A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [5]
“Yes.”
Nora rocked herself in a chair. “Tell me more about your wife.”
“Evelyn? Well, let’s see. She’s French Canadian. She’s tall and has short blond hair. I think her hair might actually be gray now, but she never lets anyone see it. She’s a very good mother.”
Harrison had then a quick image of Evelyn and the boys at home. He could see the interior of their town house, particularly the small, cluttered kitchen. A jumble of laundry, including his boys’ slippery red hockey shirts, would have spilled out onto the floor from the alcove where the washer and dryer were stowed. He could see the breakfast table with its boxes of American cereal that the boys favored, a tea bag rolled and hardened on a saucer. Evelyn would be in a pink cashmere robe Harrison had given her for her birthday, and her hair would be askew from sleep. In the background would be the steady patter of an early morning news show. And Harrison realized, as he saw and heard this scene, that he did not wish himself there. With that realization came an emptiness he was all too familiar with, an emptiness that opened up whenever he found himself alone in a foreign place—a sense of floating, of not being anchored in the way that chores and hockey games and engagements will do. “My older son, Charlie, who’s eleven, has Evelyn’s looks but my disposition,” Harrison said, “while Tom, who’s nine, is the spitting image of me, but has Evelyn’s disposition.” He paused. “It’s occasionally deeply unsettling,” he added, smiling.
“And what disposition would that be?” Nora asked.
“Evelyn’s?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I think most people would say she tends to be somewhat more dramatic than I am,” Harrison answered, feeling mildly disloyal.
“And so you would be . . .”
“More even tempered,” he said.
“Yes. I can see that,” Nora said.
Sometimes Evelyn seemed closer to Harrison the farther away he was from her in a strict physical sense. When they were separated, he tended to think of her with more fondness than when he was with her, and he wondered if she felt the same. He sometimes thought that he had disappointed her in marriage—or, rather, that marriage, with its promise of constant love and physical intimacy, had disappointed them both. In her most dramatic and, paradoxically, romantic moments, Evelyn reproached herself for not having loved Harrison enough; but he couldn’t ease her mind on this point without admitting to the death of hope. Together, they cared for the boys, attended to their jobs, and had made, he thought, a good family. And occasionally there were moments of true joy, as when one or the other of the boys would say something winsome at the dinner table, and Harrison would catch Evelyn’s eye, or as when, lying together in the bed, having made love in the forgiving half-light of an early Sunday morning, a kind of weekly hurdle crossed, Evelyn would put her head on his chest and he would stroke her shoulder, and a brief contentment would envelop them before they drifted off to sleep.
“Tell me a story,” Nora said.
Harrison laughed. “You used to do this all the time.”
“So I did.”
He let his mind go blank. He sat in a rocker opposite and let some seconds pass.
“Once I was staying at Le Concorde in Quebec City,” he said. “I had a view toward the Frontenac, down the Grande-Allée. Between my hotel and the Frontenac, there were a dozen rooftops. All shapes and sizes. And on one of these rooftops, there were four teenage boys. They had brooms, and I thought at first they’d been sent to the roof by maintenance to sweep off the snow. But it soon became apparent to me that they were making a hockey rink. The prospect of that was horrible, you see, because there was no guardrail, no barrier, and if one of the boys bodychecked the other, say, or if one simply lost his footing, he’d have slipped right off the roof. And died, presumably. The building was at least seven stories up.”
Nora tilted her head, waiting for more.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off them,” Harrison said. “And yet, strangely, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know what the name of the building was, and I