A Wedding in December

by Anita Shreve

  Impossible thought.

  Beyond Nora's shoulder, at the edges of the shades, Harrison could see the light coming up. It was Sunday morning now. He re­membered the wedding, the dinner, Agnes's confession. It had been, he reflected, a dreadful send-off for Bill and Bridget, who certainly had deserved better. Though, in the end, Harrison knew, the send-off would not matter. Bill and Bridget's battle would be intensely personal now.

  The light grew brighter in the room, and Harrison could make out the armchair in which he had sat. Through the bathroom door, he could see the tub. The sun was making rectangular patterns on the shades. He thought about how he had seen his own reflection in the dark glass. It would be a sunny day, one he did not want to enter.

  Harrison had felt some relief in finally telling Nora what had happened that May night nearly three decades ago. To have shared that burden with her and then to have felt her hands on his shoul­ders, the forgiveness that implied. Harrison had thought, prior to the weekend, that he would never again feel that intense mingling of desire and love he'd known as a young man. He had never been unfaithful to Evelyn, a fact that occasionally had seemed a kind of failure on Harrison's part, a failure of the imagination. Last night, Harrison had rejoiced in temptation, glad simply to feel alive.

  Alive at Evelyn's expense. He remembered the way in which he had pushed Evelyn from his mind. She would never know, but Harrison would, and that would change everything. He would have new, fresh memories now.

  A loud, intrusive sound made Harrison flinch. Nora rolled away from him.

  "You set the alarm?" he asked.

  "I had to," she said, lying back, trying to wake herself. "I have to be up to see to the breakfasts."

  Nora turned her head on the pillow to look at Harrison. She touched his face, as if she did not believe he was in her bed. "This is extraordinary," she said.

  Harrison hitched himself closer to her, but she put a hand on his chest. "I really do have to get up," she said.

  "Do we need to talk?"

  "We will," she said. "Later."

  Nora stood and put on her robe. She had to shower and dress. Harrison watched as she raised the shades. He covered his eyes with his arm. The sun's reflection from the snow was harsh.

  In his room, Harrison paced. He still had on the clothes he'd worn to the wedding. His suit jacket and tie were tossed upon his bed, still made, not slept in. His face felt grainy, and he knew he should shower.

  He thought that for the good of his family he ought to leave the inn as soon as possible. He would arrive in Hartford early for his flight, but better to be at the airport than to remain here. He was too agitated, however, to perform the simple task of packing. He walked from the bathroom to the far wall and back again.

  He had not even held Nora this morning. He had not kissed her good-bye. Would they leave each other this way?

  He sat on the bed and stared out the window. He could hear water dripping from the roof. He needed a cup of coffee to clarify his thoughts, and he remembered the machine in the library.

  Would it be primed and ready to go at such an early hour? What time was it, anyway? He checked his watch. Nearly seven. Early for a Sunday morning. Might coffee be set out in the dining room?

  Harrison, unwashed, left his room and walked downstairs in search of the library. As he did, he could hear the sounds of an inn waking itself up. Voices from a distant room. Footsteps on a wooden floor. The swish and thunk of a large door closing. A man in the lobby had a newspaper spread out on a low table, cup of cof­fee in hand. Harrison thought of asking him where he'd gotten it. Judy, Nora's assistant, walked into the hallway carrying a stacked set of linens.

  "Good morning," she said.

  "Good morning," Harrison said.

  She had her blond hair pulled tight against her scalp, and once again she had lipstick on her prominent eyetooth. Harrison won­dered why no one had ever pointed it out to her.

  "You're up early," she said.

  . . . the asymmetrical smile . . .

  "Yes," he said.

  "You found Nora?"

  "Excuse me?" he asked.

  "Last night," she said, "you were looking for Nora."

  "No," he lied, his mind racing. "I didn't find her. I wanted to thank her, but she'd gone to bed."

  "Well, she'll be up soon enough," Judy said. "Shall I tell her you're looking for her?"

  "No, that's all right," Harrison said. "No. I'll be around for a bit. I'm bound to run into her. I'm looking for a cup of coffee actually.

  "In the library," Judy said. "I just fixed it up."

  "Thanks," Harrison said.

  He headed in the direction of the library, but then he stopped. He took a turn at the stairway.

  It couldn't be, he thought.

  He had his key out — that hefty gold key — before he'd even reached his room. Once inside, he tossed the key on the bed and searched for the book he'd bought yesterday. He lifted a sweater from the desk and found the slim volume. He sat on the bed and turned immediately to the poem he'd been reading in the town library, the one that had so intrigued him, tortured him, for its sexual images. "Under the Canted Roof."

  The woman in the poem was blond and had bad teeth. Yester­day, the word "tongue" had caught his eye. He found the line again: . . . caressingyour tooth with my tongue . . .

  A small confirming jolt straightened Harrison's spine.

  He read the lines again, certain as he did so that Carl Laski was writing about the woman who had served Harrison the salad with the fly, the woman who had just passed him in the lobby.

  . . . the asymmetrical smile . . .

  Harrison could hardly imagine the cruelty on Laski's part to have written this poem, then to have made Nora type it. Finally to have published it.

  Quickly flipping to the front of the book, Harrison checked the copyright date. 1999. The volume had been published post­humously.

  Harrison sat on the bed, thinking. Five minutes passed. Ten.

  He stood with the book in his hand. He walked to the window and then back again. He scratched his head. How was it possible that Nora had allowed this?

  Harrison pocketed his key and left the room. He retraced his steps back to Nora's suite. He remembered Nora saying that Carl had been unfaithful to her only on the page.

  When Harrison reached the end of the corridor, he saw that Nora's door was shut. He might simply have opened it — didn't last night give him the right? — but he knocked instead.

  Nora was in her robe, still wet from the shower. On the bed — neatly made, its taut lines breaking Harrison's heart — was a bra and a pair of underpants, a pair of black slacks, a white blouse, two black socks.

  Nora's face was pink, her hair flat against her scalp. Her eye­brows were pale, her lips naked.

  "Harrison," she said, surprised.

  "May I come in?"

  "I'm . . . I'm a bit late," she said, but then she stepped aside. "Of course," she added.

  Harrison embraced Nora and kissed her. Her breath smelled of toothpaste. He let her go and sat on a cedar chest at the end of the bed. He held the book in his hand, and he could see that she was looking at it. "There's a poem here, toward the end," he said.

  Nora said nothing.

  "The one called 'Under the Canted Roof''"

  She put her hands into the deep pockets of the plush robe. Har­rison studied her pale legs below the hem of the robe, her bare feet. Her hands, he knew, were the only roughened part of her, callused from hard work.

  "I think maybe you need to tell me a story," he said quietly.

  Nora walked past him and sat on the bed.

  "I love you," Harrison said.

  And instantly, he minded the hollow words — trite and saccha­rine — the stuff of greeting cards. How strange to discover, after all these years of waiting to deliver his message, that it simply was not enough. Not enough at all.

  "Last night," he said, "might have been the most intense sexual experience of my life." />
  "You don't really believe that," she said, laying her hands in her lap.

  "It feels that way right now," he said.

  There was a long silence in the room.

  "I was the one for whom Carl had left his wife," Nora said. "He'd never done that before, never even thought of it. He had so many students, so many beautiful young women throwing them­selves at him. Right up until his late fifties, he could make a twenty-year-old turn her head."

  Nora paused, and Harrison could hear the heat come up through the registers.

  "We moved from the city," Nora said. "Carl did it to get away from the horrible mess with his wife. I think he believed he could purify himself by coming to the country. With yoga. By giving up meat. By taking long walks. I could have told him it wouldn't work, that mere geography couldn't alter who he was."

  Harrison set the book down beside him on the chest.

  "Some men need women to complete themselves," Nora contin­ued. "I've said that."

  "You were the helpmeet," Harrison said.

  "Carl was voracious in that way. He demanded my presence, my attention, every minute he was home and not actually writing. You had to know him to understand this. I believe there are many men like this. Perhaps Jerry is this way. Bill is not. You are not."

  "No," Harrison said.

  "Yes, I was the helpmeet." She paused. "Is that so bad? To sub­sume one's life to another's? If giving myself to Carl meant that his art was all the better, wasn't that sacrifice worth it?"

  "Worth it to him, perhaps," Harrison said quietly. "I can't see how it can have been worth it to you."

  "You don't?" she asked, genuinely puzzled. "Can you say that pursuing what I might have wanted to do was a greater good? I don't think one can. There's much to be said for sacrifice. Whole re­ligions are based on this premise."

  "It's just not the way women live now," Harrison said, knowing, of course, that this wasn't entirely true. Many women sacrificed themselves for others.

  "I thought he was a brilliant poet," Nora said. "If I could be part of that in any way, it seemed worth it at the time."

  Harrison tried not to think of Nora with Carl Laski, a man who had been in his late sixties when he'd died. Harrison knew what a man of that age looked like. He'd seen plenty of them at the gym.

  Harrison noticed suddenly — the way one might look up and register the absence of a particular sound — the lack of a stutter in Nora's speech. She was calm, resolute.

  "I was even more isolated than Cairl," Nora said. "We lived here, in this house, so far from town. It seemed I existed only for him. I worked for him. He was everything to me."

  It was hard for Harrison to picture the particular Nora she was describing, the one for whom Carl Laski was everything. But when Harrison thought about the girl Nora had been, the one who had lived in Stephen Otis's shadow, he could perhaps believe that she might have allowed herself to be subsumed by another.

  "There were many rumors about other women," Nora said. "But it was all based on the poetry. In his imagination, Carl was unfaithful to me every day. I could read it in the work. There would be a paean to a woman, and I['d have a suspicion, but there would be enough similarities to me cor to those who had gone be­fore me that I could never be absolutely sure."

  Harrison winced for this image of Nora studying Laski's poetry for clues to his imaginary infidelities.

  "But I knew," she said, "in all the banal, commonplace ways that women know. Carl was voracious sexually as well — I know you don't want to hear this — and there: would be a slight falling off following a heightened interest in sex. It became a pattern. I could sense it, feel it. In his imagination, he had many affairs. I suppose all men do. But in this case, he was writing them down, and I was typing them."

  She took a long breath.

  "Curiously, I never thought of leaving," she said. "I'd married him, and we were isolated. Leaving never seemed an option. Where would I have gone? And with whom?"

  You could have come looking for me, Harrison thought.

  "One day Carl came home with a young woman," Nora said. "She was blond and nineteen and not at all what you'd expect as a student. Carl called her a 'townie,' even to her face. He found her fascinating. Her accent. Her bad teeth. She was different from any­one he'd ever known before. A girl on a scholarship. Brilliant, Carl said. But raw and unpolished. She had terrible table manners, I re­member. I used to think she played to his image of her — the working-class girl made good — and that the wretched table man­ners were part of her act."

  Harrison was struck by the seeming ease with which Nora was telling her story. No tears. No hesitations.

  "When I say he brought her home," Nora explained, "I mean he brought her home to stay. He said it was temporary, that she had nowhere to go. That the scholarship covered only tuition. That she'd been living part-time in her car, part-time with friends. She was dirty enough that I believed him. We had so many bedrooms, he said, we could certainly spare a room for her until she got on her feet. He presented it in such a humane way, I could not say no."

  Nora turned to face Harrison.

  "You see, that's how it works," she said. "In increments. In the beginning, one has such high expectations. And then life, in small increments, begins to dissolve those expectations, to make them look naive or silly. You realize that marriage will not be what you thought it would. That the romance is intermittent at best. That perhaps the man you have married at such a young age is a difficult man. That hopes of constant intimacy are, to use a word Carl was fond of, bourgeois."

  Nora began to nibble on a nail.

  "I could sometimes hear them making love," she said. "The walls were thin, and even from the end of the hall, I could hear them."

  The image shocked Harrison. Nora lying alone in her bed. The first wife listening to the husband visit the second.

  "It's one of the things I took great care with when I did the reno­vation after Carl died," she continued. "I made the bedroom walls sturdy and thick, so that from room to room one cannot hear a thing."

  It was true. From his room, Harrison had been unable to hear a sound.

  "What Carl hadn't told me was that Judy was pregnant. Within a few weeks, it became obvious to me. Perhaps it was obvious even before I realized he was visiting her bed. I heard her retching in the bathroom in the mornings. I could see her waist begin to thicken. One day I asked her. She said, yes, she was pregnant. I stopped short of asking her if it was Carl's. I knew, but I didn't want to hear it said aloud."

  "Nora," Harrison said, "I'm so sorry."

  "That day, I realized that Carl Laski was a monster. For years, he had forbidden me to have a child. He had had his children, he said, and doing so had brought him nothing but heartache. He wouldn't do that to himself again. Besides, he would always add, he was too old for children. But, you see, I wasn't too old, was I? I had longed to have a child. And here was evidence that Carl had allowed him­self to have a child with this . . . this schoolgirl."

  Harrison struggled to take in the reality of what Nora was telling him. A girl living in her house, a girl pregnant by her husband. He remembered the way in which Nora had spoken of Carl Laski just two days earlier: He was a wonderful man. A wonderful poet and a wonderful man.

  Harrison had read the Roscoff book, and though he had not liked the work, he'd been persuaded that Laski had been, at the very least, a difficult and troubled man. But then Harrison had lis­tened to Nora's somewhat defensive and laudatory comments about her husband, and he'd begun to see the man anew: the won­derful husband, the good teacher. And now, like someone whose first hunch has turned out to be the correct one, Harrison saw the man finally for what he'd really been. A self-absorbed tyrant.

  "I was furious," Nora said. "I confronted him. He denied the child was his. He pretended surprise. Carl was capable of betrayal, but not of lying. He was absurdly bad at it. I threatened to leave. I think I actually packed a suitcase. I've never told anyone this."

  "I
'm glad you feel you can tell me," Harrison said, but he wasn't sure if this was true. Last night, his feelings had been simple, pure, imperative.

  "I said I would stay only if he got rid of her," Nora continued. "That I would not live under the same roof, that I was tired of hearing them make love at night. That got Carl's attention. I think he'd imagined that I hadn't heard, hadn't known. He said he would find her a place." She took a breath. "And then he discovered he was sick."

  "The cancer," Harrison said.

  "He'd had a terrible sore throat for weeks. I thought he had strep. I urged him to see a doctor, but he wouldn't go. He had an arsenal of herbal remedies. There used to be a place in town he went to buy them. He swore by them. But eventually, the pain got so bad, he finally went to the clinic at the college. They advised tests. The word terrified Carl. 'Tests.' He became a child then. A kind of willful and destructive child."

  Harrison imagined an old man raging, a kind of Lear.

  "In the end," Nora said, "it was I who had to find the girl a place. I visited the college and talked to the dean and told him she'd been living out of her car and now was living with us. The dean knew that Carl was sick. Carl was revered at the school. The dean said he would arrange to have the girl's scholarship increased to in­clude room and board. I didn't tell him she was pregnant."

  Would the dean have known, Harrison wondered, that the girl and Laski had been lovers?

  "And then Carl became very sick," Nora said. "Howlingly, terrifyingly sick. He raged. He cried. He named every woman who'd been the inspiration for every poem. He confessed every sordid imaginary affair he'd ever had. He enjoyed it. He wasn't looking for forgiveness. He was looking to hurt me because I was young and because I was going to outlive him. Some of the girls, he said, were only seventeen. He said he liked it especially when they were fresh­men. I was merely one in a string — a long string, he said. That I'd been the one he married, the one he'd stuck with, really said more about me than it did about him. I had no character of my own. I was nobody. An empty cipher. He trampled over every good mem­ory I'd ever had of the two of us together."