A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [86]
“Last I looked, Melissa was nearly a grown woman.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You just have to go with your gut,” Harrison said, not at all sure he actually believed this.
“Been doing that for quite a while,” Bill said, gazing down at his paunch.
“How’s the software business?” Harrison asked.
“We’re doing some subcontracting for a company in Boston to provide facial recognition software for places like Logan.”
“Hope the ACLU doesn’t stop you in your tracks,” Harrison said.
“I think the climate has changed. How’s your business?”
“Not great. Someone said—I forget who—that it was as if God or Alan Greenspan had pushed the pause button.”
“What happens in New York affects what happens in Toronto.”
“Absolutely,” Harrison said. He had a question for Bill but wasn’t sure it should be asked. “You and Jerry Leyden must have stayed friends,” he said tentatively. “I was a little surprised to see him here.”
“He gives a lot of money to a charity I head up in Boston,” Bill said.
At the beach house, Harrison suddenly remembered, Jerry had offered to spring for pizzas for everyone.
“What’s with you two, anyway?” Bill asked.
“Not sure,” Harrison said. “Nothing, really.”
Bill stood. “Going to get some more strawberries.”
Harrison watched Bill walk to the buffet. He thought about the notion of nonstories. What if he hadn’t signed up for eighteenth-century French poetry and hadn’t arrived late to class that morning in October and hadn’t sat in the last chair in the last row next to a pretty blonde in a white turtleneck? He would not have met Evelyn. Might he, the next night, or a week later, have met someone else? And what would that person have looked like? Might Harrison have daughters now instead of sons? Or would he, in a kind of wild enterprise, have gone looking for Nora, despite the fact that she was already married? Harrison was still in college when he heard that she and Carl Laski were together. He remembered his tremendous surprise and then his sharp dismay. It was as though a moat had suddenly been built around Nora. One didn’t compete with the likes of Carl Laski. Though Harrison had not spoken to Nora since that night at the beach house, she was always there, in his thoughts, and he sometimes imagined himself getting in his car and driving to New York to see her. In the early years, after Harrison had heard that Nora had married Laski, he’d wondered what Nora’s life was like. The associated glamour. The cachet of being married to someone famous. Then Harrison found himself in the publishing business and heard the gossip: Laski’s misanthropic exile, the stories about the drinking. It seemed to him that Nora had entered a foreign country to which Harrison did not have a passport, that she spoke a foreign language.
Bill returned to the table without the strawberries. “Changed my mind,” he said. “Think I better go see how Bridget’s doing. Order her room service. Pamper the bride-to-be.”
“That’s your job,” Harrison said.
Harrison, paper tucked under his arm, found the library empty, the espresso machine ready to go. He pressed what he thought was the right button and received a half cup of espresso, the operation immensely satisfying. He settled himself on the sofa on which he’d sat yesterday when he’d had coffee with Nora. When he looked up through the bank of windows, he saw that the snow had almost stopped. A weak sun glowed through a layer of nearly translucent cloud.
For a moment, coffee cup in hand, Harrison merely sat, not willing yet to open the newspaper. He watched the light come up slowly through the thinning cloud, causing the snow-laden bushes and trees to begin to sparkle. In less time than it took to finish his coffee, the view was almost too bright to look at. Harrison briefly closed