A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [34]
Nora smiled.
“Carl read from the pulpit. There was no other place for him to stand. And, well, you can imagine. That man, that head of hair, that booming voice. Did you ever hear Carl read?”
“Yes. Once, I think. In New York.”
“He . . . he was magnificent,” Nora said. “It was a performance. And the words . . . the words . . .” She put a hand to her chest, as if even now, after all these years, she was still slightly stunned by those long-ago words. “He read from Bones of Sand. He saw me from the pulpit. I don’t think he took his eyes off me during the entire reading. He never actually read, you know. He would memorize everything in advance. So that the performance, if you want to call it that, was riveting.”
“I’m imagining a charismatic Calvinist in a New England pulpit,” Harrison said.
Nora glanced at her watch, and Harrison found he was beginning to mind this constant gesture. “He had a hotel,” she said. “You don’t want to hear all this.”
Harrison did, and he did not. “As an editor, I find this fascinating,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a fact that sheds light on the work.”
“A poem,” Nora said, “is an act of the imagination. It’s rarely, if ever, an act of straight reportage.”
Harrison wasn’t sure he agreed. “You don’t think your husband once saw the girl with the red suitcase waiting at the airport?”
“No,” Nora said with an air of fatigue that surprised Harrison. “I gave up trying to make straight connections years ago. I don’t think . . . I don’t think readers give writers enough credit for the imagination. They always want to know, Did this happen to the writer? When, of course, it probably didn’t. Not literally. Not exactly as described. It’s the imagination. That makes a work come alive.”
“But the chestnut hair,” Harrison said gently. “I assume you’re the model for ‘Monday Morning’ and ‘Talk After Supper’?”
“Actually not,” Nora said, looking away. “The ideal preceded me.”
The sentence was full of implication, and Harrison let it go. “By the way,” he said, “I looked up ‘helpmeet.’ I will make an help meet for him. Genesis. Adam and Eve. I will make a partner suitable for him. I gather it’s appropriate to you and Carl?”
“Some men need women to feel as though they exist.”
Harrison set his napkin at the side of his plate.
“Would you like some coffee?” Nora asked.
“Yes, thank you, I would.”
Harrison watched as Nora made a gesture to someone standing behind him.
“You don’t seem like an innkeeper,” he said.
“How so?”
“I think of an innkeeper as a red-faced publican or a starchy spinster, not . . .” But here he faltered, for to tell her how he saw her was to assume too great an intimacy. “In another age, you’d have been the mother of war heroes,” he said instead, “or the wife of a distinguished physician or perhaps even a poet yourself.”
“They’d have said ‘poetess’ then.”
“So they would.”
“One could argue that being an innkeeper . . . with its financial independence and only the self to answer to . . . is a better job than being merely a wife and mother. Better than being a poet.”
“True,” Harrison said. His plate was whisked away, and a cup of coffee was set before him. “You won’t have any?” he asked.
“I . . . I drink too much caffeine already.”
“I went for a walk earlier,” Harrison said, stirring in some milk. “I got as far as a stone wall. It seemed to end in the middle of nowhere.”
“It used to be part of an estate.”
“Odd place to have an estate.”
“There are lots of access roads in these woods. That seem to lead to nowhere.”
“I assume this is your wedding-rehearsal uniform?” he asked, pointing with his teaspoon.
“It is.”
“Very pretty,” he added, keeping it light. “What happened to you when you returned to NYU after Provincetown?”
“Carl was married, and he had sons. His wife had more or less tolerated his previous affairs. But now Carl wanted to move out. She wouldn’t stand for that. She wouldn’t forgive him for leaving her alone with the two children and humiliating her. Though one could argue she’d been thoroughly humiliated long ago.”