“An inside source tells the Post that the dirty professor keeps a secret room with a shower and a bed adjacent to the ritzy off-campus office where he has been earning a mint telling investors how to spend their money according to his liberal politics. The same source reports that the NYPD is close to making an arrest and that we will soon be learning more about the various uses to which the renowned economist has been putting the bed in question.”
I had to stop myself from throwing the iPad on the floor. When we first moved downtown, Jason missed being able to run in Central Park every day. Splurging for that shower when he opened FSS had been a way to get back to his old running routes. And the bed wasn’t an actual bed. It was the daybed we used to have in the hallway alcove of our old apartment. I had been the one to suggest moving it into the room we jokingly called his “suite” at the office. With no windows, the room was perfect for a quick catnap when Jason’s early-bird grind caught up to him in the afternoon.
I tried calling Jason’s cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. “Jason, call me as soon as you get this.” I sent a text with the same message.
I scrolled down the page on my iPad to see the Facebook comments accompanying the Post article. It was going viral.
I knew his good-guy shtick was an act.
The police are about to arrest? Is he still teaching undergrads? WTF?
I know a girl at school who interns with him. She’s the only female in the program. It has to be her. Name is Rachel Sutton. She’s hot.
Several comments followed that one, scolding the author for “doxxing” the woman who was single-handedly ruining my husband’s reputation. Apparently it was okay for Jason to be named, but her privacy was to be protected. I made a mental note of her name and continued skimming the comments.
What kind of professor meets with a student alone . . . in a bedroom?
OMG. His son goes to my daughter’s school! He always seemed so nice. I’m crushed.
The author of that last comment was a woman named Jane Reese. I clicked on her profile picture and recognized the teenage girl next to her from Spencer’s choir performances. According to Facebook, Jane and I were “friends.” And she was the one who was “crushed.” I clicked the unfriend button.
Spencer.
Jesus, Spencer. I had protected him from so much, but I was powerless to shelter him from this.
I googled my name and Spencer’s—using both Powell and Mullen—searching for any mentions within the last twenty-four hours. No one had dragged us into the story. Not yet, anyway.
But if some random Internet user had already posted the name of Rachel Sutton, how long would it be before people who thought they knew something about me jumped into the fray?
Spencer had a pillow pulled over his head to block the light seeping around the window shade. He let out a moan when I sat at the foot of his bed. My son had a way of treating each morning as a theater audition.
“Do I need to remind you that little girls in other parts of the world have literally died trying to get an education? Time for school, mister.”
He squinted up at me from beneath his shaggy hair. “Normal moms say, Get the fuck up before I kill you.”
This is my precocious son’s idea of “normal.” “I prefer guilt trips to death threats. Get up. But we need to talk for a second. Some kids at the school might be talking about Dad.” Spencer had started calling Jason Dad after our first anniversary. We never asked why. We were just grateful.
“Loretta’s mom has an Academy Award, and Henry’s dad is literally like a musical genius. Trust me, no one talks about Dad.”
Ah, the joys of a private school in Manhattan.
“There’s a story going around the Internet. Someone accused him of something. It’ll get cleared up, but I need you to try to block it all out today at school.”
“What do you mean, he was accused?”
There was no way I could keep the details from my son, not with the 24/7 media cycle. “It’s a student from the university. College students can overreact, Spencer.”
I started babbling from there. I told him that sometimes extremely troubled students found their way into the university. That his father had done nothing but try to help her by supervising an internship. That teachers have conflicts with students all the time, but Dad had the additional complication of being a public person. It was possible the student was looking for attention at his expense.
“So what are people going to say?”
I searched his pale brown eyes, which peered out beneath wisps of hair that should have been cut two weeks ago. My son was too old to be treated like a child, but he was young compared to his peers. His friend Henry, for example—son of the “musical genius”—had two nannies, a driver, and a bodyguard at his disposal, and saw his parents twice a month. These kids would pull no punches.
“That a student accused your father of inappropriate behavior.”
“What? Like . . . sex?”
I said I didn’t know exactly. That it was a misunderstanding. That I only told him in case someone mentioned it at school.
“And this is, like, online?” He started to get up, probably heading for the phone I made him dock downstairs in the kitchen, one of the phone-related Mom Rules, along with divulging his passcode, asking permission before sharing photographs of others, and, most controversially, all phones in airplane mode while the car is moving.
I tried not to think about the other parents whispering in their kitchens right now about my husband. Or the NYU students texting links to one another during class. Or the people I used to know on the East End, gloating that my perfect life in the city hadn’t worked out quite so well after all.
“This young woman is obviously troubled, Spencer. Deeply. And your father’s been trying to help her, okay?” I was hinting at facts I knew nothing about, but needed to offer some kind of explanation for what was happening. Troubled girl gets fixated on successful mentor seemed, sadly, to work.
“Mom, I can’t go to school. You have to let me stay home.”
I walked to the bathroom in the hallway and turned on the water in the shower. It took forever to heat. “You can’t stay home, or people might assume he’s guilty. He’s your father, Spencer, and you’re not a child anymore. We have to protect our family.”
7
While Spencer was in the shower, I tried Jason again. I hung up when I heard the familiar “You’ve reached Jason Powell . . .” I’d already left two voice mails and three text messages.
I flipped on the small television hanging beneath our kitchen counter, keeping the volume low to make sure I’d hear Spencer on the stairs in time to turn it off. I flipped to New Day. Jason initially became a semiregular on the show due to our friendship with one of the hosts, Susanna Coleman. Now that Jason’s commentary was widely sought after, he still appeared about once a month, primarily out of loyalty.
Susanna and her cohost Eric were in the studio’s kitchen, flanking a chef I recognized from one of those cable cooking shows. The chef was saying, “See? Perfect al dente,” while Susanna and Eric attempted to sample the supposedly perfect spaghetti strands with grace.
Susanna was nodding in agreement until her mouth was free to speak. “You’re my hero. I always overcook my pasta.”
Had Jason already been on the air this morning? What was he supposed to talk about today? He had brought it up the night before, while I was trying to read Spencer’s paper about James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. My son was only in the seventh grade, but some of his homework was already more sophisticated than anything I had ever done in school. I had stopped reading to look up the word circumlocution on my phone when Jason mentioned his plans for the TV segment.
Now I remembered: seven retailers who were changing the world in small ways. It didn’t take an economist, let alone one with Jason’s credentials, to hype footwear and blankets, but these were the compromises he made for the sake of expanding his “platform.”