by Anita Shreve
Even now, in the dining room of the inn, Harrison experienced a slight aftershock of the quake he had felt that afternoon. First the bewilderment. Then the stunning surprise. Finally, his outrage at Stephen, even though Harrison knew Stephen's betrayal to have been unwitting: Harrison had never spoken to Stephen of his missed opportunity — a missed opportunity being, by definition, a nonstory.
Harrison, stunningly preoccupied, could not get into the crouch, could not get loose, as the new pitcher threw his first pitch. Strike one. Harrison glanced from Stephen to Nora and back again, a comic-book swivel, Harrison's intuition confirmed when he saw Stephen glance over at the hillock and smile. How had Harrison not seen that smile before? Surely, it was not the first of the game?
The batter swung at a bad pitch — strike two — which should have lifted Harrison up onto his toes, ready for a grounder and a third out. The batter swung at the third pitch, high and outside, improbably making contact and sending it on a hop to Harrison, who booted it behind the first baseman, a senior, who in turn had to run for it, trying to field it as it ricocheted against a wooden fence.
Man on second.
Harrison, glancing at Stephen, saw a puzzled look on his friend's face. Harrison turned away, furious. North Fentohs pitcher was at the plate, an easy out by all accounts, though now it was a ground ball right through the legs of Kidd's pitcher. Harrison fielded it but was slow to get it out of his glove, and the runner beat the throw. When Harrison glanced up, he saw that the runner from second had scored.
0-7.
Harrison's memory could not retrieve the rest of the game, though he recalled that afterward, as they picked up their bats and helmets and ate the brownies and drank the lemonade a team parent had brought, he saw Stephen walk to where Nora reclined. She stood up and brushed the back of her skirt. Stephen hovered over her and spoke. Of the pitiful game? Of his own beautiful but wasted play? Nora looked up once and smiled. And though the pair did not touch, Harrison knew, by the way Nora let Stephen stand so close to her, that they had touched, had perhaps even kissed. Was it possible they were already lovers?
Harrison felt a brief touch on his left shoulder and looked up. Nora moved into view. "The fly appears not merely to have alighted on the fruit," she said. "Nor . . . nor even to have inadvertently drowned. But... it would seem from the insect's supine and slightly sensual posture ... to have wallowed in the viscous syrup of the dressing." She had on a slim black skirt and a white blouse through which Harrison could see her camisole. He stood, but she waved him down and sat across from him. "This . . . this is not, strictly speaking, a crime," she added. "Nor can this event entirely obliterate the sense of well-being I had earlier on the porch. Not in the way blocked plumbing can, for example. But I wonder if it isn't, if it isn't a harbinger of the weekend to come. 'Well-being' a fruit one can peel away, layer by layer."
Harrison smiled at the baroque apology.
"I'm joking," Nora said, "but I just wanted to say I'm sorry about the fly."
"Don't be," Harrison said, "if the result is that charmingly obscene image."
"Judy brought the plate to me for my inspection." Nora had on pearl earrings and, unlike earlier this morning, a suggestion of makeup. Her lips looked glossy. Her eyes were darker, more defined.
"Judy is very honest, then, and you should employ her forever. She was apologetic enough for both of you."
"Judy is a pretty girl with no charm whatsoever," Nora said. "She's so quick and bright, though, I dare not offend her."
"I imagine the fly, dazzled by the unseasonable weather, flew into the kitchen and was seduced by the luscious-looking fig," Harrison said.
"Will you tell the others?"
"Very funny. You seem in good spirits."
"Despite the fly, I am."
"Why?"
She sat back in her chair. "I'm . . . I'm amazed by this day. And being amazed, I'm filled with an incredible sense of happiness."
"I'm glad. The raclette is very good, by the way. My compliments to the chef."
"Eddie. I'll tell him. May I?" she asked, indicating Harrison's untouched water glass.
Harrison pushed the glass toward her. "I was just wondering. Why take on an inn? Surely your husband's royalties ..."
"Carl's royalties were pitiful," Nora said, crossing her legs. "You . . .you ... of all people should know that." Harrison was struck by her poise. "But that's not the real reason. The real reason is that I wanted to."
Nora took a long sip.
"How did you and your husband meet?" Harrison asked, aware of a slight problem of nomenclature. To call the man "Carl" assumed a familiarity Harrison did not have. Yet to refer to him in Nora's presence as "Mr. Laski" felt bizarre. And Harrison couldn't keep referring to Laski as "your husband" either.
"I wish you wouldn't keep asking me questions you already know the answers to," Nora said.
Rebuffed, Harrison took a sip of wine.
Nora set down the water glass. "I thought Poetic License a work of spite. I refused to cooperate with Alan Roscoff. Did you read it?"
"Yes."
"It... it wasn't so much that it wasn't as respectful as a widow would have wanted. It was that it was insipid. And uninformed. I don't believe he had the faintest idea of what Carl's work was all about."
"I thought the book thin and rushed," Harrison said loyally. "Deliberately sensational."
"I've been wondering if I should have a serious portrait of Carl done," Nora mused. She nibbled on her finger, and Harrison found this break in her poise endearing. "Perhaps you could help me suggest a writer? Someone you respect?"
Harrison was flattered by the invitation, but wondered if it wasn't slightly disingenuous. Surely Nora Laski was flooded with requests for interviews, for access to the poet's files. Harrison guessed that there might be two or three literary biographies of Laski in the works already. "I'd be happy to," he said.
"I ... I was sitting on a park bench," Nora said, "in Washington Square Park. I was eating a sandwich when Carl sat down. He asked me if he could have half. I knew him then as Professor Laski.
For a few minutes, I couldn't speak. I was a sophomore at NYU. Professor Laski was . . . well, he was a presence. I'd taken a lecture course with him the year before. Though he claimed that day to remember me, he later confessed that he had not."
Harrison could not imagine any man failing to remember a young Nora.
"Carl would come by every day to the park at the same time. And it was understood that I would give him lunch. I started making more and more elaborate lunches until they began to be full-blown picnics. I was aware that he was married. I was also aware of his reputation. I thought... I thought that as long as nothing progressed beyond the park bench, we were fine. And, for a long time, it didn't."
Nora paused. "I didn't think much about his age," she continued. "It didn't seem as fraught then as it does now. If anything, there was a kind of conferred status upon girls who slept with their professors."
"For how long did this go on?" Harrison asked.
"Weeks," she said. "I met him in the spring. It went on until I left for the summer."
"Where did you go?"
"I worked as a waitress in Provincetown. I shared a room with another girl. It was the thing to do then. We'd spend our tips in the bars after work. In July, I saw a poster announcing a reading by Carl Laski at the Unitarian church. I think I may have bragged to my friends that I knew him. And once I'd done that, I had to go. To prove it. I thought I'd make a picnic and bring it. It would be a sort of joke."
Nora smiled.
Carl read from the pulpit. There was no other place for him to stand. And, well, you can imagine. That man, that head of hair, that booming voice. Did you ever hear Carl read?"
"Yes. Once, I think. In New York."
"He ... he was magnificent," Nora said. "It was a performance. And the words . . . the words . . ." She put a hand to her chest, as if even now, after all these years, she wa
s still slightly stunned by those long-ago words. "He read from Bones of Sand. He saw me from the pulpit. I don't think he took his eyes off me during the entire reading. He never actually read, you know. He would memorize everything in advance. So that the performance, if you want to call it that, was riveting."
"I'm imagining a charismatic Calvinist in a New England pulpit," Harrison said.
Nora glanced at her watch, and Harrison found he was beginning to mind this constant gesture. "He had a hotel," she said. "You don't want to hear all this."
Harrison did, and he did not. "As an editor, I find this fascinating," he said. "Sometimes there's a fact that sheds light on the work."
"A poem," Nora said, "is an act of the imagination. It's rarely, if ever, an act of straight reportage."
Harrison wasn't sure he agreed. "You don't think your husband once saw the girl with the red suitcase waiting at the airport?"
"No," Nora said with an air of fatigue that surprised Harrison. "I gave up trying to make straight connections years ago. I don't think... I don't think readers give writers enough credit for the imagination. They always want to know, Did this happen to the writer? When, of course, it probably didn't. Not literally. Not exactly as described. It's the imagination. That makes a work come alive."
"But the chestnut hair," Harrison said gently. "I assume you're the model for 'Monday Morning' and 'Talk After Supper'?"
"Actually not," Nora said, looking away. "The ideal preceded me."
The sentence was full of implication, and Harrison let it go. "By the way," he said, "I looked up 'helpmeet.' I will make an help meet for him. Genesis. Adam and Eve. I will make a partner suitable for him. I gather it's appropriate to you and Carl?"
"Some men need women to feel as though they exist."
Harrison set his napkin at the side of his plate.
"Would you like some coffee?" Nora asked.
"Yes, thank you, I would."
Harrison watched as Nora made a gesture to someone standing behind him.
"You don't seem like an innkeeper," he said.
"How so?"
"I think of an innkeeper as a red-faced publican or a starchy spinster, not..." But here he faltered, for to tell her how he saw her was to assume too great an intimacy. "In another age, you'd have been the mother of war heroes," he said instead, "or the wife of a distinguished physician or perhaps even a poet yourself."
"They'd have said 'poetess' then."
"So they would."
"One could argue that being an innkeeper . . . with its financial independence and only the self to answer to ... is a better job than being merely a wife and mother. Better than being a poet."
"True," Harrison said. His plate was whisked away, and a cup of coffee was set before him. "You won't have any?" he asked.
"I... I drink too much caffeine already."
"I went for a walk earlier," Harrison said, stirring in some milk. "I got as far as a stone wall. It seemed to end in the middle of nowhere."
"It used to be part of an estate."
"Odd place to have an estate."
"There are lots of access roads in these woods. That seem to lead to nowhere."
"I assume this is your wedding-rehearsal uniform?" he asked, pointing with his teaspoon. It is.
"Very pretty," he added, keeping it light. "What happened to you when you returned to NYU after Provincetown?"
"Carl was married, and he had sons. His wife had more or less tolerated his previous affairs. But now Carl wanted to move out. She wouldn't stand for that. She wouldn't forgive him for leaving her alone with the two children and humiliating her. Though one could argue she'd been thoroughly humiliated long ago."
"You seem sympathetic to her."
"I am," she said. "Now, I am. But I wasn't then. Nothing makes a person more selfish than being in love. Carl's wife retaliated by suing for sole custody of the boys. He hired a good lawyer, and he was sure he would win, but that's not how it worked out."
"That must have been hard on both of you."
"When . . . when a man leaves his wife and children for another woman, there's a burden on that woman. She has to be worth the sacrifice."
Harrison blew over the top of his coffee cup. "I'm sure you were."
"No one is worth that kind of sacrifice. In Carl's case, it was even worse. To be worth the sacrifice, every word had to be incandescent."
In the corner, Harrison could see Judy clearing away dishes.
"If the work was extraordinary, one might be able to say later that artistic greatness had come from the sacrifice," Nora added.
"I would think to be worth the sacrifice, as you put it, there has to be only one truly great poem."
"You think there is?" Nora asked.
"Of course I do," he said. "There are many truly great poems. I know 'The Red Suitcase' is widely regarded to be his best work, but personally I think 'The Fourth Canto' is."
Nora said nothing, a silence Harrison took to be dissent.
"I imagine you know the work intimately," he said.
"I should. I had to type them all a hundred times."
"Literally type?"
"In the early days, yes."
"Carbon papers and all that?"
"Carl was slow to take up the computer. I think it was the promise of pornography that intrigued him finally."
Harrison was taken aback by this intimate revelation, an entire universe contained within. Unhappy marital sex? Bitterness? Betrayal? Or was it simply a joke, and only Harrison had missed the punch line?
"Carl wrote in his study in the mornings," Nora said. "He would go there immediately after waking up, and I wouldn't see him until around noon or so."
"He always wrote in the mornings?"
"He used to say that anything written after twelve noon wasn't worth keeping. He could be very bristly when he came out of his study, and it was usually impossible to talk to him. I think he hated pulling out of the dream state in which he wrote. I used to tell him to take a shower. Mostly, though, he just wanted to sit and stare out the window. I really didn't like being around him during that time. If I started to talk to him, or he to me, we would invariably end up arguing. So I avoided him." Nora glanced at her watch again. "Agnes is here," she said.
"Is she?"
"I'm surprised you didn't see her at lunch."
"How is she?"
"Does our Agnes ever change?"
"I don't know," Harrison said. "I'd like to think she's had some great adventure."
Nora smiled. "She looked very well. Healthy and fit."
"You've stayed friends with her?"
"Yes," Nora said. "She used to come here often. When Carl was alive. They had fabulous arguments."
"They fought, you mean."
"Not quite. I think of their debates like verbal spirals, circling inward but moving forward in another dimension. Carl could out-argue anyone."
"Even you?"
"Oh. Especially me," Nora said lightly. "I have to get some papers in my office. Want to come?"
Harrison followed Nora along a corridor, up a short set of steps, along another corridor, and down an equivalent number of steps. Her suite began with a vestibule that opened onto a sitting room / bedroom with French doors to a private veranda. Off the room, Harrison had a glimpse of a large white bathroom. Cut glass cruets of exotic colored oils lined the marble surround of the tub.
"This is your apartment?" Harrison asked.
"Just a bedroom and a bathroom. I eat all my meals in the kitchen. I never cook."
"Not such a bad life."
"Not if you're fond of fifteen-hour days."
"Seriously?"
"Weekends, yes," she said, walking to her desk and opening a drawer. "The parties often go on until midnight. You can try to end them at eleven, but it hardly ever works. They'd go on longer if we let them. Whatever happened to the notion of the bride and groom leaving before the end of the reception and going off on their honeymoon? Today . . . to
day it's prewedding lunches, rehearsal dinners, golf, tennis, shopping, after-parties in the bar, bride's breakfasts in the morning. I should think it would sour any marriage right from the get-go. If I'm exhausted by Sunday afternoon, the brides must be comatose."
"But isn't this good for your business?"
"Well. Yes." She laughed. "I encourage it, actually."
The crisp, clean look of the inn had been continued in Nora's quarters. Harrison glanced at the chairs and the cocktail table with its objets — a vase, a stack of books, a small photograph that might have been of Nora's mother — and at a chaise near a window. One wall was covered in paintings and prints and photographs, arranged not so much artlessly as haphazardly, as if Nora had simply hung them as she'd found them, utilizing whatever space was available. He was drawn immediately to the photographs.
"Is this you?" he asked, pointing to a picture of a man he recognized as Carl Laski and a woman who was clearly a very young Nora.
"Yes," she said, looking up. "That was our wedding day."
Harrison studied the photo. Nora, who looked barely twenty, had on a blue-and-orange flower-print dress, her long chestnut hair done up in a bun. Laski s hair was also long — wild and unkempt. He had on a white shirt and a sport coat and a pair of jeans. His eyes seemed unfocused, as if he might already have been drinking. Looking at the picture, Harrison was aware of a vulnerability in Nora he had missed, that of a young child wanting to be reassured, or of a bereaved wife needing comfort. And he suddenly understood how it was that she might be taken advantage of. Harrison had an urge to enter the photograph and put an arm between Nora and Carl Laski.
"There," Nora said, finding a sheet of paper in a folder. She turned to face Harrison, a question on her lips. She hesitated a moment and then spoke. "Do you ... do you ever think about what would have become of Stephen?"
Harrison forced himself not to look away. "Had he lived, you mean?"
"Yes."
"I imagine he'd have gone to Stanford on a baseball scholarship, as he was supposed to have done, then been drafted by the Blue Jays. He'd have been traded to the Twins and later would have ended up playing shortstop for the Red Sox — pre-Nomar, that is. Stephen would be a four-time Gold Glove winner and have an all-time batting average of .301, and any minute now he'd be on the ballot for the Hall of Fame."
