A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [77]
I didn’t mean to do this, Jim. I know it sometimes angers you when I write of this thing we cannot have. But I can’t pretend that I don’t long for you. I wish that you were here with me and that we could slip under this duvet cover together. I know that no woman has made love to you as I have. I know that I am still your fantasy.
Agnes put down the pen. She held her head in her hands. The ache was as fresh and as keen as if Jim had just left the room, not to return for months.
Agnes got up from the chair and walked into the bathroom for a tissue. She blew her nose. She would not send the letter. She wouldn’t even finish it. She would have to take it with her in her backpack. She couldn’t risk leaving even the torn bits in the wastebasket. But would it be so awful to tell her story to just one person? Nora, for example? Nora certainly would honor her secret. All this time Agnes had lived with her story. Must she live with it for the rest of her life? What if Agnes were to die suddenly? If no one knew about the affair, who would tell Jim?
The memories, jostled and released by the letter, bombarded Agnes now. She remembered bending her head forward and Jim kissing her all the way to the base of her spine. Opening a box two days before Christmas in a motel room in Bangor to find a ring—not an engagement ring, but a small silver band inside. Agnes had worn it every day since. She remembered the feel of Jim’s muscles against her palm. And bars, dozens of them. The thrill of the first kiss of the evening. The touching of hands while the drinks were ordered. The relentless talk about themselves, their affair, as if there were nothing else in the universe that mattered. The arrival of the dusky drinks that promised a room with a bed. Agnes remembered a room in Montreal, a cavernous room with many beds. Six or seven of them anyway. Even now, she thought of it as The Room with Many Beds.
Agnes padded back to her own bed and slipped between the sheets. Her head throbbed. She turned on her side, facing the unshaded windows. Yes, perhaps she had had too much to drink last night. It was the cognac that had done it. It was foolish to accept another drink after the meal was finished, but there was Jerry, holding out the bulbous glass, and Agnes was so seldom offered a drink of any kind.
She would like to go back to sleep now. The memories hurt. She understood that they were, in some way, deeply masochistic. Perhaps it would be a good idea to go to a hypnotist to try to erase the memory of Jim entirely. Was such a thing possible? And if she did successfully obliterate Jim from her life, what would be left? A dull sphere with its radiant center missing?
She sat up suddenly and experienced again, at the periphery of her vision, the odd oily blips that seemed to rise up in cylinders at the edges of her eyes. She must absolutely make the appointment to see her ophthalmologist, she thought. Not to be able to see: Agnes could hardly imagine a worse fate. She thought of Louise, blind behind her bandages. How would one manage in the world? Should Agnes change Louise’s fate?
No, Agnes thought as she found her notebook in the bedcovers. Louise would remain as she was.
Innes put new dressings on Louise’s wounds. It would likely not be he who operated on her in the morning, when a shipment of chloroform was expected.
In a supply room on the first floor, exhausted surgeons found shelter. A half dozen cots had been set up. Men who could barely stand waited for one to become free. Nursing sisters were housed upstairs. Even in calamity, one had to observe certain proprieties. Innes fell into a deep sleep, but was woken four hours later. Other physicians needed