Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  Going to my place to write.

  That was it: no name, no signature, no further explanation.

  I came back into the living room and picked up the phone again.

  ‘All right, I found it. But is there any reason why you couldn’t have put it in a more visible place?’

  ‘Don’t blame me for you not seeing it.’

  ‘I blame you for nothing, Theo. I just wish you treated this relationship like a relationship – and not like a convenience station you stop by whenever you need sex or a home-cooked meal.’

  But the next night he showed up before I came home from work and organized a small Thai feast from a local restaurant. A few days later, he took Emily off for a long Saturday afternoon at the zoo, then cooked me an Italian dinner while regaling me with amusing anecdotes about Welles and Huston and Ford and Hawks and all the other great directors he so admired. And when, out of nowhere, he put his arms around me and told me I was wonderful . . . well, for the remainder of the evening I had a glimpse of how good things could be between us. Until all my doubts flooded in again.

  ‘When will you ever accept the fact that it’s all so damn flawed, and that you will always be hit with doubt?’ Christy asked me one evening when she rang close to midnight and admitted that she herself was nursing a bruised heart. (‘And no, it’s not another dumbshit biker – the guy had some class and some smarts, which makes it all the worse.’)

  ‘So what you’re saying is: be happy with what you have, despite its flaws.’

  ‘No,’ Christy said, ‘my thought for the day is: you have an interesting career which will get more interesting once you are liberated from that university. You live with an interesting man who may not be the ideal partner but certainly can’t be described as boring. To add the maraschino cherry to the cake, you have a beautiful daughter – and you are managing to walk that tightrope between professional life and motherhood that makes you the envy of the majority of women I know, this one included.’

  ‘Now that’s news to me. I mean, you’ve always been so adamant about not having children.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I’m not in constant conflict about it. I mean, look at you. I know you consider Emily—’

  ‘The best thing that ever happened to me,’ I said, finishing her sentence.

  ‘There you go. And I know full well that, fifteen years from now, if I have let the moment pass, I might well rue the fact that my independence was far more important than the gamble which is parenthood.’

  ‘You might not rue it.’

  ‘We all end up rueing everything. It’s the nature of this thing we call “our condition”. Could, but didn’t . . . Wanted to, but stopped myself . . . All the damn statements of regret we can never dodge.’

  Maybe Christy was right. Maybe it was best to embrace the ambivalence that hovered over everything. Maybe that which was flawed was also that which was always interesting.

  But, as I told Christy, if there was one thing about which I was never ambivalent it was Emily. No matter how frustrated I would get with Theo, or with the inanity of university politics, my daughter would smile at me or say something completely disarming, or would simply snuggle up against me and lift me out of the pettiness and diffidences that characterize so much of life.

  ‘Mommy . . . Daddy . . . good,’ Emily said one evening as Theo and I sat chatting over the remains of our dinner and laughing at some absurdity he’d overheard in a coffee shop that afternoon.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ Theo said. ‘Mommy and Daddy are good.’

  I took his hand. I smiled.

  Ten days later, he came home with an announcement: He had just gone into business with a woman named Adrienne Clegg.

  After that, Mommy and Daddy were never good again.

  Six

  ADRIENNE CLEGG. From the moment Theo brought her home, I couldn’t stand her. Check that: I loathed her. Because, from the outset, I could see that she would bring us nothing but grief.

  To admit that you loathe someone is to admit failure. Hate is such an extreme emotion. Once in its grip, you often find yourself wondering whether it’s really worth despising someone that much. My father might have cost me my job at Freedom Mutual and left me feeling betrayed, but I still couldn’t bring myself to hate him. That would have been almost like hating myself.

  Adrienne Clegg was different. She wasn’t family – and in her own insidious way she helped unpick the entire fabric of the life that I had created for myself. So yes, I hated her – and in turn I loathed myself for not blocking, from the outset, her invasive attack on our little family.

  Perhaps that remains the hardest thing to stomach – the fact that, as soon as I met her, I knew she was trouble. So why didn’t I fight back far earlier? What was it in me that allowed her to visit such damage on us?

  But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

  Adrienne Clegg. She was in her early forties. Tall. Rail thin. Electric-red curly hair that was worn tightly around her head. Skin that seemed perma-tanned. (‘I’m one-quarter Inca Indian,’ she once told me.) A woman who always wore leather and huge ostentatious earrings and chunky rings on six of her ten fingers. She came across as a cross between a biker chick and one of those relentlessly ambitious Manhattan women who are constantly on the make.

  The thing was, Adrienne Clegg had struck out in Manhattan. Just as she had struck out in LA and in London. But then she landed herself in Boston. In that happenstantial way of things, she met Theo right at the moment when he had connected with a local filmmaker named Stuart Tompkins. And Stuart had just made, for around $10,000, a violent/ comic ‘Bonnie and Clyde Go Insane’ movie set in a college fraternity. It was called Delta Kappa Gangster – a terrible title. Stuart was a classic movie geek. Like Theo he was in his early thirties. Like Theo he lived in a tiny apartment and also subsisted on a diet of fast and frozen food. But there all comparisons ended. Stuart was tall. Seriously tall and seriously thin, as in six foot five and one hundred and thirty pounds. He had serious acne. (‘His face is like a penicillin culture,’ Theo noted.) He also had serious body odor. Fortunately I was never invited over to his apartment. Theo – being his new best friend – did get asked to drop by one evening and informed me later that night that he would never repeat the experience. There were dishes that hadn’t been washed in six months, cruddy underwear strewn across the floor, a toilet that hadn’t been cleaned since 9/11, and the pervasive stench of someone who didn’t take personal hygiene very seriously.

  Given Theo’s anal obsessions with order and cleanliness, it wasn’t at all surprising that he returned from his first – and only – visit to chez Stuart looking as though he was in an advanced state of toxic shock.

  ‘Never doing that again,’ he said, actually opening a bottle of my eau de cologne – my only bottle of eau de cologne – and holding it under his nose to sniff in its cleansing floral scent. ‘It was like walking into a septic tank. But the guy has made a great little movie which is going to make me a considerable amount of money.’

  ‘Make me a considerable amount of money.’ As I reflected back on all this much later on, I realized that, from the outset, Theo saw this potential windfall as benefiting him and him alone.

  Full credit to Theo – I would never have thought that more than ten people would ever dream of watching Delta Kappa Gangster. But he immediately saw its big potential and also considered Stuart to be a major talent, ‘if I can ever get him to wash’.

  He’d met Stuart at the archive where he had a part-time job in the film library and, like Theo, thought nothing of watching movies for ten hours a day. As it turned out, Stuart had used a very small inheritance from ‘a crazy aunt’ (‘I mean, she had to be crazy to leave me anything’) to finance this eighty-minute horror fest. He’d shot it on HDV on the campus of a local community college in Marblehead. All the actors were locals, everyone worked for a $300 fee and Stuart shot the entire movie in ten days. He also knew a couple of budding special-effects guys who looked upo
n this film as a chance to try out, on a minuscule budget, some of their more outlandish ideas.

  That was the first thing that struck me about Delta Kappa Gangster: its absolute outlandishness and crudity. Theo insisted on screening it for me at home. He even made a massive bowl of popcorn for us to munch while we watched the damn thing. It was, in its own strange way, riveting stuff. Behind the primitivism of much of the acting and the low-budget effects was a noticeable flair when it came to grabbing the audience by certain soft parts of the anatomy and forcing them to pay attention.

  The story was a straightforward horror-cheapie idea: a homecoming weekend at a particularly moronic fraternity turns most gory when a geek and his goth girlfriend wreak havoc on the jocks who once hounded him. The geek and the goth become avenging angels and devise horrible deaths for the football-playing, beer-swigging stooges: electrocution, eye-gouging, defenestration onto a spiked fence, impromptu brain surgery with an electric drill, even yanking out a tongue with a handy pair of pliers . . .

  And then they start robbing banks.

  The film’s violence, though utterly extreme, was also executed with a maniacally black wit. Stuart and his colleagues poured on the gore but they did so with such brio and subversive anarchy that you couldn’t help but be amused by it all – while simultaneously feeling uncomfortable about being so taken in by such slasher stuff.

  What intrigued me even more was the film’s overall subtext: how it could be viewed as an attack on the sort of rabid anti-intellectualism that has always been a component of American life. It was the ultimate Geek’s Revenge movie – the kid who had always been ridiculed and picked on turning the tables against the arrogant, vapid morons who found his bookishness a threat. As much as I was appalled by the rabid violence, the part of me which had always loathed bullies was cheering the madman on.

  ‘Well, that certainly got my attention,’ I said as the final credits rolled. ‘Now all I need is three steadying vodkas and a cleansing hot shower.’

  ‘It’s a masterpiece,’ Theo said.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘I would. You just don’t run into this sort of talent every day.’

  ‘It’s a pretty unrefined talent.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what makes him so interesting. He’s a primitive – with the body odor to match.’

  ‘Yes, it does have a decided stench to it.’

  ‘What you also need to know is that this kind of movie sells. Properly distributed it will be a huge hit in every college town in the country. Even the fraternity types will dig it. And when it gets released on DVD . . . I’ll be driving a Porsche.’

  ‘I can’t exactly see you in a Porsche, Theo.’

  ‘I was being metaphoric. I promise you, this film will do gangbusters. All I need to get things rolling is about fifty grand.’

  ‘And where do you propose to find that?’

  ‘Well, I was hoping that you might like to invest in the project . . .’

  I knew this pitch was coming, but it still made me feel desperately uneasy.

  ‘I don’t really have fifty thousand to spend on something like that.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘Because I’ve seen your bank statements.’

  ‘You’ve been going through my papers?’

  ‘Hey, lose the accusatory tone. Of course I haven’t been rifling through your papers. But last month, when you were doing your accounts, you did have all the bank statements on your desk . . .’

  ‘And you just had to look them over.’

  ‘If you leave stuff on a desk for all to see, it will get seen.’

  ‘Only if someone decides to take a look themselves – which is what you did, Theo. I mean, you leave your journal on your desk all the time and I have never, ever opened it.’

  ‘Well, why would you? It’s a closed book. But paperwork scattered on a desk . . .’

  ‘Are we really going to get into a semantical debate here about what constitutes a breach of privacy?’

  ‘The thing is, I know you have around sixty-eight thousand left in the bank.’

  ‘That’s money I’ve saved over the years, month by month.’

  ‘Well, it’s just sitting in some account. And if you were to go into partnership with me and Adrienne . . .’

  That was the first time he ever mentioned her name.

  ‘Who’s Adrienne?’

  ‘Adrienne Clegg. This absolutely brilliant film distributor I’m planning to work with.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, my tone chilly. ‘And when exactly did you meet this “absolutely brilliant film distributor”?’

  ‘Don’t worry – I’m not fucking her.’

  ‘Well, that makes my day.’

  ‘I met her through Stuart. He met her at this big horror festival in Bratislava last year—’

  ‘Bratislava, New York?’

  ‘Very funny. Stuart was in Slovakia covering the Bratislava Horror Festival for some fanzine he writes for. And the only reason he was able to get to Bratislava is because the festival agreed to fly over one fanzine journalist to cover it – all the horror distributors know that they shift a hell of a lot of DVDs through these magazines. As Stuart is considered the most knowledgeable horror-film journalist out there these days—’

  ‘So he’s the Pauline Kael for the “Driller Killer” set, right?’

  ‘Very witty.’

  ‘I don’t like the set-up, Theo.’

  ‘Look, Adrienne is this amazingly knowledgeable woman—’

  ‘Whom you met during an intimate dinner at Stuart’s hovel?’

  ‘You actually sound jealous . . .’

  ‘I’m just surprised you didn’t mention her before now.’

  ‘Do I ask you for a detailed rundown on everyone you’re meeting, day in, day out?’

  ‘No, but I haven’t suddenly announced that I’m going into business with someone . . .’

  ‘Adrienne came by last week to the archive after I first saw the final cut of Stuart’s movie and told him that I wanted to distribute it. He told me he was up for that but only if I’d work with Adrienne, as he thought we’d be a great team. Which, as it turns out, is the truth. She’s got the business clout and I’ve got the passion. She figures we should do fifteen million dollars minimum, which, given that the distribution agency takes thirty-five percent, is—’

  ‘Five hundred and something . . .’

  ‘Five twenty-five. Your fast math is impressive.’

  ‘You really think it can make that sort of return?’

  ‘I don’t think . . . I know it will surpass that. And if you invest fifty grand, I can assure you that the first fifty thousand we make will be immediately refunded to you, and then you’ll receive twenty percent of our commission. So you could easily make back the principal and double your money in less than a year.’

  ‘If the project is so sure-fire wouldn’t it be better to approach a bank or a finance house?’

  ‘Banks and big-deal investors don’t touch no-budget splatter movies. It’s not exactly the sort of thing that’s in their field of vision.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll find some well-heeled cinephile who’s willing to gamble on this . . .’

  ‘Whereas you won’t touch it – because that would mean investing in me.’

  ‘Now that’s a lousy thing to say,’ I said, trying not to sound too angry or too hurt – and failing badly.

  ‘But it’s the truth. You have never trusted me, you have never believed I could succeed at anything.’

  ‘How can you say that? I’m always telling you what a brilliant guy you are. I laugh at your jokes, I brag to my friends how talented and—’

  ‘You don’t have any friends.’

  That comment landed like a right to the jaw.

  ‘That’s not true. I talk with Christy all the time . . .’

  ‘She’s three thousand miles away. Other than that, you see no one.’

  ‘A
nd how about you, Mr Solipsistic? You were living like Oblomov before I—’

  ‘I have plenty of friends,’ he said quietly. ‘You simply never meet them because I know you’d look down on them. Just as you have already decided to look down on Adrienne and Stuart.’

  ‘I am simply troubled by the idea—’

  ‘That I might actually succeed at something and then leave you.’

  ‘That is not what this is about,’ I said, even though there was an uncomfortable truth to what he had just said. Our entire relationship was predicated, in part, on my fear that he would take the door marked Exit out of our lives – and I both hated and feared that knowledge.

  ‘I would be thrilled if you succeeded with this film. And you know I would always support you in just about anything you’d want to do . . .’

  ‘Then you have to invest in me.’

  There was so much I wanted to say here: about how couples should never mix money and business; how, by investing in his project, I would be forced to confront my own doubts about Theo’s sense of responsibility and that I would be giving him this rather substantial sum of money under duress. But I was in one of those tricky no-win situations. Refuse to plunk down the money and I would be telling him I had no faith in him. Invest the money and I would feel as if I had been strong-armed into this, with someone whose business sense was, at best, unevolved.

  Trust your instincts. That is, perhaps, the best piece of advice you can ever heed, followed by: Never put money into a movie. So I decided to play for time and told him: ‘I’ll need to have some sort of partnership agreement. And I’ll also need to meet your associate.’

  Theo smiled the smile of someone who knew he was going to get what he wanted.

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘No problem at all.’

  Two days later, Adrienne came over to the apartment for dinner. Theo spent much of the day cooking an elaborate Indian meal. Though part of me was dazzled by the extent of his preparation (he’d sourced all the ingredients at a tiny Indian shop in Chelsea and even went so far as to hand-grind his spices) I couldn’t help but think that he had only cooked me three meals in the two years we had now been together. He also insisted on buying champagne and several ridiculously expensive bottles of Bordeaux.