The Weight of Water (32 page)

Much appeared to have happened before the camera in the unseen hand focused on the quartet. One saw the girl (always
the girl
in Mike’s eyes) turning (twirling, it seemed to be) away from a tall, slender boy who still had his jeans on, and toward
a somewhat shorter, more solidly built naked young man, who caught the young girl and bent to suck on her right nipple. At
that point in the tape, no faces were visible, doubtless a deliberate edit on the part of the person behind the camera. Also,
at that moment in time, Mike, who was then headmaster of Avery Academy, did not recognize the setting as a dorm room, though
he would soon do so. The shorter boy then turned her to face the first boy, who by then was unbuckling his belt, his jeans
sliding off in one go, as if they were cartoon pants, too big for the boy’s slender hips. The camera panned jerkily, instantly
causing in Mike the beginnings of motion sickness, to a narrow dorm bed on which a third boy, entirely naked and appearing
to be slightly older than the other two boys, lay stroking himself. And Mike remembered, among other images he wished he could
excise from his brain, the truly impressive length of the young man’s empurpled penis and the concentrated tautness of the
muscles of the boy’s chest and arms. The camera slid back to the center of the room, producing a second dip and rise in Mike’s
stomach, to the two standing boys and the now kneeling girl.

It was at this point in the tape that Mike realized there was sound attached, for he heard a kind of exaggerated groaning
from the side of the room where the bed was, as well as hard-pounding music (though the latter seemed to be, for some reason,
muted). Meanwhile, the tall boy with the slender shoulders was holding the blond head of the girl to his crotch. She appeared
to know what to do — even to have, at some point prior to the event,
practiced
what to do — for Mike couldn’t help but notice a certain expertise, a way of drawing the standing boy’s engorged penis toward
her so that it seemed she might painfully stretch it before gently swooping forward and seeming to swallow it whole. The slender
boy came with an explosive adolescent sound, as if taken by surprise. The cameraman or ? woman (it was difficult to picture
a girl behind the camera) swung the lens up to capture the boy’s face, which, with a start, Mike Bordwin recognized. He had
assumed, when Kasia had solemnly handed him the tape just an hour earlier, saying to him in an extremely sober tone,
I think you should take a look at this,
that the tape was simply confiscated pornography (not that the tape
wasn’t
pornographic) — something a dorm parent might have dealt with. The idea that there would be recognizable people attached
to the action — students he had seen in hallways, in the cafeteria, and on the basketball court — did not really occur to
him until he saw the face of the boy, contorted as it was in a paroxysm of pleasure and therefore somewhat grotesque to the
outside observer. He thought,
Rob,
and
It can’t be
. The Rob he had known was a polite, hardworking student who also happened to be an outstanding forward on the basketball
team. And was that how Mike had seen his students, he wondered then, even as he was observing the moment of coming on Rob’s
face, as
excellent student
or
promising actor
or
pretentious brownnoser
or
good arm?
Because it was perfectly apparent that such descriptive tags were entirely inadequate. The Rob whom Mike had known seemed
to be but an embryo of the full-fledged sexual being on the tape. There was a kind of seizure then in Mike’s chest as he suddenly,
from different parts of his brain, received alarming and unwanted bits of information, not unlike an air traffic controller
watching several blips on his radar screen inexplicably about to collide. The girl hardly seemed to come up for air when she
turned to the other standing boy, whose face had not been visible during the first pan but which now clearly was, jolting
the headmaster and causing him to cry out the name of the boy—
Silas
— and to emit a groan of his own, entirely unsexual. Silas and the girl lay down on the floor with Silas on top and went
at it in an old-fashioned though frenetic way, the girl’s body thudding lightly onto what was clearly now a dormitory floor,
dotted with a half-dozen beer cans. Mike closed his eyes, not wanting to watch this particular boy have his own paroxysmal
seizure. When he opened them again, the camera was on the face of the girl, who was either experiencing the heights of pleasure
or giving an excellent imitation of same. It was then that he saw the girl was very young — very,
very
young: the number
fourteen
floated through his brain — though he didn’t at that time know her name. It was not unusual for the headmaster not to know
all of the students by name, particularly the underclassmen who hadn’t yet distinguished themselves, which Mike was pretty
certain she had not. He suddenly wondered how many other persons — faculty or students — had watched this performance on the
tape, this particular worry marking perhaps the worst moment of his life to date (though far worse was yet to come).

Groping for the camera, he found and pressed the
pause
button. He was on his knees in his empty house, his breath tight, causing him to put his hand to his chest as if an angina
attack might be coming. That any number of people might already have seen the tape was creating in Mike what felt like a temporary
heart stoppage but what was really a temporary brain stoppage, his neurons refusing to fire, or whatever they did —
connect
— because he couldn’t process another thought, the last having been too awful to contemplate, with its attendant images segueing
into the words
police
and
rape
and
alcohol
and
press,
none of which any headmaster wanted in any sequence in any sentence. It seemed important then to focus on the girl to determine
how willing a participant she had been in this… this
thing
that he was witnessing. Since he didn’t have the heart to rewind and review what had gone before, he poked
play,
wishing he could slow down the action, not so that he could enjoy it more — Lord, no—but so that his whole being could catch
up to what was inevitably going to be a difficult future. To ease into it, so to speak.

The tape started again with what felt like a snap, once more zooming in on the girl’s face. Mike saw, to his dismay, that
no matter how experienced she had seemed earlier (and also seemed now, in her fairly convincing expression of ecstasy), she
was, in fact, as he had suspected, very young indeed. A freshman, there could be no doubt about it. He thought he could almost
retrieve the face and body in a uniform — field hockey? Soccer? JV? thirds? — and he was certain that she was a boarder, not
a day student like Silas, who seemed to have collapsed upon the girl, who was smiling now, actually smiling.
Is this good or bad?
Mike wondered.

There seemed to be a great deal of chaos. Perhaps the unseen hand had lowered the camera for a moment. Mike narrowed his eyes
to keep the nausea at bay while the lens momentarily came to rest on the perfectly innocent corner of a desk leg, with a boy’s
dirty white sneaker, its laces untied, leaning against it. Mike felt an ache in his throat at the sheer innocence of that
image, since it seemed to represent, at that moment, a universe of loss. In the background, there were sounds — none of them
very articulate. Mike was fairly certain he heard
Hey
and
Go for it
and
Your turn
(and not necessarily in that order), and then the lens, with a sudden, wild swoop, settled upon the body of the third boy.
(
Boy
, Mike thought,
isn’t at all accurate in this case.
There was a subtle moment in time when boys turned into men, and it had nothing to do with age or facial hair or voice timbre.
It had to do, he had decided — and he had seen this happen hundreds of times over the course of nearly twenty years in a secondary-school
setting — with musculature, the set of the jaw, the way the male held himself.) The young man was quite literally holding
himself, masturbating over the supine body of the (Mike had to admit) heartbreakingly lovely girl, who appeared to be urging
the young man on with rhythmic movements and even various contortions, doubtless learned from watching movies. The unseen
person behind the camera had moved his or her vantage point, and one saw now, saw all too clearly in fact, the utter determination
on the face of the young man, who was, Mike instantly recognized, a PG (postgraduate) brought to the school to take the basketball
team to the play-offs. It was then that Mike quickly calculated and arrived at the number
nineteen
just before the PG, whom the other students called J. Dot (as in
[email protected]
), came all over the chest and neck and chin of the girl who was
at least
four years younger, causing Mike to reach forward and push
stop,
the way he wished he could push a
stop
button on the future long enough to figure out what to do with this very unwanted piece of celluloid now poised to explode
inside his camera.

He sat back against the sofa in the TV room. Mike had tried, in the early years of their residence in the impressive Georgian,
to refer to the room as a
library,
as befitted his position in life, but in fact Meg and he had spent more time there watching television and DVDs than they
had reading, and so they had started calling it what it really was. Mike was panting slightly, his mouth dry. That there was
probably more to the tape seemed unthinkable. (And, after all, hadn’t all three boys come within minutes of one another? But
then again, these were teenage boys.) He doubted that he could watch any more. He was both glad and sorry that Meg was not
in the house, glad because he needed to think about what to do, and sorry because it was just conceivable she might have comforted
him, though probably not. Would Meg have been as shocked as he? Was she closer to the kids? Did she understand them better?

Mike immediately wondered when the event had taken place and in what dorm. It seemed likely that the incident had followed
a drinking binge, to judge from the number of beer cans on the floor. Perhaps there was a clue on a desk or a date marked
on a calendar. It almost certainly had to have been on a Saturday night, because students had to be present for study hall
in their dorms at eight p.m. weekday evenings as well as on the Friday night before a Class Saturday. There had been a school
dance the previous weekend. Geoff Coggeshall, the dean of students, had mentioned that there had been the usual number of
kids who had been caught drinking or who were suspected of it. The abuse of alcohol was impossible to stop and was at the
top of the list of worries for nearly every headmaster or principal of every secondary school in the country. Though there
had been many assemblies and seminars on the subject, it was Mike’s opinion that the problem was more severe than it had been
in previous years. He sometimes wondered if all the focus on alcoholism, meant to promote awareness of the dangers of drinking,
had not, in fact, subtly brought it to the fore in a way it had not been so blatantly
important
before. Every generation of students had done its share of binge drinking, but it was pretty clear, from all the data he
had seen, that the drinking was starting at an earlier age and was both more habitual and more intense than it had been just
a decade earlier.

He lay his head back against the sofa and closed his eyes. The house was empty and quiet. He could hear the wind skidding
against the windows and, from the kitchen, the sound of ice cubes tumbling in the Viking, recently installed. Tasks now needed
to be accomplished, students queried, the Disciplinary Committee convened, and all of this conducted beneath the radar of
the press, which would, if they got wind of the story, revel in a private- school scandal. In this, Mike thought that private
schools had been unfairly singled out. He doubted that such a tape would have been of any interest to the press had it surfaced
at the local regional high school, for example. The tape might have circulated underground, students might have been expelled,
and meetings might have been held, yet it was likely that the incident would have been greeted with indifference not only
by the local newspaper, the
Avery Crier
(its editor, Walter Myers, could be talked down from just about any story that might cause embarrassment to local kids and
parents), but also by the regional and national press. Mike thought the national media would scoff at the idea that sex and
alcohol, even sex and alcohol involving a fourteen- year- old girl in a public-high-school setting, was news of any sort;
whereas
if the same set of facts, but in a private- school setting, were to pass across the computer screen of a reporter at the
Rutland Herald
or the
Boston Globe,
it was entirely possible that the reporter would be dispatched to Avery to find out
what was going on.
In such a story, there was juice, there was neat, there was blood. There was also, if this tape had been copied in any way,
footage.
Was it because private schools were held to higher standards, according to which such an incident ought to be nearly unthinkable?
Or was it because everyone loved to see the elite (even if that elite involved a local farmer’s son on scholarship) brought
down and ridiculed? A little of both, Mike guessed, with emphasis on the latter.

More troubling, however, was the thought of police involvement. Though Mike felt nothing but revulsion when he thought of
the Silas and Rob he’d just seen on the tape (boys whom he had previously much respected and even, in Silas’s case, been quite
fond of), the idea of them being led away from the administration building in handcuffs was appalling. (Did police routinely
handcuff boys suspected of sexual assault, which was what this particular crime, in the state of Vermont, was deemed?)
Police
in this case meant either Gary Quinney or Bernie Herrmann, neither of whom would find any satisfaction in the arrest; Gary
was, after all, Silas’s uncle. Would the boys then appear some months later in the dowager courthouse across the street from
the gates of Avery, the building itself smug in its self-righteousness? Mike’s job would be at risk, and any number of teachers
who were supposed to be supervising either the dance or the dorm that evening might be fired, for one could not expect the
trustees to view the incident and its attendant legal fuss lightly. Would the boys then go to jail, to the Vermont State Prison
at Windsor, where almost certainly they would be raped in turn?