The Headmaster's Wife (20 page)

He had a copy of
The Portrait of a Lady
stuffed into his coat pocket in the hope that he would be able to sit off by himself and read for the obligatory half hour; but as soon as he got to the Student Center's door, he saw that thatwouldn't be possible. Marta Coelho was waiting for him. She must have seen him come up the walk. He made no effort to hide his annoyance. He knew he didn't have to; Marta would never pick up on it. She was one of those people who was completely tone-deaf when it came to social intercourse. At a place like this, she was worse than tone-deaf. She was every cliché he could remember: a fish out of water, a bull in a china shop, a fifth wheel. Why they hadn't noticed when they'd hired her how bad the fit would be, he couldn't understand, but he'd been around long enough to know it happened all the time. And then, some of the most unlikely people ended up fitting perfectly well, even if you couldn't figure out how or why. Look at Philip Candor. James began to unbutton his coat as he reached the door. Marta was standing just inside it, shifting from one foot to the other like a schoolgirl called in to the principal's office for cutting class and breaking school rules.

James stepped through the glass door. The air around him went from being much too cold to being much too warm. He got his coat the rest of the way unbuttoned and shrugged it off.

“You don't know how glad I am to see you,” Marta said, looking around at the students milling and streaming through the long breezeway corridor. James looked at them, too. They looked … scruffy. They always looked scruffy. There was no dress code here. It would have been considered another form of elitism. The result was that the students felt free to wander around in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. Everyone looked sloppy. Even students who worked hard at taking care of themselves looked sloppy.

James put his coat over his arm and started to move toward the cafeteria. He had no intention of spending even a minute longer in this place than he absolutely had to. “Surely it can't be that big a miracle to find me at dinner,” he said.

Marta was hurrying to keep up. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” she said. “Something Philip Candor told me, and then somebody else confirmed it. Edith, I think. Edith always knows everything, have you ever noticed that?”

“Everybody always knows everything in this place,” James said. He had forged ahead steadily, and now he was at the back of the cafeteria line. There was a stack of plastic trays. He took one. If it had been up to him to redesign this place, he would have started by getting rid of all the plastic.

Marta picked up her own plastic tray. “I don't know that we should talk about it here,” she said. “I mean, in line. Where too many people could hear.”

“My dear woman,” James said, “if you heard whatever this is from Philip, and then again from Edith, there isn't a person in this school who doesn't know what it is already, except perhaps for people who've been away all day or shut up at home and without contact with the rest of the school.”

“Have you heard about it already?” Marta asked. “About Gregor Demarkian?”

“I've been shut up at home,” James said drily. He had just been presented with the choice of entrée: fish fried in some kind of batter; chicken with a sauce on it that looked as if it had come straight out of a sump pump; large wedges of vegetarian omelet. He took the omelet. He'd have the least trouble looking at it throughout his purgatory at dinner, and then he could go home and cook something edible for himself. “I have heard of Gregor Demarkian though,” he said. “He's that detective. He was on that television program
American Justice.”

“Oh, do you watch those?” Marta asked. She had chosen the chicken and the limp green beans that must have come from a can, and the glutinous rice they served with an enormous ice cream scoop. It was hard for James to watch. “I watch those, too. And
City Confidential.
And the other things on Court TV. You're right, he has been on some of those. I even heard that they wanted to give him his own show, but he turned it down. Could we go over there to that corner? There's an empty table. I really don't want to be—crowded.”

No,
James thought,
of course she doesn't want to be crowded.
He went toward the corner anyway. He didn't want to be crowded himself. He didn't want to talk to anybody. He put his tray down and sat in front of it. Then he very carefully began to take the plates off the tray and put them directly on the table. If there was one thing he wouldn't do in the cause of antielitism, which he didn't believe in anyway, it was eat directly off a cafeteria tray The table itself was made of nothing known to nature, and laminated on top of that, and bolted into the wall, but there was nothing he could do about that.

Marta sat down. She didn't bother to take her plates off her tray. James hadn't expected her to. “Gregor Demarkian,” she said, “is in town. Here. In Windsor. Earlier today, Edith heard that he was coming, and she told Philip, and then Philip saw him on Main Street near the Windsor Inn, which I suppose is where he must be staying.”

“Really?” James cocked an eyebrow. He'd taken great pains to learn to do that when he was younger, and now he did it all the time without thinking. “That's surprising. From what I remember, Mr. Demarkian is a consultant to police departments, who call him in when they have homicide cases they're having trouble with. I thought our local police had decided without doubt that Michael Feyre committed suicide.”

“Oh, they have,” Marta said. “At least, as far as I know they have. The police didn't bring him here; Mark DeAvecca did.”

“Did he? How did he manage that?”

“Oh, Demarkian is a friend of the family or something. You know what it's like in this place. The students. Their parents. It makes me sick sometimes, it really does. Don't mind me. I've been in a mood for days. Before Michael Feyre died really. And now I just don't know what to think. It bothers me, this Demarkian person being here.”

“I don't see why,” James said. The vegetable omelet was inedible, but he'd expected that. The coffee was undrinkable, too, but he forced himself to drink it because the Windsor Academy coffee had one thing to be said in its favor. It was some of the strongest coffee he had ever had outside of Istanbul. “I don't see what business it is of ours if Mark DeAvecca wants to ask a family friend to come here to visit, even if the family friend
is
Gregor Demarkian. Gregor Demarkian can't change the fact that Michael Feyre committed suicide.”

“No, he can't change it,” Marta said, “but there are other things, aren't there? There's all that stuff about Alice, for example.”

“Marta, 'all that stuff about Alice,' as you put it, has been going on for a long time. It didn't start with Michael Feyre, and I doubt if it will finish with him.”

“It will if it causes the school to fail,” Marta said. “This isn't Exeter, you know. We don't have that kind of an endowment. If that kind of thing gets out—”

“If it gets out, Peter will be fired and he and Alice will go off somewhere, and we'll get a new headmaster whose wife is fifty-six and looks like a long-haul trucker. That's all. You've got nothing to worry about on that score.”

“Well, there are other things, too,” Marta said. “There are the things about the drugs.”

“‘The things about the drugs'?”

“That he was selling drugs.”

“Marta, students sell drugs to each other in every school in the country. Schools don't fail over incidents like that; they just expel the students.”

“But he wasn't just selling drugs to students,” Marta said. “He was selling drugs to faculty. He was selling drugs to you.”

It was odd, James thought, but just a second ago he had considered this room far too warm. Now it seemed far too cold. His plates were still spread out on the table. The vegetable omelet still looked heavy and wet at the same time. The coffee still looked too dark to really be coffee. There was a lot of noise. It seemed to be coming from another room, through a wind tunnel, broadcast by a bad microphone.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“Oh, James, for God's sake,” Marta said. “What do you think, that I want to turn you in? If I did, I'd have done it already. And it wouldn't matter in this place anyway. You know what they're like. You've been here a lot longer than I have.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” James saidagain. He picked up the plate with the omelet on it and put it back on the tray. It was very important to move slowly, and with seriousness, to not appear to be hurrying. He wanted to take the plate with the omelet on it and smash it over Marta Coelho's head, but it was the kind of thing he would never do.

Marta had pushed her tray away from her into the middle of the table. “James, please, behave like a sane person. Somebody around here has to. You bought amphetamines from Michael Feyre. I
saw
you. In Ridenour Library not two weeks ago. My office—”

“Everybody's office is in that wing,” James said. “You're mistaken.”

“I'm not mistaken, and you know it.” Marta stopped. Her voice had risen. She'd become aware of it. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. “I'm not mistaken,” she said again. “I heard the whole conversation. Six something-or-the-others of crystal methamphetamine. I don't remember the word he used. Two hundred dollars. And I couldn't believe it, you know, so I went out into the hall so that I could hear better, and you were right there. You didn't even have your office door closed. I suppose you must have thought the wing was empty—”

“You're mistaken,” James said again. He was saying things again and again. He was repeating himself. There was a roaring in his ears, like the sound you heard when you held a shell up to your head to hear the ocean. He put the coffee cup and saucer back on the tray. He put his utensils back on the tray. He felt as if he were proceeding by rote. He was a paint-by-numbers picture. All he had to do was fill in the outline and he would turn into a real boy.

“Michael saw me,” Marta said. “He winked at me. James, will you please, please make sense here? This isn't a game. That boy is dead—”

“And nobody killed him,” James said savagely. “He committed suicide, which, if you ask me, was entirely predictable. He was a jumped-up piece of white trash, and no lottery jackpot was ever going to change that. When he knew it was true, he cut himself off. I wish more of them would have the guts to cut themselves off. We'd be better off without them.”

“We'd be better off without whom?” Marta asked. “What are you talking about?”

“We'd be better off without people like you,” James said. The roaring was gone from his ears. The panic was gone from his body. He was simply more angry than he had ever been in his life. “Don't you think we all know what you are?” he said. “You got yourself a degree, and you think you can reinvent yourself as better than what you came from, but it's not working. You don't have the fiber. You don't even have the imagination.”

Marta looked close to tears, but not so close that she was willing to stop. “There's no reason to shoot the messenger,” she said, looking away from him. “Don't you realize that if I saw you, somebody else may have too? Not that day, of course, but another day. And he winked at me. He winked at me, James. He didn't care that I knew. He could have told anyone.”

“If I were you, I'd go back to whatever godforsaken town you came from and get a job at a community college where the demands of your work will match your skills,” James said.

Marta was still looking away. James knew she would not look back. He had his tray fully loaded. He need do nothing but bring it back to the kitchen, scrape off his plates, and leave. There it was again, that drive to egalitarianism. He couldn't abide the ritual of scraping off his plates.

“I don't know what you think you're doing,” he told Marta Coelho, “but I can tell you for certain that you won't get away with it.”

It was seven thirty when the phone in Gregor Demarkian's room at the Windsor Inn began ringing, and it rang a dozen times before Mark DeAvecca managed to get himself awake enough to pick it up.

“This is the front desk,” a voice chirped at him. “This is your wake-up call. It's now seven thirty.”

For a few long minutes, Mark was completely disoriented. He didn't think they gave wake-up calls in the dorm, and the world outside the windows he could see was far too dark for it to be seven thirty in the morning. Besides, he didn't get up at seven thirty. If he did, he missed breakfast or classes and spent the rest of the day in a complete mess. He sat up and looked around, feeling increasingly uneasy. There had been at least three times in the last two months when he'd woken up in his dorm room bed and not been able to remember how he'd gotten there, or why he'd gone to sleep, or when. The thing was he didn't feel now the way he'd felt on all those occasions. He actually felt pretty well. His head wasn't full of fuzz, or not as full of it as it tended to be these days. He wasn't suicidally depressed, which he'd come to think of as the background music to his present life. He
was
very tired, but a couple of hours napping wasn't likely to cure several months' worth of not sleeping, so that didn't worry him.

He turned on the light next to the bed. Then he sat up and looked around. The room service trays were still on the table near the window. He got up, went to the table, and sat down. He opened another bottle of Perrier and then another still. He was so thirsty, he was nearly frantic with it. He downed the first bottle in a couple of seconds and then started on the second. He took the lid off the sandwich plate and took out four roast beefs and another four tunas. Then he put them back and put the lid to the side. He was going to eat them all. There was no use pretending he wasn't. He'd missed dinner, and he was suddenly completely ravenous.