Leaving the World Read online

  Yes! There, beneath my feet, was a pothole. Not a particularly big pothole – maybe a foot or so in diameter – but located in a telling spot, perhaps twelve feet or so before the skid marks and the police cones. A narrative assembled in my mind. David left the beach and was coming along the road at speed. He saw the truck moving towards him. He prudently steered himself to the edge of the blacktop. But then his front wheel hit the pothole, he lost control of his bicycle and was thrown into the path of . . .

  That was it. That’s how it happened. An accident. So random, so arbitrary – an unlinked set of circumstances coming together to create disaster.

  I could now tell myself that it wasn’t suicide; that, truly, David had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I walked back to the car, feeling no relief, no lightening of my sadness, no sense that this personal confirmation of his accident had made his loss easier to bear. All I could think was: Why are you here? OK, you’ve confirmed what you wanted to confirm. Now what?

  Now . . . nothing. Except the drive back to Boston. And then . . . ?

  But before I headed back I decided I should see his house. I’d passed it on my way out to Popham – knowing it immediately because he had talked so often about its exact location in the village of Winnegance.

  Now, upon reaching it, I first stopped at the end of his driveway and got out, looking up its winding path to ascertain that no car was parked there. Then I drove the rest of the way to his house. It was exactly as he had described it – a small salt-box structure, situated on an elevated prospect looking right out on the water. I walked around the house and stopped when I saw the room that was obviously David’s study: a small simple space, with a desk, a bookshelf and one of the several Remington typewriters that he owned (he refused to write anything but academic stuff on a computer). The desk faced a wall, just like his office at Harvard – ‘Otherwise I’d look out the window and get distracted by everything that’s going on outside.’ I found myself getting shaky. But I forced myself back into the car and returned to the main road, parking at the little general store just opposite David’s place to buy a bottle of water.

  Or, at least, that’s what I told myself I was doing there. Once inside, the elderly, flinty-looking woman behind the counter gave me the skeptical once-over that she probably reserved for anyone who wasn’t a local during the off-season.

  ‘Hey,’ she said tonelessly. ‘Get you anything?’

  I asked for some sparkling water and a copy of the local paper.

  As I paid for them, I said: ‘I was just taking a walk down on Popham Beach and saw the police tape. Did something happen there?’

  ‘A guy steered his bicycle into a truck,’ she said, making change for me.

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘If a guy deliberately steers his bike into the direct path of a truck, it’s no accident.’

  ‘Did you know the guy?’

  ‘Sure did. Professor from Boston, had a place just across the road. Pleasant enough guy. Never would have thought . . .’

  ‘But how can they be sure that it was—?’

  She gave me a long, cold look.

  ‘You’re not some kind of reporter, are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Just interested,’ I said, sounding nervous.

  ‘You know the Professor?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You know Gus?’

  ‘Who’s Gus?’

  ‘Gus is my second cousin – and the fella who was driving the truck. The man’s completely devastated about what happened. Been driving the same fish truck ’round here for over twenty years. Never hit anything or anyone. Poor guy’s in total shock, won’t get behind the wheel again. Says he saw the Professor biking towards him and, then, right when he was almost alongside him, the Professor swerved right into his path. Completely deliberate . . . like he wanted to get hit.’

  ‘But maybe he ran into a pothole on his bike and—’

  ‘If Gus says he swerved into him, he swerved into him. Gus is a little slow in the head, but if there’s one thing I know about him, he never lies.’

  I left. I got into my car, drove off and hit the highway. Somewhere south of Portland I had to pull off the road because I was crying so hard.

  If Gus says he swerved into him, he swerved into him.

  I wanted to believe my own version – the one I created after seeing the site of the accident. But here now was contradictory information – from the one authoritative source at the scene.

  Maybe that was why I was crying so hard – not just because David’s loss was finally hitting me with full-frontal force, but also because the manner of his death was so ambiguous.

  When I returned to my Cambridge apartment that night, I discovered, in my mailbox, a plain white postcard. On one side, in David’s scratchy handwriting, was my address, and a Bath, Maine postmark. On the other side were three words:

  I’m sorry

  David

  I went up to my studio and sat down at my little dining table. I put the card down and stared at those three words for a very long time. My head was swimming. His last message to me. But what was he telling me? I’m sorry . . . and I’m going to kill myself? Or: I’m sorry for the mess I’ve caused? Or: I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you about the book? Or: I’m sorry I’ve disappeared? Or . . .

  Nothing definitive. No answers. Just more ambiguity.

  I’m sorry.

  With the door slammed on the outside world, I broke down again, crying like an idiot. But this time my tears weren’t just a response to my sense of loss – a loss I couldn’t share with anyone. Rather, they were also bound up with real anger. I was furious with David – not just for dying, but also for trying to salve his conscience with that fucking postcard and a message which simply added another enigmatic wrinkle to an already ambiguous situation.

  I’m sorry.

  In the days that followed, my anger ebbed a bit, replaced by a sadness that was hard to shake. I received a call from Mrs Cathcart – all quiet and conciliatory, telling me how everyone in the department was so distressed by Professor Henry’s death (a lie); how there was now a general backlash against the New York journalist who penned the accusations of plagiarism (another lie); and how she was thinking about me during this difficult time because ‘I know how close you were to the Professor’.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, trying to sound controlled. ‘He was a brilliant thesis advisor and a good friend.’

  But before I added ‘Nothing more’, I stopped myself. When you protest too much you incriminate yourself.

  ‘You should know that the Maine police ruled the whole thing an accident,’ she said. ‘Just in case you were wondering.’

  ‘I wasn’t wondering anything,’ I said, while simultaneously wondering: Did they decide not to believe the testimony of Gus the Driver? Or maybe Gus was talked into a narrative explanation – ‘The bike hit the pothole and the next thing I knew he was thrown directly in front of my vehicle’ – as a way of simplifying matters, ending ambiguity and quashing all difficult questions. As I later heard on the departmental grapevine, the very fact that David’s death was ruled an accident meant that his wife would receive his life-insurance payout. Maybe the cops – wanting to minimize the pain suffered by the driver and by David’s family – stuck with the accident scenario.

  But I knew the truth. And the truth was: There is no truth here. It’s like that line of Eliot’s from ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow.’

  I’m sorry.

  I’m sure you were, David. But it doesn’t lessen the questions, doesn’t diminish the shadows.

  His funeral was private. He was cremated and his ashes sprinkled on the water fronting his cottage. When I learned of this – from Mrs Cathcart, naturally – I couldn’t help but think of something David once said to me about the transient nature of everything.

  ‘We try so hard to put our mark on things, we like to tell ourselves that what we do
has import or will last. But the truth is, we’re all just passing through. So little survives us. And when we’re gone, it’s simply the memory of others that keeps our time here alive. And when they’re gone . . .

  ‘That’s why – when I go – I’m asking that my dust gets tossed on the water. Because everything ends up floating away.’

  Everyone in the department was very solicitous towards me. The chairman, Professor Hawthorden, rang me personally and asked if I would drop by his office for a chat. I steeled myself for the third degree. As it turned out, he was the very model of tact. He talked about the ‘accidental tragedy’ of David’s death, and how the plagiarism charges were nothing more than ‘trial by hack journalism’. He also wanted me to know that David always spoke very highly of me as a student, and that he himself would like to take charge of my dissertation, if I was ‘comfortable’ with this offer.

  Why did the department head want to be my advisor – especially as his specialty was Early American Literature? Was he trying to silence any gossip about my relationship with David? Was he keeping me ‘on side’? I had no idea. If Professor Hawthorden preferred to keep things nice and ambiguous, I was not going to argue. As I had come to discover, ambiguity had its virtues.

  I threw myself into work, writing two pages of my dissertation per day, six days per week. I kept a low profile, seeing Hawthorden twice a month for an hour-long conference, but otherwise spending most of my time at the library or at my apartment. I vanished for the next nine months. Bar Christy, my life at Harvard had been David. And with David gone . . .

  But I liked the solitude. Check that: I needed the solitude . . . needed the time to . . . grieve, I suppose. But also to somehow reorder my brain and put David’s death in a box that I had already marked ‘Off Limits’. Though I might quietly mourn him, I had to accept the cold brutality of his demise. Just as I was determined that no one would ever be privy to the grief I actually felt.

  There was a considerable amount of public hand-wringing at Harvard and in the press about whether David had been unfairly victimized by certain English department colleagues. Fair play to the Harvard Crimson – they outed the bastards who had been calling for his head. But what did it matter now? David was still dead. There was also a memorial service held at the college chapel three months after his ‘accident’. Naturally I attended. Afterwards, as everyone spilled out of the church and Polly found herself shaking a lot of hands, I stood by the chapel door surveying the scene. At that very moment, Polly glanced around and her eyes happened to land on me. Her gaze was cold, yet level – and followed by a very fast nod of acknowledgement. Then she turned back to a group of mourners who had gathered around her. That look haunted me for a very long time. Was she telling me that she knew exactly who I was? But why follow such an arctic stare with a gesture that almost seemed to acknowledge the connection – and loss – that we both shared? Maybe I was simply trying to impose far too much interpretation on five seconds of eye contact. Perhaps the cold gaze was just the look of a woman trying to stay in control of things during a difficult public juncture, the nod nothing more than a simple ‘Hello to you . . . whoever you are.’

  We can never really determine the truth behind the unspoken. A gesture can have any meaning you wish to impose on it. Just as the truth behind an accident will never be fully understood. Just as embracing ambiguity can shield you from so much.

  That’s something David’s death taught me. If you confess to nothing, you provide those around you only with supposition . . . and no proof. That which remains hidden does, indeed, remain hidden. I took some comfort in this realization – not just because I saw it as a way of constructing the defensive shield I needed to get through the subsequent months at Harvard, but also because it somehow allowed me to compartmentalize all the rage and sadness; to control the demons within. So I went to ground. I did my work. I allowed myself little latitude when it came to a life outside of my thesis. Professor Hawthorden – who read each chapter as it came ‘off the press’ – seemed pleased with its progress. When I completed it, he expressed his amazement that I had managed to deliver it six months before its provisional due date.

  ‘I’ve just had an extended burst of . . . concentration,’ I said.

  Usually there is a four-month gap between the delivery of the thesis and your defense of it. But Hawthorden – evidently wanting to speed things along – informed me that he would be arranging the defense before all faculty members disappeared for the summer break. As it turned out, there were only three other members of the department quizzing me on the finer points of The Infernal Duality: Obedience and Defiance in American Literature. There were questions about whether there was any real Zola-esque leitmotif in Dreiser, and about the uses of progressive political thought in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. One professor got rather tetchy about my need to find a socio-economic subtext in every novel under discussion (I fielded that one handily), someone else queried my own need to be ‘novelistic’ in an academic thesis . . . and I left my defense doubting whether I was in any way credible.

  Within a week I received an official letter from Hawthorden, informing me that my thesis had been approved and that I would be granted the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard. At the bottom of the letter were two handwritten lines:

  It has been a pleasure working with you. I wish you well.

  And Hawthorden initialed this.

  Was he telling me, in as polite a way as he was able: ‘Now please get lost’? Was this the reason he gave my thesis express service – to dispatch me from their lives as quickly as possible? Or, again, was this simply one of many interpretations that could be applied to twelve words? Was everything always so riddled with multiple meanings?

  A few days after I received my letter from Hawthorden, I was also contacted by the Harvard Placement Office, asking me to drop by for a chat. The woman who saw me – an all-business type in her forties named Ms Steele – told me that there was a last-minute job opening for an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

  ‘It is a tenure-track appointment – and Wisconsin is pretty first rate as state universities go.’

  ‘I’ll take the interview.’

  Two days later I was flown out to Madison. The chairman of the department – a rather harried, exhausted man named Wilson – picked me up at the airport and unburdened himself to me on the drive to the university: how this position had opened up when an assistant professor developed an unhealthy interest in one of his students and was let go; and how he was also having to fill another post, in medieval literature, as the woman who had held it for the past twenty years had finally drunk herself into the local intensive care unit, and . . .

  ‘Well, what can I say?’ Wilson told me. ‘It’s just your average dysfunctional English department.’

  When I sat around the conference table that afternoon in some administrative building, being interviewed by Wilson and four other department members, I looked at the drabness of my future colleagues – their air of enervation and tetchiness; the way they undercut each other as they sized me up, finding out just how smart I thought myself, whether I’d be a threat to them or someone they could manage, and asking what I thought about the scandal that had engulfed one of their colleagues.

  Careful here, I told myself, then said: ‘As I really don’t know the details of the case—’

  ‘But what do you think in general about the rules against intimate student–faculty relationships?’ this woman asked.

  Does she know about me and . . . ?

  ‘I can’t condone them,’ I said, meeting her gaze. The subject wasn’t raised again.

  I flew back to Boston that evening, remembering something that David once told me: ‘Anytime you ever think about taking a teaching post, always remember that most time-honored of clichés: the reason everyone is so bitchy in academia is because the stakes are so low.’

  David. My poor wonderful David.

  And the idea of now embraci
ng the world that had helped to kill him . . .

  So when the call came three days later from Wisconsin, informing me I had the job, I told the department chairman I wasn’t taking it.

  ‘But why?’ he asked, sounding genuinely shocked.

  ‘I’ve decided to make money,’ I said. ‘Serious money.’

  Part Two

  One

  MONEY. I NEVER gave it much thought. Until I started making real, proper grown-up money, its existence was something that I largely ignored. As I now realize, how you deal with money – how you control it and how it controls you (and it inevitably ends up doing that) – is something you learn very early on. My adolescence was a frugal one, as Dad paid Mom a very nominal amount of alimony and child support. At high school I was always known as ‘the librarian’s daughter’. Unlike most other teenagers in Old Greenwich, I didn’t have my own personal car, let alone membership of a country club – Old Greenwich being the sort of place where boys get their first set of golf clubs on their eleventh birthday. As I began to understand, not having a car and not spending the weekends at some white-bread enclave was no bad thing. But I still wished I could have had some of their fringe benefits – most of all, not having to worry about asking Mom for certain things, as she was constantly embarrassed about her small salary and the fact that she couldn’t do more for me, even though I kept reassuring her that I needed no more than I had.

  It’s extraordinary how patterns of behavior develop without either you or those closest to you ever realizing that they are being formed. Mom felt guilty about not having much money. I felt guilty about Mom feeling guilty, and also felt hurt and confused about my father being so parsimonious. Simultaneously I wanted to win scholarships (and hold down assorted part-time jobs) to relieve my mom of certain financial burdens and show my father that I could hold my own in the world.