“Maybe. I think I’ll quit this job now before you get around to firing me next week. You will get around to firing me. And I find, thinking about this, that I don’t really care one way or the other what happens to Windsor Academy. I just know I don’t want to be the one to deal with it.”
“Well,” Jason said, “the board will of course consider the submission of your resignation—”
“No, Jason, I’m not submitting my resignation. I’m quitting. Right here. Right now. As of this moment. I’m done. Get somebody else to deal with this mess. I won’t.”
“You can’t do that,” Jason said automatically. “You’ve got a contract. You’re required to give us notice. If you walk out, we could sue you.”
“Go right ahead. I don’t own much. Most of what we have is Alice’s, and most of it’s untouchable.”
“You’ll never work in another school.”
“No,” Peter said, “I won’t. Thank God.”
“This is completely and utterly irresponsible.”
“Of course it is,” Peter said, “and I’ve been responsible all my life. And now I’ve stopped. I really have stopped, Jason. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to do anything anymore.”
“But you can’t—” Jason said.
Peter hung up the phone in his ear.
He had had no idea that he was going to do what he had just done, but he was very happy he had done it. It was the right note, the note he had been looking for all day. He went out of the study into the living room. He wondered where Alice was, and what she was doing. He wondered if it would matter to her one way or the other if she came in and found him dead on the floor. The furniture all belonged to the school. A headmaster was no different than any other faculty member in a boarding school. His life belonged to the school, twenty-four seven. He owned nothing but what he wore. His housing, his furniture, even his food were all provided.
He went to the living room fireplace and looked at the rifles there. They were perfectly useful rifles as far as he knew. They had not been disabled in any way, although they contained no ammunition. There was something so alluringly English about guns over a fireplace; even a school as “progressive” as Windsor had not been able to resist using them. He could go into Boston and buy ammunition. He didn’t think he would.
The sensible thing would be to hang himself, as Michael Feyre was supposed to have done, to put a rope from the utility room over the sprinkler system pipes and stand on a chair and then kick the chair out from under him. He looked at the sprinkler pipes. They looked fragile. They probably weren’t. He went out into the hall again and then to the back where the kitchen was. The utility room was just through the kitchen near the backdoor. He went in and stood next to the washing machine and looked at the coil of rope where it sat on the shelf above the freezer and had satthe whole time he had been at Windsor. He tried to imagine it as a snake, the way horror novelists were supposed to like to do. He had never read a horror novel either. There were so many things he had never done. There were so many things he would never do. It wasn’t true that where there was life there was hope. Some people left some things far too late.
All of a sudden a song popped into his head, a song from his early adolescence, that had been big on the radio when he was a teenager and had stuck with him in spite of the fact that he’d thought at the time that the music was stupid and the lyrics were stupider. “Sixteen Tons,” that was what it was called, all about selling your soul to the company store, sung by somebody called Tennessee Ernie Ford. There was a lot of bass, and not much melody. The whole thing was brain-dead and repetitive. He couldn’t get it out of his head.
He’d sold his soul to the company store, all right. He was going to go on selling it, too, because he knew now that he did not have the courage even to commit suicide. He would not load one of the guns in the living room. He would not throw this coil of rope over the sprinkler system pipes. He would not down an entire prescription bottle of whatever Alice might have in the medicine cabinet upstairs. He had used up what little store of courage he’d had when he’d quit his job, and now he regretted even that.
He sat down on the utility room floor abruptly, slamming his coccyx against the floor tiles with such force that he was sure he’d broken it. There was pain, but it felt very far away. Mostly there was nothing, this room, this floor, the sight of his long-fingered hands on his knees, nothing and nobody, nowhere. It didn’t matter. He would not kill himself. He would not leave this world he was used to. He might leave Alice, if she didn’t leave him, but he would trade her in for another woman of the same type, if perhaps with more sexual discretion. He had nowhere to go. What was worse, he had nothing he really wanted. He couldn’t abscond to the Bahamas or take up the bongo drums and become a Beatnikor take to drink and end up on Skid Row. Sartre had had it right. There was no exit, and hell was other people.