This should have been the happy ending were this a fairy tale. But it isn’t, and it wasn’t. Over the next several months, Dan struggled to make sense of Katie’s feelings for him. Shortly after that fateful day when he had allowed her to know his feelings for her, and saw her respond in kind, she seemed to pull back from him. She went on vacation for two weeks and, at a time before cell phones, did not contact him until her return to work. He in turn had to travel to Spain to accompany his dad on business for two weeks shortly after that. When he returned, she spoke of her plans to move out of state. She seemed conflicted but would not explain the reasons for what appeared to be a change of heart, but only at times. He did not think she was playing games with him and knew there had to be a good reason for her change but could not fathom what it was. And she would not tell him. He was very much in love with someone with whom he would share no physical intimacy beyond a single kiss and had no idea as to what had turned her away from him. Perhaps she had never really felt anything close to what he did for her. Perhaps guilt about Linda and Dan’s breakup had affected her—though there was no rational reason for it. She had done nothing wrong—had never pursued Dan or expressly encouraged his feelings for her. Perhaps she had second thoughts about starting a serious relationship with her boss, though she could easily have been reassigned so as not to report to or even work with Dan had a romance blossomed beyond its mere acknowledgment. Perhaps she feared for the future—or for Dan’s constancy, fearing he might fall in love with yet another third party and break her heart. Perhaps loyalty to a friend who might also have had feelings for Dan, something he suspected for a time but would never know, influenced her. Perhaps she simply had a case of buyer’s remorse. Or perhaps she had her own conflicted feelings about someone else Dan was completely unaware of. Dan would never know for the simple reason that she refused to tell him while continuing to give him mixed signals.
Confused and reeling from an emotional rollercoaster that had derailed at its zenith and was still freefalling to its inevitable crash landing, Katie’s mixed signals proved to be the final straw for him. He began to plan his exit strategy in earnest and made it known to Katie and to his best friend, Gene, that he would look for another job. He updated his resume and applied for several administrative and college teaching positions, went on several interviews, and accepted an offer two months later for an assistant dean’s position with limited teaching responsibilities at a small privately owned not-for-profit college in also in New York City. He gave formal notice. Katie and Gene did the same around the same time—coordinating their exit to coincide with Dan’s. Christine graduated shortly after Dan’s, Katie’s, and Gene’s exits. Dan helped recruit and train a new dean when Gene told him that he was not interested in staying after Dan left. A veteran academic with a Ph.D. and an impressive resume was hired and Dan spent his last days assisting him to make the transition.
The SED visit happened without any problems—fake lending library and all. And within a week of leaving, Dan began getting messages from a number of his former faculty with requests for references and some just to say they missed him. Ironically, Dan was not even allowed the satisfaction of knowing that after all the hard work and personal heartbreak at least his legacy would live on to benefit students and his successors long after he had departed. Although he had left the school in much better condition than he had found it, with two new computer labs and a program that provided graduates good jobs in just three months of study, six months after Dan’s departure, PEMTI declared bankruptcy and closed all six branches. The reason? Student loan default rates exceeded 50 percent and guaranteed student loans were no longer available to PEMTI students. TAP and PELL grants were also pulled. The result after that was inevitable.
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Not long after leaving PEMTI, Dan saw Katie one last time. In his frustration and pain, he was unusually cold towards her and did his best to ignore her, not out of spite and certainly not because he was no longer in love with her, but out of pain, disappointment, self-protection and anger at no longer being able to spend time with her every day as before in those innocent days before and after he fell in love with her, when all was still right in his world and hers. Like many other things, that is something that Dan would regret long after the heartbreak more of less mended, leaving behind one more scar that would fade in time but never fully heal.
Dan, Gene, and Bob got together for a time some weekends for breakfast or lunch near PEMTI while the school remained open, and Bob still worked there and lived just blocks away. But that too fizzled soon enough. Dan genuinely missed the year-long regular lunches with Bob who had become a good friend. But those meetings also caused him great pain, primarily in that they reminded him of Katie, his loss, and of Linda’s loss as well, and of the pain he had caused her. Emotionally letting go of people he truly loved is something Dan had not mastered and would never master for the remainder of his life. It was an Achilles heel that would cause not his death by a poisoned arrow, but a life never free of heartache and pain.
Shortly before leaving PEMTI, he would write and give to Katie a sonnet written for her. He found a copy he had made and kept for himself that would remain hidden among his personal effects including old photographs and other pieces of long-ago shattered dreams for more than 30 years. He no longer remembered the exact words but found upon reading them once more with old fresh eyes that his old wounds could still bleed and water dormant seeds buried in faded scars that would blossom a bittersweet harvest of suppressed memories. It read as follows in faded ink from Dan’s own hand:
Sonnet to C. R. - 1988
I tried so hard to share my love with you,
To make you see the dream I saw so clear,
Yet you could not believe my words were true,
Could not let go of your consuming fear.
I waited hoping for some subtle change,
Ignoring every sign it would not come,
Until the dream was clearly out of range,
And hope, an evanescent shadow, gone.
The emptiness I feel knows no regret,
So do not weep for me, sweetest of friends,
Each fleeting moment shared I'll not forget,
I know what love is now, and how it ends.
The love I felt will live while I take breath,
The dream I'll carry with me to my death.
Dan went on to other administrative roles beyond the assistant dean position at the small private college after leaving PEMTI. He would serve as a division dean, and twice as department chair at other institutions. He would also twice reach the rank of tenured full professor at both a public and a private university. A year after their breakup, He and Linda would reconcile, and not much later marry. Marvin and Bob would attend their simple wedding. Gene would be his best man. But for Linda and Dan, their relationship would never be the same.
Alas, Dan would find to his great consternation throughout his otherwise successful and fulfilling academic career, that the more things change, the more they remain the same. But this is a story for another day and perhaps another novel—one in which our battered but still idealistic if perhaps less naïve lawyer/administrator/professor continues to learn some painful lessons about higher education and about life on the long, uphill road to enlightenment.
End