A Wedding in December

by Anita Shreve

  Ten thousand days, Bridget calculated, was roughly thirty years. She'd be in her early seventies when the happiness ran out.

  If only.

  Her skirt girdle cut into her abdomen. She ordered the goat cheese salad and the salmon, wondering if she'd be able to eat any of it. She mouthed Thank you to Jerry across the table, and he cocked a finger gun at her. Almost immediately, the decibel level in the room was such that Bridget had to raise her voice even to speak to Bill, the noise increasing exponentially as each person discovered he or she had to shout. It sounded like a party, for which Bridget was grateful. She had feared the gathering might be stiff and dull. She would have minded for Nora's sake.

  Bill had his hand on her thigh. If he could have conveyed good health through that hand, Bridget reflected, he would have, even at the cost of his own health — a kind of health transfusion he would willingly have undergone. There was a sudden lull in the conversa­tion, during which Julie (Julie, of all people) asked Bridget to tell the story of how she and Bill remet. Bridget looked to Bill for help, both of them aware that the heart of the story — the secret assig­nations in hotels, the betrayal of Bill's wife, the passionate phone calls when Bridget's son was in bed — couldn't be told in Matt and Brians presence. Bill gave a meaningful look in the boys' direction to convey to the group that the R-rated movie would not be shown tonight. Instead he would tell the brief and sanitized version. I went to my twenty-fifth reunion, looked across the room, saw Bridget, and twenty-two years just melted away. It was as though we'd never been apart.

  What was not discussed was Jill's anger, Melissa's grief, and the cost to Bill, which had been considerable. If Bridget died soon — as was entirely possible, even likely according to the statistics — Bill would have risked everything for so little: three, maybe four years together at best. Would he still think it worth the cost twenty years from now?

  Bridget put a hand briefly over Bill's hand on her thigh. Nora was in a huddle with Brian and Matt. Something she said made them both perk up considerably. Jerry, who might be just a little bit drunk already, was telling the group about how he'd often bragged about being practically best friends with Carl Laski's wife. Nora blinked. Bridget imagined Nora might have seen the friendship a little differently.

  "Of course, I never read poetry," Jerry said, canceling out the goodwill of the flattery. "Does anyone?"

  "Don't be ridiculous, Jerry," Harrison said.

  "Okay, so name the last book of poetry you read."

  "I publish Audr Heinrich," Harrison said.

  "You don't count," Jerry said, pointing with his glass, a bit of wine sloshing out onto the tablecloth. "How about you?" he asked Rob, ignoring Julie's restraining hand on his arm.

  "Oh, I don't know," Rob said, "I used to like Yeats."

  "I read Billy Collins," Agnes said. "I love him, actually."

  "Who's Billy Collins?" Jerry asked.

  "Your poet laureate," Harrison said quietly.

  "Now Robert Frost," Jerry announced. "There was a poet who deserved the laureate."

  "I think your husband's work was magnificent," Rob said in Nora's direction, bringing the conversation back to where it belonged.

  "Thank you," Nora said as two waiters began to serve the salads. She examined each plate as it was set down.

  "I didn't even know who he was until I met Rob," Josh said, "but now I think I've read everything Carl Laski ever wrote." He smiled broadly, seemingly unaware of the backhanded compliment.

  "If I could have had anyone on my list," Harrison said, "it would have been Carl Laski."

  Bridget caught a look that passed between Nora and Harrison. Was this a private joke as well?

  "You were always half a poet yourself," Jerry said, taking a vi­cious bite out of a piece of crusty French bread.

  "How so?" Harrison asked.

  "Oh, I don't know. Kind of dreamy. Always going off on walks of your own. Into nature and all that."

  ' I suppose I was," Harrison said, and even Bridget could hear the what of it? that was not spoken. Harrison, too, was drinking rather a lot. He hadn't yet touched his salad. A sudden feeling of— Bridget couldn't quite describe it — danger? potential danger? was in the air. She strained to think of something to say to deflect the tension.

  "Not Stephen, though," Jerry said. "You wouldn't find Stephen reading a poem."

  "No," Agnes said, "he'd just talk about it."

  Rob gave a kind of snort, and Bill chuckled.

  "You wouldn't find him reading anything," Harrison said, mean­ing to keep it light. Bridget noted that Harrison had glasses of both red and white in his forest. A waiter was refilling the white. Bridget wanted to reach across Bill and put a similar restraining hand on Harrison's arm. Goading Jerry would end in disaster. "He was the only person I ever knew who could intelligently discuss a piece of writing — a story, a poem — without having read it."

  "How did he do that?" Julie asked.

  "He'd listen for a minute and pick up on cues, and he had an un­canny knack for capturing the essence or a central theme and dis­cussing that, and somehow it all worked for him. Before you knew it, Stephen was at the center of the debate."

  "But it was false," Julie said.

  "Well, it was and it wasn't," Harrison said.

  "So tomorrow," Bill said, "we'll have a game?"

  "A game of what?" Rob asked.

  "You can ump," Bill said, pointing to Rob's million-dollar fin­gers. Bridget wondered if he had had them insured. "I brought some balls and gloves and bats," Bill explained.

  "Cool," Matt said.

  "We'll divide up into two teams. Agnes and Nora" — and here Bill turned to Bridget to include her as well (though he knew as well as anyone that Bridget wouldn't be able to play; she might lose the wig for one thing) — "you'll have to play, too. With Matt and Brian here, we ought to be able to get something going."

  "I'm in," Jerry said. "Branch, you'll have to play shortstop. You think you can handle it?"

  Harrison set down his glass with care. Jerry, chin jutting, glared at Harrison. Agnes studied her plate. Julie gazed off in the distance, doubtless wishing herself back in New York. Only Bill glanced be­tween Jerry and Harrison as if he might, at any minute, have to leap onto the table to referee.

  "Leave it," Rob said under his breath.

  "Leave what?" Jerry asked, feigning ignorance.

  Nora raised a hand and snapped her fingers, a sharp, skilled summons that cleared the air at once. Two waiters appeared and began to take away the salads and to set down the entrees. Bridget's salmon was translucent. Bill's was well-done. Bridget exchanged plates. Jerry had to dismantle his aggressive posture to allow his beef to be set in front of him.

  "Times have changed," Nora said with a brilliant non sequitur.

  "They certainly have," Rob said, arbitrarily ascribing meaning to Nora's statement. "Unfortunately, Bush is going to use it to every political advantage."

  "Were you there?" Jerry asked.

  "I was in Boston," Rob said.

  "Well, if you weren't there, you can't judge. Julie and I were there. We saw the bodies. Giuliani was magnificent. The police, the firemen, they loved Bush when he showed up."

  One might have guessed Rob a Democrat, but Jerry a Repub­lican?

  "You literally saw the bodies?" Agnes asked from her end of the table.

  "Jumping," Jerry said. "Falling. You could hear the thuds. My office was right across the street."

  There was a silence as each of them imagined the horror of hav­ing to jump, the moment of letting go. One hundred and two sto­ries down. Bridget closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, she glanced at Matt, who had gone pale. Matt had seen the television images, but would his imagina­tion have encompassed thudding bodies? She looked across Matt's plate to Brian, who was poking at a carrot. This would not do.

  "Jerry," Bridget said in a tone that caused everyone to look in her direction, "I'm sorry that you had to witness what you did firs
t­hand. And I think everyone here would agree that those who lived in New York on September eleventh bore the brunt of the horror. But no one at this table was untouched or unmoved. The catastro­phe hurt all of us."

  "That's the thing about catastrophe," Rob said, wiping his lips with the heavy damask napkin. "It's so often the most democratic of events."

  "You say you were moved by it," Jerry insisted, though Bridget could see that the steam was leaving him, "but you can't really know about it if you weren't there."

  "Jerry," Julie said, "I don't think anyone here wants to own it."

  Jerry scowled at his wife.

  "Jim Mitchell once said that," Agnes added from her end of the table. " The democracy of catastrophe. Don't you remember? When we were reading All Quiet on the Western Front?"

  "Your memory is better than mine," Harrison said.

  "Of all the teachers I ever had," Agnes said, "he was the best."

  "Yeah. Mitchell," Jerry said. "He was the man. He still teaching at Kidd?"

  "No," Agnes said. "He moved to Wisconsin. He's teaching at a private school there."

  "Wisconsin," Jerry said. "Was Mitchell from there?"

  "No," Agnes said. "He was from Massachusetts. We overlapped for three years when I first went back to Kidd."

  "Was it weird being a colleague of a teacher you'd had yourself? Josh asked.

  "A little. At first. But you quickly get used to it."

  Agnes's face flushed pink. She must get hot flashes, too, Bridget thought, though it might be a little soon for menopause for Agnes.

  Other teachers were remembered. The spray painting of the front of Ford Hall was recalled. Bill mentioned the night Rob "borrowed" a truck from the work shed and drove all the way to Portland and back. Four years at Kidd were retrieved in bits and pieces, making a kind of memory mosaic: not the whole picture, just the highlights. The night Jerry rented a motel room and gave a party and the cops came. The time Harrison got up on the stage and did a Mick Jagger impression ("I never did that," Harrison said). Julie seemed as lost in this litany of anecdotes as Matt and Brian were. Nora, with impeccable timing, told the assembled that they would now move back into the library for coffee and dessert. There would be after-dinner drinks for those who wanted them. Predictably, Bridget guessed, it would be those who had had the most to drink already who would ask for the cognac or the Dram­buie. Harrison stood with care. Jerry blew his nose into what looked like his dinner napkin.

  How did Julie stand it?

  Bridget thought she would make her exit. She would not say good night because that would simply call attention to the fact that she was abandoning them. So far, no one had said the word "cancer," for which Bridget was grateful. It was a miracle, consider­ing Jerry and his penchant for the jugular.

  Bill held back. Nora disappeared into the kitchen. Bridget wanted to thank Nora again for the meal, but it would have to wait until the morning.

  "Where are Matt and Brian?" Bridget asked.

  "Apparently there's a pool table in the basement," Bill said.

  "That's what made them perk up so. Make sure they hang up their jackets." If the boys started off playing pool in their suits, she knew, a jacket would end up on a chair, then slip to the floor, and a boy, cue in hand, would back up and step on it. The scenario de­manded it.

  "What about you?" Bill asked.

  "I think I'll go lie down," she said.

  "I'll go with you."

  "No," Bridget said. "You stay with the others. Keep Jerry and Harrison in line."

  Bill laughed. Bridget saw, in the doorway, Josh running his fin­gers down the back of Rob's impeccable jacket. The hand stopped just below the waistline. Julie bent to retrieve an earring that had fallen to the floor. Jerry announced that he had to take a piss. Agnes was asking Harrison if he had ever heard of the Halifax disaster.

  Bridget turned toward Bill so that her right knee was touch­ing his left. He put his hand again on her thigh. He had his chin propped in his other hand, his elbow resting on the table. "You do look beautiful tonight," he said.

  Bridget sighed and then smiled. There was simply no adequate response. "Jerry's really something," she said.

  "Some people never change. Maybe none of us ever do. That was a nice toast, though."

  "What's with his wife?"

  "Ice queen?"

  "Maybe it's just around him," Bridget said. "Is she his first wife?"

  "I think so."

  "I like Josh. He's cute," Bridget said. "I always think gay men — the couples — seem to care about each other in a way you don't al­ways see with straight couples. It's as though they treasure the small moments, assign meaning to them, whereas they so often pass us by.

  "The unexamined life," Bill said.

  "It might be because they don't have children," Bridget said.

  "Children take up all the oxygen, don't they? Create chaos. I didn't know Jerry and Harrison had a thing."

  "I'm not sure they ever did," Bill said. "This feels new to me. Sometimes Jerry sees a weakness, and he pounces."

  "He was always a little like that."

  "More so now, I think," Bill said.

  Bridget thought about the way age could chisel away at a person so that only the most prominent characteristics remained.

  She wanted to get out of her clothes. "Nora has been amazing," she said. "I know it's partly her wanting to show what she's done with the place, what she's made, but it's so much more than that. She's been extraordinarily generous."

  "We'll have to do something for her," Bill said. "Have her out to our house some night."

  "Oh, sure," Bridget said. "And second prize is two nights at our house."

  Bill bent toward Bridget and kissed her. It was an unexpectedly hard kiss, and Bridget put a palm on his chest.

  "Kiss, kiss," Jerry said, passing behind them.

  So you don't know that story," Harrison was saying.

  They were sitting on stools in the center of the kitchen. Only one light was burning, a globe over the island. Harrison had an im­pression of cream paint, tongue-and-groove boards, shelves of an­tique white dishes, a wash of stainless steel. Under a bank of windows was a built-in bench with an upholstered cushion. Off the kitchen, Harrison could see the dark interior of a pantry, closed up for the night.

  He took a sip of coffee made from a machine similar to the one in the library. Coffee. He'd be lucky if he fell asleep before morn­ing. He'd had more coffee today than he'd had in years. On the other hand, he'd had more to drink than he'd had in years. He thought the combination would make for a spectacular hangover, the beginnings of which he could already feel at the edges of his vision.

  The inn was quiet. The big wooden clock set among the shelves of dishes read 1:25. Harrison briefly imagined the guests in their rooms. Jerry and Julie, their backs to each other, hugging their sep­arate edges of the bed. Bill curled around Bridget, snoring lightly into her neck (was that a wig Bridget had on? did she sleep in it?)-Agnes lying on her back, hands folded across her chest, a woman with a clear conscience who didn't move in her sleep. Rob and Josh: one was curled up within the other; Harrison couldn't take the thought further than that. Or perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps Jerry and Julie, antagonistic in public, were passionate in bed. Maybe Bridget and Bill slept separately while she was on chemo. Possibly Agnes's duvet was twisted in a knot, her dreams troubled and nightmarish. If Harrison had learned anything about private lives, it was that anyone looking in from the outside could never know the reality.

  Nora seemed exhausted, and Harrison knew he should let her go to bed. She would have to be up early, to see to the Saturday breakfast.

  "The one about Carl and me?" she asked. "No." She looked past him through the windows. "It's snowing," she said.

  Harrison turned. Fat flakes were drifting in the light of a lantern. "Wow," Harrison said, standing. He walked to the door and opened it and could feel the sharp, wet cold. While they had been dining and having after-dinner drinks, the tempe
rature had plummeted. Harrison looked at a thermometer just outside the door. "It's only thirty-one," he said. "That's what. . . ? A drop of forty degrees?"

  He shut the door and moved back to the island. He perched an unsteady hip on the stool and took a sip of coffee. Nora's lipstick had worn off, and there was a smudge of something dark just below her eye.

  A twenty-two-year marriage is a long story," Nora said. "It's . . . its a continuum with moments of drama, periods of stupefying boredom. Passages of tremendous hope. Passages of resignation. One can never tell the story of a marriage. There's no narrative that encompasses it. Even a daily diary wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know. Who thought what when. Who had what dreams. At the very least, a marriage is two intersecting stories, one of which we will never know."

  All of Harrison's questions died on his tongue. What would the narrative of his own marriage be? Would it encompass the weekend he and Evelyn spent at the Chateau Frontenac exhausting their budget on room service because they never left the bed? Or would it include the fight they'd had over snow tires in the parking lot of Harrison's apartment building at the end of that weekend? Would it be incomplete without the ennui Harrison felt and dreaded on Sunday evenings when the boys were busy and Evelyn and he no longer had anything to say to each other? Or would that narrative be defined by the one moment of perfect joy he experienced when he and Evelyn and the boys had boarded the Canadian excursion train at the beginning of their trip from Calgary to Vancouver last spring?

  "I just wanted to know if you were happy," he said.

  "I was happy. Sometimes," Nora answered.

  "Fair enough."

  "Jerry was on a tear, wasn't he?" Nora asked. "Would you like some water?"

  "I'd love some," Harrison said. "I'm starting a killer hangover."