A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [62]
“What about you?” Bill asked.
“I think I’ll go lie down,” she said.
“I’ll go with you.”
“No,” Bridget said. “You stay with the others. Keep Jerry and Harrison in line.”
Bill laughed. Bridget saw, in the doorway, Josh running his fingers down the back of Rob’s impeccable jacket. The hand stopped just below the waistline. Julie bent to retrieve an earring that had fallen to the floor. Jerry announced that he had to take a piss. Agnes was asking Harrison if he had ever heard of the Halifax disaster.
Bridget turned toward Bill so that her right knee was touching his left. He put his hand again on her thigh. He had his chin propped in his other hand, his elbow resting on the table. “You do look beautiful tonight,” he said.
Bridget sighed and then smiled. There was simply no adequate response. “Jerry’s really something,” she said.
“Some people never change. Maybe none of us ever do. That was a nice toast, though.”
“What’s with his wife?”
“Ice queen?”
“Maybe it’s just around him,” Bridget said. “Is she his first wife?”
“I think so.”
“I like Josh. He’s cute,” Bridget said. “I always think gay men—the couples—seem to care about each other in a way you don’t always see with straight couples. It’s as though they treasure the small moments, assign meaning to them, whereas they so often pass us by.”
“The unexamined life,” Bill said.
“It might be because they don’t have children,” Bridget said. “Children take up all the oxygen, don’t they? Create chaos. I didn’t know Jerry and Harrison had a thing.”
“I’m not sure they ever did,” Bill said. “This feels new to me. Sometimes Jerry sees a weakness, and he pounces.”
“He was always a little like that.”
“More so now, I think,” Bill said.
Bridget thought about the way age could chisel away at a person so that only the most prominent characteristics remained.
She wanted to get out of her clothes. “Nora has been amazing,” she said. “I know it’s partly her wanting to show what she’s done with the place, what she’s made, but it’s so much more than that. She’s been extraordinarily generous.”
“We’ll have to do something for her,” Bill said. “Have her out to our house some night.”
“Oh, sure,” Bridget said. “And second prize is two nights at our house.”
Bill bent toward Bridget and kissed her. It was an unexpectedly hard kiss, and Bridget put a palm on his chest.
“Kiss, kiss,” Jerry said, passing behind them.
So you don’t know that story,” Harrison was saying.
They were sitting on stools in the center of the kitchen. Only one light was burning, a globe over the island. Harrison had an impression of cream paint, tongue-and-groove boards, shelves of antique white dishes, a wash of stainless steel. Under a bank of windows was a built-in bench with an upholstered cushion. Off the kitchen, Harrison could see the dark interior of a pantry, closed up for the night.
He took a sip of coffee made from a machine similar to the one in the library. Coffee. He’d be lucky if he fell asleep before morning. He’d had more coffee today than he’d had in years. On the other hand, he’d had more to drink than he’d had in years. He thought the combination would make for a spectacular hangover, the beginnings of which he could already feel at the edges of his vision.
The inn was quiet. The big wooden clock set among the shelves of dishes read 1:25. Harrison briefly imagined the guests in their rooms. Jerry and Julie, their backs to each other, hugging their separate edges of the bed. Bill curled around Bridget, snoring lightly into her neck (was that a wig Bridget had on? did she sleep in it?). Agnes lying on her back, hands folded across her chest, a woman with a clear conscience who didn’t move in her sleep. Rob and Josh: one was curled up within the other; Harrison couldn’t take the thought further than that. Or perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps Jerry and Julie, antagonistic in