The Headmaster's Wife(40)
When the bus leaves at 11:15 for the ride back up to Massachusetts, she is not on it. Instead, she is in a nearby dorm, fully clothed, on her back on a bed next to Arthur Winthrop, talking in the half dark, staring at the ceiling, whispering stories with him as if the past were a long time ago.
On weekends they burn up the highways from suburban Boston to New Haven, more she than he, since she can stay in his dorm. At Wellesley things change more slowly, and she has to sneak him in. The young Arthur is an ardent lover, and they f*ck with abandon. His roommate—a nice, tall, skinny, long-haired kid from Exeter, of all places—is kind enough to find another place to stay on the nights she comes down.
In that dorm room, with its fireplace and high ceilings and its view of the broad expanse of the quad, they try their hardest never to leave this space. They bring in pizza. They drink wine straight from the bottle. They smoke cigarettes. She studies, and he does not. This mystifies her about Arthur, how he never seems to study. She feels perpetually behind, like she will never catch up, but he doesn’t seem to give a shit, or at least that’s what he wants to show her. In the end, she decides it’s genuine: that he is just one of those people who can absorb books, never take notes, and show up and ace his tests. Plus, he has the advantage of knowing what graduation brings. Graduation brings a return to Lancaster. The point is to get the degree. No more, no less.
College, as it turns out, is Lancaster unbridled, Lancaster without rules.
They can sleep as late as they want. They can be in each other’s rooms. They can smoke and drink, and if they want to skip class—something he does but she cannot imagine, aware, as she is, of the dollars and cents of it all—they can do that, too. Most of all they can make love, and in those first months, those precious weekends when she arrives late and they fall into each other, they are as much scientists as they are artists.
She is on the Pill now. It is a revelation, this thing she takes every day that says she can have as much sex as she wants and not worry about getting pregnant. Arthur loves it, too, for it is as if the last impediment to relentless f*cking has been removed. Plus, she is all hormones. “Look at me,” she says to Arthur once, “my tits are bigger, aren’t they? I mean, I’m not imagining that, right?”
“No,” he says, “you’re not.”
And so she climbs on top of him; he climbs on top of her; they climb on top of each other and curl together like vines.
All walls between them fall away, and they are willing to be naked with each other, not just in the narrow biblical sense, but in the larger sense of the word, opening their insides as well as their outsides without shame or remorse or fear. She lets Arthur see her with all her flaws and she sees all of his, and sometimes, when she is leaving him, a wave of inexplicable sadness comes over her. It is nothing specific that she can point to—not the leaving, for she likes her freedom, too—but come over her it does, and soon she is weeping.
Arthur always mistakes this for her having to get back on Interstate 95 and leave him behind, and he invariably commits the one mistake he will compound throughout their lives: a failure to leave her alone. If he just let her be sad, just let her dwell in it for a moment, she would come out the other side and be fine.
But he is a man and he wants to fix her. She tells him not to, she tells him he cannot, but he doesn’t stop. He tries humor at first, as if he can jolly her out of this mood, and when that doesn’t work he tries anger.
“For Christ’s sake, Betsy, knock it off, will you?”
On her birthday he takes her to New York City and surprises her by securing Dick Ives’s apartment. Dick is a friend of theirs from Lancaster, and the apartment has been in his family. She has heard of it before, this grand place that Dick sometimes lets his friends use, but she has never seen it.
As a consequence, Betsy finds herself in the most remarkable apartment she has ever seen, the penthouse of Halvorsen Hall on West Sixty-fourth and Central Park West. The place is huge by New York standards, two floors with a swooping staircase that leads up to the bedrooms and, most magnificently, a balcony—can you call it balcony if it fits fifty people?—with marble railings that looks out over Central Park to the towers of the Upper East Side.
This is in the fall. The city is gorgeous in autumn color, and they catch a Broadway show, eat dinner at a French restaurant, where a duck is carved at the table for them and a sauce is ladled out of a copper pan and onto their plates.
They drink bottles of wine and afterward they walk down the busy city streets with their arms locked, strolling while the bustle flows over and around them. Everyone, it seems, is in a hurry except for the two of them.
That night, when they are both high from the wine, she dances for Arthur. It begins as a lark, something funny to do, though she admits she likes his gaze on her as she takes off her clothes in front of the window, not giving a shit who might be looking in from the big city. She likes his gaze as she begins to move for him, closing her eyes and letting her body go, truly go, for the first time in her life.
They make love in the huge shower with water spilling over them, and afterward, now on their third bottle of wine, she breaks down again, this time even more unexpectedly—it comes over her faster than a cold—and maybe it is because it happens after a magical night in the city, the gift of it that he has given her on her birthday, and while Arthur wants to deliver her from this moment, she knows that he cannot and that, like a cold, it will have to run its course.