The Headmaster's Wife (14 page)

“Did you?”

“No,” he says. “I swear. No. I wouldn’t do that.”

And the funny thing is that part of her hopes he did. No girl wants to be a slut, but part of her wants these boys to know, wants other girls to know, that she is a girl who has graduated. That she sleeps with boys. That she will sleep with boys.

Maybe it is Arthur talking about going to Yale, ignoring the present for the uncertain future—or maybe it is the sense she has that he has spilled the truth about the two of them—but walking around that campus as fall drifts toward winter, she is aware of eyes on her, and one set of eyes in particular.

Russell Hurley is a postgrad, and everyone knows who he is. He is hard to miss at almost six foot six, with a thick head of brown hair. In some ways he is an anomaly at this old school, for he is not celebrated for the usual things that one is celebrated for, money and connections or academic accomplishment. Instead, Russell is, like her, a scholarship student, though whereas Elizabeth, Betsy, is here because she is smart, Russell is here for the narrower and yet more elevated ability to throw a basketball through a hoop.

He is charmingly unrefined. He appears to own one tie. His clothes are rumpled but not in that classic, intentionally preppy sense. His pants are never pressed. But he is tall and good-looking, and in her math class she finds herself staring at him, and sometimes he looks back at her, and she knows he is aware of her and hopes it is not just because of whatever Arthur may have told his friends about her.

One afternoon she finds herself in the student union, part of a group of friends, and Russell joins them, and there is something about the way the other girls are drawn to him, the boys, too, and it is not just his status as the rarefied athletic god to grace the Lancaster campus, but instead because he has that nameless magnetism that certain people have, an ease with themselves that draws other people like a moth to a light. Russell is telling a story, and Betsy sees how the other girls laugh, and she finds herself laughing reflexively, and when she does, she sees that he is smiling at her and catching her eye.

Afterward, she is walking up the stairs and toward the outside and the wan November sun when she notices he is coming up behind her, and determined not to turn around, she keeps walking, hoping he will catch up to her, and he does, just in time to open the door for her, and together they move outside, and before they go their different ways to their dorms to get ready for practice, they stop in the quad and talk. She can see in his eyes the same look she saw in Arthur’s, a look she is beginning to recognize as desire, and it confirms for her what she suspected downstairs in the student union, when he seemed to catch her eye more than the others.

And she is drawn to this. It pleases her to think that she has become a girl to be desired.

That week, she begins to avoid Arthur. He comes to her dorm window at night, and she opens it and tells him first she is not feeling well and then that she has just too much work to come out. The first time, he is okay if disappointed, but by the end of the week she can see his anxiety and knows she has to do this. She leads him to the river this time, away from the soccer field and other couples. The stars are out and arc away above them and beyond the horizon.

They sit down on the bank of the river. The water in front of them is inky and dark, and beyond it they can see the fallow fields stretching into shadow.

This is the first time she has ever had a boyfriend and the first time she has ever had to break up with a boyfriend, and she has the obvious challenge of trying to make him feel good about himself and at the same time to be clear that it is over.

She tells him all the things she can think of, about how next year he will go to Yale anyway and she will not; how she just needs some space right now; that her studies have to take priority and she does not have the time. In other words, it is has everything to do with her and nothing to do with him, and certainly nothing to do with long-limbed Russell Hurley and his wonderful, open smile.

It goes badly. He cries. She has not anticipated this, his crying, and she hates him for it, since he looks shitty and pathetic sobbing into his scarf amid the burble of the flowing river. For a while she turns away from him and is grateful for the dark so she only has to listen to him snivel and choke on his cries. She looks upriver and imagines the falls she knows are up there but that she cannot hear, and to relieve herself from his crying she thinks about jumping under the falls and letting the torrent of water pick her up and send her tumbling over and over and away.

Looking back through the prism of time, she sees Russell Hurley take on much greater significance in her life than she supposes he should for the short span of time he was part of it. She might even say he was the great love of her life if anyone ever asked her the question, since it is the kind of question she figures someone asks you eventually, though no one ever has.

Leading into the winter of 1973, the only thing that tempers the beauty of the thing she and Russell Hurley have is the specter of Arthur, Arthur who seems to be everywhere all of a sudden. Coming out of class, she finds him there, moving silently by her, determined not to show her he cares, and one night, while she is walking with Russell across the fields she once walked with Arthur, he appears like an apparition out of the dark, and she is startled he is upon them, and Russell, with the ease that certain large men seem to have, gives Arthur a hearty hello, and, when he does not respond, turns to her and says, “Don’t worry about him, okay?”

And mostly she does not, for she is too busy falling for Russell Hurley. The relationship, unlike with Arthur, is not immediately sexual. He does not push her, and she likes how slow he is going, like some crazy long-drawn-out tease, and at night they sometimes just kiss for twenty minutes or so, and she likes the feel of his strong, long body against hers and the way he sometimes opens his big peacoat and brings her inside it like it’s a blanket and just holds her to him.

She likes how small she feels next to his bulk. She’s never thought of herself as big, though she considers herself awkward and clumsy, but in his arms it’s as if the physical grace that promises to make him the greatest basketball player in the history of Lancaster has somehow rubbed off on her.

What she likes most, though, is that there is no bullshit between them. Russell doesn’t try to impress her or embellish his life. He tells her it kind of sucks at home, and it kind of sucks at home for her, too, though she has never heard anyone else at Lancaster admit such a thing.

When she imagines the life of a Lancaster student when not in Vermont, she pictures summers on islands, holidays in the city, trips to Paris. Russell is not much different from many of the boys she knew back in Craftsbury, and while part of her wants to run from that, there is something entirely disarming about his genuineness. And not only does he speak truthfully about where he came from and why he is here, but he also wants to know everything about her. She finds herself talking much more than she is used to. In fact, she tries to tell herself to shut up but she cannot, for he is so passionate about listening to her.

“I want to know everything about you. I mean everything,” he says one time when they are sitting down among the wrestling mats in the gym where they have gone to squirrel away and make out before dinner.

“Everything?” she says.

“I don’t want us to have secrets. I want to know all of it. All the embarrassing shit. The things you hate about yourself. The things you love. Your most secret fantasies. The stuff you would never, ever dream of telling anyone else.”

“Ha! No way,” she says.

“I’m serious. And I’ll do the same. Nothing is sacred. Everything out in the open.”

“Then tell me something about you that no one knows.”

“I’m a virgin,” he says.

She smacks him. “Bullshit.”

“Really.”

“Wow. You’re not kidding.”

He shakes his head. “Nope, never done it.”

“I would have thought, you know, big basketball star and all.”

Russell smiles and shrugs. “Not that I couldn’t have. I just haven’t.”

“Wow,” she says. “Well, I think it’s cool.”

“My turn. Tell me something about you that no one knows.”

She looks across the darkened room and says the first thing that comes to her mind and does not filter it. “This is the only time I have ever been happy.”

“When?”

“Right now.”

“You mean this minute?”

“Yes. This very minute. This second. Right now.”

“Why?”

“Why am I so happy right now? Or why is this the only time I have ever been happy?”

“Both.”

She smiles. “Well, I am happy right now because the only thing I am thinking about is right now. I mean, I’m right here, you know what I mean?”

“You mean sometimes you’re not?”

“I mean sometimes, I don’t know, I get so caught up it’s like I can’t catch my breath. And when you do that you’re not really living. Everything is so … so heavy, I guess. Like where I am going to go college? Even you—I mean, everyone here seems to know what they are doing. I’m just here, you know? It’s all future, and if it’s not the future, it’s the past. My family. My mom and dad and little sister. What are they doing? All of that shit. But being here with you it’s like it’s just you and me and nothing else. That sounds weird, I know.”

“No, no, it doesn’t.”

“You’re sweet.”

“So why never happy before?”

“For the same reason.”

“What reason?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“You and me. Don’t make me say it; you know what I mean.”

It is his turn to laugh. She looks away, and he laughs that big tall-man laugh, the one that starts low in his belly and moves up through his body. It is a laugh she loves, though now it embarrasses her, and she looks away at the moment he sweeps his arm around her and says, “You want me to say it?”

She turns toward him. “Yes.”

“I love you,” he says, and she leans into his shoulder, where his skin is warm and clean, and places her face against it and she softly bites his neck. He pulls back and laughs again.

“Hey,” he says. “No biting.”

“Maybe I want to.”

“I love you,” he says again, and this time it sinks in, more definite than her teeth on his skin, makes an impression even, one that will last, and she allows herself the tiniest of moments to appreciate that this is the second time a boy has said this to her in the past month, though now it feels different. It is not just words, not just the silly words of teenagers, but it’s real somehow, realer and bigger than she can imagine, bigger than their bullshit lives and this small room with its wrestling mats piled high everywhere. And when she goes to reciprocate, it is not the struggle for authenticity she imagines, but rather, it flows off her tongue, and she means it as much as she is capable of meaning anything at this point in her life when she is still learning how to molt into adulthood.

“I love you,” she says.

He turns his head toward hers, and for a while they kiss, until they realize they are late for dinner. Ten minutes later, walking into the broad dining hall with its high windows and its chandeliers—to eat, paradoxically, fried chicken sandwiches or whatever is planned for that evening—she likes the fact that they are late, that they make an entrance, that the eyes of the school absorb the two of them as they rush in with the winter behind them and their hair tousled. She likes the clear obviousness of their affection. There is nothing to hide.

That Saturday night, they both sign out for home and separately leave campus, and in the small strip mall parking lot out of town they hop the bus and ride together to Burlington. A light snow falls, and they sit in the back of the bus and look out the windows and she leans into him, and they watch the snowfall stick to the trees on the sides of the highway.

They reach Burlington at dusk, and it is snowing heavily now, and the wind coming off the lake is fierce, but they do not care. He takes her hand as they walk down Church Street, and at a coffee shop they drink milkshakes and eat hamburgers and there is something nice about this, she thinks, for he is so easy for her to be with, different from Arthur, nothing enigmatic about him, just straightforward and as wholesome as the chocolate shakes they slurp with their straws and laugh about, looking across at each other, and then out to the street, where college kids and others move quickly and covered against the snowy cold.

They rent a room at a cheap motel on the waterfront. Russell pays the bill up front and in cash, counting the ones out carefully and without pretension. Upstairs he seems unsure what to do, and thankfully the bed actually has a slot to put quarters in to make it rock, and this is both puzzling and hilarious, and it breaks the ice for both of them when they lie on it and he says, “Does anyone actually like this?” as the whole bed quakes with epileptic fervor.

For a while they just kiss, and outside the snow muffles the sound of the cars moving down Battery Street. He asks if they can turn out the lights. She rises and flicks the switch. Back on the bed, she likes how slow he takes it, finally unbuttoning her shirt and stopping so she can help with the bra, and when later she takes him out, she is stunned at how big he is compared to Arthur, which shouldn’t be a surprise, because he is a giant relative to slight, thin Arthur, and when she slowly lowers herself onto him, she looks in the half dark toward his face, and he smiles right at her, and she smiles back, and then she quickens her movements, and a moment later the entire bed breaks.

It crashes to the floor with what sounds like a tremendous crash. They fall apart from each other, letting out peals of laughter that start slowly and build to near hysteria, and then someone is pounding on the door, and Russell stands up and he is still erect, and she laughs and says, “What are you thinking? You can’t answer it.”

She wraps the sheet around herself and gets the door. It is the hotel manager, summoned by the crash, and she explains that they were not doing anything, it just broke, and in the end, he gets them a different room, but the spell is more than broken.