There was a big evergreen wreath in the window of Abigail’s Fine Cheeses, and Gemma sat behind the wheel of her little Volvo, staring at it and wondering how long she could go on sitting in her car on Main Street before somebody stopped to ask her what was wrong. She’d left the rectory half an hour ago because she hadn’t been able to stand the idea of staying in it one more minute. Every time the phone rang, she wanted to scream. Every time Kelley asked her a question, she wanted to scream, too. She hated being around Kelley these days. She had hated it since the conversation they had had just before Tisha’s death, but she had begun to hate it more and more afterward. It was all mixed up. What did a philosophy of experience mean if you didn’t know what you were experiencing? She didn’t want to be near her phone. She didn’t want to be near Kelley Grey. She didn’t want to be near Jan-Mark, never mind in bed with him, where all she could remember was a hairy, boozed-out torso with sagging skin and too much flesh around the middle. She had driven out there today, before she’d come into town, and ended up parked by the side of the road, nauseated.
Abigail’s Fine Cheeses was right across the street from the Bethlehem News and Mail. The Bethlehem News and Mail was lit up more brightly than the town park and on fire with activity. The Bethlehem News and Mail was always like that, even on the day after they put out an issue. Peter Callisher was some kind of throwback to the nineteenth century, a capitalist baron with a stable of wage slaves. Either that, or they were having orgies in there. Gemma Bury thought of Tisha hinting and hinting about the points of resemblance between Tommy Hare and Timmy Hall, and found herself getting nauseated all over again.
If I go on like this I’ll never get anything done, Gemma told herself. Then she popped the door to her car and swung her legs out into the road. Main Street had been closed off to traffic at one, as it was on every day when an actual performance of the Nativity play was scheduled. Gemma didn’t have to look out for cars or worry about being crushed by a farm vehicle on its way to the Grange. She stretched a little in the cold air and shut the car door behind her. She didn’t bother to lock it because nobody but tourists ever locked anything in Bethlehem, Vermont. There were people on the street, but nobody around she knew, which was a blessing.
She crossed the street, walked down the sidewalk on that side very carefully so she wouldn’t slip on the patch of black ice that had begun to form on the surface, and then crossed the intersection that brought her to the front door of the Bethlehem News and Mail. Main Street was not quite straight. Gemma had to make a little arc to get where she was going, and when she got there and stood on the highest of the concrete steps, she could look back over her shoulder and see the park and the settings for the play as if they were on a distant stage, presented for her amusement. She knew the other place you could do that—the top floor of the Green Mountain Inn. If she’d been interested in the Nativity story, she would have rented one of those rooms and watched the spectacle from above. It was one of the worst drawbacks of living in the rectory that she had no view of the town at all.
She stamped her feet on Peter Callisher’s L. L. Bean flying-duck welcome mat, gave herself one more chance to change her mind, and then tried the door. It opened easily, in spite of the magnetic seal Peter had installed to save on heating bills and turn himself at least a light environmental Green. Gemma stepped through into the big room and looked around. Not many people were there. The paper would have been sent to the printers at noon, for distribution tomorrow. Timmy Hall was sweeping up. Amanda Ballard—whom Gemma had cordially hated from the moment they met—was filling out a form at the front desk. Cara Hutchinson was leaning against the counter and babbling. Peter was nowhere to be seen. Gemma shut the door behind her. Cold air had been pouring in around her calves.
“It was just absolutely the most wonderful thing,” Cara Hutchinson was saying, presumably to Amanda Ballard, although it was hard to tell. Amanda didn’t seem to be paying much attention. She must have been paying some, however, because Gemma could see she was agitated. Amanda was usually very careful to keep the hair over her right ear, so that the lack of earlobe and the stunted little end didn’t show, but when she got excited she forgot. She had forgotten now, and had her hair firmly behind both ears.
“You know,” Cara told her, “when I went up there today, I was half-convinced he was going to have me pose nude. I mean, he hadn’t said anything like that yesterday, but what did that mean? He might have assumed I’d understand. After all, everybody knows about artists. So I went up there and I’d absolutely made up my mind, I really had, that I was going to do it if that was what I was supposed to do. I am going away to college next year. I don’t intend to spend all of my life in some backwoods town that doesn’t understand Art. Never mind Literature. I was reading The New York Review of Books in the library the other day, and you wouldn’t believe the stares I got from practically everybody.”