The Headmaster's Wife(50)
Out on the avenue the night is dark and cold, and the streets are full of people walking huddled and faceless against it. Coming down Ninety-second, he can see the river now beyond in the icy dark and, as he enters his unassuming apartment building, he has this sudden sinking feeling that she will no longer be upstairs.
He rides the elevator to the fourteenth floor, and Mrs. Goldsmith, well into her eighties, is in the hallway, her groceries at her feet, her terrier looking up at him expectantly as she fumbles through her bag for her keys. Russell desperately doesn’t want to talk with her, not tonight, but she sees him and breaks into a wide smile, and he says, “Let me give you a hand with those.”
A moment later he has Mrs. Goldsmith safely in her apartment, her groceries on the kitchen table, and he opens the door to his own apartment and for a moment he thinks his fears are to be realized, as the kitchen is dark and in the small living room there is only the light from the reading lamp and there is no sign of her. But then he sees the bathroom door is closed, yellow light coming from underneath it. He goes to it and says, “Betsy?”
“Oh,” the voice comes back to him, and he is relieved. “Just finishing in the tub. Be out in a minute.”
Russell quickly hustles and turns on lights, cleans off the small dining room table in front of the best feature of his place, the large window that looks out over West End Avenue to the wide Hudson and the twinkling lights of New Jersey on the opposite shore. He considers candles—he knows he has them somewhere, in the kitchen perhaps—but that would be too much, he decides, deliberately romantic. That is not why she is here, though, from the moment he saw her yesterday, for the first time since they were in boarding school together so long ago, he has allowed himself the fantasy, and why not? He is single, and he suspects, from the few things she has said opaquely, that she has left Arthur for good. But more than that, standing in front of her for the first time in fortysomething years, he realized that she has aged, of course, as has he, but that the ineffable part of her beauty, the part he thought about all the time during that interminable six months after he left Lancaster and before he started as a freshman at Brandeis, had not changed one bit. Even with short gray hair and the furrowed lines of late middle age, he would have recognized her on the street. And, he thinks, she is even more beautiful now to him, if that is possible. She wears her sorrow like clothes, but with wisdom and loss and years of living come a different, particular beauty that no smooth-faced adolescent can possibly match.
When she comes out finally, flushed from the heat of the bath, and wearing a T-shirt and jeans, he smiles at her. The table by the window is set. It is hardly elegant, with the containers of sushi simply opened, but he does have small plates and wineglasses and an open bottle of rosé, more of a summer thing than winter, but he couldn’t think what else made sense with the fish.
“Oh, lovely,” she says.
“I hope you like sushi.”
“I do,” says Betsy.
And she sits down across from him, and when she does he looks her in the eye and he thinks how much time can steal from us, what a goddamn thief it is, that an entire lifetime could be lived since he last sat with her. They should be strangers but he does not feel that way. He is comfortable with her, and he has been alone so long he decided a few years ago that he might never be comfortable with someone again. But here he is, the great irony, sitting across from Betsy Pappas (for, in his mind, that is what he will call her), and the years have stripped away. He permits himself to imagine that maybe this is just another Wednesday at their city apartment. Their kids are out and about in the world, living splendid lives. They will small-talk about what each of them did that day, about the children, who might have called with some new bit of news. Perhaps a new boyfriend or girlfriend or something they can collectively worry about.
She jars him out of this. “How is Arthur?”
Russell shrugs. “He’ll be okay.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Are they going to keep him?”
“They don’t want to. I proposed a solution.”
“Oh?”
“Stamford Hills. A facility in Connecticut. He’ll get the help he needs. But it won’t be Bellevue. He may even like it there.”
Betsy raises her glass. She leans it toward Russell’s. “Thank you.”
He tips his glass into hers. “He still needs to agree.”
“He will, won’t he?”
“I think so,” says Russell.
They eat. Russell watches as she takes a piece of slender fish into her mouth, dipping it first into soy, and he follows. She is skillful with the chopsticks—smearing wasabi on the fish, and all of it is seamless, and for a few moments they eat in silence.
“This is wonderful,” she says.
He shrugs. “I wish I could cook, but New York always has sushi.”
She smiles, and in the smile he sees her younger self once again and suddenly he is insecure for all the years he has worked and lived. What does he have to show for it? This apartment? He doesn’t even have a tiny spit of land. All he has is this apartment on the Upper West Side, a failed marriage, but at least there are children who think fondly of him. He has his job as an assistant district attorney, one of many. He will never be district attorney, for this is Manhattan, and he is not that person. Perhaps in a small town, where he came from, but he always had different aspirations, didn’t he? Otherwise he would not have gone to Lancaster, which is not the place for the son of a plumber from Western Mass.