Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [50]
“This wedding is huge,” she remarked. “How many people, would you guess?”
He looked around at the tables, counted eight bodies at each. “Around two hundred, I think.” He drained his water glass and looked over at Megan, her animated face without a trace of discomfort.
“Where was your wedding?” Felicia asked.
“We eloped eight years ago. City Hall.” It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time—instead of asking his parents to fly in from Lausanne, and Megan’s parents to go to the expense, and figuring out how to make everybody happy. He was twenty-nine, Megan thirty-four. It had been exhilarating—the joy of getting married combined with the fact that it would all be in secret, without planning, without involvement from anyone else. His parents had not even met her. He was aware of what an insult it was to them. For all their liberal Western ways he knew they wanted him to marry a Bengali girl, raised and educated as he had been.
“Do you regret it at all?” Felicia asked.
“I think our daughters do.” For they were at the age now when they expected tales of a wedding cake, pictures of their mother in a white gown.
Felicia asked how old the girls were, and again, clumsily, he pulled out the photos in his wallet. “Megan has better ones. More recent, I mean. But they’re at the hotel.”
“Did you have to try for a while?”
He thought it a bold question, coming from a stranger. But he was honest with her, his thoughts still loose from the spiked lemonade. “Would you believe, with Maya it happened the first time,” he said. He remembered how proud he’d felt, how powerful. The first time in his life he’d had sex without contraception a life had begun.
“Will you go for a third?”
“It’s hard to imagine.” He thought back to when his daughters were infants, when swings and play-saucers crowded the rooms and the sticky tray of the high chair had to be scrubbed in the shower at the end of each night. His girls had already turned mysterious, both out of diapers, withdrawing to their room to read or play games, talking in secret languages, bursting into peals of laughter at the table for no apparent reason. He’d been more eager than Megan to start a family. It was exotic, the world of parenting, fulfilling him in a way his job did not. It was Amit who’d pushed for a second. Megan was content with one, telling him she’d paid the price for being from a large family. But Amit hadn’t wanted Maya to be an only child, to lead the lonely existence he remembered. Megan had given in, gotten pregnant again even though she was almost forty, but since Monika’s birth she’d worn an IUD.
A spoon clinked on a glass and they all turned their attention to the front of the tent, to the first round of toasts. They listened to friends of Pam’s from prep school and then from college, a few of whom he vaguely remembered drinking with at the Marlin. They were followed by members of both families, and coworkers of Pam’s and Ryan’s. Amit was distracted by a pale gray spider that crawled up the side of the tablecloth and then into the space between the cuff of Jared’s shirt and jacket. He was tempted to say something, but Jared hadn’t noticed; instead he sat there, the same faint smile still fixed on his face, no doubt anticipating the day people would stand up and offer toasts at his own wedding.
The entrée was served, plates of prime rib with asparagus and potatoes.
“How was it, going from one child to two?” Felicia inquired, picking up the conversation where they’d left it. “A friend of mine told me that one plus one equals three. Is it true?” She sliced into her prime rib, causing blood from the meat to seep into the potatoes.
He considered for a moment. “Actually, it was after the second that our marriage sort of”—he paused, searching for the right word—“disappeared.” He realized it was a funny word to use, but something had been lost, something had fallen through their fingers, and that was the only way he could put it.
“What do you mean?” Felicia asked. She set down her fork and squinted at him with her small eyes, her voice suddenly cold.
He