Douglas Kennedy - Woman in the Fifth

‘I was just a little unnerved by all this instant emotional excess. When we were just meeting over coffee, she was always romantic … but I never got the idea that, once we’d slept together, she’d get so clingy.’

‘You can never predict another person’s emotions … especially the post-coital ones.’

‘Too damn true. When I found Shelley loitering outside one of my classes two days after Toledo, I decided to take immediate action. I suggested we go for a drive out into the country. Once we got to the place by a lake, I quietly explained that, as much as I cared for her, the affair had to end. She was devastated — and told me that she would never have slept with me if she knew it was going to end it straight away. I tried to patiently explain that, as crazy as I was about her—’

‘You were a man with a conscience …’

‘Something like that, yes. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how you agonize over crossing a dangerous threshold. Then, when you finally summon the courage to make that move, you instantly regret it.’

‘Another of those large contradictions, Harry. So did she cry when you broke her the news?’

‘She simply wouldn’t accept it … simply couldn’t believe that I had changed my mind. Again, I tried to explain. Yes, I had feelings for her … yes, I’d loved all our conversations, and thought she was a fantastic person … and yes, if I wasn’t married and wasn’t her professor …

‘She didn’t take the news well — and started to plead with me, telling me she’d do anything to keep it going between us.’

‘Was she a virgin?’

‘No — there had been a big high-school love affair … which ended when she came to college. But as far as she was concerned, we were Tristan and Isolde: destined to be together from here to eternity. Try as I did to persuade her that, in time, she’d just see this as a passing blip in her romantic life, she remained devastated … and determined to somehow keep things going between us. There were constant notes in my mailbox, at least a half-dozen emails every day, and she made a point of hanging around every class I taught.’

‘Surely your colleagues began to realize that one of your students was a bit obsessed about her professor?’

‘Of course. Doug Stanley — my one close friend on the faculty — took me aside and asked me directly if I had been involved with Shelley. Naturally I told him everything — and wondered out loud if I should go to the Dean of the Faculty, Gardner Robson — and make a clean breast of everything. He was adamant that I confess nothing. Because once I did that, I was finished. He also emphasized that, until Shelley went public about the affair, I was in the clear. His hope was that she would soon calm down — and he even offered to speak to her and see if she might agree to seek help from the college psychotherapist.’

‘Knowing you, the guilt must have been massive.’

‘It was nonstop. I wasn’t sleeping and lost about fifteen pounds in less than two weeks. I couldn’t teach, couldn’t concentrate. Even my wife, who was totally ignoring me, noticed that I was in rough shape, and asked me what was wrong. I said I was depressed — and that’s when she told me that, as far as she was concerned, I had been in a gloomy place for years. “ And the only time you’d lightened up was during the last few months — when it was clear to me that you were having an affair .” I didn’t deny it, nor did she hint that she knew who my lover might be. But when I came back from the college the next night, I found her in my office, on my computer, reading my email files.’

‘Don’t tell me you hadn’t deleted everything you’d written to your friend — and she to you.’

‘I’d deleted it from my AOL account, but not the Recycle Bin. A bad oversight on my part, as that’s where Susan found them all.’

‘Your wife had the password to your computer?’

‘I’m pretty certain she once heard me tell our daughter that it was her name: Megan123. Whatever way she had managed to get into my files, the fact was, she had managed to get into my files . When I walked in and found her sitting in my desk chair, and staring at an email that Shelley had sent me, she said — in a voice so low and cold it sounded like a frozen whisper — “Pack a bag and leave right now. Otherwise I’ll call the police and tell them you’ve assaulted me.”’

‘And you bowed to this threat … this blackmail?’

‘I thought it best to let the initial shock she was feeling—’

‘Harry, she was fucking some guy before you even hooked up with Shelley—’

‘I still didn’t know that—’

‘But she betrayed your privacy—’

‘True. And she also evidently emailed all this evidence against me to her lover, the Dean. Because, the next day, I had a visit from representatives of the firm that looks after security for the college. Two of their goons showed up at my office around ten that morning, telling me that they were escorting me off the premises and that I was now legally barred from setting foot on the campus again. They brought me downtown to the office of the law firm which handled all the college’s legal stuff. There, some flinty smalltown lawyer — bow tie, blue serge suit, suspenders — read me a document, informing me that, as I had contravened several college codes of professional conduct, I was being summarily dismissed from my tenured position “without pay or any subsidiary benefits”. He also said that if I made trouble, the case would go public and—’

‘You didn’t get a lawyer yourself ?’

‘The college’s legal eagle said that if I signed an agreement he’d prepared, in which I promised not to contest this dismissal, they would announce that I had “resigned” for health reasons. “You might just be able to rebuild your career,” he told me. So I signed the damn document … not knowing that Susan’s lover, the Dean, had another denouement in mind for me. The next day I woke up on the sofa in the house of Doug Stanley, to find I was being laid siege to by assorted regional television stations, not to mention a couple of local newspaper reporters.’

‘All over a brief fling with a student?’

‘Being dismissed for sexual misconduct is a big thing in small-town America. As it turned out, somebody had forwarded to the Ohio press the salient details of my correspondence with Shelley. Doug was certain that Gardner Robson had tipped them off and also told them where I could be found — because Doug had run into Robson on the campus, and the Dean had started spewing this bullshit of how it “genuinely injured” him to have to let me go, and how he wondered if Doug knew of my whereabouts. When Doug made the innocent mistake of telling Robson that he was harboring me, do you know what that sonofabitch told my friend? “I really feel for him right now.”

‘Doug managed to keep the reporters from invading his house — and I essentially took refuge in the rec room in his basement until …’

Pause. I looked away.

‘Until … ?’ Margit asked.

‘Until Shelley killed herself.’

LATER THAT NIGHT, before going to work, I stopped by my room to pick up my laptop computer and a book I was reading. When I arrived home, the note I was dreading was stuck under my door:

I get 1000 euros tomorrow or you fucked.

The handwriting was scrawly. I turned over the scrap of paper and wrote:

You will get your money in a couple of days. If you reveal anything before then, you will get nothing.

I shoved this note under Omar’s door, then entered my room and sat down on my bed and tried to sift through everything I had told Margit tonight, and how good it felt to finally unburden myself of this secret, and how I felt simultaneously exposed and self-belittled for having admitted the terrible shame that haunted my every waking hour.