“Air conditioning and everything,” Tom said, and sighed.
“Since yesterday.”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
They cooled off in the pool, and when they went back to their sun cots Sara nudged Tom and whispered to him to look at a couple who had just arrived. Tom smiled. They were a cute couple, and they might just as well have worn sandwich signs labeled “Honeymoon!” Tom and Sara looked at them with a sort of fondness and tolerance, feeling practically middle-aged.
“Hope she shook the confetti out of that swim suit,” Sara said.
The couple sat quite near them. Tom could sense how awkward they were with each other. He knew that they were in that curious climate of politeness and formality. He hoped they would come out the other side, as he and Sara had done, into that perfect and exciting accord that can be the result of a honeymoon of greatest perfection. He felt an empathy for the nervous, brand-new bridegroom, sensed the quality of the young man’s quiet desperation.
They heard the girl say, “But if it isn’t even finished yet, why do they take your money? I don’t think it’s right.”
“It’ll be okay, Marie,” the boy said.
“But it’s — sort of — well — crude. All that hammering.”
Tom wanted some way to tell them that it would be all right. If the marriage was all right, it would be all right anywhere; and they’d find that out soon enough. Too bad, he thought, that they hadn’t been married early enough to have experienced the worst of it.
And while he was considering the futility of trying to tell the new couple anything, he was enormously surprised to hear Sara take care of the whole thing.
He saw their startled faces as his Sara turned toward them and with sweetness and only a hint of condescension said clearly, “You should have been here in the old days, dears.”
