The Headmaster's Wife(33)
She says, “Have you told anyone about us?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, that we had sex.”
“It’s cool,” he says.
“You didn’t answer me.”
“Not really,” he says. “I mean, that’s between us, right?”
“Who did you tell?”
He looks away, and she gets an image of his whole dorm knowing about them, boys sitting cross-legged in one of those paneled rooms and Arthur holding court about her, details about how easily she gave it up in Boston and, even worse, in the woods on the Groton campus.
“Did you?”
“No,” he says. “I swear. No. I wouldn’t do that.”
And the funny thing is that part of her hopes he did. No girl wants to be a slut, but part of her wants these boys to know, wants other girls to know, that she is a girl who has graduated. That she sleeps with boys. That she will sleep with boys.
Maybe it is Arthur talking about going to Yale, ignoring the present for the uncertain future—or maybe it is the sense she has that he has spilled the truth about the two of them—but walking around that campus as fall drifts toward winter, she is aware of eyes on her, and one set of eyes in particular.
Russell Hurley is a postgrad, and everyone knows who he is. He is hard to miss at almost six foot six, with a thick head of brown hair. In some ways he is an anomaly at this old school, for he is not celebrated for the usual things that one is celebrated for, money and connections or academic accomplishment. Instead, Russell is, like her, a scholarship student, though whereas Elizabeth, Betsy, is here because she is smart, Russell is here for the narrower and yet more elevated ability to throw a basketball through a hoop.
He is charmingly unrefined. He appears to own one tie. His clothes are rumpled but not in that classic, intentionally preppy sense. His pants are never pressed. But he is tall and good-looking, and in her math class she finds herself staring at him, and sometimes he looks back at her, and she knows he is aware of her and hopes it is not just because of whatever Arthur may have told his friends about her.
One afternoon she finds herself in the student union, part of a group of friends, and Russell joins them, and there is something about the way the other girls are drawn to him, the boys, too, and it is not just his status as the rarefied athletic god to grace the Lancaster campus, but instead because he has that nameless magnetism that certain people have, an ease with themselves that draws other people like a moth to a light. Russell is telling a story, and Betsy sees how the other girls laugh, and she finds herself laughing reflexively, and when she does, she sees that he is smiling at her and catching her eye.
Afterward, she is walking up the stairs and toward the outside and the wan November sun when she notices he is coming up behind her, and determined not to turn around, she keeps walking, hoping he will catch up to her, and he does, just in time to open the door for her, and together they move outside, and before they go their different ways to their dorms to get ready for practice, they stop in the quad and talk. She can see in his eyes the same look she saw in Arthur’s, a look she is beginning to recognize as desire, and it confirms for her what she suspected downstairs in the student union, when he seemed to catch her eye more than the others.
And she is drawn to this. It pleases her to think that she has become a girl to be desired.
That week, she begins to avoid Arthur. He comes to her dorm window at night, and she opens it and tells him first she is not feeling well and then that she has just too much work to come out. The first time, he is okay if disappointed, but by the end of the week she can see his anxiety and knows she has to do this. She leads him to the river this time, away from the soccer field and other couples. The stars are out and arc away above them and beyond the horizon.
They sit down on the bank of the river. The water in front of them is inky and dark, and beyond it they can see the fallow fields stretching into shadow.
This is the first time she has ever had a boyfriend and the first time she has ever had to break up with a boyfriend, and she has the obvious challenge of trying to make him feel good about himself and at the same time to be clear that it is over.
She tells him all the things she can think of, about how next year he will go to Yale anyway and she will not; how she just needs some space right now; that her studies have to take priority and she does not have the time. In other words, it is has everything to do with her and nothing to do with him, and certainly nothing to do with long-limbed Russell Hurley and his wonderful, open smile.
It goes badly. He cries. She has not anticipated this, his crying, and she hates him for it, since he looks shitty and pathetic sobbing into his scarf amid the burble of the flowing river. For a while she turns away from him and is grateful for the dark so she only has to listen to him snivel and choke on his cries. She looks upriver and imagines the falls she knows are up there but that she cannot hear, and to relieve herself from his crying she thinks about jumping under the falls and letting the torrent of water pick her up and send her tumbling over and over and away.
Looking back through the prism of time, she sees Russell Hurley take on much greater significance in her life than she supposes he should for the short span of time he was part of it. She might even say he was the great love of her life if anyone ever asked her the question, since it is the kind of question she figures someone asks you eventually, though no one ever has.