French Braid(54)

“You want to watch again?” he asked, sitting forward.

“Not really,” she said.

He sank back in his seat.

“They made me kind of sad, to tell the truth,” she said.

“Oh, yes, me too,” he said hastily.

“I guess it’s just as well there’s no movie of our wedding day.”

“But we do have photographs,” he said hopefully. “In the album.”

She was pursuing her own train of thought, though. She said, “And yet I didn’t feel like a kid, at the time. Remember how Daddy wanted us to wait a year? ‘Wait!’ I told him. ‘That makes no sense! I’m already twenty,’ I told him. ‘I’m a grown-up.’?”

“Well, I didn’t feel grown up,” Robin said. “Not on the actual day. I remember when I was all dressed and ready, I looked in the mirror and saw I’d missed a spot shaving. I didn’t even know how to shave right, I thought, so what business did I have marrying? How would I know what to do with a wife?”

“You knew enough, though,” Mercy told him, and she gave him a mischievous little dig in the ribs with her elbow.

“Oh,” he said, “I’m not so sure about that.”

“Now, now, don’t be modest.”

He made a chuckly sound.

She said, “At first I thought, Will he know how? Because I surely didn’t. And it did seem you were slow to start, somewhat.”

“That was Reverend Ailey’s doing,” Robin said.

“Pardon?”

“In our counseling session. Remember how he had us each meet separately with him before he’d marry us? And what he told me was, I should be ‘considerate.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. ‘Considerate how?’ I asked, and he said, ‘The groom should know not to rush into things on the wedding night. The bride might be feeling timid,’ he said. Said, ‘I always counsel the groom to view that first night as just a chance to get to know each other better. You don’t want to put her off,’ he said.”

Mercy laughed. She said, “You never told me that!”

“So there I was, quick-quick scrambling into my pajamas while you were changing in the bathroom. New pajamas I’d bought specially. I ducked under the covers; I folded my hands across my chest…And then you came out of the bathroom in your slinky white satin nightie.”

“And you looked away,” Mercy said. “You looked off toward the bedroom window.”

“I was trying to get control of myself,” he said.

“So I slipped into bed next to you, and I lay on my back and waited. And after a while I said, ‘Well! Here we are!’ And you said, ‘Mm-hmm,’ and went on looking out the window.”

“I was trying to figure out what Reverend Ailey meant about getting to know you better. Did he mean, like, conversationally? I should ask you about your interests or something? Or did he mean more like in a physical way, I mean a sort of working-up-to-the-main-event kind of way.”

“And that’s when I turned to you and started unbuttoning your pajamas,” Mercy said.

Now he was laughing too. He said, “You were shameless!”

“Well, I had waited so long, you see,” she said. “Up to then, I’d been so well-behaved.”

She was speaking into the crook of his neck now. She was nestling closer against him. He bent his head to kiss her, and he had started to slide one hand up her thigh when she pulled slightly away to whisper, “You want to go upstairs?”

“Okay,” he said.

In the old days, they would never have managed to wait till they got upstairs.



* * *



—

When he woke up, it was late afternoon. He could tell by the deep-yellow dust filming the windowpanes. Mercy’s side of the bed was empty, and her tossed-back sheet had a hardened look, as if she’d been gone for hours.

But then he heard footsteps downstairs, and he took heart. He got up and put on his bathrobe and his terry-cloth mules, and he padded down to the dining room. Mercy was folding clothes from a laundry basket she’d set on the table. Her hair was neatly reknotted and she was fully dressed. “Hi, sleepyhead!” she told him.

“I was out like a light,” he said. “How long have you been up?”

“Ages,” she said, waving toward the laundry as proof.

He didn’t often manage to fall asleep in the daytime. No doubt it was due to relief, he thought—the relief of having the party over and done with—and he considered telling her that but then decided not to. It might sound like a complaint. Still, the fact was that he’d been sort of tense the past couple of weeks, and now he could safely say that the whole thing had gone off without a hitch.

He sat down at the table and watched her shake out a slip and fold it into a square. “I dreamt about the Hampden apartment,” he told her.

“You did!”

“I guess it was all that talk about the past. I dreamt I was closing up the couch we used to sleep on after the girls were born, that old hide-a-bed. I was lifting up that metal bar at the foot of the mattress; I was doing that dip thing, that dipping motion where you kind of tuck the mattress down and then back till it’s folded into the couch again.”