Suspended - Part I
“Suspended” is a fictional story about a New York family — husband, wife and college-aged son — who’ve become disconnected from one another and lost their sense of purpose until a beautiful young woman who claims she’s a hands-on-healer enters their lives and shakes everything up.
THIS IS PART 1 of a FIFTEEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15
Image: Jessie McCall
In his final year at Harvard, a month shy of graduation, Danny was suspended for plagiarism. This was a shock to everyone, including Danny who was known as a scholar, a thinker, a deeply moral and honest person. His only excuse was sleep-deprivation — he'd been up night after night writing a paper, his honor’s thesis, and somehow, carelessly, had incorporated a sentence from one of his research books into the text, had been too blurry to check. This was what everyone was told. But secretly he couldn’t help feeling there was a level on which the error had been intentional, as if one part of his persona had ganged up on the other in a sly and gleeful act of self-destruction.
Horribly ashamed, he packed his things and drove down to New York City. The review board had informed him that his suspension was to last a year, following which, in order to graduate, he would have to submit a totally new and original thesis. The deadline for this new thesis was November fifteenth, eighteen months after he’d been suspended. Danny couldn't bear thinking about it — any of it. He moved back into his old room in his parents’ apartment on Central Park West, withdrew from everyone he knew, took a part time job as a waiter at a local restaurant and agonized over what his next topic should be. Nothing rose to the surface of his brain, at least nothing that excited or interested him. His mind was a dead swamp. To clear it, he began a yeast-free diet — no bread, no sugar, no vinegar, no dairy, no caffeine, no fruit. He was thin to start with, but now he was truly skinny, living like a monk on kefir and vegetables, a little fish, a little meat. He had broken up with his girlfriend the day he left Harvard, so he had no sex either, refused even to pleasure himself alone in bed at night. His routine, when he came home from work, was to have a small bowl of raw vegetables, then retire to his room where, without thinking, he would sink to the floor and sit cross-legged, hands on his knees, eyes rolled back beneath closed lids. In this way he would lose himself in space for hours.
Image: Arthur Brognoli
Danny's parents, Rich and Marcia, were too busy with their own problems to worry about him. Marcia was hardly ever in the city. She had inherited a house in an upstate town and that was where she preferred to be, a short, hefty, frizzy-haired woman who'd lost interest in clothes, beauty, glamour, in fact in just about everything but her horse, an old gelding boarded at a nearby barn, and her yappy apricot-colored poodle. On these two she doted, cooking for the dog and bringing fancy treats to the horse. Her husband, Rich, visited her on weekends. He was an optician who owned a shop on Columbus Avenue that had been doing well until the past few years when more and more people began to opt for Lasik. About this he whined incessantly, which made Marcia want to grab him by the skinny throat and strangle him. She'd listen to his theories on macular degeneration the way she'd listen to a repairman explaining the workings of her dishwasher, glassy-eyed, stolid, counting the seconds till his nasal voice stopped droning. And forget about sex — that was a thing of the past: Rich knew better than to stroke her between the thighs when they climbed into bed at night.
Out of habit, he claimed he loved her and went around with a stiff, sullen, martyred air, suffering, he announced, from backaches, headaches, sciatica because of his wife's inattention. How bitter he was that all of Marcia's needs could be satisfied by a trail ride on a fat old gelding.
Cover Image: Cup of Couple (Pexels)