The Headmaster's Wife(8)

“No?” I say. It dawns on me that the language of love, the very word, love, may not be the lingua franca of her generation. Maybe no one talks about love anymore, maybe there is some other language I am not privy to. Everything grows coarser over time, less subtle. There is no mysticism anymore. Perhaps love is too high-minded.

Betsy cracks open the window, and the night air comes in, along with all the sounds of the cars passing by the Common, the stop-and-start, the diesel roar of a bus. “You have nothing to worry about from me,” she says again.

“Good,” I say, though secretly this dismays me. Right now I want things from her to worry about.

She goes to her pocketbook and, to my great surprise, pulls out a pack of cigarettes.

“You smoke?” I say incredulously, and the boundaries between us return for a moment, as I am the headmaster and she is the student.

She laughs again. “Sometimes,” she says. So mature, I think. Look at her. She pads across the room to the window again and lights her cigarette, exhales into the night.

“These are all No Smoking rooms,” I say.

She looks back at me. She impresses again. “Are we suddenly obeying the rules?”

I feel old and silly. I look down at my hairy chest, my slight gut—not bad for a man of my age—and then to my tired cock. “No,” I say. “No rules tonight.”

Betsy leans out the window. Her ass is in the air, and I feel a stirring again. She turns back toward me. She says, “I just wanted to check the box, you know.”

“Check the box?”

“The one next to ‘older man.’”

I realize I have underestimated her again. The knock comes to the door, and she drops her cigarette out the window and hustles to the bathroom. Closes the door behind her. I rise and put on a terrycloth robe, and Room Service brings in a bottle of wine in a bucket. The man asks me if he should open it. I nod. He does. There are two glasses. I can see him taking in the smell of smoke and the lower-note, but still undeniable, smell of our sex. I sign, and he leaves.

I pour two glasses of wine. Betsy returns from the bathroom, the closing door apparently her cue. A towel is wrapped around her. All sense of propriety has gone out the window, and I hand her a glass of wine. She takes it from me and drinks.

I look at the clock. It reads ten past eleven. At home I would be in bed now, reading, and it would be past lights-out for Betsy. As if reading my mind, she says, “It’s early.”

She jumps onto the bed. I join her. There is nothing to say. I turn on the television, and we sit together drinking wine and watching a movie on HBO. I pay no attention to it. She lies next to me, and the towel falls from her breasts, the rich ripeness of her youth spilling out onto the sheets. Later we make love again, and this time it is different, the lights off, and I am filled with a deep urgency. She is on all fours, and I look over her to the windows and the refracted light of the city. I hold her shoulders in my hands and feel the bones moving quietly underneath her skin.





He stops talking as another man comes into the room. The man is African-American and tall and leans down toward the man who does all the talking and whispers something inaudible in his ear. The man who does all the talking nods, and then the African-American man backs out of the room.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No, continue. Unless you want a break. You can have one, you know.”

“What was that about?”

“What?”

“The man who came in. What did he tell you?”

“He confirmed your identity.”

“My identity?”

“That an Arthur Winthrop who fits your general description was the headmaster at the Lancaster School in Vermont.”

“Was that in doubt?”

“Routine,” the man says. “We have to check these things out. You understand.”

“One part you have wrong. You said was the headmaster. I am the headmaster.”

“Of course. Just a figure of speech.”

“Not a figure of speech. It was the wrong tense.”

“My apologies,” the man says, and he smiles. “Forgive me. And please, continue.”

“Can I have more coffee?”

“Sure.”

“And a cigarette?”

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Sometimes I do.”

“It’s a public building, but if you don’t tell anyone, I think we can make an exception.”

The man who doesn’t talk gets up and leaves the room. “Should I wait for him to come back?”

“No, you can continue. He’ll get your coffee and a smoke.”

“Thank you.”





The next morning, under steely skies, I drop her off at the front of her dorm and return home and take a long hot shower before making way across the road to my office. The campus feels different to me somehow. I can’t pinpoint why, but it feels smaller maybe, the buildings closing in on themselves. It is more than the usual feeling I get when I return from Boston or New York. Something has changed, but I do not know what.

It is only later, when I am back in the swing of my work—meetings and phone calls and the things one does to run an independent school—that it occurs to me what it is. In Boston, Betsy and I could walk the streets together, share a hotel room, make love without interruption. Now we are in our familiar roles again, and any interaction we have is predetermined. I cannot just see her. She cannot come to me. We have to pretend to be strangers after we have learned to know each other. I look for her that night at dinner. I am filled with longing. Students at my table talk around me, and Elizabeth listens patiently to them, but I wait with anticipation every time the swinging door from the kitchen opens. I want to see her come out with a tray in her hand, catch her eye as she looks over at me. But she is not in the dining hall. I am certain of it. Just like class, you need an excuse to be absent from dinner. I have half a mind to find one of her dorm parents and see what the story is, though I do not want to call more attention to her than I should. It would be most unusual for the headmaster to inquire about the welfare of a particular student only because she was not at dinner.