Leaving the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

the longest affair went on for . . . ?’
    ‘You ask a lot of questions.’
    ‘I simply want to know everything about the man with whom I’m getting involved.’
    ‘You know a lot about me already.’
    That was true – as I had been working with David on my thesis for the last six months. At the outset of my time at Harvard, he showed himself to be a terrific advisor: sympathetic, but not touchy-feely; intellectually rigorous, but never pedantic; very clever, but someone who always avoided playing the bravura card. From the start, I was smitten. From the start I also knew that there was no way I would land myself in an involvement with my advisor. Nor, for that matter, did David flirt with me during those early months in Cambridge. In fact, up until Thanksgiving, our relationship was strictly student/teacher. Then I got the news from Dublin that Tom and I were no more. I vanished for a week, skipping classes, canceling my tutorials, venturing out only to buy food, and generally feeling miserable and sorry for myself. I found myself frequently bursting into tears in inappropriate places like the supermarket or while returning library books. I’ve never been someone who has been comfortable with the idea of becoming emotional in public. Call it a reaction to that morning after my thirteenth birthday, when Mom blamed me for Dad’s departure. Though I ran upstairs and hid in my room, I couldn’t bring myself to cry at the unfairness of her accusation. Was that the moment I started thinking that to cry was to lose control? Certainly, Dad preached a doctrine of always keeping everything that was eating at you under wraps, ‘otherwise people will see your vulnerabilities and prey on them’. I heeded that advice – especially when it came to all ongoing emotional transactions with Mom – but still privately grappled with a huge sense of vulnerability. In the face of a setback or a loss I would always try to constrain my feelings – fearing what others might think if they saw me in such a weakened state. But inside, the wounds never really cauterized – which meant that, when Tom broke it off with me, the sense of loss was all the more acute. If your father is absent and your mother finds you wanting, you search for some sort of personal ballast in the world. And when that’s taken away . . .
    Well, all I could do was hide for a while.
    So when I left a message calling off a third consecutive meeting with David, he rang me at home and asked if there was anything wrong.
    ‘Bad flu,’ I said.
    ‘Have you seen a doctor?’ he asked.
    ‘It’s not that sort of flu,’ I heard myself saying.
    I did make our next scheduled tutorial, in which we spent an hour discussing Frank Norris’s McTeague – which, as David noted, was an indictment not just of American cupidity, but also of early twentieth-century dentistry.
    ‘But you didn’t need a dentist last week, did you?’ he asked.
    ‘Just sleep.’
    ‘You sure you’re over it?’
    That’s when I lowered my head and bit my lip and felt my eyes well up. David opened a drawer under his desk and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and two glasses.
    ‘When I was in graduate school,’ he said, ‘my advisor told me that when I became a professor, I should always keep a bottle of whiskey in a filing cabinet . . . exactly for moments like this one.’
    He poured us each two fingers of Scotch and handed me a glass.
    ‘If you want to talk about it . . .’ he said.
    I did so want to talk about it – and the story came out in a rush that took me by surprise, given my refusal to speak to anybody about such things, let alone my thesis advisor. At the end of it I heard myself saying: ‘. . . and I don’t really know why I’m taking it so hard, as I knew six months ago that this is how it would turn out. In fact I told him this last spring, when he decided that Dublin was his destiny. But he kept telling me—’
    ‘Let me guess: “The last thing I want to do is