I FELT MYSELF AT A loss for what to believe. On the one hand, I worried I was just trying to fit suspicion onto Lee because it was easy to scapegoat the outsider and because it was hard not to love the rush of clues accumulating around a new suspect. Even Stephen Loring had said, “I don’t think of Lee as an evil person. I think of him as incredibly tortured.” On the other hand, perhaps my reluctance to consider him as capable of murder was replicating a pattern of disbelief. Was I excusing him like the cops had allegedly excused his lie detector test results, and Joyce Marcus had dismissed the supposed drunken confession?
Everything felt like quicksand.
I’d been back at Harvard for a few weeks, and my grip on the present had already begun to erode. There really wasn’t anyone around to see me. I desperately did not want to be the “creepy” Elf, so I aimed instead for “mystery” Elf, by drinking iced coffee in my kimono in the courtyard. Needless to say, I overshot the mark.
In the dining hall, I had my own force field, and ate most meals alone. When one boy asked if the seat in front of me was taken, I looked up at him too eagerly, I’m sure. “Nope!” I said with a smile.
“Thanks,” he said and pulled the chair across the way.
I had left a city I loved and an apartment I loved and a job I loved. A blossoming relationship wasn’t wearing the long distance well, and I resented that I felt like I had been asked to choose between work and romance. Would the same have been true if he was the one who had to move?
But a secret part of me was also relieved. I believed—without daring to let the thought become fully conscious—that if I was happily in love, I would forget the visceral experience of longing for it, and I would lose access to Jane.
In order to make the sacrifices worth it, I threw myself even further into Jane’s story. I signed up for the Harvard University Police Department self-defense course. They gave me that metal baton that looked like a ribbed shiv, and they warned me not to try to take it on airplanes. “It’s legal, for now,” one of the officers said. Walking around the Square, I practiced sliding away the fifty years. Bank of America was once again Elsie’s, JFK Street was home to the Wursthaus, the wurst of all possible houses. The punk kids by the T stop were Jane’s “ankle biters.”
But it wasn’t just Jane’s life that imposed itself on me.
Adrienne Rich describes her experience of feminism as a kind of re-vision in her 1972 essay “When We Dead Awaken.” “The sleepwalkers are coming awake,” she wrote. “It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.” Her words registered in me like a shiver.
Because this strange second chance at college was insisting I also re-see my time at Harvard.
The undergraduates, thank goodness, were just as remarkable as I remembered my classmates being—but little else was spared.
Academia no longer felt like an idealized kingdom of learning; it was nasty and political.
The graduate students who had seemed creepy and sad were now my peers. And I realized that many were downtrodden not because that was the type attracted to academia, but because of the system they were locking into. Treated as interchangeable and disposable.
I saw some undergraduates—the chosen few, I knew—wearing heels and tuxes and rushing down the street. I knew they were headed to a “punch” event, where hopefuls would try to impress the final club members enough to give them a spot in the new class. The clubs hadn’t been my entire life at Harvard, but they had been a bigger part than I cared to admit. I knew the clubs were elitist, I knew they created a problematic power dynamic, and I knew that many of my best friends had never stepped inside, and yet, I was never so critical of them that I stopped going. I had even joined one of the few all-women ones, telling myself that there was no damage done if its very existence helped mitigate the power imbalance. I saw now that it was a privilege not to be forced to examine the issue more critically, and that no matter how much I thought I stood apart from them, my hands were not clean of having perpetuated the structural problems they reinforced.
There was the Vonnegut quote that Jane had loved: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” And as I thought of it, I smiled, realizing that she’d done it again. I thought I was in Boston to retrace her steps, when in fact I was also retracing my own. And in trying to track Jane’s ghost, I had become a ghost myself.