That did make sense. In fact, that quite suddenly made perfect sense, and it seemed a light had flared in his mind by which he could read his strange past with Celeste clearly for the first time.
“It’s probably like a nightmare for her,” said Laura. “Reuben, money confuses people. It does. That’s a fact of life. It confuses people. Your family has plenty. They don’t act like they do. Your mom works all the time, like a driven self-made woman, your father is an idealist and a poet who wears clothes he bought twenty years ago, and Jim comes off the same way, otherworldly, spiritual, driving himself to minister to others so that he’s perpetually exhausted. Your dad’s always struggling with his old work, or taking notes in a book as if he had to give a lecture in the morning. Your mother rarely gets a good night’s sleep. And you come across a bit that way too, working night and day on your essays for Billie at the paper, pounding away on the computer till you practically fall asleep over it. But you do have money, and really no idea what it’s like to be without it.”
“You’re right,” he said.
“Look, she didn’t plan it. She just didn’t know what she was doing. But why did you ever listen to her, that’s what I’ve always wondered?”
That rang a bell with him. Marchent had said something so very similar to him but now the words escaped him—something about the mystery being that he listened to those who criticized him and cut him down. And his family certainly did a lot of that and had done a lot of that before Celeste ever joined the chorus. Maybe they’d unwittingly invited Celeste to join the chorus. Maybe that had been her ticket in, though he and Celeste had never realized it. Once she’d taken up the relentless scrutiny of Sunshine Boy, Baby Boy, Little Boy—well, it was established that she spoke the common language. Maybe he’d felt comfortable with her for speaking that common language.
“In the beginning, I liked her a lot,” he said in a small voice. “I had fun with her. I thought she was pretty. I liked that she was a smart. I like smart women. I liked being around her and then things started to go wrong. I should have spoken up. I should have told her how uncomfortable I was.”
“And you would have in time,” said Laura. “It would have ended in some completely natural and inevitable way, if you had never gone to Nideck Point. It had ended in a natural way. Except now there’s the baby.”
He didn’t answer.
The restaurant was becoming crowded, but they sat in a little zone of privacy at their corner table, the lights dim, and the heavy draperies and framed pictures around them absorbing the noise.
“Is it so difficult for someone to love me?” he asked.
“You know it’s not,” she said smiling. “You’re easy to love, so easy that just about everybody who meets you loves you. Felix adores you. Thibault loves you. They all love you. Even Stuart loves you! And Stuart’s a kid who’s supposed to be in love with himself at his age. You’re a nice guy, Reuben. You’re a nice and gentle guy. And I’ll tell you something else. You have a kind of humility, Reuben. And some people just don’t understand humility. You have a way of opening yourself to what interests you, opening yourself to other people, like Felix, for instance, in order to learn from them. You can sit at the table at Nideck Point and listen calmly to all the elders of the Morphenkinder tribe with amazing humility. Stuart can’t do it. Stuart has to flex his muscles, challenge, tease, provoke. But you just keep on learning. Unfortunately some people think that’s weakness.”
“That’s too generous an assessment, Laura,” he said. He smiled. “But I like the way you see things.”
Laura sighed. “Reuben, Celeste is not really part of you now. She can’t be.” Laura frowned, her mouth twisting a little as though she found this particularly painful to say, and then she went on in a low voice. “She’ll live and die like other human beings. Her road will always be hard. She’ll soon discover how little money will change it for her. You can afford to forgive her all this, can’t you?”
He stared into Laura’s soft blue eyes.
“Please?” she said. “She’ll never know for one moment the kind of life that’s opening now for both of us.”
He knew what these words meant grammatically, intelligently, but he didn’t know what they meant emotionally. But he did know what he had to do.
He picked up his phone, and he texted Celeste. He wrote in full and complete words, “I’m sorry. Truly I am. I want you to be happy. When this is all over, I want you to be happy.”
What a cowardly thing to do, to tap it into his iPhone when he couldn’t say it to her in person.
But in a moment, she’d answered. The words appeared: “You’ll always be my Sunshine Boy.”
He stared at the iPhone stonily and then he deleted the message.
They left San Francisco by three thirty, easily beating the evening traffic.
But it was slow go in the rain, and Reuben didn’t reach Nideck point till after ten.
Once again, the cheerful Christmas lights of the house immediately comforted him. Every window on the three-story façade was now neatly etched with the lights, and the terrace was in good order. The tents were folded and to one side at the ocean end. And a large, well-built stable had taken shape around the Holy Family. The statues themselves had been hastily arranged under it, and though there was no hay or greenery yet, the beauty of the statues was impressive. They appeared stoical and gracious as they stood there under the shadowy wooden roof, faces glinting with the lights from the house, the cold darkness hovering around them. Reuben had some hint of how wonderful the Christmas party was going to be.
His biggest shock came, however, when he looked to the right of the house, as he faced it, and saw the myriad twinkling lights that had transformed the oak forest.
“Winterfest!” he whispered.
If it hadn’t been so wet and cold, he would have gone walking there. He couldn’t wait to do that, walk there. He wandered around the right side of the house, his feet crunching in the gravel of the drive, and saw that wood-chip mulch had been spread out thickly under the trees, and the festooned lights and the softly illuminated mulch paths went on seemingly forever.
Actually he had no idea how far the oak forest continued to the east. He and Laura had many times walked in it but never to the farthest eastern boundary. And the scope of this undertaking, this lighting of the forest in honor of the darkest days of the year, left him kind of breathless.