The Headmaster's Wife(20)

Boredom was the key. In the end everything came down to that. Most of the time Alice lived in a positive fog of boredom, and she knew herself too well to think that she could do what most women in her position did to make the time pass. It was a tradition in “independent” schools that the headmaster’s wife had a teaching job at the school or a place on the support staff. Husbands and wives worked together almost always because that meant two paychecks and a more viable household income from jobs that—except on Peter’s level—didn’t really pay much at all. Alice could not see herself as a counselor. She could not see herself teaching English. She could not see herself at faculty meetings. She could barely see herself making her way across the quad every morning to have dinner in the cafeteria, although she did it, the way she did everything that was required of her.

She was not bored tonight, although she was oddly lightheaded. It confused her because she didn’t often get dizzy. She’d come into the headmaster’s house by the side door. She was standing in the little mudroom with its built-in storage bench and its brass wall hooks and its full-length mirror hanging on the door that led into the kitchen. Some nights she stood in front of that mirror and contemplated the realness of herself. There were times when she did not actually feel entirely real. Tonight she felt more real than she wanted to. She stripped off the black leather gloves and put them down on the bench. She took off the cape and hung it on a hook. The black leather of her jeans almost blended into the black leather of her boots, giving her an uninterrupted visual line. She was a tall woman. This made her look taller still, as did the fact that the boots had three-inch heels. One summer when she was in college, she had taken a trip to Greece with three of her cousins. They had gone to the harbor at Rhodes, and she had stood there on the shore thinking of what the Colossus must have looked like, if it had ever existed, with one foot on one side of the water and the other on the other. Later, Julianne—the “smart one,” as the family liked to call her; the uptight idiot with the grades everybody was always marveling about, as if it mattered to them when none of them had cared one way or the other all the time they were in school and wouldn’t have liked anyone who did—had said it wasn’t true. The Colossus didn’t really bestride the harbor. It had just been a statue, off to one side. Alice had thought, immediately, that that was too bad. It was the kind of thing she would have liked for herself, to be tall enough to stand like that, with her legs so far apart ships could go through them.

She was wearing a black silk blouse, her best one, bought in New York on one of the buying trips she took to get away from Peter. Peter was glad to let her take them. He wanted to get away from her. She leaned over and took the gloves off the bench and looked at them. They did not seem to be any different than they had ever been. She supposed they had no reason to be. She wished she could get rid of this jumpy nervousness that was making her feel like running back out the door and down the quad and into the night to nowhere.

She dropped the gloves again and went through the door into the kitchen. The light was on in the living room. The television was on, too. The sound coming from it was the weird flat hush of public broadcasting documentaries. She wondered why the announcers on PBS always felt they had to whisper when they talked.

She went through the kitchen to the living room. Peter was sitting on the long, floral couch, his shoes off, his feet up on the coffee table. That was as close as he ever came to informality unless he was in bed—and even there he wore tailored pajamas, dark blue with white piping, bought at Brooks Brothers. At the moment he was in sports jacket and tie. His trousers still had perfect center creases.

“Where have you been?” he asked, not turning around.

There was a drinks tray on a small occasional table set just behind the couch. Alice bypassed the gin and the vodka and the Scotch and opened a small bottle of Perrier. Like most of the women she knew, she only drank wine, and only good wine, and only episodically. The last thing she wanted was to start guzzling booze like an advertising executive at lunch. God, she thought. They could have put her down in the middle of one of those ethnic restaurants in Boston, the ones that got written up in the weekend section of the Globe, and the only way anybody could have told her apart from all the other suburban Boston ladies with their memberships in WGBH and their days at the Gardner Museum would have been by her hair, and that was a good enough reason never to let herself go gray. Even the—things—she did didn’t set her apart. She was convinced that half the women she saw with their beaten-silver Native American jewelry and their J. Jill flowing-linen summer skirts did all the same things she did, or worse, and then wrote about them in journals kept meticulously, year after year, on the assumption that they would one day provide the basis for a novel of sensitivity written by a woman who cared. That much, at least, she had to congratulate herself on. She did not keep journals, and she did not expect ever to write a novel.