The Professor and the Prostitute (7 page)

The discovery enraged him. He had acquiesced to all her demands, albeit while going behind her back to get even. He had been willing to satisfy his passion under any terms. Terms were par for her profession. But that there was another man in her life, a man to whom she gave herself freely, changed the whole picture. Previously, he'd refused even to consider that there might be such a man. But now he could no longer deny this truth to himself, and anger began to boil up in him.

Robin's behavior didn't help the situation. Early in December, she took $25,000, which she had obtained from Douglas, and placed a down payment on a two-story wooden house on a shabby but respectable lower-middle-class street in Malden, Massachusetts. A local bank had given her a mortgage for another $25,000 and overnight she was a property owner, a woman of substance. She owed that new definition of herself to Douglas. But when, a few days later, he asked her where the house was, she said, “I don't want you to know where it is.” She knew all about the Tufts investigation by then, knew that the source of his largesse might soon dry up, and the knowledge made her cavalier. “I don't want you to have my home phone number,” she said to end the conversation.

With the house an accomplished fact, by the end of the month Robin seemed, at least temporarily, to have decided to take J.R.'s advice and extricate herself from the professor's attentions. On New Year's Eve, he begged her for a date, even a short date, but she told him she was busy. That evening he telephoned her at the apartment in Natick, where she and J.R. were still living, imploring her at least to talk with him on that most romantic of all nights. Robin listened to him for a while, but then she cut him off. “I've got to go,” she snapped. “We're leaving in a few minutes.” She slammed the phone down hard.

This time her rejection suited Douglas. He'd told her he was speaking to her from Boston, but in fact he had called her from across the street from the apartment. Now, from her words when she hung up on him, he realized that he might, at long last, be able to lay eyes on the man she was living with. Was the man black or white? Short or tall? Slight? Powerful? He wanted desperately to know and, getting into his car, waited for her and whomever she'd meant by “we” to emerge. She'd said they would be leaving in a few minutes. Excited, he sat tensely behind the wheel.

But no one came out of her building. He waited and waited. It was a cold night, but he was wearing a fleece-lined coat, so he just sat still and waited some more. He sat in the darkened car for an hour. And then another hour. But although he remained in the car for much of the night, Robin never emerged.

At last, deeply frustrated, he decided she must have seen him sitting there.

Perhaps she had, for the next day she telephoned and told him in no uncertain words how little she thought of him. He was a pest and a nag, she said. He was stupid. He made her so angry that she didn't want to hear from him at all, at least not until she got over her anger.

Her repudiation was like a hammer blow to him. How could he live without speaking to her? Still, he knew she was right. He
had
been a pest and a nag. He would mend his ways, and then surely she would speak with him again. Sitting down with a sheaf of paper in front of him, he began to write to her. He wrote her an abject, sorrowful letter. “You know I am sad that it happened but I have only myself to blame,” he scrawled. “I will change my ways! I will work hard on trying to act like an adult when I interact with you and not some lovestruck teenager. I must learn to think through a situation clearly before acting and not be a pest or a nag. During the time we are apart I will work hard on these problem areas to correct the defects.”

He told her he admired her for her smile, and how he loved squeezing her hand, and how grateful he was for “You being You You You You You.”

And he told her about a touching childhood longing: “Dear, when I was a teenager growing up I used to dream about designing a machine that would reverse time and let you relive time and places that you have already had. I guess all kids have thoughts like that. Today I wish I was clever enough to make one of those instruments for two reasons. For one reason, to go back in time and change the stupid things I did, and do it right.… The second reason is to act the appropriate way when I am with you, so that I could be someone you are proud of, someone that you respect, someone that you care to be with.”

Twilight of the Affair

That January the New England air was crystal clear and the Douglas children got out their sleds and skates. Pammy had become a first-rate figure skater, and Bill could see, in her spirited pirouettes on the ice, a reflection of the best side of himself, a reaping of grace from the years in which he had shuttled her back and forth to her skating lessons. But it gave him no pleasure. Nor did his sons' accomplishments on the computer he'd gotten for them. The children were so much more adjusted than he had been as a teenager. They had friends, made sleepover dates. Billy was even a halfback on the high school football team. All of this should have comforted him. But he was still being investigated by Tufts. His career was crumbling. And Robin, for whom he'd risked that career, was still refusing to see or speak with him. He began to grow depressed.

Robin, for her part, had moved with J.R. to the new house and was fixing it up, making it truly the house of her dreams. She shopped for fabric, interviewed carpenters, selected appliances. And because she'd been having so much trouble with the police in Boston, she and J.R. agreed she should give up the city for a time and get some work in the suburbs. She took a job as a masseuse in a health club in Saugus, some ten miles from Malden, and devoted herself, when she wasn't working, to the renovations. For a brief while she was happy. For a brief while she may even have imagined herself to be once again the girl with great expectations she'd been in the early days of her love affair with Costic.

The neighbors on Cliff Street, all whites, felt disconcerted when they first saw J.R. I talked to several people who insisted that they had nothing against black people moving onto the street but that J.R. had worried them. He wasn't your ordinary black man, they said. He dressed outrageously. He wore purple pants and a black fur jacket. And while everyone else on the street had American cars or, at the most exotic, Japanese makes, J.R. drove a red Audi. They didn't want me to think they were prejudiced, they said, but J.R. would have made anybody nervous.

Interestingly, however, they soon accepted J.R.'s presence on their block. Or so they said. One neighbor told me that the presence of the Hispanic-looking but conservatively dressed Robin at J.R.'s side was the reassuring factor. Another said that what assuaged the neighborhood was the way the new people launched into making substantial improvements to their property. They gutted the kitchen and purchased new equipment. They ripped out walls; they even installed a skylight. Said this neighbor, “We began to accept them, because it looked as if they were going to turn out to be as house-proud and middle class as everyone else on the street.”

But if the neighbors were reassured, Robin and J.R. weren't altogether content at their new address. Despite Robin's refusal to give it to Douglas, he'd ferreted it out, and now sometimes they'd see his Toyota—a twin to hers—parked just across the street. And he kept on writing to her at her post office number and leaving messages for her at her answering service and, once she began working at the health club, trying to make appointments with her there.

One day in early January, hoping to throw him off her scent, she called him and left a message that she was no longer working at the club.

Douglas was desperate to find out if it was true. Shortly after getting her message, he drove to a motel in the vicinity of the Danish Health Club. Behind the motel was a forested, snowy hill from which the club was visible. Taking a pair of binoculars, he climbed up among the trees and, hidden, waited to see if Robin's car would turn up at the club. When it did, he knew she was lying to him and his spirits plunged even lower.

But the worst was still to come. On January 11, he was once again called to a meeting at Tufts on the matter of his expenses. This time he was informed that the auditors now knew for certain that he had been stealing from his grants. He was asked for his resignation. He had no choice but to give it.

The following day he turned up at his laboratory to collect his research and personal possessions. But he was denied entry. And the chairman of Anatomy and Cellular Biology, a woman who had sought him out six years earlier because she had the highest respect for his research and believed he would round out the department, came and escorted him off the premises. He stood at the elevator saying goodbye to her, and even as he did so locksmiths arrived and changed the locks on his office and laboratory.

In his desk drawer, never to be retrieved by him, were two eight-by-ten photographs of drawings Robin had done. One was a picture of three flowers, and on its back was the inscription: “To my favorite Prof. Talk to you later. Robin. 8/11/82.” The other depicted a pretty girl surrounded by four natty men in tuxedos. On the back of this one was the message: “To my favorite professor. I signed [this] while we were sitting in my home in Natick on November 18, 1982. A moment I do believe you will treasure for quite some time. (Me too.) You can never tell what we are going to do next. It's been wonderful and will be more wonderful in times to come. Let's enjoy them. Always, Robin.”

He thought about her constantly in the next few days, and on January 14 he wrote to her, pouring out his loneliness and his disgrace. “I need your help!” he wrote. “I am so depressed and sad. Everything in my life is going wrong lately. I truly need a friend that I can talk with and share things with.”

The letter went unanswered. And on January 21 he went back to Saugus and, concealed among the trees high up on the hill behind the motel, spied on her once again. There was her Toyota, which he'd paid for, in the health club parking lot. He made up his mind to get even with her for turning her back on him after all he'd done for her, lost for her. But how?

The idea came to a him a moment later. As he was leaving the hill, he noticed a billboard with the name and telephone number of a man selling garage doors, a Mr. Schloss. He went to a telephone booth and, dialing the Saugus Board of Health, asked for the health commissioner. When Joseph Tabbi, health agent for the town of Saugus, got on the wire, he said in a high falsetto, “My name is Mr. Schloss. I'm on the road a lot. I'm a salesman.” And he then proceeded to inform Tabbi that over at the Danish Health Club, there was a woman who claimed to be a masseuse but who was really a prostitute. “The woman is there in the club, now,” he complained. “You've got to do something about it.”

The health agent said he'd send someone right over.

Douglas drove to a restaurant that had a good view of the Danish Health Club. He asked the waitress to give him a window table. He ordered food and toyed with it nervously, looking out the window until he saw a car pull up at the club and a man with a harried expression and businesslike gait go inside. A few minutes later the man reappeared, this time with the manager of the club. The two walked around to the back of the building, deep in serious conversation. He saw them look at Robin's car. Then the men went back inside, and a few minutes later Robin came out, carrying her bag. Moments later she left the Danish Health Club parking lot, never to return. She too had been fired. And he had engineered—and even gotten to witness—the whole humiliating scene.

If Douglas was pleased with himself at the time, afterward he found that his revenge gave him little satisfaction. Despite his fury at Robin, he still wanted to see her. But whenever he managed to reach her, she said they were finished.

He refused to believe her and held long dialogues with himself in which he consoled himself with the thought that surely one of these days she'd make up with him. Hadn't she said once that she'd learned forgiveness in the bosom of her family? Hadn't she told him all about how she'd had an uncle who'd stolen money from her parents and landed in jail but been forgiven by the family, who'd even gone to visit him? Anyway, Robin would no doubt make up with him
someday
because even when she'd been angriest, she'd never said, “I will
never
see you again.” It was one of the things he treasured most about her. And besides, there was something else that gave him hope. It was the way she liked money. He figured her passion for money was particularly related to her passion for cocaine. And if only he could get another job, if only he could offer her the money with which to indulge her habit, surely he'd be able to persuade her to see him again.

His musings proved right. Several weeks later, the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, his old stamping ground, came through with a job offer. He'd sent out feelers to SUNY shortly after the Tufts investigation had begun and now, unaware of the scandal, they promised him a professorship, starting in September, and invited him to come to Plattsburgh immediately to codirect a week-long seminar in tissue culture. Taking heart, he called Robin and asked her to accompany him. And, his good fortune making him euphoric and expansive, he promised her that if she would come, he'd pay her $1,000 a day.

Robin said yes. How could she, why would she, when by now she knew that Douglas was shadowing her, even if she didn't know he was behind her arrests and the health club firing? The answer was in part Robin's greed. Just as Douglas had suspected, when offered enough money, she could readily put anger aside. But apparently she also, like many beautiful women, believed that because an admirer said he loved her, he truly did, and that this meant he would never hurt her, that she would always be the person in control of the relationship. On February 17, the next to the last day of the seminar, she flew to Plattsburgh.