Part 11 (1/2)

”It seems like bad luck not to do it this time,” he said. ”I don't want to hex the company for the next millennium. I'll just stay an hour or so. I can probably be back for dessert.”

We all nodded. Some of us smiled. The thought of Simms, stuffed full of goose and champagne and in his khakis and a crew-neck sweater, presiding over the vast, distinctly suburban holiday revels of a medical supply company was an engaging one. As if she could read our thoughts, Lila said, ”He has his tuxedo in the car. He says he'll change in the rest room at the plant.”

Simms grinned and most of us did, too. Lila did not. Neither did I. Would there be a little-used rest room in some tucked-away corner of the plant? Would a honey-haired, silky-skinned young woman with a flat upstate accent wait there for him?

I hated the thought and looked over, involuntarily, at Lila. She was looking straight ahead. I looked at Camilla. She was staring intently at Lila, as if to hold her upright with the sheer force of her gaze. I did not know if it was still going on, Simms and his women. But I knew that Lila, and the rest of us, were forever changed by it, even if most of us did not know it. Even if the center still held, there was a tiny crack now.

”Oh, Simms, who or what could be worth it?” I whispered just before Creighton Mills, more ma.s.sive and commanding now, but still in his beach clothes, set down his sherry gla.s.s and moved to stand before the fireplace. The firelight leaped on his gla.s.ses and the cross on his chest, and he wore his clerical collar, but despite these he was still simply one of us.

”Church is in session,” he said, smiling. ”Lila, Simms. Will you stand together before me, Simms on my right hand and Lila on my left?”

They moved into their positions. From behind them I could not see their faces, but I could see the faces of those of us who could. Camilla watched, perfectly still, her beautiful face neutral. Henry smiled in simple happiness; pure Henry. Fairlie, beside him, her face smoothed into girlhood by the firelight, reached for his hand. Camilla's eyes moved briefly to them, and then back to Lila and Simms.

” 'Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of G.o.d, and in the face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony...' ”

Creighton Mills's beautiful voice and the flickering firelight were hypnotic. Our days and nights in the place seemed to unroll before me like a strip of film. The Scrubs rus.h.i.+ng me into the surf on my first day here, laughing. Fairlie and Henry doing the s.h.a.g ankle deep in the rus.h.i.+ng green and white water, to show me how it was done. Henry and Lewis heading out with their surf-casting gear while Fairlie, stretched out in the hammock, said, ”Don't even think of bringing those fish in here.” Camilla, alone and far down the beach with Boy and Girl. Lewis and me, naked in the phosph.o.r.escent surf, on fire with joy in our every atom. Charlie bellowing with glee as a long flight of pelicans grazed the water just beyond him, ”G.o.dd.a.m.n! It's the loan committee!”

Oh, Charlie.

All of us, on my first night, hands on the photo of the Scrubs on the first day they had come into the house as owners, swearing to share our lives forever.

Lila and Simms holding hands as they climbed the stairs from the beach at twilight, their heads bent together, talking earnestly. Talking, talking...

” '...let him now speak or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.' ”

There was a silence; even the fire seemed to hush its breathing, and then Creighton said, ” 'Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together after G.o.d's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?' ”

”I will,” Simms said. I could scarcely hear him.

When it was her turn, Lila's voice rang out as bright and hard as a diamond.

”I will.”

” 'Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?' ” Creigh said.

Camilla got up from the rocker beside the fire, and stood, bent and fragile.

”I do,” she said.

It was an enormously moving moment. Tears glimmered in more than one pair of eyes. In my mind I saw Camilla as she had been on the day I had met her, on the beach under the faded umbrella that we still used, glowing and beautiful, holding out her arms to me, saying to Lewis, ”Well, Lewis, you finally got it right.”

I did not really hear the rest of the ceremony, nor see it clearly. Tears blinded my eyes and the past in this place roared in my ears. I heard Simms say ” '...to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to G.o.d's holy ordinance, and thereto I plight thee my troth.' ”

You'd better, you son of a b.i.t.c.h, I thought fiercely.

When Lila repeated the vow, her voice was nearly inaudible.

Simms slipped a ring onto her finger. It was an enormous sapphire, almost the color of Lila's eyes, and it looked like a great bubble of trapped seawater on her ring finger. She looked at it, and then up at Simms, a perplexed look, as if she had expected to see the small Tiffany solitaire with which he had married her. I wondered how much it had cost. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

” '...Those whom G.o.d hath joined together let no man put asunder,' ” Creighton Mills said. Camilla was still in her fireside chair. Her eyes burned into the side of Simms's face. He did not turn. How could he not have felt those eyes?

” '...I p.r.o.nounce that they are man and wife,' ” Creigh said. And instead of the traditional benediction, he paused for a moment, and then said, ” 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.' ”

”Amen,” we all whispered. We looked around at one another. Creigh Mills caught the looks and grinned and said, ”It's the old collect for aid against perils. Part of the traditional evening prayer. Lila asked for it. Come to that, it's not such a bad way to end a marriage ceremony, especially in this new millennium. I think I'll incorporate it in the future. Beats prenuptial counseling by a country mile.”

Simms bent his face to Lila's and kissed her. Both their eyes were closed. When they turned to face us, smiling, I saw that both their faces were wet.

A little silence held for a moment, and then Lewis said, ”That ought to last you guys for a while. Let the games begin!”

We ate our feast then, murmuring compliments over the oyster-and-pecan dressing, drinking up all of the excellent Chilean wine that Lewis had brought, jibing at Fairlie's gelatinous goose, oozing fat and port and mired in prunes.

”Well, you should have known better,” she said lazily. Fairlie was no better a cook now than the day I had met her. ”Next year just a.s.sign me the booze. I can't go wrong. You guys will drink anything.”

For the first time that I could remember, our beach house Christmas was an edgy and tenuous one. Everyone, not just I, seemed to feel the frisson, though I am not sure most of us could name it. Simms left just after the meal, and his absence seemed to leave a fissure in the skin of the evening that no one was eager to step over. Lila showed her new ring around, smiling at the compliments, but her eyes went every now and then to the door. Henry and Fairlie got up immediately and began to stack dishes in the pitted old white enamel sink, even though, over the years, Fairlie had been known to take long walks in bone-chilling cold or pouring rain to avoid the moment. Henry and I began to gather crumpled paper and ribbon. Camilla sat still, watching us, and then said, ”Leave it, please. Everybody just sit down. I'm coming back out in the morning; I'll do it then. Right now I just want my people around me.”

”You're coming out here on Christmas Eve?” I said worriedly. We were used to her habit of spending solitary hours and even days here, but surely now, at this season of homing...

”The children and grandchildren aren't getting in until tomorrow afternoon,” she said. ”I think little Camilla is dancing in the Nutcracker for the four-millionth time tonight. Just as well. My cousin Mary Lee is having one of her unspeakable brunches at noon, and I don't have to go to the airport until four. I'll do scalloped oysters for just us tomorrow night, and Lydia is having everybody for Christmas dinner. Thank G.o.d it's at five. That will give us all time to get drunk. I'd love the time out here alone in the morning....”

Camilla rarely drank, but I knew that her battalion-like extended family harbored a few imbibers. Most Charlestonians's did. Lewis had said that when he was a child he had thought that carrying Uncle Joe Henry Cannon upstairs to sleep off the punch was as much a ritual of Christmas as the tree and the carols.

We laughed.

But still...but still. Tonight had always been our own Christmas ritual. None of us had ever come here on the actual festival days.

Lewis and I took the sacks of trash out to stow them in the big receptacle under the house. Everyone else settled themselves back around the fire and Camilla. The smell of perking coffee followed us out the kitchen door and into the cold. I looked back. It was a Norman Rockwell scene: the whispering fire, and the tree lights on the faces of old friends, drawn close at this season. But it felt like just that, an ill.u.s.tration.

We stood in the cold sand behind the house, holding each other close. I smelled the mothy wool of his sweater and felt his breath warm on my hair. We did not speak for a while, nor did we move to go back in. Overhead, the stars wheeled and burned, and the surf breathed on the beach.

”What's the matter with tonight?” I said into his shoulder. ”I feel like when we go back upstairs it will all be different. It won't be us sitting there. Nothing will even look the same.”

” 'The times, they are a-changin',' ” he said. ”Things aren't the same, Anny. They haven't been for a long time. They started changing when Charlie died. You just didn't want to notice.”

I felt colder than I should have, there in the circle of his arms. I half-remembered studying entropy in physics in college. What had I remembered of it? That it was the nature of an organism to lose its structure and drift toward chaos? Was that happening to us, so slowly that we did not even comprehend it? That the ent.i.ty that was us and the house and the beach was moving molecularly outward, like a dying star?

But there's a center still, I thought. Just like Camilla said. Maybe it's a little looser now, maybe a little flaccid. After all, we've lost Charlie, lost the sense of Lila-and-Simms, lost other things. But they were within the realm of the normal abrasions of time and life; they might hurt, but were not mortal. I was willing to admit that the whole organism that we were together could alter. That it might implode was more than I could contemplate.

”But here we are still,” I said fiercely. My lips chafed against his sweater. ”Still here, going into an entirely new millennium together. So many years, for most of you. After so long, after all we've lived through, what could possibly change in any of our lives that would move the...the focus of us anywhere else but to us and the house? I mean us, the Scrubs. I'm not talking about our lives outside.”

”I've often wondered just what it was that held us together,” Lewis said, hugging me hard. ”It's not exactly normal, after all; not many school-day alliances last, not really. Did you know that some folks in Charleston call us the Lost Tribe, and the house Never-Never-Land? By all rights we should be just seeing each other at parties and weddings and funerals, and waving to each other at Sunday lunch at the yacht club. But you're right. Here we are still. I think everybody's feeling a little strange these days, not just us. Like things are beginning to change, to end. It must be millennium fever.”

”But we really haven't changed much,” I said stubbornly, feeling on the brink of peevish, childish tears.

”Look back, you'll see,” he said, and kissed me on the forehead, and we dashed up the steps and back into the warm, dim room.

The strangeness persisted during coffee. People stole surrept.i.tious glances at their watches, and cut their eyes worriedly toward Camilla. But she sat as serene as a Buddha, wrapped in the scurrilous old wedding ring quilt that we used for a picnic blanket, staring into the fire and rocking. She was smiling slightly.

She looked over at me.

”Have you been out of town?” she said. ”I haven't seen you for three or four mornings now, and your car hasn't been there. I was afraid you were stuck somewhere awful like Scranton and might miss Christmas.”