The Headmaster's Wife (15 page)

Later she thinks that if she had known this was the last time he would be inside her, she would have climbed right back on top of him in the new room. She would have ripped him apart limb by limb. She would have chewed on him like a wolf.

But at the time they had no way of knowing this, of course, and on the bed in the new room they lay together in comfortable semi-postcoital silence and watched a Celtics game on television, the men running up and down the court, until she fell asleep in the crook of his arm.

A few days later, back on campus, Russell Hurley had his room searched, and under his bed they found an illegal stash of liquor, all kinds of liquor, and this under the bed of a boy who wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of his dream not to work with his hands and so had never so much as sipped from a can of beer.

He knew someone had planted it, and seeing Arthur’s smug smile as the student rep on the discipline committee put it in his head that he might have done it, but Betsy was certain of it, though it was hard for small-town Russell to imagine anyone could be so malignant. The headmaster, Arthur’s father, offered him an out if he admitted the booze was his, but he couldn’t do it. He had too much integrity.

And so Russell Hurley left Lancaster without ever doing the one thing he was brought there to do, wearing the black and orange and shooting long jump shots in front of a packed gymnasium.

He left Lancaster with a long, slow hug for Betsy Pappas, and when she cried and said they would still see each other, he just held her face in his big hands and looked her in the eye, and he knew as well as she did that it would not work, that there was Lancaster and then there was the rest of the world, and once you were on the outside there was no coming back in again.

She starts playing tennis at first on a lark, an invitation that comes from one of the other librarians, who has put together a foursome to take lessons together from the new tennis coach, who is widely considered to be remarkably handsome, though Elizabeth finds something sad in his good looks, in this man in his mid-fifties trying to cobble together a living by coaching high school kids in Vermont and giving lessons to aging female faculty who look forward to that once a week when someone touches them again, even if it is only a strong hand showing them where their elbow should be for a volley.

She also finds something queasy in his demeanor, his awareness of his square-jawed handsomeness and what it does to these aging, doughy, well-bred women.

But the truth is that behind the veneer of all that macho bravado, and the class-conscious sense he has underneath the surface that he has lived a failed life—he confesses to her once that his dream was to be a writer—lives a really good teacher. He knows tennis. And what starts for her as a lark quickly grows into an obsession. And long after her fellow players give up the lessons, she stays hard at them, and not because she wants to fuck the tennis pro—though sometimes, in the shower afterward, she does think about it—but rather, because for the first time in forever she is getting better at something, there is something new to learn, and her life has not yet collapsed into complete stasis at this old school, with her old husband, and her willful son fighting a war thousands of miles away.

And so once a week turns into three lessons a week. Three lessons a week turn into five days of tennis, one day of just hitting without instruction—still at fifty dollars an hour—and free time spent hitting serve after serve, the satisfying thwack of the ball leaving her strings for that square patch of real estate on the other side of the net.

The pro, Todd, spends a solid month just trying to teach her the elegance of a one-handed slice backhand, and at first it feels as impossible to her as learning to play the violin. She cannot ever imagine mastering it, but he tells her just to be patient, keep pulling the racket back and hit through the ball.

And one day they are on the court and it is like a gift, an astonishing gift, for suddenly she pulls the racket back, and the ball returns over the net with the perfect trajectory, low and spinning, skidding on the court when it hits. Then she does it again, and again, and she is no longer thinking about it, just hitting, and Todd on the other side is saying to her, “Yes, that’s it, good hit, just like that, again, oh, good job, Betsy!”

She is so elated by this small victory that she agrees with him that they should definitely celebrate, and so she sends Arthur an e-mail that she will not be at the dining hall and instead finds herself at an out-of-the-way pub with Todd drinking gin and eating burgers and talking tennis.

There is a moment, halfway through her first gin, when she suddenly becomes aware of the oddity of this situation, of Todd, across from her in a T-shirt and jeans, and she realizes it is the first time she has ever seen him in anything outside of the Head tennis sweats he always wears on the court.

She has no business being here, she thinks, for she is fifty-four years old and the wife of the headmaster, and she decides that she will finish this drink and then have Todd take her home. But then the second drink seems like a good idea, and oh, fuck it, let’s have a third, and when he takes her home it is not to the headmaster’s white Colonial, but instead through the basement of old Spencer dorm (looking both ways, hoping not to be spied by a stray student), where he has a small apartment provided by the school.

He is kind enough to keep the lights off, and when she gets over the awful feeling of being naked for the first time in more than thirty years in front of a man who is not Arthur, he fucks her athletically, as if he wants to show her that his prowess is not limited to hitting powerful forehands. She gives in and lets him flip her this way and that, and later it is this she will remember, how he tosses her around, and not how any of it felt, since she completely blanks when confronted with the awesome spectacle of his near-pornographic and quite improbable ability to work through the first fifty pages of the Kama Sutra in less than twenty minutes.

Worse than the sex itself is the fact that immediately afterward she begins to weep.

Todd at first mistakes her convulsions for laughter but then realizes quickly that she is crying and crying inconsolably. He tells her it will be okay, but it doesn’t matter. For the truth is she has no idea why she is crying.

She is not crying because she has betrayed her husband, or even because the sexual act itself has reminded her of all the things she does not like about getting older. She does not cry for her son, who worries the hell out of her with his e-mails from Mosul, saying how scared he is and not to tell anyone that. “Tell everyone I am fine and strong, Mom,” he writes, “especially Dad.”

She cries for reasons she cannot even understand, and this only makes her cry harder. She cannot stop, and Todd is freaked out and keeps asking what he did. She is sobbing too hard to tell him he has not done a damn thing. That this has nothing to do with him.

Elizabeth does not like when Arthur gets in his cups and seems fit to say to perfect strangers that she was the one who was unsure about having children. He presents this information casually, like a conversation one might have about snow tires, and it pisses her off when he does it, but she feels unable to protest. She was ambivalent about it, that part is undeniably true, and it almost killed her, this ambivalence, but it welled up from deep within her, from a place she didn’t fully understand. Of all the things to be ambivalent about! Either you want children or you don’t, she figured, and for a time she imagined that something was wrong with her, deeply wrong with her, that she could be so indecisive about something so important. It was easier, frankly, to be cavalier about God.

She had friends who said that women know when they are done having children, as if it were hardwired and beyond their control. The women who have one child and demand a second, and the women who have two children and suddenly want them to flow like rabbits.

And then there are the women, like her, who don’t know if they even want a kid at all, and with that feeling comes a weird guilt, because what could be more fucked up than not doing what your very body suggests is the one thing you were born to do? It’s like turning your back to the ocean for no other reason than that you dislike beauty.

And so she finds herself, at twenty-five, back at Lancaster, living in a small apartment in the same dorm she lived in as a student, though now with a Wellesley degree, a faculty husband, and a job assisting J.V. field hockey and working the reference desk at Gould Library. She is, in short, what she probably always secretly desired to be: a faculty wife.

And in some ways she has never been happier. It is like reliving the best part of her life, though with money and a car and the freedom to play adults. At night the girls in the dorm check into their apartment—so young, the lot of them; is it possible she was ever that young?—and then she makes martinis for herself and Arthur, and she reads books on the couch while he meticulously grades essays, writing in the margins of the little blue exam books all the students still use.

The campus feels like theirs finally, not like when she was a student and somehow understood she was just a visitor. There is something wonderful, she decides, in the certainty that they will most likely never live anywhere else. Arthur has his sights clearly set on the house where his parents live, and like the scion who goes to work in the mail room, teaching is part of the apprenticeship, though he will not admit this to anyone outside the two of them, not even to his father.

She loves the structure of the school year, how it mirrors the seasons. She loves her job in the library, dressing in pencil skirts and cardigan sweaters and sitting behind the desk, helping the young people carve their way through the voluminous amounts of knowledge in the stacks behind her.

She loves not having to worry about any of the concerns of other newlyweds, cooking and keeping house and paying bills—all of that is taken care of for you at Lancaster. It is as if you had all the trappings of adulthood with none of the responsibility.

And perhaps, deep down, this is why she is resistant to the idea of children. It is a fundamental selfishness, maybe, a realization that a child will change everything, and this state of suspended adolescent animation they are living in will vanish forever.

But around her—all around her, pressing in—one by one the other young faculty wives begin to get pregnant. They are almost biblical in their pregnancies, babies begetting babies, all this fertility like the advent of spring in the verdant hills that rise up and away from the floodplain and the small town with its small school.

At faculty parties on weekends, after the students have gone to bed (or pretend to have gone to bed, more likely), she sits on couches with the women while the men smoke in another room. Other women, she realizes, have this incessant need to put their babies in her arms. And when she looks down at those shriveled little faces, those hooded eyes, she says all the right things, oh, how beautiful and so on, and she coos appropriately and knows her social role, but she can’t help but wish that she were a man—not literally, of course, for she cannot imagine that, but conceptually, certainly, the freedom not to have this responsibility, other than in the most general sense; the freedom to stand around with other men and smoke and drink and talk about politics and sports and not hold a baby, whose weight is pleasant enough, she supposes, but whose visage she finds not beautiful but rather odd, old manish and sad.

What could be wrong with her?

Though part of her knows that her reluctance is ultimately futile. On nights when Arthur rolls into her and wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her to him (his signal that he wants to make love), she still has him put on a condom. Though, afterward, when they lie in the dark and look out the window to the stars above the river, he often says, “When are you going to give me a baby?”

And while this provides the opening for her to tell him about her ambivalence, to try to give it words beyond the nagging thoughts in her head, she does not.

“Soon,” she whispers back, and then after he falls asleep, she considers all the happenstance that led her to this point, back at school, next to her sleeping husband, already a revered teacher of English and destined one day to fill his father’s shoes and become the living embodiment of Lancaster itself.

Maybe, she thinks, it all goes back to 1954, when a boy, a sophomore named Augustus Holt, drowned on a warm spring day when the runoff from the hills swelled the river to twice its normal size.

No one should have been swimming that day, least of all Augustus Holt, who could barely tread water. His father was a wealthy industrialist, the owner of Holt Industries of Pittsburgh, and after Augustus’s death his significant gift to the school in the boy’s name came with a catch: Every Lancaster student would now have to pass a swimming test to graduate.

Growing up in Craftsbury, Elizabeth never became much of a swimmer. There were no pools, only the short season at Caspian Lake, ten miles to the south. Saturdays when they had a family picnic, she was not one of those who swam out to the raft and jumped off it.

She was afraid of water. She had always been afraid of water. It was not a rational fear, she knew, and maybe it was no more her dislike of that murky lake with its reeds that slid against her legs like damp noodles. Maybe it was that her hippie parents never pushed her to do anything she did not want to do, some kind of Waldorf nonsense where you figure it out on your own and decide you want to learn something when it is time.

Regardless, she made it all the way to Lancaster managing to hide this fundamental fact about herself, and even though they explain the swimming requirement to her when she is admitted, and later when she first enrolls, she never for a moment considers they are really serious about it. What? She won’t graduate because she can’t swim the length of a pool? Really? Is this a serious academic position for a serious academic place?

It turns out, of course, that it is.