A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [110]
“Harrison.”
“So I’m at this party, which is taking place at a beach house that belongs nominally to a couple named Binder from Boston who use it only in the summers, but in essence belongs to the privileged of Kidd Academy, who think nothing of breaking and entering a temporarily abandoned house. Said house being one point three miles from the boarding school, a fact that will take on some significance later on.”
Harrison had not remembered that fact in years.
“And let’s see,” he continued, “who is there with me at this party? At which, I should point out, there seems to be an inordinate amount of booze, courtesy of Frankie Forbes, who had, two days earlier, dropped off at the beach house—for our convenience—ten cases of Budweiser, numerous bottles of wine, and for the hard drinkers among us, several fifths of Jack Daniel’s.” Harrison paused. “Good old Forbes. Precious friend to the class of nineteen seventy-four. Where would we have been without him?”
And where exactly would Forbes be now? Harrison wondered. Had he become a drunk? No, too canny for that. Forbes probably had a house somewhere on the coast of Maine, all purchased, of course, with profits from the willing students of Kidd.
“So, who’s at the party?” Harrison asked again. “Jerry Leyden, who is at all the parties, not because he particularly likes to drink but because he’s a student of human behavior. He likes to observe and then draw conclusions about the observed, these tidbits to be stored and parceled out upon occasion for sport or for further advancement. Jerry would have made a marvelous spy, I always thought, but instead elected to parlay his exceptional talents into sharp business skills, wheeling and dealing his way to the top of the food chain in New York City, no mean feat. So there’s Jerry and his girlfriend, Dawn, who, I understand, is now a sheep farmer in Idaho. And who else? Rob Zoar, doubtless fully aware of his sexuality though not yet prepared to announce it, nineteen seventy-four being a good two decades before the era of Gay Alliance clubs on high school campuses. Rob, the quintessential good egg, is mildly drunk on beer—buzzed, shall we say—and is also something of an observer of human behavior, though, unlike Jerry Leyden, not for political ends. There is no Josh in his life as yet, though who knows, there might have been—a sophomore boy? a headmaster?—human nature being as various as it is.
“There are perhaps fifteen others—no, twenty, at least—at the party, well into its midpoint by now, curfew dictating the arc of any social engagement at Kidd. The beach house must be vacated by ten forty-five in order to sprint back to the dorm and be in our rooms by eleven. You remember curfew, Nora?”
“Harrison, why are you doing this?”
“I’m telling you a story, remember?” he asked her reflection in the glass. “And, yes, my story has a plot, though a sordid one. But I’m getting to that. I was speaking of the others present at the party. Bill and Bridget making out in a corner. We begrudge them nothing. Agnes O’Connor is sitting on the couch talking to Artie Cohen about . . . what . . . let’s see, the Vietnam War? And there are many others, but some of this is a blur, because yours truly was well into his cups by then. Not as drunk as some, mind you. Not as stoned as others. No, I was somewhat more than buzzed but less than wasted. Certainly less wasted than Stephen, who may have been combining Jack with THC. Hence the bloodshot eyes, the faltering steps, the wet kisses. Yes, I did see those, Nora. And let us not forget his fabulously charming laugh, which tended toward the hilarious and infectious, rising above the crescendoing symphony like a piccolo gone nuts.”
“You’re drunk now,” Nora said.
“Do you think so?” Harrison asked, briefly swiveling in her direction. “Not happily, I can assure you. Not in the tiniest bit happily.”
He turned back to the windows and uncrossed his