“When you put it like that, you make me sound like a fool.”
Cynthia said she should greet that line with a polite but telling silence.
Warden turned the bacon. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. He felt robbed of his Thanksgiving holiday. He and Cynthia were going to take a vacation in New York, but then he was forced by agent and publisher to go without her. “This last excursion, it was more work than pleasure.” He complained that long trips to read his old material robbed him of time to write new stuff. And now that school was starting up again, his writing time would be diminished even more.
Cynthia reminded him that he could always work down the road at the university.
A delicate subject, one that he wanted to avoid.
“Maybe I should try it,” said Warden. “It’s just that college students are so sycophantic.”
“I beg your pardon?”
It was one of their running jokes. They had met three summers ago, when Warden was teaching a graduate seminar on poetry for the summer session at the University of Virginia and Cynthia enrolled in his class. She had read every one of his books before the course started, and she had startled him by using two lines of his poetry as epigraph to her own work. At first he had been suspicious, but when she had told him that she was merely auditing the course for no credit, he had invited her for dinner, despite his self-consciousness at dating a woman twelve years younger. By the end of the summer, they were married. And they had lived here in their dormitory at Montpelier School since.
He poured hot water over the tea bag in the mug, let it brew for fifteen seconds, and then shifted the tea bag to another mug, which he also filled with water. He took the cups to the table. Cynthia groped for hers and grasped it with both hands.
“You’re shaking again,” said Warden.
“Yes,” said Cynthia.
“Do you really feel all right?” said Warden.
“No,” said Cynthia.
“What is it?”
“I’m scared, Ben,” she said. “I’m scared of what this is.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Warden.
“Ever since yesterday afternoon, my left foot has been numb.”
Warden heard her as though she were speaking a line in one of his dreams-where a character could surprise him and yet confirm his most dreaded expectations all at once.
He asked her why she hadn’t told him earlier. “Because,” she said, “I knew we’d spend the rest of the morning talking about me.”
She held her mug in front of her with both hands, as though she were carrying a chalice. He cupped her hands, mug and all, within his large palms.
Her skin felt so cold.
SCENE 2
Thomas Boatwright was sitting in English class and dying. He knew this must be what it felt like to die of boredom, because he was doing it. He looked at his watch again: 8:17. Whoopee-do, an entire minute had passed since his last look. They’d been back exactly seventeen minutes from Thanksgiving vacation, seventeen minutes of class for the first time since last Wednesday, and he was dying, dying of boredom, wondering why in the hell he’d ever agreed to attend boarding school, wishing that something would happen to make Mr. Farnham shut up and leave the room.
There were eleven other boys in the class. Their desks were arranged in a semicircle around Mr. Farnham’s old wooden desk with GRATEFUL DEAD carved in little tiny letters on the front. Thomas had been staring at the GRATEFUL DEAD for months—it seemed more like years—ever since he’d started school in September and had entered Mr. Farnham’s class in fourth-form English. They wouldn’t call it sophomore English here at the Montpelier School for Boys; that sounded too American, even though the school was American and everybody sitting here was American and they were, in fact, about two hours away by car from the American capital city, which was where Thomas’s family lived and where he’d spent his Thanksgiving vacation and where he ought to be right now, going to Cathedral Academy and getting home at night and away, away, away from this unbelievably boring class.
8:19. His watch had to be broken. Time could not possibly move this slowly of its own volition. They were smart not to put clocks in these classrooms. Sometimes if you didn’t look at a watch, you could go into a sort of hypnotic trance and the time would slip away from you. Thomas promised himself that he wouldn’t look at his watch for at least another twenty minutes. How would he know when twenty minutes had passed? He would be dead, that’s how. He would be dead of boredom. Just before he keeled over, he would look at his watch to see what time he’d expired.
“. . . two kinds of love,” Mr. Farnham was saying. He was writing on the board. “Cupiditas is the bad kind of love, what we would call today ‘cupidity’ or ‘lust.’” He wrote CUPIDITAS=CUPIDITY (LUST) on the board in his usual block letters. “And the good kind of love is caritas, what we would call ‘charity’ or ‘unselfish love’ today.” He wrote another little equation up on the board: CARITAS=UNSELFISH LOVE.
In his notebook Thomas wrote LOVE-2 KINDS. CUPIDITAS BAD, CARITAS GOOD.
“Are those words capitalized?” asked Landon Hopkins, who sat in the middle of the semicircle and was undoubtedly writing down every word Farnham said. Thomas sat on one end of the semicircle, to the teacher’s left, because he had read somewhere that teachers don’t tend to call on the person situated to one side, that the teacher’s attention spreads out in an arc and often misses the people in the front side seats. He looked across the room at Richard Blackburn, his best friend, who rolled his eyes and pretended to draw a gun and shoot Landon under the desk. Richard just killed Thomas. He
