The Woman In The Fifth

by Douglas Kennedy

  'Well, all tracks were so carefully covered that I still had no knowledge that she had a "jardin secret". Even the following year, when she was suddenly promoted and actually became a tenured professor, I still didn't suspect . . .'

  'Did others?'

  'Being a small college, I'm sure there was a lot of talk about this promotion – because it's absolutely unprecedented for someone who has been denied tenure to suddenly get a second chance. Still, I heard nothing of this talk – because the rule of gossip is that you don't tell the person being gossiped about that they are the subject of whisperwhisper talk. But, as I found out from a faculty friend much later on, their liaison didn't become official until well after my—'

  'Downfall?' she asked, finishing the sentence.

  'Yes – after my downfall.'

  'And that came about . . . ?'

  'When I met a student named Shelley. But before I turn to that . . .'

  'Susan gets her tenured job – and suddenly the domestic balance of power shifts again? She becomes arrogant and very preoccupied and busy, and begins to push you away?'

  'Bull's-eye. Now that she too was a tenured professor, Susan started playing the arrogance card. As in, telling me that her time was now more important than mine, and that I had to be at home every day at four when Megan got home from school. And she stopped wanting to have sex with me. Or we'd be in the middle of the act and she'd push me away and say something like, "You're useless."'

  'Charming.'

  'That was one of the milder things she hurled at me. One night, mid-act, she grabbed my head in both her hands and looked up at me and said, "Do you have any idea how boring this all is?"'

  'Did you think it boring?'

  'Not particularly – but she let it be known that I now turned her off.'

  'So she made you feel unwanted, unloved and all that. And you still didn't suspect . . . ?'

  'Of course I suspected something. I even came out one night and asked her if she was having an affair. You know what her response was: "I should be so lucky."'

  'And you still – still! – didn't suspect?'

  'I was naive, OK? Or maybe I just didn't want to really see what was going on.'

  'And then this Shelley student came into your life?'

  'Shelley Sutton. From Cincinnati. Super-bright, superprecocious. A complete film nut and very pretty – if you like the artsy intellectual type.'

  'Long black hair, little Lenin-like glasses, black jeans, a black leather jacket, and a dreadful family background?'

  'And someone who was far too bright to be at Crewe College – but was a self-admitted screw-up in high school . . .'

  'And she was in one of your lectures and came up to you afterward and started talking about . . .'

  'Fritz Lang.'

  'How romantic.'

  'Listen, it's not every day that you meet a very attractive freshman student who knows everything there is to know about Lang's Hollywood noirs.'

  'So it was a coup de foudre?'

  'Not exactly – especially as all American colleges have insanely strict rules these days not just against student/ professor relationships, but even doing something mild and innocent like having a meal with a student of the opposite sex. At Crewe, we were even sent directives by some faculty committee on "sexual ethics", informing us that, if we had a student in our office, we had to keep the door open and that we should always maintain at least three feet of physical distance between ourselves and them.'

  'No wonder America is insane.'

  'Anyway, after that first lecture, Shelley and I had coffee in the café on campus – and I have to say that there was this absolute instant rapport between us. She might have been nearly thirty years my junior – but within a few meetings it was clear to me that her world view was so considerably more mature than her age.'

  'Isn't that always the cliché with the significantly younger woman? Yes, she might just have stopped playing with Barbie dolls, but her insights into Dostoevsky are extraordinary.'

  'OK, I do realize I was acting out certain Humbert Humbert fantasies—'

  'But Lolita was only in her early teens.'

  'Still, we had to be fantastically careful. So we started meeting at a coffee shop downtown. When the woman who ran the place noticed we'd been there around three times too often, we arranged that I would pick her up on a backstreet far from the college and then we'd drive to a small shitty city named Toledo—'

  'Like Toledo in Spain?'

  'Like Toledo – the rubber-tire capital of America.'

  'When did you finally have sex with her?'

  'Around two months after—'

  'Two months!' she said, interrupting me. 'What took you so damn long?'

  'I was nervous as hell. Naturally I was smitten with her – but I also knew I was playing an insanely dangerous game.'

  'What made you finally decide to sleep with her?'

  'Susan kept pushing me away at home, and Shelley kept telling me how wonderful I was . . . and how we should "give ourselves to each other" . . . even if it was just for one time.'

  'And you believed that?'

  'After two months of flirtatious chat, I thought I knew her. The thing was, I kept trying to patch up things at home.'

  'So what triggered you finally sleeping with her?'

  'I came home one night from the college and walked into Susan's study and put my arms around her and told her how much I loved her and how I wanted things to be put right between us again. Know what her response was? "If you think that's going to ever make me want to fuck you again, you're completely deluded."'

  'Charming.'

  'No – it was anything but that. The next day I saw Shelley again for coffee. She put her hand on mine and told me she wanted me, and that we had to stop being so damn cautious and . . .'

  I fell silent.

  'Where did you go?' Margit asked. 'A hotel?'

  'A grim little place called Motel 6 in Toledo. It's a chain in the States, and only twenty-four ninety-nine if you check out of the room by six p.m. Twenty-four ninety-nine meant I could pay cash, as I didn't want the motel stay clocking up on my credit card. We really didn't care about the look of the place, we just wanted—'

  'To fuck each other.'

  'Well, that's a crude way of putting it, but—'

  'Completely accurate.'

  'Absolutely.'

  'And the sex was wonderful?'

  'I was in love with her. I know that sounds inane – and probably strikes you as yet another example of male midlife stupidity. But it's the truth. I fell completely for her – and she for me. Truth be told, I'd never been in this sort of realm before . . . never really felt this sort of . . . OK, I'll say it . . . completeness with another person. She might have been several decades my junior, but there was no sense of gulf between us. She was so damn smart – and not just when it came to movies and books and jazz and all the other things I also loved to talk about. She was just so wise about everything . . .'

  'Very touching,' Margit said.

  'Haven't you ever been so smitten by another person you couldn't stand being out of their presence?'

  'Once,' she said quietly.

  'Zoltan?'

  'Someone else.'

  'What happened?'

  'This is your story, remember? So you were madly in love with your "student". And you kept meeting twice a week at the same autoroute motel?'

  'No – after that first tryst in the Toledo motel, I ended it.'

  'Out of guilt?'

  'Absolutely. As smitten as I was, once we crossed that line I knew it had to stop immediately. Because—'

  'You feared for your job, your career?'

  'Yes, that. But also because I kept telling myself that things with Susan and I would eventually improve . . . that her disaffection with me was just one of those temporary dips that happen in a long marriage.'

  'Why couldn't you have simply arranged to see your student discreetly a few times a week? That's what she wa
nted, wasn't it?'

  'Once we finally did the deed, Shelley was head over heels. And she couldn't understand why I wouldn't sleep with her again. I tried to explain – many times – that I simply couldn't continue to be her lover . . . that as much as I was taken with her, this simply had no future . . .'

  'She took it badly, of course.'

  'Who could blame her? Especially as I'd been stupid. Wildly stupid – in the way that only a man can be stupid. I'd carried on an ever-escalating two-month flirtation with a very impressionable student, and then – once we finally consummated it – I broke it off.'

  'But why was that stupid? All right, you enjoyed a quasi-platonic relationship with this girl. Then you both decided to become lovers. Then you decided that it was not wise to continue as lovers. Surely, had she been emotionally more mature, she would have accepted your decision—'

  'The thing was, she was eighteen—'

  'There are emotionally mature eighteen-year-olds. She wasn't.'

  'All during those months of holding hands in cafés, and staring dreamily into each other's eyes, I knew that if I kept seeing her, it was all going to blow up in my face. But the thing is, I couldn't bear the thought of not keeping it going.'

  'That's because you were in love. That's also why you ended it – because you knew that, once you started sleeping with her regularly, you wouldn't be able to stop.'

  'Perhaps. But don't you see how my thinking was so completely contradictory? I so desperately wanted her. Then when I'd finally had her . . .'

  'Why shouldn't you have thought that way? And why can't you accept that, when it comes to matters of the heart, we all do contradictory things? You know that line from Pascal – "The heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know."'

  'You're trying to tell me it's "all right", when the truth is—'

  'You resisted temptation, you acceded to temptation, then you decided to resist temptation again. End of story. But because Americans equate sex with risk and potential disaster, it wasn't the end of the story, was it?'

  'No, it wasn't.'

  'So what happened to the girl, Harry?'

  'The story goes a little haywire here. In the days after that afternoon in the motel, she started sending me love notes all the time – five a day on colored paper in my office mailbox at the college. There were just as many emails. And they all said the same thing: "You are the love of my life . . . I can't bear to be apart from you for more than another day . . . can we go to the motel tomorrow?"

  'I was just a little unnerved by all this instant emotional excess. When we were just meeting over coffee, she was always romantic . . . but I never got the idea that, once we'd slept together, she'd get so clingy.'

  'You can never predict another person's emotions . . . especially the post-coital ones.'

  'Too damn true. When I found Shelley loitering outside one of my classes two days after Toledo, I decided to take immediate action. I suggested we go for a drive out into the country. Once we got to the place by a lake, I quietly explained that, as much as I cared for her, the affair had to end. She was devastated – and told me that she would never have slept with me if she knew it was going to end it straight away. I tried to patiently explain that, as crazy as I was about her—'

  'You were a man with a conscience . . .'

  'Something like that, yes. It's amazing, isn't it, how you agonize over crossing a dangerous threshold. Then, when you finally summon the courage to make that move, you instantly regret it.'

  'Another of those large contradictions, Harry. So did she cry when you broke her the news?'

  'She simply wouldn't accept it . . . simply couldn't believe that I had changed my mind. Again, I tried to explain. Yes, I had feelings for her . . . yes, I'd loved all our conversations, and thought she was a fantastic person . . . and yes, if I wasn't married and wasn't her professor . . .

  'She didn't take the news well – and started to plead with me, telling me she'd do anything to keep it going between us.'

  'Was she a virgin?'

  'No – there had been a big high-school love affair . . . which ended when she came to college. But as far as she was concerned, we were Tristan and Isolde: destined to be together from here to eternity. Try as I did to persuade her that, in time, she'd just see this as a passing blip in her romantic life, she remained devastated . . . and determined to somehow keep things going between us. There were constant notes in my mailbox, at least a half-dozen emails every day, and she made a point of hanging around every class I taught.'

  'Surely your colleagues began to realize that one of your students was a bit obsessed about her professor?'

  'Of course. Doug Stanley – my one close friend on the faculty – took me aside and asked me directly if I had been involved with Shelley. Naturally I told him everything – and wondered out loud if I should go to the Dean of the Faculty, Gardner Robson – and make a clean breast of everything. He was adamant that I confess nothing. Because once I did that, I was finished. He also emphasized that, until Shelley went public about the affair, I was in the clear. His hope was that she would soon calm down – and he even offered to speak to her and see if she might agree to seek help from the college psychotherapist.'

  'Knowing you, the guilt must have been massive.'

  'It was nonstop. I wasn't sleeping and lost about fifteen pounds in less than two weeks. I couldn't teach, couldn't concentrate. Even my wife, who was totally ignoring me, noticed that I was in rough shape, and asked me what was wrong. I said I was depressed – and that's when she told me that, as far as she was concerned, I had been in a gloomy place for years. "And the only time you'd lightened up was during the last few months – when it was clear to me that you were having an affair." I didn't deny it, nor did she hint that she knew who my lover might be. But when I came back from the college the next night, I found her in my office, on my computer, reading my email files.'

  'Don't tell me you hadn't deleted everything you'd written to your friend – and she to you.'

  'I'd deleted it from my AOL account, but not the Recycle Bin. A bad oversight on my part, as that's where Susan found them all.'

  'Your wife had the password to your computer?'

  'I'm pretty certain she once heard me tell our daughter that it was her name: Megan123. Whatever way she had managed to get into my files, the fact was, she had managed to get into my files. When I walked in and found her sitting in my desk chair, and staring at an email that Shelley had sent me, she said – in a voice so low and cold it sounded like a frozen whisper – "Pack a bag and leave right now. Otherwise I'll call the police and tell them you've assaulted me."'

  'And you bowed to this threat . . . this blackmail?'

  'I thought it best to let the initial shock she was feeling—'

  'Harry, she was fucking some guy before you even hooked up with Shelley—'

  'I still didn't know that—'

  'But she betrayed your privacy—'

  'True. And she also evidently emailed all this evidence against me to her lover, the Dean. Because, the next day, I had a visit from representatives of the firm that looks after security for the college. Two of their goons showed up at my office around ten that morning, telling me that they were escorting me off the premises and that I was now legally barred from setting foot on the campus again. They brought me downtown to the office of the law firm which handled all the college's legal stuff. There, some flinty smalltown lawyer – bow tie, blue serge suit, suspenders – read me a document, informing me that, as I had contravened several college codes of professional conduct, I was being summarily dismissed from my tenured position "without pay or any subsidiary benefits". He also said that if I made trouble, the case would go public and—'