A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [56]
Bridget remembered the cocktail party as a series of small shocks. Over and over again, a face would emerge from the countenance of a stranger like a photograph coming up in a bath of a chemical solution. Years would melt away, and then, in an instant, return, each encounter requiring a number of mental and emotional adjustments. It had been both a rewarding and a distressing experience, knowing that everyone who greeted her had to be making the same adjustments. (Though, of course, there were the half-dozen ageless who basked in compliments, her friend Anne being one of them—which doubtless accounted for Anne’s eagerness to attend the party.)
Half an hour into the event, Bridget had felt a tap on her shoulder. When she’d turned, she’d known him at once—something magnetic in the eyes that felt nearly as intense as it had more than two decades earlier.
Bill, she had said.
He’d kissed her on the cheek.
And for a minute, possibly two, neither of them had spoken, Bridget aware of a trembling in her fingers that grew so disturbing she had had to hold the stem of her wineglass with both hands. She’d looked up and she’d looked down. She had not known where to put her eyes. Whereas Bill had simply stared.
While the experience had been literally breathtaking for Bridget, Bill had later said it was among the saddest moments of his life. For he had seen instantly what Bridget had been too bewildered to comprehend: the staggering sum of all the days and years they had missed together.
Though Bridget often thought about coincidence and fate, she and Bill discussed the reunion seldom, and then only in hushed voices, neither willing to catch the attention of the gods who had allowed them to find each other, both aware of the implied treachery of their good fortune. Matt did not yet know that Bill had left his wife to be with Bridget, and Bridget knew that she would soon have to tell her son. He was bound to learn of it, from a gleeful Melissa one day if from no one else. With a sudden chill, Bridget realized that there was every possibility Matt would learn of it this weekend. She didn’t like keeping secrets from her son, believed it counterproductive to an honest relationship. But then again she wasn’t sure an entirely honest relationship between a mother and a fifteen-year-old boy was possible. What secrets, for example, did Matt hold dear?
For months after the reunion, Bill and Bridget had e-mailed each other, Bridget unwilling to meet Bill for lunch because he was married, the proposed meal clearly not simply a meal, but rather signaling a willingness to proceed further. Bridget didn’t doubt Bill’s sincerity when he’d spoken of the years he’d spent thinking about her, about how he was certain they should be together. Her memories of Bill’s honesty as a teenager were still keen. Still, she told herself, she would not enter into a relationship that required lies or sneaking around, even though she knew the waiting to be a kind of smoke screen to mask her ever-increasing feelings for Bill—feelings that emanated from a rich store of memory, triggered by that electric meeting at the reunion. And she supposed she’d known all along that eventually she would capitulate, that the self-imposed restraint was a feeble attempt to assuage her guilt, to stave off the inevitable chaos that coming together would set in motion. Eight months after the reunion, Bridget finally agreed to the lunch, biryani and chicken tikka at an Indian restaurant in Cambridge, the spices from the tikka somehow squirting under her contact lens and causing a brief though acutely painful episode until she washed it out in the ladies’ room, ruining her eye makeup in the process.
And after that lunch, Bridget had surprised herself by discovering just how willing she was to compromise her previous ethics for love. Prior to meeting Bill, she would have said, categorically, that she would never have considered a relationship with a married