A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [120]
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 Carl,” 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 or 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