The Executor Page 5

  SHE WAS THEN in the first of a three-year stint as department chair, which meant that before I was allowed to see her, I had to contend with her idiot receptionist, Doug.

  “One sec, please,” he said, simpering.

  While he was gone, I stole all his pens.

  “Joseph. What a nice surprise.”

  Linda’s office had been arranged to accommodate her wheelchair, all the furniture spaced a few inches wider than normal. Even when she was sitting, her personality was such that she could still seem to tower over me. I noticed, not for the first time, that her shoes were flawless—literally unused—whereas mine looked like they’d been fished out of the trash.

  “I was just finishing up an e-mail to you,” she said. “Would you like to hear it?”

  “I would.”

  “My pleasure. Although if you don’t mind, I’m going to make myself some coffee first.” She pushed her joystick, turning her back on me. By the window was a lacquered sideboard with a drip machine and several mugs. “Sit down.”

  I sat, dropping my bag as loudly as I could.

  “You seem upset,” she said. “Is there a problem?”

  “The problem, Linda, is that my carrel has been emptied.”

  “Really,” she said.

  “Really.”

  “Hm.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to warn me?”

  “What makes you think I had anything to do with it?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “That wasn’t my question,” she said, wheeling to her desk. “The question of whether I had anything to do with your carrel being emptied is completely distinct from the question of whether you have any grounds to suggest that I did.”

  “For God’s sake, did you or did you not—”

  She put up a hand. “Calm down.”

  “What did you do? Expunge me from the records?”

  “Joseph—”

  “I mean, wouldn’t it’ve been easier to have me shot, or—”

  “Joseph,” she said, leaning forward. “Stop it right now.”

  Though she spoke to me like I was a poodle, I instinctively shut up.

  “Thank you. Now I’m going to read you that e-mail, and I want you to listen very carefully. Can you manage that?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Good.” She turned to her computer, moused something open, cleared her throat.

  Dear Joseph,

  “‘It is my duty to inform you that, effective June fifth, your active student status will be suspended. Notice has been filed with GSAS and with the registrar.

  “‘I regret that the situation has come to this, and I hope that you will understand why the faculty has found it necessary to take such a measure.

  “‘We both know that your work has come to a standstill. Despite having been granted numerous extensions—extensions granted on condition that you submit work—you still have not given me, or anyone else, a single satisfactory dissertation chapter. This is unacceptable. Twice last year you failed to file applications for an academic extension. Additionally, you failed to file a tuition waiver. That in itself would constitute grounds for your removal. However, the faculty and I decided to give you one more chance, and to that end I have repeatedly sent you e-mails—’”

  “But that’s absurd,” I said. “I never—”

  “‘—none of which you answered. I—’”

  “But I never got any—”

  “I’m not finished. ‘None of which you answered. I left a letter in your mailbox. This, too, went unanswered. I was therefore compelled to report to the faculty that you had grown noncompliant.

  This decision will not preclude completion of your doctorate. For the time being you may retain your e-mail address, along with limited borrowing privileges. Provided you submit all outstanding coursework’”—a long stare—“‘you may still qualify to graduate. However, your name will be removed from the department roster, and your active status suspended.

  “‘I doubt this change will affect you much, seeing as how you have already ceased to attend lectures, and have not taught in three semesters.’ ”

  “That’s because you told me I couldn’t teach anymore.”

  “I’m not finished, please. ‘I understand that you may wish to explain to me the cause of your dereliction, and to plead your case for yet another round of extensions. You are welcome to do so. You may also appeal to GSAS. However, be aware that, having consulted Dean Blevins prior to making this decision, the faculty are not alone in considering the burden of proof to rest on your shoulders rather than ours. Our patience is thinning.

  “‘On a more personal note, I wish you to be aware that while I respect Sam Melitsky, I cannot and will not permit his reputation to keep you in clover indefinitely.

  “‘Sincerely,

  Linda Neiman.’”

  She put her manicured hands on the desk. “Several of your cohorts are already assistant professors elsewhere. Gil Dickey is at Pittsburgh. Alexi Burgher is at Stanford. Nalini, as you know, is here. As we speak, both Hudi and Irit Greenboim are interviewing at Oxford. Everyone’s moved forward—except you. How do you explain that? You can’t, so don’t even try.”

  I said nothing.

  “Listen,” she said, adopting what she must’ve thought of as a gentler tone; it only made her sound more patronizing. “I’m simply saying what someone should have said to you years ago. This is not the right place for you. It never has been. I appreciate your commitment to your principles. But other people need the resources you’re taking up. Just the other day I sat here with a student from Brown—with publications—looking to transfer here. What am I supposed to tell him? ‘Sorry, no can do, we’re saving that spot for someone.

  No, hasn’t produced anything of value in six years. But Sam thought he was the Next Big Thing!’ I mean, honestly. When does it end?”

  The mortification had gone on long enough. I stood up.

  “My door is always open,” she said, right before it swung closed.

  6

  All this carnage had one upside, and that was Yasmina.

  By my penultimate year in grad school I’d run out of philosophy classes to take and had started picking my way through the rest of the course catalog, reasoning that I was doing myself a favor by broadening my horizons. I went first to our pet subjects, math and quantum physics. Nobody looked askance when I took an artificial-intelligence seminar. Nor did they take notice when I signed up for Greek. Film theory raised some eyebrows; but it was after I wangled a spot in an undergraduate photography studio that my so-called advisor not-so-politely suggested that I’d veered off course.

  Chastened, I next semester enrolled in a political theory class given jointly with the law school. While meandering through the law library stacks I came across a pretty woman in a black cashmere coat, her brow furrowed in the unmistakable distress of a first-year. I asked what the problem was, and she showed me: the call numbers had switched mid-shelf. Having become something of an expert on the Harvard system, I escorted her to the right place, and she repaid me with a date.

  We were halfway through dessert before she realized I wasn’t a law student at all.

  No, I wasn’t.

  “That’s good. Lawyers are assholes.”

  I pointed out that in three years’ time, she would be a lawyer.

  “Then I’ll be an asshole,” she said.

  She picked up the check.

  At first blush, we made an odd couple. Yasmina came from Los Angeles, where her family was prominent in the Persian Jewish community. Back in Tehran, they had owned several carpet and furniture factories, amassing a minor fortune before the Islamic Revolution forced them to flee. Servants, a chauffeur, two vacation homes—this was a life known to Yasmina only in pictures, as she had been born in Rome, where her parents lived while awaiting U.S. visas.

  Once in California, her father tried to stick to what he knew, opening a furniture store with borrowed money. But he’d learned his t
rade on the streets and in the souk, and Americans found his aggressive brand of salesmanship off-putting. The store floundered, and the family suffered through moves every three months, each apartment crummier than the last. Despondent, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, he had a sign printed up that read GOING OUT OF BUSINESS—EVERYTHING MUST GO! He stuck it in the window and the inventory cleared within a week.

  Now there were seven such stores, with seven such signs, scattered across the greater L.A. area, all of them going out of business continuously for the last twenty years. The Eshaghians once again lived in a big house, drove big cars, and lacked for nothing. Yet the fear of losing everything, instantaneously, clawed at them day and night. No place felt safe, no matter how democratic its elections or how free its markets. They obsessed over money: talking about it, equating it with moral worth, pestering their children to marry into it. They drove Yasmina bananas. In a sense, I owe them thanks, as it was their needling that drove her into the arms of a penniless Gentile philosopher.

  But that’s not giving either of us enough credit, because in fact we had more in common than met the eye. Both of us admitted to feeling like outsiders at Harvard. Having snuck past the bouncer, though, we both wanted to make the most of our time inside. We visited Walden Pond to see the leaves turn; we followed the Freedom Trail and sucked down clam chowder. On Saturday mornings we would take long walks through the leafy neighborhoods surrounding Radcliffe Quad, stopping in at open houses to pick up tear sheets, pretending to be a young couple in search of their first home. Yasmina liked to stand in these living rooms, remodeling them in her mind—but respectfully, with an eye toward preserving the details that gave them character. Afterward we would get coffee and donuts and sit by the river, watching the scullers: pale young men moving in unison, bright boats against steely water. The Head of the Charles Regatta was by far our favorite weekend of the year. Standing there, cheering on the Crimson, we allowed ourselves the fantasy that our presence in the crowd signified more than high test scores and the need for demographic completeness; we shed our motley, inglorious pasts and became, briefly, full-fledged members of the American intellectual elite, part of a long line stretching back to John Harvard himself.

  Plus, our sexual chemistry was fantastic. That explains a lot.

  If not for her, I would have ended up homeless much sooner than I did. I was lucky enough to meet her right before losing my standing, and while the cynical might regard my decision to move in with her as one of expedience, at the time it felt like love.

  In fairness, I never took her or her support for granted. The opposite: I felt indebted and strove to justify myself by assuming all the housework. I shopped for groceries. I picked up her dry cleaning. I went to the library, checked out Joy of Cooking, and read it cover to cover (knowledge whose application entailed considerable trial and error, and once triggered the hallway sprinklers). Yasmina loved to throw parties but was more or less hopeless in the kitchen, coming to rely on me and my ever-expanding culinary repertoire, which soon included Thai and Mexican, her favorites, as well as a slew of Persian dishes: kebabs, crispy rice, unpronounceable stews.

  Playing houseboy allowed me to ignore my professional collapse. More than that, though: I liked doing chores. Their simple physicality was weirdly freeing. It turns out that there is no one more mundane, no one more housewifely, than a thwarted academic. Funny—and unsettling, as I realized how easily I could have gone another route. Had I never left home, who knows what would’ve become of me? Office flunky, fertilizer salesman, account manager for the slaughterhouse. I began to sympathize with my mother, to understand what it’s like to see one’s world reduced to soups and saucepans. Martyrdom has its comforts.

  And I didn’t object to living in relative luxury. The fact that I paid no rent yet came home to a king-sized bed and walls filled with tasteful nautical-themed prints did not, to my mind, mean that I had sold out. I wasn’t the one turning the hamster wheel. The bed, the art, the panini press—none of it belonged to me. All I had were my books, my clothes, my ideas, and half of Nietzsche. In this way, I justified becoming a yuppie.

  Yasmina’s disdain for her upbringing notwithstanding, at heart she’s very traditional. She would roll her eyes at her family, mock their accents and their provincialism, but I knew she still loved them. (Here we have a neat demonstration of the difference between an annoying childhood and an abusive one.) Holding their conventional wisdom in inexplicably high regard, she never could manage to get over the idea that she had to be married by twenty-three or risk dying alone. Most of the women she knew, including her sisters, were, foremost, homemakers. She’d had to fight for permission to go to college out of state. Certainly nobody expected her to go beyond a bachelor’s degree, and while her parents paid her law-school tuition, they refused to believe that she intended to work, viewing the pursuit of a career as a phase she’d grow out of once she met the right man.

  I was not the right man.

  I never met her family. I never spoke to them. As far as they knew, I didn’t exist. Whenever a relative came to town, Yasmina would dig out an antique silver hamsa and hang it on the nail by the front door. That was my cue to pack an overnight bag and arrange a place to sleep. It was demeaning, the two of us running around trying to cover our tracks like naughty children. Banished to Drew’s sofabed, I would fulminate as he threw darts and grunted sympathy.

  Nor had Yasmina met my parents, who never visited me and whom I never went to visit. I’m not sure what she expected if we couldn’t or wouldn’t get everyone in the same metro area. That we loved each other was never in doubt. We made each other laugh; we fascinated each other with our Otherness. But we were destined to fail. We both knew it. To be honest I think we found the sense of inevitable doom rather romantic.

  There was one more sticking point. Though she claimed to have fallen for my intellect, I always suspected that deep down, Yasmina had other plans for me. She sometimes referred to a nonspecific point in the future when I “stopped,” the implication being that I would eventually own up to my shortcomings and find gainful employment. And if she wanted to remake me, I must confess that I sometimes felt the same way. She could be overbearingly pragmatic. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get married, and if I did, I wondered if it could be to someone who wasn’t a philosopher.

  The argument that led to her throwing me out began over something insignificant. I can’t even remember what it was. Isn’t that the way it always is, though? It starts with a dirty plate or the default orientation of the toilet seat, and before you know it you’re at each other’s throats. She accused me of being distant, citing my dissertation as proof that I couldn’t commit. I replied that Hegel didn’t finish The Phenomenology of Mind until he was thirty-six. By that measure I still had six years. For a fuller explanation of what ensued, the reader is referred to chapter one.

  THERE ARE TWO CAMBRIDGES. There’s the magical Cambridge, steeped in history and ripe with opportunity, the postcard of my undergraduate years and the first few years of grad school, before I fell from grace. Then there’s the real Cambridge, the one where real people live, beyond the walls of the ancient cocoon. In the real Cambridge, there are no carrels. No grants. No deeply meaningful all-night discussions. Pride of membership is noticeably diminished. This second Cambridge can come as something of a shock to the system when you’ve spent a decade living in the first. All through my twenties I’d been hanging on for dear life, but as I slogged through the filthy slush, headed for a job interview with a stranger, I felt myself headed into hostile territory. Glancing back at Memorial Hall, I saw its bell tower giving me the finger.

  It’s a testament to the insularity of life in the academy that I could walk less than a mile off campus and find myself on a street hitherto unknown to me, a charming little cul-de-sac lined with white oaks and red maples. Cars lay buried under snow. A sidewalk in dire need of shoveling fronted a long row of clapboard Victorians—some high-gabled Gothic Revivals, others bracket
ed simply in the American folk style, all except the last converted to duplexes and triplexes. Number forty-nine’s empty driveway revealed that the house ran quite far back. Soon enough I would discover what those depths held.

  Down at the corner, a silent procession of pedestrians and taxis, spectral in the winter haze.

  I could not blame my prospective employer for wanting to have her conversation delivered in. Getting to the end of the block would be nightmarish for someone with bad hips or an arthritic knee.

  One benefit to being so tucked away: it was quiet. Blissfully so. I grew aware of my own breathing, the fizz of my nylon jacket as I moved my arm to cover a cough. It occurred to me that this would be an ideal place to get some writing done.

  I climbed the porch steps and knocked. The curtains in the bay window stirred. I looked over but not in time, and twenty seconds later the front door opened on darkness.

  “Mr. Geist. Do come in.”

  I stood in the entry hall, my eyes adjusting.

  “I would offer to take your coat, but you may want to keep it. I’m afraid the house is rather cold. Before we go any further, let me get a look at you.”

  I did likewise. I put her at seventy-five, although it was still too dark to draw firm conclusions. What I could tell was that she had once been exceedingly beautiful, and that much of that beauty had lingered on into old age. Her face was heart-shaped, her eyes quick and moist. I squinted: were they green?

  “You appear decent enough,” she said. “You aren’t going to rob me, are you?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “Then let us hope that your plans remain unchanged, eh?” She laughed. “Come.”

  Down a creaking hallway she went, trailing perfume. She was right about the temperature. New England homes tend to be suffocatingly overheated—anyone who has lived there will understand—and often I came in from the cold to start pouring sweat. Now I zipped up my coat. She paused at the noise, turned with an apologetic smile.