Leaving the World (5 page)

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘Sometimes these days I find myself—’

He stopped, then started again: ‘Have you ever been through a time when you found yourself so consumed with rage that—?’

Another pull on his Gitane.

‘I shouldn’t be talking about all this,’ he said.

‘It’s OK, Professor . . . sorry,
David
. Talk away.’

Another long drag on his cigarette.

‘My wife tried to kill herself two weeks ago. It’s the third time she’s tried to end it all this year.’

That’s when I first found out that – for all his professional accomplishment and high academic standing – David Henry had his own private hell. Her name was Polly Cooper. They’d been married over twenty years, and from the 1970s photographs of her I’d seen in his office, she’d been the quintessential thin, willowy beauty back then. When he met her, she’d just published a collection of short stories with Knopf
and
had also done a big Avedon photo shoot for
Vogue
. Back in 1971, the
New York Times
profiled her, calling her ‘
impossibly beautiful and impossibly smart
’. When David hooked up with her – fresh off his National Book Award triumph and fantastic reviews for his first novel, and his appointment, at the age of thirty, to a full Harvard professorship – they were deemed a golden couple, destined for further greatness.

‘When I met Polly, it was such an instant
coup de foudre
for both of us that we were married within six months. A year after that, our son Charlie was born – and Polly went into this real tailspin within a few weeks of his arrival. She stopped sleeping, stopped eating and eventually refused to even touch him, saying that she was certain she was going to mangle the child if she picked him up. It got so bad that, at one point, she went four straight days without sleep. That’s when I found her one night in the kitchen, prostrate on the floor, banging her head on the side of the stove.

‘When the ambulance arrived, the guys on duty took one look at her and brought her straight to the psychiatric wing at Mass General. She was there for the next four months. What first seemed to be a serious case of post-natal depression was eventually diagnosed as a major bipolar disorder.’

Since then her mental health had been, at best, patchy. There was at least one major breakdown per year, followed by a period of relative calm. But she could never find the necessary creative energy to write another story and the years of being medicated had taken their toll on her physical health and her looks.

‘If it’s been that awful,’ I asked, ‘why didn’t you hit the self-preservation button and leave her?’

‘I tried to do that over a decade ago. I’d met this other woman, Anne, a violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It got serious very fast. Polly – for all her manic moments – still could whiff a lie. When I seemed to be spending several afternoons a week away from the university, she hired a detective . . . who got photographs of me going in and out of the violinist’s apartment in Back Bay and the two of us holding hands in some nearby restaurant. God, clandestine details are so banal.’

‘Was it love with you and the violinist?’

‘I certainly thought so. And so did Anne. But then I came home one evening to discover the detective’s eight-by-tens of me flung around the living room and Polly in the bathtub, her wrists slashed. She barely had a pulse.’

The medics had to give her over five pints of blood to stabilize her.

She spent another three months in the psychiatric wing.

‘Our son Charlie – who was ten at the time – told me I couldn’t leave. You see, he came home from school around a minute after I had found his mother. I tried to stop him from coming into the bathroom, but he burst in anyway and saw his mother naked, floating in bloody water. After that . . .’

After that, Charlie closed down for a very long time, becoming withdrawn and gloomy. He crashed and burned at a series of schools. As he stumbled deeper into adolescence, he also discovered hallucinogenic drugs – and was ejected from one school for that perennial ‘bad trip’ stunt: trying to set fire to his bed. They tried a more progressive school, they tried a tough-love military academy, they even tried having him tutored at home (he trashed his room). Eventually, the son of two rather brilliant people ran away on the eve of his seventeenth birthday. He wasn’t found for another two years – during which time David went through over a quarter of a million dollars (‘my entire inheritance from my father’) trying to find him. He was eventually discovered living in a hostel for the destitute off Pioneer Square in Seattle.

‘The good news was that he wasn’t HIV positive and hadn’t drifted into anything horrible like prostitution. The bad news was that he was quickly diagnosed as schizophrenic.’

For the last three years, he’d been living in a ‘managed care’ facility near Worcester. ‘It’s depressing, but at least he’s in a place where he can’t harm himself.’

Meanwhile his mother had somehow managed to find a way back to a reasonably sane place. So much so that – after a fifteen-year silence – a slender book of stories was published by a small university press.

‘They probably sold no more than five hundred copies – but, for her, it was a huge victory. And what was wonderful was the way Polly seemed to rally and become, once again, the smart and beautiful woman I married. But these interludes were just that – momentary respites from the full onslaught of her craziness.’

The ongoing fragility of his wife and son had a knock-on effect, as David found it difficult to get back to his own books. The first novel had cascaded out of him ‘like a geyser – once I started I simply couldn’t stop. The story was
my
story, even though it was all heavily disguised. Every day that I sat down to write, it all came without hesitation, without a moment of doubt. It was as if I was on some sort of auto-pilot – and it was, without question, a six-month period when I sensed what real happiness is about.’

‘What is it actually about?’ I asked.

‘Believing that you have been spirited away – for even just a few short hours every day – from all the crap of life, all that quotidian shit which clogs up everything and sends you hurtling towards despair.’

‘Remind me not to bump into you with a hangover.’

‘You can bump into me any time.’

There was a long, uncomfortable silence after this comment was uttered. I stared down into my Martini, my cheeks reddening. David realized that his comment could be interpreted as provocative, and immediately tried to cover his tracks.

‘What I meant by that was . . .’ he said.

I covered his hand with mine.

‘Shut up,’ I whispered.

I left my hand there for the next half-hour – as he talked more about ‘the Gordian Knot’ that was his second novel – how it simply wouldn’t flow the way the debut book did; how he knew from the outset it was overwrought and overworked. So he turned his attention to the big Melville biography for which he had received a considerable advance from Knopf. But again, he couldn’t find the mental space needed to get on with the work.

I listened to all this with a growing sense of amazement and privilege. After all, this was
David Henry
confiding in me. Not just confiding in me, but also letting me keep my hand on his. I felt like an idiotic schoolgirl – yet one who didn’t want to pull back and play by the rules of propriety. A wildly cerebral and attractive man in pain is – I was discovering – such an aphrodisiac.

‘Had I been a proper novelist,’ he said, ‘I would have found a way, despite all the domestic chaos, of still writing. Because real writers write. They find a way of somehow shoving aside all the other detritus and getting on with it. Whereas I was always trying to be the great polymath: academic, novelist, biographer, media darling, talk-show bullshit artist, crap husband, crap father . . .’

‘David . . .
stop
,’ I said, now grasping his hand tightly.

‘This is what happens when I drink. I become Pagliacci – the sad, pathetic clown.’

He suddenly stood up and threw some money on the table and said he had to go. I reached again for his hand, but he pulled it away.

‘Don’t you know there are rules against such things these days?’ he hissed. ‘Don’t you know the trouble you could land me in?’

He sat down. He put his face in his hands. He said: ‘I’m so sorry . . .’

‘Let’s get you home.’

I guided him out of the bar towards the front entrance of the hotel. He was very subdued and said nothing as he got into the cab and muttered his address. When it drove off, I returned to the bar and finished my half-drunk Martini and tried to mull over what had just happened. What surprised me was that I wasn’t horrified or offended by the show that David had just put on. If anything I suddenly saw all the contradictions he was living with – the private grief behind the public face – and how it had so changed the contours of his own life. We always admire people from afar, especially those who have accomplished so much with their lives. But listening to David vent his anger and frustration also got me thinking: nobody gets away lightly in life. And the moment you think you’ve arrived is the moment that it all goes wrong.

As I downed the last drops of the Martini, another thought struck me: David was everything I was looking for in a man. Brilliant, original, seductive, vulnerable. I wanted him – even though I also knew I was stupidly smitten and straying into dangerous terrain. But though I was more than willing to give in to intoxication, I was also determined not to create havoc. Just as I also knew that this would not start between us until David let it be known he wanted it to start between us.

I didn’t have to wait long for that signal. Around nine the next morning, the phone rang at my little apartment in Somerville.

‘This is your shamefaced professor,’ he said quietly.

‘You mean you’ve decided I can no longer call you David?’

‘I’ve decided I’m a horse’s ass – and I hope you won’t think I was being—’

‘I thought you were just being human, David.’

That comment gave him pause.

‘And I also appreciated the fact that you decided to confide in me.’

‘So you’re not going to approach the head of the department—’

‘And report you for harassment? You didn’t harass me, David. And I was the one who took your hand.’

‘I was thinking more that you might not want to work with me again.’

‘Now you do sound hungover.’

‘Guilty as charged. Could I buy you a cup of coffee?’

‘Why not? But as I’m finishing up some work, could you maybe stop by here?’

And I gave him the address.

When he arrived half an hour later, the cup of coffee was quickly forgotten. As soon as he was inside the door we were all over each other.

Afterwards he turned to me and said: ‘This is dangerous.’

‘Only if we allow it to be dangerous,’ I said.

‘If anyone else finds out . . .’

‘Is this your usual style of post-coital conversation . . . ?’

‘I don’t make a habit of—’

‘Sleeping with your students?’

‘That’s right.’

And that’s when we had our little conversation about his past flings, culminating in him telling me that I asked a lot of questions.

‘There’s one thing you have to know from the outset – that is, if this thing between us is to carry on beyond today. There is no future for this as anything more than an arrangement, a little adventure. So I’m never going to play the clichéd other woman who becomes increasingly possessive and psychotic. But I will demand that you’re always straight with me. If you ever want to hit the escape button, tell me. You’re not to string me along.’

‘You’ve evidently thought this out beforehand,’ he said.

‘So have you.’

‘Are you always so rational?’

‘If I was rational I wouldn’t be in this bed right now.’

‘Good point,’ he said.

That’s how it started. And yes, from the outset, I did take an ultra-rational approach to our ‘adventure’. I knew that, by remaining rational, I could insulate myself against any disappointment or heartache that might attend our involvement. The thing was, I knew I’d fallen in love with David Henry and that elated and scared me. Because the central problem with falling in love with a married man is . . .

Well, you can fill in the blank.

Of course I knew I was playing the other woman. Just as we both knew that if word ever got out about our little arrangement, it would be the end of David’s career and would possibly also result in my expulsion from the doctoral program. (‘They’d probably see you as the victim,’ David once noted, ‘and would still let you go for getting preferential treatment from your thesis advisor.’) What this meant was that I couldn’t –
wouldn’t
– tell anybody. Not Sara Crowe – a very patrician, somewhat grand, but witty New Englander who was working on a doctorate on American Puritanism. Sara was someone who was massively well connected. She held a salon every Sunday night at her apartment off Brattle Street where a Who’s Who of Harvard (or anyone of importance visiting Cambridge that weekend) always seemed to be in attendance, and after we met at an on-campus symposium on Emily Dickinson she decided I was interesting enough to be asked over for dinner occasionally. But she was certainly not someone to whom I would have confided anything.

Nor did I even say anything to Christy Naylor – and she was the one truly close friend I’d made during my first year at graduate school.

Christy was from Maine – and had so goofed off in high school that she had ended up at the State University in Orono. While there she suddenly turned into this academic star (‘Largely because the men were so boring’), graduating
summa cum laude
in English and, like me, getting the all-expenses-paid package to Harvard. Her specialty was American modernist poetry, especially Wallace Stevens, whom she considered a near-deity. She herself had also begun to get the occasional poem published in small magazines and journals. A self-proclaimed ‘backwoods girl’ from Lewiston, Maine – ‘the shithole of New England’ – she was someone who thought nothing about smoking forty cigarettes a day and getting drunk on cheap beer. But start her talking about the metric intricacies of one of Pound’s
Cantos
or the use of pentameter in Williams’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, and she demonstrated an intellectual acuity that was nothing short of dazzling. Her own work also mirrored the high modernism of the poets she so admired.