The Headmaster's Wife (4 page)

“Good,” I say, though secretly this dismays me. Right now I want things from her to worry about.

She goes to her pocketbook and, to my great surprise, pulls out a pack of cigarettes.

“You smoke?” I say incredulously, and the boundaries between us return for a moment, as I am the headmaster and she is the student.

She laughs again. “Sometimes,” she says. So mature, I think. Look at her. She pads across the room to the window again and lights her cigarette, exhales into the night.

“These are all No Smoking rooms,” I say.

She looks back at me. She impresses again. “Are we suddenly obeying the rules?”

I feel old and silly. I look down at my hairy chest, my slight gut—not bad for a man of my age—and then to my tired cock. “No,” I say. “No rules tonight.”

Betsy leans out the window. Her ass is in the air, and I feel a stirring again. She turns back toward me. She says, “I just wanted to check the box, you know.”

“Check the box?”

“The one next to ‘older man.’”

I realize I have underestimated her again. The knock comes to the door, and she drops her cigarette out the window and hustles to the bathroom. Closes the door behind her. I rise and put on a terrycloth robe, and Room Service brings in a bottle of wine in a bucket. The man asks me if he should open it. I nod. He does. There are two glasses. I can see him taking in the smell of smoke and the lower-note, but still undeniable, smell of our sex. I sign, and he leaves.

I pour two glasses of wine. Betsy returns from the bathroom, the closing door apparently her cue. A towel is wrapped around her. All sense of propriety has gone out the window, and I hand her a glass of wine. She takes it from me and drinks.

I look at the clock. It reads ten past eleven. At home I would be in bed now, reading, and it would be past lights-out for Betsy. As if reading my mind, she says, “It’s early.”

She jumps onto the bed. I join her. There is nothing to say. I turn on the television, and we sit together drinking wine and watching a movie on HBO. I pay no attention to it. She lies next to me, and the towel falls from her breasts, the rich ripeness of her youth spilling out onto the sheets. Later we make love again, and this time it is different, the lights off, and I am filled with a deep urgency. She is on all fours, and I look over her to the windows and the refracted light of the city. I hold her shoulders in my hands and feel the bones moving quietly underneath her skin.

He stops talking as another man comes into the room. The man is African-American and tall and leans down toward the man who does all the talking and whispers something inaudible in his ear. The man who does all the talking nods, and then the African-American man backs out of the room.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No, continue. Unless you want a break. You can have one, you know.”

“What was that about?”

“What?”

“The man who came in. What did he tell you?”

“He confirmed your identity.”

“My identity?”

“That an Arthur Winthrop who fits your general description was the headmaster at the Lancaster School in Vermont.”

“Was that in doubt?”

“Routine,” the man says. “We have to check these things out. You understand.”

“One part you have wrong. You said
was
the headmaster. I
am
the headmaster.”

“Of course. Just a figure of speech.”

“Not a figure of speech. It was the wrong tense.”

“My apologies,” the man says, and he smiles. “Forgive me. And please, continue.”

“Can I have more coffee?”

“Sure.”

“And a cigarette?”

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Sometimes I do.”

“It’s a public building, but if you don’t tell anyone, I think we can make an exception.”

The man who doesn’t talk gets up and leaves the room. “Should I wait for him to come back?”

“No, you can continue. He’ll get your coffee and a smoke.”

“Thank you.”

The next morning, under steely skies, I drop her off at the front of her dorm and return home and take a long hot shower before making way across the road to my office. The campus feels different to me somehow. I can’t pinpoint why, but it feels smaller maybe, the buildings closing in on themselves. It is more than the usual feeling I get when I return from Boston or New York. Something has changed, but I do not know what.

It is only later, when I am back in the swing of my work—meetings and phone calls and the things one does to run an independent school—that it occurs to me what it is. In Boston, Betsy and I could walk the streets together, share a hotel room, make love without interruption. Now we are in our familiar roles again, and any interaction we have is predetermined. I cannot just see her. She cannot come to me. We have to pretend to be strangers after we have learned to know each other. I look for her that night at dinner. I am filled with longing. Students at my table talk around me, and Elizabeth listens patiently to them, but I wait with anticipation every time the swinging door from the kitchen opens. I want to see her come out with a tray in her hand, catch her eye as she looks over at me. But she is not in the dining hall. I am certain of it. Just like class, you need an excuse to be absent from dinner. I have half a mind to find one of her dorm parents and see what the story is, though I do not want to call more attention to her than I should. It would be most unusual for the headmaster to inquire about the welfare of a particular student only because she was not at dinner.

As the evening grows later, I find myself in a state of profound agitation. Elizabeth is out somewhere, and I have the house to myself. I nurse a scotch and pace in my office and spend some time peering out the window like a crazy person. Betsy’s absence has unnerved me. In my mind I replay all the things she said to me during the magic of the previous night. Was there anything in those words to suggest she might do something rash and let someone know the truth about us?

During the study hall hours, I head out across the soccer fields. The moon is up and hangs low and fat over the river. Between the brick dorms I creep up on her window, but this time I am thwarted. The shade is pulled tightly down, as if she has anticipated my visit and does not want to see me.

I linger outside for a few minutes. I am confused. I try to see in through that tiny margin that exists between shade and glass, but I can make out nothing. I return home defeated.

And in the middle of the night something most curious happens. I am in my bed unable to sleep. The moonlight comes through the window and paints a fat rectangle on the hardwood floor. My thoughts are racing with images of Betsy—her touch, the feel of her beneath my coarse, wrinkled hands. I panic about all I could lose should she choose to reveal what exists between us. And like a schoolboy, I also go to thoughts of jealousy. What if I bored her? What if she was disappointed? I think of her saying she wanted to check the box. Perhaps she has expectations, some kind of cliché, of how an older man might perform. An idea born of films or books and one that, I think, is fundamentally unfair. What if she discovered that, when you come right down to it, we are all just boys? Clumsy and stupid underneath a cultured veneer developed over decades of careful living?

I am lying in bed turning all this over in my mind when I hear footfalls in the hallway. Elizabeth. I open the door to my bedroom. The bathroom door is closed, but yellow light streams out from underneath it. I have an urge to confess, to tell Elizabeth everything, though I know this makes no sense. Instead I realize that the urge I have is simply to talk, to hear my own voice in the darkness, and so I go to the door and say, Elizabeth?

Whatever response she has is muffled, and I realize then she is sitting in the tub, as she does sometimes when she cannot sleep. So I begin to talk. And what I say surprises me. You know how the middle of the night can open you up sometimes? How it can make wounds appear seemingly out of nowhere?

And so, before I know it, I have launched into a passionate speech to the door, and to where Elizabeth lies soaking in her bath. I tell her that I am not proud of how I have been, that I know I have been distant, and then I am speaking all kinds of words of love, words I didn’t know I still had in me. I tell her I have loved her longer than anything else on this earth. Where did this come from? Welling up inside me, perhaps, from unrequited guilt?

And when I finish I am silent. I wait for her to speak. A moment goes by, and then another. Finally I call out her name, and when she does not respond, I slowly open the door. The bathtub is empty. There is no humidity in the air that you get from a recent bath, no moisture on the windows or the mirror. I have been opening my heart to an empty room.

I do not see Betsy Pappas again until my Russian literature class meets. My heart is practically in my throat during the walk from my office to the Shephard Hall academic building. As it turns out, she is in front of the building when I approach. It is an unseasonably warm day for early October, and she wears a skirt that flirts with the dress code for length. I cannot help but wonder if her clothing is a response to our dalliance. Does she think she is now allowed to take liberties?

She is in a pack of students, another girl and two boys, and one of the boys, Russell Hurley, a postgraduate we brought in solely for his ability to put a basketball through a hoop, appears to be holding court. As I walk toward them, I see the way she looks up at Russell, a tall, good-looking kid, and how she laughs at whatever it is he has just said. It’s a flirty laugh, her head kicking back a little, her fingers once again running those threads of hair behind her ears. She is exhibiting a newfound confidence, and I find this disconcerting.

If my life were a film, this would be happening in slow motion. I walk by them to the entrance of the building, staring over at her. Her head moves slowly up, her eyes stray reluctantly from Russell’s chiseled face. Her gaze catches my own, and I smile. She is exactly as I have imagined in these days since I last saw her. I do not notice the other kids around her. She looks quickly away, and my heart sinks a little.

In the classroom she is the last one in. Everyone else is seated when she takes her customary spot in the front. She looks down at her book and not at me when I begin to talk. We are reading Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot,
and it is hard to focus. I ask the usual questions—the Christ metaphors and so on—and Betsy seems curiously disengaged. In my mind I keep going back to the feel of her underneath me, my bones on her bones, and then I flash to the moment before we came into this building, her staring up at basketball star Russell, and I suddenly have the urge to punish her.

I can be quite pedantic sometimes. It is a tendency I try to repress in myself. Lancaster students are smart and ambitious, and in the classroom there is seldom a reason to cold-call on any of the students. But today I call on Betsy, posing a withering question, but she fends it off rather nicely, so I come right back at her with a more challenging one. I have a sense of the class moving forward in their chairs. She stumbles a little, and I pounce. It is not a fair fight, and the class seems to sense this. I am overly combative, and at one point, while I am ranting at her, I see a look in her eyes like glowing hate. I back off, and the class settles down. We make it through the remainder of the discussion, and on a whim I assign a paper not on the syllabus. There is an audible groan, and I smile broadly.

“Three to five pages,” I say. “Due next Monday.”

The students all stand up. “Betsy,” I say. “Wait.”

She stops and turns to face me. I point at the departing students, and she honors me by waiting until we are alone to say, “What do you want?”

Still, she says it a bit loudly for my taste, and for a moment I do not say anything. “When I can see you?”

“In class three times a week,” she says.

I smile. “I am sorry about that,” I say, referring to my earlier grilling of her. “Been a long few days.”

“Wasn’t very nice.”

“I know. My apologies. You are absolutely right.”

She softens a bit. I can see it in her green eyes, the anger receding. She is a tricky one, this Betsy. Different from any other girl I have known, and yet I feel somehow that I have known her forever.

“This isn’t a good idea, you know,” she says.

“Oh, it’s a perfectly good idea,” I say. “We need to be … discreet.”

“I’m late for history,” she says.

“Let me give you my personal e-mail,” I tell her. “You can let me know. We’ll sneak out or something.” It embarrasses me to say this last part, but I am just another schoolboy here, searching for the right language.

“Later, okay?” she says, and just like that she is gone.

That night I drink way too much. Lancaster has always given me the freedom to live my life, you see, but suddenly it feels like a prison. My heart is open to all possibilities, but not all possibilities are available to me. I seal myself from Elizabeth, who now and again I hear in her room readying herself for bed. And Betsy I cannot reach.

That Wednesday is an away day for sports, all the teams at Groton. This is normally a day when I take advantage of a campus largely devoid of students to catch up on development work and many of the other duties that fall on a head of school. But today I decide to make the trip and I drive myself down to Massachusetts. I cut off any surprise Mrs. LaForge may feel about this impulsive decision by explaining that I have just gotten word that a parent I want to meet is planning to attend the boys’ soccer game. Old Boston money, Mrs. LaForge, I say, and there is nothing else I need to tell her. In truth, this is entirely plausible and why I have traveled in the past.

I have no interest in boys’ soccer. It is girls’ field hockey I come to watch. The game itself is rather silly—girls with sticks trying to give this hard ball some direction but mostly flailing at it, and now and again a semblance of something that looks orchestrated emerges—but on this warm Wednesday in the fall, with the backdrop of the brick buildings and the woods beyond them, it is a pleasure to watch. Girls in their black skirts and high socks and tight white shirts moving effortlessly on a field so richly green it looks painted.