A Wedding in December

  In the steam, Bridget's wig frizzed. She thought that if she didn't breathe too deeply the buttonholes of her suit jacket wouldn't gape. She stepped out of the bathroom, Bill waiting by the door. "You look beautiful," he said, which was, of course, the right thing to say, but which she didn't believe for a minute. At some point, one simply had to stop caring about how one looked, she decided as she picked up her purse and stepped into her pumps. Age and ill­ness had to be accepted. This was her wedding weekend, after all. Wasn't it the event itself that mattered?

  Bridget descended the stairway, teetering as she went. In a mir­ror on the landing, she saw that she had put on too much makeup, that her skirt already had stretch marks across her lap. She had a memory of herself in her childhood bedroom at eight or nine years old, following the telecast of the Miss America pageant, singing, Here she comes ..." to herself in the mirror, absolutely certain that one day she would be in the pageant. She had been able to imagine the moment of winning so intensely, it was as if she were actually there.

  Miss America, indeed.

  Bridget heard her name and turned.

  Harrison held her gently by the shoulders and kissed her cheek. "Congratulations," he said.

  "Harrison," she said, hardly believing it was really he standing before her. He had not grayed up as much as Bill, but his hair was thinning at the crown. She remembered the soft brown eyes, the V-like dent over one eyebrow (the legacy of having fallen out of a tree house when he was a boy, she seemed to recall), the wiry body slightly less wiry now. He was the man she'd have imagined he would become, and yet his face was not precisely the same. The dif­ference had to be age, but Bridget thought there was something else. Regret possibly. Conceivably wisdom, though Bridget wasn't sure what wisdom looked like. Harrison was smiling and telling her that she looked wonderful. Bridget hoped not everyone would feel the need to reassure her that she was still attractive. Bridget had a clear idea of what she was and was not. What she was, was sick. What she was not was healthy.

  Looking at Harrison, Bridget was reminded of moments with him at school. Once he had caught up to her as she was foolishly walking from Ford Hall to dinner in a blizzard without her jacket. He'd made a tent of his own jacket for both of them (she remem­bered, too, that the windows facing the ocean had been an opaque white from the frozen sea spray). She recalled Harrison giving a speech in his bid to become class treasurer. Pink Floyd had played "Money" in the background. She remembered as well the day Har­rison had been beaned at home plate. He'd gone down like a shot despite the helmet. And of course she could not forget Harrison Branch at that last party at the beach, the tension between him and Stephen and Nora. She remembered, too, the awful final weeks when Harrison had retreated into himself and would not talk to anyone.

  "I was stunned to get Bill's e-mail," Harrison said now, Harrison the only one of them who'd known Bill's first wife, who had spent time with Jill. Bridget wanted to ask Harrison if Bill had seemed happy in his first marriage, what he'd been like with young children, facts Bridget had no way of knowing. But Agnes was at Harrison's side now, and she was saying Bridget's name. Agnes em­braced Bridget fiercely, and Bridget was glad Agnes didn't think her fragile. Agnes had aged more than Harrison. But mightn't a weath­ered face indicate a richer life?

  "My God, I can't believe it's you," Agnes said.

  (Is it me? Bridget wondered. Some of me? More of me?)

  "It's such a romantic story," Agnes said. "Meeting up with Bill again after how many years?"

  'Almost twenty-two."

  "It must have been . . . was it just, like, love at second sight? I went to that reunion, but I didn't get there until Saturday."

  "It was a bit more complicated than that," Bridget said, "but I think we both knew right away."

  "It's such a wonderful, wonderful story," Agnes repeated. "Life never works out that way, does it?"

  It was an unanswerable question, because, of course, life had worked out that way. But here was Rob, kissing her on each cheek and introducing her to Josh. Then Jerry enveloped her in a bear hug and introduced Bridget to his wife, Julie. Bridget, at the center of a cluster of people — more popular than she'd ever been at Kidd — felt as though she'd just won an enormous prize.

  And she thought then that perhaps she had. The prize the prod­uct of possibilities and near misses. Bill's wife, Jill, coming down with the flu on the Thursday before the weekend-long reunion. Bill making the decision not to go himself. Jill talking him into it, say­ing that she'd be fine. Bill compromising by deciding to attend the Friday night cocktail party only. Bill wanting to have a drink with Jerry and Harrison and Rob and even their old English teacher, Jim Mitchell, who was putting in a surprise appearance. Bill's software company had finally kicked into high gear, and he'd had a selfish, nearly childish, desire to tell his old friends about this thing he had made. Bill had driven to the Back Bay town house where the event was being held. Melissa, Bill's daughter, who was seventeen at the time, was spending the night at a friend's house. Jill had said she'd be fine with a cup of tea and a rare opportunity to have the remote to herself.

  Bridget had gone to the cocktail party with her friend Anne, who was a legitimate member of the class of 1974 but who hadn't the courage to walk in alone. Because many of Bridget's friends — not to mention her old boyfriend — were from that class, Bridget had allowed herself to be talked into accompanying Anne. Bridget had thought she might see Nora or Agnes or Harrison, none of whom had attended the party. And, of course, Bridget had guessed she might see Bill. She was at least as curious about Jill, however, the woman who had won him over, as she was about seeing her old love after an absence of twenty-two years.

  Bridget remembered the cocktail party as a series of small shocks. Over and over again, a face would emerge from the counte­nance of a stranger like a photograph coming up in a bath of a chemical solution. Years would melt away, and then, in an instant, return, each encounter requiring a number of mental and emo­tional adjustments. It had been both a rewarding and a distressing experience, knowing that everyone who greeted her had to be mak­ing the same adjustments. (Though, of course, there were the half-dozen ageless who basked in compliments, her friend Anne being one of them — which doubtless accounted for Anne's eagerness to attend the party.)

  Half an hour into the event, Bridget had felt a tap on her shoul­der. When she'd turned, she'd known him at once — something magnetic in the eyes that felt nearly as intense as it had more than two decades earlier.

  Bill, she had said.

  He'd kissed her on the cheek.

  And for a minute, possibly two, neither of them had spoken, Bridget aware of a trembling in her fingers that grew so disturbing she had had to hold the stem of her wineglass with both hands. She'd looked up and she'd looked down. She had not known where to put her eyes. Whereas Bill had simply stared.

  While the experience had been literally breathtaking for Bridget, Bill had later said it was among the saddest moments of his life. For he had seen instantly what Bridget had been too bewildered to comprehend: the staggering sum of all the days and years they had missed together.

  Though Bridget often thought about coincidence and fate, she and Bill discussed the reunion seldom, and then only in hushed voices, neither willing to catch the attention of the gods who had al­lowed them to find each other, both aware of the implied treachery of their good fortune. Matt did not yet know that Bill had left his wife to be with Bridget, and Bridget knew that she would soon have to tell her son. He was bound to learn of it, from a gleeful Melissa one day if from no one else. With a sudden chill, Bridget realized that there was every possibility Matt would learn of it this week­end. She didn't like keeping secrets from her son, believed it counter­productive to an honest relationship. But then again she wasn't sure an entirely honest relationship between a mother and a fifteen-year-old boy was possible. What secrets, for example, did Matt hold dear?

  For months after the reunion, Bill and Bridget had e-mailed
each other, Bridget unwilling to meet Bill for lunch because he was married, the proposed meal clearly not simply a meal, but rather signaling a willingness to proceed further. Bridget didn't doubt Bill's sincerity when he'd spoken of the years he'd spent thinking about her, about how he was certain they should be together. Her memories of Bill's honesty as a teenager were still keen. Still, she told herself, she would not enter into a relationship that required lies or sneaking around, even though she knew the waiting to be a kind of smoke screen to mask her ever-increasing feelings for Bill — feelings that emanated from a rich store of memory, trig­gered by that electric meeting at the reunion. And she supposed she'd known all along that eventually she would capitulate, that the self-imposed restraint was a feeble attempt to assuage her guilt, to stave off the inevitable chaos that coming together would set in motion. Eight months after the reunion, Bridget finally agreed to the lunch, biryani and chicken tikka at an Indian restaurant in Cambridge, the spices from the tikka somehow squirting under her contact lens and causing a brief though acutely painful episode until she washed it out in the ladies' room, ruining her eye makeup in the process.

  And after that lunch, Bridget had surprised herself by discover­ing just how willing she was to compromise her previous ethics for love. Prior to meeting Bill, she would have said, categorically, that she would never have considered a relationship with a married man. Not only was such a relationship complicated and risky but it was simply wrong. A woman she did not know would be terribly hurt. Bridget knew firsthand how this worked. Had she not been terribly hurt herself six years earlier, when Arthur had walked out on her? Arthur had simply announced, an hour before Matt was to return home from school, his palms open as if he were merely re­porting scientific fact, that he was leaving her. The news had been so shocking that Bridget had not been able to comprehend his words, in the same way she had not been able to understand calcu­lus her first year in college. She could see herself as shed been that afternoon — head shaking back and forth, mouth open, asking soap-operatic questions she would not have believed possible: Who is she? When did you meet her? How long? Where? What about Matt? The answer to this last question so enraging Bridget that she threw the nearest thing to hand, her pocketbook, the lipstick and hand cream and coins and supermarket receipts spilling out on its jour­ney from her arm to Arthur's chest and then dropping to the floor as he made no effort to catch it. He no longer had any interest in her handbag or its contents or in her. He would sue for custody of Matt.

  "On what grounds?" Bridget had asked.

  "I can support him," Arthur had said simply, "and you can't."

  Knowing it was a cliche even as she said it, Bridget had uttered the truest thing she knew: Over my dead body.

  And it had been an ugly war, love turning to hatred overnight; in a month to disgust; in a year to pity; and finally to indifference. Bridget, her resources stretched and pummeled, had won the first two battles. Miraculously, a third had not been necessary. An arrangement had been agreed to: Matt would see Arthur on alter­nate weekends and for a month in the summer.

  (Bridget waited, like a scientist studying lab rats, for Matt finally to act out the playlet written for him that afternoon. Where, for example, was his rage? Apart from the Incident with the Alcohol, Brid get so far had detected nothing. Matt left for his month with his father with a quick fraught hug — and until this year, tears in his eyes — and returned happy, seemingly undamaged and ready to resume his normal life. Of course, Bridget thought, visiting his father was his normal life, just as Bill's presence now was, children being remarkably flexible about their givens.)

  Perhaps not all children, though. Bill's daughter, Melissa, had decidedly not been flexible. Nineteen and intractable, she had taken her mother's side, which Bridget thought perfectly under­standable. Bill saw his daughter, a sophomore at Boston University, for dinner as often as he could. Bridget had met Melissa only twice, once before the diagnosis, once after, and each occasion had been disastrous. The revelation that Bridget had cancer had not pro­duced, as Bill had hoped, a chink in the ice but rather had made Bridget somehow repellent to Melissa, a diseased thing that should not be further exposed to her father.

  Bridget cringed when she recalled their second dinner together in Boston. Bridget still didn't know why Melissa had agreed to the meal. Perhaps Bill had coerced her in some way that Bridget was not allowed to know. During dinner, Melissa made a point of talk­ing, when she spoke at all, only to Bill, and of inserting her mother into the discussion whenever possible. It was as though Bridget was not present, though her presence was implied, in every reminis­cence, in every bulletin from home. Melissa looked directly at her father, locking eyes when she spoke to him, as if trying to commu­nicate an urgent message. Come back.

  Bridget asked questions and received one-word answers. It was maddening, she thought, because she could see that in another universe she and Bill's daughter might have had true affection for each other. Melissa would be easy to like. Battle-ready armor pro­tected an essential sweetness. Melissa had shiny dark hair that fell in a sheet down her back and would, from time to time, fan across her shoulders. She had as well a fetching way of tossing it slowly back. Bridget admired Melissa's narrow waist and the mouth that rose in a perfect curve to a point just below her nostrils. Bridget thought the look Parisian, the narrow waist and lovely mouth a legacy from her mother. Bridget supposed that she could, if she allowed it, work herself into a state of mild jealousy over Bill's first wife, whom she had seen in photographs but never in the flesh.

  Over coffee, Bill broke the news of the wedding to his daughter, and Melissa responded as Bridget might have guessed. The young woman set down her water glass, wiped her mouth, stood up from the chair, and, without so much as a glance at either Bill or Bridget, left the restaurant. Since that night, she had not returned Bill's phone calls.

  "She'll come around," Bill had said, though Bridget could see that Melissa might not, that it might take years for a reconciliation.

  Matt had responded differently to news of the wedding. Bridget had told Bill that it was too early to talk to Matt about a marriage, but Bill had argued the opposite, reading Matt as needing more of a family, not less. And Bill had been right, Matt breaking into a grin with the news. Bill asked him to be best man (though a best man was hardly needed), and they'd all immediately fallen into a discus­sion of venues and caterers, as if it were perfectly normal to be dis­cussing the marriage of a man to a woman whose chance of being alive in two years was only 50 percent.

  Bridget looked around at the gathering in the library. Was it ob­scene to marry in her state? Bill and Bridget had been together only fifteen months when Bridget had received her initial diagnosis, causing her to wonder if the cancer wasn't some kind of cosmic punishment. She remembered, early in her treatments, a conversa­tion between two women in the hematology-oncology waiting room, the first telling the second in a breathless voice that she was getting married in two weeks. Bridget attributed the breathlessness to excitement until she heard the woman tell the other that the cancer had started in her lungs and had spread to her brain. Brain cancer and a wedding. Bridget had been stunned. But wasn't her own impending marriage just as bizarre?

  * * *

  Nora announced that it was time to move into the private dining room. Place cards were consulted. Bridget would sit between her son and her husband-to-be, as Nora had earlier promised. Brian would be to the other side of her son. The table was a wedding in itself, with its white damask, antique ivory plates, crystal glasses, and heavy silver. Bridget was seated so that she could see the win­dows at the other side of the room. A twinkling light in the dis­tance was the only visible element. Mostly what she saw was the reflection of faces. Harrison, with his chin on the back of his hand, listening to Bill. Agnes leaning in toward Julie at a sharp angle. Nora in consultation with a waiter. The evening's menu was en­graved on stiff white cards set upon the plates. Bridget would have trouble with the salmon, but the b
eet and goat cheese salad sounded appetizing.

  A waiter filled one of a small forest of glasses in front of Bridget with champagne.

  "A toast," Jerry said, standing. He looked fit as he unfolded him­self to his full height. His camel V-neck sweater draped appealingly from broad shoulders. Clearly, Jerry visited a gym on a regular basis.

  A ripple of tension made its way along the table. Jerry, always unpredictable, might come out with anything. Bridget noticed that Matt's and Brian's glasses had been partially filled with champagne. Julie's face remained an impenetrable mask as her husband raised his glass.

  "Bill and Bridget's Wedding, "Jerry said. "A comedy coming to a theater near you. Starring Tom Hanks and Andie MacDowell." (A smattering of laughter here.) "A feel-good movie from Universal with a surprise happy ending." (Nervous laughter, as the possibility of a nor-happy ending inevitably entered each mind.) "I believe I speak for everyone," Jerry continued, "when I say that I never knew a couple so destined to be together." (An awkward pause as every­one at the table looked at Julie, clearly left out of the running for that particular award.) "When we knew you both at Kidd, you were inseparable," Jerry continued. "And, truthfully, we all envied your happiness." (Hear, hear, Rob said.) "Then there was a little hiccup somewhere . . . hmmm, a twenty-two-year hiccup . . . and now you're together again and about to make it legal." (Bridget glanced at Matt, wondering if he minded his birth and childhood being contained within the hiccup.) Jerry raised his glass a bit higher, and everyone at the table stood. Bill and Bridget remained seated. "To unions and reunions," Jerry said. "We wish you ten thousand days of happiness."

  Jerry, to everyone's surprise and Julie's evident relief, had acquit­ted himself with grace and humor. Bill reciprocated by standing and thanking Jerry warmly and then thanking Nora for her gen­erosity. Jerry gave a quick salute. Nora smiled. A waiter hovered next to Agnes, ready to begin taking orders. Matt and Brian drained their glasses. Bridget reminded herself to tell the waiter not to give the boys any wine. She didn't want her son getting drunk the night before the wedding, or ever again, for that matter.