The Headmaster's Wife(9)

As the evening grows later, I find myself in a state of profound agitation. Elizabeth is out somewhere, and I have the house to myself. I nurse a scotch and pace in my office and spend some time peering out the window like a crazy person. Betsy’s absence has unnerved me. In my mind I replay all the things she said to me during the magic of the previous night. Was there anything in those words to suggest she might do something rash and let someone know the truth about us?

During the study hall hours, I head out across the soccer fields. The moon is up and hangs low and fat over the river. Between the brick dorms I creep up on her window, but this time I am thwarted. The shade is pulled tightly down, as if she has anticipated my visit and does not want to see me.

I linger outside for a few minutes. I am confused. I try to see in through that tiny margin that exists between shade and glass, but I can make out nothing. I return home defeated.

And in the middle of the night something most curious happens. I am in my bed unable to sleep. The moonlight comes through the window and paints a fat rectangle on the hardwood floor. My thoughts are racing with images of Betsy—her touch, the feel of her beneath my coarse, wrinkled hands. I panic about all I could lose should she choose to reveal what exists between us. And like a schoolboy, I also go to thoughts of jealousy. What if I bored her? What if she was disappointed? I think of her saying she wanted to check the box. Perhaps she has expectations, some kind of cliché, of how an older man might perform. An idea born of films or books and one that, I think, is fundamentally unfair. What if she discovered that, when you come right down to it, we are all just boys? Clumsy and stupid underneath a cultured veneer developed over decades of careful living?

I am lying in bed turning all this over in my mind when I hear footfalls in the hallway. Elizabeth. I open the door to my bedroom. The bathroom door is closed, but yellow light streams out from underneath it. I have an urge to confess, to tell Elizabeth everything, though I know this makes no sense. Instead I realize that the urge I have is simply to talk, to hear my own voice in the darkness, and so I go to the door and say, Elizabeth?

Whatever response she has is muffled, and I realize then she is sitting in the tub, as she does sometimes when she cannot sleep. So I begin to talk. And what I say surprises me. You know how the middle of the night can open you up sometimes? How it can make wounds appear seemingly out of nowhere?

And so, before I know it, I have launched into a passionate speech to the door, and to where Elizabeth lies soaking in her bath. I tell her that I am not proud of how I have been, that I know I have been distant, and then I am speaking all kinds of words of love, words I didn’t know I still had in me. I tell her I have loved her longer than anything else on this earth. Where did this come from? Welling up inside me, perhaps, from unrequited guilt?

And when I finish I am silent. I wait for her to speak. A moment goes by, and then another. Finally I call out her name, and when she does not respond, I slowly open the door. The bathtub is empty. There is no humidity in the air that you get from a recent bath, no moisture on the windows or the mirror. I have been opening my heart to an empty room.





I do not see Betsy Pappas again until my Russian literature class meets. My heart is practically in my throat during the walk from my office to the Shephard Hall academic building. As it turns out, she is in front of the building when I approach. It is an unseasonably warm day for early October, and she wears a skirt that flirts with the dress code for length. I cannot help but wonder if her clothing is a response to our dalliance. Does she think she is now allowed to take liberties?

She is in a pack of students, another girl and two boys, and one of the boys, Russell Hurley, a postgraduate we brought in solely for his ability to put a basketball through a hoop, appears to be holding court. As I walk toward them, I see the way she looks up at Russell, a tall, good-looking kid, and how she laughs at whatever it is he has just said. It’s a flirty laugh, her head kicking back a little, her fingers once again running those threads of hair behind her ears. She is exhibiting a newfound confidence, and I find this disconcerting.

If my life were a film, this would be happening in slow motion. I walk by them to the entrance of the building, staring over at her. Her head moves slowly up, her eyes stray reluctantly from Russell’s chiseled face. Her gaze catches my own, and I smile. She is exactly as I have imagined in these days since I last saw her. I do not notice the other kids around her. She looks quickly away, and my heart sinks a little.

In the classroom she is the last one in. Everyone else is seated when she takes her customary spot in the front. She looks down at her book and not at me when I begin to talk. We are reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and it is hard to focus. I ask the usual questions—the Christ metaphors and so on—and Betsy seems curiously disengaged. In my mind I keep going back to the feel of her underneath me, my bones on her bones, and then I flash to the moment before we came into this building, her staring up at basketball star Russell, and I suddenly have the urge to punish her.

I can be quite pedantic sometimes. It is a tendency I try to repress in myself. Lancaster students are smart and ambitious, and in the classroom there is seldom a reason to cold-call on any of the students. But today I call on Betsy, posing a withering question, but she fends it off rather nicely, so I come right back at her with a more challenging one. I have a sense of the class moving forward in their chairs. She stumbles a little, and I pounce. It is not a fair fight, and the class seems to sense this. I am overly combative, and at one point, while I am ranting at her, I see a look in her eyes like glowing hate. I back off, and the class settles down. We make it through the remainder of the discussion, and on a whim I assign a paper not on the syllabus. There is an audible groan, and I smile broadly.