I.

I am retiring next Spring after a career and personal life that have had more disappointments than successes. Things for me peaked at the 1981 AEA meetings in Washington (actually they were in December 1981 and were thus kind of the 1982 meetings). I was an assistant professor at a top 7 department and I had been a star a few years earlier. I was also still young and handsome. Things wouldn’t pan out. I wouldn’t publish well and would fall far down the totem pole professionally. I also never married but I didn’t expect either of these things at the time.



Women were far less common in the profession back then. At a session, I met a striking young woman, in my field, who introduced herself as an Assistant Professor at a PAC-10 school- and not one of the prominent ones. I can’t emphasize how exciting it was to meet a pretty young peer, everyone who was married in my department had a stay at home wife. She was charming and we hit it off better than I could have hoped. Coffee became dinner, dinner became drinks, and then one thing led to another. I have never excelled in romance. But we made magic that night. I did everything right, I was never that good before and would never be that good again.

Falling asleep that night was my personal high-water mark. I thought that night would prove to be long-lasting, something life-changing. But alas, it was not meant to be.

II.

As for Black Widow’s request for a happy ending, ‘Maybe.’ Its complicated. But I will tell you what happened and let you make up your own mind.

I woke alone up at dawn, around 7, the next morning. I stayed in bed, content in the belief that she would soon return. I thought that maybe she had just run out to pick up some breakfast. But taking note of the total quiet in the room, I abruptly felt that her absence was more ominous. I hastily rose and, seeing no evidence of her, I quickly dressed and went to the lobby despite having no specific plan of how to find her.

Upon emerging into the bustle of the conference, a seemingly serendipitous moment occurred when I saw Ray, an old resource economist. He was the only person in her department who I knew; with a mutual friend we had gone on a grueling hiking trip in the Cascade Mountains. If it were today, I would of course already have looked up all of her professional information. But back then, she remained largely a mystery. I mentioned to Ray how I had met his junior colleague the previous day. He proffered a perplexed look. He had never heard the name before, and nobody in his department remotely matched her description.

I wandered away from the lobby. I was staggered. But I did not feel angry or betrayed. Rather, my alarm was due to having no way of finding her or even discovering who she really was. I was supposed attend several sessions, Walter Adams had unexpectedly become something of a mentor to me and I had told him that I would be at his talk which was starting soon at a different hotel. But I didn’t feel up to it (our relationship did wither afterwards, although I never found out if it had anything to do with his talk. I doubt it did). So I decided to go back upstairs to my room.

As I began to head toward the elevators, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a young woman with curly, shoulder length black hair getting into a taxi.

To this day, I don’t know if it was her. I ran out of the hotel in in the direction of the cab until the futility of my efforts was clear. I stood outside, it was damp and dreary, with no umbrella, no coat. At that moment, I thought I would never hear from her again. And while that would not be true, it was the case that one night of love would be all we knew. Years later, I would figure out that I was standing exactly where President Reagan had been shot earlier that year.

III.

As I returned to my room, I was met by a member of the hotel staff. He had been sent to deliver an envelope that another guest had left for me. And sure enough, all that she had left me was a note. I opened it immediately of course. It was mostly warm. She told me that the previous night had been wonderful and that I would “always live in her memory.” But the note’s end left no ambiguity: “Don’t try to find me.” As I write this, I still have her letter.

I returned home and was especially miserable in my longinquity. I took my frustration out on a paper about contingent pricing that I was reviewing for the Bell Journal of Economics. I made the grave error of writing a sarcastic report. The editor called me out on it, taking the paper while explicitly telling the author he could ignore my comments (the author went on to thank “a referee” even though there were two of us). I was typing away and keeping an eye on a Clemson-Nebraska football game that was on TV when I was interrupted by a phone call. I answered. The caller never spoke, but I could tell someone was there. I can’t defend it, but somehow I know it was her. She never responded to my pleas and hung up after 30 seconds.

She had told me that she was in my field. I didn’t know if that were true. But she had at least faked it well enough for me to be sure that she was really an economist (although we didn’t talk too much about economics). For years, I looked for her at conferences with no luck. A few years later in Dallas, at a new job, we were hiring and a candidate came in to interview with us. The room grew hot for the split second when I thought it was her. But sadly, it was not.

As the years passed, I thought about her less. There had been no point in standing for tenure at my first job. But I was lucky to get an abbreviated tenure clock at a different research department. But that didn’t work out either. I managed tenure on my third try at a very good liberal arts college. Nowadays, few people get three tries at tenure. I was lucky, their research standards for tenure would soon increase far above what I could meet. When you accept that your career is never going to work out the way you had hoped, you turn you energy to other things. So I stopped presenting, began to mail in my classes (I had previously been been a fair teacher), and I didn’t try very hard to publish. I suppose that I became what we, as grad students, used to sneeringly call deadwood.

It would be almost two decades, long after I had given up searching, before I found out who she really was.

IV.

By the late 1990s, I was largely detached from my job, really I had become detached from the profession as a whole. One day, we received an email from the department head that a prominent economist would be on campus. I will not tell you his name. But if I did, you would all immediately know his work, he is a true star. Ironically, he had been the runner up, behind me, for the job that I had landed fresh out of graduate school. We had actually been finalists at several of the same schools with me coming out on top most of the time. I wonder if he knows that last fact, if so he must find it amusing that he, now a darkhorse Nobel contender, lost out to a flop like me.

I was not supposed to meet him, I am not exactly the faculty member that the school likes to show off (to be honest, everyone wishes I retired long ago. A colleague a few years prior had too many Zimas and said within my earshot that I wa “the biggest mistake the department has ever made”). I was returning to my office from a meeting with my stock broker where we had moved the bulk of my assets to a firm called etoys.com at what he called the “`bargain”’ price of $80 per share. Then it happened we came round the same way. Like lots of academics, he was looking at smaller schools for his own kids. He was with his family to scout colleges.

His wife and I recognized each other immediately. She was still just as beautiful as she was in Washington so long ago. And seeing the daughter, you can imagine my surprise when I saw my own eyes. It is hard to describe what I felt, but I suppose disoriented is the best word I can think of. Nobody said a thing. Indeed, neither the daughter nor husband appeared to take any note of the encounter at all. I saw her tear up. I could only take off my glasses and rub my chin.

A prouder man might have engaged them. But I am not that man. Instead I displayed my typical poltroonery and beat a hasty retreat. I reached my car and just drove for a while, a long while. By the time my afternoon class started, I was 3 hours away. It was a place I knew well. I forgot I had to teach. I had prepared a nice set of transparencies discussing Europe’s impending monetary folly and the absurdity of the Economics profession, only days earlier, awarding its highest honor to its intellectual architect. I was disappointed that the students would not hear me confidently predict that the German Mark would be back by 2005. None of them, however, seemed to care, not one even complained that I forgot to show up.

I did not sleep that night. The next day, I staggered into my office. As was the case long ago, a note- with handwriting so familiar- awaited me.

V.

While driving the previous night, I had decided that I didn’t want to know anything more than I already did, no good could come from it. But I couldn’t resist. When I returned home in the dead of night, I succumbed and tried to find out as much as I could. I remember watching that ship’s steering wheel spinning with a sense of dread each time Netscape searched. I learned some, all based on the husband. They had married unusually young for an academic and had been together for several years by 1981. They had no other children. She seemed to have no independent web presence.

Exhausted, I arrived at my office the next day to find her note:

“please, please understand

I’m in love with another man

And what he couldn’t give me

was the one little thing that you can”

I never contacted either her or the daughter. The unexpected phone call from Ray that I mentioned at the end of Part 3, especially his stunning disclosure, obviously made pursuing a relationship untenable. So I take the situation for what it is, I accept it with a smile. I have seen the daughter once more, briefly. A few years later, it was a rainy night when she came into sight. I saw her boarding a Pan-Am flight to Orlando in the Worcester airport. Since then, I have carried on with my prior pigritude. I check up on her online often, but she has no idea to this day who I am.

I was asked earlier why this ending could be construed as a happy one. Even though I know on an intellectual level that my failures are my own, they had nevertheless generated a great deal of bitterness and resentment towards my peers who accomplished far more than I. But that ended when I saw her again. I never achieved the career everyone expected of me. Nor the family. But I, inadvertently, did achieve something timeless and meaningful. No matter my failures, and even if he finds himself on a stage in Oslo, I take comfort in knowing that I at least cuckolded that guy.

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