The Headmaster's Wife(19)
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.