The Headmaster's Wife (14 page)

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.

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.

“Room two seventeen,” the man said.

Gregor headed for the elevators with Mark still in tow. They were self-service elevators. That was a good thing because the few other guests in the lobby were looking at Mark very oddly, and Gregor didn't blame them.

“I told you this was a nice place,” Mark said, getting into the elevator beside Gregor. He looked dubiously at Gregor's case. “Would you like me to carry that? I always carry my mom's suitcases, or I used to before she married Jimmy. I'm sorry I didn't say anything before.”

“That's all right.” Gregor kept a grip on his case. Mark did not look capable of carrying anything for very long.

They got to the second floor. The elevator doors opened. They got out and walked down the hall, Gregor watching the numbers of the doors and moving slowly because Markseemed to be having a hard time moving. They got to room 217 and Gregor unlocked the door.

“Are you sure you're all right?” he asked Mark, even though he knew the answer to that one. Mark was not all right. He wasn't even close to all right.

Mark came in behind him and headed across the room to the chairs near the window. He sat down and shook his head. “I'm fine,” he said. “I'm actually having a pretty good day. Sometimes I can't think at all, but it's not like that now. I'm just so tired. And I've got a sore throat. And I've got work jobs.”

“Work jobs?”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “It's—it's sort of like detention. When you screw up, they give you work jobs to do to make up for the infraction.”

Mark didn't look capable of making his bed, never mind doing something called “work jobs.” Gregor threw his suitcase on the bed and opened it. “You're a mess,” he said. “Have you got any idea what you look like? What's happened to you?”

Mark put his face in his hands. “You know,” he said. “I know what everybody thinks, and it isn't true. I'm not taking drugs, unless you count caffeine as a drug, which I guess it is, but you know what I mean. I just can't remember things. I keep losing things. I've lost my student ID twice, and I need that to get my allowance out of my student account. I just forget.”

Gregor came to the edge of the bed and sat down. “Mark, if you're not on drugs, there's something seriously and truly wrong with you. You need to be hospitalized or something. You're—”

“I know,” Mark said. “I found this thing, we studied it in biology, called Huntington's chorea. It fits perfectly. But it can't be that because there isn't anybody in my family with it. I thought maybe my dad, you know, might have had it, because he died so young maybe it just hadn't shown up yet; but then one of his parents had to have had it, and my dad's mom is still alive and she's fine, and my dad's dad died at sixty something and he never had it. So it can't be that.”

“What does your mother say?”

Mark looked up. “I haven't said anything to my mother. Well, I mean, yeah, I have, sort of. But I haven't, you know, made a thing about it. It's hard to explain. She thinks I look pale, so she got me these vitamins.” He rooted around in his coat and came up with a prescription bottle. He shook the last capsule onto his hand. “I'd better take this. I don't think it does any good. And maybe they're right, do you know what I mean? Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm just too stupid to be here.”

“You're one of the least stupid people I've ever met in my life.”

“I'd have said I was smart enough before I got here, but I don't know anymore. Do you know what I did last week?”

“No.”

“I got a zero on a quiz,” Mark said. “A
history
quiz. An
American
history quiz. It's usually my best subject. And the other weird thing was that it was on the election of 1800: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. I read a book about it last summer. And I couldn't remember any of it. I sat there and looked at the paper and none of it made any sense at all. And of course they think I didn't study a damn, except that I did, and it just didn't matter. My mind went completely blank. I got questions wrong on stuff I knew cold before I ever came to Windsor. Maybe it's psychological. Maybe I just don't want to be here.”

“Why don't you leave then? I can't believe your mother would insist on your staying if she knew you didn't want to.”

Mark looked away. “That would be quitting. I don't like to quit.”

“Better quitting than killing yourself,” Gregor said. He looked back at the clothes in his suitcase. “Look, we're more or less the same size—I'm heavier than you are and a bit taller, but I've got some things that will work. Sweatpants.”

“You wear sweatpants?”

“Sometimes. It seemed like a good idea to bring some. You could fit into those. And I've got a sweatshirt. And some brand-new boxer shorts still in their store bag. Go take ashower, and I'll order us some room service. When was the last time you had something to eat? You look like you've lost twenty pounds.”

“I went to lunch,” Mark said. “I think we had pasta. I don't remember. Did I tell you about that on the phone? I can't remember anything.”

“You said something about it, yes.” Gregor got up and started looking through his things. The sweatpants were black. The sweatshirt was a deep maroon. Bennis must have picked it out for him. He put both of those on the bed and went looking for the bag with the boxer shorts in it.

“It's not just that Michael died,” Mark said. “I can still see it in my head. It was incredible. And they wanted to put me back in that room. Did I tell you? The police are finished so they wanted me to move back in. They still want me to move back in. The dorms are all full. They don't have any place else to put me.”

“Where have you been staying while the police did their work?” Gregor found the shorts.
Socks,
he thought, and went looking for those.

“I've been staying with one of the houseparents. He's not married or anything, so he's got some extra space. But that's not a good situation because he hates me. God, I sound stupid. I sound like one of those complete fuckups who are always complaining about how everybody hates them, but the real truth of it is that they're fuckups.”

“What is it you've been—screwing up while you've been staying with this houseparent?”

“What? Oh well, I'm sort of a slob. I've always been a slob. That's not new to Windsor. But the thing is, I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. They think I'm not smart enough to be here. And they think—”

“What?”

“I don't know,” Mark said. He tried straightening his spine, but it was a halfhearted effort. “I know Michael committed suicide, Mr. Demarkian. I know it's not a murder, okay? But there are things, things I think I saw—”

“You only think?”

“I could have been hallucinating,” Mark said. “I think I do that sometimes. I'm not sure. And sometimes I black out. Did I tell you about that, about blacking out?”

“No.”

“One day I was crossing the street right out on Main Street here, or I think I was, I think I must have been. The thing is, I can't remember it. I don't know how I got there. It was the middle of the afternoon and there was a lot of traffic and I just sort of … came to in the middle of this intersection. And people were honking at me and giving me the finger and screaming at me. I don't know how I got there. I don't know how long I was standing there. I was just standing there, not moving. And I don't know why.”

“Mark, listen to me.” Gregor sat down on the edge of the bed again. “You really do need to be in the hospital. There's got to be something physically wrong with you.”

“I think so, too, but I can't imagine what,” Mark said. “I must have looked through that medical book twenty times. More. Huntington's chorea was the only thing I came up with. And I feel like such a jerk, do you know what I mean? I don't fail at things. I really don't. Except now that's all I do. And then Michael—His hand came up and fluttered in the air. He shrugged. “I don't know how to explain it. But there's something wrong. And there was that thing I saw, and maybe it was a hallucination, but I don't think so. So I thought, you know, you could come up and check into it”

“I did come up.”

“Yeah, I know. Thank you. I'm sorry to be such a… whatever. To be so out of it. I'm not all the time, you know. Sometimes I'm half-sane for a couple of days, and then it goes back like this.”

“Take a shower,” Gregor said. He got up and threw the boxer shorts and sweat clothes into Mark's lap. “You'll feel better when you get cleaned up. I'll call for room service. Is there something you'd particularly like to eat?”

“Just coffee,” Mark said. “I don't have an appetite much these days.”

“Take a shower,” Gregor said.

Mark bunched the clothes into his hands and stood up. He swayed when he got to his feet. For one nervous moment, Gregor was afraid he was going to fall over. Then he righted himself and began to walk across the room to the bathroom. He walked, Gregor thought, like an old man. Father Tibor, who was at least middle-aged and who had led a very hard life in the Soviet Union before coming to America, was more steady on his feet.