The Headmaster's Wife(41)
He goes silent, and she rolls away from him on the bed, toward the wall, toward the window that looks west between the buildings to the Hudson. A few minutes later, she hears him leave the room.
At one point she falls asleep, and when she wakes he is nowhere to be found. She moves through the apartment until she finds him on the balcony. He is naked with his hands on the top of the ornate balustrade. She comes up behind him, and now he is the one who is weeping. The air is cool this high up, and the breeze stiffens her nipples and blows her hair off her shoulders. She does not say anything, but follows his eyes to the ground far below. It is late at night, but the street is full of people. Cars stream down Central Park West toward Columbus Circle.
He turns and looks at her, his eyes fat with tears.
“What are you thinking about?” she says.
“Honestly?”
“Yes.”
“I am thinking I would like to walk in the park naked. Disappear into its trees and not come back.”
And then she realizes that they are more alike than she has imagined. Like her, he is broken. And she thinks perhaps this is what love is: letting someone else see that part of you that shatters like glass. All of us are broken in our own way. And in that moment, on her birthday, looking over the black trees to the bright lights of the other side, she knows she will marry Arthur. They will grow old together, broken together, and as long as they both don’t completely shatter at the same time, they might find a way to pick each other off the ground.
One night they are at a faculty dinner at one of the houses on the row. It is early September but might as well be midsummer for there is a heat wave, and while the wife offers gin and tonics, the husband lights the grill for steaks. They could be anywhere, Betsy thinks, at any old cookout, except that the white clapboard is so classically New England and in the walled-in garden the faculty chatting in small groups are mostly in their late twenties and thirties, a particularly handsome group of people, she thinks, especially in the bright sunlight and against the pale blue sky.
She is standing with Arthur and with James Booth, the new art teacher, and his wife, Ella, who has been hired into music. They are a little different, more bohemian, she supposes, and this is partly on her mind, but mostly she is not listening, for behind them she sees the host’s daughter, a girl of about thirteen, sitting cross-legged near the rosebushes in the far corner of the garden. The girl is beautiful, with long, straight flaxen hair, and she is shucking corn for dinner. She has on a sundress and is barefoot. In front of her is a large pot, and as she shucks she takes the freshly cleaned cobs and places them in it. For some reason this moves Betsy, and she can’t keep her eyes off the girl.
For the remainder of her life she will remember this simple moment, a pretty girl shucking corn, and she will never tell anyone about it. And she does not know why this moves her so—could it be because it was something she did as a child when her parents had summer cookouts? No, it’s bigger than that, it’s more what the girl represents, this idea of family, and for the first time she sees herself as someone who should carry a legacy to a new generation. And that night, when they return to their apartment, the two of them gilded from gin and tonics in the sun, it is she who initiates the lovemaking, first with passionate kissing in the living room and then when they move to the bedroom and undress each other. In the dim light she looks up at Arthur, and he smiles warmly at her and brushes her hair off her forehead before he lifts her shirt up and over her head. And when Arthur reaches for the condoms in the top drawer of the nightstand next to the bed, she stops him.
“Not tonight,” she says.
“No?” he says, surprised.
“No,” she says.
And when he is inside her, she presses her face into the pillow, and her mind empties until there is only the simple feel of him, his hands on her hips, the strength of him, of her, of both of them.
The thing she imagines, before having a baby, that she will dislike the most, breastfeeding, she falls in love with. Seeing it from a distance, other women sneaking into the coatroom and sliding up their shirts, holding a screaming baby like a football, there was a primalness to it she found entirely unappealing: women as cows. But now, with Ethan, once she gets over the initial soreness and they figure it out together, how to latch, the two of them a team, she finds herself looking forward to it, the tug, the release of milk into his eager mouth. It is almost sexual, this feeling—but of course that cheapens it. It is more complex and nuanced than sex, more as if a fifth chamber in her heart has suddenly revealed itself.
He is more beautiful than other babies, she thinks, not one of those weird old men. He has perfect features, and when he is nursing, she stares down at his beatific face and she loves him more than she thought it possible to love any living thing. Most of all she loves that she can give him this, the milk. The fact that she has this ability innately is as close as she has come to believing in God.
Later she will look back on this as the time in her life she was happiest. Ethan grows like a tree. Motherhood suits her. Arthur is a rising star in the classroom and even more so in the school at large. They have found their place fully in the world, and when that happens, you cannot help but feel it. It is as if their lives were locks that needed to be calibrated. Suddenly everything fits.
Soon Ethan is walking, banging into everything, muttering his first words. He is verbal early, and this pleases Arthur to no end, and when Arthur tells her excitedly, “I think he’s smart. He looks smart, doesn’t he? I mean, look at him.”