A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [84]
Harrison needed coffee and a large breakfast. What had been an incipient headache had now settled into his frontal lobes. He glanced at the headline: TALIBAN ABANDON LAST STRONGHOLD: OMAR IS NOT FOUND. He turned to the page where the Times was still running its “Portraits of Grief” section, the short bios of those lost in the World Trade Center. He read about a man who had graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and had developed a proprietary mathematical model for yield curve analysis. He read about another man who had worked evenings at Spazzio’s restaurant on Columbus Avenue and had recently bought a house in Union City, New Jersey. Harrison tried, as he did from time to time, to imagine the reality of being trapped in the building, perhaps knowing one was going to die. The flying glass and blocked passageways. The advancing flames and the smothering smoke. The bodies piled in window frames and the cell phone calls to relatives—first to ask for help and then to say good-bye. The fear would have been unendurable. And these images led Harrison to thoughts of Jerry last night at dinner with his odd insistence that if one hadn’t been in the vicinity of the disaster one had little right to speak of it. In some small way, Harrison agreed with him. It would have been nightmarish to watch people falling from the towers, and then later to have to breathe in the ashes of the catastrophe. One literally had been made to take it in, absorb it, a unique sort of ownership. If it hadn’t been Jerry who’d been arguing the point, Harrison might have jumped in with his support, but Jerry’s very tone of voice—his presence even—made Harrison grit his teeth. He didn’t like the man, though he had liked the boy well enough. Jerry had been something of a braggart at Kidd as well, but then it had seemed funny rather than annoying. And, of course, the guy could pitch.
A waitress, not Judy, informed Harrison that on Saturday mornings, there was a buffet. She pointed in its direction. Harrison could order à la carte if he chose, but she confided that the spread was really pretty good. She poured him a cup of coffee that tasted watery compared to the rich espresso in the library. After breakfast, Harrison decided, he would wander in there and have a second cup and read the paper. He’d never really had much success trying to deal with a newspaper at a breakfast table not his own—no room to spread out.
Harrison headed for the buffet. He chose baked eggs, well-done bacon, a dish of strawberries (he couldn’t help but look for a fly), and a carrot muffin. If this didn’t cure his headache, nothing would. As he was returning to his table, he spotted Bill at the entrance.
“Bill,” Harrison called out in that louder-than-normal voice men reserve for addressing each other.
“Harrison,” Bill said. He advanced toward Harrison and examined his plate. “Looks good, looks good.”
Harrison gestured with his bowl to the table by the window. “I’m over there,” he said.
“Join you in a minute. Gotta get my daily mg’s of cholesterol.”
Harrison set his plate and bowl on the table. He folded up the newspaper and slid it into the space between his chair and the wall. In a few minutes, Bill, in plaid shirt and gray sweater-vest, took the seat across from Harrison. Harrison noted a slight paunch under the vest, the thinning steely colored hair (iron filings on a balding pate), more evident in the morning light than at the cocktail party. Bill had chosen berries only.
“So where’s the cholesterol?” Harrison asked.
“Trying to lose fifteen.”
“On your wedding day?”
“Have to fit into the tux.”
“Little late for that.”
“I’m saving myself for the dinner,” Bill said. “You should see the menu. And the wines.” Bill put his hand to his forehead in disbelief. “I’m glad I didn’t overdo it last night. All I’d need today would be a hangover.”
“That’s all right,” Harrison said as he spooned the last bit of baked eggs from the white ramekin, “I’ve got one big enough for the both of us. How’s Bridget?”
“Great.” Bill