The Eliot Girls

by Krista Bridge

  “Hi there, sir,” she said.

  He nodded. “Audrey.”

  Since she had found out about Henry, English class had presented her with a conflict unlike the one she’d expected. She could make no connection between the Henry known to Ruth and the Henry who stood before her as English teacher, jadedly lecturing about F. Scott Fitzgerald. She studied him for signs, half-expecting him to grant her some special attention that would constitute a loving, coded message to her mother. But she detected nothing. His attitude towards her was as indecipherable as ever.

  She reached down and casually zipped up her knapsack.

  “Friday afternoon and still here,” Henry said.

  “Lots of homework. Just packing everything in.”

  If anything, he seemed more restless than usual, his hands thrust into his pockets, looking not at Audrey but at the locker next to her head. She pictured him on an incomparably verdant expanse of lawn, mindlessly remarking on the monotony of the ocean, martini in hand.

  “Gatsby quiz tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll want to make sure you’re prepared.”

  “It’s a hard one?”

  He smiled thinly. “Well, it’s best always to be prepared, isn’t it? This is your education, after all.”

  She returned an uneasy smile as he continued on his way, at a frustrating amble, glancing back once to give her a final nod.

  RUTH STOOD IN THE doorway, waiting to speak. She had been waiting all day. Her class had been gone for an hour, and each moment that passed had confirmed her condition: he was not coming. So, beating back her pride, she had gone to him.

  The classroom was lit, but at first there appeared to be no one inside. The smell was stale, of a place long since vacated: no lingering breath of humanity. She cursed Sheila for delaying her downstairs with an explanation of the importance of nut-, gluten-, and dairy-free treats for an upcoming bake sale. Then came the sound of a heavy book falling in the corner. Henry rose, holding an encyclopedia.

  “What’s up? You working?” she said. Her words aimed for breeziness, but a tight perkiness of tone betrayed her. “An encyclopedia? Aren’t you supposed to know everything already?” She laughed.

  “I thought I saw a mouse.”

  “Christ!” she exclaimed, looking around her feet before she could stop herself. “And you plan to kill it with the encyclopedia?”

  He shrugged. “Killing a mouse with a book may be ultimately less painful than dealing with a horde of screaming girls on Monday. But now I’m not certain I saw anything at all.”

  He had gotten a haircut. For all the time Ruth spent summoning him in her mind, she found it difficult to look straight at him, to note the minutiae of his appearance, to absorb what he actually looked like, there in that moment. The freshly cut tips of hair glinted even more brightly with silver. At the back of his neck, in the centre of his hairline, was a little point, like an arrow. She had always wondered why barbers did that, and she didn’t want to notice it on Henry. There was a vulnerability she associated with it, and as embarrassed and unwanted as she felt, she didn’t care for the defencelessness of his naked expanse of shaven neck, the prissiness of that tiny V.

  He walked briskly to the desk and set the encyclopedia down with a resolute thud. Ruth reached behind her and closed the door, then stepped forward, grabbed his hand, and pulled him towards her. With her strained execution, the move was not so much lightheartedly seductive as petulant and demanding, and his body was far less compliant, less flexible, than she anticipated. He stumbled a little, his body tautly resisting the momentum she was trying to create, but she ignored this and grabbed the lapels of his blazer, looking up into his face.

  “It’s been too long,” she said, pulling his face into alignment with hers. When he didn’t respond by kissing her, she kissed him hard, her annoyance masked as passion.

  He pulled back decisively. “Christ, Ruth,” he said, his eyes shooting towards the door.

  “You said you liked spontaneity.”

  “Spontaneity, not stupidity.”

  “Forgive me,” she replied. “I didn’t realize we’d never behaved stupidly before.”

  “Clayton is picking me up today at 4:15. My train leaves at six.”

  Ruth looked back at the clock and saw that it was not yet four. “There’s still time,” she said.

  He reached out and ruffled the back of her hair, smiling absently with a big brother tameness she was terrified to interpret as pity. He turned back to his desk, where he transferred several folders from the desk to his briefcase.

  The previous day, at the end of lunch, there had been a staff room meeting about improper use of staff computers. (Larissa had been appalled to boot up a computer one morning when her office computer was down, only to discover that the most recently browsed website was not the New York Times, or the Globe and Mail—she could even have abided the Toronto Star—but People magazine. A further search revealed that celebrity pictures, entitled “Star Tracks,” had been perused.) Henry had been sitting directly across from Ruth at the long table, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed mid-chest. Before her was a mug of tea that she was clutching so hard she felt everyone must notice the telling whiteness of her knuckles. (Did she not want him to detect her tension and feel moved to reassure her with a foot nudge, a hand on her knee?) But he seemed entirely at ease—his posture relaxed, his eyes twinkling in amusement. Was that a message he was scribbling to Michael Curtis on the notepad in front of him? A subversively cavalier comment that made her throw back her head and elbow his arm? Even if the note’s content were inconsequential, the revelation was rude: he could enjoy himself in the company of others, with her in plain sight; he could forget her for the world outside them, the mindless pageantry of daily life. Was it so easy to get bored of her? If Ruth had been inclined to think moralistically, she would have theorized that this was the requisite flip side of an affair’s early rewards, that the narcotic excitement, the blissful resurrection of self, were merely a bluff, concealing the awaiting punishment: your metamorphosis into this contemptible thing, this grasping, loathsome creature.

  Ruth had left the meeting as soon as Larissa stopped talking, and she had deliberately gone all the way around the table so that she could pass behind him on her way out. She looked for a change in posture, a deep intake of breath, even a forced attitude of relaxation, anything that would indicate that he felt her presence at his back, that his apparent indifference was only typically male compartmentalization, or better yet, a chivalrous, loving shield designed to protect them both from the ravenous scrutiny of their colleagues. She noticed that the collar of his blue shirt was up at the back, and she had to resist the urge to reach out and turn it down, not just because they were in public, but because she knew that he would disapprove, even if they were alone, that he would consider the gesture a misguided assertion of ownership: unsettlingly proprietary, repellently sentimental.

  When she was at the door, she glanced back as Larissa was barking out a final reminder about the United Way fundraiser, and Henry’s eyes met hers; he looked immediately away. That was all she had needed, as satisfying, in its way, as the opposite would have been. How perversely grateful she had been, as she entered the fresh air of the hallway, for this sign that he was troubled by her, that she was not, after all, like everyone else.

  On the desk beside his briefcase now lay a dog-eared copy of the Coles Notes for The Great Gatsby. He wedged it inside, next to a folder bursting with essays.

  “Looking for teaching tips?” Ruth laughed, a breaking into the liquor cabinet kind of cackle. How she hated everything she said.

  “Weeding out plagiarism. I had to give them quite a lecture today about what constituted plagiarism. Most seemed to be under the impression that if the ideas came from Coles Notes, they were doing nothing wrong. They seemed genuinely shocked that borrowing from that tripe was dishonest, and not a lit
tle unintelligent.”

  The noise of loud laughter in the hallway burst through the closed door. Someone called out, “We’re going to be late,” with a kind of wicked glee, as if the speaker very much hoped to be late, followed by the sound of galloping down the hall.

  He looked at the clock. “Ruth, I can’t have you here.”

  “Oh, is this not my workplace too?”

  “Clayton could walk in at any minute.”

  “Something tells me that Clayton is impeccably punctual.”

  “Don’t be obtuse. You know that I can’t have you following me around when Clayton is due to arrive.”

  “Following you?” she exclaimed. “I deserve some credit. I’ve never followed you!” She knew that, at this point, to say less was the judicious choice, but she thought of the hair point at the back of his head and was filled with loathing. Her voice dropped several decibels. “You know, I think you want me to be that kind of lover. You hate that woman but you need me to be her at the same time.”

  He shook his head dolefully, as if saddened by how wrong she had gotten everything.

  Wind gasped at the window. Purple-grey shades tinged the rattling glass, offering even clearer warning of the time than the noisy tick of the clock. Someone slammed a nearby locker, the sound ricocheted off the rows of abandoned lockers in the empty hallway. At the far end of the hallway, a vacuum cleaner started up, the cleaners already beginning their systematic progression through the closing school.

  “Will you tell me something?” Ruth said suddenly. “Why did you leave U of T?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Is the question confusing? I remember Larissa saying you had tenure. There’s been gossip, you know. Constantly.”

  Henry reordered the folders in his briefcase. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint your desire for mystery. There’s nothing whatsoever gossip worthy behind it. I needed a change. It wasn’t what I wanted anymore.”

  “After all the years of work that went into getting there?”

  He shrugged.

  That was it? After all these months of speculation, all that waiting for the perfectly timed confession, the clarifying turpitude, she had ended up with only this? At the core of it all was not some appalling, life-threatening shame but simply his own capriciousness? Ruth had been—they had all been—so certain that there was a dark secret. She supposed that she had wanted to think this, that to believe him debauched in some spectacular way was not materially different from heroicizing him. Although she had not actively planned, over the course of their affair, on exhuming the secret, she saw now that its projected presence had bestowed on him a grandeur, had rendered him instantly, undeservedly intriguing.

  She thought of that first night in the staff room: the reverent darkness of the school, their cocoon of exclusive light, the mesmerized compliance of her shocked body, the thrill, equal to the raw pleasure of the kiss itself, of knowing that her life could still take turns, that it was not, after all, entirely arranged. She had not known that the experience, even had it ended there, would become necessary to her sustenance. An insane leap, she knew, but the closest parallel she could summon for the way she felt with Henry that night was her moody elation when she discovered that she was pregnant. That concurrence of foreboding and euphoria—not merely the connection, but the symbiosis, of fear and hope.

  “Tell me,” she pressed. “Tell me what happened.”

  He looked towards the window, and she was certain that she saw something in his face: a hardness that aged him, the pulse of bitterness.

  “Don’t I deserve to know, after all this?”

  “Ruth, don’t be facile. I can’t think why on earth it matters anyway.”

  “Why did you start this with me, Henry?”

  He took a small step towards her, his palms upturned but not outstretched. He seemed at a loss, a state that only made everything worse. He had become wary rather than frustrated. Annoyance she would have welcomed. Antagonism would have offered at least some acknowledgment of her modicum of power, an assurance of some enduring conviction on his part.

  “What do you want from me? A psychological examination of my motives?”

  “You just got married.”

  “There are no reasons, Ruth.”

  What had she hoped for? A philandering father? A murmured confession that he had never learned to be better than this, and that he chosen her because he had seen, even before she did, that she wasn’t better than it either? She walked down an aisle towards the back of the room and crossed her arms, ostensibly studying the arrangement of wilted, faux-antique brownish maps of the continents. For a second she thought that she could hear Larissa’s voice travelling through the grid of hallways—so distant it sounded like a television left on at low volume. “I envy you your restraint,” she said.

  “Restraint?” he replied with a smile. “We wouldn’t be here if I had any. We both know that.”

  “But you know better than to talk about love.”

  She thought that now was the safest time to float that idea, even to say it, flat out, when he was sure to say nothing back. She had not planned on ever bringing that word into their vocabulary. Whatever she felt she would feel privately. But Henry’s distance made her push for something she didn’t quite understand. She turned to face him, and he looked at the clock, then to his watch, assessing their synchronicity, as if to throw onto an imaginary screen before them the image of Clayton in the parking lot, jingling her keys in her hand, heading to the door under the cover of the low evening clouds.

  “Let’s be dignified about this,” he said.

  She searched his face for some sign that there was something he wanted to say to her, a softening at the corner of his lips, a cautious dip of his eyelids, an allusion to affection, somewhere, but she found nothing. He clicked shut the clasp of his briefcase: the insignificant sound of dismissal.

  He regarded her for a moment, relenting. “You were so nervous that first night. So nervous and lovely. Your nervousness made you more lovely.”

  The words were brutally elegiac.

  “Maybe you should meet Clayton outside,” she said.

  Nodding, he grabbed his briefcase and was gone with a bashful backwards wave, gone to the warm, waiting car, its private swish through the gathering congestion of the city streets to the gritty freedom of the train station, which would take him farther, still, from this classroom, where it seemed she would wait forever, wondering what had just happened.

  Chapter Sixteen

  MS. MCALLISTER’S DARK FORM was silhouetted against the too-bright window when Audrey opened the door and stepped into her office on Thursday afternoon. The summons had been sent during final period, and Audrey had spent the remainder of French class in a flap. Unsuccessfully, she tried to pay even closer attention to the lesson, as though at the eleventh hour she could make up for her academic apathy. All her alarm focused on her grades: another midterm report card loomed, and she had made little improvement since the fall term. She had a vision of Ms. McAllister poring over her results with an enormous magnifying glass.

  With a sideways flick of her wrist, Ms. McAllister motioned for Audrey to sit, then continued to gaze out the window for a moment, her profile precisely outlined again the dusty glass. Audrey had the impression of forced calm—not leisure but the performance of it. At length, she made a stiff and slow revolution, fixing her eyes on Audrey as she sank into the commodious recesses of her stately chair. A file was open before her and she leafed through it with reflective gravity. Finally she folded her hands and spoke. “You worked very hard to get into this school.”

  Audrey nodded.

  “Although the process of test design certainly has its own rewards, the entrance examinations are not simply a difficult test I design for my own fancy,” Ms. McAllister began. “They serve a critical function you and I have discussed before. In man
y respects, they are the linchpin of George Eliot Academy’s success. What is a school but an amalgamation of its principles and its people?” She looked at Audrey as if waiting for a response, then continued. “This is why I allow prospective girls to try the tests only twice. In your case, as you know, an exception was made. For this, I blame myself. I allowed personal feelings and the obligations of a long-standing professional relationship to override my better judgment. And now, I fear, we are all suffering the consequences of my misguided, and dare I say foolish, compassion. I have never so heartily wished to be proven wrong. ”

  The sound of rowdy male voices shouting outside roused Ms. McAllister from her desk. She pulled back the half-drawn curtain and peered outside in curiosity and consternation. Even with her back turned, her eyes were trained on Audrey, immobile but seemingly alive, staring out from the enormous portrait of her that hung on the wall to the right of the desk. Although painted a decade before, to mark the occasion of Eliot’s opening, it might have been a likeness of her appearance that day. It made words, the lecture or punishment intended to set Audrey on the right path, almost unnecessary, so clearly did it convey her message of authority and disappointment.

  Ms. McAllister cleared her throat and turned back around. “What have you to say for yourself?” she asked.

  Audrey swallowed hard. “I know I can do better.”

  “I shouldn’t think it possible to do much worse.”

  “I’m trying really hard. I am. My mom’s getting me a math tutor. I’m just starting to catch up. Everything was different at my old school. It was a lot easier, obviously. And I mean, I love how challenging it is here. I’m really getting used to it now. I know that by the end of the year, you’ll see how hard I’m working.”