The Headmaster's Wife(9)

The icicle was still dripping. It was bitterly cold out on the quad. He could see the temperature on the round L.L. Bean thermometer he had mounted on the outside wall. Minus nine degrees Fahrenheit. Cold enough for anybody. The porch must be warm somehow. Maybe there was a crack in the sealant around the window letting out heat. This was one of the great things about being headmaster and not an ordinary teacher anymore. He didn’t have to live in a dorm. He didn’t have to share his space with students who would be only too happy to find a way to embarrass him. He knew he shouldn’t think that way about students. Most of them meant well enough, and most of them were not that happy to be away from their families at this young an age. He hadn’t been happy with it either back at Andover. It was odd what you went on doing that you didn’t intend to do at all.

He was in his study at the front of the house. He went to the door and locked it, although he couldn’t imagine who would bother to come in without knocking. Not only were there no students here, there were no children of any kind. Alice didn’t want to contribute to the world’s problems with overpopulation. Peter thought it was more the fact that she didn’t want to cramp her style. Alice had never had much interest in turning herself into an earth mother. He tried the door and it felt secure. He went to his desk and sat down behind it. He should turn the desk around so that he would be facing the window when he worked. He liked to face a window when he worked. It made him feel less constricted and blocked in. The desk was turned this way because he knew, instinctively, that that was what the trustees expected, and his motto was always to give the trustees what they wanted in little things. That way it was a lot easier to get what he wanted in the big ones.

He reached into the pocket of his trousers and came out with a small key ring, sterling silver on a fob made to look like two tennis rackets and a ball. He found the smallest key on the ring and used it to open the long center drawer of his desk. The drawer was empty except for a single manila envelope. He took the envelope out and put it down on the green felt blotter in the middle of his desk. The sweat had come out on his forehead. It was incredible, really and truly incredible, how carefully he had made his life all of a piece.

The manila envelope seemed to pulse. He turned around to make sure nobody was looking through the window at him. That was silly because of course nobody could. There was a tight growth of hedge bushes hugging the walls of the house. Anybody who wanted to get close enough to see what he was doing through the window would get torn apart by evergreen needles.

He opened the envelope and took out the photographs inside. They were bad photographs, really, and black-and-white, but there was nothing he could do about that except spend so much money he would make himself conspicuous; and that would really and truly defeat the point. The sweat was not just on his forehead now. It was on the back of his neck and running down the sides of his arms. It was in the small of his back. His lungs felt as if they were encased in iron bands, razor thin and pressing against the softness of his flesh whenever he took a breath. He remembered the day he had installed the first of the cameras in their bedroom, the day Alice had gone to New York with her best friend from Smith to attend some kind of rally against George W. Bush. There were times when Peter Makepeace blessed George W. Bush.

The first of the photographs was of Alice with a student who had left the school last year, graduated, and gone on to the University of Denver or one of the other places where rich boys who don’t want to work very hard liked to get together in fraternities. Alice was sitting astride him as if she were Lady Godiva and he were the horse. She was holding her legs wide open, so that he could clearly see the tuft of her hair in that place. If he’d been able to use color film, it would have looked like a flame. The boy’s face was out of sight, hidden by some pillows and a fold of the sheet. It didn’t matter to Peter Makepeace, and it probably hadn’t mattered to Alice. It said a lot about her that she did not shave herself there and yet she very carefully did shave her underarms and legs.

The next picture looked distorted. The camera was on the ceiling of their bedroom, in a corner, disguised by a hanging plant. He’d had to disguise it with something. From that angle, some … positions … looked less probable than others. This was a simple thing really. Alice on the bed on her hands and knees and the boy coming at her from behind, not just doing it doggy-style, as they used to say when Peter was at Andover, but ramming it up her behind, half off her and half on, his face contorted, hers pulled into a grimace, her breasts hanging down. Peter could almost see them sway. The pictures all seemed to be alive anyway. They moved like the photographs in the Harry Potter books. Peter’s mouth was dry; his brain felt too big for his head.