He was met by Geoff Coggeshall. Mike was aware of a moment or two of mutual assessment, much in the way of two actors auditioning for the same part sizing each other up. Coggeshall guided Mike to a conference room in a corner. When Mike entered, five trustees (all the school could manage to assemble on such short notice) were sitting around an oval walnut table. They nodded in his direction and did not get up.
The position was described to Mike, and he was questioned at great length. He was told at least three times that the job was for an interim candidate only (surely any person worth the post, Mike thought, might be expected to have absorbed this information the first time). He listened carefully, he answered all questions, he was alert to nuances. He smiled, he laughed, he made assurances. He nodded politely, he asked a few good questions himself, and before he had returned to Hartford later that evening, he had been given the job. He was to start as soon as he possibly could, according to a message he heard on the answering machine shortly after he walked in the door of their apartment, Meg standing not five feet away from the telephone with an expression on her face that could only be described as curious and furious together.
Mike had a great deal of hasty explaining to do to his wife, in whom he had not confided the fact of the interview. Why was perfectly obvious: Meg would have argued strenuously that she could not be uprooted in the middle of the academic year, that she had no thought of leaving the school at which she was now quite happy, and, furthermore, how could Mike even think of not fulfilling his own responsibilities to a school that needed him far more than any elite academy did? Had Mike known that Avery would respond so quickly — and by phone — he’d have given Mrs. Gorzynski his office number only and then would have begun a campaign of persuasion that might have convinced his wife of the benefit to herself of his taking the job at Avery.
After three hideous days of acrimony, it was decided that Mike would accept the interim job in Vermont, but Meg would finish out the year in Hartford. In June, if Mike was offered an extension of the post, they would reassess the situation. He was to commute back and forth to Hartford on alternate weekends, and vice versa, actually quite a difficult enterprise at private schools because of the necessity to be present for Saturday games. Mike thought at the time that each welcomed the separation. Meg would have to weather the storm his departure would create, but she could come home to an apartment empty of tension. For Mike’s part, he would have a shot at fulfilling a long-held academic fantasy, one that would require all his attention and time.
Mike and Meg had met in Hanover, New Hampshire, at a pre-Thanksgiving dinner party given by a fellow graduate student in the Master of Liberal Arts program at Dartmouth. Those enrolled in the program were a motley crew — many (of which Meg was one) former high-school teachers hoping to better their lot and their salaries, others (like Mike) unable to commit to a doctoral program. As a result, there was a great deal of fluidity in the course offerings and one might find oneself taking seminars in developmental psychology as well as creative writing. Since Mike did not then know how to cook, he had brought wine to the party. Meg had brought a pumpkin eggnog flan, a nontraditional dish that at first puzzled the partygoers and then pleased them so much it became the most popular offering at the table. She had made it, she said, from a recipe handed down from her grandmother in Ohio, and though it contained nearly lethal amounts of sour cream and eggnog, it was always a hit. She sat across the makeshift plywood table from Mike, slightly too far away in the noisy conviviality either to hear or to speak to him, but he spent much of the meal too obviously observing her. He was awed by something both feisty and warm in her, suggesting a sexual appetite that might hold many surprises. At one point during the dinner, Meg returned Mike’s stare, opening her eyes wide and smiling, as if to say, Well now, and after the meal, when he sought her out, she appeared to enjoy his attention. He learned her name, her course of study, her hobby (volleyball), and her profession (she had taught for three years in a public high school in Lewiston, Maine). He also learned, by touching her on the upper arm to move her out of the way of an oncoming pumpkin pie, that she was tautly muscled. Because of that first touch, he was never able to shake the notion that she was tightly wound, high-strung.
Later that night, both before and after he learned that his instincts about her sexuality were correct, he also came to understand that she was slovenly beyond belief. It was something of a small miracle, actually, that she was so presentable and seemingly well-groomed in public — her chestnut hair neatly trimmed to fall just below her ears, her face always fresh-scrubbed and gleaming. She shared with another woman an apartment that seemed tidy enough until Meg opened the door to her own room, where Mike discovered there was not one inch of uncovered floor space between the door and her bed. Her entire wardrobe, as well as bits of odd wiring leading to various electronics, and loose-leaf notebooks with pages spilling out, made a kind of carpet. This squalor only partly registered at the time, for by then Meg was raising her sweater up over her long white back as she walked toward the bed. A few hours later, however, the chaos hit Mike with a shock when he discovered that the tub in her bathroom was filled with grayish water that clearly hadn’t drained in days, if not weeks, since it appeared to contain the scummy residue of a number of baths, and that her sink was so encrusted with dried toothpaste and makeup and bits of tissue that he nearly gagged when he caught sight of it.
“I’ve got a drain problem,” she called to Mike from the bed in a not-very-worried voice. “Had it for weeks.”
After Mike had used the toilet, trying not to touch anything in the room, he asked her how she was managing to shower. She answered, “Oh, it always goes down a little bit each day,” clearly demonstrating an enforced frugality with the earth’s resources that even Al Gore might have envied. Disgusted, but by now thoroughly besotted by Meg’s dark nipples, the slight hollow in the curve of her hip, and the feel of her silky pubic hair on his cheek, he offered to do what any smitten suitor might. He would return, he said, with a snake and a bottle of Drano.
The task was odious and revolting. Any sane man, Mike thought, might reasonably have come to the conclusion that Meg’s sloth was an unnegotiable flaw. Surely that man would not then have proposed marriage six months later, having taken on the task of keeping Meg’s quarters more or less sanitary even if they were never tidy. That Mike did, he thought, was a tribute either to Meg’s nerveless charms or to his own belief that marriage to him would reform his beloved.
(Mike had loved Meg from the first moment he’d seen her across the plywood table. Exactly when Meg had discovered she loved Mike was less clear. It seemed to him that she had consented to marriage, and in that verb lay the very heart of the union, with its innate imbalance. Mike asked. Meg sometimes consented. Sometimes, she didn’t. That Meg had more power in the marriage than he didn’t surprise or even displease Mike. That Meg had the power to withhold was what bothered him most.)
In due course, Mike was given the post of headmaster of Avery Academy (nothing interim about it now). Meg reluctantly joined him in the headmaster’s house, a very good reproduction of a brick Georgian that came with a maid and access to the various chefs in the dining halls, thus nipping a great many housekeeping disasters in the bud. Mike grew into his post in a way he felt few before him had ever done, the fantasy and reality of being headmaster of Avery Academy fusing into a passion and loyalty to a job he considered himself extraordinarily fortunate to have. His early success was largely due to an exceptionally generous gift to the school during his interim-tenure-only months as headmaster, a gift in excess of four million dollars that he was instrumental in quickly shepherding through the previously archaic bureaucracy. Though it was understood that the part he had played was rather small in relation to the size of the gift, there was nevertheless an aura of luck briefly associated with him that few wished to ignore. (The serious, not to say stern, demeanor of the trustees was dispelled some four months after his interview at a dinner following a l
ong day of meetings in New York City and the announcement of the spectacular donation to the school, the news causing Mike’s chinless nemesis to order a dozen bottles of champagne, which predictably loosened tongues and produced much laughter as well as some memorably foolish behavior.)
At first Meg had held fast to her desire to stay in Hartford, but she proved herself only human — and female at that — when she visited the campus during a particularly lovely stretch of mild summer weather. She was drawn outside the Georgian reproduction that was causing in her the first stirrings of appreciation, and wandered the vast lawns of the campus for long walks and picnics and occasional visits to the playing fields, where summer soccer and field hockey camps were being conducted. From certain hillocks, one had views of both the Green Mountains to the east and the Adirondacks to the west, as well as of the snug valley that lay between these two ranges, and something in the landscape, those rolling hills perhaps, briefly softened the feisty bit of Meg’s nature so that she was able to convince herself that adolescents requiring both parenting and an education have more similarities than differences, and that this particular age group was ferociously needy on all fronts. The fact that she would be permitted to teach Advanced Placement Calculus as well as to coach girls’ varsity volleyball sealed the deal.
In August, Meg moved in with Mike for good. Mike viewed this move as a success, though he shortly came to understand that Meg was there on sufferance, an attitude that expressed itself occasionally as irritation, dismissiveness, or a ready cynical smile when presented with anything that might be construed as elitist.
Back in his den, Mike stood up from the couch, intending to retrieve the small cassette from the movie camera and then to summon Arlene and Kasia to his office so that he could question them about the provenance of the tape. He heard the front door open. Mike panicked slightly, not wishing to be caught with the apparatus — with the evidence — on the floor. He unplugged the camera, unhooked the cables, and pushed the mess under the sofa. By then, Meg was in the kitchen, where he went to meet her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, setting down on the kitchen table both a small bag of groceries and her bulging brown leather briefcase. He could see that she’d been counting on having the house to herself and now was annoyed. The briefcase had a zip top, the zipper long broken, and Mike could see from across the room the bunches of student papers that had been stuffed into the bag, Meg’s disorganization extending into the classroom, where it didn’t belong. His wife was forever losing pens and lesson plans and calculators and, once, a set of student exams. Invariably, Meg was the last teacher to turn in her grades. Many of the faculty would try to get their grades done immediately after the last exams so that the students could head home for the holidays or the summer break with some idea of what their report cards would look like. None of Meg’s students had ever had that luxury, and it was not uncommon for her to receive, well into the break, calls from distraught students who still didn’t know if they had passed the class or, if the callers were top-shelf candidates to various colleges, if they had gotten their all-important A for the term. Mike dreaded hearing that a promising student had asked Meg for a college recommendation, since she was unlikely to get the appropriate forms in by the deadlines. Mike could only hope that no student had been turned away from a university because of his wife’s negligence. She was, he kept reminding himself, a superb teacher.
Mike was not in the habit of being in the house midday, and though his wife’s question was a reasonable one, he stumbled over his answer, which was as good as admitting he was telling half-truths. “I left a list here,” he said. “You didn’t come across it? A list of donors’ names for the annual bulletin?”
Meg removed the first of a dozen fat-free yogurt cartons from the bag. She narrowed her eyes.
“Also,” Mike said, “there’s been a tape. There is a tape.”
“Of what?”
Meg shrugged off her jacket and let it fall onto the seat of a kitchen chair. It wouldn’t occur to her to hang it up.
“There’s been an incident,” Mike said. “A potentially serious incident.”
Meg peeled back the lid of a small yogurt container and examined its contents as though she suspected she had been cheated.
“I think you’d better come see this,” Mike said. “It’s important.”
“If you say so,” she said.
As they walked together down the hallway, he was already regretting having slipped the camera under the sofa. He explained himself as he retrieved it. “I didn’t know who might be at the door,” he said.
“People regularly walk into our home without knocking at noon on Tuesdays?” Meg asked.
Mike connected the various cables and wires. “This is going to be rough,” he said.
“What’s it of?”
“Some kids,” Mike said. “They’re having . . .” He paused, stopping at a word that ought to have been easy to say to his wife but was not, and he wasn’t sure if it was the situation itself that was inhibiting him or simply its boldness. “They’re having sex.”
“Avery kids?” Meg asked. “Where did you get this?”
“Kasia gave it to me. She got it from Arlene.” Mike watched Meg mold the yogurt on her spoon with her upper lip, producing an erotic sculpture, though at that moment Mike was immune to eroticism of any sort. Meg ate five small meals a day and one large one (dinner), and the yogurt was, he calculated, meal number three. It consisted of a sixty-calorie carton of fat-free peach, and she liked to make it last.
“Here goes,” Mike said.
He had rewound the tape to the beginning so that it started precisely as he had seen it begin: with the girl twirling between the tall boy who was still clothed to the sturdy boy who was naked. Mike noted, on the second viewing — no easier than the first — that one could not see any of the faces. The boys were cut off at the shoulders, at least in the beginning.
“Oh my God,” Meg said, lowering her spoon. It was not an utterly shocked Oh my God but rather said quietly, as one might say, also quietly, Yikes, and Mike realized that being told about the tape was no preparation for the real thing.
“Oh my God,” she said again after several seconds.
The naked boy had bent to kiss the girl’s nipple, and the slender boy was now allowing his jeans to fall off in one go. The girl began to kneel at the crotch of the taller boy. Meg covered her mouth.
“I’ll stop it,” Mike said, bending forward.
“No, wait,” she said.
Again, Mike looked for clues as to when the incident had taken place — for a calendar on the wall, a school diary open on a desk — but the camera panned so quickly and so inexpertly between the participants that it was difficult to make out much of anything, and, once again, he had to ward off incipient nausea.
They listened to the moans of the boy on the bed as they watched the girl perform. “This is awful,” Meg said.
“She’s young, isn’t she?” Mike asked.
“A freshman. She’s on thirds soccer.”
“How old?”
“Fourteen, fifteen?”
“You know her name?”
“No.”
By now Meg was perched at the edge of the couch. She had bent forward so that her arms rested on her knees. It was both a rapt and a defensive posture. Where normally there was a Wolf Blitzer or a Jim Lehrer, the intense visage on their television screen was that of Silas Quinney.
Meg turned and stared at her husband. “You’ve got yourself a hell of a mess here,” she said.
Laura
When my parents dropped me off that first day of orientation our freshman year, they weren’t impressed with my roommate. She was acting weird with them — kind of all over them but fake, if you know what I mean. I think that was her way of trying to impress, of trying to be charming, of saying look at me. It didn’t work at all with my parents, and I know they later tried to get my room changed. The freshman class was a big one, though, and the
administration couldn’t do anything about the situation.
When I got to Avery, I knew that I was going to have to get along with lots of students I didn’t have much in common with, so I was pretty much, like, prepared for anything, and looking forward to it, too. I wasn’t prepared for her, though.
That first day of school, she got there before I did. She took the best bed and the best desk. That was OK, I expected that. Though if it were me, and I had arrived first, I would have left the best desk and the best bed for her. But that’s just me. When we got there, she had a couple of purses and maybe a dozen pairs of shoes strewed all over her bed, which had an incredible down comforter on it already. I don’t know designer pocketbooks from knockoffs, but you could tell that the leather and the quality were good. My mother, later on the phone, referred to them as designer. No one at Avery has purses, never mind designer ones. We all just use backpacks. My roommate’s closet was so full of clothes, she had nowhere to put the purses and shoes, so she ended up stuffing them under the bed, where she kept her candy.
We all keep candy under the beds. If it’s out on your desk, it’s understood that anyone can eat it. If it’s under the bed, it’s your own private stash.
That first day, I was a little shaky since I’d never been away from home except for camp. Right off, she offered me a joint. I remember being stunned. I’d never had a joint before. Never even held one. I was fourteen then. I said no. She lit up right there in the room, and I thought, Oh my God, we’re going to get expelled before my parents even get home. I didn’t know what to do, so I just got up and went for a walk until I thought it was safe to go back.