The Headmaster's Wife(31)
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.