The Headmaster's Wife(24)
When I gather myself from her onslaught, grateful suddenly for the deeply cold night and the stiff wind that has picked up and gathered our voices in its embrace, I summon all the coldness I can and I say to her, “Who will believe you?”
She whirls as if to walk away, and in that moment the long bangs she has, the ones she is always pushing behind her ears, slip out. She kicks her head back, and the hair moves with her in the dark. I repeat myself, “Who will believe you?”
She comes at me then. I am unprepared for this. For her violence. She strikes me in the chest first, and then her fists are in my face. I step back and move away from her.
“Betsy,” I say. “Please. Think.”
She steps back from me. We stand in the wan porch light looking at each other. Her face breaks my heart, I find it so pretty. I realize one of the things I love about it is its lack of symmetry. Her lidded eyes are different sizes, her nose slightly off-center—her half-moon Slavic features.
Too often symmetry is synonymous with beauty, and it occurs to me that if we are not symmetrical on the inside then why should we be on the outside?
That perhaps we have it wrong, that, in other words, beauty should be found in things that don’t match, not in those that do.
Betsy stands in front of me breathing hard. I cannot help it, I smile at her. I smile at her from looking at her pretty face, and this is the last thing I should do. She is a wild animal in front of me, all heart and bravado and liquid breathing sentience. I know she will come at me again, and when she does I am ready for her. I catch her and wrap her in my arms.
She struggles against me, and her rage is palpable and kinetic. I feel it in her slender arms and I whisper to her, “Quit it, will you? Just quit it.”
She thrashes in my arms, but I just hold her tighter. I lift her off the ground like a child, and she squirms, but I have her arms fully pinned and, like this, I back the two of us toward the front door of the house. If anyone were to happen by, we would be quite the odd sight. The headmaster with a student in his arms, clearly holding her against her will, as if she’s some spastic child who needs to be restrained.
The door is slightly ajar, and when I push my back against it, it gives way and I fall backward into my front hallway, Betsy landing on top of me.
She scrambles to her feet and is on her way to the door. I do not hesitate, and when I tackle her, it is with no small measure of force. I am on top of her now, and her face is pressed into the Persian carpet. “Let me go,” she says, and I know in this moment that this is the one thing I cannot ever give her. I will not let her go; I cannot let her go; and while you will rightfully imagine it is for the narrow, selfish reason of not having my entire career tossed aside over these indiscretions, that would capture only a portion of what I am feeling.
For the larger truth reveals itself to me while I am lying on top of Betsy Pappas in the foyer of this house in which a Winthrop has resided in for close to eighty years. She stops struggling underneath me, and for a moment there is just my weight on her body, her face turned to the side, the labored sounds of our breathing coming together. And what I realize is that what I want for her is that most unreachable of human desires. I want her to be immortal. Immortal like the great Russian novelists. Immortal like this grand old school built to endure on the flatlands of Vermont alongside the Connecticut River.
And sometimes the only path to immortality, paradoxically, is to die. For to live with nothing in your heart is a greater form of death. To be able to breathe and walk means nothing if you have died inside. It means nothing if you are alone and without love.
It means nothing if all you have built crumbles the moment you cannot have that which you covet the most.
I carry her upstairs. I draw a bath. Back in the bedroom, while the tub fills, I lay her down and undress her. I take my time, for there is no rush. Her skin is still warm to the touch, her face flushed and pink, and it will be awhile before the blood drains and she no longer looks like herself. This is how I want to remember her. Just like this.
When her clothes are off, I stand for a while and admire her. She has never been lovelier. Her eyes are closed and her arms lay slack at her sides, and there is the subtle rise of her full breasts, the brown nipples, the arched cage of her ribs, and the slope of her belly and the dark thatch of her sex.
Lying there on the white quilt, with her pale skin, it is almost as if she were in a state of suspended animation. Part of me wishes I could keep her like this forever, on this bed, nude, like some magnificent piece of art I come to commune with whenever I desire.
I carry her off the bed and bring her to the bath. I test the water with my elbow as if she were a child, and then I lower her in. She falls back into it and starts to sink, until I pull her up and settle her head against the back. Then I begin to wash her.
I use the large sponge that Elizabeth loves, and I slowly, carefully, move it around her face and eyes, across her nose and down her mouth, along the long trunk of her neck, over her chest and her breasts, down her slender arms, across her belly, through her sex, along her right thigh and then her left, and, slipping down her calves, to her feet. I then start the whole thing over again.
I do this until the water grows cold. I lift her out and return her, draped in towels, to the bedroom.
I lay her on the bed and reluctantly—for I love her nakedness—dress her. Her clothes seem inadequate for the occasion, and I find myself wishing there was something of Elizabeth’s that might work, something formal perhaps, but the ravages of age have made Elizabeth a different woman from when she was a girl, of course, and her clothes would not fit Betsy’s body.