A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [119]
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