The Headmaster's Wife(36)
He left Lancaster with a long, slow hug for Betsy Pappas, and when she cried and said they would still see each other, he just held her face in his big hands and looked her in the eye, and he knew as well as she did that it would not work, that there was Lancaster and then there was the rest of the world, and once you were on the outside there was no coming back in again.
She starts playing tennis at first on a lark, an invitation that comes from one of the other librarians, who has put together a foursome to take lessons together from the new tennis coach, who is widely considered to be remarkably handsome, though Elizabeth finds something sad in his good looks, in this man in his mid-fifties trying to cobble together a living by coaching high school kids in Vermont and giving lessons to aging female faculty who look forward to that once a week when someone touches them again, even if it is only a strong hand showing them where their elbow should be for a volley.
She also finds something queasy in his demeanor, his awareness of his square-jawed handsomeness and what it does to these aging, doughy, well-bred women.
But the truth is that behind the veneer of all that macho bravado, and the class-conscious sense he has underneath the surface that he has lived a failed life—he confesses to her once that his dream was to be a writer—lives a really good teacher. He knows tennis. And what starts for her as a lark quickly grows into an obsession. And long after her fellow players give up the lessons, she stays hard at them, and not because she wants to f*ck the tennis pro—though sometimes, in the shower afterward, she does think about it—but rather, because for the first time in forever she is getting better at something, there is something new to learn, and her life has not yet collapsed into complete stasis at this old school, with her old husband, and her willful son fighting a war thousands of miles away.
And so once a week turns into three lessons a week. Three lessons a week turn into five days of tennis, one day of just hitting without instruction—still at fifty dollars an hour—and free time spent hitting serve after serve, the satisfying thwack of the ball leaving her strings for that square patch of real estate on the other side of the net.
The pro, Todd, spends a solid month just trying to teach her the elegance of a one-handed slice backhand, and at first it feels as impossible to her as learning to play the violin. She cannot ever imagine mastering it, but he tells her just to be patient, keep pulling the racket back and hit through the ball.
And one day they are on the court and it is like a gift, an astonishing gift, for suddenly she pulls the racket back, and the ball returns over the net with the perfect trajectory, low and spinning, skidding on the court when it hits. Then she does it again, and again, and she is no longer thinking about it, just hitting, and Todd on the other side is saying to her, “Yes, that’s it, good hit, just like that, again, oh, good job, Betsy!”
She is so elated by this small victory that she agrees with him that they should definitely celebrate, and so she sends Arthur an e-mail that she will not be at the dining hall and instead finds herself at an out-of-the-way pub with Todd drinking gin and eating burgers and talking tennis.
There is a moment, halfway through her first gin, when she suddenly becomes aware of the oddity of this situation, of Todd, across from her in a T-shirt and jeans, and she realizes it is the first time she has ever seen him in anything outside of the Head tennis sweats he always wears on the court.
She has no business being here, she thinks, for she is fifty-four years old and the wife of the headmaster, and she decides that she will finish this drink and then have Todd take her home. But then the second drink seems like a good idea, and oh, f*ck it, let’s have a third, and when he takes her home it is not to the headmaster’s white Colonial, but instead through the basement of old Spencer dorm (looking both ways, hoping not to be spied by a stray student), where he has a small apartment provided by the school.
He is kind enough to keep the lights off, and when she gets over the awful feeling of being naked for the first time in more than thirty years in front of a man who is not Arthur, he f*cks her athletically, as if he wants to show her that his prowess is not limited to hitting powerful forehands. She gives in and lets him flip her this way and that, and later it is this she will remember, how he tosses her around, and not how any of it felt, since she completely blanks when confronted with the awesome spectacle of his near-pornographic and quite improbable ability to work through the first fifty pages of the Kama Sutra in less than twenty minutes.
Worse than the sex itself is the fact that immediately afterward she begins to weep.
Todd at first mistakes her convulsions for laughter but then realizes quickly that she is crying and crying inconsolably. He tells her it will be okay, but it doesn’t matter. For the truth is she has no idea why she is crying.
She is not crying because she has betrayed her husband, or even because the sexual act itself has reminded her of all the things she does not like about getting older. She does not cry for her son, who worries the hell out of her with his e-mails from Mosul, saying how scared he is and not to tell anyone that. “Tell everyone I am fine and strong, Mom,” he writes, “especially Dad.”
She cries for reasons she cannot even understand, and this only makes her cry harder. She cannot stop, and Todd is freaked out and keeps asking what he did. She is sobbing too hard to tell him he has not done a damn thing. That this has nothing to do with him.