The Precious One (27 page)

“You should also know,” I went on, “that if I became part of Willow’s family, it wouldn’t stop with me.”

“What do you mean?” asked Caro.

Our eyes met and held.

“I mean—what if we were to crack this thing wide open?” I said. “Invite everyone in.”

Radiance broke through her exhaustion. “Oh, Taisy, that is exactly what I was hoping we would do.”

When we got back to the house, my car was parked in the circle. Ben’s was gone.

E
VER SINCE THAT FIRST
trip to Mr. Insley’s house, I had been checking in with myself several times a day, monitoring how much I loved him, like a nurse checking the vital signs of a patient, and what I found was that the patient was still alive but fading a little more each day, presenting with an increasingly thready pulse, labored breathing, and—oh, this simile is just too morbid! Here it was: I loved him the way you love someone you’ve once loved desperately, and to whom you will be forever grateful for saving you from death by loneliness and for making you feel pretty and smart when you most needed it, and who has a sad, dark house, a dissertation that will never be finished, and a boat that will never see the water. In short, I did not want to sail away with him (a good thing, considering the boat), and I did not want to kiss him anymore ever, but I did want him to be happy, three things I realized I needed to tell him before our relationship went any further. Scratch that. Three things I needed to tell him in order to stop our relationship dead in its tracks. For good. It would be nice to stay on congenial terms with him, too, of course, and even nicer to get the A in English that I rightfully deserved.

I had already tried twice that week. On Monday, I’d stayed after class to ask if we could talk at lunch, and mischievously, he’d said, “No, our next conversation will be at my house over dinner or not at all!,” and when I went to his room at lunchtime, sure enough, he wasn’t there. On Tuesday, he handed back a paper to me with “A word, after class” written at the top, a form of communication he had used before, so I’d stayed, and, as soon as everyone was gone, Luka shooting me a quick backward glance as he walked out, Mr. Insley said, sorrowfully, “Willow, I fear our lunches must come to an end, at least for a while,” words that, not long before, would have slammed down on me like a heel and ground my soul to dust. Now, I felt a rush of light-headed relief that I tried my darnedest to hide.

“Why?” I asked, gravely.

From the inside pocket of his jacket, he slid a folded piece of notebook paper stained with what looked like yellow paint, unfolded it, slowly, and held it open for me to see. I AM WATCHING YOU, it said, in thick black lettering.

“At lunch yesterday, as I was eating in the teachers’ lounge, I found it inside my sandwich. I bit into it, actually.”

Mustard. I was struck by the desire to laugh, but then worry quenched it.

“Did anyone see it?” I asked.

“No,” he said, with a touch of coldness, as though my question were insulting.

“I’m sorry,” I said, reflexively. “Of course not.”

“But I’m afraid this might mean that our anonymous prude is not a student after all. Or that we have more than one prude on our trail.”

“What? Why?”

“My lunch languishes, poor thing, all day in the teachers’ lounge refrigerator, an old, only semi-clean appliance to which the student body has no access.”

“Oh,” I said, somewhat blankly. Oddly, even though I had seen the other messages and been disturbed by the language of them, I had
somehow never fully absorbed that they were the handiwork of a true-blue, individual person, which was stupid of me. Maybe out of sheer denial or because the world of high school was so new and big and baffling to me, I’d instead attributed the messages to a vast, faceless culture of adolescent meanness. Now, it hit me that whoever had sent the notes was real and had possibly not merely seen me with Mr. Insley and thrown out blind, if unsavory, innuendos, but had maybe truly been watching us. And the idea of that person’s being an adult chilled me to the bone.

“Who?” I asked, even though I mostly did not want to know. “Who would do that?”

Mr. Insley shrugged. “As I think I’ve indicated, just as you feel yourself to be an entirely different species from your peers, so am I not cut from the same dull cloth—intellectually and in myriad other ways—as many of my so-called colleagues. They are small and narrow people, and, frankly, they resent me. So it could have been any of them, but if I had to guess, I would say the insufferable Ms. Janine Shay.”

Ms. Shay? Even though I could imagine that she disapproved of Mr. Insley and could even imagine that she’d been keeping an eye on the two of us, I simply could not picture her balancing on a chair to write those colossal black letters on the whiteboard or stuffing a note into a sandwich.

Mr. Insley regarded me with mournful blue eyes. “Alas, my Willow, it feels more and more as though we are each other’s only ballast in a provincial and narrow-minded sea. And, oh how I will miss our lunches!”

“But maybe we could have just one more?” I said, with a sinking heart and a glance at the clock. “I was hoping to talk about something with you. It’s quite important, and there’s no time now. I have to get to class.”

“Can’t be done,” he said, wistfully. “Someone may be watching us even now.”

Startled, I darted a glance at the doorway. Because it was almost
time for the next class, the crowds in the hallway were thinning. People were flying noisily by, but no one was stopping. No face leered around the doorjamb.

He tapped me on the chin and gave me a playful grin, one eyebrow raised. “No, I’m afraid you have no choice but to come to my house for dinner. There’s nothing else to be done!”

“But I don’t see how I can,” I said.

I noticed that the smile stayed on his mouth but disappeared from the rest of his face. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

That night, I thought about writing him a letter, but, somehow, I could not bear the possibility of its existing, lingering—a concrete fact—in the world after our relationship had ended.

So the next day, when Mr. Insley handed back my graded
The Portrait of a Lady
quiz (which, incidentally, I aced), and I saw written at the top: “Tomorrow at 6:00, Chez B.I.,” I stared at the words for a long moment, and then, with a sigh of resignation, folded the paper in two. I nodded to Mr. Insley on the way out the door and threw the quiz into the first hallway trashcan I found.

Now, in my room, I tied my shoes, stood up, and surveyed myself in the mirror. Unlike the day of the drive in the country, I was in full teenager regalia: ponytail; skinny, dark jeans; a cropped, fitted striped sweater with a long tank top underneath; and—heaven help me—sneakers of a variety called Chuck Taylor that I’d purchased during a shopping trip with Muddy the evening before. I’d planned on the red version, but, at the eleventh hour, my heart failed me, and I bought dark blue, low tops, not high. Even so, I hardly recognized myself. The whole kit and kaboodle screamed, as it was meant to,
I am a callow sixteen-year-old, practically a babe in arms, and much too young for a thirty-year-old man in battered wingtips and raveled tweed
. I can’t say I hated the way I looked, which took me off guard. As I left my room, there was even a new, youthful spring in my step; I damned near skipped.

My father was in his room, where he’d been spending more time lately, recovering from the attack of pericarditis, and as luck would
have it, my mother was attending a meeting of the local Artists Guild, so I left without telling a soul where I was going, a first for me. Muddy’s meeting included dinner and would take several hours, by which time I planned to be safely home and free as a sneaker-shod bird. I had expected to have a full-blown case of the butterflies, but I was cool as a cucumber as I zipped my cell phone into the pocket of my parka, slipped out the door, and ran lightly down my long driveway to the street, where the cab I’d called (another first!) was waiting.

I hit a weak moment when Mr. Insley opened his wretched front door. His smile was so guileless and hopeful, and he didn’t throw himself upon me and wrestle me into an embrace, but merely leaned over and planted a comradely kiss on my cheek.

“Darling girl, how lovely you look!” he said.

I stepped inside. His house looked better this time, still dim, but less cluttered and with lighted candles set here and there. I could see firelight doing a golden dance on the living room walls, and the house smelled golden as well, like apples and cloves and cinnamon. Mr. Insley started to help me off with my coat, but I remembered the cell phone in my pocket and suddenly felt that I did not want it too far out of my reach. I gave an ostentatious shiver.

“I’ll keep it on for a while, if you don’t mind. I’m one of those people who takes a ridiculously long time to warm up.”

He smiled. “It comes from being so slender,” he said. “We will do our best to fatten you up tonight, but first, let me give you some mulled cider. Nothing warms in quite the same way.”

“That must be what smells good,” I said.

“Smells and is,” he said, ladling some into a cut glass mug. For a single man with a moth-eaten carpet runner, Mr. Insley had some very nice crockery.

“What a pretty glass,” I remarked.

“It was my grandmother’s,” he said. I wondered if he meant the grandmother who owned the lake house in New Jersey, but the possibility of her being dead and passing down her glassware made me so
sad that I couldn’t even ask. How Mr. Insley had cherished his summers at that house! I understood right then that this was going to be harder than I thought. Sitting in your room, planning how you would break it off—cleanly, surgically—with a person was a very different thing from his standing before you, with his carefully ironed shirt, his childhood stories, the special drink he’d made, his pretty glass mugs from his possibly dead and beloved grandmother. It could break your heart: people becoming, in the blink of an eye, so dreadfully human.

Which is maybe why, when Mr. Insley came up behind me and tugged my hair band off, releasing my ponytail, I only laughed, and maybe also why we got through all of dinner without my having broached the subject of the breakup. We ate at a wooden table set up at one end of the living room, which was warm from the fire, too warm, really. I took off my parka and slipped it onto the back of my chair.

Mr. Insley brought the soup first. It was delicious, butternut with mushrooms, and it took a moment for me to realize that it was the same soup my mother always got from the gourmet grocery. As it would turn out, I would recognize all the dishes as having come from the same store, while Mr. Insley rambled on about how he’d made them himself, even to the hand-ground spices. Perhaps because I was already softened up by the grandmother mugs, I wasn’t put off by these lies. I was touched.

It wasn’t until I took the first sip of my cider, which had been too hot for me to drink when he’d handed it to me (I loathe drinks that scald my mouth), that I felt the first tremor of alarm because even though the cider had cooled to lukewarm, it burned going down my throat. At home, I had been allowed to have wine at fancy dinners (little more than a splash, barely one swallow’s worth) since I was eleven, so I recognized the burn. Not wine, but definitely alcohol. My English teacher, serving me liquor. For a mad instant, I considered propping my foot on the table to show him my sneaker, but instead, I set the glass down several inches from my plate and avoided it like the plague.

During dinner, Mr. Insley talked about Rossetti again, about the
women who had modeled for his paintings, like Alexa Wilding and Elizabeth Siddal, ethereal beauties who had inspired him and some of the other painters of his set, as well. He got so excited about the topic that midway through his arugula salad, he set down his fork.

“Wouldn’t you like to see them?” he asked, his eyes like blue flames. “Won’t you come look?”

“The muses, you mean?”

“Yes!”

I didn’t even know what he meant, but his bubble was so big and shimmery that I couldn’t stand to burst it. I should have said no. I really should have.

“Um, okay,” I said.

Before I knew it, he had me by the hand, tugging me with childlike excitement, up the stairs, where I most assuredly did not want to go. Upstairs meant bedrooms; bedrooms meant beds, one of which he had imagined me in, me and my milky shoulders. It had been part of my plan to not, under any circumstances go upstairs, but short of tearing my hand from his and running away, I could do nothing but grimly go.

The room he led me into, though, harbored no beds whatsoever, and I nearly melted with relief. It was his office. One wall was lined with shelves, which were, in turn, lined with books, and in the center of the room was a dark wood table, more a kitchen table than a desk, piled with books, notebooks, a silvery laptop that looked new, a big printer that looked old. He flipped the wall switch, and light flooded the room. My eyes went straight to the books, but Mr. Insley turned me around to behold a wall plastered with pictures, some of them prints, like you’d get at an art museum, some of them looking suspiciously like pages of books. I recognized a few of them in a vague way and understood that they must be Pre-Raphaelite paintings, although I hadn’t known to call them that before now. I stood there, letting it all sink in: picture upon picture of pale-faced, big-eyed women with clouds of coppery hair. Unthinkingly, I reached up and took hold of a hank of my own.

Mr. Insley was pointing to different pictures, excitedly naming the
artist, the painting, the muse, but I was hardly listening because I’d caught sight of one low on the wall that made my heart stop: a woman floating on a pond, surrounded by flowers, a tumult of green on every side, her hands open, her face to the sky. My very own dream. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I’d had a premonition of this moment, but somehow all Mr. Insley’s talk of the Pre-Raphaelites way back when must have jarred the painting loose inside my mind—a full-color memory I hadn’t even known I possessed—and set it adrift in my dreams. I handed over a few marveling seconds to the mysteries of the subconscious, before I drew closer to the picture and crouched before it.

“Ah,” said Mr. Insley. “That one’s Lizzie Siddal. Isn’t she ravishing?”

Ravishing?

“She looks—dead,” I said.

Mr. Insley chuckled. “Well, it is a depiction of Ophelia, although I reckon she’s supposed to be alive in it. She wasn’t actually dead until her skirts dragged her under, ‘down to muddy death.’ Remember?”