A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [13]
History, Agnes always told her students on the first day of school, was not a matter of dates and battles, but rather one of stories. She would tell them stories, she announced, and they would listen. But as Agnes put her pen and notebook away, she wondered this: Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by the imagination?
Agnes left the rest area and drove in the direction of the inn. After a short time, she spotted the sign she was looking for. She realized, as she slowed for the exit, that she was excited. Who would be there? Harrison, for one. And Bill and Bridget. Rob. Jerry and his wife, whom Agnes had never met—had any of them met the wife? Agnes hadn’t seen Harrison or Rob or Jerry in more than twenty years. She would hug them, of course, but they would be strangers to her. She thought about all the days that had intervened since they’d last spoken to one another. And it was then that she recognized the source of her excitement. They would know Jim. She would actually be able to say Jim’s name aloud to them. Of course, they would know him only as Mr. Mitchell, the young English teacher who had introduced them first to Whitman and O’Neill and then to Kerouac and to Sylvia Plath. He had made them laugh even as they had imagined themselves budding intellectuals. Agnes would be able to say—oh so casually—Remember Mr. Mitchell?
(A muscular chest, a gap between a belt buckle and his pelvic bones. A pang—a longing as familiar to Agnes as breathing—moved through her body, and she waited for it to pass.)
Would she tell them? Did it matter now? Yes, of course it mattered. Jim was still married. But if she’d been able to tell them, what would they say? They would be shocked. Their Agnes—sturdy, studious, and sometimes stubborn (though surely they had never thought her sexy)—involved in an affair with a man who had once been their teacher.
Jim. In her bones and in her blood. She would tell them of how it had all begun, of the challenge of keeping the affair a secret, of the places she and Jim had gone to be together. And later, when she was teaching in the public schools, of how they would meet in motels and hotels in anonymous towns and cities. She remembered—indeed, fed off of—the thrill of driving to a place she had never been before, checking into a hotel, and then finding Jim, as they had agreed, in the bar at a prearranged time. And later still, of how she had interviewed at Kidd and surprised Jim with the news, and how she saw him then every day for three years until finally he’d left to go to Wisconsin, after which they’d had to resume their intermittent rendezvous. Nora and Harrison and Bridget and the others would remember that Jim had been married. And when they learned that he still was, would they then want to know how Agnes had lived with this fact all these years? Twenty-six years, to be precise?
She would answer their questions with a question: Why was a marriage the only possible happy ending?
(No, she wouldn’t discuss this, she realized suddenly. This was Bridget’s wedding, after all.)
But still. Agnes would like to ask what they thought was more real, the living of a love affair or the imagining of it? Wasn’t it more delicious to engage in a transcendental passion than to endure the messy and boring mechanics of actual marriage? In Agnes’s ideal scenario, she and Jim would continue to meet in anonymous rooms in anonymous hotels. Agnes had little desire to be a wife. Rather, she wanted to be the steady mistress. If only she could be certain that the affair would last, that Jim would be there on a consistent basis.
Agnes desired certitude.
Maybe it was not entirely true that Agnes would not have chosen marriage had she been given the opportunity. The difficulty was that Jim sometimes had doubts. He was occasionally overcome by guilt. He wrestled with moral quandaries. That struggle kept him apart from Agnes, usually