The Headmaster's Wife(54)

He had a copy of The Portrait of a Lady stuffed into his coat pocket in the hope that he would be able to sit off by himself and read for the obligatory half hour; but as soon as he got to the Student Center’s door, he saw that thatwouldn’t be possible. Marta Coelho was waiting for him. She must have seen him come up the walk. He made no effort to hide his annoyance. He knew he didn’t have to; Marta would never pick up on it. She was one of those people who was completely tone-deaf when it came to social intercourse. At a place like this, she was worse than tone-deaf. She was every cliché he could remember: a fish out of water, a bull in a china shop, a fifth wheel. Why they hadn’t noticed when they’d hired her how bad the fit would be, he couldn’t understand, but he’d been around long enough to know it happened all the time. And then, some of the most unlikely people ended up fitting perfectly well, even if you couldn’t figure out how or why. Look at Philip Candor. James began to unbutton his coat as he reached the door. Marta was standing just inside it, shifting from one foot to the other like a schoolgirl called in to the principal’s office for cutting class and breaking school rules.

James stepped through the glass door. The air around him went from being much too cold to being much too warm. He got his coat the rest of the way unbuttoned and shrugged it off.

“You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” Marta said, looking around at the students milling and streaming through the long breezeway corridor. James looked at them, too. They looked … scruffy. They always looked scruffy. There was no dress code here. It would have been considered another form of elitism. The result was that the students felt free to wander around in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. Everyone looked sloppy. Even students who worked hard at taking care of themselves looked sloppy.

James put his coat over his arm and started to move toward the cafeteria. He had no intention of spending even a minute longer in this place than he absolutely had to. “Surely it can’t be that big a miracle to find me at dinner,” he said.

Marta was hurrying to keep up. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” she said. “Something Philip Candor told me, and then somebody else confirmed it. Edith, I think. Edith always knows everything, have you ever noticed that?”

“Everybody always knows everything in this place,” James said. He had forged ahead steadily, and now he was at the back of the cafeteria line. There was a stack of plastic trays. He took one. If it had been up to him to redesign this place, he would have started by getting rid of all the plastic.

Marta picked up her own plastic tray. “I don’t know that we should talk about it here,” she said. “I mean, in line. Where too many people could hear.”

“My dear woman,” James said, “if you heard whatever this is from Philip, and then again from Edith, there isn’t a person in this school who doesn’t know what it is already, except perhaps for people who’ve been away all day or shut up at home and without contact with the rest of the school.”

“Have you heard about it already?” Marta asked. “About Gregor Demarkian?”

“I’ve been shut up at home,” James said drily. He had just been presented with the choice of entrée: fish fried in some kind of batter; chicken with a sauce on it that looked as if it had come straight out of a sump pump; large wedges of vegetarian omelet. He took the omelet. He’d have the least trouble looking at it throughout his purgatory at dinner, and then he could go home and cook something edible for himself. “I have heard of Gregor Demarkian though,” he said. “He’s that detective. He was on that television program American Justice.”

“Oh, do you watch those?” Marta asked. She had chosen the chicken and the limp green beans that must have come from a can, and the glutinous rice they served with an enormous ice cream scoop. It was hard for James to watch. “I watch those, too. And City Confidential. And the other things on Court TV. You’re right, he has been on some of those. I even heard that they wanted to give him his own show, but he turned it down. Could we go over there to that corner? There’s an empty table. I really don’t want to be—crowded.”

No, James thought, of course she doesn’t want to be crowded. He went toward the corner anyway. He didn’t want to be crowded himself. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. He put his tray down and sat in front of it. Then he very carefully began to take the plates off the tray and put them directly on the table. If there was one thing he wouldn’t do in the cause of antielitism, which he didn’t believe in anyway, it was eat directly off a cafeteria tray The table itself was made of nothing known to nature, and laminated on top of that, and bolted into the wall, but there was nothing he could do about that.