Leaving the World Page 29

  ‘Because I’m playing with you,’ I said with a tight smile. Then the message kicked in, followed by: ‘This is Vicky Smatherson – and your associates owe me over ninety-four hundred dollars for a big party they threw out here. Now maybe ninety-four hundred dollars isn’t much to a bunch of big shots like you, but it’s a goddamn fortune to me and I’m damned if I am going to let you get away with not paying me. If you think I’m being a little extreme here, tough shit. You will find out just how fucking difficult and relentless I can be if—’

  I made a dive for the answering machine and turned the volume way down. Emily looked both bemused and unnerved by the call.

  ‘That woman is angry at you,’ she said.

  ‘She’s just upset.’

  Then the cellphone sounded. I checked the screen. I didn’t answer it. A moment later, the landline blared back into life. I double-checked that the answerphone volume was well and truly off. As it rang and rang, the cell also rang and rang. Emily smiled in the midst of all this cacophony and said: ‘Lots of people want Mommy.’

  I was so popular that the two phones kept ringing off and on for the next ten minutes until I had the good sense to unplug the landline and turn off the cell. After that I got Emily to bed, poured myself a double vodka and phoned Christy in Oregon – where I managed to catch her in her office.

  ‘As always,’ I said, ‘I have something of a story to tell you.’

  As always, the story came rushing out in one long rant.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said when I reached the part about Theo and Adrienne vanishing to the ends of the earth or wherever the hell they were right now.

  ‘My guess would be Morocco,’ Christy said. ‘A good place to go to ground – and handy for the South of France, should they want to sneak back across the Mediterranean for a decent meal.’

  ‘I think you can eat pretty well in Morocco,’ I said. ‘Especially with other people’s money.’

  ‘You mean, especially with your money.’

  ‘I’m absolutely certain that the funds are well and truly spent. Now their creditors are going to take my apartment away from me.’

  ‘No, they won’t.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because I won’t let them. Anyway, I’m certain you’ll get the favorable court judgment that your lawyer is promising you, and then everyone will be off your back.’

  ‘And if that doesn’t happen? If it goes the other way . . . ?’

  ‘Then you’ll survive somehow – which is what we all do. If you lose the apartment you’ll get another apartment. If you have to declare bankruptcy to meet all the debts, then you’ll eventually recover from that. It’s all very unfair, I know. But life is so often like that. Unfair, unjust, and more than a little cruel.’

  Cruelty was something of a specialty of one Morton Bubriski. He was Fantastic Filmworks’s landlord in Cambridge and he was very determined to collect the $19,000 in back rent that they owed him. Having found my phone number in the local directory he began a campaign of harassment that made Vicky Smatherson’s angry phone calls seem like the height of politesse. He first phoned me around eleven one night at home – and thinking that Christy was about to ring me back (I’d left a message at her home earlier that evening), I grabbed the phone without thinking.

  ‘This is Morton Bubriski and you owe me nineteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-six dollars. I know you’ve got it because I know you’re a professor at New England State. Just as I know where you live in Somerville and the fact that you own your apartment. I even know what crèche you drop your daughter into every morning—’

  That’s when I hung up. Thirty seconds later the phone rang again. When the answerphone kicked in he went vicious.

  ‘Now you listen to me, you little bitch, you hang up on me again and I will not only fuck with your career, but I’ll also destroy the rest of your life. Your associates completely screwed me around. And now I’m going to collect. And if you don’t pay me—’

  I grabbed the phone and shouted: ‘Threaten me like that again and you’ll have the police on the doorstep.’

  Then I slammed down the receiver and pulled the cord from the wall.

  ‘More yelling!’ Emily said.

  ‘That’s the last of it.’

  I kept both phones off for the rest of the night – but I couldn’t sleep. My exhausted yet hyperactive brain began to picture all the legal proceedings I would be facing, and the very public disgrace of being evicted from my home and having it sold from under me. No doubt the university would soon learn about my financial disgrace and that, in turn, would be another black mark against me, further proof (as if that was needed) that I was trouble.

  As it turned out I didn’t have to wait that long for the university to discover that I was the target of a very angry group of creditors – the charming Morton Bubriski phoned the English Department the next morning and spent ten minutes haranguing Professor Sanders’s secretary. He got so vehement and scatological that she too put down the phone – but only after having taped the entire conversation. (‘It’s a new university regulation,’ she explained later. ‘If someone starts going postal I hit the record button and we have his nastiness on tape.’)

  In turn, the record of Morton Bubriski’s nastiness was played for everyone from the chairman of my department to the Dean of the Faculty to the university President himself. When the Dean of the Faculty demanded that I present myself in his office at three o’clock that afternoon I made an emergency call to Mr Alkan and begged him to drop whatever he was doing and accompany me to the Dean’s office. To his credit he said immediately: ‘No problem,’ and was there just before three p.m.

  The Dean was disconcerted when I walked into his office accompanied by ‘my lawyer’.

  ‘This is not a trial, Professor,’ he said.

  ‘I just thought it best to have counsel present,’ I said.

  ‘And it was me who insisted that she have counsel present,’ Alkan lied, ‘because she is a completely innocent party here.’

  The Dean played us the call from Morton Bubriski. It wasn’t pleasant listening – and when I was about to say something in my defense, Alkan put two restraining fingers on my arm right before I was able to open my mouth. (Did they teach him that move in law school?) Once the tape was finished Alkan informed the Dean that he was planning to have a restraining order issued against Bubriski by the close of business today – and ‘the man will find himself in jail if he contacts you or my client in the future’.

  Before the Dean could get another word out, Alkan kicked in with a detailed explanation about why I was being chased by assorted creditors, how I wasn’t responsible for these bad debts, and how the two principal officers of the company had ‘gone to ground’.

  ‘Isn’t Mr Morgan the father of your child?’ the Dean asked me.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘The problem for us – and I have actually spoken to the university President himself about this – is the perception that Professor Howard may have engaged in some sort of bad financial speculation. Were this to be made public – to end up in the press, for example – and were someone to start digging around in her background, they’d discover that her father also went on the run after being exposed for financial chicanery . . .’

  ‘I’m not going on the run,’ I said, sounding angry. ‘And I resent the sins of the father being visited upon—’

  Again Alkan put two restraining fingers on my arm.

  ‘There will be no publicity surrounding this case,’ Alkan said, ‘because there is no case for Professor Howard to answer. As to your assertion that she is in any way following in the footsteps of her father when it comes to financial dishonesty—’

  ‘If you both would allow me to complete the sentence I was attempting to finish . . . of course we knew when we hired Professor Howard that her father was a fugitive from justice. Of course we accept your assurances that she is not to blame for her partner’s bad business management
. And yes, as long as we do not have further threatening phone calls or any publicity about the case we foresee no problems . . .’

  I asked: ‘But if something is made public – or some angry lunatic phones you here . . . ?’

  ‘Then we will have to reassess our position.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Alkan said. ‘Because I know all about the statutory clause in every university contract. Maybe you remember the Gibson vs Boston College case last year . . .’

  I could see the Dean turn a little pale. Gibson vs Boston College involved a professor who had written a rather scandalous book about her extra-curricular sex life. Even though she published the book under a pseudonym (but was outed by that right-wing blogger Matt Drudge) the university tried to fire her on the grounds that her account of having had over four hundred lovers in the past three decades (not to mention picking up a recently ordained Jesuit outside the men’s room at Boston’s South Station) brought the university into disrepute. Not only did Boston College end up having to reinstate her and issue her with an apology, they were also forced to pay all her legal fees and offer her a year’s paid sabbatical to make up for the unfair dismissal.

  ‘Now, we’re hardly dealing with a case like that here,’ the Dean said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ replied Alkan. ‘Because if you do try to dismiss my completely innocent client over bringing New England State into disrepute—’

  ‘I can assure you we won’t be taking such action.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Alkan said. ‘Then I think we’re done here.’

  Outside the Dean’s office I said: ‘You were brilliant.’

  Alkan just shrugged.

  ‘Well, that’s the university dealt with – for the moment anyway. And don’t worry about Bubriski. I’ll have him muzzled by nightfall.’

  Even though Alkan later emailed me, enclosing the details of the restraining order that had been placed on Bubriski, the man filed a countersuit against me the next morning, demanding the $19,000 in back rent plus another $20,000 in assorted nonsensical damages, ‘psychological stress’ and the like.

  ‘It’s easily defendable,’ Alkan said. ‘Don’t sweat it.’

  But I did sweat it – and suffered another sleepless night.

  Two days later Vicky Smatherson also filed a similar suit against me – as did six other Fantastic Filmworks creditors.

  ‘The good news,’ Alkan said, ‘is that the sum total of all the demands is just under eighty thousand dollars, which means, at the very worst, that’s all you’ll be liable for. But that’s the absolutely worst-case scenario. The truth is, once we go into court next week it will all be cleared up.’

  ‘Until then . . .’

  ‘I will send the requisite letters keeping all the vultures at bay. And I’m sorry to say this, but I will need another five thousand from you as a further retainer. All going well this will be the last payment.’

  ‘And if things don’t go well?’

  ‘Try not to think that.’

  But I did think that.

  Again I didn’t sleep that night – my third in a row. The next day I found myself increasingly unable to concentrate, to focus, to make it through a lecture without having a ‘dead zone’ moment when, out of nowhere, I would zonk out for a few seconds – much to the amusement of my students, one of whom trenchantly noted out loud: ‘I think the Professor was wasted last night.’

  When I snapped back into consciousness and scanned the classroom to see who out of the fifty students had made that comment, everything in front of me was a blur.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I haven’t been sleeping . . .’

  This comment got back to Professor Sanders who made a point of stopping by my office and catching me with the door open and in the midst of a doze at my desk.

  ‘I hope I’m not interrupting you?’ he asked, stepping inside.

  ‘Sorry, sorry. It’s just—’

  ‘You haven’t been sleeping. And you fell asleep in your class this morning.’

  ‘I am just coping with a great deal right now.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ he said, all coolness. ‘I really do advise you to get some sleep, Professor. The university might not be able to take action against you because of your association with deadbeats. But dereliction of duty while on the job, hinting at a larger psychological instability . . . that’s another matter entirely.’

  That evening – when I changed at Park Street for the Red Line train back to Somerville, I felt myself getting so shaky that I actually had to grip the platform bench when the train rattled into the station. Did I feel like throwing myself under the Red Line? I couldn’t make sense of anything right now.

  But I did manage to negotiate myself onto the train. I got off at Davis Square and went into a local pharmacy where I bought some over-the-counter sleeping aid that the druggist assured me would send me out for eight hours that night.

  Emily was always able to read my moods – and when I came home that night she turned to her nanny and said: ‘My mommy needs to go to bed!’

  ‘How right you are,’ I said, picking her up. But she stiffened as I held her.

  ‘You’re upset with me,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘You are.’ Then to Julia: ‘Mommy’s cranky.’

  ‘I’ve just got some stuff I’ve been dealing with.’

  ‘Mommy’s getting angry calls from people . . .’

  ‘Emily, that is enough.’

  My tone was far too sharp, far too ‘end of my rope’. My daughter’s face fell, she burst into tears and she ran off into her room. I turned to Julia and said: ‘Sorry . . . there’s a lot going on right now.’

  ‘It’s no worry, it’s no worry. I go to Emily . . .’

  ‘No, no, you go home. I’ll calm her down.’

  ‘You OK, Mrs Howard?’

  ‘I just need one night’s sleep.’

  When I went into Emily’s room I found my daughter curled up on the top of her bunk bed, her thumb in her mouth. As soon as I came in, she pulled her thumb out and guiltily shoved her hand under her pillow (I’d started trying to break her of the thumb-sucking habit). I sat down next to her and stroked her hair and said: ‘I am so sorry for getting angry at you.’

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘Nothing. I just overreacted.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Getting angry unnecessarily.’

  ‘Why are you angry?’

  ‘Because I’m over-tired. I haven’t been sleeping.’

  ‘Because Daddy isn’t here?’

  ‘That’s part of it.’

  ‘You won’t run away too?’

  ‘And leave you? Never. Never in a million years.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Of course I do. And I promise not to get angry again.’

  ‘That’s a big promise,’ she said with a small laugh. At that moment I couldn’t help but think: This daughter of mine gets it all so damn fast.

  I took two sleeping pills that night, chased with a mug of chamomile tea. They knocked me out for around two hours, but then I was up again, staring at the ceiling, feeling as if my brain had been cleaved. I swallowed another two pills. I got up. I read through some papers. I waited for the pills to kick in. Nothing happened. I looked at the clock. It was now just one-thirty in the morning. I picked up the phone and called Christy. She too was up late, grading papers.

  ‘You have me worried,’ she said.

  ‘I have me worried too.’

  ‘It’s not just insomnia you’re suffering, it’s depression.’

  ‘I’m functioning just fine. A good night’s sleep—’

  ‘Bullshit. You’re in a dark wood. My advice to you is to get to a doctor tomorrow and get some help. Otherwise . . .’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  ‘Stop dodging the obvious. Depression is a serious business. If you don’t deal with it now—’

  ‘I’ll deal with it, OK?’

  B
ut the next morning I dropped Emily at nursery school and dozed off on the T. Later I caught sight of myself in the mirror in my office and saw just how strained and netherworldly I looked. I drank three large mugs of coffee and got through my lectures, constantly sensing that I was a bad actor inhabiting the body of this alleged professor of English, trying to sound erudite and engaged with her subject matter while simultaneously knowing that I was nothing less than a sham . . . and that life as I knew it was nothing but a series of misadventures and setbacks, in which people disappointed you hugely and – worst of all – you kept disappointing yourself. And had it not been for Emily I might just now—

  No, no, don’t go there. But do go to a doctor. Now.

  However, another voice in my head – the voice that didn’t want to begin to face up to what I needed to accept, that, yes, I was in something akin to free fall – told me: ‘You’ll sleep tonight and all will seem better tomorrow. Why add another goddamn wrinkle to your life by deciding you’re depressed? Get home, go to bed. Show the bastards this won’t bring you down.’

  So even though the faculty doctor was on duty that afternoon and I could easily have seen him and begged for some pharmaceutical way out of this sleepless hell, something in me forced me back across Boston on the T, and to Cambridge to pick up Emily. (Julia herself had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon.)

  ‘Mommy, Mommy!’ Emily said as she saw me in the doorway of the nursery. ‘Can we go get a treat?’

  ‘No problem, my love.’

  ‘You tired, Mommy?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  And I helped her on with her coat and led her by the hand out the door.

  ‘I think there’s a coffee shop near here that does great sundaes,’ I said. ‘But first you’ll have to eat something nutritious . . . like a hamburger.’

  ‘Are hamburgers good for you?’

  ‘They’re better than ice-cream sundaes.’

  Suddenly, in front of us, there was a commotion. An elderly woman had been walking her terrier. The lead had broken and the terrier was running free, heading towards us. The woman was yelling its name. Emily, all wide-eyed, broke free of my grip and chased right after it. I lunged for my daughter, screaming at her to stop. But she was already off the curb . . .