She reminded him that he had already told her about his error twice. “Are you tired of reading?” she asked.
He said he was absolutely not tired of reading. How could he be, when he was reading his favorite writer to his favorite audience?
She had woken with blurred vision in both eyes. They had not panicked; she was going to the hospital soon, where the doctors would make her well. In the interim, she was going ahead with learning her lines. She was not going to allow her eyes to prevent her from playing Desdemona.
“Do you know why I’m writing about this play?” she said.
“Why?”
“Because it reminds me of us,” she said. “The father who objects to his daughter’s marriage, the older man marrying the younger woman.”
Warden had not missed the parallels himself. “The fair young woman marrying the man with the sooty face.”
“Your face is not sooty,” said Cynthia. “It’s rubicund.”
Warden touched the mark on his face without thinking. “I was paranoid when I first met you,” he said. “I thought you were trifling with me. I assumed you had some ulterior motive.”
Cynthia reached up and took his hand from his face. “What do you mean?” she said. “I had a very ulterior motive. I wanted to marry my teacher.” She kissed his open palm.
“I hate my face,” said Warden. “I wish I could give you a face you deserve.”
“‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,’” said Cynthia. “Desdemona and Othello truly loved each other, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And we truly love each other, don’t we?”
“Yes,” said Warden.
“Then how could he kill her? Could you even imagine killing me?”
“Stop it,” he said. He pulled his hand away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s this vertigo. It makes me just the tiniest bit off plumb.”
But her question brought the play into focus for him as if he had never understood it before. Othello adored Desdemona, and she him. And yet he killed her. In their bed. At night, when he should have been making love to her. The scene of her death was as familiar to Othello and Desdemona as this bedroom was to Warden and Cynthia—the most intimate, the most private, the most personal room of the house. Desdemona lay in bed and begged her husband to investigate her story, to believe her, to trust her as she had trusted him, but he proceeded to kill her nonetheless. He was jealous, under the spell of the green-eyed monster that lurks in wait to feed on love. He loved her so much that he killed her.
Warden thought of Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover,” told by a madman who killed his mistress at the moment she expressed her greatest love for him, so that such a love could never be diminished. He imagined himself, even now, putting down the book, leaning over, and taking his wife’s throat in his own large hands and squeezing the life out of her. Would she fight? Would she protest? Or would she simply look at him in understanding that he was killing her because he loved her so much, because he could not stand the thought of her living with some terrible virus inside her, nibbling away at her insides, stealing her energy away. The sickness knew her in a place where even Warden could not go. He was jealous of her disease.
He shuddered.
“You have given me the worst sorts of nightmares,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
It was warm and bright in the bedroom. He lifted the white-covered Signet paperback and looked for his place. Cynthia interrupted him.
“Othello must have killed people in the course of his career, don’t you think?” said Cynthia. “He was a general. He had had a long life of adventure. It was hearing about all those adventures that attracted Desdemona to him. She was attracted to him because he was a killer.”
Warden accused her of deliberately misreading the text. “She was attracted to him because of his nobility, his courage, his valor,” he said.
“So killing people was noble?”
“For the right cause, of course.”
“Would you kill someone for the right cause?” she asked.
“It would have to be a very good cause,” said Warden.
“Would you kill someone if it would cure me of cancer?”
“Cynthia.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m doing it again. We don’t know that it’s cancer.”
Warden reached over and caressed her neck.
“It could be nothing,” he said. “Some tropical bug you got off a papaya in the Safeway.”
“I want to get back to work,” she said. “I think of the poor English department, all those vocabulary quizzes you’re having to photocopy by yourself, those grades that need recording, those book orders.”
“They can all wait.”
“And the mixer this Saturday. I should tell Sam Kaufman he needs to get somebody else to be in charge. I’ve taken on too much.” Cynthia was also director of weekend activities at Montpelier.
Warden said she suffered an excess desire to take part in the daily workings of the school. “This mixer can take care of itself.”
“It certainly cannot,” she said. “I have to be there. I have to check on the bands and make sure that all the chaperones are there and check in the buses from the girls’ schools.”
Warden told her that he would help.
“I should still call Sam,” she said. “Only Sam Kaufman is the biggest gossip on campus.”
“So we won’t tell him,” said Warden. “How do we explain your absence?”
“I’m going to be back before they notice,” she said. “I’m going to be back by tomorrow.”
He continued to read to her until the telephone rang and pulled them both back to their bedroom. Eerily, it was Samuel Kaufman, the dean of students, and for a moment Warden wondered whether Kaufman was calling to confirm the rumors he’d heard about Cynthia’s illness.
“Is Cynthia available to do some substitute teaching?” asked Kaufman.
Warden said she was not.
“Then you’re going to have to find somebody to cover Patrick McPhee’s classes this morning. He can’t make it. We’ve got this . . .”
“What’s the matter?”
“He found a boy dead last night. We’ve
