A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [63]
Nora seemed exhausted, and Harrison knew he should let her go to bed. She would have to be up early, to see to the Saturday breakfast.
“The one about Carl and me?” she asked. “No.” She looked past him through the windows. “It’s snowing,” she said.
Harrison turned. Fat flakes were drifting in the light of a lantern. “Wow,” Harrison said, standing. He walked to the door and opened it and could feel the sharp, wet cold. While they had been dining and having after-dinner drinks, the temperature had plummeted. Harrison looked at a thermometer just outside the door. “It’s only thirty-one,” he said. “That’s what . . . ? A drop of forty degrees?”
He shut the door and moved back to the island. He perched an unsteady hip on the stool and took a sip of coffee. Nora’s lipstick had worn off, and there was a smudge of something dark just below her eye.
“A twenty-two-year marriage is a long story,” Nora said. “It’s . . . it’s a continuum with moments of drama, periods of stupefying boredom. Passages of tremendous hope. Passages of resignation. One can never tell the story of a marriage. There’s no narrative that encompasses it. Even a daily diary wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to know. Who thought what when. Who had what dreams. At the very least, a marriage is two intersecting stories, one of which we will never know.”
All of Harrison’s questions died on his tongue. What would the narrative of his own marriage be? Would it encompass the weekend he and Evelyn spent at the Château Frontenac exhausting their budget on room service because they never left the bed? Or would it include the fight they’d had over snow tires in the parking lot of Harrison’s apartment building at the end of that weekend? Would it be incomplete without the ennui Harrison felt and dreaded on Sunday evenings when the boys were busy and Evelyn and he no longer had anything to say to each other? Or would that narrative be defined by the one moment of perfect joy he experienced when he and Evelyn and the boys had boarded the Canadian excursion train at the beginning of their trip from Calgary to Vancouver last spring?
“I just wanted to know if you were happy,” he said.
“I was happy. Sometimes,” Nora answered.
“Fair enough.”
“Jerry was on a tear, wasn’t he?” Nora asked. “Would you like some water?”
“I’d love some,” Harrison said. “I’m starting a killer hangover.”
Nora fetched two glasses from the shelves, turned the faucet on, and let it run. She fingered the water to test its temperature and filled the glasses.
“If Jerry had said one more word about Stephen, I swear I’d have decked him,” Harrison said.
Nora laughed as she set the glasses on the counter.
“Don’t laugh. I would have.”
“I’d faint if I ever saw you hit someone. I don’t doubt you have other ways of eviscerating opponents. But decking isn’t one of them.”
“How does Julie stand him?”
“She was a good sport to stay as long as she did. To put up with all our stories. It must have been mind-numbing for her.”
“How old do you think she is?”
“Thirty-six? Forty? I enjoyed Josh. I’m . . . I’m happy for Rob.”
“I don’t think any of us knew. At school.”
“He may not really have known himself,” Nora said, taking a sip of coffee. “He’s very elegant, very polished, isn’t he?”
“It must be the European influence,” Harrison said. “What happened exactly? He just discovered this talent out of the blue?”
“No. No,” Nora said. “He’d taken lessons since he was a boy. They discovered his talent early. He just decided he wanted no part of it—through high school. The first time he tried out for Juilliard, he got turned down. That’s when he started to take it seriously.”
“I always loved Rob,” Harrison said.
“Oh, I think we all did.”
“What I don’t get is how Bill and Jerry have stayed friends.”
“There’s