He grinned. “Then we’d fill the school with girls who wouldn’t miss it. We’d have enough money to pay off the accumulated deficit.”
She didn’t answer. She was right and so was he. The school had failed to make budget for the last four years of Marjorie Boyd’s tenure. The total accumulation was one million and two hundred thousand dollars. The board had pledged to find the money to pay down the loan that covered it. The deadline was in three years, four hundred thousand dollars a year. If they failed to meet it, the bank would raise the interest rate, maybe even call the loan. The school would be out of cash.
They came to where the trail ran down off the bluff to a little beach. She sensed that it was too steep for his old legs, so she pretended she’d had enough walking. They turned around and started back, and just before they arrived at his car, he told her to make sure she dropped everything over the Labor Day weekend so she’d be rested up “when school starts and everything hits the fan.” She told him she would. She and her husband and siblings and dad were going to spend the weekend at their family place on Martha’s Vineyard.
Just as he was about to get in his car, she remembered what she’d had Margaret call him for.
“You really care what your title is?” His tone was incredulous.
“I do,” she said. She wasn’t about to try persuasion. There wasn’t a PC bone in his body.
“Well then, I’ll take care of it.” He was looking over her shoulder at something behind her. She turned around. Gregory van Buren, still in his blue blazer, was just disappearing into the library. “What about him?” Milton Perkins said.
Rachel didn’t answer.
“I understand,” Milton Perkins said. “Plummer’s the one with the most charisma—and the alumnae expect it.” Then he got in his car and drove away.
FOUR
It was three o’clock in the morning and Mitch Michaels was wide awake.
Ordinarily, the two Vicodins he had swallowed at midnight would have taken him all the way to six o’clock, and then there would be the limo ride to the studio where, as soon as he leaned forward into the mike, he’d imagine all those people nodding their heads, guys mostly, driving to work all over the country, their shoulders relaxing because they were hearing what they already believed, and his pain would melt away. But there was no show today because it was a holiday weekend and he was not in his New York apartment. He was in his summer house on the beach in Madison, Connecticut, and without the daily morning rage vent to look forward to, and with the disturbing presence of Claire Nelson, his daughter’s long-legged, willowy guest with the raven hair and deep-set innocent eyes, who was sleeping just down the hall, he knew that if he didn’t take another pill in another half an hour, the electricity that was then a mounting tingle at both sides of his lower back would pulse down through his buttocks and explode in his hamstrings and toes like bombs going off every minute and a half. Ninety seconds exactly. He’d counted them. It never varied. The worst part was waiting in between.
He didn’t need to turn the light on to find his way down the hall to the bathroom past the room where his daughter Amy and Claire were sleeping, because it was just a little shingled cottage, which he and his wife had bought for seventy-five thousand dollars when he was still a sportscaster. Seventy-five thousand! It was worth six hundred thousand now. He knew because he’d had to pay her half that to buy his half from her when they divorced—which he was happy to do—until he figured out that it made her rich enough to enroll their daughter in that school. “How would you feel,” he’d asked on his show, pretending he was talking about some other family, “if you had no say in what kind of a school your daughter goes to?”—forgetting that most of his listeners sent their kids to public schools and didn’t have any say either. The more he’d learned about Miss Oliver’s School for Girls in Amy’s freshman year—how the students address their teachers by their first names (or even nicknames!), how the kids are allowed to dress like savages and read books like Catch-22 (as if they knew enough by then to know why we fought that war and what guys died for)—the more cheated he felt. It didn’t help that his ex-wife, as sole guardian of his daughter, in total control of when and if he could visit with her, had obtained a court order prohibiting him from stepping foot on the campus.
In the bathroom, he opened the medicine cabinet and reached behind the row of bottles containing aspirin and ibuprofen and vitamin C and Barbasol shaving cream to where the one containing the Vicodin pretended to hide, and he opened it and shucked two into his palm. Only ten left. He put one back and swallowed the other. He’d learned to take them without water because water was not always handy, and besides, if he drank water now, he’d have to get up and pee when what he needed was to be obliterated in sleep. The doctor in Madison didn’t know there was a doctor in New York who filled out prescriptions too—or pretended he didn’t anyway.
On the shelf beside the sink sat his daughter’s guest’s toilet kit. Toilet. What a nasty name for what was in there: toothbrush, toothpaste—lipstick maybe? What else? He reached, touched the soft leather, ran his fingers where the zipper was slightly opened, then, shamed, pulled his hand away. Never before in his life had he imagined that a teenager would stir him. Girls that age, especially if they were as beautiful as this one, were people you needed to protect! He didn’t understand that this one’s ability to stir feelings very near to lust in him was a purposeful application of power, in this case just for the hell of it, and he was as addicted to being around power as he was to painkillers—because maybe they were the same. But he did understand that when the Vicodin kicked in and he was back in bed in the dark, not counting the seconds until the next explosion, he might dream of her, and because he hoped he wouldn’t and still wanted to, he was shamed still more.
On Thursday, Amy and her mother had driven from their home on Long Island to meet Claire at JFK, where she’d flown in from London. They spent the day and that night in the City—Mom’s treat—all three in the same hotel room. Yesterday morning, Amy’s mother had put them on the train in Grand Central Station; he’d picked them up an hour and a half later at the New Haven railroad station. They were still glowing from their New York City fun. Claire’s dad, a VP of an NYC investment bank, recently transferred to the London office, was busy that weekend, Amy had explained, and Claire, whose mother had abandoned the family when Claire was eight years old, didn’t want to be in London alone, so Amy invited Claire to spend the weekend. Afterward, Amy’s mom would drive them both to Miss Oliver’s.
Typical of Amy: innocent, naive, kindness personified, but he also knew that she’d never spend a whole long weekend alone with her dad. “Just don’t listen to my show,” he told her every time she let him call her on the phone. “Just forget that part of me, and we can like each other again.” He was that straight with her. “No,” she said. Every time. “No way. You stop, and then we will.” That made him love her all the more. So when she announced Claire was visiting, he’d said, “Of course, you can bring a friend.”
They’d gone straight from the railroad station to the house, put on their bathing suits, and walked to the beach across the front lawn in bare feet, and he remembered when Amy was just five years old and she stepped on a bee; it stung her and he carried her back to the house, feeling her arms around his neck, and he put ice on it and it stopped hurting just like he told her it would. It was one of those times when he was almost crazy with happiness, but now they couldn’t go swimming because the water was full of jellyfish, which happened more and more now in August than it ever did before, and so they had sat on a blanket in the hot sun while he tried to keep his eyes off Claire as she talked about her life in London. “Oh, I’d love to go to England,” Amy had said—an enchanted sophomore to a postgraduate student. He’d coached her in T-ball and early volleyball, and now, in her one-piece modest bathing suit, he saw she didn’t have that chubbiness anymore and wondered if she was wearing it so she wouldn’t have to listen to him disapprove.
Now, with the pill inside him, he turned out the bathroom light and headed down the hall to his room where he’d get back