We Are Not Ourselves(126)

“He can’t do the job anymore, Eileen.”

“He has rights as a tenured professor. He’s supposed to be given time to take corrective action, isn’t he?”

“It would be good for the department if he retired.”

She felt herself begin to shake, more in fear than in anger. She couldn’t help wishing she could turn to Ed for advice; he was always clear-sighted at times like these. She knew it would be hell for him if she forced him to keep going to work. He would be in an adversarial relationship with his department; they would be looking for signs of incompetence.

“I don’t give a damn about the department,” she said. “He’s given enough to the department. I’m interested in my husband.” Her mind was working feverishly. Every passing second would erode her bargaining position. She tried to think like Ed. Ed would have worked out some algorithm in his deep subconscious to produce the right answer. He would have seen it from the beginning. “He could probably sit there for two years,” she said. “That’s how long the review process would take, especially for someone with as exemplary a record as Ed.”

“Nobody wants to hurt Ed here,” he said.

Then it came to her, as if Ed had whispered it in her ear: a palatable option for both sides that would forestall a protracted fight. His preoccupation with getting to work every day no matter what shape he was in, which she’d always found frustrating and even a little insane, would benefit her in the end. It would get him to thirty years.

“I’m not asking for a review process,” she said. “He has over a year of sick days coming to him. Let him finish this year and then give him the sick days.”

? ? ?

Stan called back the next day to say that Ed’s colleagues had volunteered to fill in his classes for the remainder of the semester. The school would keep him on the payroll through the summer. The sick days wouldn’t start counting down until the fall.

“I wanted to do that much for him,” Stan said. “He won’t have to teach. He won’t have to come in at all.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing,” she said. “Like you don’t know how much he loves his job.”

“Everyone knows how much he loves teaching.”

She wanted to believe that, in his heart of hearts, he had never really loved teaching. That would bring them closer, somehow. She wanted to believe he’d pretended to love it, pretended to be patient in reviewing material endlessly with imbeciles, in order to get his students to respond positively and ultimately make a distasteful job easier on him. The truth, she knew, was that none of it had been a sacrifice. He’d been happier with his career than anyone she knew. It was she who had made sacrifices for his happiness.

“None of those kids will ever know how much he gave up,” she told Stan.

? ? ?

On February 13, 1993, Ed went to work for the last time. A week later, she went in with him to sign some HR paperwork and learned that she’d miscalculated. She’d been correct about the amount of unused sick time coming to him, but she hadn’t understood that it wouldn’t count toward his pension. By then it was too late to reverse course. She tried to call Stan about it, to feel him out about procuring Ed some kind of time credit, but she got nowhere. She signed off by telling him he was a jerk and slamming down the phone.

Ed would finish in June with twenty-nine years of service to the city instead of thirty, which meant he was due a lower percentage of his salary. And since he’d be retiring before the minimum retirement age, he’d see that number drop even farther. The fourteen hundred dollars a month or so he’d receive from Social Security disability would make up part of the difference, but they were going to have to adjust to new means.

Ed hadn’t had a raise in four years, due to a budget freeze. There was rumored to be a raise coming in the next year or two that would have bumped him up to where he should have been all along. He’d never see the raise he’d already earned. He hadn’t been holding on for just one raise, though. He’d been about to enter the period in his career in which he would make real money. He’d have taught until he was seventy or older, his salary rising every year.

He was also losing his grant from the government, which budgeted thirty thousand dollars a year for his efforts and was up for renewal for four more. The loss of the grant was the keenest blow for her. It was the surplus, the comfort fund, the dream of luxury, the symbol of his status.

As long as Ed was on the payroll, she’d be covered by his health insurance, but once the sick-day checks stopped coming and he started receiving his pension, that would cease.

When he’d chosen a benefits plan, a few years after they’d gotten married, he’d chosen the plan that would deliver them—and her, in his absence—the most after-tax money per month. The trade-off had been that this particular plan didn’t confer health coverage on her in the event of his retirement or death. They’d made that decision with conviction, anticipating that she’d get health insurance in retirement through some job or other. They hadn’t known then that something would keep her moving every few years: the promise of more responsibility; a better salary; a higher-up who took exception to a strong-willed woman; her inability to keep her mouth shut when she found something ethically questionable.

In order to retain health benefits, she was going to have to keep a full-time job, any full-time job. Thinking longer term, she was going to have to survive at NCB, or at another city hospital, for ten years if she wanted to qualify for the basic New York City pension and have health insurance in retirement. That wasn’t going to be the easiest task at her age and pay scale.