The Headmaster's Wife (37 page)

Peter walked across the room to the fireplace and threw the envelope and photographs inside. It was a gas fireplace, easy to turn on and just as hot as one that burned with wood. He flipped the switch and watched the flames leap, instantaneous and deadly.

“I'd have thought you would want to keep those,” Alice said.

Peter was watching it all bum. “I was thinking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, did I tell you that? This house is a replica of Emerson's house in Concord.”

“That was in the material they gave us when you were applying for this job.”

“I know. I was thinking about it. And about Emerson himself and all those people—the New England transcendentalists. The original American ‘radicals': Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. I was thinking that Windsor was just their kind of place. They would have liked it here.”

“Thoreau didn't even like schools.”

“He didn't like the schools he was used to. He wanted to encourage creativity and expressiveness and getting in touch with the greatness of the universal spirit, or however he put it. It was all very vague. We're like that, aren't we, Alice? We're very vague. We don't know what we're talking about; we only want to feel special.”

“I don't think it's a small thing to celebrate diversity, do you?”

“No,” Peter said. The photographs were almost gone. Nobody would be fooled if they came to look, however. There were ashes in the grate now, and gas fires didn't leave ashes. He stood up. “It's not a small thing to 'celebrate diversity.' It's just that to the extent that we know what it means, wedon't do it; and to the extent that we don't know what it means, it doesn't matter. We haven't got the faintest idea of what it means to live with the differences in people. We're very careful, every year, to make sure we have the right number of African Americans and the right number of Hispanic Americans and the right number of students from abroad, and we pick them all very carefully to make sure that they fit this place just as much as we do. When we're faced with someone we really don't understand, we don't behave too well. Do you know how I know that?”

“Please,” Alice said.

“I know that because I realized, in the middle of this afternoon, while I was panicking about what was going to happen now that Jimmy Card has arrived and Liz Toliver would very much like to shut us down—realized that Mark DeAvecca is the first student we've had here for years whom I cannot anticipate. I have no idea what he's going to do next I have no idea what he thinks. I have no idea what he's going to say. And I further realized that there are lots of people out there whom I do not understand, but none of them are connected to this school in any way. Unfortunately, a lot of them are essential to this school's surivival.”

“You're not making any sense,” Alice said.

“It's Ralph Waldo Emerson's two hundredth birthday this May twenty-fifth. We ought to get the school to celebrate it, if we're still here and the school's still here. We can mount events around the lives of Emerson and Thoreau. We can stage readings from Emerson's essays. We can show the world how little we've changed since that man was bleating on about all the drivel we've since adopted as dogma. Back to nature. Eastern religions. The all-compassing wisdom of the Oversoul. We even use the same language.”

“You really
aren't
making any sense,” Alice said, and now she was finished. She pushed the drawer back into place and stood up. “We'd better get over to dinner. We've both been ducking appearing in public for days. Wouldn't you usually call that irresponsible?”

Peter didn't know if he was being irresponsible or not. Hedidn't think he cared. She had been really beautiful, Alice. When he'd first known her, she'd been as perfect as the miniature Renaissance madonnas he had loved to go to see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Exquisite and rare, she had been her own reason for existing; and like all truly beautiful people she had been almost a force of nature, like a hurricane or a tornado. Beauty is a compelling thing, and he had been compelled, unable to look at anything or anybody else, unable to reason calmly about who and what she was under that flawless exterior shell. Now the shell was no longer flawless, and it stunned him to see just how small the imperfections needed to be to wreck the majestic power of the whole. She was still a beautiful woman, in the sense that the lines and angles and shadows of her face and body made up an aesthetic ideal, intellectual and cold. She was no longer a beautiful woman in the sense of beauty as power. In the half-light cast by the study's lamp, he could see darkness and hollowness under her eyes, under her cheekbones, along her jaw. Even surgery could not replace what she had lost because it depended so heavily on the impression that she carried within herself the secret to eternal life, lived as someone forever young.

If she wondered what he was thinking, she gave no indication of it. She just brushed by him and went out the door, into the hallway and the rest of the house. He thought she might be going to the cafeteria. He didn't care.

The first thing James Hallwood had done after his conversation with Marta Coelho was to take the rest of the crystal meth out of its hiding place behind the medicine cabinet and flush it down the toilet. There wasn't much of it left, and for the time being it would be safer to indulge in that sort of thing at David's apartment rather than here. David would have said it served him right for insisting on staying here, where he was treated as a child almost as much as the students were. For James, the issue was more complicated. He'd seen his share of true crime documentaries. If there was an investigation and he became the target of it, they would surely find traces of crystal meth in his apartment and probably traces of cocaine, too. It was nearly impossible to erase all evidence of the stuff once you had used it because powders scattered. Their individual grains were too small to be seen, but not so small they couldn't be discovered by chemical tests. At first this seemed to be his biggest and most important problem: the possibility that they might find the drugs and along with the drugs the things he was not so proud of, the things that he at once associated with his own homosexuality and rejected on account of it. This was not something he could talk to David about because this was not something David had much sympathy with. David's tastes in sex were strictly vanilla, the way his tastes in music were strictly for the bourgeois classical. If he had been born in England instead of the United States, he might have ended his life as an Anglican bishop. James had never had vanilla tastes in much of anything. The homosexuals he had sympathized with, in literature, while he was growing up had been the ones like M. de Charlus in Proust, who had been first and foremost men of great dignity and culture. There was something to be said for those Anglican bishops. The world was not worse off for having men in it who understood the human drive for perfection in form and language. The problem was, he himself could never have been one of those men because he himself could never force himself to be attracted only to the nobility of the human being. In private, what he was attracted to was anything but nobility. He thought he might be the only man in history to suffer from a madonna/whore complex about himself.

“After all”—David would say, after they'd discussed it for the twentieth time, and David had acquiesced for the evening or not, depending on some standard of decision making known only to David himself—“it's not as if you invented the taste for leather. It's not even as if the gay community invented it. Think of the Marquis de Sade.”

James did think of the Marquis de Sade, and that was what bothered him. It was self-evident to him that no completely sane person could read de Sade without repulsion. De Sade loved not just the “bondage and discipline” so favored by the owners of Web sites and specialty stores, he loved pain, real pain, complete with blood and great gashing holes in the skin, holes that would cause scars and sometimes death. Sadism was not “bondage,” and it was not “discipline.” Sadism was not playacting either. It lived not on suburban streets where middle-class couples made videotapes of themselves pretending to be masters and slaves, but in the soundproofed back rooms of skid-row storefronts, where you could buy the literature in the front and everything else you wanted in the back. He had been in a room like that exactly once, during a terrified trip he had taken to New York City while he was still in college. He had known in no time at all that he would never be back, in spite of the fact that it had been the best and most obliterating sex of his life. He was not David, and he would never be David. He would not call himself “gay.” He would not start “coming out” and campaigning for “gay rights.” At the same time he felt he owed it to the whole history of men like himself not to be what the straight world expected of him, and what he'd seen in that back room was far too much what the straight world expected of him. It was the dignity of his position that mattered to him. He had an obligation to preserve it for himself and to maintain it for the sake of everybody else who might want to occupy a similar one.

The second thing James had done after he'd talked to Marta Coelho was to gather up all the leather things from their different places around the apartment. He had been much too nervous about having them to have felt comfortable about keeping them together in one place. They were scattered around in drawers in both the bedroom and the living room. They were hung up in the closets, safely hidden in opaque cleaner's bags that zipped shut and couldn't be taken off their hangers without a struggle. He had laid them all out on his dining room table and gone through them withpainstaking concentration to make sure there was nothing on them that could be traced to him. He couldn't imagine what there could be, but he didn't put it past David to do something cute, like etch their initials in the soft underside of one of the restraints. There was nothing, and he had realized only at the last minute what a mess he would have been in if somebody had knocked on his door while he was in the middle of checking. Nobody had—but then, nobody had been knocking on anybody's door much in the last few hours, since noon, when the first news began to trickle back to campus that something far more serious than a drug addiction had been going on with Mark DeAvecca.

He'd put the entire collection into two plain brown grocery bags, bags without so much as a few lines of printing on the sides, anonymous bags that could have come from anywhere. He had gone into Boston and taken them to The South End. He had never understood the lure of stores like the ones he saw there. There was something infinitely sad about the way the lights jumped and hammered, all to take the attention of their viewers away from the fact that there was nothing here but failure and resignation, the natural habitat of men who had given up. He had put the bags in two separate garbage cans, moving aside fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts and used condoms to make sure that his own garbage was not in plain sight of people on the street. He thought about the news stories that appeared from time to time about babies left in Dumpsters, and body parts discovered in antilittering receptacles, the police baffled, the public up in arms. When he got back to Boston proper, he stripped off his gloves and discarded them in the first garbage can he saw. They were good gloves, black leather lined with cashmere, but they had been in too much muck today. He didn't think he would ever be able to wear them again or to trust them. Then he'd come back to Windsor, feeling infinitely tired. It had started to snow. The campus looked hyped up and jittery. The few people moving around it moved as if they had nothing to do.

He went back to his apartment and got his second-bestgloves from the top drawer of his dresser. He looked around his bedroom and thought with some satisfaction that anybody who entered it would find nothing but the possessions of a man who took himself and literature seriously. There would, of course, be no question about his “sexual orientation,” as they put it these days, but the indications of it would not be shameful, and they would not be stereotypical. Here was a man who liked Proust and Eliot, Dante and Raphael, John Donne and Emily Dickinson.

He was about to go out again to the cafeteria and to dinner. He knew that Peter Makepeace would think it was important, in a desperately crucial time, for all the faculty to show their commitment to the best interests of “the Windsor community.” He also knew that Peter Makepeace was unlikely to be defining those best interests any more than a week from now, but there would be somebody new, and that somebody would be watching for the smaller signs. He started to get a book from the shelf to read while he ate, and then stopped, thinking of something. He didn't usually bring his work home from his office. He liked to keep things in their places, and correcting papers should be done at his desk in the Student Center, not at home, where his private life was. He had brought these papers home because, with all the mess caused by Michael Feyre's death, he hadn't been able to concentrate in his office. Besides, people kept going in and out. Everybody wanted to talk. Everybody wanted to say something meaningless but profound.

He had brought this set of papers home in a plain folder and left the folder on top of the bookcase to the right of his fireplace in his living room. He got the folder now and put it down on his coffee table. He unbuttoned his coat and sat down. This was the only piece of creative writing he had assigned in his sophomore English class. He didn't like doing it because, as far as he was concerned, the vast majority of high school students knew no more about writing fiction than they knew about the government of Burkina Faso. The school insisted, though. It had its reputation as a haven for the arts and for the artistic students to consider. He had assigned the story and then had had a hard time making himself read what his students handed in.

He went through the papers now and pulled out first the one written by Mark DeAvecca and then the one written by Michael Feyre. The story was supposed to be four to five pages long. Mark's was over seventeen pages, and James had been able to tell, from the first paragraph, that it was an assignment he had done while deliberately ignoring every instruction he had been given for doing it. James suspected that that was the way Mark did most of his homework, except that in every assignment before this one he had done far less than he had been asked to do. James had put it down to laziness and bad attitude. This story was an example of neither. It was, instead, an assertion of integrity so forceful and uncompromising that there was no mistaking it. Mark DeAvecca might or might not be a scholastic slacker. James was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt now that it was known for certain that the boy hadn't been on drugs and had been seriously ill at least some of the time. What Mark DeAvecca was, without question, was a writer, with as strong a narrative voice as James had ever seen anywhere. It was astonishing in a boy of his age, and what was more astonishing was the fact that it was obvious that, at least on some level, Mark knew exactly what he had. Knew it, James thought, and had no intention of violating it for the sake of jumping through hoops to get an A on an English paper.
Quite right,
James thought. He'd even give the boy his A, in spite of the fact that it wasn't the kind of fiction he liked or even found possible to appreciate. James had an ear, and that ear knew when it was hearing the real thing.