Summer is late

 

scott yarbrough

John Singer Sargent could have painted the wedding. The late afternoon light trickled softly through the trellised glass veranda doors and washed through the wedding party to splatter silently apart on the guests. The non-denominational minister made some comments about compromise that could have been borrowed from a line of greeting cards. They hadn’t written their own vows, thank God. Before we knew it, they were kissing and we were following them out, Savannah on my arm, her teeth shining like a lighthouse beacon on a foggy evening.

 We were told to cluster at the base of the stairs while a long side-room was cleared of guests for the pictures. The bride and groom and family pictures had been taken before the wedding, so it wasn’t supposed to take long. The whole procedure was made less painful when one of the bridesmaids left and returned in a few minutes with her arms full, followed by a similarly burdened member of the catering crew. Between the two of them, they were carrying a bottle of gin, a bottle of bourbon, and a bottle of tonic along with cups and ice. “Y’all Yankees just don’t know how to get things going,” she said after a minute. It struck me as odd that so many of the bridesmaids were Jay’s friends from the south and so many of the groomsmen were Debra’s from New York. We kept cracking jokes and making each other laugh until the stormtrooper photographer told us all to shut up.

 I found Miriam not long after the pictures were done. She was chatting with a woman who reminded me of a young Mary Tyler Moore with black plastic, narrow-framed glasses. “Well, they’re married,” I said.

 Miriam nodded. “Yes indeed.”  She introduced me to the woman she’d been speaking to, who was named, coincidentally enough, Mary. After explaining that Mary worked in textbook publishing, Miriam said, “I need a new drink,” and walked toward the bar. I noticed her white wine was half full.

 Mary and I discussed the latest literary enfant terrible until I excused myself to speak to Jay’s father. After a couple more social moments and a refill of my gin and tonic, I saw Miriam on the veranda. I started to walk over; before I could meet her there, she’d re-entered the main building and joined a knot of what seemed to be Carolinians. I was pretty sure she’d seen me.

 So instead of chasing her down I let myself be collared by Mike and Mindy from the office. I tolerated the conversation until they started asking about a particular judge’s issues with probable cause searches and decided I’d had enough. The problem with attending a colleague’s wedding was that it seemed almost everyone there was an attorney and wanted to talk shop. You’d pick up your drink at the back and wander into a conversation and hear “tort” or “stipulate.”  You’d step another way and hear “due process” or “discovery.”  I eventually ended up comparing notes with Jay’s cousin from South Carolina, a tall, swaggering man named Chip who designed lawn treatment systems for golf courses. Chip slurped noisily at a screwdriver while we talked about New York. He loved Indian food and went on and on about some place he’d found in Brooklyn.

 I saw Miriam walk by and I waved and smiled and tried to invite her over with a gesture, but she ignored me. I excused myself from Chip and followed her.

 I can’t speak for all husbands and wives, but my moods are slow, tidal, trickling in little by little until they reach a peak before slowly ebbing away. Usually, Miriam’s were more sudden, like a summer storm that surges up out of nowhere and breaks, catching you unaware in its downpour. This timed it seemed like an entire weather system was moving through.

 I finally caught up to her in the antechamber near the large front doors. She was staring at the mound of white and silver-wrapped gifts atop a table along one wall. “Okay,” I said. “What’s going on?”

 She ignored me and I stood there for a time. The drink was sweating in my hand, cold water softly dropping to the tiled floor. Then she said, “It’s amazing, all that they’ll give you.”

 I shrugged. “How many blenders and bread-makers can you actually use?”

 She shrugged. “Well, we never had a chance to find out, did we?”

 “I guess not.”

 Two large frames were set up on the farthest table; each was a collaged collection of photos of Jay and Debra, respectively, as kids. Him in a little league outfit, her as ballerina. Prom pictures for both, birthday parties, that kind of thing.

 Miriam lingered in front of the pictures for a minute. “Do you ever think that maybe we should have adopted?”

 “We’ve been over this before.”

 “But don’t you wonder?”

 I sipped my drink. “No,” I said.

 “Not just about—about adopting. But about everything.”

 “Miriam, what are you doing here?  What is this?”

 She made a loud sighing noise and looked at the gifts again.  I tried to take her arm but she shook me off. Her eyes had the flat look I’ve seen them get sometimes. More like gunmetal than blue.

 “I mean, don’t you ever think ‘what if’?” she said. “What if you’d gone to art school?  What if I’d stayed abroad?  What if we’d just taken our time?  What if we’d waited until we were really grownups?  I mean, Christ, I was twenty-three.”

 “No,” I told her, not knowing whether I was lying or not. “I don’t think about all that.”

 She toyed with a bow on one of the presents. Tinny bells jingled as she plucked at it. “Sometimes when I get home late and you’re playing tennis or off on a work trip, I walk around and I count things. Furniture, antiques, art prints, books, computers, even dog toys.”

 She walked back to the arched doorway and stared at the other guests in the main room while I stood there in my rental tuxedo, one hand holding the drink, the other in my pocket. I realized that my face felt hot and that a slow bead of sweat was trickling down my back.

 “And then sometimes it’s so quiet I think I’ll go crazy. Sometimes.”

 There were things I could have told her. The woman after the Federal Appeals meeting in D.C. who touched my thigh under the table and who scrawled her room number on a Marriott napkin and told me to be there at ten, but instead I watched television and raided the mini-bar, watching The Matrix on the pay-channels although my face felt flushed and my heart beat a jackhammer rhythm at the idea of it.

 Or about how when I met strangers on airplanes or trips I’d sometimes invent stories about kids we’d had, lauding them with imaginary triumphs, impugning them over illusory misdeeds. Once I went so far as to show a Federal Judge in Albany a picture of our nephew Sam and told a story about my imaginary son’s problems in tennis returning serves with any spin on them.

 I watched her as she walked back into the main hall, and there are other things I thought of and did not do: I did not leave her the keys and take a cab to the hotel. I didn’t seek out Savannah and find out whether her husband had made the trip. I did not go straight to the bar and toss back three or four drinks in a row or pick a fight with someone. I didn’t follow Miriam out onto the floor and confront her. I am not the kind of man who does such things. Sometimes I wish I was.

 Instead, I walked outside and looked at the reds and purples of the sunset. I took off the clip and strap bowtie and put it in my pocket. I took deep breaths and watched the kids who, grown tired of the wedding, had wandered to the banks and bluffs overlooking the river and stood tossing rocks, sticks, and clumps of mud down into the water, watching them splash home with satisfaction.

 The clouds spiraled in the high winds and the sun reflected red and orange from the river as the ripples from the children’s rain of debris softly echoed across the current. I felt cooler and thought of the first time I saw Miriam. At Syracuse, my first year in law school, the first big snow of the year. I remembered a wrinkled gray blanket sky unraveled into soft fleecy snow that collected on car roofs and lawns and finally the streets themselves, building over one night and then the next into deep doorway drifts and whipped marshmallow fields.

 She was on the quad, the large domed chapel behind her, walking with her friend Alison. I was out wandering around, trying to decide whether to stick out law school or to take off at the end of the semester. I saw the two of them, and then I saw Miriam hit a patch of ice so that suddenly both her feet slipped from under her and she landed on her back in the glistening snow, arms flung wide. I remembered her hair in her face and her friend trying to help her up and falling next to her. And I remembered how her laugh sang out into the sunlight and the bright December day as the snow crunched beneath my feet, the air sharp in my chest, and I knew then, despite all the admonitions of reason, of experience, that I could love this woman for the rest of my life. This was the picture I painted for myself: her lying in the snow, her laugh ringing through the clear afternoon, her hair in her face, her arms thrown wide. This was the picture I painted for myself and kept as my talisman always, to keep my head above the rippling waves and currents of misfortune and melancholy, and it was the picture I kept still. August couldn’t last forever.