The Headmaster's Wife(19)

“Like what?”

Mark shook his head. Edith was beginning to feel the cold. She wondered why she hadn’t felt it long ago. There was something odd about this scene. It was as if they were both suspended in space, riding in a bubble without weather. There was a wind in the quad, though, the same wind that had blown Alice Makepeace’s cape around her legs. Edith thought it was going to take her an hour before she got herself warmed up again once she was back inside.

“Come in,” she said. “Warm up. Have something to drink. You look awful, and I’m freezing.”

“Thanks anyway,” Mark said, “but I’ve got to get some sleep, I think. Sometimes it feels like I haven’t slept all year.”

“You look as if you’re sleeping now, right on your feet.”

“Sleepwalking,” Mark said solemnly. Then he turned away from her and looked across the quad, all the way to the other end, where Hayes House was. “I don’t remember leaving and coming out again. I don’t remember it. I remember deciding to do it, but I don’t remember doing it. I don’t remember anything until I got down to the pond, that was the second time at the pond, I think. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. That’s what this year has been like. I can’t ever remember anything.”

Edith almost said something, too sharply, about the fact that he almost never remembered his homework, but she bit it back. Maybe it was drugs. Maybe he was stoned all the time. There was certainly something wrong with him. He was swaying on his feet. She thought he might pass out right in front of her, but it didn’t happen.

“If you’re not going to come in, go back to Hayes,” she said. “Go back right now. Go to your room and lie down. You shouldn’t be wandering around in the condition you’re in.”

“The question is, what condition am I in?” Mark said. “That’s it, you see. The infirmary says there’s nothing wrong with me. For a while I thought I had that thing, Huntington’s disease, Huntington’s chorea—”

“Does it run in your family? Did one of your parents have it?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“I know,” Mark said, “but the thing is—”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Mark said. “I must have been hallucinating, and that’s a first. I’ve never hallucinated before.”

“Go back to Hayes,” Edith said.

Mark nodded slightly. Edith stood back a little, giving herself the partial shelter of the doorway, and watched him head off down the path in the direction of Hayes House. Had he really already been there once tonight and then come out again for a … hallucination? What were the drugs that caused hallucinations? She’d never paid much attention to the drug information that floated around campus like confetti in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. She wasn’t interested in her students’ drug lives any more than she was interested in their sex lives. Mark was bobbing and weaving as if his bones had half melted under his skin. Edith stepped all the way back into the hall and closed the door in front of her. Lytton House was very quiet tonight, as quiet as she usually liked it to be. Now it felt oppressive and stale.

She went back into her apartment and closed that door, too. She sat down in her big club chair and looked at her cup of tea. They all just assumed the boy was on drugs. It was the most obvious explanation for the way he was behaving.

It had suddenly occurred to her just how much trouble that boy’s parents could make for this school if it turned out they were all wrong and something was really the matter with Mark.





8


Alice Makepeace knew that her husband had a surveillance camera in their bedroom, and she knew what it was he used it for. Every once in a while, when he was safely out of state at a conference of independent school heads—the euphemism drove her crazy; when had they decided to hide the elitism of it all under cover of that bourgeois word “independent”?—she went into his study with her spare key and looked through the photographs in the desk. They were terrible photographs more often than not, grainy and unreal, nothing at all like what she had really experienced in bed. She was not afraid of the photographs any more than she was afraid of Peter. It would hurt him far more than it would hurt her if anybody ever knew what was in them, just as it would hurt him more than it would hurt her if anybody ever found out about the boys. She was no Mary Kay Letourneau. She wasn’t conducting a grand passion or working out the demons from a tackily wretched childhood spent feeling guilty and ugly on the streets of some subdivision in flyover country. She had had a wonderful childhood, thank you very much, and an even more wonderful young adulthood. She had been to Paris four times before she was eight. She had spent every one of her winter vacations on the Riviera right up until the year she married Peter, when they had had no winter vacation because he was taking seminars at Harvard and attempting to beef up his résumé. She should have realized, then, that this was what it would be like—the unutterable boredom, the endless sameness of it all, day after day, week after week, year after year, with nothing to look forward to but the malice in the eyes of the old ladies on the board, the ones who hated her for merely existing.