The third photograph was the one that always made him stop because it proved that this was all deliberate. It wasn’t just a few cases of desperate, overwhelming passion. It wasn’t that Alice needed sex and he wasn’t giving her the sex she needed and so she found herself overcome with desire and just gave into it. In this photograph the boy was tied to the bed, not with twine or rope from the garage, but with black leather straps that had obviously been made for the purpose. Peter had seen them for sale in shops in Boston. The boy had a gag in his mouth and a black leather blindfold over his eyes, and those had also been professionally made. Peter wondered how she had gotten hold of them. She couldn’t have just waltzed into a store somewhere and bought them herself. There was her hair. It made her stand out. Maybe she’d gotten the boy to buy them. Maybe she’d sent away for them on the Internet and just trusted that she would be home when they came and that nobody else would get hold of them. In this photograph she was kneeling between the boy’s spread legs and bent over so that her hair half fell in front of her face. Enough of that face was visible so that Peter could see she had the boy’s penis in her mouth, so deeply it seemed to be climbing down her throat.
Boys, Peter thought, they aren’t really boys. That was true. This one, the “boy” from last year, had been eighteen at the time the photographs were taken. He’d been as big as a house and stronger than Peter had ever imagined himself capable of being. The boy this year—yes, of course there was a boy this year, there was a boy every year—was sixteen, and Peter suspected that that was deliberate. Alice would know the law and know what she needed to do to stay inside of it. She served on the boards of organizations dedicated to “fighting child abuse.” Of course the child abuse they were fighting was the abuse done to girls. The only time Alice had ever been interested in the abuse done to boys was when it had looked like a policy of the Roman Catholic Church.
Peter shuffled through the photographs and came up with the ones from this year, new ones, only a few weeks old. He really couldn’t breathe. It was impossible. He knew this boy. It wasn’t a boy he would have expected Alice to take up with because Alice—in the end, when she wasn’t watching herself, when she wasn’t acting a part for the rest of the world—was who she was. She could no more help herself than he could. This boy, though, this boy was all wrong. He was from the wrong background. He had the wrong looks. He had the wrong tastes in sex. The photographs from this year were all predictably vanilla, no odd positions, no leather equipment. The boy’s thick, dark hair fell on Alice’s breasts as he leaned over her, pumping away in the missionary position.
Peter suddenly wished he had it all on tape, that he could run it back for himself in video the way other men ran porno films to get themselves in the mood.
“There’s one thing you have to remember,” a good friend of his on the board had said when Peter had first been appointed headmaster, “a headmaster is always a headmaster. No matter what he does. No matter where he is. Once you take on the title, anything you do will be interpreted as being not your own actions but the actions of the headmaster of Windsor Academy. It isn’t a comfortable position.”
No, Peter thought, it isn’t a comfortable position. It paralyzed him. He had no idea what he was doing with these photographs. He had no idea what he wanted them for. He couldn’t see himself divorcing Alice. Even if she agreed to give him a divorce without a struggle, it would be a disaster. The headmasters of New England prep schools did not get divorced from the women the Board of Trustees expected to act as mothers to the students under their care. What was worse, he didn’t want to get divorced from Alice. He didn’t want his life disrupted in any way. He only wanted—what?
To find the leather equipment, where she’d put it, what she did with it when she wasn’t using it. To see her exposed, not physically, not by the circulation of these pictures, but exposed, right down to the bone, so that everybody could see her for what she was. Peter’s real problem was that he didn’t know what that was. He had a terrible feeling Alice didn’t know either. He reached out for the photographs and swept them up. He put the envelope back into the drawer. He shut the drawer and locked it. Once the photographs were out of sight, he could breathe more easily, but he still couldn’t think.
Michael Feyre, he thought, and the idea was so absurd he simply stopped thinking of it. Even with the pictures in the drawer, he couldn’t imagine Alice panting over the body of that thick, awkward, unimaginative clod.