A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [35]
“You seem sympathetic to her.”
“I am,” she said. “Now, I am. But I wasn’t then. Nothing makes a person more selfish than being in love. Carl’s wife retaliated by suing for sole custody of the boys. He hired a good lawyer, and he was sure he would win, but that’s not how it worked out.”
“That must have been hard on both of you.”
“When . . . when a man leaves his wife and children for another woman, there’s a burden on that woman. She has to be worth the sacrifice.”
Harrison blew over the top of his coffee cup. “I’m sure you were.”
“No one is worth that kind of sacrifice. In Carl’s case, it was even worse. To be worth the sacrifice, every word had to be incandescent.”
In the corner, Harrison could see Judy clearing away dishes.
“If the work was extraordinary, one might be able to say later that artistic greatness had come from the sacrifice,” Nora added.
“I would think to be worth the sacrifice, as you put it, there has to be only one truly great poem.”
“You think there is?” Nora asked.
“Of course I do,” he said. “There are many truly great poems. I know ‘The Red Suitcase’ is widely regarded to be his best work, but personally I think ‘The Fourth Canto’ is.”
Nora said nothing, a silence Harrison took to be dissent.
“I imagine you know the work intimately,” he said.
“I should. I had to type them all a hundred times.”
“Literally type?”
“In the early days, yes.”
“Carbon papers and all that?”
“Carl was slow to take up the computer. I think it was the promise of pornography that intrigued him finally.”
Harrison was taken aback by this intimate revelation, an entire universe contained within. Unhappy marital sex? Bitterness? Betrayal? Or was it simply a joke, and only Harrison had missed the punch line?
“Carl wrote in his study in the mornings,” Nora said. “He would go there immediately after waking up, and I wouldn’t see him until around noon or so.”
“He always wrote in the mornings?”
“He used to say that anything written after twelve noon wasn’t worth keeping. He could be very bristly when he came out of his study, and it was usually impossible to talk to him. I think he hated pulling out of the dream state in which he wrote. I used to tell him to take a shower. Mostly, though, he just wanted to sit and stare out the window. I really didn’t like being around him during that time. If I started to talk to him, or he to me, we would invariably end up arguing. So I avoided him.” Nora glanced at her watch again. “Agnes is here,” she said.
“Is she?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t see her at lunch.”
“How is she?”
“Does our Agnes ever change?”
“I don’t know,” Harrison said. “I’d like to think she’s had some great adventure.”
Nora smiled. “She looked very well. Healthy and fit.”
“You’ve stayed friends with her?”
“Yes,” Nora said. “She used to come here often. When Carl was alive. They had fabulous arguments.”
“They fought, you mean.”
“Not quite. I think of their debates like verbal spirals, circling inward but moving forward in another dimension. Carl could outargue anyone.”
“Even you?”
“Oh. Especially me,” Nora said lightly. “I have to get some papers in my office. Want to come?”
Harrison followed Nora along a corridor, up a short set of steps, along another corridor, and down an equivalent number of steps. Her suite began with a vestibule that opened onto a sitting room / bedroom with French doors to a private veranda. Off the room, Harrison had a glimpse of a large white bathroom. Cut glass cruets of exotic colored oils lined the marble surround of the tub.
“This is your apartment?” Harrison asked.
“Just a bedroom and a bathroom. I eat all my meals in the kitchen. I never cook.”
“Not such a bad life.”
“Not if you’re fond of fifteen-hour days.”
“Seriously?”
“Weekends, yes,” she said, walking to her desk and opening a drawer. “The parties often go on until midnight. You can try to end them at eleven, but it hardly ever works. They’d go on longer if we let them. Whatever happened to the notion of the bride and groom leaving before the end of the reception and going off on their honeymoon? Today .