The Headmaster's Wife (8 page)

“It’s good to see you,” I say.

“You know why I am here?”

I decide to play coy, for this is a game. “You are struggling with your appreciation of all things Chekhov?” I smile slightly.

“Don’t be cute,” she says.

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“You know why I am here, then.”

I lean back. I am enjoying this. Her needing something from me. I have played this well. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“It’s about Russell. I know what you did.”

“What I did?”

“You put the bottles under his bed, didn’t you, Arthur?”

I laugh. “Don’t be absurd.”

Her eyes flash with anger. “Russell has never so much as tasted alcohol. He has no interest in it. The bottles were not his.”

“He will have a chance to make his case in the Disciplinary Committee.”

“Oh, you are something,” she says. “Look at you. So smug.”

“You are lovely when you are angry,” I say, and I mean it. There is genuine passion in her voice, in her demeanor, the coiled energy of her young body.

“You think your Disciplinary Committee would like to know about you fucking me?”

She says this rather loudly, probably not loud enough for Mrs. LaForge to have heard in the outer office, but close enough to make me uncomfortable. I have not imagined Betsy going here in this conversation, and it unnerves me a little bit. I suddenly have lost the upper hand.

“Easy now,” I say. “Easy.”

“Do you actually believe that getting rid of Russell will make me love you? Is that what this is about?”

I sigh deeply. “We are in different places. I know that.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Betsy, please. So much anger.”

“Do not take this out on Russell, you hear me?”

Before she can say “or else,” I have an idea. “Tell you what,” I say. “Come away with me. To New York. One night. I will show you the city. If after that night you no longer want to see me, I will leave you alone. It will hurt me deeply, but I will leave you alone.”

I see the air go out of her. She sits back, crosses her arms over her chest. She looks toward the window, the spindly bare branches of the maple. “And if I do this, will you leave Russell alone?”

“I have not done anything to Russell,” I say. “Despite what you might think.”

“Give me your word,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “You have my word.”

“When?”

“New York?”

“Yes.”

“This weekend,” I say.

“Where do I say I am going?”

“Sign out for home,” I say. “No one will question that.”

You should see us. My Saab parked next to the Dumpster behind her dorm, a Saturday morning. It is a bright, sunny day, and I cannot remember a time when I felt so happy, so full of anticipation. In my rearview mirror I look for her and out the windows I glance around nervously. This first moment will be the delicate one, her getting in the car, our chance to be exposed if someone were to come by. It is oddly thrilling, the daring of this escape in broad daylight.

Here she is now, in the rearview, moving quickly toward the car with an overnight bag. She is aware of the stakes and peers all around her as she walks. She opens the car door quickly and throws her bag in the back, and I say to her, get down, and she closes the door behind her and tucks herself as best she can into the footwell on the passenger side, her head coming over and resting in my lap.

We drive through campus. It fills me with delight to pass students and faculty, staff members and maintenance people. Everyone recognizes the car and they wave to me, and I wave back. Betsy’s face is nuzzled to the right of my crotch, and in between waves, I run my fingers through her hair.

It is with a measure of reluctance that I let her know when we have left campus and that she can sit up. She does, letting her hair down when she sits back, and I watch it cascade down and around her shoulders.

There is something cathartic about taking her out of Vermont. About crossing the river and driving downhill to the splendor of New York. She is a small-town girl, and I try to see all of it through her eyes. The speeding down the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, with its old stone bridges and stately forests hiding mammoth homes. The first glimpse of the wide Hudson, with its steep Palisades, running massively to the sea. And then the turn onto West Seventy-ninth and the immediate hum of the city, the choreography of the cabs, Betsy gazing longingly at the tall buildings rising up all around us.

This is her first time in New York. And whatever misgivings she has about us seem to be disappearing as her awe of the city grows. I have Dick Ives’s apartment keys. He is in Florida now, where he will stay most of the winter. The apartment is spectacular. It takes up the top two floors of Halvorsen Hall, a grand old prewar building on Central Park West. The building itself is more reserved than its more famous neighbors, like the Dakota, and you might not notice it if you were to walk by it on the street.

Dick Ives’s pied-à-terre has long been one of the perks of being head of school at Lancaster. He is there only a handful of days a year now, and the doorman Rupert knows me by sight and is too discreet to say anything about Betsy. He arranges for someone to valet my car, and we walk through the cobblestone courtyard to the outdoor elevator that will take us directly to the top floor.

Betsy marvels at the elevator. It is small and old with a wrought-iron cage in front of the door, but its walls are cased in mahogany leather, and gold leaf runs along the outside of a large mirror against the back well. She gasps when the elevator opens into the broad marble foyer, and even more when we open the French doors to the balcony and, in front of us, in the late afternoon sun, is all of Central Park. It does not matter that the leaves are off the trees for the light is tinged with November gold and the buildings on the Upper East Side and in Midtown catch it in their glass sheathing and reflect it back to where we stand together, looking out and across, and down to the small people striding briskly below.

Maybe, I think, this is what love is. Giving someone the gift to see worlds that would otherwise be closed to them. Is there anything more beautiful than a woman surprised?

Betsy runs around that apartment with discovery at every turn. The piano room with its massive Steinway. The gleaming kitchen with the granite countertops and the windows that look west to a wide slice of the Hudson between buildings. The improbable—since we’re on the twelfth floor—Scarlett O’Hara staircase that curls and sweeps up to the master suite above.

The grandness of this place, of the city, allows Betsy to forget the nature of our bargain. She is no longer here against her will. Or to win someone else’s freedom.

That night we walk those city streets cloaked in the anonymity that only New York can bring. With the sun down, the air grows cold, and I take her arm in mine and she moves into me and no one gives us a second glance.

We eat at some small French bistro near Columbus Circle. I order for us, a whole roast duck for two, which comes out in a great copper pan and is carved at the table. I order a bottle of wine, and the waiter glances at Betsy for a moment, as if wondering if she is of age, but there are still places in the city where there is discretion in such matters. We drink one bottle of wine and open a second, and sometime during dessert, with the crepes flambéing in front of us, I realize that I cannot keep my promise. I realize that I cannot have her just this one night, regardless of how long we manage to make the night last. No, I need her beyond this. I will need her always. It is good to know oneself sometimes, and in this moment I know this with absolute certainty. It both saddens me and thrills me. Though I am smart enough not to say any of this to Betsy. That will have to wait, but I think part of her knows this as well as I do.

We walk back along the park. I take her hand in mine, and she doesn’t pull away. There is a chill in the air but it is tolerable. I love the teeming streets. I love the feel of her hand in mine. I love the hazy night above us, the twinkling lights of the buildings.

Rupert the doorman opens the wrought-iron gate for us, and in the courtyard, before we enter the elevator, I am suddenly overcome and take her in my arms. We move together backward until I can feel the cold limestone against my back. I pull her tightly toward me. My kisses rain down roughly on her mouth and on her neck and in the soft hollow of her throat until she says, “Let’s go upstairs.”

In Dick Ives’s stately living room she asks me, “What do you want?”

I say, “I just want to watch you.”

I sit on the soft couch and fall back into it. She takes my breath away. She undresses for me in front of the French doors and, when she is completely nude, stands there awkwardly, her arms covering her breasts. “Close your eyes and let them go,” I say, and she does. She drops her arms to her sides and I see all of her.

“Move for me,” I say.

She begins to move, slowly swaying her arms, and it is slightly self-conscious, but for some reason this arouses me even more, the slight reluctance she has to let go. If it were easy, it would mean less. At one point she releases her hair, and it comes down and falls in front of her face as she dances.

She opens her eyes. “Don’t you want to touch me?”

“Not now,” I say.

The truth is that I could watch her forever. She is eighteen years old with skin like cream. There is no beating clock. There is no time. She will never be this young again. I want to remember her like this, just like this, forever. She is perfect.

That night we make love in Dick Ives’s shower built for two—or, in Dick’s case, because of his considerable bulk, for one. I sit on the wide marble bench, and while the water pours over us, Betsy straddles me and when she moves on top of me her breasts are against my chest and her wet hair whips across my face.

Afterward it is like something inside me gives way and I am almost embarrassed to tell you some of the things I whisper to her while we lie entwined in the giant bed in the dark looking to the large windows and listening to the sounds of city below us.

I am a sad, needy puppy; I am the boy clinging to his mother’s apron; I am the teenager experiencing the pangs of love for the first time, my young mind unable to wrap itself around the complexity of the feelings my heart slings upward.

I tell her I love her. I tell her she moves me to want to live differently, to do great things in her name. I tell her I cannot live without her. I tell her that I am suddenly aware of my heart. I want to tell her how long it has been since I have felt this way—how sometimes you don’t know you have forgotten how to live until you are presented with the roaring matter of life again, until you hold the heart of another in your own. I want to tell her how important it is not to take any of this for granted, for someday you may end up in a cold house where the silence hangs heavier than a curtain of fog over the river. But I do not say any of this.

What I do say is foolish talk, and she knows it and I know it. But it flows like water out of me, and she shushes me, saying, “Arthur, enough,” and I love that she calls me Arthur.

“Say my name again,” I ask her.

She puts a finger over my lips and says, “Go to sleep, Arthur.”

She rolls away from me. I roll into her. I wrap my arms around her and hold her, and soon she is sound asleep.

For a while I just listen to her. Listen to the rise and fall of her breath, and then I slide away from her and stand up.

Outside on the balcony the wind has picked up. I put my hands on the railing and feel it push my hair back. I look out into the dark, at the park, and the bright lights of residential towers on the East Side.

I am twelve stories up. Below me is the hard concrete of the sidewalk. I think of Betsy inside sleeping. And the fact is, late at night, the only question one should ask oneself when standing on a high balcony is whether to jump. I know that sounds morbid, and perhaps insane, but when you boil it down, is anything else relevant?

I look straight down. A man and a woman—at least that’s what they appear to be from this height—walk huddled together in their overcoats. The breeze that blows toward me is thick with winter. I think about going over the balcony. Would I jump and fly for a moment? Or would I just lean over and tumble like a high diver?

I do not want to die. Not because I have tons to live for, other than this girl sleeping upstairs. The philosopher will make an argument that the truly courageous never jump, because the real courage lies in going on living when you know death is an eventuality. That this is the very stuff of being human. I am not sure this is true. I do not jump not because I am brave. Rather, I do not jump because I am a coward.

What do I fear? I fear a tiny moment in time. A tiny moment that will last no longer than two hands clapping. And it is not that (as they say in movies and books) life will flash before your eyes that scares me, but that it will not. Death is so pedestrian, you see, that when it comes it will not be imbued with the ineffable meaning you hope it will. You at least want it to matter; and to be sure, for some it will. For a small few, it will matter a great deal. But the larger truth is that when we die it is no different from a shoe stomping on an ant. The ant stops moving. The world goes on. The world goes on as if the ant never existed.

“
You don’t talk about your son much.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Arthur shrugs. “What is there to say?”

“You were angry with him.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Do you have children?”

“I do.”

“How old?”

“Two girls. They are both in junior high.”

“You have dreams for them? High hopes?”

“Sure.”

“Now imagine if, just to spite you, they do the exact opposite with their lives from what you hope they will.”

“Is that what he did to you?”