The man picked up his belongings and left the theater. Outside, the cold air hit him again. He thought back to the silly musical he had seen. At Eighth Avenue he caught the subway, one stop to Penn Station. He arrived at 5:28, caught his train at 5:40. He read a book on the way to Washington. At 9:00 he was in Union Station. Then he caught a Metro to the parking lot, hopped into his car, and drove southwest. By 11:30 P.M. he was in central Virginia, at home, back on campus.
It was the end of Thanksgiving vacation. He still had his chores to do for tomorrow, when classes resumed. All around him, 360 boys slept or talked or perhaps planned pranks. But none of them, not students or teachers, knew what he knew about passion.
He shivered, but not from the cold.
The Second Act
SCENE 1
Benjamin Warden twitched awake upon hearing the loud electronic pulse of the alarm on his clock radio. It was 6:30 Monday morning, time to get up for school. He had forgotten over the holidays just how much he hated this noise, a peculiar combination of rhythmical beeping and disc jockey chatter, but as he jumped from scatter rug to cold wood to turn off the switch, he permitted a shred of appreciation for how well the damn thing worked. He and Cynthia deliberately left it across their bedroom so that at least one of them would have to get up to shut it off.
Warden hated to start work tired after a holiday. In fourteen years of teaching, however, he had learned to be aware of his fatigue and to discipline himself not to pass it on to his students. Christmas vacation was only three weeks away. With luck he could find some reserves to get him through the next twenty-one days.
Cynthia kept her head on the pillow and watched him stretch his arms.
“Courage,” she said.
“Morning.” He crossed to the bed, climbed back in, and kissed her. Even when she was ill, she was beautiful. Her hair was exquisitely long and straight, her eyes the color of ripe blueberries, her mouth tiny and turned up in a crescent smile. He loved the dimple at the base of her neck and the others inside her arms and knees, loved to look at the way her breasts swelled so seamlessly outward, loved the firm but soft texture of her skin, loved her smooth parts and her coarse parts, loved her flawlessness, her intelligence, her charity.
“I vaguely remember your arrival last night,” she said. “It must have been late.”
“Pre-midnight, I believe,” he said. “We talked for a minute.”
“Was I glad to see you?”
“You were sleepy. You told me that I missed nothing here.”
“Did you tell me about your activities in New York?”
He covered the surge of anxiety with a mock shiver. “Cold. Dull without you.”
“Did you get to the theater?”
“Joe got me a ticket for a Sunday matinee of Cats. I ended up going by myself.”
She asked if the play was worth all the Tonys it had won.
“No,” he said, “it was actually pretty good.”
She laughed.
“For a musical,” he added. “Feeling better?”
“Different, anyway,” she said, but she turned away when she answered. “I don’t think I should go in today.”
“We can manage.”
Warden was chairman of the English department, and Cynthia was its part-time secretary. When she was well, she spent her mornings typing quizzes or running photocopies. She spent her afternoons starting the research for her doctoral dissertation.
Cynthia said she would not fight him for the first shower this morning.
“Stay here,” Warden said. “I’ll get breakfast.” He pushed himself out of bed again, shuffled his feet into his boating shoes. He pulled on a sweater over his T-shirt and a pair of khakis over his boxers.
“Don’t you want to eat in the dining hall?” she said.
“No.”
She told him that Kathleen Somerville had left some food in the refrigerator.
As he descended the stairs to the living area, Warden could hear the noises of Stratford House through the walls around him. The denizens were up a little early today. Usually even the most punctual boys waited until 7:00 or 7:15 to take their showers in time for the 7:30 buffet breakfast, while some of the older boys waited until 7:55 to get up for their 8:00 classes. Perhaps there was the genesis of a poem here—morning noises, daily routines. Warden imagined them all through the walls, getting ready, the younger ones still learning how to shave, the older ones lying about their sexual exploits over the holidays. Warden thought of them as his family, his and Cynthia’s. He liked their youth, liked to say that they kept him young.
He entered the kitchen and turned on the overhead light. It shone down on green Formica countertops, dark green tiles, white appliances. Cynthia’s orange gourd and red apple centerpiece remained from Thanksgiving. Beside it was Warden’s blue canvas travel bag, which he had simply dropped on the table before climbing up to bed last night. Exactly how late had he gotten in? He couldn’t remember. The whole trip
