Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy Page B

need to find a socio-economic subtext in every novel under discussion (I fielded that one handily), someone else queried my own need to be ‘novelistic’ in an academic thesis . . . and I left my defense doubting whether I was in any way credible.
    Within a week I received an official letter from Hawthorden, informing me that my thesis had been approved and that I would be granted the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard. At the bottom of the letter were two handwritten lines:
    It has been a pleasure working with you. I wish you well .
    And Hawthorden initialed this.
    Was he telling me, in as polite a way as he was able: ‘Now please get lost’? Was this the reason he gave my thesis express service – to dispatch me from their lives as quickly as possible? Or, again, was this simply one of many interpretations that could be applied to twelve words? Was everything always so riddled with multiple meanings?
    A few days after I received my letter from Hawthorden, I was also contacted by the Harvard Placement Office, asking me to drop by for a chat. The woman who saw me – an all-business type in her forties named Ms Steele – told me that there was a last-minute job opening for an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
    ‘It is a tenure-track appointment – and Wisconsin is pretty first rate as state universities go.’
    ‘I’ll take the interview.’
    Two days later I was flown out to Madison. The chairman of the department – a rather harried, exhausted man named Wilson – picked me up at the airport and unburdened himself to me on the drive to the university: how this position had opened up when an assistant professor developed an unhealthy interest in one of his students and was let go; and how he was also having to fill another post, in medieval literature, as the woman who had held it for the past twenty years had finally drunk herself into the local intensive care unit, and . . .
    ‘Well, what can I say?’ Wilson told me. ‘It’s just your average dysfunctional English department.’
    When I sat around the conference table that afternoon in some administrative building, being interviewed by Wilson and four other department members, I looked at the drabness of my future colleagues – their air of enervation and tetchiness; the way they undercut each other as they sized me up, finding out just how smart I thought myself, whether I’d be a threat to them or someone they could manage, and asking what I thought about the scandal that had engulfed one of their colleagues.
    Careful here , I told myself, then said: ‘As I really don’t know the details of the case—’
    ‘But what do you think in general about the rules against intimate student–faculty relationships?’ this woman asked.
    Does she know about me and . . . ?
    ‘I can’t condone them,’ I said, meeting her gaze. The subject wasn’t raised again.
    I flew back to Boston that evening, remembering something that David once told me: ‘Anytime you ever think about taking a teaching post, always remember that most time-honored of clichés: the reason everyone is so bitchy in academia is because the stakes are so low.’
    David. My poor wonderful David.
    And the idea of now embracing the world that had helped to kill him . . .
    So when the call came three days later from Wisconsin, informing me I had the job, I told the department chairman I wasn’t taking it.
    ‘But why?’ he asked, sounding genuinely shocked.
    ‘I’ve decided to make money,’ I said. ‘Serious money.’

Part Two

One
    M ONEY . I NEVER gave it much thought. Until I started making real, proper grown-up money, its existence was something that I largely ignored. As I now realize, how you deal with money – how you control it and how it controls you (and it inevitably ends up doing that) – is something you learn very early on. My adolescence was a frugal one, as Dad paid Mom a very nominal amount of alimony and child support. At