A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [127]
“There,” she said, pointing to a cracked leather chair and betraying an impatience that sent Innes’s heart soaring.
Hazel, standing before him, had on a belted dress of thin brown fabric. Her hair was cut short and had been waved. The brown dress fell just below her knees. She was slender. Many women were slender these days, Innes thought. He hadn’t remembered the sturdy legs, muscled.
“I’ve thought of you often,” he said.
She nodded. “Has it been very difficult?”
“Louise? My life?”
“Louise.”
“No,” he said. “Not very. Sometimes.”
“You did it for me,” Hazel said. “To let me go.”
“My reasons seemed complicated at the time,” Innes said.
“Are you bitter?” she asked.
“No, I’m not bitter.”
He followed her into the penumbra of a small dark room. On the bed was a fabric he now knew was chenille. Innes, even in his exalted state, took note of a skirted dressing table, a pearl necklace hooked around a post attached to the mirror. Later he would notice the small economies: the lovingly washed silk stockings hanging from a towel bar in the bathroom, a single orange in the icebox, the paper sacks saved in a drawer.
That she had been here all these years scarcely seemed possible.
“I teach at a girls’ school in the city,” Hazel said.
“Did you marry?” he asked.
“No.”
“I thought you might have,” Innes said. “I was sure you had.”
“No.”
“There must have been . . .” Innes stopped himself. He could not ask about other men. Not in this room, not under these circumstances. “I have a son,” he said instead. “A lovely boy. He will study engineering, I think. Architecture perhaps. We’ve been to the Empire State Building twice together. I also have a daughter. Her name is Margaret. She’s quite tall for her age. She’s very good at the piano.”
“What’s the boy’s name?” Hazel asked.
“Angus,” Innes said and paused. “My father’s name. You are their aunt.”
“Do they know about me?” Hazel asked.
“A little. That you exist. We have said that you were injured at Halifax,” he explained with some shame. “That you live abroad.”
Hazel nodded.
“I have perhaps twenty minutes at best,” Innes said.
Through the thin cloth of her dress, he could feel the bones of her spine. He drew his shirt up over his head. She carefully unfastened her garters. He felt the ridges of the chenille along his back. Her breath was sweet. He gave no thought to Louise, for whom he had sacrificed a joy he might have had for years. For Innes had always believed that, given time, he could have persuaded Hazel to go away with him. Had he not seen Louise sitting in the chair that afternoon.
They lay naked on the bed facing each other. Hazel’s thighs were wet. He could see the fine lines of thirty-nine now that the sun had come around the corner of her building. He had been gone nearly an hour. Hazel was not a virgin. How could he even have imagined that she might be? He smoothed her face, her hair.
“What do you teach?”
“History.”
“Have you been here all this time?”
“I was in Boston for a while. I returned to Halifax. And then I came here.”
“You went back to Halifax?” he asked, surprised.
“Briefly.”
“I haven’t gone back,” he said.
“I found it depressing.”
“You have had . . .” Innes hesitated. “Lovers,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
Innes discovered that he was glad, that he would not have denied her this pleasure. He was equally glad he could not put faces to the men.
“One who mattered?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
How strange that Innes had known Hazel for only a night, a morning, and an afternoon, and yet he had missed her all this time. The resemblance between the sisters might have kept Hazel alive for him.
“I haven’t the strength to leave you,” he said.
She pulled him to her breast. Innes had a sense of needing to remember every second so that later he would be able to re-create this hour in all its wonder. The ease with which she had undressed. The lack of shame. The sense of inevitability.
“Did you ever think about me?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said.
“That night,