The Headmaster's Wife(3)
She walks by our table. The tray is full of ramekins of Jell-O, heading for a nearby table. I contemplate the shape of her beneath her clothes. She is full breasted but otherwise unremarkable. This is her peak, I think rather ungenerously. She will never be this beautiful again.
The headmaster’s house is a white Colonial that sits on the main road that runs through the quiet town of Lancaster, Vermont. Behind it are soccer fields and dorms, and beyond those runs the Connecticut River, slow and fat. The house is large and designed for entertaining, with tall, high-ceilinged rooms downstairs. The upstairs originally had four bedrooms, though it now has only three, as my father, when he was head of school, turned one of them into an office, which I still use.
After dinner Elizabeth and I go upstairs. It is early, but as is our pattern now, she stops at the top of the stairs and gives me her cheek. I lay a soft kiss on it. She goes to our bedroom, which has become her room exclusively. I sleep in the guest room. It was never anything we talked about, and I do not remember precisely when it first started. But we are happier this way. Married people often forget how nice it is to sleep alone.
The other bedroom was once mine, when I was a child, and later belonged to our son, Ethan. It is still Ethan’s room, I suppose, and Elizabeth has refused to take down any of his things. His clothes still hang in the closet, his athletic trophies are still on the bureau. Ethan wanted out of Lancaster. After graduation he spurned Yale (and by so doing, spurned me) and became a soldier. He went to Iraq, and Elizabeth does nothing but worry about him. He disappoints me. Not that there is anything wrong with serving one’s country. And despite what you may think, I do not need him to return here as I did, or as my father and grandfather did. I do not need him to, though it surprises me that he chose to impetuously close the door to that possibility. Though that is another story.
As is my habit, I go into my study. I pour several fingers of scotch from the fifth I keep in the bottom right drawer of the large wooden desk. I nurse the scotch and absentmindedly turn on the laptop and review the day’s e-mail. But something has me restless.
I drain the scotch and go downstairs to fetch my coat.
Outside, the fall air is cool but the night is clear and without moon. Full of stars. I like to walk at night. It is mandatory study hall time, and all the students are in their rooms or, with special permission, at the library.
Normally I head for the heart of campus, crossing the street and into the quadrangle, with its historic granite academic buildings and upper-class boys’ dorms. I like having this part of the campus to myself. Alone with the history of it all. But tonight I walk the other way, out across the soccer fields. The grass dewy on my shoes.
I walk toward the four squat brick buildings that were built in the late 1960s to accommodate the new type of Lancaster student: girls. I was a freshman the year Lancaster went co-ed. My father made the decision with the board, and it was controversial at the time, especially with alumni, though also with my classmates. I am still not sure what we feared would be lost.
The buildings themselves I have always found an eyesore. Out of character with the rest of the campus, which is a tasteful mixture of stately granite and early-nineteenth-century clapboard homes, they are brick and featureless and were built on the cheap. When I was a student we called them the projects, though it has been a long time since I have heard that particular terminology. Then again, as headmaster, you hear less and less.
I come down the small slope from the soccer field and then cross the pavement that separates the dorms and the field. The four buildings are in front of me, close together, separated by narrow alleys of grass. Each building is two stories, and the first-floor windows are close enough to the ground that years ago we put in place what we call the “one-foot rule.” Boys visiting from the upper campus must have at least one foot on the ground at all times when visiting the windows, which they do most evenings.
I walk between the first two buildings, Fuller and Jameson Halls. The windows are lit up, and the shades are all open. Inside are girls at their desks, girls lying facedown on their beds with books in front of them. Their doors open to the hallways inside, as they are required to do. I pause in front of each window and look in, and while part of me knows there is something entirely untoward about the headmaster staring into the windows of the upper-class girls’ dorms, I am unfazed by it tonight. Not a single girl as much as looks up. I am an apparition.
I make it through the first set of dorms, and then the second alleyway. It is on the third and final pass that I finally see her. Hers is a corner room, with two windows, one that faces the alley and another that looks toward the river.
She is at the desk closest to the alley window. Beyond her is her roommate, a girl I recognize, Meredith something or other, from New York. Her father is a prominent attorney specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Someone the board has targeted for cultivation.
We are separated only by glass. She is reading for my class: Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. Reading that is not even due for a week. She is ahead, which says something about her. She wears sweatpants and one of those tight white tank tops that all the girls seem to wear these days. The ones that don’t even attempt to cover their bellies. As if sensing me, she suddenly looks up and then toward the window. I quickly step back.
She has not seen me. She stands and arches her back like a cat. Her breasts are indeed full beneath the tank top, and her belly has only the slightest of outward curves.