The Headmaster's Wife(36)

Gregor Demarkian didn’t recognize any of the names in the class notes section of the Windsor Academy Chronicles. He didn’t know if that was because he really didn’t know them or because he couldn’t focus. He found himself wondering if Bennis would have known them. There were times when he thought Bennis knew everybody on the planet, or at least everybody who might at any time have had any reason to be called “prominent.” Maybe he was just thinking about Bennis, with an excuse or without one. He had been thinking about Bennis more often than not now for over ten years. He was sure that, although relationships changed, this one would not change like this, this fast, over just one remark he’d made about marriage—or something. He was, he realized, completely unsteady. He wanted to get out his cell phone and call Bennis now, wherever she was, and demand an explanation. He didn’t do it because he was afraid she’d give him one.

When he got to Boston, he had two choices. He could take public transportation—first the MTA, then a trolley out to Windsor—or he could take a cab, which would cost an arm and a leg. He decided on the cab. He didn’t care about the money, and he was too old to leap nimbly on and off sub-way cars. He stood in the cab line less than a minute before he found somebody willing to go out to the suburbs; and as soon as he got settled in the backseat, he got out his cell phone and called, not Bennis—although his fingers almost did it all by themselves—but Mark DeAvecca. The first number he called gave him an answering machine. He checked his book again and called the second one, which turned out to be Mark’s cell phone. It rang and rang. Gregor checked his watch. Maybe he was in class. It was only two o’clock. He hung up and checked the book again. Mark had a pager number. It was incredible the way these kids were wired up these days. Gregor searched around his pockets until he found his own pager and sent up a silent prayer that

Mark would be able to receive actual messages on his. Then he typed in:

HAVE ARRIVED, ON WAY TO WINDSOR INN and sent the thing.

That is, he thought he sent it. He was never entirely sure. This was something else he needed Bennis for. Bennis understood the machines. Tibor understood the machines. Gregor was awash in a sea of his own ignorance. If the time ever came for a truly paperless society, he would be dead meat, lost and homeless without a clue as to how to work his own pager.

Boston became the Boston suburbs. It barely mattered, at first, since city block blended into city block without change. Then the landscape got greener, and the houses got farther apart, and the architecture became clapboard and Federalist instead of brick and generic. There were signs everywhere marking historic sites. He got out the Windsor Academy Chronicles again, but they made no more sense to him now than they had on the train.

What bothered him, deep down, was that his relationship with Bennis had changed as the result of that one small comment, and that would mean that it had never been what he thought it was all this time. It was not the kind of thing he was good at thinking about. It was not logical. It was not linear. It was not sane. It was information in a language he didn’t think he knew how to speak. It made him feel hollow, as if his rib cage were an echo chamber, and all it was doing was delivering bad news.





3


Mark DeAvecca was waiting for him at the front door of the Windsor Inn when he got there, but in the first few moments getting out of the cab, Gregor didn’t recognize him. The cabby put his suitcase on the inn’s front step and took his fare and tip without comment. Gregor watched what lookedlike a homeless man hovering in the background, shifting restlessly from foot to foot as if he were on speed. Then the cabby retreated and the homeless man came forward. Gregor was just about to turn away brusquely and grab his suitcase when he realized it was Mark.

“Good God,” he said, “what’s happened to you?”

“Excuse me?” Mark looked confused. Gregor saw immediately what Walter Cray had been referring to on the phone. Mark not only looked drugged out, he looked as if he had been drugged out nonstop for months. His hair was matted with sweat. His clothes were not quite clean. There was a stain running down the front of his yellow cotton sweater, and it was so dingy and stretched out of shape it was barely possible to tell that it had once been expensive. He rubbed the palms of his hands together compulsively. “I think I need more coffee,” Mark said. “I think I’m falling asleep.”

Gregor thought he was on the verge of passing out, but he didn’t say so. He motioned toward the front door with his head and started inside. Mark followed him, much too slowly, looking completely disoriented. Gregor stopped at the front desk and got the key from a bored-looking man who took the time to look past Gregor’s shoulder at Mark. The look of distaste was palpable.