A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [111]
“Also at this party is the aforementioned girl,” Harrison continued. “And I, being a seventeen-year-old boy in love—yes, what the hell, we’ll use the phrase—with a beautiful but untouchable girl who seems, if I may say so, more than a little annoyed with Stephen—for his drunkenness, possibly, but more, I think, for his crude possessive gestures: the dramatically wet kisses, the public overtures to enter one of the mildewing bedrooms—follow this girl into the kitchen, where she has gone, ostensibly for water, but I think to be by herself. A chance our hero—that would be me—cannot afford to miss. I find her not at the tap but rather sitting on the really-not-very-clean floor, arms covering her head. A girl in distress. Definitely.”
Harrison remembered Nora wedged into the corner, a small animal gone to ground.
“I squat down in front of her,” Harrison said, “and ask her what is bothering her, though I, who have been watching her every move and being as astute an observer of human nature as are our Jerry and our Rob, already know. I lift the distressed girl to her feet. And as will sometimes happen with seventeen-year-olds, a comforting embrace morphs into something rather more, producing in the boy at least a feeling akin to rapture, if not actually rapture itself. And in the girl? Who knows? One likes to think some rapture reciprocated. Certainly the kisses, passionate and protracted, suggest strong feelings on the part of the girl—and perhaps even relief? Was there relief? I think so. And then there was a kind of fumbling embrace and the girl’s hand is under my shirt, slightly above my waistline, a detail I have remembered my whole life. Imagine that. Twenty-seven years spent remembering one tiny detail.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Nora said.
“Somehow the girl and I got turned around,” Harrison continued, ignoring her, “and my back was digging into the metal band of the molding of the Formica counter, and I was, to put it simply, thrilled to be holding this girl I’d wanted to touch for months. This girl who admittedly did not belong to me—if one human being can be said to belong to another—but who appeared to be giving herself to me with some abandon. So I might be forgiven for thinking that this girl shared some of the same feelings I was having: namely that we had, albeit by a circuitous and not entirely blameless route, found each other.”
Harrison paused, not wanting to leave this moment in his narrative—a moment he could feel in all its immediacy, a moment he hadn’t ever been able to duplicate, despite years of trying.
Nora put a hand to her eyes.
“But such sublime pleasures,” Harrison continued, “if stolen, must be paid for, no? And thus the sudden lurching into the kitchen of Stephen Otis, who could not fail, despite his altered state, to note that his roommate and his girlfriend were locked in passionate embrace.”
Harrison remembered Stephen’s sudden face, his expression of disbelief, the jackhammer of guilt pounding inside his own chest.
“We might have blown apart then,” Harrison continued, “but to the girl’s credit, she did not move away from me, a nongesture for which I will always be grateful. Though, in retrospect, that nongesture might have given us both pause, since it was that lingering embrace, that disinclination to untangle limb from limb, that put a period instead of a question mark at the end of Stephen’s exclamation, which, as I recall, went something like, What the fuck.”
It went precisely like What the fuck, Harrison recalled.
“The girl said nothing, and I said nothing,” Harrison added, “a demonstration of extraordinary poise, I think now, in light of potential calamity. Who knows what a drunk will do when crossed, when betrayed? Newspapers and TV shows are full of such scenarios. The girl left us both then, I remember, trailing her hand along my arm, a distinct commitment to a future. A gesture that filled my yearning heart with joy and perhaps even