It was, she thought now, a story without drama, a story that doubtless had been repeated hundreds of times that fall on campuses everywhere. Two kids who sensed they ought to be together managed to find each other. Bill did not kiss her that night, but before the week was out, they had snuck once more down onto the beach and had become lovers. The speed with which she had allowed Bill to make love to her might have frightened another girl, made her proceed with caution, but Bridget felt no guilt, no remorse, no need to slow down. That she and Bill had come together in the most primitive sense of the word had felt absolutely right.
There was a small silence now from the justice of the peace and a nod in Matt's direction. With a quick fumble in his pocket, the boy-produced the rings and presented them on his sweaty palm. The justice took them from him and gave one to Bridget, one to Bill.
. . . The outward and visible sign of the unbroken circle of love. . .
Just before she'd come down from the room, Bridget had slathered her hands with Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion so that Bill would have no trouble slipping her ring on. Shed been worried that her weight gain since they'd bought the rings might make the gold band stick at her knuckle. But Bill, with a light touch, accomplished his one and only task with ease.
. . . forsaking all others and holding only unto her?. . .
In a few seconds, she and Bill would be well and truly married. She wished their story had been a simple one, a clear shot from the day they'd first met until this day. But it was not. The hiccup that Jerry had referred to in the toast had lasted more than two decades.
It had never occurred to Bridget that Bill might be unfaithful. He was as honest a boy as she had ever met. So when his letter had come during the spring of her sophomore year at college, Bridget had been stunned. Bill had, he wrote, fallen in love with someone else. The girl's name was Jill. Bridget read and reread the letter a dozen times, disbelief turning into a kind of leaden certainty, for Bill, a good man, would never put Bridget through such pain were the news equivocal. If Bill said he had fallen in love with another woman, then that was that.
Bridget didn't like the language of excess or of melodrama, but it was impossible for her to remember that time without thinking of the words "shattered" and "catastrophic" and "disaster" and "wanting to die."
Bridget did not write back to Bill. Her mother and her roommate urged her to drive to Vermont where Bill was at school and confront him, but Bridget would not beg. She could not imagine a scene in which she knocked on Bill's door and found inside the woman named Jill, with whom Bill was now in love. Bridget was quite sure she would not survive that encounter. That even if she lived (well, of course, she would live), something inside of her would be lost. Memory? Faith? The ability ever again to believe in love?
And so she had suffered in silence. The news was dire. Her hormones were rampant. Bridget remembered days spent in the bed with the covers drawn up over her head. Long risky walks late at night, begging someone to mug her. The missed meals, the nearly unbearable weekend nights, the having to explain why she was not with Bill to friends and family. Most of all, Bridget minded the future she would now not have. She had for so long imagined their life together — the wedding, the house, the baby — that it was as though this had been taken from her as well. And, of course, Bridget cried. So much so that she'd had a headache for weeks.
In the library, Bridget slipped Bill's ring on his finger, and she, too, said I do.
She was aware then that Josh was standing beside Bill. She prayed that Josh's singing wouldn't be too painful or awkward, ending the wedding on a wincing note.
But Josh's voice, when he began, was glorious. Simply glorious. She glanced at Bill. What was this astonishing song?
She didn't mind now that her back was to the guests. Josh's voice, far more than the words of the simple ceremony, moved her. And how odd, since the song appeared to be in Italian. Not knowing the lyrics, Bridget invented her own: We had so many years apart, but now we have found each other. I wish that we had had children together. I had a beautiful strong body in my twenties and early thirties, and I'm sorry that you never saw it.
Josh let the last note linger, and then it faded away. Bill took Bridget's hand. Her son, Matt, was just inches from them both.
This is what I have now, Bridget thought. This is it. A man and a son and a short future, during which I must live every hour as if it were my last.
Agnes knew that she would cry as soon as Rob started to play. She had this reaction at church when a familiar hymn was sung, at the symphony when the violins were exquisite, even at baseball games when the tenor began the national anthem. The music was a kind of trigger that summoned emotions normally kept in check. Reverence. Gratitude. A sense of something greater than herself. Sorrow. Heartache. Loneliness.
Sometimes she cried for the anonymous. For the thousands dead in tribal genocide in central Africa. For the victims of earthquakes in southeast Asia. For the hundreds swept away in floods in India. Occasionally, she cried for all those lost during World War I or on the Titanic or at Masada. More recently for those who had died on September n. What would it take to make yourself jump from the 103rd floor of a building, knowing — knowing— that you would die in a suicide more efficient than any other? Only gravity would be necessary. Would one be conscious during the fall, or would the body seize up, causing a blessed blackout? How long would it take to hit the ground? Agnes imagined the woman she had read about in the New York Times, the one reaching for the coffee pot, standing in the ledge of a window, looking down, the flames behind her. No, Agnes thought. She would not have jumped.
And, oh God, just the crying itself was a kind of personal horror, wasn't it? Should she excuse herself? Josh handed her a handkerchief, and she tried to smile in his direction, but it was no good. Her body, rhythmically convulsive, would not calm down. Her face would be a ruin, and her eyes would not recover for hours — she would have to dunk her face in ice water to clear them.
But Agnes couldn't stop crying, because now she was thinking about Halifax and all the people who had died there. She pictured the woman pinned under the beam, her chest crushed. That woman would have been a mother. Of course she would have. Or the ten-year-old girl who had lost her family. Imagine — to experience that bright light and then to wake to a hellish universe in which you were utterly alone. And then there was that poor man propped against a dead horse, his child lifeless in his arms. Would the shock of the event obliterate pain? Could a parent's pain ever be obliterated?
Agnes would never know. Agnes would never be a mother. She was forty-four years old, and already her periods were irregular, sometimes two and three months apart. Jim's wife, Carol (such a cold, cold name), was a mother twice over — her children grown now, one in college, one just out. Jim had once said that he might leave Carol when both children were through college (earlier, it had been when both children were out of high school, but, as Jim had pointed out, that clearly wouldn't work: where would the children go when they came home from school on vacations?), but Agnes doubted that Jim would ever leave his wife. Even if he did, it was too late for children, wasn't it?
So a child was out of the question.
Agnes glanced around her. Nora was sitting with Harrison. Nora had never had a child. Carl had already had his children, he'd said. He would not entertain thoughts of another. Rob and Josh would not have their own children unless they adopted. But they all had, or had experienced, something Agnes did not have. Steady companionship. A wife. A husband. A lover with whom one lived. Agnes and Jim had shared motel rooms and cottages, but never for more than three days at a stretch. What would it be like to come home with groceries in a bag to find Jim sprawled on a couch, reading the paper? To wake up morning after morning and see his long back as he bent to put on his shoes? To fold herself into him whenever she wanted to?
. . . union of a man and woman in marriage . . .
And that was another thing Agnes wou
ld never have. A wedding. Never a public celebration of herself and Jim. A thing so commonplace and yet so utterly impossible for her. She shook her head. The self-pity was endless. Pathetic, really. And utterly useless. What good did it do to cry over something she could not have? None whatsoever. All she could hope to accomplish would be to draw attention to herself and thus have to invent a plausible explanation for her tears. She hardly knew Bill and Bridget as adults, though she liked them well enough.
(Agnes had a sudden and horrifying thought. Would Bridget misinterpret the tears, thinking Agnes was crying because Bridget might die soon?)
Agnes blew her nose again and sat back against the pew. Josh removed his arm and gave her leg a little squeeze. He stood, and Agnes was confused. Was the ceremony over? She watched as he turned to the assembled. He seemed to collect himself, and Agnes thought that he would speak the way people spontaneously did at funerals. A little weird. A little nervous making. Josh was not one of them, really, for all his kindness.
Instead of speaking, however, Josh began to sing. It was an aria, Agnes thought. It had to be. From an Italian opera. Or an opera in Italian. Agnes might know the work. She often listened to opera on her public radio station. She closed her eyes, and the rhythmic convulsions began to subside. She folded her hands in her lap. Had Nora arranged for this? Well, of course, it would have been Rob's idea. Perhaps Josh sang professionally in addition to playing the cello. No man could be this good and keep it to himself.
(Had Agnes been wrong, she wondered now, to make Louise blind? Had she been too heartless?)
The song was too brief, and Agnes minded when suddenly it was over. She wanted to clap, but one didn't clap at weddings. She felt she needed more of the music. She had a sense of having almost reached something inside herself that needed to be got at.
Agnes blinked. The justice of the peace was pronouncing Bill and Bridget husband and wife. So soon? Was the service over? Agnes had hardly heard a word.
She knew she must compose herself now. There would be a dinner, toasts, a sense of celebration. The entire weekend had been leading to this moment. Agnes would have to say that she always cried at weddings. She ought to have warned them. How pathetic, she would add, trying to make a small joke of it. She would sidestep all questions, exclaiming over Bridget, Josh's singing, Rob's playing. How lucky they were to know such talented people!
Agnes stood, her knee stiff from having held herself so tightly. There was a small crowd already around Bill and Bridget. Jerry, tie-less, in a charcoal suit. Julie smoothing the bun at the back of her head. Harrison shaking Bill's hand. Bridget hugging Josh. Rob, standing to one side, barely containing his pride in his partner. No, Agnes thought, she must go back to her room and wash her face. Did she have any Visine in her toilet kit?
"Agnes," Harrison said.
Agnes turned, and with one tug, Harrison pulled her into him. Her face was pressed against his shirt and tie. She could smell his soap or his aftershave. He asked her no questions, for which Agnes was grateful.
Harrison held her for a long time. Agnes was aware of people moving, of voices subsiding.
Agnes drew away from Harrison. "I'm just... I don't know," she said.
"You're a mess," he said, examining her. "Where's your room?"
"Twenty- two."
"I'll walk you up there and wait for you."
"You don't have to —"
Harrison cut her off. He put his fingers under her chin and tilted her face up toward his — her unlovely, ruined face. It had been years since a man had touched her just this way.
"Agnes," Harrison said. "What's wrong? Why are you so sad?"
She wanted to tell him — oh God, she wanted to tell him — but what exactly would she say? I love a man, have always loved him, but he only loves me back sporadically with long, inexplicable gaps in between? No, that simply could not be said, not to this kind man in front of her.
"So," Jerry was saying, "here's the deal. You board a plane and take your seat in first class. After a few minutes, six Arab men get on the plane and take seats, also in first class. Let's say one of them is carrying a copy of the Koran. The question is: do you get off the plane?"
For a moment, the table, which had been noisy with two and sometimes three conversations running simultaneously, was quiet. Agnes pondered Jerry's question.
After the ceremony and the drinks that had followed, the wedding party had settled around the long table in the same private dining room as the night before. No need for place cards this evening, however. No need for Nora's careful planning. Or perhaps the very randomness of the seating had been part of Nora's planning. Though the dining room suggested a wedding, with its anemones and ivory damask linens, the mood was more relaxed than it had been earlier. A half dozen bottles of champagne had been opened. The toasts had been made. A first course of pumpkin-cranberry soup had been consumed. Agnes was drinking a delicate white wine, though she didn't know the name of it. She was hardly a connoisseur.
"I'd only notice if they were good-looking," Josh said from his end of the table, which produced a hoot from Bill, who'd been nearly levitating since the end of the service. He sat with his new wife on one side and his daughter on the other, and though the daughter had barely spoken to anyone else (and noticeably not to Bridget), Bill was the picture of a happy man. "Basking" was a word that had crossed Agnes's mind.
"I'd get off," Bridget said. "For Matt's sake. When you have a child, you can't make decisions for yourself anymore." Agnes glanced over at Matt, whose face instantly reddened with embarrassment. "But I probably wouldn't be on the plane in the first place," Bridget added, "because I'm terrified of flying. I'd look at it as a wonderful excuse to bolt."
Bridget's sister, Janice, was seated next to Matt. Bridget's mother had stayed for the drinks and toasts but would have her meal in her room, Bridget had explained. The woman's arthritis was apparently so severe she couldn't sit for long periods without pain.
"If Bridget got off, I'd go with her," Bill offered.
"Cop-out," Josh said genially.
"Anyone else?" Jerry asked. He'd shed his jacket and had his shirtsleeves rolled. Agnes wondered if he'd been preparing this question for the group all day.
"I think I'd engage one of the men in conversation," Rob said thoughtfully. "I'd ask him what he did for a living. Where he lived. And then I might base my decision on his answers and his general demeanor and how the others reacted to my talking to the man."
"Sounds sensible," Harrison said.
"I'd tell the flight attendant," Agnes said abruptly, without having given her answer much thought.
"What good would that do?" Jerry asked.
"Oh, I don't know. I guess I'd ask her if she'd noticed that six Arab men had just gotten on the plane."
"That's discrimination, right?" Jerry asked.
"Well, of course," Agnes said. "But the configuration so mirrors what happened on 9/11 that I'm not sure the notion of discrimination applies any longer."
"You wouldn't mind that you were engaging in racial profiling?" Jerry probed.
"I might mind, but being politically correct would certainly never take precedence over trying to save my life. Not to mention the lives of two hundred others. Not to mention the lives of thousands who might be at another ground zero."
"And what if the flight attendant did nothing?" Jerry asked.
Agnes thought a minute. She would already have publicly raised the question. The men on the plane might have heard Agnes and the flight attendant in discussion. "Wait a minute," she said. "You said first class, right?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, I'd stay on," Agnes announced. "If I were lucky enough to get a seat on first class — which I've never flown by the way — I certainly wouldn't give it up."
Harrison laughed, and Nora, seated next to him, smiled.
"What about you, Nora?" Jerry asked.
Their hostess had on a black lace shawl over a sleeveless dress. The s
kin of her neck and collarbones was smooth and white and unblemished. Two black pearl pendants hung from her ears. Agnes had always admired the way Nora, with little obvious fuss, could make herself look so well dressed. "I figure if my number is up, it's up," she said.
"That's it?" Jerry asked. "You wouldn't get off the plane?"
"No," she said. "No. I don't think so."
"I doubt I'd get off the plane either," Harrison offered. He lifted a bulbous glass of red wine to his face and pondered it, as if looking for the answer there. He, too, had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie.
"You're kidding," Jerry said.
"No. Good manners would initially keep me in my seat. I'd feel extremely rude getting off. I'd be thinking, too, about the hassle of missing my flight and having to get another one. Then I'd be figuring the odds. The likelihood that these six men were terrorists would be, I don't know, one in a thousand? One in ten thousand? And the odds that one of them got through security with a box cutter? One in a million? I'd be sweating bullets, but I don't think I'd get up."
"Julie?" Jerry asked, turning his head to his wife sitting beside him.
"I'd take a Xanax," she said coolly. "Two maybe."
The remark was received by the table as a joke, though Agnes was quite sure that Julie hadn't meant it as one.
"You're all crazy," Jerry said. "Me? I'm off that plane faster than a speeding bullet."
"Why?" Harrison asked.
"Even if they're all high-level executives at Schwab, six Arab men in first class three months after 9/11 puts me on red alert."
"And the racial profiling?" Harrison asked.
"I could care less about racial profiling in that situation," Jerry said. "Let's see: if I stay on the plane, I might die. If I get off the plane, I don't die. Sounds pretty simple to me."
"That might be the case even without the six Arab men," Harrison offered. "If you stay on the plane, you might die. If you get off, you won't."
"My point exactly," said Bridget. "Which is why I'm not on the plane in the first place."