Leaving the World (6 page)

‘The problem with me,’ she said one night when we were out drinking, ‘is that, when it comes to art and men, I always go after the most complicated, difficult person in the room.’

The fact that she was somewhat overweight – and that exercise or even the most marginally healthy diet were anathema to her – lent her an added allure: the redneck intellectual who looked as though she’d just walked out of a trailer park, but nevertheless managed to always have some preppy guy named Winthrop Holmes III chasing after her.

‘I think they see me as rough trade, whereas the fact is: I like rough trade. Or crazies. Whereas you – the Patron Saint of Self-Restraint with your damnable inability to put on weight . . .’

‘It’s not for want of trying.’

‘Yeah, you’re just some goddamn ectomorph – and pretty to boot.’

‘I’m hardly pretty.’

‘You would say that, given your talent for self-deprecation. But take it from me, guys find you easy on the eye.’

David told me the same thing on several occasions, commenting how he often saw me frown when I looked in the mirror, as if I didn’t like what I saw there.

‘I’ve always had a thing against mirrors,’ I said.

‘Well, you’re hardly a plain Jane,’ he said. ‘More from the Audrey Hepburn school of—’

‘Oh, please . . .’

‘Even Professor Hawthorden – the chairman of the Harvard English Department – noted the resemblance.’

‘My hair is longer than hers.’

‘And you have the same patrician cheekbones and radiant skin and—’

‘Stop, now,’ I said.

‘You can’t take a compliment, can you?’ David said with a small smile.

I don’t trust them,
I felt like telling him, but instead said: ‘You’re simply biased.’

‘That I am. And what’s wrong with that?’

I looked back up at Christy and just shook my head.

‘One of these days you’re going to actually start liking yourself,’ she continued. ‘Maybe then you’ll start putting on just a little make-up and stop dressing like some tour guide in the Rockies.’

‘Maybe I don’t care about style.’

‘Maybe you should stop playing the rigid, self-protective card at all times. I mean, shit, Jane . . . it’s graduate school. You’re supposed to drink too much and start dressing like an intellectual slut, and be sleeping with a lot of unappetizing and inappropriate guys.’

‘I wish I had your epicurean attitude to such things,’ I said.

‘
Epicurean?
I’m just a slob and a nympho. But come on, you’ve got to have some guy stashed somewhere.’

I shook my head.

‘Why don’t I believe you?’ she asked.

‘You tell me,’ I said.

‘Maybe because – one – I sense you have a secret lover, but– two – you’re so damn controlled and disciplined that you’re keeping his identity secret, because – three – he’s somebody you don’t want anyone to know you’re involved with.’

I worked hard at putting on my best poker face – and concealing the fact that I was quietly terrified that she might know something about David and myself.

‘You have a very vivid imagination,’ I said.

‘You’re seeing someone on the side.’

‘But as I’m not married . . .’

‘You’re the
thing on the side
, sweetheart.’

‘Again, I admire your ability to conjure up—’

‘Goddamn it, Jane – I am your friend, right? And as your friend, I think I deserve to know all the salacious details . . . just as you know all of mine.’

‘But if there aren’t any salacious details to report . . .’

‘You are impossible.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

Told, in fact, by my very own mother on many occasions during adolescence when I wouldn’t share details of my own life with her. As Mom didn’t have much life outside of our own life she was frequently bothered by the way I didn’t tell her things, and seemed to keep so much to myself. Part of this was a reaction to her need to be all-interested in everything about me – to the point where she was downright overbearing. Now, of course, I see the very personal despair – the loneliness and isolation and sense of having been cast off by my father – that made her turn her energies on to me as her very own Grand Project, who would achieve in life everything that had been denied to her. So, back in high school, every homework assignment, every book I read, every movie I saw, every mark I received on an exam, every guy who ever asked me out on a date (not that there were many of them) became something for her to scrutinize.

It all became too much. My mother had turned into a micro-manager – trying desperately to make certain I sidestepped as many potential pitfalls and mistakes as possible. By the time I reached college, I had became so much more private, so guarded, that the landscape between us had changed irrevocably. She enquired less about my life and checked herself whenever she was about to veer into the meddlesome. On the surface, we were still pleasant enough with each other – and I did let her in on the basic superficial stuff in my life. But she knew that we were no longer close.

Yes, I felt terrible about this – especially as I knew that, for Mom, it was further proof that she could ‘do nothing right’.

But perhaps the most telling exchange we ever had about all this was after the break-up with Tom. It was Christmas. I was back home in Connecticut, and I hadn’t mentioned anything yet to her about the phonecall I had received from him before Thanksgiving. Naturally, on my first night back, she asked me if ‘my future son-in-law’ would be arriving on December 26th (as he always had done in the past).

‘I’m afraid Tom will be spending Christmas with his future in-laws in Ireland.’

Mom looked at me as if I had just spoken to her in Serbo-Croat.

‘What did you just say?’

‘Tom met someone in Ireland – a medical student. They’re an item now . . . and we’re not.’

‘And when did this happen?’

I told her. She turned white.

‘And you waited this long to tell me.’

‘I needed time.’

‘Time to do
what
, Jane? If you haven’t forgotten, I’m your mother – and though you may have pushed me to one side—’

‘I call twice, three times a week, I show up for every major holiday—’

‘And you keep all the big stuff in your life hidden from me.’

Silence. Then I said: ‘This is the way I have to do things.’

‘But why?
Why
?’

We can rarely tell others what we really think about them – not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves. The gentle lie is often preferable to the bleak truth. So in answer to her demand, ‘But why?
Why?
’, I simply met my mother’s maimed gaze and said: ‘It’s my problem, Mom . . . not yours.’

‘You’re just saying that to keep me quiet, to let yourself off the hook.’

‘Let myself off the hook for
what
?’

‘For being such a closed book. Just like your father.’

Dad
. I so wanted his approval, his interest. But he always remained elusive, distant, beyond my reach. He was now living full-time in South America – and, from the sporadic, quarterly phone calls I received from him, I knew he was shacked up with a much younger woman, and little else beyond that. But I still adopted his closed-book way of dealing with the world. Maybe I was subliminally trying to please him – ‘
See, Dad, I can be just like you
 . . .’ Or maybe the distance I kept between myself and others was simply a modus vivendi, because it kept so much chaos at bay and because it meant I knew how to guard against intrusion or prying eyes or even a cross-examination by my best friend.

‘You are impossible,’ Christy Naylor said.

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘You know what the big difference between us is?’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘I reveal everything, you reveal nothing.’

‘A secret remains a secret until you tell somebody. From that moment on, it’s in the public domain.’

‘If you don’t trust anyone, don’t you end up feeling lonely?’

Ouch. That was a direct hit – a real right-to-the-jaw. But I tried not to show it and instead said: ‘Everything has a price.’

But the harboring of secrets also has its virtues. Not a single person ever knew of my involvement with David Henry . . . and we were together for four years. We would have probably been together longer – in fact, I often think that we might still be together right now – had he not died.

F
OUR YEARS
with David Henry.

Considered now, it all seemed to pass in a fast heady rush. That’s the tricky thing about time. When you’re living it on a daily basis, it can seem impossibly slow – the routine grind making you believe that the distance between Monday and the weekend is a vast one, riddled with longueurs. But regarded retrospectively, it always appears hyper-charged. A click of two fingers and you have left childhood and are trying to negotiate adolescence. Click – and you’re in college, pretending to be a grown-up and yet still so wildly unsure of yourself. Click – and you’re doing a doctorate and meeting your professor three afternoons a week to make love in your apartment. Click – and forty-eight months have passed. Click – and David dies. Suddenly, randomly, without premonition. A man of fifty-six, without what is known as ‘medical issues’, goes out for a bike ride and . . .

As David so often noted, the prosaic always forces its way into everything we do. We fool ourselves into thinking we are extraordinary. Even if we are one of the lucky ones who do extraordinary things, commonplace realities inevitably barge in. ‘And the most commonplace reality,’ David once said, ‘is the one we fear the most: death.’

Four years. And because we were ‘operating in the arena of the clandestine’ (another of my favorite David quotes), we were able to sidestep so many banalities. When you set up house with somebody you’re bound to find yourself falling into the usual petty disputes about domestic minutiae and personal idiosyncrasies. But when you’re meeting the man you love from four to seven, three times a week – and are denied access to him at all other times – the hours you spend together take on a heightened reality . . . because, of course, they’re so unreal to begin with.

‘If we lived together,’ I said to David a few months after it all started, ‘the let-down would be huge.’

‘That’s a decidedly unromantic thing to say.’

‘Actually, it’s a decidedly
romantic
thing to say. I don’t have to find out whether or not you floss your teeth, or kick dirty underwear under the bed, or only take out the garbage when cockroaches start to crawl out of—’

‘“No” to all of the above.’

‘Delighted to know that. Mind you, judging from your near-perfect personal hygiene when you’re over here—’

‘Ah, but maybe I’m just on my best behavior during our afternoons together.’

‘And if you were with me all the time . . . ?’

Pause. I could see how that question made him instantly uncomfortable.

‘The thing is . . .’ he finally said.

‘Yes?’

‘I pine for a life with you.’

‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’

‘But it’s the truth. I want to be with you every damn hour of the day.’

‘But you can’t, for all sorts of evident reasons. So why,
why
? Tell me that.’

‘Because I find it very difficult leaving you, leaving here, and returning to . . .’

‘All that you don’t want, but refuse to walk away from. Isn’t that known as a paradox? Especially as I handle the situation. That’s my pragmatism. And it bothers you, because I make no demands on you. Would you rather an insane harpy who lies in wait for you outside your house, who threatens to report you to the Dean of the Faculty if you fail to meet a liaison or decide to end things?’

‘I’d never end things.’

‘That’s nice to hear. But
I
might if you keep on talking about this –
us
– and how painful it is to say goodbye to me after our afternoons together. It simply makes me think you’re doing the usual male thing of trying to explain away your guilt and your need to vacillate. And David, the thing is: you’re smarter than that.’

To his credit, he never brought up the subject again. Perhaps the reason why I got so harsh with him for talking about it in the first place was because I was so damn crazy about him. And knew if he continued to hint about wanting to end things with his wife and set up house with me . . .

Well, the sense of expectation would have been unbearable, coupled with the knowledge that, at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, he would have found a way of backing out of our life together. Because David could never come to terms with that which he wanted and that which he felt he couldn’t abandon.

Four years with David Henry.

We were very adept at divorcing our life outside Harvard from the one we had within the university. Whenever I came to David’s office for our weekly thesis meetings, it was business as usual between us. Though a knowing smile would occasionally pass between us, we both made it a point to treat these professional meetings as just that – and never even bring up the next rendezvous
chez moi
. Similarly, if I ever saw David at a campus event, I would always call him ‘Professor’ and behave in a relatively formal manner. Just as I was rigorous about getting him to cover his own tracks, so his wife wouldn’t get suspicious about all his absences. That’s when I suggested he tell her that he was writing in his office during our afternoons together – and invest in an answerphone that he would turn on before leaving for my place, but which he could access remotely. Having told Polly that he would be working for these hours – and that the answerphone was on – he had his alibi.

This ruse worked. After plaguing him for a couple of weeks, Polly bought the lie. He was ‘moving forward’ on the novel he’d been threatening to write for the past decade . . .