Escape (2 page)

Six
months earlier...

Setting aside her copy of the
New York Times,
Jessica Campbell smiled as her husband, Charlie, hurried into the kitchen and over to the espresso maker. He poured himself a double-shot and took a sip before putting the cup down to fumble at his tie.

"Here, let me help with that," Jessica said, standing. "I fixed breakfast—a western omelet, bacon, and an English muffin."

"No time," Charlie replied, turning his face away from her as she stood on her tiptoes to complete a Windsor knot. "I'm expected at campaign headquarters by 8, and I have to stop by and pick up Diane." He stepped back and gave her a funny look. "What's with all the domesticity?"

An angry expression sailed quickly across Jessica's face, but she forced a smile in its wake. Act
normal, no tantrums or crying.
Her laugh was brittle. "Can't a wife cook breakfast for her husband, the future congressman from the 8th Congressional District, without losing her feminist credentials?"

Charlie caught the strain in her voice. "Sure, she can," he said, forcing a smile of his own. "Just checking to see if you're feeling okay."

They both knew that the question was as loaded as a pimp's gun in Spanish Harlem. She wondered for a moment if he was on to her.
Careful, or he'll ruin everything.
"I'm fine, silly," she said. "I just wish I could be more of a help to you with your campaign. It's already March and you've hardly started fundraising."

Politics was a safe subject, unlike the state of her mental health or their marriage. And despite everything that had happened of late, she had her admirers and friends in the media, and he needed to keep her on his side.

Jessica had been inducted into grassroots liberal politics by her parents, Benjamin and Liza Gupperstein, who liked to boast at cocktail parties that they'd hung out with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at the Chelsea Hotel. Abbie Hoffman had once crashed on their couch. Their daughter had been born in 1968, just a few weeks after they were arrested in Chicago for protesting at the Democratic National Convention. They'd also marched in Selma, worked for Eugene McCarthy, and burned flags to protest the war in Vietnam. Many years later their stories gave them a sort of rock-star credibility among the wealthy liberal crowd of upper-crust Manhattan. But they hadn't always hobnobbed with the rich.

In fact, Jessica had spent her first decade living with her parents in a tenement building at 120th Street and Fifth Avenue across from Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem. The white, non-practicing Jewish couple had explained to their horrified Modem Orthodox families that the reason they chose to live "among the oppressed" was to "immerse our child in an environment surrounded by the suffering and discrimination faced by blacks so that she will learn to be sympathetic to the plight of those less fortunate."

However, their home had been broken into more often than a methadone clinic; the Guppersteins were robbed and mugged so many times that when Benjamin's parents were killed in a car accident in 1978, he and Liza quickly decided that the lesson had been learned and moved into the now-vacant Gupperstein Sr.'s walk-up in SoHo. It was the first of many steps up the ladder. A few years later, Benjamin's more capitalist-minded brother, Sam, a computer-software savant, talked them into giving him their life savings so that he could buy stock for them in a young company he worked for, a little startup called Microsoft. This was shortly before the company went public. And the rest—you guessed it—was history.

The Guppersteins assuaged the guilt of sudden riches by contributing large checks to the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Anti-Defamation League. Every Christmas Eve, which they referred to as "Winter Solstice," Benjamin, Liza, and Jessica had the chauffeur drive them to a soup kitchen just a few blocks from the old family tenement in Harlem to serve turkey and ladle mashed potatoes and gravy onto the plates of their former neighbors. They then went home where the adults quietly thanked their lucky stars for insider trading and multiple stock splits.

That kind of money bought the Guppersteins seats at every liberal charity and political event in the Five Boroughs, including the cocktail parties, where they trotted out their former radical left-wing bona fides. Unfortunately for family tranquility, however, teenaged Jessica saw her father—in his designer tie-dyed Tshirts, Birkenstock sandals, and cell phone with its speed-dial set to his stock broker, lawyer, and hair stylist—as a sellout, and she frequently told him so. Even her mother's seat on several boards of nonprofit organizations and charities did little to mollify Jessica's abhorrence of all things smacking of capitalism, though she made no complaint about the money spent on her private schooling and the latest teen fashions. She gladly took her free ride through Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, where she majored in art, and then through graduate school in political science at Columbia. And she also accepted her parents' wedding present of a $2 million brownstone on the Upper West Side when she married Charlie Campbell.

At the time she met Charlie, Jessica had been involved in a lesbian relationship—not because she was particularly attracted to women, but it seemed the right thing for an avowed feminist to at least sample. She and her lover had gone to a coffeehouse one night where Charlie, an aspiring writer, was trying out his poetry on an unsuspecting crowd during Open Mic Night. His poetry was predictably neo-Beat and self-indulgent, but he was so earnest and so obviously interested in Jessica that she'd shown up the next week without her girlfriend and gone home with him to his flat in the East Village. They'd been together ever since.

The son of a third-generation Detroit autoworker, Charlie was tall, slightly overweight, and slope-shouldered but handsome in a cherubic kind of way—pouty lips, round flushed cheeks, and wavy brown hair. She, on the other hand, was short, dishwater blonde, flat-chested, thin-lipped, shaped like Anjou pear, and in need of thick glasses to see much of anything with her watery blue eyes.

Despite their physical disparities, their politics and interest in social issues meshed like peanut butter and jelly or lox and bagels (depending on which side of the family was talking). She admired how he wanted to make the world a better place; he liked the way she admired him, and besides, her family had more money than God.

Only the most cynical of Jessica's friends, such as her former lesbian lover, pointed out that Charlie had proposed marriage the night after he'd met her parents and discovered the extent of their wealth and political connections. The former lover also noted—at the wedding reception—that for an avowed feminist, Jessica had been quick to announce that she was dropping Gupperstein for Campbell as a last name. "Quite the transformation," the woman complained. "Jew dyke to WASP breeder practically overnight."

Such bitter pronouncements and their owners were soon left to the past. The young couple moved into the brownstone at 95th and Columbus where they hosted meet-the-candidate, or avant-garde-artist, or hip-new- musician dinner parties, after which the hosts and guests retired to the living room for heated political and social debates fueled by dense clouds of Lebanese hashish and expensive Spanish wines. Meanwhile, Jessica worked on her Ph.D. in political science—specializing in feminist revisions of history—while Charlie decided with his in-laws' financial blessing to pursue a law degree at Columbia University.

After Jessica received her doctorate, her parents' connections and financial resources landed her a job teaching at New York City University, where she made it a point to introduce herself to her students as a "left-wing femi-socialist." Always good for an anti-government or anti-business quote in the school newspaper, she was soon enjoying her reputation as a campus radical. But it wasn't until November 2001 that she made front-page headlines by chaining herself, along with her three-year-old daughter, Hillary, to the gate of Trinity Church on Broadway, just down the street from the still-smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center.

Running low on post-9/11 stories, the press was happy to give her a soapbox. With her daughter in her arms, she accused the United States of being "the true terrorist nation." The publicity and hate mail that followed had been the highlight of her life to that date. She'd even had the photograph from the Times article enlarged and framed to hang in her campus office. It showed her handing off Hillary to Charlie as she was being hauled off to jail.

Another child, Chelsea, was born into the Campbell household just before the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. Which is when Jessica became Public Enemy Number One on conservative local radio talk shows. Both hosts and callers were angered by her proclamation that Islamic extremists were "at least fighting for Allah, which is a more ethical reason than our troops fighting for Big Oil, the god of the United States."

There just seemed to be something about childbirth that got her radical juices flowing. In late 2005, when she was pregnant with their third child, Benjamin, she wrote an essay entitled "What Goes Around, Comes Around," published in a left-of-center national magazine, which suggested that the people who'd died in the World Trade Center were "casualties of war ... no different from civilians the U.S. government kills daily in Fallujah." Indeed, she wrote, the WTC dead shouldn't be considered victims, or even "collateral damage," because they were "the economic foot soldiers of the American war machine."

"Therefore," she said, "it can be argued that they were legitimate military targets." She also noted that Islamic jihadists believed that they were obeying the will of God when they blew up other people along with themselves. "Thus they consider themselves, with some degree of accuracy ... at least in an abstract sense, to be operating on a higher moral plane."

Throwing rocket fuel on the fire, she'd concluded that "the Christian Right, who run this country, should be the last to judge someone who believes that they are obeying the will of God."

After the article was published, Jessica eagerly awaited the deluge of hate mail and telephone death-threats she'd receive and pass on to her friends in the media as badges of honor. This time, however, the fallout was more than she'd anticipated. It was one thing to be pilloried by conservative talk-show hosts, but this time, even the
New York Times,
while defending her right to express her opinion, tepidly admonished her for "opening wounds that are still healing."

The public was not so timid. The Families of 9/11 Victims, as well as various conservative groups, organized a protest march on the NYCU campus that turned into a near-riot when anti-war and pro-Jessica supporters showed up. Heated words quickly turned to fisticuffs and an all-out brawl before the police moved in to separate the combatants. After the incident, members of the New York state legislature, including some middle-of-the-road Democrats, threatened to cut funding to the university for what the sponsor of the budget appropriations bill called Campbell's "hate speech."

NYCU's board of regents voted to censure her for "actions detrimental to the reputation of the school" because she'd signed the piece as "by Jessica Campbell, professor of political science at New York City University," without permission from the administration. Jessica threatened to sue on First Amendment grounds, and a settlement was reached. But part of the agreement was that she take an extended maternity leave for the birth of baby Benjamin in January.

The brouhaha might have ended there. However, Ariadne Stupenagel, a reporter for the normally liberal Manhattan weekly the
New York Guardian,
received a tip from an anonymous member of the NYCU faculty that Jessica's work wasn't entirely her own. The reporter began digging and found several instances where Jessica had apparently plagiarized the work of other scholars for a number of her essays, including her Ph.D. treatise, A
Feminist View of the Criminality of White Males in American Politics.
Stupenagel's investigation, published under the headline "What Goes Around, Comes Around for NYCU Prof," uncovered evidence that Campbell regularly made up facts and falsified research to support her writings.

Jessica's lawyer protested to her friends at other media outlets, as well as to the school's Board of Regents at a hastily arranged ethics hearing, that "these small irregularities, if they can even be described as such, were at worst accidental, and the product of carelessness and poor editing, not intentional academic fraud." He then hinted to the press that Stupenagel's story was essentially ghost-written for her by right-wing pundits, noting that the reporter was in an apparently amorous relationship with an aide to the New York district attorney, himself a notorious conservative.

Campbell's lawyer lambasted the university for using "these minor and out-of-context accusations to punish my client, not for alleged academic fraud, but for her essay regarding the people who died in the World Trade Center." And that, he wagged his finger, "is a reprehensible assault on Jessica Campbell's constitutionally protected free speech." Any effort by the university to punish her, he warned, would have "a chilling effect on academic freedom" and result in a hefty lawsuit against the school.

However, with public sentiment decidedly against Jessica, and even the governor pronouncing that taxpayers should not have to fund "radical demagoguery disguised as free speech," the Board of Regents felt safe to begin an official inquest to determine if the charges of academic fraud and plagiarism warranted dismissal. In the meantime, they told Jessica and her attorney that her maternity leave was now a "sabbatical" until the review was complete.

Jessica wanted to fight. But gazing at an accordion file full of evidence that damned his client, the attorney shook his head. "No. You're going to take a break until this all blows over. Then you're going to throw yourself on your knees in front of the regents and beg to keep your job.
Comprende
?"

Jessica saw the look in his eyes and nodded. As high as she'd been while working on the article and immediately following its publication, her spirits plummeted like Icarus back to Earth.