The joys of the internet being what they are, by the time that, with nauseous foreboding, I forced myself to check my email on arrival home, I’d been sacked. Though it was only five p.m., I poured myself a frozen vodka the size of a hotel orange juice. It was a trite emotional response, but I wasn’t terribly consumed with originality at the time. Oh, and overpriced grain alcohol didn’t help in the slightest, if you’re interested, though the glass did give my hand something to rest on to keep it from shaking. When FaceTime rang on my phone and I saw it was Emory, I hesitated a couple of rings before punching accept.
“It’s everywhere, Pearson.” She skipped so much as hello. I recognized the backdrop as her slick Voltaire two-bedroom. “Not only on Twitter, either. You’re in the live feed of The New York Times.”
“Yes, well, you’ll forgive me if I don’t rush to go read it. I was there, so I can skip consulting the misquotations.”
“Multiple videos are online. They don’t need to misquote you.”
I took another slug. “Oh, and I’ve been fired. Universities are known for their creaky bureaucracy. It’s heartening to see that at least the Office of CE can move with such fleet-footed efficiency.”
“You’re surprised? And I don’t understand why you sound so flippant.”
“I can now sound however I like. When all is lost, nothing’s at stake.”
“What the hell got into you?”
“Nothing that hasn’t been in me since I was about ten years old. I guess the question is why it got out.”
“Exactly. Aside from that nonsense with Fyodor a few years ago, you’ve kept yourself in check. Now you’ve thrown it all away—for the sheer satisfaction of blowing your top, as far as I can tell. Was it worth it?”
“Emory, I don’t need to be lectured. Not now.”
“I worry you don’t understand how serious this is.”
“Oh, I understand, all right. I live in the same world you do, you know. I’ve never figured out why you think you have to translate it for me.”
“. . . Are you okay?” A softening. For a moment, she sounded like a friend of mine.
“Of course I’m not okay. That’s like asking someone who’s jumped off a forty-story building if they’re okay. And I dread telling Wade.”
“You won’t have to. You’re topping all the push notifications. All he has to do is turn on his phone.”
“Oh, great. I can visit him in the hospital well assured that he’s already pre-hating me. He’s barely out of surgery. The timing could hardly be worse.”
“It’s your timing,” she said.
“It’s not a coincidence. I found out this morning they poured nitroglycerin or something in his IV by mistake, and they almost killed him. I was . . . in a state of some displeasure.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that. Is he going to be all right?”
“So they tell me. Though I can’t trust doctors anymore.”
“Still, I doubt that’s enough of an emotional backstory to get you off the hook. If you went off about incompetent medical personnel, it could sound like more of the same.”
“You’re already designing my comeback PR?”
“I think it’s called clutching at straws. I have a hard time imagining how you’ll escape being evil incarnate for the foreseeable.”
“A sizable proportion of this country agrees with everything I said this afternoon. They’ll watch that video, probably more than once, and not from horror but delight. They just won’t say so.”
“I’m not sure that proportion is ‘sizable,’ Pearson. There’s a fringe of outliers on the right—”
“Why is belief in standards, and excellence, and stringent qualifications for certain important jobs necessarily right-wing?”
“Now of all times you want to split political hairs? Yes, the elevation of those values over other values, of justice, of civility, is perceived as reactionary, if not fascistic. You can rail against those labels with me, but you’ll never win that argument in public.”
“That’s because my compatriots are cowed, frightened, easily manipulated worms.”
“More winning PR,” Emory said. “Though I’m queasy about the genetics of a ‘cowed worm.’”
A glimmer of our old affectionate banter, now grown all too rare.
Right before she signed off, I noticed a funny rectangular ghost beside her bookcase on the wall behind her. The framed letter my mother had forced me to write, telling Emory that we could no longer be friends unless she found God, because otherwise she’d be “wiped from the earth in the coming battle between Jehovah and worldly government”: it was missing.
My children are digitally literate. Even Lucy was not averse to learning when it came to mastering her iPad. So I assumed the whole trio had watched the four-minute and fifty-two-second video by the time I’d backed out of VU’s reserved faculty parking (for the last time, as it happened; I was immediately banned from campus, not even allowed to clean out my office). They’d have waited until they heard me get off FaceTime, after which Darwin and Zanzibar filtered down to the kitchen with the silent somnolence of a procession in Catholic mass. After a slight lag—D&Z never consorted with their younger sister if they could help it—Lucy followed, skipping with glee, though I think even at ten she grasped the rough implications of my newfound infamy. After all, she’d personally brought the full force of officialdom to bear on her mother on the basis of hearsay. This ongoing public lynching—which was just getting started—was sparked by hard evidence.
As a rule, in adolescence Darwin was emotionally undemonstrative, so the fact that he rested a hand on my shoulder for a long, sorrowful beat nearly moved me to tears. Grown willowy and as tall as her mother at fourteen, Zanzibar took my face between her palms, kissed the center of my forehead, and gave me a hug. When Lucy exclaimed, “Mommy’s gonna get in tro-ouble!,” they blanked her.
We convened with a funny formality around the kitchen table. Despite the fact that their maternal genetic heritage was therefore on the aesthetic wane, I was still gratified that as they matured both D&Z were looking more Japanese. I loved the subtle androgyny of my donor’s ethnicity, which made them seem more like identical twins than brother and sister. I treasured the unwritten canvas of their features, which seemed capable of concealing just about anything, even if that entailed concealment from me. I’d always associated the Japanese visage with not so much duplicity as discretion—a quality in eternal short supply in the United States. Physically, the contrast between the older two and their sister had only sharpened. Lucy wasn’t fat, but she’d grown blunter; one of Wade’s close ancestors must have been a lumberjack.
For a minute we didn’t say anything. The feeling was that we didn’t have to. We were all in the process of working out the inevitable domino effect of my outburst; we could almost hear the dotted wooden tablets clicking in a snake around the room. Even Lucy was socially attuned enough to infer that maybe at this exact moment it was best to put a sock in it.
“I’m most concerned about what effect this could have on you kids,” I said at last. “The stigma . . .”
Darwin emitted a short, mirthless guffaw. “We’re already stigmatized. Have been for years.”
“Smart is one thing,” I said. “Satanic is another.”
“No, smart and evil aren’t any different,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“You shouldn’t worry about us,” Zanzibar said. “I mean, maybe you should, but things on our end really couldn’t get much worse.”
“You may be wrong about that,” I said. “You could be physically attacked.”
“That might be a relief,” Zanzibar said.
“No, it wouldn’t be,” I said. “I think for now you should all stay home.”
“Nobody ever attacks me!” Lucy declared. She was making the same mistake of so many of her revolutionary forebears, who time and again blithely assumed that the forces they’d unleashed would never blow up in their own faces. I had a feeling our family’s neo-Stasi snitch had made a fair number of enemies at her elementary school. Some of her classmates might seek to turn the tables once she was tarred overnight as the spawn of a pariah.
“I realize you’re way too scary for anyone to pick on,” I said. “But just to be on the safe side, for now you’re staying home from school, too.”
“For me, doesn’t matter,” Darwin said. “I’m sixteen next week. Planning to drop out anyway.”
When he was younger, I’d never have imagined that my son the scientific prodigy would ever say such a thing and all I’d respond was “Yeah, I know.”
“Have they fired you yet?” Zanzibar asked.
“Yup.”
“So with Wade laid up,” Darwin said, “where’s the money coming from?”
“That’s not the sort of thing you should concern yourself with. It’s your parents’ business to sort out.” I must have advanced this parodically Mommy-ish assertion by way of playacting the competent grown-up, since I was starting to feel like anything but. I’d been irresponsible. I’d driven our family to insolvency. I’d communicated an additional social taint that my abominably bright older children could ill afford. And for what? Unless it was only the vodka, one sign that I was feeling more culpably negligent than I could bear was near narcolepsy at six p.m. I could hardly keep my eyes open.
“It’s totally our business,” Darwin said. “So don’t be—can I say ‘Don’t be stupid’?” He nodded at Lucy. “I mean, what can she do to us now?”
“I think what you should say,” I said with a little smile, “is ‘Don’t be retarded.’”
“Retarded, retarded, retarded!” both older siblings recited together, and laughed. Lucy scowled. Some spell had been broken, and she didn’t like it.
I went on to explain that we had to brace for a slew of vitriol. I’d be pilloried on social media and in the press. The house might draw hostile reporters; in that instance, we should refuse to talk to them and shelter our faces from photographers. No one should answer the landline. Meanwhile we needed to be nice to one another, I said, because no one else would be. Although we’d need to visit Wade until he came home, we should avoid unnecessary forays into the outside world. For groceries and such, until this foofaraw blew over—“If it ever blows over,” Zanzibar noted—we should order in. Insofar as humanly possible, I suggested staying off the internet, if only to preserve what little peace of mind we had left.
“How are we going to buy everything online and stay off the internet?” Darwin said.
“You know full well which sites to steer clear of. Don’t put yourselves in the way of incoming artillery. Remember that when people say and write horrible things about your mother, you can’t ever unhear or unread them.”
And then I said I could not express how sorry I was to have brought this shitstorm down on our heads.
“Don’t apologize,” Darwin said. “I thought it was fantastic. I was only disappointed it didn’t last longer. I’ve watched it four times now. Like, good for you. Finally pulled your tongue out of the MP ass.”
“I never planned to say any of that stuff,” I said. “I just lost it. I don’t see how I get anything out of this besides grief. I’m not sure I deserve your admiration for an act of consummate self-destruction.”
“Take what you can get,” he said.
It was good advice.
Wade’s release the very next day should have been good news, if only because he was safer out of the clutches of ninnyhammers, but facing down his reaction to the fact that he was now living with the most deplored woman in America was nothing to look forward to. This was a guy whose raison d’être was to be left alone—to be overlooked, to fade into the landscape—and I might as well have covered our house in the overkill Christmas decorations of neon poinsettias, blinking fairy lights, illuminated snowmen, and rooftop Santa’s sleigh that send your electric bill into the thousands and draw gawkers from out of town. Sure enough, that morning the TV crews I’d anticipated had set up on the sidewalk. In a scarf and dark glasses, I dived into the car, uncertain why I made so much effort to keep from running them over.
On arrival at the hospital, for once I regretted my “interesting face.” It seemed I was instantly recognizable. Medics whose job was ostensibly nurturing, healing, and caretaking pointed at me in the hallways, turned heel and marched nose-high in the opposite direction, glared with unabashed antipathy, and indulged in verbal abuse, from a mumbled passing “bigot” or “fucking hatemonger” or “you’re a disgrace!” to the receptionist’s prim, tight-lipped instruction, “I hope you can keep your potty mouth zipped, madam. We don’t tolerate cognitive smears in this facility.”
By the time I caught my breath in that empty classroom, I’d already accepted that my diatribe had been reckless—impetuous, intemperate—but those are morally moderate adjectives that didn’t belong in any sincerely searing self-reproach. True, I’d resorted to language “unacceptable” not only in the post-MP years but for the previous twenty. Yet by my own lights the taboo against employing “the R-word” was merely a matter of rhetorical fashion. The term simply meant “slowed.” Given time, the stigma that attached to being learning delayed, or whatever we were told to call the disability next, would inexorably infect every euphemism that replaced it—much as one’s unwashed clothes, transferred to another piece of luggage, will soon impart the same funk to the new bag. When I was growing up, children wielded the word with abandon, while “mentally retarded” was still the preferred, neutral classification of the public school system. Proscriptions installed later in life don’t bite as deep. Besides, in the climax of my tirade, I may have instinctively reached for “retarded” for its very rawness. I’d been trying to cut through.
On review, then, although my demeanor had hardly embodied a model of pedagogical patience, I believed everything I’d said. I’d impugned the larger student body as unqualified (well—not “unqualified”; stupid); I’d dissed the absent Jerome’s dismal doggie story; I’d insulted Drew Patterson, who’d been begging me for years to do just that; but I’d been short of overtly abusive to the other students in that class. I might have been kicking myself for inviting a host of dire practical consequences, but aside from unintentionally damaging my family’s fortunes and reputation, I’d done nothing wrong in my own terms. Nevertheless, I can now testify that shaming works. I felt soiled. Feeling soiled for speaking the truth did seem wrong, which made me feel worse.
When I’d phoned the night before to warn that his partner had been “terminated with immediate effect,” Wade had said only, “We’ll talk about it later”—flatly, with no inflection. When I met his eyes as he perched on the edge of his hospital bed, I had trouble reading his expression. Forlorn? Resigned? Fuming? Despite everything, able to see the funny side of this debacle? It was anyone’s guess. But the biggest favor I could do him at that moment was not share our personal business within anyone else’s hearing. I’d brought his baggiest sweatpants, which just cleared the surgical boot. Mutely collecting his things, fetching his crutch—with his left wrist in a cast, he could use only the one—I concentrated solely on the material world that Wade understood.
Out in the parking lot, I adjusted the passenger seat backward to give him more room. In perfect silence, Wade propped his crutch against the car while keeping his balance with the open front door. When I stood, he pulled me to him with his uninjured arm and held me close for a good thirty seconds. It was just what I needed.
We didn’t talk until we were both settled in our regular timber-framed lounge chairs on the broad back deck. The minimal footage the cameras out front would have garnered when we slipped in the side door from the carport wouldn’t have given them much for the evening news, and our woodsy backyard, newly exploded into leaf, protected us from the peering of disapproving neighbors. It was doubtless inadvisable to combine the white wine I’d poured us with Wade’s pain medication, but we were learning to live on the wild side.
“This is nice,” Wade said, reaching for a cheese straw. “I guess we’re all on a kind of extended vacation.”
“Or retirement,” I said.
“You’re forty-four. That’d be a very extended retirement.”
I took a sip of Chablis. It was only four p.m., but at least white wine was more likely to go the distance during a long-term dependency than straight vodka. The air was oxygen-rich and humid with a slight breeze; the cheese straws were crisp; the birds were nesting. In this state of suspended repose, it was hard to remember what all the fuss was about.
“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Wade said.
“Oh, probably,” I said.
“You’re headstrong. You have a temper. You can’t stand irrationality, and you have an authority problem. Whenever we go through airport security together, I hold my breath. It’s worse than traveling with a bomb in my bag. I travel with a bomb on two legs. So maybe I should be grateful you held off for so long.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should have gotten it over with years ago. Then I could have trained as your assistant at Treehouse, Inc., and your wrist and ankle would be fine.”
“You get vertigo, and you’re terrified of chain saws. You’d make an awful tree surgeon.”
“I wouldn’t have mugged you with a tree branch while you were at the top of a ladder.”
“Pretty low bar,” Wade said.
“. . . Are you mad at me?” I asked in a small voice.
“What good would that do?”
“Authentic emotions aren’t always useful.”
“I knew what you were like when we got together.”
“Do you like what I’m like?” I seldom sounded so timid.
“I accept what you’re like. But that isn’t what I’m thinking about, and with three kids it shouldn’t be what you’re thinking about, either.”
“I don’t want to be thinking about what I’m thinking about.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” Wade said. “I’m stumped. I don’t know what to do.”
“Did they give you any idea how long it will take before you can walk?”
“Six weeks, maybe two months. That’s if all goes well. And you? The way you . . . You won’t get any severance?”
“Not after violating VU’s core values. I’d be surprised if I get this month’s paycheck. I’m sure there’s some moral turpitude clause in the fine print.”
“Moral turpentine . . . ?”
I laughed. “Maybe that’s what I need to clean off the stink: moral turpentine.”
“That video. It’s going to follow you.”
“I know, I know! I can kiss any other teaching job goodbye.”
“We’re way past that. We’re talking any job. Every time someone enters your name into a search field . . .”
“Give me a little credit. I’ve been intensely aware of that from the get-go.”
“You’re marked. And it could last for years.”
“I could change my name and get plastic surgery.”
“You say that like a joke. But it’s not a joke. It could come to that. Though we don’t have the wherewithal for plastic surgery—”
“Or I guess we could leave the country.”
“People always say that. But it’s not so easy, switching countries. And it’s possible that the video . . . especially in Europe, Canada, Australia. It could even keep you from getting a visa.”
“There’s always Russia or China.”
“This is serious,” Wade said. “You have to stay serious.”
“I was serious. Though both countries are very restrictive. And leery of Americans. It’s as if we carry a virus, a cultural virus, and they don’t want to get infected.”
“We have to focus on right now. We don’t have—”
“I know what we don’t have,” I snapped. “We can probably get through June. Maybe even July.”
“It’s May.”
“I know what month it is. I’m out of a job, I’m infamous, but I’m not demented.”
“The semester was almost over. You only had to get through a couple more weeks—”
“Okay, I knew the recriminations would come eventually. So go ahead. You’re due. Recriminate.”
“I don’t want to fight.” Wade backed down. “But I don’t know what people do. In this situation. It has to have happened to people before, with accidents or other bad luck.”
“If you’re fired for ‘willful misconduct,’ you don’t qualify for unemployment in Pennsylvania. I looked it up.”
“I’m self-employed, so I don’t get unemployment, either. There’s a chance I could get disability through Social Security, but the process of applying can take a long time, and I’m not good at that stuff. I hate it.”
“You’re right that this kind of sudden calamity or roadblock, everything going wrong—it has happened to people before. Lots of people. And there is a protocol.” I said heavily, “You lose everything.”
I didn’t realize at that time quite how right I was.