Augusta Played by Kelly Cherry Page A

when he saw you.”
    This sobered her up. “The whole hotel will know,” she said. “You were still dressed.”
    â€œWhat has that got to do with it?” he asked, puzzled.
    â€œWell,” she said, “well… I don’t know how to explain it, but it has a lot to do with it. It’s so…unequal, somehow.”
    â€œYou’re not in North Carolina,” he said. “Nobody’s going to be shocked. We were only doing what you’re expected to do in hotels. You can guess what goes on in the other rooms.”
    â€œBut they aren’t bridal suites.”
    Norman was beginning to feel beleaguered, and he did not quite understand why this should be so, particularly on his wedding day. Holding himself in with the last of his patience, he took one more stab at getting through to Gus. She was supposed to be a fairly rational person; she was supposed to be straightforward, as girls went. How could the simple process of becoming a bride scramble a woman’s brains beyond recognition?
    â€œGus,” he said, “that is all the more reason they won’t be shocked to hear that you took your clothes off in this room.”
    â€œIt’s not the same thing,” Gus said, wistfully. “For you to be dressed and me not is almost decadent. You can tell that by the layout of the bathrooms. We weren’t supposed to start making love the minute we walked through the door.”
    Norman flung himself on the settee and tried to think. It seemed to him that lately he was thinking more and enjoying it less.
    There, on the coffee table in front of him, was the champagne.
    â€œI guess we could have a glass of champagne,” he said. “If I can get the cork off.” He was half afraid to try.
    But the cork came off beautifully, and Norman managed to pour the champagne into the chilled glasses successfully, and that made him begin to feel better, and after a while he called room service and ordered Chateaubriand. Unfortunately, the radiator went on the blink, and the hotel had to send up a man to fix it because the room was growing cold, and he, the man, came up with the food. He talked all during dinner. He directed all of his observations, which were chiefly about the weather, the plumbing, hippies, and, for some reason, Howard Hughes, to Norman, man to man, dumping Gus conversationally, so that she felt like a dangling participle. She kept looking at him while he was talking—he seemed to think it was all right for a woman to look at him—trying to determine whether he had heard about their contretemps, but she couldn’t decide yes or no. After he left, the radiator resumed its comfortable hissing, and the room grew warm again, as if someone had spread an invisible blanket over the settee and coffee table and chairs and carpet. She watched a late movie while Norman read the newspaper which the maintenance man had left behind, and when the screen said THE END, she went to the window and drew the heavy draperies wide open. It was snowing. The flakes were as large and soft as cotton balls. Illumined by the street light, snow edging the sill looked like lace; falling against the traffic lights, it looked like colored sugar—spun sugar, because it was spun in the sky by the winter wind and spiraled downward in a vast and lovely confusion.
    â€œI packed a nightgown for you,” Norman said, behind her.
    â€œI saw.”
    â€œIt’s getting late.” He was proceeding cautiously, testing gently, wishing he could read her mood in the way she stood. Her hair was so close to his mouth that it seemed it might leap to his tongue, like nylon to a metal comb. It was as if her whole body was breathing, and he wanted to inhale every inch of it. “Do you want me to meet you in bed, as planned by the architect?”
    She nodded, not yet quite ready to shatter her mood of snow, but when they were both in the big bed in the other room, she whispered,