Leaving the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

to . . . all right, all right, I’m sorry, I’m . . . oh, Jesus, will you please . . . yes, I am getting angry, fucking angry . . . and I can’t take this, you . . .’
    Suddenly he stopped talking – as if the conversation had been cut off. He sat in his chair, immobile, trying hard to keep his anger and upset in check. A good minute passed – during which David simply stared out the window. Finally I said: ‘Professor, maybe it’s best if I—’
    ‘I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have heard that.’
    ‘I’ll go.’
    He didn’t turn back towards me.
    ‘OK,’ he said.
    When I saw him again the following week, he was all business – continuing our discussion of Sherwood Anderson. But at the end of the hour, he asked me if I was free for a beer.
    Actually the ‘beer’ turned out to be a Martini in the bar of the Charles Hotel off Harvard Square. He drank his – gin, straight up, three olives – in around three gulps, and fished out a pack of cigarettes.
    ‘Yes, I know it’s a disgusting habit – and yes, Gitanes are about as smelly and pretentious as they get – but I keep it down to ten a day maximum.’
    ‘Professor, I’m not a health fascist. Smoke away, please.’
    ‘You must stop calling me Professor.’
    ‘But it’s what you are.’
    ‘No, it’s simply my title. David is my name – and I insist that you use that in the future.’
    ‘Fine,’ I said, slightly surprised by the vehemence in his voice. So was David, as he immediately flagged down the waitress for a second Martini and lit up another Gitane, even though he already had one balanced on the lip of the ashtray.
    ‘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,