SELF INFLICTED

The announcement came over the intercom. I didn’t think twice about it.

Then the plane lurched.

Far more than the mild turbulence the captain had warned about when he turned on the seatbelt sign and asked everyone to remain seated.

I checked my seatbelt.

Still secure. Of course it was. I hadn’t moved since takeoff.

Another drop.

That one was significant. The kind where your stomach lifts before the rest of you remembers gravity. A few people gasped. Somewhere behind us a plastic cup hit the floor and rolled, tapping its way down the aisle. I reminded myself that planes hardly ever crash, that the odds of mine going down were astronomical.

“Is this normal?”

The question came from the old woman sitting beside me – seventy, maybe eighty. She had talked to me a bit when we were first seated. This was only her third flight, she said. The other two had been when she was much younger.

“I wouldn’t say normal,” I said. “But nothing to worry about.”

The worst jolt yet. Two overhead compartments flung open.

I’d never seen that before.

I looked over at the woman, ostensibly to make sure her seatbelt was secure. When our eyes met, I saw they were tearing.

“It’s going to be fine,” I said, as reassuringly as I could.

She took my hand.

Her fingers were colder than I expected, the skin thin in the way that comes with age. I wondered whether she’d even realized she had done it, or if instinct had simply reached for the nearest human being.

When the plane dropped again a moment later, she squeezed with more force than I would have imagined a woman her age could muster.

“It’s going to be fine,” I said again. “I promise.”

I wasn’t sure it would be.

It wasn’t the first time I had lied to her, though.

We had only spoken briefly. I had listened with a smile as she told me she was from the suburbs of Chicago, our point of departure, and was flying to New York for a grandson’s bar mitzvah. I nodded as if interested when she added that when she was married, her husband insisted on driving to see their daughter, even though it was a fourteen-hour trip. He was the kind of man who valued money over time, she said, and then mentioned that he had been gone for four years in a way that made it clear she still missed him.

I told her I lived in Manhattan and had been in Chicago for a conference, explaining I was a professor at Columbia. When I switched my phone to airplane mode, she saw the screensaver and asked about my family. I pointed to the picture, indicating which of my daughters was Sophie and which was Hannah. I told her the photo had been taken last year, that they were three and seven now, and that the woman between them was my wife, Rachel.

“You are truly blessed,” she said with a smile.

“I am,” I said.

That was the first lie I told her.

The plane leveled out. The woman released me from her death grip and laughed the nervous way people do when they realize they had been foolish for imagining the worst.

“You were very brave,” she said.

“I was scared too, believe me,” I said.

It was the third lie I told her.

I wasn’t frightened at all. Not because I’m brave. Or even because I had faith in the pilot’s ability to get us safely on the ground.

For the opposite reason.

The thought of landing—of taking a taxi back to my apartment, of seeing Rachel and my children, of having to go back to my life—made me hope the plane crashed.

I was delayed getting a taxi because of a phone call. I’d thought it would be quick, just the perfunctory – I’m back, safe and sound. Instead, it lasted nearly an hour. By the time I got home, Rachel told me the girls were already asleep.

“I tried to keep them up for you,” she said.

I blamed traffic from JFK. Rachel nodded as if that made sense.

Over cold pizza, I told her about the conference. She listened the way spouses do when the details of a job interest them only insofar as the job continues to exist.

I didn’t tell her about the flight home.

We watched television. Before I left, we’d been binging a cop show on Hulu and had left off on a cliffhanger.

“It took all my willpower not to watch without you,” Rachel said.

“You could have,” I said.

“I know.”

Sometimes we talk like that.

In bed, we had sex.

“Maybe we shouldn’t let so much time pass before we do it again,” Rachel said.

“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” I replied.

“I mean, I really like it.”

“Sex is good,” I said, like a caveman.

She gave me her Why are you such an asshole all the time look.

I said I was sorry.

The better answer would have been that I didn’t really know.

I saw Allison the next morning in the History department office, which is little more than a copy machine beside a table. The faculty all have their own offices, so there’s rarely a reason to be there—except that someone makes coffee in the morning.

And because Allison is there.

“Professor Ellis,” she said with a nod when I walked in.

She already had a cup of coffee, though she was still standing, which meant she had poured it recently. We were alone, but that didn’t necessarily mean our admin wasn’t somewhere nearby.

That wasn’t why Allison used my title, though. She sometimes does that even when we’re alone.

“Professor Walling,” I said.

Allison studies fascism, which has made her a minor television presence lately—timely expertise, and the fact that men prefer their moral lessons delivered by a beautiful woman.

My field is intellectual history. It sits somewhere between philosophy and history—the ideas themselves and the world that produced them. My work focuses on competing notions of morality: whether right and wrong are grounded in reason or something less tidy.

Yes, I’m aware of the irony.

“As much as I’d love to chat, Professor Ellis,” she said. “Duty calls.”

She looks at me. Her eyes asking if we’re still on for later.

Yes, I tell her with mine. A thousand times, yes.

It’s been going on for seven months. Allison and I meet once or twice a week in the cheapest hotel in Morningside Heights. There, we have sex. Talk intimately about our lives. Have more sex. Say goodbye.

Sometimes, in between the sex or in the time we’re clothed, we talk about a life in which we can be together. I don’t think either of us believe that will ever come to pass, though. If we did, we’d talk it about more seriously. Now it has the wistful tenor of imagining hitting the lotto.

Allison is married too. She has a son roughly between Sophie and Hannah in age.

When we began our affair, she said that she liked that I was married with children.

“Isn’t that the first rule?” she said. “Don’t cheat with anyone who has less to lose than you do?”

My first class that morning was my least favorite. An introductory seminar. One week—three hours of lecture—for each thinker.

“Good morning, one and all,” I said, as if I were a ringmaster. “Today we discuss the man who Immanuel Kant said woke him from a long slumber, so you know it’s going to be good. Anyone who did the reading and thinks they understood it want to explain David Hume’s idea that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions?”

No volunteers.

Then a reluctant hand rose from the middle. The same boy who usually started things.

“I think he means that what we know—or think we know—is only what we’ve experienced,” he said. “Not just what people tell us is true.”

“Not very encouraging for college professors who have devoted their lives to telling people things, now is it?”

Polite laughter. The kind people offer when the boss tells a joke. Or your father-in-law.

“But you’re right,” I said. “Anyone want to take a stab as to what it is about that concept that Kant found so revolutionary?”

The boy shook his head, indicating that he had done his part. No one else volunteered.

“As we discussed last week, Kant believed there was nothing higher than reason. From that, he constructed a system that could tell you what actions were right and wrong. Lying—wrong. Murder—also wrong. Always. No exceptions. It was a system of morality that was very easy to follow, even if it sometimes led to outcomes that seemed . . . well, not very moral at all.

“And then along comes David Hume who says, Actually, you’ve got it all backwards there Immanuel. The world isn’t black and white. It’s gray. Morality doesn’t come from reason. It comes from context. Or put another way, Hume is saying that nothing – even murder -- deserves praise or condemnation in and of itself. It’s why you did it that matters.”

A few of them nodded, the way students do when an idea sounds important even if they’re not entirely sure they understand it yet. I was about to explain it in their language.

“Show of hands, who’s had fajitas in a Mexican restaurant?”

Every hand was in the air.

“Think back to the first time. The waiter comes over with this sizzling concoction, the smoke billowing up. He places it before you and says . . . don’t touch the plate, it’s very hot.” I take a beat. “What did you do?”

A boy shouts out the punchline – “touch the plate.”

The kids laugh.

“Of course you do. It’s what we all do – once. And we do it because the fact that someone tells us it’s hot isn’t enough to convince us. So, we touch it, and it burns. But – here’s the thing, we don’t still do that – touch the fajita plate, I mean. And that’s because after that first time, experience guides reason.”

The students were clacking away at their keyboards. The college professor equivalent of applause.

This was a philosophy late teenagers could get behind.

Their professor, of course, should have already learned that lesson.

I didn’t have a second class that day. My upper-level seminar meets only Wednesdays and Thursdays. But Allison had a noon class, which meant our rendezvous had to wait until one.

As a result, I always went to the hotel first. Paid the man in cash and then texted Allison the room number.

That was my plan that day too, until I got an email from my department chair asking that I stop by. Lily – Professor Weitzner to the students -- always liked to get a debrief after she sent one of us to a conference.

Her office door was ajar. In her guest chair was a man about my age, with a completely bald head and a goatee. The fact he was in a suit and tie told me that he wasn’t an academic because we don’t dress like that unless it’s to go to a wedding or a funeral.

Something was not right.

“This is Elliot Hunter, he’s with the University’s general counsel office,” Lily said.

He didn’t stand to shake my hand. Just nodded once and looked down at a folder on Lily’s desk. Not a thick one, but thick enough to suggest preparation.

In the next thirty or so minutes I lied.

Repeatedly.

Allison and I were colleagues, nothing more, I said.

No, I had never been in a sexual relationship with her.

No, I had never been in any relationship with her that I would consider inappropriate.

No, I had never engaged in an inappropriate relationship with anyone in the workplace.

He nodded as if he believed me, although I knew enough to know that he didn’t.

When I was done with a version of reality that bore no resemblance to my life, Hunter said, “And so there’s absolutely no misunderstanding,” he continued, “Professor Walling is your subordinate. Therefore, if you were engaged in a relationship with her, it would be a violation of the code of conduct and would necessarily result in consequences, up to and including termination.”

I was tempted to tell him that I didn’t consider Allison my subordinate. We weren’t a business in which people reported to each other. I didn’t consider Lily my boss, even though she might have. To me, bosses can hire or fire someone. Give them raises. Or the good assignments. Or even okay their pet projects. I didn’t have that kind of authority.

Needless to say, I didn’t mention any of that.

Nor did I remind him I had tenure.

That was actually the problem, I knew. As a tenured faculty, the one power I had over Allison was that I voted on her tenure application. I was one of twenty-seven votes, and I was the most junior tenured faculty, which meant no one gave a rat’s ass about my opinion, but, at least technically, I had a say in the most important decision regarding her professional career.

Allison and I had discussed it. I told her that I wouldn’t speak on her behalf when she came up. Nor would I vote for her if I was the deciding the vote.

She laughed. “Mark, if you’re the deciding the vote, I’m not going to get tenure.”

We laughed about that because it was true.

Before I was allowed to go, he said, “This is an ongoing investigation, so are you not to discuss it with anyone. To do so would be a violation of your obligations under the faculty ethical code, and could lead to disciplinary action, even if no other wrongful conduct was deemed to have occurred. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And that, needless to say, includes most of all, that you are not to have any contact with Professor Walling,” he added.

It was needlessly said. I already knew that was wo he meant when he said no discussions. I also was six steps ahead of him by then, trying to figure out how to engage Allison without him knowing.

The moment I was out of the building, I texted Allison.

Need to talk to you ASAP. Important.

She was still in class. It ended at one.

Normally she texted within a minute or two of the bell.

But for the next thirty minutes, I waited for her to respond.

And she didn’t.

All the while, I stood across the street from the department building longer than necessary, pretending to read email on my phone. Thinking that perhaps her phone had lost charge, and that’s why she hadn’t texted back, but that she’d any moment step outside with that half-smile she used when she knew no one was watching.

When I hadn’t heard or seen from her by 1:15, I suspected that she’d been intercepted by Lily and her egg-headed henchman.

When Allison still hadn’t responded by two, I assumed her interview had gone longer than mine.

At three, I knew she wasn’t going to respond. Not because she was busy, or angry, or teaching another class. Because Hunter had told her the same thing he told me.

And, unlike me, she was heeding his warning.

Rachel was surprised to see me home.

She worked from home on Wednesdays and Fridays, one of the accommodations her firm gives its partners.

“I thought you had your seminar on Wednesday afternoons,” she said.

That’s what I’d told her. To explain why I was unreachable from two to five.

“Cancelled,” I said.

For a moment she looked at me the way she sometimes did to make clear to me she knew something was off but didn’t care enough to question. “Well, it’s a very nice surprise. Unfortunately, I’ve got a few more hours to go, and a conference call at five.”

“Maybe I should take Hannah to the park, give you some alone time.”

My motivation wasn’t Rachel’s alone time. I needed to sit in the park and stare at my phone until Allison texted.

Hannah sat in the sand box. I intermittently shifted my attention from my daughter to my phone.

The one-time Allison and I discussed what would happen if either of us were confronted – either by our spouses or the university -- we agreed on the strategy.

Deny, deny, deny.

“There’s thinking you know and really knowing,” Allison once said. “And none the twain shall meet.”

Which told me that Allison’s silence was out of her concern the university could track her texts somehow. I’m not as paranoid, but it makes sense. Whatever needs to be said can wait until tomorrow – when we see each other and there is no electronic record.

When I look up, Sophie is waving at me from the sandbox. Not like a parade queen — the shorter, sharper wave that means I’m being summoned.

I slide my phone into my pocket, making sure it will vibrate if a message comes through.

At the swings, Sophie is screaming Higher.

After a few pushes she’s reached cruising altitude. I decide the moment calls for a picture. So, I move around the swing set, framing the shot in my head — the ear-to-ear grin she gets when eating ice cream or when Rachel comes home from a trip.

But when I pull out my phone, I see a text.

For some reason it hadn’t buzzed.

I’m momentarily elated. And then the bottom falls out.

The message isn’t from Allison.

It’s from Lily.

A Zoom link. Tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.

I don’t accept the invitation. Instead, I text her.

I have a class at ten.

Her reply comes immediately.

It’s been cancelled.

Rachel and I alternate nights putting the girls to bed. The idea is that one of us gets the full hour off every other day while the other reads to Sophie and then, once she’s down, to Hannah.

Tonight is my night.

Sophie’s routine has held steady lately: first Owl Babies, then How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? ending with Goodnight Moon.

After we say goodnight to noises everywhere, she asks for a song, which is her newest stall tactic. I sing the chorus of Yellow Submarine because she likes to change the color.

Tonight, it’s pink.

Hannah has graduated to chapter books. We’re midway through Unicorn Academy. Tonight, we read two chapters—one more than usual, which I tell myself is penance.

Then she asks for Yellow Submarine too, probably because she heard my rendition with Sophie.

Her color is blue.

I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. For a moment my heart lifts. But when I check the phone, it sinks again.

False alarm. No message.

Rachel has a glass of wine in her hand when I come back out to the kitchen. She says dinner’s in the oven, and it’ll be another five minutes.

I almost ask what we’re eating but stop myself. It doesn’t matter.

“Everything okay?” Rachel asks over dinner.

The question hangs there a second longer than it should. Long enough that I wonder if she already knows something.

“Yeah,” I say. “All good.”

And it will be, I tell myself.

I have tenure.

It’s not like I slept with a student. Or worse, something non-consensual.

This is two married people who work together having an affair.

It’s practically a cliché it happens so often. If we were on a TV show, it would practically be required.

Rachel is already dressed when I open my eyes the next morning. She tells me she has an early meeting. For a moment, I worry she’s going to ask me to take Hannah to school, but instead she says our nanny is coming in early.

She kisses me on the lips—a quick peck—and leaves.

Ten minutes later Jen lets herself in. She knows not to come into the bedroom in the morning, so I lie there listening as she tells the girls she’ll be taking them to school.

By the time I shower and get dressed, they’re gone. For a second I consider taking the Zoom call somewhere else, just in case Rachel comes back, or Jen does. But that seems unlikely, and if it happens, I’ll improvise.

I’ve gotten good at that.

So, I set up my laptop at the dining room table.

It’s 9:30.

I have time.

By now I’ve checked my phone so many times that I’m surprised it still has charge.

No texts, no calls, no emails from Allison.

Strangely, I’m not worried about that anymore.

We’ll talk as soon as this is over.

At 9:59, I pressed the button to join.

The host will let you in soon.

I sat up a little straighter.

At exactly 10:00, faces popped on to the screen one by one.

Lily appeared to be in her office. Hunter somewhere else, his head just as shiny as it had been in person. A third a woman, someone in her forties, with the calm expression indicating she’d sat through many conversations like this was there too, her name read Reena Patel.

“Good morning, Mark,” Lily said.

“Morning.”

“You remember Elliot Hunter from the other day. And this is Reena Patel from Faculty Affairs.”

The woman nodded politely.

“We appreciate you making time to speak with us,” Hunter said.

I almost smiled at that. As if I had been given a choice.

“Of course.”

A pause followed. Not long. Just long enough to feel deliberate.

Hunter glanced down at a sheet of paper. Apparently, there was a script.

“Professor Ellis, since we spoke yesterday, we’ve continued our review of this matter.”

I nodded, trying to look attentive rather than defensive.

“And we’ve made a preliminary determination.”

Preliminary was good.

Preliminary meant temporary.

“You will be relieved of your duties for the remainder of the semester. With our recommendation that you be terminated from your position at the university for cause.”

For a moment the sentence didn’t make sense. The words arrived separately and refused to assemble into meaning.

“How can something preliminary be permanent?” I asked, as if I’d caught them in a lie.

“Mark, as you know, removing a tenured professor requires a vote of the department and ratification by the provost,” Lily said. “That vote has already occurred. The matter is now awaiting the provost’s ratification.”

The vote had already happened. My colleagues — people I considered friends — had fired me.

“Is due process something the university only teaches in the law school?” I said.

I could see my own smug expression reflected back at me on the screen.

“We can assure you proper procedures were followed,” Hunter said.

Lily sighed, loudly enough that Zoom shifted the screen toward her.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I told you, Professor Walling and I are just friends. Nothing more.”

Even as I said it, it sounded ridiculous. Professor Walling.

“And we told you not to lie to us, Professor Ellis,” Hunter said.

I opened my mouth.

I was about to lie again.

Something in me hesitated.

“Mark,” Lily said quietly, “we have proof that you and Allison were more than friends.”

Hunter leaned slightly forward in his little square. “That issue is no longer up for discussion,” he said. “On its own, the sexual relationship between a tenured and non-tenured faculty member is grounds for termination. In addition, you obstructed the investigation.”

“Obstructed?” I said, my voice rising. “I didn’t even know you were investigating anything. I didn’t obstruct anything.”

“You lied to us,” Lily said. Not angry. Almost tired. “That’s the obstruction.”

I kept my face still.

“But I didn’t.”

No one reacted.

Not Lily.

Not Patel.

Not Hunter.

Hunter made a small note on the paper in front of him.

“Your access to university property is suspended effective immediately,” he said, now reading. “You are not to attend campus events or attempt to access university systems remotely.”

“My work is on that computer.”

“When the process concludes, we’ll arrange for you to retrieve your belongings,” Lily said.

I barely heard her.

My work didn’t matter anymore.

Now all I was thinking about was how to get even with them.

I’d find another job. A better one. Harvard had been sniffing around. Or maybe somewhere on the West Coast.

Allison was from the Bay Area.

And that’s when it clicked.

They said they had proof.

We never used email. Our phones weren’t university property.

The fight drained out of me.

“What about Allison?” I asked.

“We view Allison as a victim in this situation,” Lily said. “The university will not be taking disciplinary action against her. She has requested—and I sincerely hope you honor this—that you not contact her.”

Something inside my chest dropped. Hard.

I understood, suddenly, why Allison hadn’t responded.

Everything felt unreal.

But the feeling itself wasn’t.

I’d felt it before.

On the plane.

Only then there had been the possibility that the crash might save me from my life.

Now there wasn’t.

After Rachel came home, I told her I decided to take some time off work. I said I hadn’t been feeling well. Mentally. That I needed a break. I told her the university had been very nice about it—that they would cover my classes and not to worry.

She nodded as if all of this made perfect sense.

Which told me she knew that it didn’t.

She went to bed early, while I was still in the living room. The show we’d been watching wasn’t over, but Rachel had apparently had enough. As she got up, she told me she was taking the girls to her parents for the weekend.

She didn’t suggest I come with them, and I didn’t ask.

Once I was alone, I found myself thinking about the fajita plates from my lesson the previous day.

You know the plate is hot.
You know it’s going to burn if you touch it.

And you do it anyway.

I knew the plate was hot.

I touched it anyway.

And I kept touching it.