The Headmaster's Wife(32)
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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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.