age of thirteen – when the movie bug first hit – he’d kept a filing card for every film he’d ever seen. At the last count he had 5,765 cards – ‘that’s close to three hundred movies per year in the past nineteen years’ – each of which contained, on the front side, the name of the film, the director, principal actors, screenwriter, etc., while the back contained his own individual commentary on the movie, all written in a spindly handwriting that only he could decipher.

  Theo Morgan grew up in a bland suburb of Indianapolis (‘the vanilla ice cream of American cities – anemic’), the son of
an insurance executive and a mother who was something of a creative spark at college but ended up re-enacting Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street by doing what was expected of her: ‘marrying a stiff and moving to a dull little midwestern town’. His father was an ex-Marine who preached a doctrine of God and country and tried to stamp down hard on Theo’s burgeoning interest in film.

  ‘I spent a lot of my free adolescent time sneaking off to see movies at the Indiana University Film Society,’ he told me on our second date. ‘In my junior year, there was a big festival of Bergman’s films and I had to tell Dad that I had gone out for the school fencing team which trained twice a week from seven to nine. When he found out that I had been seeing “atheistic European crap” – his exact words – he grounded me for three months after punching me in the stomach as a “lesson in the price to be paid for insubordination”. My mom – being an impassive resident of the Valley of the Dolls – told me that “your dad only wants the best for you”, which is why he also threatened to “rearrange my face” and send me to military school if he caught me watching any more “ungodly pictures”.’

  Fortunately Theo was a bright kid and he had a powerful ally at school in the form of an English teacher named Mr Turgeon. The teacher was gay, but very closeted.

  ‘He had a boyfriend – one of the librarians at the university – and his life was rather cozy in what he called “a circumscribed way”. Outside of classical music his real passion was film, and though this was the early days of the VCR he had this fantastic film library at his home. When he discovered that I was getting into cinema, he started asking me over to his house after school to give me a crash course in film history. I mean, the guy had something like three thousand VCR tapes and I watched everything from D.W. Griffith to Fritz Lang to Billy Wilder with him. Of course I had to keep all this quiet from my parents and Mr Turgeon told me on more than one occasion that, if it ever got out that we were having these movie sessions at his home, he could lose his job – even though the man never, ever came on to me. He simply recognized a fellow sufferer. That’s what cinephiles really are: people looking for an escape hatch.’

  Theo’s father never found out about the afternoons at Mr Turgeon’s – watching Truffaut and Rivette and Carl Theodor Dreyer while sipping proper Earl Grey tea that Mr Turgeon bought in bulk during his annual summer pilgrimage to London. But when he was grounded after attending the Bergman festival at the University of Indiana, Theo told all to the one person in Indianapolis who understood him. Turgeon knew that raising the matter with the school authorities might wreak havoc so he counseled Theo to sit tight, bide his time and work his ass off to get the best grades possible in his last three semesters before applying to college.

  Theo did as instructed. He was a straight-A student for those three terms, and even impressed his father with his diligence. Then, at Turgeon’s urging, he made Columbia University his main choice. Theo’s dad would not hear of it – ‘over my dead body are you going to that degenerate city’ – and refused to write the $75 check for the application fee. So Turgeon paid for it himself and also used inside pull there (he’d done his MA at Columbia) to secure Theo a fully paid scholarship.

  ‘When Dad discovered that I’d applied to Columbia on the quiet, he made good on his threat and actually rearranged my face. After the assault, I went to school with two black eyes. Mr Turgeon insisted on marching me down to the principal. Our principal was one of these flag-hugging idiots and a deacon in the local Presbyterian church. But even he was horrified by my father’s assault on me and actually called my father in to school and told him that I had earned a major scholarship to an Ivy League university, so he had absolutely no right to stand in my way of accepting it. And if he ever assaulted me again, he would be turned over to the cops.

  ‘After this meeting, my mother cried for hours, asking me why I had to go running to the authorities and “play tattle-tail”. My dad, on the other hand, simply told me to get out of the house and never come back.’

  ‘And you were just eighteen?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the right age to cut and run – especially if you’ve just been handed an all-expenses-paid scholarship. That effectively removes you from the parental sphere of influence.’

  I certainly knew a thing or two about that sort of liberation through academic funding. As he spoke with dry irony of his insane family and the pain they visited on him, I also knew that I was falling for him. Don’t we often seek out someone who’s traveled through the same damaged emotional landscape as ourselves – and, as such, understands us? From the outset I was pretty certain that our shared family misery – and the way we both partially broke free of it – meant that Theo understood me, as I did him.

  Once he started at Columbia he effectively cut his ties with his parents. He never returned home again. Within three months of landing in New York, he’d also found a part-time job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art as an assistant archivist. He held on to that job for his four years at Columbia – where he also ended up as head of the Film Society, movie critic for the campus newspaper and habitué of every small independent cinema in the city.

  At twenty-two – with a magna cum laude degree in hand and a rent-controlled studio apartment on Amsterdam and 118th Street – he was poised for a big life in the Big City. In fact, Columbia offered him another full scholarship to complete a doctorate in Film Studies. UCLA also contacted him, letting it be known that they too would like him to accept a doctoral scholarship and a teaching position in their cinema department.

  ‘I had all these offers and wanted nothing to do with them,’ he said. ‘Call it a lack of ambition – as several of my college advisors did – but I just wanted to program movies for a cinema.’

  So he accepted a gig being the chief programmer for the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan. ‘One hundred and fifty dollars a week and I was happy as hell, especially as you could get away with anything at the Film Archives. I mean, it was the ultimate cinephile wet dream – a truly “out there” place where I could organize an entire season of East German musicals and get away with it. The work absolutely suited me. I could report to the cinema at noon and work until eight or nine in the evening without hassle. And then I could stay up the rest of the night watching movies.’

  For five years he happily kept his zombie hours and created strange ‘out there’ seasons for the Film Archives: obscure Czech animators, forgotten anti-Communist B-movies from the McCarthy era, the great goofy classics of Japanese science fiction, every James M. Cain adaptation ever made . . .

  Theo would reel off his film knowledge with rapid-fire delivery. He was a motor mouth, yet the spiel he spieled was always so spirited and erudite that I quickly came to accept his mile-a-minute repartee. Passionate intensity can be very seductive.

  He only stood five foot six – and had a big unruly mop of black curly hair, a Frank Zappa goatee and a slight pot-belly (he abhorred all exercise). He always dressed in size 36 black Levi’s 501s, a black T-shirt and an old black leather bomber jacket. Though he wasn’t conventionally handsome, the interest he showed in everything to do with me wowed me. Ever since David I’d always dreamed of meeting another verifiable intellectual. So what if Theo tended to eat crap food and never took vitamins and insisted on getting up to watch a movie after we made love . . . He was never less than interesting.

  For such a physically unruly person, he was surprisingly fastidious about certain elements in his life. He was fanatical when it came to flossing his teeth, and showered at least three times a day. His apartment in Cambridge was small – maybe 300 square feet – yet it was amazingly orderly. The hundreds of films that dominated all the bookshelves weren’t just alphabetized, they were also organized with library-style dividers. His bed was always immaculately made and he insisted on changing the perfectly ironed sheets every other day. Just as his black jeans were always perfectly pressed, as well as the boxer shorts that he would only buy from Brooks Brothers. That was another thing abou
t Theo – he had certain rigid consumerist choices from which he wouldn’t deviate. His black T-shirts came from the Gap and once a year, so he told me, he’d rent a car and drive the two and a half hours to Freeport, Maine where there was a Gap outlet. Once there he’d buy thirty size large black T-shirts for $5 a shirt and then go to the Brooks Brothers outlet in the same town and purchase eighteen pairs of boxer shorts for $155 – he was very specific when it came to recalling prices. Finally he’d move on to the Levi’s outlet and buy eighteen pairs of black 501s at $25 a pair. Purchases complete he’d drive north to the village of Wiscasset and buy a lobster roll and a root beer at a famous take-away shack called Red’s. He’d plonk himself down at a table facing the bay, look at that widescreen vision of coastal Maine at its most bucolic, eat his lobster roll, drink his iced tea, and then turn his car around and head south for Boston, arriving back to catch at least three movies that evening chez lui.

  ‘That would take care of both my clothes shopping and my view of the Great Outdoors for another year.’

  Now I know all this sounds just a little quirky – because he really didn’t buy another shred of clothing for the rest of the year and he resisted all my attempts to get him to spend a weekend somewhere outside of Boston that didn’t have a cinema. But there was something strangely compelling about his quirks, just as I liked the fact that he was outside the mad consumerist dance that characterized so much of modern life. He got his DVDs free from all the distributors he knew. He ordered any books he needed from publishers or libraries. He did all his own washing and cleaning and cooking – and largely subsisted on a diet of Cheerios and frozen lasagne and instant soups and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And when he awoke every morning at noon, he’d start the day by writing for two straight hours before heading off to his job at the Harvard Film Archive.