The Headmaster's Wife (13 page)

“Self-awareness is one of my strengths,” he said, and grinned, and she permitted herself a look at him. He had good teeth, a strong jaw, even if his brown eyes were a little small.

“Well, I feel safe here,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yes. The headmaster’s son. Who’s going to bust this party?”

“You don’t know my father.”

“Would he kick his son out of school?”

She saw him considering this. “No, probably not. But my life would not be easy.”

“You mean like it is now?”

“You can presume to say that my life is easy?”

“Isn’t it?”

He kicked his head back and laughed heartily. She looked at him and then back to the goldfish.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is. But you’re tough, you know that?”

“I’m just not good at being a girl,” Betsy said.

Later he walked her home, and when he left her at the front door of her dorm, she wanted him to kiss her, but she was not going to let him know that. Before he had an opportunity, she stuck out her hand, and he shook it and then shook his head and laughed. She laughed, too, at the formality of this parting, a shared joke. He walked away into the fall night, and she stood there for a while, watching the breeze swirl leaves in the yellow lamplight, oblivious to the rush of girls who moved past her and into the dorm to check in for the night.

This is what Elizabeth does sitting in Ethan’s room on those long winter afternoons staring out at the snow-covered fields sloping toward the woods. She considers the past. She measures it and weighs it and holds it in her hand like a plum. The past is everything now, and she understands that this is what it means to be dying: You stop looking forward, instead living for moments that happened years before. She turns them over and over in her mind, things she has not thought about in years, and she can see now how obvious it all is. Every small event begets another one, each one built off the other until you have a chain of events that all lead to this heartbreaking room with the day slowly fading outside the windows.

It is obvious what she saw in Arthur. She wanted to belong to Lancaster more than anything, to feel the old school run through her like a river, and who better to give her that than Arthur?

The school was not only in his blood, it was his blood, and he was so comfortable there because he had always been there, and because—though he never said this to her until much later, when she visited him at Yale—he already knew he would return and become his father, as his father had, once, become
his
father.

There is a silly immortality to the boarding school life, and isn’t that what she wanted? To know forever the happiness she knew in those two short years when she was a student? Not to have to worry about shopping or meals or where they would live? All that would be taken care of. Teaching—even running a boarding school—is another form of arrested adolescence. Even in their responsibilities, they are all playing Peter Pan, the real world something that happens outside these ivy-covered walls.

They are in Boston. She is sixteen years old, and in the school’s eyes this is an illegal trip. Well, the first part of the trip is not, for Arthur is accompanying his father to an alumni event and manages to convince the headmaster that Betsy would be the perfect student to bring. After the event, she signs out to meet her parents, who she says are in the city. Arthur’s story is that he will be staying with a friend in Cambridge. The ride down for her is awkward, sitting in the front seat—at his father’s insistence—with the headmaster himself. She has seen him only from a distance before, and in her mind he is a great man. He must be a great man, for it is inconceivable to her that anyone less than that would be entrusted with running a school like Lancaster.

Arthur sits in the back, and on the way down Mr. Winthrop grills her about her family, her view of Lancaster, what her dreams and aspirations are. It is an interview of sorts, and she is nervous both to be talking to him—looking straight ahead as she does, at the road disappearing beneath the tires—and to know that Arthur is hearing the version of her story she would tell to his father but not necessarily to him. Not that she would lie per se, but she might color things differently, emphasize parts of her experience more than others, but with his father that is an impossibility. The idea of trying to shape her narrative with him she cannot even fathom. She tells it to him straight.

That night, they attend the alumni gathering. From high up in the Prudential Building the lights of the city and the harbor glimmer far below. She is in love with all this, with her clothes and even with the older male alumni who never knew what it was like to have girls on campus and who have all kinds of questions for her, some of them flirty, a situation she is old enough to recognize and even give in to a little bit.

She is worried Mr. Winthrop will want to see her safely into her parents’ hands, but he seems oblivious, and an hour later she is walking in the seasonably warm night down streets lined with lanterns, past brownstones with bright windows that loom over the leaf-swept sidewalks. Arthur has taken her hand, and looking up at him, she knows she will sleep with him tonight if he wants her to, not only because she has grown to find him handsome, but also because she wants this passage in her life, wants to cross this threshold that seems to be the final thing between her and full-fledged, glorious adulthood.

On Newbury Street he finally turns and kisses her, and she responds forcefully to his tongue against her teeth, and she is aware of people moving past them on the sidewalk and she imagines how they must look: the timelessly romantic couple thrust together on this beautiful street, entwined in each other’s arms like experienced lovers.

The hotel is his idea—there had been vague talk of staying at Harvard with a friend of his from last year’s Lancaster class—and taking his arm as they come into the grand lobby with its marble friezes and its high ceiling painted like a Renaissance sky, she feels her heart quicken and a flush come to her cheeks. You are not in Craftsbury anymore, my dear, she whispers to herself, and Arthur leans down and says, “What?” but she only smiles at him. “Nothing,” she says.

Arthur negotiates the reservation desk like he is born to it and upstairs he orders a bottle of wine, and she says, “Won’t they card us?”

“Not in the room,” he says, and then they are drinking wine and toasting the city outside the window, and when they end up rolling together on the bed, she surprises him by not throwing up any defenses, and even encouraging him, taking him into her warm hand and feeling him leap like a fish against her palm.

She says, “Do you have something?”

He reaches for his wallet, and she is both pleased he is prepared and concerned when he turns it over and she sees the ring pressed into the leather, the presumptuousness of it, but then, as if reading her look when he takes it out, the wrapper crinkled with age, he says, “It’s fine. Been there a year, but it’s fine, see?”

She turns away toward the window, toward the yellowish light of the pulsing city as he takes it out, and when he climbs on top of her, she is prepared for it to hurt, but miraculously it doesn’t, and she wants to enjoy it, but that is not possible, either. Instead, she is rather indifferent to it, this first time, and this bothers her, since she has imagined extremes of either pain or pleasure, and the truth is sadly ambiguous. It shouldn’t be so banal, she thinks, becoming a woman. She wonders what the big deal is. She likes his weight on her, that much is true, the smell of him, his earnestness as he moves over her. But when it is done, she is concerned that she might weep or break out in laughter—oddly she could go either way—and she hopes that she won’t, but then, just as quickly, the feeling passes. A moment later he is off her, and it is like it never happened.

He rolls onto his back. They are side by side, staring at the ceiling. He is breathing hard, and she thinks about this, that he has just done something, something like work. What has she done?

Outside, the sounds of the city move to the foreground, the scream of cars and the cries of a siren. Voices that drift up into the fallen night.

She likes the new her. She likes having a boyfriend now, the headmaster’s son, and she wonders if everyone knows they have done it, and while she does not want to be branded as that kind of girl, she secretly hopes they do. She likes the way her clothes feel against her body, and on the field hockey field she suddenly feels self-assured, even though she knows she is not much of an athlete.

In class she sometimes writes Arthur’s name in her notebook. She imagines what it would be like to have a life together, and for the first time it occurs to her that Lancaster just might be a magical place. Weeks ago she was a nobody, one of the TV room girls, and now she is in the middle of all of it, dating the headmaster’s son as if she were born to it. Where else can things spin so quickly?

Betsy likes the way others look at her. And she indulges herself in the idea of never leaving here (except, of course, for college), since, walking across campus holding her hand in the still fall evening, Arthur says that he will teach here one day, and he even points out with confidence which one of the faculty houses might be his, and she loves this vision, a house on faculty row with white clapboards and leaves in the yard. She tries to see herself as married to him and she decides that she can. She can see the two of them in their own house, life just like this but freer. Drinking wine in front of a fireplace. Summer vacations near the beach.

After study hall he meets her at her dorm like all the boys with girlfriends do, and they walk out into the soccer fields and sometimes they just kiss, and other times they just sit down and watch the stars. They have not slept together again since Boston. Though when they are kissing he will touch her breasts through her sweater, and it feels nice, and once she takes him out and tries to finish him with her hand, but either she is not good enough at it or there is not enough time, for they are unable to bring it to conclusion.

On Wednesdays and Saturdays classes end at noon, and the afternoon is taken up with sporting events. Arthur runs cross-country, and sometimes her own game is not until later, and she cheers him on, standing next to some wooded path and watching him come flying through in his black-and-orange uniform. She likes to watch him run. He is tall and fast, and his quad muscles clench where they meet his knees, and his long hair flops in front of his face as he goes by.

Once, at Groton for an away meet, he watches her instead, and part of her feels silly on the field hockey field, sprinting up and down with the stick in her hand, knowing she is not that good; but the other part of her enjoys knowing he is watching her, that she is someone who should be watched, and after, when her teammates head inside, he takes her hand and leads her to the woods beyond the field.

The light is golden in the late afternoon. She knows what they are going to do and loves the illicitness of it, moving between silvery birch trees until they find a clearing, and he lays his overcoat down, and she does not bother taking off her skirt when for the second time he moves inside her. This time it doesn’t hurt at all, and looking over him to the mottled clouds moving past in the sky, she even feels pleasure, nothing dramatic like she hoped, but rather the subtleness of where they are joined, the sense of him all around her, the quickening pant of his breath against her ear.

One night they walk out into the soccer field and sit down on the cold ground. She pulls her knees up to her chest against the cold. Above the trees there is a harvest moon, the fuzzy gold halo around it that falls apart somewhere over the horizon. Arthur has a little flask of peach schnapps. It tastes sickly sweet, but she drinks it anyway. At first they are silent, just looking up at the sky, feeling the breath of winter in the cool air, but when she looks over at Arthur in the dim light, at his hair falling around his shoulders and his face in profile, she has the sudden urge to say something vulnerable, so she tells him she loves him. It is the first time she has ever said anything like this to a boy, and it feels silly coming out of her mouth, and she immediately regrets it when he says it back to her. She has wanted to hear him say this, such a grown-up thing to say, she thinks, but now that he does, it sounds hollow and rote to her, like another lesson they’ve learned.

But as a harbinger of things to come, he is unaware of her, unable to read her mood or language, and he leans in to kiss her, and she reflexively kisses him back, tasting again the peach on his tongue.

“I can’t wait for you to visit me at Yale,” he says, and this further punctures the moment for her, a glimpse of the future that doesn’t involve this school, which has become as comfortable to her as an old sweater.

“Definitely going to Yale?”

He shrugs. “Never thought about anywhere else.”

“Doesn’t that feel weird? I mean, Yale is Yale, but still. Don’t you want to see other places, think about it?”

“I just want you to come visit me. So we can fuck in a bed instead of the woods.”

This annoys her, too. She looks up at the moon, almost yellow in the light of its halo. She doesn’t want to think about fucking right now; she wants not to think of anything, really, least of all Yale, which she knows she will not be attending. She doesn’t know where she will go yet, and at the times she thinks of it, it stresses her a little bit, but then she forgets it and thinks that this year and next year are a long time. Time is funny, she thinks, for she has been at Lancaster only for shy of two months, and Craftsbury, a mere thirty miles to the northwest, already feels a million miles away.

She says, “Have you told anyone about us?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, that we had sex.”

“It’s cool,” he says.

“You didn’t answer me.”

“Not really,” he says. “I mean, that’s between us, right?”

“Who did you tell?”

He looks away, and she gets an image of his whole dorm knowing about them, boys sitting cross-legged in one of those paneled rooms and Arthur holding court about her, details about how easily she gave it up in Boston and, even worse, in the woods on the Groton campus.