A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [100]
It had never occurred to Bridget that Bill might be unfaithful. He was as honest a boy as she had ever met. So when his letter had come during the spring of her sophomore year at college, Bridget had been stunned. Bill had, he wrote, fallen in love with someone else. The girl’s name was Jill. Bridget read and reread the letter a dozen times, disbelief turning into a kind of leaden certainty, for Bill, a good man, would never put Bridget through such pain were the news equivocal. If Bill said he had fallen in love with another woman, then that was that.
Bridget didn’t like the language of excess or of melodrama, but it was impossible for her to remember that time without thinking of the words “shattered” and “catastrophic” and “disaster” and “wanting to die.”
Bridget did not write back to Bill. Her mother and her roommate urged her to drive to Vermont where Bill was at school and confront him, but Bridget would not beg. She could not imagine a scene in which she knocked on Bill’s door and found inside the woman named Jill, with whom Bill was now in love. Bridget was quite sure she would not survive that encounter. That even if she lived (well, of course, she would live), something inside of her would be lost. Memory? Faith? The ability ever again to believe in love?
And so she had suffered in silence. The news was dire. Her hormones were rampant. Bridget remembered days spent in the bed with the covers drawn up over her head. Long risky walks late at night, begging someone to mug her. The missed meals, the nearly unbearable weekend nights, the having to explain why she was not with Bill to friends and family. Most of all, Bridget minded the future she would now not have. She had for so long imagined their life together—the wedding, the house, the baby—that it was as though this had been taken from her as well. And, of course, Bridget cried. So much so that she’d had a headache for weeks.
In the library, Bridget slipped Bill’s ring on his finger, and she, too, said I do.
She was aware then that Josh was standing beside Bill. She prayed that Josh’s singing wouldn’t be too painful or awkward, ending the wedding on a wincing note.
But Josh’s voice, when he began, was glorious. Simply glorious. She glanced at Bill. What was this astonishing song?
She didn’t mind now that her back was to the guests. Josh’s voice, far more than the words of the simple ceremony, moved her. And how odd, since the song appeared to be in Italian. Not knowing the lyrics, Bridget invented her own: We had so many years apart, but now we have found each other. I wish that we had had children together. I had a beautiful strong body in my twenties and early thirties, and I’m sorry that you never saw it.
Josh let the last note linger, and then it faded away. Bill took Bridget’s hand. Her son, Matt, was just inches from them both.
This is what I have now, Bridget thought. This is it. A man and a son and a short future, during which I must live every hour as if it were my last.
Agnes knew that she would cry as soon as Rob started to play. She had this reaction at church when a familiar hymn was sung, at the symphony when the violins were exquisite, even at baseball games when the tenor began the national anthem. The music was a kind of trigger that summoned emotions normally kept in check. Reverence. Gratitude. A sense of something greater than herself. Sorrow. Heartache. Loneliness.
Sometimes she cried for the anonymous. For the thousands dead in tribal genocide in central Africa. For the victims of earthquakes in southeast Asia. For the hundreds swept away in floods in India. Occasionally, she cried for all those lost during World War I or on the Titanic or at Masada. More recently for those who had died on September 11. What would it take to make yourself jump from the 103rd floor of a building, knowing—knowing—that you would die