Seating Arrangements
Seating Arrangements
Maggie Shipstead
A New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize, this ebook special edition contains exclusive bonus content.The Van Meters have gathered at their family retreat on the New England island of Waskeke to celebrate the marriage of daughter Daphne to an impeccably appropriate young man. The weekend is full of lobster and champagne, salt air and practiced bonhomie, but long-buried discontent and simmering lust seep through the cracks in the revelry.Winn Van Meter, father-of-the-bride, has spent his life following the rules of the east coast upper crust, but now, just shy of his sixtieth birthday, he must finally confront his failings, his desires, and his own humanity.This ebook edition contains an extended extract of Maggie Shipstead’s second novel, Astonish Me.
About the Author (#ulink_028bd6fd-22b8-5253-ad9d-498a867c8017)
Maggie Shipstead graduated from Harvard in 2005 and earned an M.F.A at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was also a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Seating Arrangements is her first novel and was awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2012, the largest award in the world for writers under 30. She was also awarded the LA Times Book Award for First Fiction. She lives in California.
About the Book (#ulink_da0afe63-bb3f-5ac7-afed-25db8ad59b1a)
The Van Meters have gathered at their family retreat on the New England island of Waskeke to celebrate the marriage of daughter Daphne to an impeccably appropriate young man. The weekend is full of lobster and champagne, salt air and practiced bonhomie, but long-buried discontent and simmering lust seep through the cracks in the revelry.
Winn Van Meter, father-of-the-bride, has spent his life following the rules of the east coast upper crust, but now, just shy of his sixtieth birthday, he must finally confront his failings, his desires, and his own humanity.
Praise for Seating Arrangements (#ulink_0dd22ba9-472e-54d1-88ea-6a58cb324f2b)
‘Irresistible … her prose is joyously good’
DAILY MAIL
‘A ferociously clever comedy of manners’
GUARDIAN
‘A wise, sophisticated and funny novel about family, fidelity, class and crisis’
MARIE CLAIRE
‘Well-observed, hilarious, yet moving’
WOMAN & HOME
‘Definitely one to watch’
GRAZIA
‘Maggie Shipstead is an outrageously gifted writer’
Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
‘Startling beauty’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Seating Arrangements
Maggie Shipstead
Copyright (#ulink_a8475aa0-7e6a-5744-9429-f3d4e9ed323a)
The Borough Press
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2012
Copyright © Maggie Shipstead 2012
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013. Designed by Stuart Bache.
Maggie Shipstead asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
‘The Waste Land’ taken from The Waste Land and Other Poems © Estate of T.S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007467730
Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007425235
Version: 2015-08-03
To my parents, Patrick and Susan,
pillars of everything
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
T. S. ELIOT, “The Waste Land”
Contents
Cover (#ub5dd7bc4-b224-5fb3-a4b9-d1020b36205e)
About the Author (#u99621ce6-8607-5590-b6c2-f1b70d282a5c)
About the Book (#uda5236de-e6da-5e2a-bfc5-f3302e2a5926)
Praise for Seating Arrangements (#uf1eb5439-2ca2-544e-9b2b-f9f538448378)
Title Page
Copyright (#ulink_c25003c8-00f1-51f3-a560-cb3182159d91)
Dedication
Epigraph
Thursday
One · The Castle of the Maidens
Two · The Water Bearer
Three · Seating Arrangements
Four · Twenty Lobsters
Five · The White Stone House
Six · Your Shadow at Evening
Seven · The Serpent in the Laundry
Eight · A Party Ends
Friday
Nine · Snakes and Ladders
Ten · More than One Fish, More than One Sea
Eleven · Flesh Wounds
Twelve · Fortunate Son
Thirteen · A Centaur
Fourteen · The Sun Goes over the Yardarm
Fifteen · Raise Your Glass
Sixteen · A Weather Vane
Seventeen · The Maimed King
Saturday
Eighteen · The Ouroboros
Acknowledgments
Read on for an exclusive extract from Maggie Shipstead’s new novel (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday (#ulink_2935cfb2-32d6-5ca7-8868-8f432e1e7cba)
One · The Castle of the Maidens (#ulink_d261028b-8065-5720-b7bd-293385b18e35)
By Sunday the wedding would be over, and for that Winn Van Meter was grateful. It was Thursday. He woke early, alone in his Connecticut house, a few late stars still burning above the treetops. His wife and two daughters were already on Waskeke, in the island house, and as he came swimming up out of sleep, he thought of them in their beds there: Biddy keeping to her side, his daughters’ hair fanned over their pillows. But first he thought of a different girl (or barely thought of her—she was a bubble bursting on the surface of a dream) who was also asleep on Waskeke. She would be in one of the brass guest beds up on the third floor, under the eaves; she was one of his daughter’s bridesmaids.
Most mornings, Winn’s entries into the waking world were prompt, his torso canting up from the sheets like the mast of a righted sailboat, but on this day he turned off his alarm clock before it could ring and stretched his limbs out to the bed’s four corners. The room was silent, purple, and dim. By nature, he disapproved of lying around. Lost time could not be regained nor missed mornings stored up for later use. Each day was a platform for accomplishment. Up with the sun, he had told his daughters when they were children, whipping off their covers with a flourish and exposing them lying curled like shrimp on their mattresses. Now Daphne was a bride (a pregnant bride, no point in pretending otherwise) and Livia, her younger sister, the maid of honor. The girls and their mother were spending the whole week on the island with an ever-multiplying bunch of bridesmaids and relatives and future in-laws, but he had decided he could not manage so much time away from work. Which was true enough. A whole week on the matrimonial front lines would be intolerable, and furthermore, he had no wish to confirm that the bank would rumble on without him, his absence scarcely noticed except by the pin-striped young sharks who had begun circling his desk with growing determination.
He switched on the lamp. The windows went black, the room yellow. His jaundiced reflection erased the stars and trees, and he felt a twinge of regret at how lamplight obliterated the predawn world, turning it not into day but night. Still, he prided himself on being a practical person, not a poetic soul vulnerable to starlight and sleep fuzz, and he reached for his glasses and swung his feet to the floor. Before going to bed he had laid out his traveling clothes, and when he emerged from the shower, freshly shaven and smelling of bay rum, he dressed efficiently and trotted downstairs, flipping on more lights as he went. He had packed Biddy’s Grand Cherokee the night before, fitting everything together with geometric precision: all the items forgotten and requested by the women, plus bags and boxes of groceries, clothes for himself, and sundry wedding odds and ends. While the coffee brewed, he went outside with the inventory he was keeping on a yellow legal pad and began his final check. He rifled through a row of grocery bags in the backseat and opened the driver’s door to check for his phone charger, his road atlas—even though he could drive the route with his eyes closed—and a roll of quarters, crossing each off the list in turn. Garment bags and duffels stuffed to fatness made a bulwark in the back, and he had to stand on tiptoe and lean into the narrow pocket of air between them and the roof to confirm the presence in the middle of it all of a glossy white box the size of a child’s coffin that held Daphne’s wedding dress.
“Don’t forget the dress, Daddy,” the answering machine had warned in his daughter’s voice the previous night. “Here, Mom wants to say something.”
“Don’t forget the dress, Winn,” said Biddy.
“I won’t forget the damn dress,” Winn had told the plastic box.
He crossed “Dress” off the list and slammed the back hatch. Birds were calling, and yellow light bled through the morning haze, touching the grassy undulations and low stone wall of his neighbor’s estate. Strolling down the driveway to retrieve his newspaper from a puddle, he noticed a few stones that had fallen from the wall onto the shoulder of the road, and he crossed over to restore them, shaking droplets from the Journal’s plastic sack as he went. The hollow sound of stone on stone was pleasant, and when the repair was done, he stood for a minute stretching his back and admiring the neat Yankee face of his house. Nothing flashy and new would ever tempt him away from this quiet neighborhood inhabited by quality people; the houses might be large, but they were tastefully shrouded by trees, and many, like his, were full of thin carpets and creaking, aristocratic floors.
His Connecticut house was home, and his house on Waskeke was also home but a home that was familiar without losing its novelty, the way he imagined he might feel about a long-term mistress. Waskeke was the great refuge of his life, where his family was most sturdy and harmonious. To have all these people, these wedding guests, invading his private domain rankled him, though he could scarcely have forbidden Daphne from marrying on the island. She would have argued that the island was her island, too, and she would have said Waskeke’s pleasures should be shared. He wished that the ferry could take him back into a world where the girls were still children and just the four of them would be on Waskeke. The problem was not that he wasn’t pleased for Daphne (he was) or that he did not appreciate the ceremonial importance of handing her into another man’s keeping (he did). He would carry out his role gladly, but the weekend, now surveyed from its near edge, felt daunting, not a straightforward exercise in familial peacekeeping and obligatory cheer but a treacherous puzzle, full of opportunities for the wrong thing to be said or done.
HE DROVE NORTH along leafy roads, past brick and clapboard towns stacked on hillsides above crowded harbors. The morning was bright and yellow, the car scented with coffee and a trace of Biddy’s perfume. Freight trains slid across trestle bridges; distant jetties reached like arms into the sea. Pale rainbows of sunlight turned circles across the windshield. For Winn, the difficulty of reaching Waskeke was part of its appeal. Unless forced by pressures of time or family, he never flew. The slowness of the drive and ferry crossing made the journey more meaningful, the island more remote. Back when the girls were young and querulous and prone to carsickness, the drive was an annual catastrophe, beset by traffic jams, mix-ups about ferry reservations, malevolent highway patrolmen, and Biddy’s inevitable realization after hours on the road that she had forgotten the keys to the house or medication for one of the girls or Winn’s tennis racquet. Winn had glowered and barked and driven with the grim urgency of a mad coachman galloping them all to hell, all the while knowing that the misery of the trip would sweeten the moment of arrival, that when he crossed the threshold of his house, he would be as grateful as a pilgrim passing through the gates of the Celestial City.
Arriving at the ferry dock an hour early, exactly as planned, he waited in a line of cars at a gangway that led to nothing: open water and Waskeke somewhere over the horizon. Idly, he rolled down the window and watched gulls promenade on the wharves. The harbor had a carnival smell of popcorn and fried clams. When he was a child, for a week in the summer his father would leave the chauffeur at home in Boston and drive Winn down to the Cape himself (such a novelty to see his father behind the wheel of a car). The ferry back then was the old-fashioned, open-decked kind that you had to drive onto backward, and Winn had thrilled at the precarious process even though his father, who might have played up the drama, reversed the car up the narrow ramp with indifferent expertise. They had owned a small place on Waskeke, nothing grand like the Boston house, just a cottage on the edge of a marsh where the fishing was good. But the cottage had been sold when Winn was at Harvard and torn down sometime later to make room for a big new house that belonged to someone else.
The ferry docked with loud clanging and winching and off-loaded a flood of people and vehicles. Some were islanders on mainland shopping expeditions, but most were tourists headed home. Winn was pleased to see them go even if more were always arriving. A worker in navy blue coveralls waved him up the gangway into the briny, iron-smelling hold, and another pointed him into a narrow alley between two lumber trucks. He checked twice to be sure the Cherokee was locked and then climbed to the top deck to observe the leaving, which was as it always was—first the ship’s whistle and then the slow recession of the harbor’s jumbled, shingled buildings and the boat basin’s forest of naked masts. Birds and their shadows skimmed the whitecaps. Though he never wished to indulge in nostalgia, Winn would not have been surprised to see shades of himself stretching down the railing: the boy beside his father, the collegian nipping from a flask passed among his friends, the bachelor with a series of dimly recalled women, the honeymooner, the young father holding one small girl and then two. He had been eight when his father first brought him across, and now he was fifty-nine. A phantom armada of memory ships chugged around him, crewed by his outgrown selves. But the water, as he stared down over the rail, looked like all other water; he might have been anywhere, on the Bering Strait or the river Styx. Without fail, every time he was out on the ocean, the same vision came to him: of himself lost overboard, floundering at the top of that unholy depth.
As the crossing always had the same beginning, so, after two hours, it always had the same end—a gray strip of land separating the blue from the blue, then lighthouses, steeples, docks, jetties reaching for their mainland twins. There was a little lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor where by tradition passengers on outbound ferries tossed pennies off the side. Livia had said as a child that the sea floor there must look like the scales of a fish, and, ever since, the same thought had come to Winn as he passed the lighthouse: a huge copper fish slumbering below, one bulbous eye opening to follow the ferry’s turning propellers. They docked, and as he drove down the ramp into the bustling maze of narrow streets that led out of Waskeke Town, he hummed to himself, relishing solid land.
A BATTERED MAILBOX labeled “VAN METER” with adhesive letters stood at the entrance to his driveway. The narrow dirt track was edged by tall evergreen trees, and he drove up it with mounting excitement, the trees waving him on until he emerged into sunlight. Atop a grassy lump, not quite a hill, that rose like a monk’s tonsure from an encirclement of trees, the house stood tall and narrow, its gray shingles and simple facade speaking of modesty, comfort, and Waskeke’s Quaker past. Above the red front door a carved quarterboard read “PROPER DEWS,” the name he had given the house upon its purchase. The pun was labored, he knew, but it had been the best he could come up with, and he had needed to replace the board left by the previous owner—“SANDS OF THYME”—a name Winn disdained as nonsensical, given that no herb garden had existed on the property before he planted one. The house had been his for twenty years, since Livia was a baby, and over those twenty summers, time and repetition had elevated it from a simple dwelling to something more, a sacred monolith over which his summer sky somersaulted again and again. He parked the car near the back door and gazed up at the neat procession of windows, their panes black with reflected trees.
Something about the place seemed different. He could not have said what. The gutters, shutters, and gables were all intact, all trimmed with fresh white paint. The hydrangeas were not yet flowering but the peonies were, fat blooms of pink and white. He suspected he was projecting some strange aura onto the house because he knew Biddy, Daphne, and Livia were inside with all the bridesmaids and God only knew what other vestal keepers of the wedding flame. As he sat there, listening to the engine tick its way to quiet, a shard of his nearly forgotten dream punctured the pleasure of his arrival. He might have been in the car, or he might have been back in his bed, or he might have been running one finger down a woman’s spine. He tried to push the dream away, but it would not go. He wiped his glasses with his shirt and flipped down the rearview mirror to look at himself. The sight of his face was a comfort, even the chin someone had once called weak. He arranged his features into an expression of patriarchal calm and tried to memorize how it felt—this was how he wanted to look for the next three days. Extracting the dress box and leaving the rest, Winn went around to the side door and let himself in, almost tripping over an explosion of tropical flowers that erupted from a crystal vase on the floor just across the threshold.
“Biddy,” he called into the quiet, “can we find a better place for these flowers?”
“Oh,” came his wife’s voice from somewhere above. “Hi. No, leave them there.”
He let the screen door slam behind him—even though, years before, he had affixed a now-yellowed card to the door that said “do NOT slam”—and stepped around the flowers. He set the dress box down on the floor and grimaced at a pile of sandy and unfamiliar shoes. He matched them in pairs and lined them up along the baseboard. Down the hallway of white wainscoting was a bright rectangle of kitchen light. To his right, the back stairs bent tightly upward, and to his left was a coat closet. Inside he found the usual reassuring line of raincoats and jumble of tennis racquets and beach sandals, but on the top shelf, shoved in with a faded collection of baseball caps and canvas fishing hats, a cluster of gift bags overflowed with tissue paper and ribbon.
“Biddy! What are all these bags in the closet here?”
Again Biddy’s voice floated down from on high. “Bridesmaids’ gifts. Leave them alone, Winn.”
“But let me look first,” said someone close behind and just above him. “Daphne said they’re good.”
Winn turned around, unprepared to see her so soon. “Hello, Agatha!” he said, sounding too jovial.
Agatha came down a few steps and leaned to kiss his proffered cheek. Her collarbones and dark nook of cleavage dipped down and floated back up again. He caught a musky scent, heavy like a man’s cologne, and underneath it the smell of cigarette smoke. She always smelled like smoke even though he had never seen her in the act. She must still sneak around like a teenager, sitting on windowsills, dangling her cigarettes out pushed-back screens. Winn had known few women he would describe as bombshells, but from the undulant contours of her body to her air of careless, practiced dishevelment, Agatha was an authentic specimen. She wore assemblages of thin garments that might have been nightclothes—lace-edged dresses with torn hems, drawstring pants that sat below her hipbones, flimsy cotton shorts—clothing that answered the requirements of decency while still conveying an impression of nakedness. She piled up her hair with bobby pins and odd pieces of ribbon or elastic, and she was always rooting through her purse for something or other and tossing out an alluring potpourri of lipsticks, lighters, crumpled receipts, and bits of broken jewelry.
“How are you?” she asked in her slow way, sounding like she had just woken up. She was wearing a short dress of gauzy white layers that he found oddly bridal. “Welcome to the madhouse.”
“I’m very well.” Winn took a step backward, and something poked his thigh. A bird of paradise from the flower arrangement. “Is it a madhouse?”
“It’s fun—if you like girls. You’re outnumbered.” She counted on her fingers. “Three bridesmaids including me. Plus Daphne and Livia. Your wife and her sister. Am I missing anyone? No. That makes it seven to one.”
“Celeste is staying here?”
“Biddy didn’t tell you?”
“Maybe she did and I forgot.”
“Sorry, Charlie. Plus the coordinator is in and out all the time. We did a dry run with the hairstylist this morning. Daphne wants everything kept simple, thank God. One time I was in a wedding where they did our hair with tendrils dangling down everywhere like dead vines. Makeup practice is tomorrow, and what else? Manicures? There’s something with the dress, too, making room for baby probably. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Anyway, lucky you.”
“Lucky me,” Winn said. He rubbed his chin and wondered how much all that was costing him. He wondered, too, how she could be so calm while he felt jumpy as a marionette. She, after all, had been the one to take his hand at Daphne’s engagement party, and he had been struggling to keep her from his thoughts ever since. Truthfully, he had been struggling to keep her from his thoughts for years, but the party was the first time she had shown any interest. He didn’t flatter himself—he had seen her around enough men to know flirtation was, for her, an impersonal reflex, and sex appeal was something she rained down on the world indiscriminately, like a leaflet campaign. And nothing had happened. Not really. Only an interlocking of fingers under the privacy of the tablecloth, but still the touch had shocked him. And she had been the one to take the seat next to him, to find his hand where it was resting on his knee and pull it toward her.
Agatha gazed down at him, her head tilted to one side, almost to her shoulder. “Anyway, I’ve been sent to get the dress.”
“Right!” He pivoted to pick up the white box and held it out. “All yours.”
She hefted it. “It’s heavier than I expected.”
“I’m told a pregnant bride requires scaffolding.”
She laughed, a single syllable that stuck in her throat, less an expression of mirth than a bit of punctuation, a flattering sort of ellipsis. She hitched her chin and rolled her eyes up toward the second floor. “I should take this to Daphne.”
He said Okay! and Bye! as though ending a telephone call and watched her disappear around the bend of the stairs. He’d known Agatha since she was fourteen and Daphne’s first roommate at Deerfield, and though she must be twenty-seven now, he couldn’t shake his idea of her as a Lolita. His attraction still embarrassed him as much as when it had revolved around her field hockey skirt. She had been a lackluster athlete; probably she had played only because she knew she looked spectacular in skirt and kneesocks, loping down the field with her hair in two messy braids. Did she even remember taking his hand? She had been tipsy at the party, everyone had been, and at the time he had panicked because, after all these years, she knew, perhaps had always known. But, that night, lying awake and thinking of her bare knee under the back of his hand, her palm against his, he found he was relieved; now the chips would fall where they may.
Stepping around the flowers, he shut the coat closet and walked down the hall to the kitchen. As children, Winn’s daughters had run through the house upon first arrival each summer to remind themselves of all its singularities and unearth relics of their own brief pasts. They made joyful reunions with the canvas sofas, the insides of closets, the views from all the windows, the books on fish and plants and birds, the bowls of sea glass, the wooden whale sending up its flat, wooden spout on the wall above Winn and Biddy’s bed, the flower patch where the sundial lay half concealed beneath black-eyed Susans, the splintery planks of the outdoor shower. The kitchen cupboards were thrown open so the cutting boards and bottles of olive oil might be greeted and the enormous black lobster pot marveled over. The hammock was swung in and the garage door heaved up to reveal, through cirrus whirls of dust, an upside-down canoe on sawhorses and the ancient Land Rover they kept on the island. The girls would converge on Winn and clamor at him until he unbolted and pulled open the hatch to the widow’s walk so they could stand on top of the house and look out over the island.
But sometime during their teens, they had stopped caring whether everything was as they remembered and moved swiftly and directly to their rooms to arrange their clothes and toiletries. Little blasts of squabbling percussed the walls as they vied for territory in their shared bathroom. Winn had taken up the job of walking around the house to inspect all the nooks and crannies. He breathed lungfuls of salt and mildew and tipped frames back to center with one finger. He opened all the closets. He tested the hammock. He walked blindly through the spiderwebs in the dark garage.
This time on his rounds downstairs he found that everywhere he looked there were more things than there should have been, more stuff, and yet for all the women in the house and all their feminine appurtenances, no one came down to greet him. He went out to the car and brought in the luggage and groceries. Leaving the duffels at the foot of the back stairs, he carried the groceries into the kitchen and pushed aside a layer of magazines to make room on the counter. Makeup pencils and brushes were everywhere, abandoned helter-skelter as though by the fleeing beauticians of Pompeii. He walked around collecting them and then set them upright in an empty coffee mug. He straightened the magazines into piles. From the sink he extracted an object his daughters had taught him was an eyelash curler. A round brass ship’s clock ticked at the top of a bookshelf, its arrow-tipped hands and Roman numerals insisting it was four thirty. He looked at his watch. Not yet one. He pressed his fingers into a puddle of face powder spilled on the dining table and walked them across the varnished top, leaving a trail of flesh-colored prints that he immediately wiped up with a sponge. Even in his study, his cloister of masculine peace and quiet, he found a nail file and the top half of a bikini on his desk.
He was holding the bikini top by its strings and examining it (it was white with red polka dots, the fabric worn thin, the straps looped in a messy knot instead of a bow; he wondered if Agatha’s were the breasts that had last filled its cups and if she could have left it on purpose) when a movement out the window caught his eye. From the side of the house a slope of grass rambled down to the trees, interrupted here by a pair of stray pines with a hammock strung between them and there by a badminton net and there by his vegetable garden, wrapped in flimsy green fencing to deter the deer. After years of taking a bearable tribute from around the edges, the deer seemed to have grown in numbers or appetite, and the previous summer, the family had arrived to find all Winn’s herbs and vegetables eaten down to nubs. He had gone out at once and bought a roll of green plastic mesh and strung it savagely around his plants. The fence was unsightly—Livia said the garden looked like a duck blind—and still the yield was a disappointment. Some condition of soil or climate had stunted the plants into spindly bearers of flaccid leaves and runty fruit. Biddy had broken the news to him over the phone, bridesmaids squealing in the background. “I’m afraid you don’t have much of a harvest,” she said.
“Is it the deer?” he had asked.
“No, everything’s just a little on the sickly side.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Winn, I’m not a botanist,” she had said, sighing.
Livia was lying in the hammock. Blue shade fell over her bare legs and arms, and she had twisted her hair into a dark rope and pulled it around her head and across her neck. A book lay open on her stomach, the breeze ruffling the pages. Her hands were pressed flat against her face. That was the motion that had attracted his attention: the lifting of her hands from the book. She was very still; he did not think she was crying. After a long time she dropped her hands to her clavicle and stared up into the branches. Winn’s softer emotions came upon him rarely, as unexpected visitations from a place he could not guess at. He reached out and touched the window. Flat on her back in the cool shadows, Livia looked like a funeral statue. He knuckled three quick beats on the window and then again, harder, but she didn’t turn her head. His powdery fingerprints ghosted the glass. He wiped them away. He thought he would go out and see her, but a stampeding sound came from above, and when he emerged, it was to a kitchen full of women.
“Hello, dear,” he said, pecking Biddy on the cheek.
“I want to leave those flowers there so I don’t forget to take them to the Duffs’ hotel later,” she said.
“I don’t know how you’d forget them. I thought I was in the Amazon.”
“After the wedding I’ll remember things again. Until then you’ll have to step around the flowers.”
He went around stamping cheeks with his businesslike kisses: first Daphne and then Biddy’s sister Celeste where she stood beside the refrigerator fishing an olive out of a jar with her index finger. Agatha and the other bridesmaids were lolling against the counter, and he kissed each of them, saying, “Agatha, hello again, Piper, Dominique.”
“How was the trip?” asked Biddy.
“Easy. I got an early start. The crossing was smooth.”
Celeste thrust a half-filled tumbler into his hand and clinked it with her own. Three olives drifted around the bottom. “You don’t have any martini glasses,” she said. “Other than that, everything has been fabulous.”
Setting the glass on a stack of magazines, he said, “Is the sun over the yardarm already?” He seldom drank hard liquor anymore, especially not in the middle of the day, but if he reminded Celeste of this, she would want to know for the umpteenth time why not, and he was in no mood to explain that it had to do with his headaches and not at all with any judgment of those who daily embalmed their innards from the moment the sun inched past its apex to the hour when their feet tipped them onto whatever couch or bed was handiest.
“Depends on where you keep your yardarm,” she said. Her smile was localized to her lips and their immediate region. Biddy had explained that Celeste had gotten carried away with wrinkle injections, but the effect was still eerie.
Winn frowned and turned to the bridesmaids. “Having a good time, girls?”
“Yes,” came the chorus from the bridesmaids, who had settled with Daphne in a languid clump against the sink. Like Daphne, Agatha and Piper were blond and short. Dominique was tall and dark, a menhir looming over them. She was the child of two Coptic doctors from Cairo and had spent most of her breaks from Deerfield with the Van Meters. Her face was symmetrical but severe, a smooth half dome of forehead descending to steeply arched eyebrows, a nose with a bump in its middle, and a wide mouth that drooped slightly at the corners in an expression of not unattractive mournfulness. Muscle left over from her days as a swimmer armored her shoulders and back. Her hair, which was not quite crimped and African but also not smooth in the way of some Arabs’, was cut very short. He hadn’t seen her for a few years. After college in Michigan she had flown off to Europe (France? Belgium?) to become a chef. He liked Dominique; he respected her physical strength and her skill with food, but he had never understood her friendship with Daphne, who took no interest in sports or cooking and who seemed diaphanous and flighty beside her.
Dominique pointed one long finger out the window. “Your garden is looking a little peaky,” she said.
“So Biddy told me. I haven’t gone out to take a look at it yet.”
“Were you having problems with the deer?”
“Terrible. They’re glorified goats, those things. But Biddy doesn’t think they’re the culprit this time.”
“Yeah, I didn’t see much nibbling, except around the edges. And I looked for aphid holes and that sort of thing but didn’t see enough to explain why it all looks so sad. Maybe the soil is too acidic.”
“Could be.”
“Did you do the planting?”
“The first time, eight or nine years ago, but a local couple does the basic caretaking when we’re not here. Maybe they tried something different. I hope if they wanted to experiment they wouldn’t do it in my garden.”
Dominique nodded and looked away as though concealing disdain for people who did not tend their own vegetable gardens.
“I’m so psyched for the wedding,” Piper announced out of the blue and in a high chirp, which was her way. She and Daphne had met at Princeton, and Winn knew her less well than the others. Always in motion, propelled along by a brittle, birdlike pep, she seemed a tireless font of chipper enthusiasm. She was pale as bone and dwelt beneath a voluminous haystack of white blond hair, her glacial eyes and red-lipsticked lips adrift in all the whiteness like a face drawn by a child. Her eyebrows were barely discernible, her nose small and sharp. Some men found her powerfully attractive, Winn knew, but she left him cold. Her looks were ethereal and a little strange, but Agatha’s were concrete, radiant, tactile; her limbs could almost be felt just by looking at them. Daphne fell somewhere in the middle. They were three shades of woman arrayed side by side like the bewildering, smiling boxes of hair dye in the supermarket.
“It’s beautiful here,” Agatha said, letting her head fall onto Piper’s shoulder. A male friend of Daphne’s had, years ago, in a moment of drunken gossip, implied that Agatha was a closeted prude—There’s no engine, he’d said. You hit the gas and nothing happens—but Winn had trouble believing something so disappointing could be true.
“Thanks for bringing my dress, Daddy,” Daphne said.
“Yes,” he said to Agatha. “Waskeke is the way the world should be.” He was staring at her too intently and looked away, at Biddy, who was rummaging through the grocery bags. With a grunt, Daphne pushed off from the sink, waddled across the kitchen, and plopped into a Windsor chair behind Winn. “Daphne,” he said, turning, “are you feeling all right?”
“I feel fine,” she said.
“Why did you make that noise?”
“Because I’m seven months pregnant, Daddy.”
He asked for and received a full briefing on the status of the weekend. Where was Greyson? At the hotel with his groomsmen, Daphne said. His parents? They would be arriving around five. The head count for that night’s party, a dinner Winn would be preparing, was seventeen. The get-together would be a casual thing, with lobsters, a chance for everyone to enjoy the island before they had to get serious about matrimony, a sort of pre-rehearsal-dinner dinner. Had Biddy confirmed the lobsters? She had.
Winn nodded. “All right,” he said. “Well, then good.”
“By the way,” Daphne said, “Mr. Duff is allergic to shellfish.”
Winn fixed her with a look. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“It’s no big deal. Just buy a tuna steak, too.”
“Are you going to call him Mr. Duff after you’re married?” asked Celeste.
“I have a hard time addressing him as Dicky,” said Daphne gravely. “He says to call him Dad, but most of the time I don’t call him anything.”
Biddy said, “Everyone calls him Dicky. It’s his name. He won’t think it’s odd for you to call him by his name. You’re being ridiculous.”
“Re-dicky-ulous,” said Dominique, and the women laughed.
“Where’s Livia?” Winn asked, even though he knew.
“Around here somewhere,” said Daphne. “Hating me. You know, I really think her dress is pretty. I really do. I wanted to set her off from the other bridesmaids, which is a nice thing, isn’t it? She’s just being contrary. It’s a green dress. That’s all. She says it’s the exact shade of envy and everyone already thinks she’s jealous even though she’s not, but it’s not the color of envy. It’s more of a viridian.”
“Too late to change it,” said Biddy.
The moment of welcome faded into a lull. The staring half circle of female faces made Winn uneasy. With a loud, contented sigh, he turned to look out the window. Daphne held her hands out to Dominique and was heaved to her feet. “Ladies,” she said, beckoning to her bridesmaids. They wandered off, their voices drifting through the house like the calls of distant birds.
“Nice trip?” Celeste asked, having lost track of the earlier part of the conversation.
“Couldn’t have been smoother,” he said.
“You must have gotten up at the crack of dawn.”
“Just before.”
“Drink up there, Winnifred.” She picked up his glass and handed it to him again with a wink. “You deserve it.”
“If you insist.” He touched his lips to the liquid. Gin.
The house was L shaped, with a planked deck filling the crook and extending out over the grass. Through the kitchen’s French doors, Winn saw Livia walk up the lawn and onto the deck. She wore an old pair of gray shorts, and her legs were thinner than he had ever seen them. When she came through the doors and into the kitchen, a push of salt air came with her.
“Oh, Dad,” she said. “Hi.”
She made no move to embrace or kiss him. In the hammock, she had appeared sepulchral and blue, but that must have been a trick of the shade because she looked fine now, a bit pale but fine. She turned away, chewing the side of her thumbnail.
“Hi, roomie,” Celeste said.
“You two are bunking together?” Winn said. Biddy must have sprung the arrangement on Livia, otherwise he would have already gotten an earful.
“Yes,” said Livia in a neutral voice, inspecting her hand. The nails were bitten to nothing, and the flesh around them was torn and raw.
Celeste jiggled her glass enticingly. “Can I get you a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“Moral support for Daphne?” Celeste asked. “Poor thing not having a drink at her own wedding. I don’t know what I would have done without a drink or two during my weddings.”
“Let alone your marriages,” Biddy said.
“Only you,” Celeste said, swatting Biddy’s flat backside, “could say to that to me.”
“Daphne can have a glass of champagne,” Livia said. “She’s seven months. It’s fine.”
Celeste sipped. “Is it? Shows what I know.”
“Maybe I will have a drink,” Livia said. “I’ll get it myself.”
“How is Cooper?” Winn asked Celeste. “Still in the picture?” He reached out to touch Livia’s hair as she moved away.
“He’s fine. He’s sailing in the Seychelles. He wanted to come but he couldn’t.”
Livia took a bottle of wine from the refrigerator and picked at the foil. “Do you think he’ll be number five?”
“I’m getting out of the marriage business.” Celeste raised her glass as though someone had made a toast. “Though I’ll admit all this is making me sentimental. Nothing beats being a bride. Oh well. Days gone by. I’ll have to live vicariously through my nieces.”
Livia threw the foil into the garbage. “Don’t look at me.”
“Oh, sweetheart, it was his loss. There are so many fish in the sea. You’re only nineteen.”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“You are? Well, then, you’re an old maid.”
Livia put a corkscrew to the bottle and twisted it. Winn watched the curl of silver disappear. Her fingers wrapped so tightly around the bottle that her bones stood out under her skin. Winn wanted to tell her she didn’t need to squeeze so hard, wringing the bottle’s neck like she was. He remembered once watching her shatter an ice cream cone in her hand, crying out in surprise at the cold shards of waffle. “I forgot I was holding it,” she had said. “I was thinking of something else.” Why Livia always had to be so forceful, straining when she didn’t need to, was beyond him, but he held his tongue. She clamped the bottle between her knees and pulled until it exclaimed over the loss of its cork.
Two · The Water Bearer (#ulink_1fe5538c-9aa9-552f-bb1d-7765bef20ea6)
Before he became a father, Winn had assumed he would have sons. He had expected Daphne to be a boy, had lain with his ear against Biddy’s pregnant belly and heard male voices echoing down from future lacrosse games and ski trips. He saw a small blue blazer with brass buttons, short hair combed away from a straight part, himself teaching a boy to tie a necktie. He would drive his son to Harvard when the time came and help him carry his bags through the Yard, would greet his son’s roommates and their fathers with hearty handshakes. His son would join the Ophidian Club, and Winn would attend the initiation dinner and drink with the boy who would live his life over again, affirming its correctness at every juncture.
When the screaming ham hock the doctor pulled from between Biddy’s legs turned out to be unmistakably female, all crevices and puffiness, he felt a deep and essential surprise, not only that the child brewing in his wife those nine months was a girl but that he, Winn, possessed the seeds of a feminine anything. Inside the tangled pipes of his testicular factory there existed, beyond all reason, women. Watching Biddy and Daphne nestle together in the hospital bed, he realized he had been mistaken to think that pregnancy and birth had something to do with him. He had imagined that by impregnating this woman he had ensured she would deliver a son who would go forth and someday impregnate another woman who would, in turn, have a son, and so on and so forth down the Van Meter line into the misty future. But now, instead, there was this girl-child who would grow breasts and take another man’s name and sprout new branches on an unknown family tree and do all sorts of traitorous things a son would not do. The shifting and swelling of Biddy’s boyish body into a collection of spheroids, the quiet communion she lavished on her belly, her new status with her sisters and her covey of friends—all this should have told him he was standing at the threshold of a club that would not have him. Even though women held out their arms and exclaimed, “You’re going to be a faaa-ther!” he suspected they had seen him all along for what he was: the adjunct, the contributor of additional reporting, the lame duck about to be displaced from the center of his wife’s affections. The surprise should not have been that he had a daughter but that any boys were ever born at all.
When, five years later, Biddy announced she was pregnant for the second time, Winn assumed from the first that the baby would be a girl. The deck was stacked; the game was rigged. Daphne was so staunchly female that the possibility of his and Biddy’s genes being put back in the tumbler and coming out a boy seemed too small to bother with. Biddy gave him the news in bed in the morning, and he kissed her once, hard, and said, “Well!” before going downstairs to sit behind the Journal and think about a vasectomy. He was at the kitchen table, staring sightlessly at the pages when he heard the rustling, tinkling sound that announced Daphne. She slid into a chair and sat eating red grapes out of a plastic bag. She wore a piece of crenellated, bejeweled plastic in her hair, and a cloud of pink gauze stood up where her skirt bent against the back of the chair.
“Good morning, Daphne. Going to dance class today?”
“No. That’s on Wednesday.”
“Isn’t that a dance skirt you’re wearing?”
“My tutu? I just threw this on.”
Winn stared at her. She looked back at him and fingered one of the strands of plastic beads that garlanded her neck. Somehow in her infancy she had absorbed a set of phrases and mannerisms that Biddy called breezy and Winn called absurd but that, in any event, had her swanning through preschool like an aging socialite. They left her once with Biddy’s eldest sister, Tabitha, and went to Turks and Caicos for a week, hoping Tabitha’s son Dryden would get her to dirty her knees a little. Instead, they returned to find Dryden draped in baubles and Daphne arranging clips in his hair.
“Dryden,” Biddy said, “you look awfully dressed up for this time of day.”
The boy released a sigh of weary sophistication. He fluttered his blue-dusted eyelids and spread his fingers against his chest. “Oh, this? This is nothing. The good stuff’s in the safe.”
To Winn, Daphne was a foreign being, a sort of mystic, a snake charmer or a charismatic preacher, an ambassador from a distant frontier of experience. The academic knowledge that she was the product of his body was not enough to forge a true belief; he felt no instantaneous, involuntary recognition of her as flesh and blood. Not for lack of trying, either. He had changed her diapers and held her while she cried in the night and spooned gloopy food into her mouth, and certainly he loved her, but she only became more and more strange to him as she got older, and his love for her gave him no comfort but instead made him alarmingly porous, full of hidden passageways that let in feelings of yearning and exclusion. Sitting behind the paper, he imagined with trepidation a house populated by two Daphnes, a Biddy, and only one Winn.
“Daddy,” came the piping voice from across the table, “am I a princess?”
“No,” Winn said. “You’re a very nice little girl.”
“Will I be a princess someday?”
Winn bent the top of the newspaper down and looked over it. “It depends on whom you marry.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, there are two ways for a woman to become a princess. Either she’s born one, or she marries a prince or, I think, a grand duke—although I’m not sure those exist anymore. You see, Daphne, many countries that used to have princesses don’t anymore because they’ve abolished their monarchies, and an aristocracy doesn’t make sense without a monarchy. Austria, for example, got rid of all that business after the First World War. Hereditary systems like that aren’t fair, you see, and they breed resentment among the lower classes. Anyway, the long and short of it is, since you weren’t born a princess, you would need to marry a prince, and there aren’t very many of those around.”
Reproachfully, she ate a grape and then wiped her fingers one at a time on a napkin. He returned to reading.
“Daddy.”
“What?”
“Am I your princess?”
“Christ, Daphne.”
“What?”
“You sound like a kid on TV.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re full of treacle.”
“What’s treacle?”
“Something that’s too sweet. It gives you a stomachache.”
She nodded, accepting this. “But,” she pressed on, “am I your princess?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have any princesses. What I do have is a little girl without any dignity.”
“What’s dignity?”
“Dignity is behaving the way you’re supposed to so people respect you.”
“Do princesses have dignity?”
“Some do.”
“Which ones?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Grace Kelly.”
“Who is she?”
“She was a princess. First she was an actress. Then she married a prince and became a princess. In Monaco. She was killed in a car accident.”
“What’s Monaco?”
“A place in Europe.”
Daphne took a moment to absorb and then asked, “Am I your princess?”
“We’ve just been through this,” Winn said, exasperated.
She looked like she was trying to decide whether her interests would be better served by smiling or crying. “I want to be your princess,” she said, teetering toward tears. Daphne was an accomplished crier, plaintive and capable of great stamina. For a girl so physically delicate and soft in voice, she was unexpectedly stalwart in her emotions. Her tears were purposeful, as were her smiles and pouts. Biddy called her Lady Macbeth.
Ducking back behind his paper, Winn did what was necessary. “All right,” he said. “Daphne, you are my princess.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
Daphne nodded and ate a grape. Then she cocked her head to one side. “Am I your fairy princess?”
Biddy, when Winn went looking for her, was getting out of the shower. Through the closed door he heard the water shut off and the rattle of the shower curtain. She was humming something to herself. He thought it might be “Amazing Grace.” Knocking once, he pushed open the door, releasing a cloud of steam. Her bare body, flushed from the shower, was so close he could feel the heat coming off her back and small, neat buttocks. A foggy oval wiped on the mirror framed her breasts and belly button, the dark badge of hair below, his tight face hovering over her shoulder. After fall stripped away her summer tan, her skin tended toward a certain sallowness, but the hot water had turned her chest and legs a rosy pink. Already, her breasts looked swollen. A white towel was wrapped around her head. Her reflection smiled at him. Biddy, he had planned to say, maybe one is enough. He would suggest they sit down and make a pros and cons list. He was holding a yellow legal pad and a blue pen and had already thought of cons to counter all possible pros.
“What is it?” she asked, her smile draining away. He wondered if she had already guessed that he had trailed her to this warm, foggy room to argue her baby away from her. She had some lotion in her hand, and he watched her rub it on her sides and stomach, across stretch marks from Daphne that were only visible in the pale months. “Winn?” she asked. “What?”
“What was that you were just humming?” he asked.
“‘Unchained Melody,’” she said.
“Oh.”
“And?”
“And what?”
She took another towel and wrapped it around herself, tucking in the end beneath her armpit. “What else?”
“Nothing important.”
“What’s that for?” She pointed at the legal pad.
“I needed to take some notes.”
“About what?”
“A work thing.”
She turned to the mirror and asked, almost casually, “Are you excited about the baby?”
Winn was silent.
“Are you?” Biddy prodded.
“Yes,” Winn said. “No.”
“No, you’re not excited?” She and Daphne had the same way of wrinkling their foreheads when their plans went awry. “What were you going to say when you came in here?”
He tapped the legal pad against his thigh. “I’m not sure.”
“Winn, out with it.”
“Fine. I was thinking about saying we shouldn’t jump into anything. We didn’t exactly plan this.”
“We always said we would have two.”
“We hadn’t talked about it in years. Maybe four years.”
“No, we talked about it last year. On Waskeke. At the bar in the Enderby. You said you’d like to try for a son.”
“We’d been drinking, and that was still a year ago.”
“I didn’t think it was empty talk. We always said we’d have two. I understood our plan was for two. We always said so.”
“I thought … I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that we’d both cooled on the idea.”
“You should have said if you’d changed your mind.”
“You should have said you wanted another one.”
“Let me ask you this, if you could know right now that it’s a boy, would we be having this conversation? Would you have made one of your lists? That’s what you have there, isn’t it?”
He hid the pad behind his back and soldiered on. “I didn’t know you’d gone off the pill,” he said. “Did you do it on purpose?”
She rummaged in a drawer. “I forgot for a week. I know you don’t like to be surprised, but I thought we wanted this. I thought if it happens, it happens. I didn’t realize you had changed your mind. You should have said something.”
“I didn’t know I had to. I didn’t realize I had given tacit approval to conceive a child at the time of your choosing.”
He stepped back in time to remove himself from the path of the slamming door. The bath began to run. Biddy’s sisters said that Biddy was drawn to water in times of need because she was an Aquarius. Winn put no stock in astrology—the whole concept was embarrassing—but he admitted that his wife’s passion for baths, showers, lakes, rivers, ponds, swimming pools, and the ocean was a powerful force. Biddy descended from a line of people who were at once remarkably unlucky and extraordinarily fortunate in their encounters with the sea. Since a grandfather many greats ago had managed to catch hold of a dangling line after being swept by a wave from the deck of the Mayflower and be dragged back aboard, her forebears had been dumped into the ocean one after the other and then, while thousands around them perished, been plucked again from the waves. A grandaunt had survived the sinking of the Titanic; a distant cousin crossed eight hundred miles of angry Southern Ocean in a lifeboat with Ernest Shackleton; her father’s cruiser was sunk at Guadalcanal, and he saved not only himself but three others from shark-infested waters. The grandaunt’s photograph, a grainy enlargement of a small girl wrapped in a blanket and looking very alone on the deck of the Carpathia without her nanny (who had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic) hung in their front hallway.
Whatever the root of Biddy’s affinity for water, as long as Winn had known her, she had been able to submerge herself and come out, if not entirely healed, at least calmed, her mood rubbed smooth. But he could not have anticipated that she would emerge from this particular bath and find him where he had settled with the newspaper in his favorite chair and announce that she was going to have a water birth for this baby.
“A what?”
“A water birth. You give birth in a tub of warm water. There’s a hospital in France that specializes in it. We’re going there.”
Winn felt an “absolutely not” pushing its way up his throat. He had married Biddy partly because she was not given to outlandish ideas, and he felt betrayed. But the rafters of the doghouse hung low over his head. “Sounds like some kind of hippie thing to me,” he said.
“I’ve done research. Candace McInnisee did it for her youngest, and she swears by it.”
“You did research before you knew you were pregnant?”
“We always said we would have two, Winn. And since you’re not the one giving birth, I don’t see why you should mind where it happens.”
Winn lifted his paper and let it fall, a white flag spreading on the floor in marital surrender. He held out his arms. She came close, leaned to kiss him on the forehead, and slipped away before he could embrace her.
LIVIA WAS BORN in France in a tub full of water, and she, like Biddy, had spent the years since her birth returning, whenever possible, to an aqueous state. She had once come home from a fruitful day in the fourth grade and declared that she was a thalassomaniac and a hydromaniac while Biddy was only a hydromaniac, which was true. Biddy’s love of water did not extend past the substance itself, whereas Livia loved all water but especially the ocean and its inhabitants. During her time at Deerfield, she had baffled Winn by organizing a Save the Cetaceans society and by spending her summers on Arctic islands helping researchers count walruses or on sailboats monitoring dolphin behavior in the Hebrides. She had passionately wished to join the crew of a vessel that interfered with Japanese whaling ships, but Biddy had managed to convince her that she would be more helpful elsewhere. Now she was studying biology at Harvard with plans for a Ph.D. afterward. She had made it clear to Winn that she thought his ocean-provoked existential horror was a bit of willful silliness. From the age of eleven, she had insisted on getting and maintaining her scuba certification and was always after Winn to do the same, though the idea held no appeal for him. He had snorkeled a few times and once swam by accident out over the lip of a reef, where the colorful orgy of waving, flitting life dropped into blackness. He felt like he had taken a casual glance out the window of a skyscraper and seen, instead of yellow taxis and human specks crawling along the sidewalks, only a chasm.
Winn had expected Livia’s passion for the ocean to fade away like her other childhood enthusiasms (volcanoes, rock collecting), but a vein of Neptunian ardor had persisted in the thickening stuff of her adult self. She spotted seals and dolphins that no one else noticed, and she was on constant watch for whales. A stray plume of spray was enough to get her hopes up, and after she had stopped and peered into the distance long enough to be convinced no tail or rolling back was going to show itself, she would blush and fall silent, seeming to suffer a sort of professional embarrassment. She claimed she would be happy to spend her life on tiny research vessels or in cramped submersibles, poking cameras and microphones into the depths as though the ocean might issue a statement explaining itself. His selkie daughter. How Livia could feel at home in a world so obviously hostile was beyond him, as was her willingness to lavish so much love on animals indifferent to her existence.
Daphne was the simpler of his daughters to get along with but also the more obscure. By the time she finished college, she seemed to have shed the serpentine guile of her infant self, or else her manipulations had grown so advanced as to conceal themselves entirely. He couldn’t be sure. A smoked mirror of sweetness and serenity hid Daphne’s inner workings, but Livia lived out in the open, blatantly so, the emotional equivalent of a streaker. Livia’s problem was a susceptibility to strong feelings, and her strongest feelings these days were about a boy, Teddy Fenn, who had thrown her over. She had seen too many movies; she did not understand that love was a choice, entered and exited by free will and with careful consideration, not a random thunderbolt sent from above. He had told her so, but she would not listen. She was angry at the world in general and Winn in particular, so he was angry with her in return. In the interest of familial peace, he would try to put everything aside for the wedding, and perhaps Waskeke would exert a healing influence, bring her back to herself.
He needed to buy more groceries for dinner and to deliver Biddy’s lunatic flowers to the Enderby, where the Duffs were staying. With the aim of forging an alliance, he sought out Livia to see if she would come along. She was in the bathtub.
“It’s after two,” he said through the door, “so the sooner we go the better.”
“Where’s Celeste?” Livia asked.
“Up on the roof.”
“Communing with the vodka gods?”
“And with your mother.”
A splash. “Give me a minute.”
They rattled back down the driveway in the old Land Rover, the Duffs’ flowers blooming up from between Livia’s knees like a Roman candle.
“What do you say we take the scenic route?” Winn said, pausing at the road.
She shrugged. “I thought we were in a hurry.”
Only to get out of the house, he thought. In the hour since his arrival, he had managed to offend Biddy by suggesting that all the test runs with makeup and hair and such were an extravagance and also to walk in on Agatha in the downstairs bathroom. He hadn’t seen anything, only her surprised face and bare thighs (the gauzy white dress concealed their crux) and a wad of toilet paper clutched in her hand, nor had he said anything, which made the situation worse. He had closed the door—not slammed it but closed it quietly and deliberately—before fleeing up to the widow’s walk to tell Biddy he was going to the market.
The day was warm and unusually still. Split-rail fences and a thickety layer of brush hemmed in the road. The interior of the island was occupied mostly by scrublands called the Moors, low hills with sharp, rusty vegetation and bony, crooked trees, like a piece of the Serengeti delivered to the wrong address. On the ocean side, shingled houses were scattered among scrub pines, cranberry bogs, and marshes. They drove past the undulating, sand-trapped meadow belonging to the Pequod Golf Club, its ovoid greens marching off like footprints left by an elephant. Distant golfers bent and flexed, launching unseen balls into the blue air.
“Heard anything about the Pequod?” Livia asked.
“No, not yet,” Winn said, trying to sound cheerful. “I’ll have to call up Jack Fenn and get the latest.”
Livia let her head tip back until she was staring up at the Rover’s ceiling. “Would it be so bad not to join? You already belong to a thousand clubs. You hardly even go to half of them. I don’t see why belonging to the Pequod is so essential.”
“It’s not essential. Nothing is essential. I think we’ll all enjoy the membership, that’s all.”
“Can you leave the Fenns out of it at least?”
“Unfortunately, no. Look, they’re not my favorites, either, but Fenn and I go back long before you and Teddy were even born. We have a relationship that has nothing to do with you.”
“Not to mention Fee,” Livia said snidely, referring to Jack’s wife, Teddy’s mother, who was an ex-girlfriend of Winn’s.
“Ancient history,” said Winn. As a consequence of its selectivity, his world was sometimes too small. “No need to bring it up. Nothing to do with the Pequod.”
“No one besides you even golfs,” Livia said to the ceiling.
“There’s a gym there, and a bar. They have nice events—dances, silent auctions, theme parties. You’ll like it.”
She let her head roll in his direction. “I do love silent auctions.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Livia. It isn’t ladylike.”
For three summers Winn had languished on a secrecy-shrouded wait list for membership in the Pequod. For three summers he had kept bitter evening vigils on the widow’s walk, staring out at what he could see of the course from the house: only a scrap of the tenth hole, but that bit of grass was the gateway to a verdant male haven and confessional. In the decades he had been coming to the island, he had always thought of membership as something obtainable but deliberately left for later. So it was to his bafflement that he had pulled all available strings and schmoozed all relevant parties, including the Fenns, and still he found himself relegated to guest status. He had an excellent track record with clubs. Though no club could equal the pleasures of his college club, the Ophidian—a brotherhood of such importance that he wrote one Christmas newsletter exclusively for its members and another for the remainder of the Van Meter family’s acquaintance—he had joined other clubs, in New York and in Boston, one in London, all places where he could drop in for dinner and feel welcome and sit in a leather chair and read newspapers hinged on long wooden sticks. He belonged to more specialized clubs, too, for the purposes of swimming or golf or racquet sports, and none had ever hesitated to accept him as a member. But Jack Fenn was on the Pequod’s membership committee and Fee Fenn was on the social committee, and, truth be told, Winn never knew where he stood with them, if bygones were bygones or not.
To change the mood, he reached over and patted Livia’s bony knee. “So,” he said, playing jolly, “the big day!”
“It’s not my big day.”
“Don’t be sour. Your day will come.”
She moved her leg irritably, and the flowers trembled. “I wouldn’t mind if everyone would stop telling me that. I’ll either get married or I won’t. I’m not jealous. I’m looking forward to this weekend being over. End of story.”
“That’s not quite the spirit, Livia.” Yearn as he might for the end of the wedding hoopla, Winn knew he must ride in front of the troops, sword raised, toward a successful event. “Especially from the maid of honor. You’re in charge of honor.”
He meant it as a joke, but she said, grimly, “I thought you weren’t impressed with my honor.”
He refrained from answering. They passed a marshy pond crowded with cattails and bulrushes.
“Look at the egret,” she said
Winn glimpsed a tall, slender shape and a flash of white wings. “It’s a heron,” he said.
“No, it’s an egret. Egrets are white. Herons aren’t.”
“Well,” said Winn in a voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere. “All right.”
In town, the traffic was slow, and without a breeze the car was warm. Livia shifted the flowers, and some greenery tickled Winn’s hand. He pushed it away. Livia sighed and rested her elbow on the window’s edge. “All these people. Too many people.”
“Hopefully they’re not all wedding guests,” he said.
She snorted. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to share a room with Celeste?”
“I think I can imagine.”
“After the lights are out, I hear ice cubes rattling around. Then she tries to get me to girl talk with her and whispers questions about my love life until she falls asleep, which is when she starts snoring. You can’t imagine. She sounds like someone trying to vacuum up a mud puddle.”
Many times in the past, over holidays or vacation weekends, Winn had been kept awake by Celeste’s industrial rumble from several rooms away, but he said, “Buck up, pal. I’d appreciate if you’d contribute by being nice to your aunt.”
“I contribute. I contribute in lots of ways. I’m the maid of honor. I’m a servant to the pregnant queen. Why do I also have to be a companion to the drunken aunt?”
“Celeste has had some rough breaks along the way. The charitable thing would be to cut her some slack.”
“She’s a gargoyle.”
“She’s a ruin.”
“Of her own making. I can’t get away from her. She’s everywhere with her martinis and her stories. She’s like, ‘Roomie, did I tell you about the time my third husband ran off to Bolivia with my best friend’s daughter? You don’t know heartbreak until your third husband has run off to Bolivia with your best friend’s daughter.’ That clink-clink, clink-clink, clink-clink that lets you know she’s coming—it’s like the shark music in Jaws.”
“Be thankful you weren’t around for that divorce, the Bolivian one. That was a dogfight.”
“I don’t think a divorce that happened twenty-something years ago is an excuse for her to be a complete mess.”
“What do you propose we do?” Winn said. “Should we put her in a burlap sack and push her off the ferry?”
“The sack is probably overkill.”
“If she wants to get drunk and say the wrong thing, then that’s what she’s going to do. And as much as we’d like for her not to exist, she does. Death, taxes, and family, Livia.”
THE FARM might have been the end of the earth. A thin seam of ocean sealed its fields to the sky, all of it coppered by the sun. The water’s surface, choppy and striated with light, was beautiful, but Livia liked to think about what was teeming underneath: phytoplankton, of course, stripers, bluefish, bonito, maybe tuna, certainly fish larvae and fry, worms and mollusks in the sea floor. Pelicans diving to fill up their huge mouths. Seals. Perhaps a whale, although they were rare around Waskeke. In previous centuries, the islanders had hunted sperm whales and right whales almost to extinction, and Livia suspected the animals still picked up bad vibes from the surrounding waters.
The older she got, the more claustrophobic she felt within her family. Her father’s desire to join clubs had once seemed perfectly normal but now struck her as grasping and embarrassing. He seemed to believe his various clubhouses, stuffy old buildings full of stuffy old people, were bunkers that would shelter him from the fallout of ordinary life, protect him like the green fence out in the yard was supposed to keep his precious vegetables safe from the menacing deer. Teddy had felt a similar skepticism about his own family, and she had imagined that together they could forge a new freedom, make lives of their own, but then he had left her, an outcome she could not accept. She kept turning the breakup around and around in her mind like a Rubik’s cube, unable to puzzle out what had driven him off. She had never been so happy as she was with him. He had been happy, too—she was sure of it.
“For Christ’s sake,” her father said, waiting for an old lady to maneuver her Cadillac out of a parking space in the market’s gravel lot.
The market building, towering over a clump of greenhouses, resembled an enormous, gray-shingled schoolhouse. Livia got out first and walked ahead. Inside, the market was airy and cool and smelled of field dirt, tomatoes, cold meat, and cellophane. Her father caught up with her, peering over his glasses at a list he’d written on a napkin. “Corn, tomatoes, lettuce, I brought cocktail onions from home, we need pickles, we’ll get shrimp at the seafood place, we’ll get smoked salmon at the seafood place, something-not-shellfish for Dicky, lobsters are being delivered, then bread, cheese, et cetera, et cetera. You get the corn first, please, Livia.”
“How much?”
“We’ve got seventeen for dinner, so why don’t you get twenty ears.”
“Do you have a cauldron to cook it all in?”
Tilting his chin down, he gave her one of his trademark looks, half smiling, steely eyed.
“Okay,” she said. “Never mind. No problem.”
She found a cart and was steering it toward a tasseled mountain of corn when she saw Jack Fenn and his daughter Meg standing beside the refrigerated shelves of fresh herbs. Even from the back they were easy to identify because they, like Teddy, were redheads. Six months had passed since she’d last seen Jack, since before the breakup, but he looked the same, like Teddy but older. He wore a blue shirt with the collar undone, and he was handsome in a rough, shaggy-dog way, with full lips and thick marigold hair that was long enough to cover the tops of his ears. He was holding Meg’s hand, a market basket over the crook of his other arm. Meg was a tall girl, a woman really, and she was dressed with perfect neatness, like a child in a school uniform: oxford shirt, webbed belt, broomstick legs poking out of Bermuda shorts and into a set of ankle braces, beneath which her long feet in gray sneakers nosed each other like a pair of kissing trout. Her hair was in a French braid, exposing the hearing aids she wore in each ear, and her face might have been pretty if not for the wide, crooked mouth that slanted open, revealing teeth and darkness. Jack asked her something—Livia could not hear what—and she replied with a round, deep burst of sound like four or five words spoken all on top of one another. Shoppers looked up from their lettuces and bell peppers. Jack set down his basket and reached for a bag of baby carrots, still holding her hand.
Livia turned to find her father. He was holding a tomato in front of his nose and frowning at it. With as much stealth as she could muster, she abandoned her cart and slunk toward him, her back to the Fenns. Catching sight of her, he said loudly, “Livia, would you find me some black peppercorns?” Grasping his arm, she tried to turn him toward the door, but he stood as though hammered into the floor. “What are you doing?” he said. “I need tomatoes.”
“Can we just go? I’m not feeling well.”
That was true enough. Her desperation had become a sort of nausea. His eyes lit with worry, and he glanced once at her belly as though she were suddenly Daphne and pregnant and the object of great concern and pillow plumping. But Meg Fenn let loose another blast of her foghorn voice, and he looked up.
“Fenn!” Winn called boisterously over Livia’s head. “Jack Fenn!”
Jack lifted a hand and walked in their direction with Meg shuffling beside him, her trout feet tumbling over each other.
“Winn,” Jack said. “Hello, Livia.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek, and she felt the corner of her mouth spasm. She prayed she would not cry. Her father’s hand twitched toward Meg and then veered back and froze into a signpost pointing at Jack. Jack set down his basket and allowed Winn to pump his broad paw. Livia put her arms lightly around Meg, who stood very still to receive her embrace. “I like your belt,” Livia said. She noticed the girl was wearing lip gloss and remembered once seeing Teddy’s mother applying it, holding Meg’s chin in her hand.
Jack turned his green eyes on Livia, Teddy’s eyes, and she blushed, conscious of her thinness. “How are you?” he asked.
At the same moment, her father, radiating a sudden vigor, said, “Can you believe the traffic today?”
“I’m fine,” Livia said.
“Absolute pandemonium,” Winn said in answer to his own question.
Tripped up, they all hesitated, and gradually discomfort saturated the air as though puffed from an atomizer. The cause, Livia knew, would not be named or alluded to, not here beside the tomatoes or anywhere else where her father and Teddy’s father happened to be at the same time. Her father would rather die than acknowledge in Jack Fenn’s presence that, for five short weeks, the two of them had shared an embryonic grandchild. Nor had Livia ever spoken with Jack about her pregnancy. The last time she had seen him was in a different life, back before she had gotten knocked up, when Teddy was still her boyfriend.
“Have you been out on the links yet?” Winn asked Jack, a note of ingratiating fellowship creeping into his voice. His body was taut, humming with too much enthusiasm. The possibility occurred to Livia that he wasn’t even thinking about her but only about the golf club.
“Just once,” Jack said.
“Good!” Winn said. “Good! Glad to hear it.”
Meg spoke, addressing Winn. “You like golf?” she asked, vowels dwarfing her sticky, guttural k and g sounds. Livia had explained to her father a thousand times that Meg could understand him, but still he froze whenever he had to communicate with her. He stared, neck straining forward, pupils moving over her face in a rapid search for comprehension, and then he gave up and examined his wristwatch.
Meg repeated herself, louder, and Winn looked helplessly at Livia. With an apologetic glance at Jack, Livia translated. “She said, ‘You like golf?’”
“Oh. I do. Very much,” Winn told Livia.
Jack lifted his daughter’s hand and kissed it. Meg’s eyes and her wide mouth closed, making her face look, in its moment of repose, normal.
“Do you like golf?” Livia asked Meg, and Meg laughed like a honking goose.
“Say,” Winn said to Jack, “I heard somewhere that you’re involved in the bluffs project.”
“Unfortunately.”
Winn chuckled. “Fenn versus nature.”
“The lighthouse is set to be moved next summer,” Jack said. “But that’s the easy part.” He went on about some scheme to shore up a disappearing beach with drainage pipes and to reinforce crumbling bluffs with rebar, concrete, and wire baskets of rocks called gabions. A line of expensive houses sat atop the cliffs, and every year their owners paid a foot or so of lawn in taxes to the wind and rain, the brink creeping slowly closer to their cedar porches.
“I hate to say it,” Winn said, “but those houses are goners. Five years and they’re in the drink.”
Livia saw an Atlantis of gray-shingled houses, weather vanes spinning in the currents beneath a white foam sky, fish at the windows and in the attics, the shadow of a whale sweeping over the roofs like the shadow of an airplane. She marveled at the two of them, chattering on like this. Her father claimed things had been awkward with the Fenns since his college years, when he had belonged to the Ophidian and Jack, a legacy, had not been invited to join. Then Winn had slept with Jack’s wife (long before Jack met her, but still), and Livia had slept with Jack’s son. Then Teddy had broken her heart. She had sacrificed their child. What could be more intimate? Probably she should be grateful the conversation was only about rebar and property values even if something in her was longing for them to acknowledge, just once, what had happened. Not likely. Even when she and Teddy were still together, relations between the families had been less than comfortable. The few times both sets of parents came together for dinners in Cambridge they had all bravely skated the hours away on a thin crust of chitchat.
Jack shook his head. “I have to say I hope you’re wrong, Winn. That wouldn’t do the island any good.”
Winn raised a finger. “But you didn’t build there, did you? No sense taking that kind of risk when you’re finally getting your own place. Rent on the bluffs, buy on the flat.”
“I don’t know—we considered building there. Of course, we’re still renting. The new house won’t be livable until the end of the summer. Even that’s not for sure. How is your family? The wedding’s soon, isn’t it?”
“Saturday,” Livia said.
“Just a small affair,” Winn said. “Mostly family.” He touched his chin. Livia guessed he was worried Jack would feel slighted.
Jack said, “Remind me of the groom’s name.”
“Greyson Duff,” said Winn. “It’s a fine match. We’re all very pleased.”
“Congratulations,” said Meg, and Jack kissed her hand again.
Livia was astonished to feel her father’s fingers clasp her own, once, quickly, and then release. The touch was something between a caress and a pinch. She could not remember the last time he had held her hand. “Thank you,” she said to Meg.
“How is Teddy?” Winn asked.
Heat crept into Livia’s face. She willed herself to hold her gaze steady, not to fold her arms. Jack smiled. He had always been kind to her. “He’s fine,” Jack said. “In fact, he’s made a very big decision.” Livia braced herself, though she did not know for what.
“Oh?” said Winn.
WINN WISHED he had gotten more of an opportunity to probe Fenn about the Pequod, but the man had stonewalled him as usual and then dropped the news about Teddy into the conversation like a meat cleaver. Teddy had joined the army. A chip off the old block—Fenn had done two tours in Vietnam. His time in the army was something people always mentioned about him, that and Meg. Now they would talk about Teddy, too, how he had traded Harvard for Iraq, and everyone would feel sorry for Jack and Fee because they must be so worried but thank heavens they had such stalwart spirits. Teddy’s decision seemed rash and odd to Winn, but at least it would take him far from Livia. Let the Fenns do as they pleased. Let them cultivate their moral superiority the way some people grew enormous, prizewinning pumpkins or watermelons that were, when you came down to it, really just freaks.
The damp fragrance of corn silk and the dusty, acidic smell of tomatoes overpowered the perfume of the Duffs’ flowers, which shuddered and bobbed between Livia’s knees. Leaving her in the car, Winn popped into the seafood store, and once he was back in the car, he found he wasn’t sure where he wanted to go. After hesitating long enough at a stop sign to draw the indignant horn of the driver behind him, he turned left.
“Aren’t we going to the Enderby?” Livia asked. She had not spoken since they parted ways with the Fenns in the market.
“First we’re going to take a look at this house of Fenn’s,” he said, choosing to ignore her petulant tone.
“Seriously? What if someone’s there?”
“Is it a crime to visit our friends’ house?”
“I can’t believe Teddy joined the army.” She said “army” as though it were the name of another woman.
“Well,” said Winn, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Jack is the same way, always having to showboat. That family has a holier-than-thou streak a mile wide. Just between you and me, I’ve never cared for it. He uses that girl like a shield.”
“Meg?” Livia said. “I think they’d probably prefer she was normal.”
“We all make sacrifices,” Winn went on, “but they expect everyone to praise theirs all the time. This army thing seems excessive. Why not the navy? Why not the air force? Coast guard? No, the Fenns have to make a show out of humility. Teddy should have gone to West Point if he wanted to go this route.”
“I don’t think this was the plan from the beginning. Not that I know anything, apparently.”
“I don’t see why he has to be a grunt like his father.”
“Wasn’t Jack drafted?”
“Yes, but he handled it in a very odd way. He could have deferred. Men like Greyson have it figured out. Greyson gives up the little things, little luxuries. He doesn’t overdo it. He’ll be good for Daphne that way.”
“I don’t think being selectively cheap is the same thing as enlisting.”
“So you’re on the Fenns’ side now?”
“I wish you hadn’t mentioned Teddy.”
“I was being polite. Better to hear the news from Jack, anyway. Now you won’t be caught off guard.”
“You can’t go around asking about Teddy like he’s just another person, Dad.”
“He is just another person, Livia. He should be, anyway.”
“Well, he’s not!”
“Ah,” Winn said, “here we are.”
In his opinion, the finest houses on the island were marked by dented mailboxes and rutted driveways. Only a chimney or maybe a widow’s walk should be visible from the road. Jack Fenn’s house, however, was a blatant, dazzling Oz set against the blue horizon of Waskeke Sound. Privet plants wrapped in burlap stood in wooden boxes at regular intervals along the road like blindfolded prisoners, holes already dug and waiting for them in the rich-looking soil. After a few years, they would merge into a hedge and provide a semblance of privacy, but the driveway was needlessly wide, a blinding avenue of broken quahog shells that unspooled in a graceful S curve up to the house, where one offshoot led to a garage and the other to the front door, making a loop around a flagpole. To one side of the house, confined by an infant hedge of its own and a cage of dark green chain-link, a mountain of red clay waited to be spread and rolled into a tennis court. Yet another nascent hedge encircled an empty, freshly poured swimming pool and the wooden bones of a pool house.
Winn turned in between two glossy black post lanterns, crunching on the shells. The flagpole at the top of the driveway was the nautical style, a yardarm across a mast, and stood in an oval of dirt. No flags were flying, but the cords were ready, their clips dinging against the metal pole, waiting to hoist the colors when the Fenns were in residence. The windows still bore the manufacturer’s decals. Part of the ground floor had been covered with new, lemony shingles, stark against the tar paper. Two years might pass before they faded to the desirable gray, and until then the house would be a bright imposition on the subtle landscape. The beginnings of a yard—paving stones, sacks of cement, a heap of mulch—loitered in the broad expanse of dirt that would one day be a lawn. Tarpaulins covered bales of shingles on one side of the driveway. The roof was a steep landscape of peaks, dormers, and gables, all sheathed in new cedar shake that shone in the sun. Brick chimneys crowned with terra-cotta pots pointed at the sky. Above the whole mess presided the bright copper sails of the three-masted clipper ship Fenn had chosen for his weather vane. Winn’s weather vane was a man alone in a rowboat.
“Anyway,” Livia said, “Greyson’s sacrifices are completely superficial. They’re not any kind of real loss. They’re just symbolic of loss. You know, like giving up chocolate for Lent or rending garments or something. At least what Teddy’s doing is genuinely hard.”
“Would you look at the size of this place,” said Winn. “I’m surprised. Jack comes from a fine old family. This is … it’s showy.”
Construction debris was strewn around: rolls of wire, crumpled wrappers, twine, tape, pipes, buckets crusted with cements and sealants. Two beige portable toilets stood a discreet distance away. “The house is poorly designed,” he said, pointing up through the windshield. “It must be a swamp up on that roof after a big rain. You see? I can pick out at least two spots where water will pool. They’ll have leaks. They probably already do. Shake is tricky. If you don’t cover the nail holes properly, you get leaks.”
“Fine,” said Livia. “The Fenns have made a mockery of roofs. They join the army just to bug you, and they design their houses to really get under your skin.”
“You disagree?”
“I don’t want Jack Fenn to drive up and find us sitting here staring at his house.”
“It’s a ridiculous house. I’m telling you. Look at that roof. Millions of dollars just to have leaks.”
“Dad, people like living by the ocean. Why shouldn’t they have a nice house if they want?”
“So you think people should have everything they want even if what they want is an ostentatious eyesore?”
“I don’t think it’s an eyesore.”
“This house is an eyesore.”
“I don’t know—to each his own. We could have built a house like this if we wanted to, right? It’s just not our style.”
Leaning forward with his chest pressed to the steering wheel, craning to see the roof, Winn was gratified by Livia’s use of “our,” that she was including herself in his aesthetic of quality, longevity, and simplicity. Since their childhood he had told his daughters he was going to give away all his money before he died, and they should make or marry their own if money was what they wanted. Better that than letting them feel the same disappointment he had after his parents died, when he discovered his inheritance was little more than untenable expectations. He had done well enough, but he was thankful for the way a certain degree of gentle dilapidation could be made to suggest old wealth. Shabbiness of necessity was easily disguised as modesty and thrift. Not that having a simple, hard-won summer-house instead of this castle by the sea would qualify him as shabby by most standards.
“Right?” Livia persisted. “We just do things differently. You aren’t a fancy house kind of guy.”
“What do they need such a big house for?” he said. “Is Teddy going to have a thousand children?”
Livia drew the Duffs’ flowers up onto her lap. “That’s the last thing I want to think about, assuming he lives long enough to have children.”
“Don’t be dramatic. He’ll be fine. Anyway, the girl’s not going to have any.”
“I can’t even wrap my head around … what if I was his only chance?”
The premise, simple enough on its surface, gave way beneath Winn’s consideration, dropping him into a feminine thicket of improbable hypotheses and garbled cause and effect. He clapped her knee. “Now, listen. I don’t want you thinking this army business has anything to do with you.” He drove around the oval and back down the driveway. Livia was obscured by pink and orange flowers and curls of green, leafy things, a tiger in the grass.
“What if Teddy and I get back together?” she said.
“I don’t think that’s very likely.”
“Thanks a lot!”
“Do you think you’re going to get back together?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying.” She pulled the vase even closer to herself. “What would you have done if I had been born like Meg Fenn?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I would have gotten used to it.”
“Really?”
“I think when something like that happens you rise to the occasion.” In truth, Winn could not imagine holding the hand of his grown daughter as she bellowed beside a pyramid of tomatoes.
“If Daphne had been born like that, would you have had another child?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Would you have wished you had never had children?”
“This is a silly conversation.”
At the Enderby, Livia jumped out with the flowers and took them inside. When she returned, she looked naked without her portable jungle, and the car felt empty.
After he’d parked in front of the house, Winn said, “Tell your mother I’ll be in in a minute.” Livia took two of the grocery bags and went inside, and Winn walked along the driveway past the garage and down a path shaded by trees and padded with a russet layer of pine needles. Unseen birds burst into a chorus of jabbering laughter as he passed. He paused beside his garden, peering through the deer fence in consternation. Dominique had chosen the right word: sad. The plants were all smaller than they should have been and drooped on rubbery stems: dwarfish melons, bloodless tomatoes, cucumbers that had not come up at all. There were some acceptable-looking green beans, but he saw no sign of the chervil or hyssop he had requested. Mint, which would grow in the crater left by a nuclear blast, was the only thing flourishing. The idea occurred to him that the caretakers could be sabotaging his little agricultural oasis, mistreating the soil or planting in adverse weather conditions. Poking his fingers through the fence, he rubbed a few leaves of mint together and walked away, farther into the trees. He held his fingers to his nose and sniffed the weed’s sharp, sweet smell.
He walked until he could no longer see the house, and then he looped back, coming to the edge of a dense clump of trees and brush and spotting, through the branches, Agatha sunning herself on the grass near the house. She was lying on a blue and white towel, and he recognized her polka-dotted bikini as the one from his study. She must have gone in there to retrieve it. Perhaps she had left him something else, a hair clip or a scarf. The afternoon sun was dropping lower in the sky, and a serrated front of tree shade advanced across the grass toward her bare toes. Daphne came out the French doors from the kitchen and crossed the deck and then the lawn, carrying a towel. She wore a black bikini, her huge, naked belly protruding brazenly between the two halves. Piper followed, turning to shut the doors behind her and giving Winn a view of wishbone thighs and a derriere so nonexistent that the blue fabric of her bathing suit hung in flaccid wrinkles. As Daphne shook out her towel, Agatha reached up and patted the side of her bare leg in a friendly way. Piper settled crossed-legged on the grass, her face obscured by massive sunglasses like ski goggles. Daphne eased herself down so her feet were facing Winn and the hummock of her pregnancy hid the top half of her body. Her shadow, humped like a camel, drew a smooth, dark curve over Agatha’s flat stomach and golden hipbones.
Watching them, he became aware of the elasticity of his lungs, the hard ridges of tree roots pressing into his feet, the muscular, rippling action of swallowing. His heart raced with stealth and vitality. That was another man’s house, another man’s daughter and her friends. He was a stranger, a prowler, a hunter, a wood dweller excluded from their world. The girls’ obliviousness transformed them, although he couldn’t pinpoint how. He couldn’t decide if they seemed more innocent when left to themselves, or more unabashedly sensual. Or were they unreal, like mermaids caught basking on a rock? They were only sitting—but there was something about them. Daphne, distorted by pregnancy, could not be reconciled with the little girl he remembered. Piper sat erect and unmoving, a sphinx. Agatha was lying on her back with her knees bent, and she moved her legs in a slow rhythm, bumping her thighs together and then letting them fall apart. A narrow strip of polka-dotted material concealed her crotch, and it tightened and slackened as she moved her legs, lifting slightly.
Close in his ear, a voice said, “Boo!”
Three · Seating Arrangements (#ulink_8b60bbc1-d35c-549f-91ee-4e80cba6f1e7)
Biddy stood with her hands on the edge of the kitchen table, leaning over a slew of guest lists, place cards, and seating charts. She felt like a general planning an offensive. Beside her, Dominique, faithful aide-de-camp, mirrored her posture.
“What if,” Dominique said, switching two cards, “we move these like this. Situation neutralized.”
“No,” said Biddy, “because then I’ve got exes sitting at the same table. Here.” She touched the paper.
“They wouldn’t be okay?”
“It’s not ideal.”
Dominique tapped her lips with one long finger and considered. Biddy, seized by affection, patted her on the back. She missed Dominique, especially during the holidays, when she had been a household fixture all through high school and college, Cairo being so far away. Dominique had been the sort of worldly kid who sought out the company of adults and who, at fourteen, had considered herself all grown up. When she stayed with the Van Meters, she behaved more like Daphne’s indulgent aunt than her friend and spent most of her time helping Winn in the kitchen and running errands with Biddy while Livia, little duckling, followed wherever she went and Daphne lay indolently in front of the television. Agatha had spent a few holidays with them, too, but her presence was less comfortable. Biddy was always finding cigarette butts in the flower beds and catching Winn staring and waking up to the sound of Agatha laughing and drunkenly thumping the walls while the others shushed her and tried to convey her to bed. Once Biddy had gotten up and flipped on the light at the top of the stairs, surprising them—Daphne, Dominique, Livia, and Agatha—like a family of possums in the sudden brightness. Agatha was lying on her side and inexplicably clinging to the balusters while Dominique worked to pry her fingers loose and Livia and Daphne grasped her ankles to keep her from kicking.
“What if,” Dominique said, pointing at the seating chart, “we move him to the leftovers table?”
“Yes,” said Biddy. “Perfect. But I feel bad calling them leftovers.”
Dominique pushed the place card across the table with the authority of a croupier. “Le mélange, then.” She stood back and looked at Biddy, her long eyebrows kinked and her long, sad mouth pulled quizzically to one side. “How are you? I mean—really.”
Biddy was so surprised by the question that her eyes began to water. “I’m fine,” she said, fussing with the cards to indicate the unimportance of her tears. “I’m great. I’m so happy for Daphne—I want everything to go well.”
“Of course you do,” said Dominique. “This is an insane amount of work. You’re handling it like a champ.”
Biddy was forced to take a tissue from the box on the counter. She never wore mascara, but she dabbed carefully nonetheless, coming up under her lashes the way she remembered her mother doing. To be seen, really looked at, the way Dominique had fixed on her, was unsettling. Her family barely noticed her, but she couldn’t blame them: she had changed so little over the years that people were never reminded to reconsider her. “It is a lot of work,” she said. “It really is.” Making the confession gave her a small thrill, and she went on, feeling her way. “And sometimes it feels like a natural conclusion to raising a daughter, that you run yourself ragged to make this one day as perfect as possible, even though, for you, the day is bittersweet because she’s leaving—I mean, she’s been living with Greyson, but somehow this is different, more official. I don’t know how those over-bearing beauty pageant mothers do it, you know, keeping track of someone else’s whole physical being: hair, clothes, makeup, all that.”
“Yeah, right?” Dominique concurred. “I think—well, I don’t know, but it seems to me the real backbreaker is being in charge of manifesting someone else’s idea of perfection. Not necessarily Daphne’s, just this idea floating around out there about what a wedding should be.”
Biddy squared a place card with the edge of the table. “Manifesting someone else’s idea of perfection. Hmm. That’s well put.” She wondered if the younger woman was talking about more than just the wedding. Certainly Biddy was no stranger to laboring under another person’s vision for life. Abruptly, her enjoyment of her own honesty peaked and fell away. She had wilted quickly under the spotlight. “I don’t know,” she said. “All I mean is that I don’t want anyone to be disappointed.”
“Well, sure,” Dominique said, switching to an offhand tone, “but there’s only so much you can control. Perfection is overrated, anyway. I’m all about meeting basic needs and seeing what’s left over from there.”
Laughing in embarrassment, Biddy balled up the tissue and hurried to throw it away under the sink. “But you! I want to hear about you,” she said. “You have the most interesting life. Tell me everything about Belgium.”
“Oh, it’s all right. I don’t think it’s my forever home. I just kind of live there. In a way, it could be anywhere. You should see my apartment—it’s completely barren. Every time I think about buying something, like nice sheets or something to hang on the wall or even fancy hand soap, I think, well, no, because I won’t be here for long, and it’ll be one more thing to get rid of.” She gave Biddy another searching look. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a break? You could run away for an hour somewhere. Have some time to yourself. I’d cover for you.”
“No, no,” Biddy said, shaking off the last of her tears. “I’m really fine. It’s not the amount of stuff I have to do, really, it’s—you’re so sweet to ask. I just—where is your forever home, do you think?”
Dominique’s eyebrows climbed a notch higher, but she said, “I’m not sure it exists. Not Egypt, not Belgium. Not France—that’s where my parents live now. They moved a couple of years ago. I don’t know if Daphne told you. I like New York but it exhausts me. Not Deerfield. Not Michigan.”
“That still leaves a lot of places,” Biddy said. “Maybe you’re supposed to live in the Bahamas.”
“I hope so. In a hammock.” They giggled.
“How will you find it?” Biddy asked. “Your home?” She was curious; she had never chosen where to live.
“I think probably I’ll look for a job first. But—I don’t know. In theory I could work most places. You’d think it would be fun, being able to pick more or less anywhere in the world, but when I think about the freedom I usually just end up feeling lonely. There’s nothing pulling me to any particular spot except vague preferences. And sometimes I wonder what it says about me that I can drift like this.” She gave a quick, wry roll of her eyes. “Total first-world problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, like, oh, woe is me, I’m so exhausted and alienated by my globe-trotting life of preparing expensive food.”
“Don’t you have a boyfriend in Belgium? What about him?”
“I don’t think he’s permanent.” Dominique made a slow, sheepish shrug, her shoulders lingering around her ears for several seconds until she abruptly let them fall. “It’ll all sort itself out. Where do you think I should live? Where would you go?”
Biddy was caught off guard not so much by the question as by her inability to process it. She couldn’t think of a single place she might live where she had not already lived. She thought: Connecticut. Waskeke. Maine. Connecticut. Those weren’t answers for Dominique. They were shameful in their timidity, their lack of adventure. But she could not imagine living on a tropical island or in the Alps or in Rome or Sydney or Rio. She could not imagine living in Delaware. “I think you’ll know it when you find it,” she said. “I think you’ll find the perfect place. Or at least one that meets your basic needs.”
The side door slammed, and Livia appeared in the hallway, balancing a paper grocery bag brimming with corn on each of her hips. “Teddy joined the army,” she announced.
“Teddy Fenn?” Biddy asked.
Livia set the bags on the counter. “Teddy Fenn.”
The boy’s name, so familiar, sounded foreign to Biddy when Livia pronounced it all by itself, like the Latin name for a rare species, some kind of wetlands bear. “How do you know?”
“We ran into Jack at the market. He said Teddy just went down to some recruitment center or wherever and signed up. He’s not coming back to school. He’s not graduating. I don’t know why Jack couldn’t stop him. What kind of father would let this happen?” Biddy thought Livia sounded like her own father, though Livia would be offended to be told so. The two of them had the same wrongheaded belief in the power of parents over children. A bag of corn tipped over, and the heavy ears thumped onto the floor. Livia gazed heavenward and flapped her arms in defeat.
Biddy was relieved not to be the object of any more scrutiny. “Easy does it,” she said, approaching her daughter even though she knew her consolation would not be welcome. Since Livia could not admit defeat and accept that Teddy really was lost, she would tolerate no pity. Biddy kept waiting for her to simply get over the boy. As a toddler Livia had been inseparable from her pacifier until the day she was put down for an unwelcome nap and ripped the rubber nipple from her mouth and hurled it to the floor, never to suck on it again.
“Dad was in rare form,” Livia said after allowing Biddy a brief hug and then stepping away. “He got all, you know, forceful and cheerful, and tried to bring up the Pequod and was weird with Meg, and then, then, he goes, ‘How is Teddy?’ Like he was talking about some random acquaintance. And Jack says, ‘Oh, funny you should ask. He’s made a big decision. He’s joined the army.’ And Daddy says, ‘Well. Well, well, well, well, well.’ Like that. ‘Well, well, well, well, well.’”
“Did Jack say why?”
Livia bent to gather up the corn. “No. I’m not sure he knows.”
“Where does he go? Does he go to … boot camp?” Biddy spoke tentatively, uncertain of the expression.
“I don’t know. I have no idea where or when or how. I don’t know. Why would I know? Did he just wake up one morning and decide, Oh, none of this is really working for me? I’d like a one-way ticket to Iraq, please.”
“They’ll give him a round-trip ticket,” Dominique said. She, too, came to hug Livia, and this time Livia seemed grateful, wrapping her arms around Dominique’s strong back and hiding her face in the young woman’s shoulder. Biddy noticed a strand of corn silk on the tiles and bent to pick it up.
“He might have to come back as cargo,” Livia said, muffled. “Why can’t he just finish college?”
“Livia,” said Biddy, “I don’t want you to think this has anything to do with you.” She reached in from the outskirts of the embrace to squeeze her daughter’s shoulder.
“That’s what Daddy said.” Livia released Dominique. “But how could it not have anything to do with me?”
Because, Biddy wanted to say, Teddy didn’t fall apart after this breakup the way you did. Because Teddy’s life no longer includes you. But she could see that Livia was taking Teddy’s decision as some kind of sign, an indication that he was becoming unpredictable and erratic, possibly on the brink of a collapse that could only drive him back to her, regretful and awakened. His flight to the army was the last dying flutter of independence, his last binge of freedom before he saw the light. The army would never love him the way Livia did. “I don’t want you to hope it has something to do with you,” Biddy said.
Livia began breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth and staring off into space. The therapist she saw at school, Dr. Z, had taught her that trick: if you feel like you’re about to lose your temper, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth and count to five or ten, depending on the direness of the situation. Winn hated that Livia saw a shrink. He said she should learn to grin and bear it.
“Anyway,” Livia said after five seconds, “after we saw Jack, Daddy decided we should go check on their new house.”
“The Fenns’ house?” said Biddy. “Why?”
“I think he wanted to sit there and glower at it and think about the Pequod. Not about how Teddy knocked me up and dumped me, no, no. About how unfair it is—what a great injustice it is—that there’s a club out there he can’t join.”
“Maybe it’s easier for him to think about the Pequod,” Dominique said.
Biddy looked at her, annoyed. The casual analysis seemed to violate Winn’s privacy. And Dominique couldn’t possibly understand what his clubs meant to him, what it was like to live inside their particular social world. Hadn’t she just been saying she didn’t belong anywhere?
Dominique was standing at the counter with a bottle of white wine she had helped herself to from the fridge, presumably to pour a nerve-settling glass for Livia. The natural melancholy of her face lent an air of pensive deliberation to even her simplest actions, and she contemplated the bottle as though it were a bouquet of condolence flowers in need of arranging. Thoughtfully, slowly, frowning, she twisted in a corkscrew and then glanced up, catching Biddy’s eye and, surely, some trace of her enmity.
“You know what I mean,” Dominique said levelly. “We all have our safe thing to run back to when we get overwhelmed.”
Biddy remembered that only minutes before she had been grateful enough for Dominique’s presence to have cried. Apologetically, she said, “He likes to keep track of new houses on the island.”
“Honestly, I think the house is great,” said Livia. “They have an amazing location. The house is big, but so what? It’s Fenn Castle.”
“The Fennitentiary,” Dominique said, handing a glass of wine to Livia. “Biddy, may I pour you a glass?”
“No, thanks.”
“Fennsylvania,” said Livia.
Biddy tried to think of a pun but couldn’t come up with anything. Had Dominique ever even met any of the Fenns? Most likely not, though certainly she had heard plenty about them—both Daphne and Livia kept up e-mail correspondences with her, and over the past few days the house had effloresced with girl talk. “Is Teddy on-island?” she asked Livia.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Probably.”
“Well, you won’t run into him.”
“What if he calls me?”
“Do you think he will?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. You’d think he’d want to tell me about the whole army thing.”
Biddy sat back down at the table.
Livia stepped closer and studied the mess of cards and charts. “Shouldn’t Daphne be doing this?”
“Seating isn’t really Daphne’s strong suit,” Biddy said. “She gives everyone the benefit of the doubt. She doesn’t see where conflict might arise.”
“On the other hand,” Dominique said, “I assume the worst.”
“You’re very good,” Biddy said. She reached across Livia to pat Dominique’s hand.
“Do you know all these people?” Livia asked Dominique.
“Not all of them,” Dominique said. “Biddy’s been explaining the web.”
“The web?”
“All the connections between everyone. It is impressively tangled, I will say.”
“Do you think Daphne’s strong suit might be shucking corn?” Livia asked.
“I’ll help you,” Dominique said. “Wine and corn shucking is an underrated combination.” She turned to Biddy. “We’ve pretty much got the seating stuff figured out, right?”
“Sure,” Biddy said, so practiced at concealing her disappointments that she had no doubt she sounded serene, even cheerful, as they abandoned her. “I’m fine here. You girls go on. Have fun.”
Through the French doors, she watched them settle into Adirondack chairs, glasses of wine on a table between them, and take up ears of corn. They ripped the green husks and pale clumps of silk free of the cobs, and dropped the naked yellow ears in one paper bag and the husks in another. Livia was talking, talking, talking, and Dominique was listening as she expertly shucked the corn, her eyebrows curved in tildes of concentration.
Biddy could no longer bear to watch Livia talk about Teddy, her eyes shining with wounded zealotry. Looking away from the girls, she made a few final desultory attempts at seating gambits that would ensure everyone’s happiness at the reception, and then she sat staring into the kitchen, wondering what to do. She could think of no more confirmation calls to make, no more gift bags to fill, no flowers to wrangle, no people to greet until the Duffs showed up for dinner. Usually e-mail was banned from the Waskeke house, necessitating a family trip to the library in town every couple of days, but this time Livia had insisted on having a cable hookup put into Winn’s office. Biddy wandered in that direction although she didn’t really want to know what new obligations were waiting in her in-box, and she only had to open Livia’s laptop and see the photo on the desktop—Teddy was not in the picture, but it was one Livia had taken on a trip with him to Scotland—to decide that, no, she would not check her mail after all. Perhaps she would follow Dominique’s advice and take a quiet moment for herself.
She sat in Winn’s chair, a winged, brooding, swiveling leather thing, and pivoted slowly around. Out the window she saw Daphne, Piper, and Agatha lounging on the lawn, but she had no desire to watch them and continued turning until she was again facing the green expanse of Winn’s blotter, bound at the sides with gold-embossed leather and clean except for a small stack of unopened mail and, all alone out in the middle, a single bobby pin. Biddy picked up the pin and held it in the light, looking for any telltale hairs, but it was clean. She supposed Livia must have left it there, though why she would be fixing her hair at Winn’s desk was a mystery.
She swiveled again to look out the window. At the rate Livia was going, she would end up being as scrawny as Piper, whose shoulder blades cast angular, inhuman shadows as she stretched her knobby arms up and out to the side. Of course she might have been as big as Daphne by now, or bigger, or already a mother. Biddy was afraid Livia was the doomed, clever moth who does not just bump against the outside of the lantern but manages to find a way inside and breaks itself against the glass—maybe trying to escape, maybe trying to merge with the flame. Biddy fiddled with the bobby pin, turning it over and over, pinching her fingertip in its tines. Teddy was a handsome kid, comfortable being noticed, impish and urbane under his red hair, not too pale but freckled, almost golden. He was friendly and charming, too, but Livia seemed unaware of how far she outstripped him in curiosity and sharpness and passion. Yes, Teddy had told Livia he loved her, but Biddy, for all her sorrow at her daughter’s pain, was disappointed and troubled that Livia had allowed herself to become so vulnerable, mulishly ignoring all the warning signs. How had she, Biddy, managed to raise someone so exposed and defenseless, a charred moth, a turtle without a shell, exactly the kind of woman she most feared to be?
CELESTE LAUGHED a hooting, triumphant laugh, pleased to have startled him so completely. Winn, turned pure animal, had bolted off to one side, his body twisting in its unimaginative sheath of polo shirt and salmon-colored pants. His feet, trying to flee, had run afoul of the tree roots, and he had stumbled badly, catching a trunk with both hands. She knew from long experience that taking jokes was not Winn’s strong suit, but still she was unprepared for the intensity of the response that crossed his face: first a very brief flash of something odd, like fear but also like despair, and then, once he had steadied himself, pure rage.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“Come on, Winnifred, just a little prank. You didn’t die.”
He examined the palm of his left hand and held it out for her to see. It was pink and scratched. Tiny white curls of skin stood up like grated cheese. “This is the last thing I need.”
“Good thing you’re not a lefty.” Earlier, Celeste had sensed she was getting too far ahead of the game and had come out for a walk to sober up. She was glad, too, because now she could be confident she wasn’t slurring her words.
His face resolved into a grim smile. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Just the right amount,” she said. She hoped the medically smoothed forehead she wore like a helmet would keep her from betraying the sting of his question. “What are you doing out here, skulking around?”
“I wasn’t skulking. You’re not the only one who can take a walk. It is my property, after all.”
His discomfort intrigued her. Instinct, honed by years of field experience, had rendered her unable to resist sniffing along a trail of male bad behavior once she caught the scent, and she studied him, increasingly certain that, underneath his bluster, something was off. Winn scowled, backed up against his tree. What had he been looking at in the first place? He moved to block her view, but she leaned around him and caught sight of the girls out in their bathing suits, soaking up the last of the sun like three mismatched lizards. “Enjoying the view, Winnifred?” she said lightly. There were worse things than being a Peeping Tom.
He gritted his teeth. “I was taking a walk. I heard a noise, and I went to see what it was. I was about to go up and say hello to the girls when you decided to give me a heart attack. I didn’t realize you were taking a break between cocktail hours to sneak around.”
“No need to get huffy with me, 007,” she said. He would never dare pick on her drinking with Biddy around, but as they faced each other out in the trees, his dignity ruptured and his adrenaline still running high, they were caught up in a primal energy. She thought he was equally likely to strike her or kiss her. He had kissed her once before, supposedly by accident, and he was attractive in his way, in good shape for his age and with a symmetrical, serious, news anchor sort of face and nice gray temples. But then again she had a thing for repressed men (hello, husbands one, two, and four), and she had a thing for men just starting to go gray (three and four), and she had a thing for forbidden men (three, oh lord, three), and, truth be told, she flirted with Winn sometimes for no more substantial reason than that she liked to keep things lively. She had stolen husband number three in the first place—he had been a charismatic trial lawyer, married, and the authoritarian, despised, partnership-withholding boss of husband number two—and then that little tramp, that child with the long, long legs and the horse face, her best friend’s daughter, had gone and stolen him, and off they’d flown to Bolivia.
But Winn was such a square. That was why he and Biddy worked. Ogling through the pine trees was probably the great sin of his life. “I wasn’t sneaking,” she said. “I was walking, just like you.” She attempted a saucy smirk, feeling a curious deadness in the parts of her face that had been injected into submission. “So, which is it?” she asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Is it Agatha or Piper? Oh, don’t tell me. I’ve already guessed.” As she spoke, she realized that she had, in fact, guessed, and scorn rose up in her.
“You are being disgusting,” Winn said with exaggerated deliberateness. “I hope you get all this out of your system before our guests arrive.”
She poked him in the belly, just above the brass buckle of his needlepoint belt, finding more softness there than she expected. “Dirty old man.”
“Screw off,” he growled and stomped away into the trees.
Celeste watched him go and then pushed through the branches and sauntered out onto the lawn. “Hello, ladies!” she called. Piper waved; Agatha propped herself up on her elbows; Daphne lolled on her side like a walrus, her chin lost in the soft folds of her neck. Poor dear. Fortunately, she would be the type to shed the baby weight right away.
“What’s up, Celeste?” Agatha said.
Piper sat up straight as a yogi and lifted her arms over her head. Her swimsuit stretched over the hollow between her ribs and hips. “Isn’t it so beautiful out?” she chirped.
Celeste flopped onto the grass. “Absolutely gorgeous.”
“Make sure you check yourself for ticks later, Celeste,” Daphne said. “Lyme is a problem here.”
“Why would limes be a problem?” Piper asked.
“Not limes,” Agatha said. “Lyme disease. With a y.”
Celeste crossed her arms over her face and wished that a hand would descend from heaven and offer her a cocktail. She was wearing shorts and a striped sailor’s shirt, and the grass pricked her calves. She kicked off her sandals and rolled onto her belly, looking uphill at the girls. “So who’s next, ladies? Who’s after Daphne?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Agatha. “Piper’s the one with a boyfriend.”
“Oh my God,” Piper said. “Don’t jinx it.” She ran a hand through the huge mane of hair that, in Celeste’s opinion, made her look like a member of Whitesnake.
“So marriage is still cool?” Celeste asked. “It’s still something girls your age want? I would have thought you all would be going over to some groovy, Swedish hipster model of commitment.”
“Obviously, marriage is cool,” Agatha drawled. “Otherwise Daphne wouldn’t be doing it.”
Daphne snorted. “If I had a baby out of wedlock, Daddy would die. Literally die.”
“You mean,” Celeste said, “you wouldn’t be getting married if it weren’t for your father?”
“Well, Mom, too. And the Duffs. But, no, if I really had my way, we’d wait a while so I wouldn’t have to be pregnant in the pictures.”
“I really want to get married,” Piper volunteered. “It’s so romantic.”
“Yes, it is,” Celeste agreed. She plucked a blade of grass from the soil and tickled her lips with its waxy edge. “But romantic and prudent are not the same thing.”
“That’s good, though,” Agatha said. “Imagine if there was only prudence.”
“Hmm,” said Celeste. “Then I never would have married, and the world would be a very different place.”
“My parents would have, though,” Daphne said. She had settled on her back again, and her voice drifted over her belly.
“That’s true,” Celeste said.
Agatha crossed one golden leg over the other and bounced her slender, dirty foot. “What was Winn like when he was young?” she asked. “It’s just that I can’t imagine it. Biddy I can picture, but not Winn.”
Celeste felt a prickle. The nymphet was interested. Never one to torture herself, she preferred not to dwell on the charms of young women and had only allowed her eyes to skim the girl before, assessing her as pretty (really, more than pretty but with the kind of looks that would turn vulgar before too long). But now she gave her full attention to the remarkable body on display in that ratty old bikini, worn to near transparency. Agatha was thin but not hard. Long limbed but still small. Totally devoid of pores or cellulite or stretch marks or stray hairs. Even something as mundane as her kneecap was finely wrought, worthy of study, top of the line.
But this girl must have her choice of men. Why would she want old Winnifred? What about him could possibly light her fire except his forbiddenness, his unlikeliness, the very triteness of his middle-aged crush? Not that any of those should be underestimated. Husband number three, Wyeth, had been the least handsome but most loved of her husbands, and now he lived off his fortune in St. Barts, the novelty of Bolivia having long ago worn off, though not, apparently, the allure of long-legged, horse-faced youth. But Wyeth had been stolen property to begin with, an unlucky penny, and Celeste, in the end, had come to accept the bulk of the blame for the sorrows caused by their marriage. Nothing like that should happen to Biddy. Biddy had always been such a docile creature, highly competent but docile, happy to be a kind of ladies’ maid to her sisters through her childhood and then an earnest bluestocking and then a selfless wife. To betray her would be the height of cruelty. But this was crazy. Agatha couldn’t possibly want Winn.
“Oh,” Celeste said, drawing an expansive sigh of phony reminiscence, “let me cast my mind back. I think—I think—yes. I remember now. Winn was exactly the same.”
Piper made a high squawk that Celeste supposed was laughter. “There has to be more. Tell! What was he like?”
“Really. I couldn’t possibly come up with one thing that’s changed.”
Daphne stirred. “Mom once said he had a bad reputation before they met. Apparently he liked the ladies.”
Agatha’s bouncing foot stilled.
“I think he started those rumors himself,” Celeste said. “Your father is a born monogamist. Boring as hell.”
“Mom seemed kind of proud of it,” Daphne said. “She’s funny.”
Agatha uncrossed her legs and sat up. The shade had fully caught her, and she rubbed her arms as though to brush it off. She said, “Some people like a little competition. You want to feel like you have someone desirable.”
“You would say that,” Daphne said. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
But Piper was nodding. “No,” she said, “I think that’s true sometimes. You want to feel like the guy had lots of options but chose you. Like you tamed him a little bit.”
“That is so retro,” said Daphne.
“Don’t you feel that way?” Agatha asked. “It’s not like Greyson was a virgin when you met. It’s not like Greyson was ever a virgin.”
“Well,” Daphne said. “I don’t know. Maybe a little.”
Sadly, but with a certain pleasure of anticipation, Celeste accepted that she needed a drink. “All right,” she said, hoisting herself to her feet and sliding back into her sandals. “I’ll leave you girls to it. Someone has to tell Daphne what’s going to happen on her wedding night, and I don’t have the stomach for it.”
“We’ll be in soon,” Daphne said. “We’ve lost our sun. Check for ticks.”
Celeste walked around the house and greeted Livia and Dominique, who were deep in conversation on the deck beside two bags of shucked corn. Inside, place cards and seating charts were spread over the table, but Biddy was nowhere to be seen. The bottle of gin was out on the counter, and after she poured a little into a tumbler and added ice and a dollop of tonic, she put it away in a cupboard, where people were less likely to monitor its level. The first sip, bitter and fizzy, was unspeakably delicious, and she felt her nerves begin to settle at once. The bottom line was that she was being paranoid about Winn. And even if she wasn’t, what could she do?
After retrieving the bottle and splashing out a tiny bit more gin, she climbed up through the house to the widow’s walk, where she could have some privacy and fresh air and take in the view. Reclining in a chair, she closed her eyes and pressed the sweating glass against her forehead. She wanted to tell herself she had once been as sexy as Agatha, but her delusions were not so strong as that. Still, she had been seductive. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to poach Wyeth from his mousy wife and three children. The best she could say for herself now was that she was the kind of woman people called well preserved. But despite all her restorative efforts, she looked tired. Which she was, in the existential sense. There would be no more seductions for her, no more ecstasy, no more destruction. She and Cooper had a pleasant life together, a sanctuary built by two reformed sinners around a policy of maximal calm and minimal communication. Quiet dinners out, long weeks apart when he was off sailing, compatible taste in TV and movies, mutual tolerance of each other’s friends, agreement that they would never marry. Maybe she had stumbled on the ideal relationship for a woman her age. Maybe, after all these years, she had solved the riddle. Even if things fell apart, she would draft another companion from the bush leagues of washed-up lovers, and they would wait out the violet hour together.
Four · Twenty Lobsters (#ulink_899049fe-694f-5ce3-b332-c4b65c7d7b0c)
I’ve spent the past six months wishing he were dead,” Livia said to Dominique. Immediately, she regretted the melodrama of the statement. Melodrama did not fly with Dominique.
The last of the corn had been shucked, and Dominique was leaning back in her chair and looking out over the lawn. Celeste had walked up the grass a minute before, and they could hear the murmur of bride and bridesmaids from around the corner of the house. “I doubt that’s what you were really wishing for,” she said tolerantly.
Livia considered. “Everyone thinks I should just get over it,” she said. “But I don’t know what’s on the other side of ‘it.’ I’m not even exactly sure what ‘it’ is.”
“No need to be all metaphysical about it. You know what you’re supposed to do. You just don’t want to do it.”
“I don’t want to give up prematurely.”
“No one could accuse you of that. I could read you back the fifty e-mails you sent me this winter detailing the ten million arguments you’d pitched to Teddy for why you should be together. But look, you’ve given it the old college try, he hasn’t come around, so cross your fingers and let go.”
A cry came from above and a crow swooped from the roof, trying to gobble something down as it flew, pursued by an enraged seagull. The birds disappeared over the trees. Livia said nothing.
“It’s been a while since you’ve talked to him, right?” Dominique pressed. “Just keep going with that. Invest some time. I mean, think of it this way. How do you think it looks if you go around mooning over him for months after he dumped you?”
“Why does it matter how it looks?” Livia said hotly, surprised at Dominique. “Why does everyone care so much about how everything looks?”
Dominique held up her hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m not a member of this Great Gatsby reenactment society you all have going on. I just think it’s possible to trick yourself into feeling better by pretending you feel better.”
“Yeah,” Livia said. “Yeah, I know, but I keep thinking about how far along I’d be. I’d be just as preggers as Daphne.” Two weeks after her abortion, she had been summoned home for a weekend. Daphne and Greyson were coming up from the city for dinner. They had news. Winn roasted a duck. They were still on the salad course when Daphne bubbled over and announced she was pregnant and she and Greyson were getting married. Livia, to her enduring shame, had burst into tears and run from the table.
“Women,” Dominique said knowingly. “We measure our lives in months.”
“People kept telling me that at least now I know I can get pregnant. Like, phew, what a relief. I’d really be spending a lot of time worrying about infertility otherwise.”
“Yeah, but what do you say to someone about their abortion? The impulse is to grasp for silver linings.”
“I’m not beating myself up over it. I just want to meet someone else. Barring that, I just want to sleep with someone else. To at least create the sensation of moving on.”
“Fine,” said Dominique, “but beware the rebound guy.”
“I just want a distraction.”
“That’s what they all say.”
BIDDY WAS COLLECTING the last of Winn’s groceries from the Land Rover when he came walking up out of the trees, frowning and moving his hands to emphasize some speech he was giving in his head.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“To check on the garden,” he said. “Depressing.”
“You saw Jack?”
“Livia told you about Teddy?”
“I’m shocked.”
“I’m not. Chip off the old block. At least he’ll be far away. Livia won’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“She thinks he’s leaving because of her. I’m afraid she’ll romanticize this.”
“Tell her she’s overestimating her own importance. He’s a Fenn. He’s joining up because he thinks it makes him look good. I tried to get a word in about the Pequod with Jack but didn’t get too far. If he’s blackballing me because of this whole business with the kids, I think that’s poor form.”
“Mmmm.” Biddy was unwilling to enter into another round of the Great Pequod Debate. Was Jack shutting Winn out because Winn had excluded Jack from the Ophidian? Was Fee carrying a grudge over their breakup all those years ago? Were the Fenns so collectively shamed by Livia’s ordeal that they simply had no wish to see the Van Meters around the clubhouse? This last hypothesis, she had pointed out to Winn over and over again, was especially silly since he had been on the waiting list well before Teddy’s hapless sperm found its way to Livia’s egg. To Biddy’s thinking, Winn had done everything he could to make his case with the Pequod, and the rest was up to fate. So there was no cause for angst, no need to spin conspiracy theories. In all likelihood, the holdup had nothing to do with the Fenns and everything to do with the club’s internal workings and quotas. And even if the Fenns were the problem, most likely Winn, not Livia, was to blame, as Biddy was fairly certain the Fenns had been genuinely fond of her daughter and would not be so unjust as to think she had tried to entrap their son. At the end of the day, why would you want to join a club where you are not welcome? But Winn saw the consequences of Livia’s mistake everywhere, as though her womb were the source of all disorder in the universe.
“I’ll tell you,” Winn said, “I have an itch to call up Jack and have it out, get the straight story once and for all.”
“No,” Biddy said, “not this weekend, Winn, please.”
Celeste’s voice clarioned down from the roof. “Winnifred!” Winn grimaced. “Oh, Winnifred! The lobsters are here!”
A red-faced man in white shirt and pants appeared around the corner of the house, struggling to push a dolly loaded with two cardboard boxes through the gravel. Each box had a large red lobster stamped on it.
“Van Meter?” he said, consulting something scrawled in black marker on the top box. “Twenty lobsters?”
“You’ve come to the right place,” said Winn. He stepped forward and lifted the first box off the dolly, setting it on the ground and pulling off the lid.
The deliveryman watched dubiously. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Winn said. “That’s why I’m checking them.” He pulled lobster after lobster out of his box, holding each in the air to make sure it was moving its antennae and rubber-banded claws before adding it to a pile on the gravel.
“I’m sure they’re all alive, Winn,” Biddy said, blocking one lobster’s escape with her Top-Sider. People said lobsters were just giant bugs, and they looked it, creeping along, probing with their long feelers.
“Better safe than sorry, dear,” Winn said. To the deliveryman, who had begun to remove lobsters uncertainly from the second box, he said, “Here, I’ll get those if you’ll do me a favor and put these ones back.”
“No,” Biddy said. She bent and grabbed a lobster by its midsection and dropped it back in the box. There was a bed of seaweed at the bottom. “I’ll do it.”
“He doesn’t mind.” Winn turned to the deliveryman. “Do you?”
“No?” the man said, confused.
Biddy set two more lobsters on top of the first, and Winn scooped two out of the second box. “Slow down,” she said, “they’re getting mixed up.”
“It doesn’t matter which box they go in, dear, as long as they’re alive.”
“You can go,” Biddy told the deliveryman. “We’re all paid up, aren’t we?”
“Just hang on one minute,” Winn said. “Let me finish here.” Biddy gave up replacing lobsters, and she and the deliveryman watched in silence until Winn pulled out the last one and waved it at them. “Now,” he said, “aren’t we glad I checked? This one’s dead.” The lobster’s claws drooped limply, swinging from side to side like a pair of oversized boxing gloves. Setting it on the ground among its living brethren, Winn straightened up and put his hands on his hips, victorious. They all looked down at the lobster.
“That’s so weird,” the deliveryman said. “I’ve never heard of someone getting a dead one. These things could live on the moon.”
“He just moved,” Biddy said. “He moved his antennae.”
“No, he didn’t,” said Winn.
But Biddy was sure. The lobster had swept his antennae to the side. As they watched, the long, whisker-like appendages flicked again. “See?” she said.
Winn nudged the lobster with his toe. It didn’t move. “It’s sick in any case,” he said. “We don’t want to eat a sick lobster.” He picked up the lobster and held it out to the deliveryman. “How about running back and getting us a replacement?”
“Well,” the guy said, “that might take a while. I have a few other deliveries to make first.”
“Not necessary,” Biddy said, reaching out and seizing the invalid from Winn. “We have more than enough. Winn, Dicky doesn’t even eat lobster.”
“But we paid for twenty,” Winn said.
“I can write you a credit,” the deliveryman said, eying the lobsters, which were slowly migrating off the path and into the grass.
“Fine,” Biddy said. “That will be fine.”
“I don’t know,” said Winn.
“It’s fine,” Biddy assured the deliveryman.
Agatha and Piper emerged from the side door, Piper catching it before it slammed. Both were in their bathing suits, and the men were, for a moment, too startled to remember to hide their interest in the girls’ breasts and legs.
“We heard the lobsters were here,” Agatha said. “Can we help?”
“Good girls,” Winn said. “You can catch the runaways.”
“You don’t have to,” Biddy said.
“No,” said Agatha, “we’ll do it.”
Winn touched Agatha’s elbow. “Sorry about earlier,” he said quietly.
“What happened earlier?” Biddy asked.
Winn and Agatha looked at each other. Agatha laughed.
“I’m afraid I barged in on poor Agatha in the bathroom,” said Winn.
“Oh, Winn,” Biddy said, “you know the lock’s broken. You have to knock.”
“It was my fault,” Agatha offered. “I should have—”
“No,” Winn interrupted, “no, I was careless. I accept full responsibility. Absolutely my fault. I’m not used to so many people being around, that’s all. Won’t happen again.”
“All right,” Biddy said. “That’s enough, Winn.”
“No big deal,” said Agatha with an ingratiating wink at Biddy. She bent to catch a lobster, her bikini nestled fetchingly in her butt crack.
As the deliveryman wrote up a receipt for the price of one lobster, Biddy held the dead or dying crustacean in one hand and, slipping the other into her pocket, found the bobby pin there. She rolled it between her fingertips as the laughing young women collected the other lobsters, scooping them up and daring each other to kiss the rust-colored noses while the creatures flipped their petaled tails.
THIS IDEA of her father’s to cook a lobster dinner for seventeen struck Livia as ill conceived but also immutable. She accepted, too, that he would want her to be his sous-chef and that she would not be able to get out of it. He received the shucked corn without thanks and sent her around to the outdoor shower with a salad spinner, four heads of lettuce to wash and tear up, and an empty laundry basket in lieu of a colander. Agatha and Piper had been in the kitchen in their bathing suits for some reason, padding around like nudists, and Daphne and Dominique came in from outside as Livia was heading out. Daphne had a red sarong tied below her belly. “Daphne,” Livia said, hefting the basket of lettuce, “you must be really stressed out, what with the wedding being so close and all. So much to do.”
“Leave me alone, I’m pregnant,” Daphne said sweetly, reaching to accept a glass of iced tea from Piper.
The shower, a stall of cedar planks around a showerhead that stuck out from the side of the house, was near the back door. Livia turned on the water and picked up a head of lettuce, holding it under the spray while she tore apart the leaves and dropped them in the spinner. She felt the way she always did after she talked about her pregnancy: a little embarrassed and slightly unclean, like she had told a crude joke at a party. The sight of Agatha in her bikini had done nothing for her mood. She found herself imagining Agatha and Teddy together, and, arbitrary though the pairing was, the thought sickened her. She had heard about two or three girls he had been with since the breakup, and she thought of those girls with Teddy, too, fragments and pieces of bodies, the whole too gruesome to contemplate. Teddy was still the lone notch on her pathetic bedpost. She dug her fingers into the lettuce, making ragged rips she knew her father would not like, and then she clapped the lid on the spinner and pulled its cord, yanking as though starting an outboard motor.
“Teddy got me pregnant”—that was what she said even though the bulk of the blame was hers. Pills either nauseated her or caused insupportable mood swings; diaphragms caused constant infections; she was afraid to get an IUD; the shot had made her roommate gain fifteen pounds. That left condoms. She fell into a habit of chancing a few days around her period when they could skip the part where Teddy picked at the foil wrapper with his thumbnail, tore it open, held the small jellyfish close to his face to see which way it unrolled, and finally applied it, like some ludicrous hazmat suit, to his penis, which all the condom-related exertions of his brain had robbed of some tumescence. Her gamble succeeded for eight months or so and, with discipline, might have lasted longer if she and Teddy had not hit a rough patch, caused, like all of their rough patches, by his attention to another girl. In the relief of their reconciliation, Livia allowed herself to imagine that they were in the green-lit pastures of the safe zone.
A week after the breakup, she had decided one night to get roaringly drunk alone in her room and dress up in pearls and a party dress. Snow was predicted, but she chose a summer dress patterned with large, old-fashioned roses. From her roommate’s closet she fished out high, spindly heels that would have frightened her had she been sober, especially given the iciness of the brick sidewalks. She could not get the zipper in back all the way up, and, for one moment, as she stretched and strained with one elbow poking toward the ceiling and the other bent behind her, she was overtaken by wretchedness and sat down on the futon to shed a few tears. Then the gin kicked back in, and she was out the door without a coat, teetering around patches of snow toward the Ophidian, a few inches of her spine framed by the V of her undone zipper. Around her, girls skimmed by in their going-out clothes, underdressed for the cold and, like her, catching their heels in the divoted ice and the grooves between the bricks. Each group of girls was a single, shimmering consciousness, like a flock of birds or a school of fish, moving together in an elaborate, private choreography, their sequins and silks tossing back the streetlights. The boy at the club’s door hesitated when he saw her, but she pushed past him.
She thought she heard him say that Teddy wasn’t there, and she said, “Fuck Teddy,” to no one in particular. She made a tour of the rooms, tripping on the nap of the Persian carpets and the knotty floorboards. Pounding hip-hop filled the clubhouse, at odds with the ponderous, old-fashioned interior, which was all tufted leather, dark paint, carved wood, and grim brass light fixtures. The décor suggested a nostalgic, appropriated Englishness, as though the Ophidian had once possessed faraway colonial holdings. Framed photographs of members, letters they’d written or received, doodles they’d made on cocktail napkins, and other inscrutable ephemera crowded on the walls. “You’re all dead now,” Livia muttered to the class of 1918, “even though you were in the Ophidian.” The club, she thought, was an institution that existed for little purpose other than to select its members. Once you were in, then what? Then you sat around drinking and gossiping until it was time to choose new members, with whom you sat around drinking and gossiping until the time came to choose the next batch. There was no point to it, not really. The Ophidian was a decoy, a façade, a factory that produced nothing. Her father loved that stupid snake swallowing its own tail. He said it was about self-sufficiency, renewal, and rebirth, shedding skins but persisting, having no beginning and no end. She thought it was about going nowhere, about finding no better option than to devour yourself.
People were looking at her, she knew, and she leered back at them, at the looming faces she knew or seemed to know. She found herself sitting on the arm of a leather couch and laughing at something the boy beside her was saying. She laughed so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. She took a sip from the plastic cup in her hand and realized it was full of water.
“This is water,” she announced. “I didn’t ask for water. If I wanted water, I would have asked for it.”
The boy on the couch looked embarrassed. She wondered how she had ever thought he was funny. “Stephen thought maybe you’d had enough.”
“Oh, is that what Stephen thought?” She was standing now. The room went quiet around her, and she swung left and then right to get a good look at it. “What?” she said. “You think I’m drunk? Stephen thinks I’m drunk? Well, you can tell Stephen that I’m drinking for two! Know what I mean? But don’t wait for Teddy to tell you and don’t send any cigars!” Water slopped out of her glass and onto her toes. “Shit.” When she bent down to wipe it away, she lost what was left of her balance and tipped forward, arcing toward the oriental carpet. As soon as she hit (or was it before? did she even fall?), she felt a pair of hands on her sides, righting her. One of them zipped up her dress. “Teddy?” she whimpered.
The hands did not belong to Teddy, though she spotted him then in the doorway, still wearing his coat, flushed pink under his orange hair, staring at her in a way she knew neither of them could recover from. His contempt radiated from across the hushed room, and she could only send back contrition and animal desperation.
Her rescuer was the despised, vodka-withholding Stephen. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough party.”
He took her to a back room, and together they went through her phone until they found a soberish friend who agreed to come get her and walk her home. “Bring a coat she can wear,” Stephen said into the phone. “And a pair of boots.”
As they sat and waited, Livia studying the floorboards and Stephen the ceiling, he said, “I would take you myself, but it wouldn’t look good. Teddy’s my friend. I’m the one who called him. He came here to get you.”
All the way home, through the falling snow and the purple-orange glow of the streetlights, while the world rattled around her, jarred by each clumsy step she took in her too-big borrowed boots, Livia convinced herself that Stephen would e-mail the next day to check on her, and something would begin, growing out of the snow like a crocus.
There were e-mails the next day, but none from him.
LIVIA LEFT HER BASKET of washed lettuce on the deck and went into the kitchen. “Dad?” she called. “What do you want me to do with the lettuce?”
Her father approached from his study carrying a thick book bound in blue canvas. “BIRDS” was stamped in silver on the spine. “I’ve solved our little mystery,” he said. “Listen.” He flipped to a page he had been marking with his finger and read, “Herons are a large family of wading birds including egrets and bitterns. Egrets are any of several herons, tending to have white or buff plumage.” He closed the book. “That settles it. We were both right.”
“That book’s out of date, and that definition is vague, anyway,” she said.
“But egrets are always herons, and white herons are egrets.”
“But there are white herons that aren’t egrets, too. I don’t know—I don’t remember exactly. I’d have to look it up.”
“I already looked it up.”
“That book is old, Dad.”
“Don’t get upset.”
“I’m not upset! I just want to be accurate.”
He looked at her steadily over his glasses as though trying to determine whether she were a heron or an egret. “Me, too,” he said.
Five · The White Stone House (#ulink_7c28035e-9e6f-5e79-a550-8eb70096f9e3)
Dominique found she was suffering from the classic dual anxieties of the well-meaning guest: she wished to avoid being asked to help with the cooking (Winn by himself was already too many cooks in the kitchen), but she did not want to appear lazy or parasitical. Escape was the only solution, and so she took a bike and struck off. She rode quickly, standing on the pedals, overtaking some local kids in basketball jerseys on low-riding BMXs who hooted at her as she passed, then a solitary guy in paint-spattered pants, riding slowly and slugging from a brown paper bag, and then a large family of day-trippers in a single-file line of descending size, Papa Bear to Baby Bear on basketed rental Schwinns. Ahead, she glimpsed a cyclist with churning, spiderlike legs in black spandex. His torso was a blaze of yellow. “Ah, oui?” Dominique said. “Le mail-lot jaune?” She lowered her head and bore down, imagining spectators lining the bike path, snowcapped Alps above, a peloton of BMX kids behind her riding serpentines and pushing one another. The rickety ten-speed she had chosen from the Van Meter bicycle jumble jerked side to side as she pumped. She caught him more easily than she had expected, the silver teardrop of his helmet growing rapidly larger until she drew alongside, disappointed. She dallied a little before passing, hoping he would turn to look at her, but he kept his sunglasses fixed on the path’s vanishing point.
The lighthouse appeared atop a distant bluff, poking up like a solitary birthday candle. In the day, its light seemed feeble and superfluous, a recurring white spark dwarfed and muted by the sun, but Dominique liked the tower’s stalwart shape and jaunty striped paint job. She would ride to it, she decided. She rode a bicycle almost every day at home in Brussels, to and from the restaurant, but she was always having to dodge and dart through fierce swarms of tiny European cars, racing for survival and not pleasure. But this—the air full of salt and bayberry, the sky as iridescent and capacious as the inner membrane of an infinite airship, the slow loosening of her muscles—this was something gorgeous. She needed speed, space, the abrasion of rushing air. Poor Livia was laboring under the illusion of being owed something, some karmic charity, for her pain, but the universe felt no compunction for its cruelties, no sympathy for its victims, especially those who helped misery along with some idiotic bareback sex. Everyone knew, of course; the Ophidian party had become known as “the Baby Shower.” Daphne didn’t seem to have done much to help Livia cope with the situation, but she claimed Livia had been giving her a wide berth, confiding little, taking no interest in her pregnancy or the preparations for the wedding. And Daphne respected other people’s privacy, even her sister’s, a quality sometimes mistaken for a general lack of curiosity. Daphne had told Dominique that during her worst fight with Greyson, the only fight where each had enumerated the shortcomings of the other, he had accused her of not being interested in anything.
These days the chatter about Livia’s pregnancy seemed to have died down, and for the most part, little Fenn–Van Meter had been swept under the communal Aubusson rug. Dominique had almost forgotten how these families worked, how they were set up to accommodate feigned ignorance, unspoken resentment, and repressed passion the way their houses had back stairways and rooms tucked away behind the kitchen for the feudal ghosts of their ancestors’ servants. She was surprised Winn had not leapt from a bridge or gutted himself with a samurai sword after his daughters got knocked up back to back. Daphne’s condition—she imagined Winn, the old Victorian, calling it that—would be grandfathered into the boundaries of propriety by the wedding, but Livia’s phantom pregnancy, the missing bulge under her green dress at the front of the church, was a void that could not be satisfactorily filled in and smoothed over. Good thing he had the Pequod to take his mind off things, setting out on his quest for membership like Don Quixote without a Sancho.
Bearing down on the pedals, she shook her head. These people, this pervasive clique, this Establishment to which Winn had attached himself and his family, seemed intent on dividing their community into smaller and smaller fractions, halves of halves, always approaching but never reaching some axis of perfect exclusivity. As long as Dominique had known her, Daphne had rolled her eyes at her father’s quirks and blind spots, but until the pregnancy, she had done nothing to differentiate her life from his vision for it. At Deerfield Dominique had assumed that college would be Daphne’s time to forge her own way, but then she found herself sitting in her Michigan dorm room, curled up in her chlorine-smelling sweats and watching the snow come down and listening to Daphne natter over the phone about eating clubs and bubbleheaded adventures she had with her new fun friend Piper whom Dominique would absolutely love and fancy charity balls in New York and Greyson, always Greyson. Generally willing to be goaded into competition, Dominique had first tried to turn Daphne against these new people, to reclaim her. “They sound like zombies,” she had said, moving from her bunk to the floor and pulling one arm across her chest, stretching her shoulder. She was always either in the pool or studying or sleeping. The amount of time Daphne seemed to have to get dressed up and drink baffled her. “They sound like exactly the friends your dad would pick for you. Don’t you want to mix it up a little bit? Get out of your rut?”
“My rut?” Daphne had repeated. “I don’t have a rut. This is me. Whether or not you approve. I like to fit in. I like people I fit in with.” Which of course was what had drawn Dominique to her in the first place, back when she was new and lost at Deerfield. Daphne, so certain of her place in the world, had been the perfect antidote to homesickness. She had been a kind of skeleton key to prep school, and Dominique had taken possession of her gladly.
“I just worry,” Dominique said, “that you’re selling yourself short.”
A few weeks of frostiness followed and then reconciliation and then Dominique visited Princeton and did not love all the activities and people that Daphne loved, and then there was a fight caused by Dominique wondering out loud how on earth Piper had been accepted at a supposedly selective school, a fight that included more references to zombies (“entitled zombie brats”) and some harsh words from Daphne about how Dominique was always judging, always thought she was better, thought she was so special, like some kind of fucking pharaoh even though she wasn’t, and sometimes people just liked to go out and have fun with people who were nice and fun.
Distance and time had been good for their friendship. Dominique had come to realize Daphne’s life was not her responsibility, and now, in return, almost a decade later, Daphne seemed to value her precisely because she was less fun than Piper or Agatha, because she was not tiny and blond, because she preferred quiet bars to lounges crowded with bankers, because she tried to be honest. And Dominique liked Greyson—she did, genuinely. She did not love him, but that was fine. She would see him only rarely. Of her friends who were married, none had chosen mates who matched her aspirations for them. Usually the spouses were steady, kind people who wanted to get married, not the thrilling, elevating, inspiring matches Dominique had dreamed up. She had been accused by her own mother, who was always trying to set her up with eligible expat Coptic doctors, of having unrealistic expectations, both for herself and others, but Dominique thought the disjunction was not between herself and reality but between her desires for her own life and her friends’ desires for theirs.
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Maggie Shipstead
A New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize, this ebook special edition contains exclusive bonus content.The Van Meters have gathered at their family retreat on the New England island of Waskeke to celebrate the marriage of daughter Daphne to an impeccably appropriate young man. The weekend is full of lobster and champagne, salt air and practiced bonhomie, but long-buried discontent and simmering lust seep through the cracks in the revelry.Winn Van Meter, father-of-the-bride, has spent his life following the rules of the east coast upper crust, but now, just shy of his sixtieth birthday, he must finally confront his failings, his desires, and his own humanity.This ebook edition contains an extended extract of Maggie Shipstead’s second novel, Astonish Me.
About the Author (#ulink_028bd6fd-22b8-5253-ad9d-498a867c8017)
Maggie Shipstead graduated from Harvard in 2005 and earned an M.F.A at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was also a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Seating Arrangements is her first novel and was awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2012, the largest award in the world for writers under 30. She was also awarded the LA Times Book Award for First Fiction. She lives in California.
About the Book (#ulink_da0afe63-bb3f-5ac7-afed-25db8ad59b1a)
The Van Meters have gathered at their family retreat on the New England island of Waskeke to celebrate the marriage of daughter Daphne to an impeccably appropriate young man. The weekend is full of lobster and champagne, salt air and practiced bonhomie, but long-buried discontent and simmering lust seep through the cracks in the revelry.
Winn Van Meter, father-of-the-bride, has spent his life following the rules of the east coast upper crust, but now, just shy of his sixtieth birthday, he must finally confront his failings, his desires, and his own humanity.
Praise for Seating Arrangements (#ulink_0dd22ba9-472e-54d1-88ea-6a58cb324f2b)
‘Irresistible … her prose is joyously good’
DAILY MAIL
‘A ferociously clever comedy of manners’
GUARDIAN
‘A wise, sophisticated and funny novel about family, fidelity, class and crisis’
MARIE CLAIRE
‘Well-observed, hilarious, yet moving’
WOMAN & HOME
‘Definitely one to watch’
GRAZIA
‘Maggie Shipstead is an outrageously gifted writer’
Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
‘Startling beauty’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Seating Arrangements
Maggie Shipstead
Copyright (#ulink_a8475aa0-7e6a-5744-9429-f3d4e9ed323a)
The Borough Press
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2012
Copyright © Maggie Shipstead 2012
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013. Designed by Stuart Bache.
Maggie Shipstead asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
‘The Waste Land’ taken from The Waste Land and Other Poems © Estate of T.S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007467730
Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007425235
Version: 2015-08-03
To my parents, Patrick and Susan,
pillars of everything
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
T. S. ELIOT, “The Waste Land”
Contents
Cover (#ub5dd7bc4-b224-5fb3-a4b9-d1020b36205e)
About the Author (#u99621ce6-8607-5590-b6c2-f1b70d282a5c)
About the Book (#uda5236de-e6da-5e2a-bfc5-f3302e2a5926)
Praise for Seating Arrangements (#uf1eb5439-2ca2-544e-9b2b-f9f538448378)
Title Page
Copyright (#ulink_c25003c8-00f1-51f3-a560-cb3182159d91)
Dedication
Epigraph
Thursday
One · The Castle of the Maidens
Two · The Water Bearer
Three · Seating Arrangements
Four · Twenty Lobsters
Five · The White Stone House
Six · Your Shadow at Evening
Seven · The Serpent in the Laundry
Eight · A Party Ends
Friday
Nine · Snakes and Ladders
Ten · More than One Fish, More than One Sea
Eleven · Flesh Wounds
Twelve · Fortunate Son
Thirteen · A Centaur
Fourteen · The Sun Goes over the Yardarm
Fifteen · Raise Your Glass
Sixteen · A Weather Vane
Seventeen · The Maimed King
Saturday
Eighteen · The Ouroboros
Acknowledgments
Read on for an exclusive extract from Maggie Shipstead’s new novel (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday (#ulink_2935cfb2-32d6-5ca7-8868-8f432e1e7cba)
One · The Castle of the Maidens (#ulink_d261028b-8065-5720-b7bd-293385b18e35)
By Sunday the wedding would be over, and for that Winn Van Meter was grateful. It was Thursday. He woke early, alone in his Connecticut house, a few late stars still burning above the treetops. His wife and two daughters were already on Waskeke, in the island house, and as he came swimming up out of sleep, he thought of them in their beds there: Biddy keeping to her side, his daughters’ hair fanned over their pillows. But first he thought of a different girl (or barely thought of her—she was a bubble bursting on the surface of a dream) who was also asleep on Waskeke. She would be in one of the brass guest beds up on the third floor, under the eaves; she was one of his daughter’s bridesmaids.
Most mornings, Winn’s entries into the waking world were prompt, his torso canting up from the sheets like the mast of a righted sailboat, but on this day he turned off his alarm clock before it could ring and stretched his limbs out to the bed’s four corners. The room was silent, purple, and dim. By nature, he disapproved of lying around. Lost time could not be regained nor missed mornings stored up for later use. Each day was a platform for accomplishment. Up with the sun, he had told his daughters when they were children, whipping off their covers with a flourish and exposing them lying curled like shrimp on their mattresses. Now Daphne was a bride (a pregnant bride, no point in pretending otherwise) and Livia, her younger sister, the maid of honor. The girls and their mother were spending the whole week on the island with an ever-multiplying bunch of bridesmaids and relatives and future in-laws, but he had decided he could not manage so much time away from work. Which was true enough. A whole week on the matrimonial front lines would be intolerable, and furthermore, he had no wish to confirm that the bank would rumble on without him, his absence scarcely noticed except by the pin-striped young sharks who had begun circling his desk with growing determination.
He switched on the lamp. The windows went black, the room yellow. His jaundiced reflection erased the stars and trees, and he felt a twinge of regret at how lamplight obliterated the predawn world, turning it not into day but night. Still, he prided himself on being a practical person, not a poetic soul vulnerable to starlight and sleep fuzz, and he reached for his glasses and swung his feet to the floor. Before going to bed he had laid out his traveling clothes, and when he emerged from the shower, freshly shaven and smelling of bay rum, he dressed efficiently and trotted downstairs, flipping on more lights as he went. He had packed Biddy’s Grand Cherokee the night before, fitting everything together with geometric precision: all the items forgotten and requested by the women, plus bags and boxes of groceries, clothes for himself, and sundry wedding odds and ends. While the coffee brewed, he went outside with the inventory he was keeping on a yellow legal pad and began his final check. He rifled through a row of grocery bags in the backseat and opened the driver’s door to check for his phone charger, his road atlas—even though he could drive the route with his eyes closed—and a roll of quarters, crossing each off the list in turn. Garment bags and duffels stuffed to fatness made a bulwark in the back, and he had to stand on tiptoe and lean into the narrow pocket of air between them and the roof to confirm the presence in the middle of it all of a glossy white box the size of a child’s coffin that held Daphne’s wedding dress.
“Don’t forget the dress, Daddy,” the answering machine had warned in his daughter’s voice the previous night. “Here, Mom wants to say something.”
“Don’t forget the dress, Winn,” said Biddy.
“I won’t forget the damn dress,” Winn had told the plastic box.
He crossed “Dress” off the list and slammed the back hatch. Birds were calling, and yellow light bled through the morning haze, touching the grassy undulations and low stone wall of his neighbor’s estate. Strolling down the driveway to retrieve his newspaper from a puddle, he noticed a few stones that had fallen from the wall onto the shoulder of the road, and he crossed over to restore them, shaking droplets from the Journal’s plastic sack as he went. The hollow sound of stone on stone was pleasant, and when the repair was done, he stood for a minute stretching his back and admiring the neat Yankee face of his house. Nothing flashy and new would ever tempt him away from this quiet neighborhood inhabited by quality people; the houses might be large, but they were tastefully shrouded by trees, and many, like his, were full of thin carpets and creaking, aristocratic floors.
His Connecticut house was home, and his house on Waskeke was also home but a home that was familiar without losing its novelty, the way he imagined he might feel about a long-term mistress. Waskeke was the great refuge of his life, where his family was most sturdy and harmonious. To have all these people, these wedding guests, invading his private domain rankled him, though he could scarcely have forbidden Daphne from marrying on the island. She would have argued that the island was her island, too, and she would have said Waskeke’s pleasures should be shared. He wished that the ferry could take him back into a world where the girls were still children and just the four of them would be on Waskeke. The problem was not that he wasn’t pleased for Daphne (he was) or that he did not appreciate the ceremonial importance of handing her into another man’s keeping (he did). He would carry out his role gladly, but the weekend, now surveyed from its near edge, felt daunting, not a straightforward exercise in familial peacekeeping and obligatory cheer but a treacherous puzzle, full of opportunities for the wrong thing to be said or done.
HE DROVE NORTH along leafy roads, past brick and clapboard towns stacked on hillsides above crowded harbors. The morning was bright and yellow, the car scented with coffee and a trace of Biddy’s perfume. Freight trains slid across trestle bridges; distant jetties reached like arms into the sea. Pale rainbows of sunlight turned circles across the windshield. For Winn, the difficulty of reaching Waskeke was part of its appeal. Unless forced by pressures of time or family, he never flew. The slowness of the drive and ferry crossing made the journey more meaningful, the island more remote. Back when the girls were young and querulous and prone to carsickness, the drive was an annual catastrophe, beset by traffic jams, mix-ups about ferry reservations, malevolent highway patrolmen, and Biddy’s inevitable realization after hours on the road that she had forgotten the keys to the house or medication for one of the girls or Winn’s tennis racquet. Winn had glowered and barked and driven with the grim urgency of a mad coachman galloping them all to hell, all the while knowing that the misery of the trip would sweeten the moment of arrival, that when he crossed the threshold of his house, he would be as grateful as a pilgrim passing through the gates of the Celestial City.
Arriving at the ferry dock an hour early, exactly as planned, he waited in a line of cars at a gangway that led to nothing: open water and Waskeke somewhere over the horizon. Idly, he rolled down the window and watched gulls promenade on the wharves. The harbor had a carnival smell of popcorn and fried clams. When he was a child, for a week in the summer his father would leave the chauffeur at home in Boston and drive Winn down to the Cape himself (such a novelty to see his father behind the wheel of a car). The ferry back then was the old-fashioned, open-decked kind that you had to drive onto backward, and Winn had thrilled at the precarious process even though his father, who might have played up the drama, reversed the car up the narrow ramp with indifferent expertise. They had owned a small place on Waskeke, nothing grand like the Boston house, just a cottage on the edge of a marsh where the fishing was good. But the cottage had been sold when Winn was at Harvard and torn down sometime later to make room for a big new house that belonged to someone else.
The ferry docked with loud clanging and winching and off-loaded a flood of people and vehicles. Some were islanders on mainland shopping expeditions, but most were tourists headed home. Winn was pleased to see them go even if more were always arriving. A worker in navy blue coveralls waved him up the gangway into the briny, iron-smelling hold, and another pointed him into a narrow alley between two lumber trucks. He checked twice to be sure the Cherokee was locked and then climbed to the top deck to observe the leaving, which was as it always was—first the ship’s whistle and then the slow recession of the harbor’s jumbled, shingled buildings and the boat basin’s forest of naked masts. Birds and their shadows skimmed the whitecaps. Though he never wished to indulge in nostalgia, Winn would not have been surprised to see shades of himself stretching down the railing: the boy beside his father, the collegian nipping from a flask passed among his friends, the bachelor with a series of dimly recalled women, the honeymooner, the young father holding one small girl and then two. He had been eight when his father first brought him across, and now he was fifty-nine. A phantom armada of memory ships chugged around him, crewed by his outgrown selves. But the water, as he stared down over the rail, looked like all other water; he might have been anywhere, on the Bering Strait or the river Styx. Without fail, every time he was out on the ocean, the same vision came to him: of himself lost overboard, floundering at the top of that unholy depth.
As the crossing always had the same beginning, so, after two hours, it always had the same end—a gray strip of land separating the blue from the blue, then lighthouses, steeples, docks, jetties reaching for their mainland twins. There was a little lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor where by tradition passengers on outbound ferries tossed pennies off the side. Livia had said as a child that the sea floor there must look like the scales of a fish, and, ever since, the same thought had come to Winn as he passed the lighthouse: a huge copper fish slumbering below, one bulbous eye opening to follow the ferry’s turning propellers. They docked, and as he drove down the ramp into the bustling maze of narrow streets that led out of Waskeke Town, he hummed to himself, relishing solid land.
A BATTERED MAILBOX labeled “VAN METER” with adhesive letters stood at the entrance to his driveway. The narrow dirt track was edged by tall evergreen trees, and he drove up it with mounting excitement, the trees waving him on until he emerged into sunlight. Atop a grassy lump, not quite a hill, that rose like a monk’s tonsure from an encirclement of trees, the house stood tall and narrow, its gray shingles and simple facade speaking of modesty, comfort, and Waskeke’s Quaker past. Above the red front door a carved quarterboard read “PROPER DEWS,” the name he had given the house upon its purchase. The pun was labored, he knew, but it had been the best he could come up with, and he had needed to replace the board left by the previous owner—“SANDS OF THYME”—a name Winn disdained as nonsensical, given that no herb garden had existed on the property before he planted one. The house had been his for twenty years, since Livia was a baby, and over those twenty summers, time and repetition had elevated it from a simple dwelling to something more, a sacred monolith over which his summer sky somersaulted again and again. He parked the car near the back door and gazed up at the neat procession of windows, their panes black with reflected trees.
Something about the place seemed different. He could not have said what. The gutters, shutters, and gables were all intact, all trimmed with fresh white paint. The hydrangeas were not yet flowering but the peonies were, fat blooms of pink and white. He suspected he was projecting some strange aura onto the house because he knew Biddy, Daphne, and Livia were inside with all the bridesmaids and God only knew what other vestal keepers of the wedding flame. As he sat there, listening to the engine tick its way to quiet, a shard of his nearly forgotten dream punctured the pleasure of his arrival. He might have been in the car, or he might have been back in his bed, or he might have been running one finger down a woman’s spine. He tried to push the dream away, but it would not go. He wiped his glasses with his shirt and flipped down the rearview mirror to look at himself. The sight of his face was a comfort, even the chin someone had once called weak. He arranged his features into an expression of patriarchal calm and tried to memorize how it felt—this was how he wanted to look for the next three days. Extracting the dress box and leaving the rest, Winn went around to the side door and let himself in, almost tripping over an explosion of tropical flowers that erupted from a crystal vase on the floor just across the threshold.
“Biddy,” he called into the quiet, “can we find a better place for these flowers?”
“Oh,” came his wife’s voice from somewhere above. “Hi. No, leave them there.”
He let the screen door slam behind him—even though, years before, he had affixed a now-yellowed card to the door that said “do NOT slam”—and stepped around the flowers. He set the dress box down on the floor and grimaced at a pile of sandy and unfamiliar shoes. He matched them in pairs and lined them up along the baseboard. Down the hallway of white wainscoting was a bright rectangle of kitchen light. To his right, the back stairs bent tightly upward, and to his left was a coat closet. Inside he found the usual reassuring line of raincoats and jumble of tennis racquets and beach sandals, but on the top shelf, shoved in with a faded collection of baseball caps and canvas fishing hats, a cluster of gift bags overflowed with tissue paper and ribbon.
“Biddy! What are all these bags in the closet here?”
Again Biddy’s voice floated down from on high. “Bridesmaids’ gifts. Leave them alone, Winn.”
“But let me look first,” said someone close behind and just above him. “Daphne said they’re good.”
Winn turned around, unprepared to see her so soon. “Hello, Agatha!” he said, sounding too jovial.
Agatha came down a few steps and leaned to kiss his proffered cheek. Her collarbones and dark nook of cleavage dipped down and floated back up again. He caught a musky scent, heavy like a man’s cologne, and underneath it the smell of cigarette smoke. She always smelled like smoke even though he had never seen her in the act. She must still sneak around like a teenager, sitting on windowsills, dangling her cigarettes out pushed-back screens. Winn had known few women he would describe as bombshells, but from the undulant contours of her body to her air of careless, practiced dishevelment, Agatha was an authentic specimen. She wore assemblages of thin garments that might have been nightclothes—lace-edged dresses with torn hems, drawstring pants that sat below her hipbones, flimsy cotton shorts—clothing that answered the requirements of decency while still conveying an impression of nakedness. She piled up her hair with bobby pins and odd pieces of ribbon or elastic, and she was always rooting through her purse for something or other and tossing out an alluring potpourri of lipsticks, lighters, crumpled receipts, and bits of broken jewelry.
“How are you?” she asked in her slow way, sounding like she had just woken up. She was wearing a short dress of gauzy white layers that he found oddly bridal. “Welcome to the madhouse.”
“I’m very well.” Winn took a step backward, and something poked his thigh. A bird of paradise from the flower arrangement. “Is it a madhouse?”
“It’s fun—if you like girls. You’re outnumbered.” She counted on her fingers. “Three bridesmaids including me. Plus Daphne and Livia. Your wife and her sister. Am I missing anyone? No. That makes it seven to one.”
“Celeste is staying here?”
“Biddy didn’t tell you?”
“Maybe she did and I forgot.”
“Sorry, Charlie. Plus the coordinator is in and out all the time. We did a dry run with the hairstylist this morning. Daphne wants everything kept simple, thank God. One time I was in a wedding where they did our hair with tendrils dangling down everywhere like dead vines. Makeup practice is tomorrow, and what else? Manicures? There’s something with the dress, too, making room for baby probably. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Anyway, lucky you.”
“Lucky me,” Winn said. He rubbed his chin and wondered how much all that was costing him. He wondered, too, how she could be so calm while he felt jumpy as a marionette. She, after all, had been the one to take his hand at Daphne’s engagement party, and he had been struggling to keep her from his thoughts ever since. Truthfully, he had been struggling to keep her from his thoughts for years, but the party was the first time she had shown any interest. He didn’t flatter himself—he had seen her around enough men to know flirtation was, for her, an impersonal reflex, and sex appeal was something she rained down on the world indiscriminately, like a leaflet campaign. And nothing had happened. Not really. Only an interlocking of fingers under the privacy of the tablecloth, but still the touch had shocked him. And she had been the one to take the seat next to him, to find his hand where it was resting on his knee and pull it toward her.
Agatha gazed down at him, her head tilted to one side, almost to her shoulder. “Anyway, I’ve been sent to get the dress.”
“Right!” He pivoted to pick up the white box and held it out. “All yours.”
She hefted it. “It’s heavier than I expected.”
“I’m told a pregnant bride requires scaffolding.”
She laughed, a single syllable that stuck in her throat, less an expression of mirth than a bit of punctuation, a flattering sort of ellipsis. She hitched her chin and rolled her eyes up toward the second floor. “I should take this to Daphne.”
He said Okay! and Bye! as though ending a telephone call and watched her disappear around the bend of the stairs. He’d known Agatha since she was fourteen and Daphne’s first roommate at Deerfield, and though she must be twenty-seven now, he couldn’t shake his idea of her as a Lolita. His attraction still embarrassed him as much as when it had revolved around her field hockey skirt. She had been a lackluster athlete; probably she had played only because she knew she looked spectacular in skirt and kneesocks, loping down the field with her hair in two messy braids. Did she even remember taking his hand? She had been tipsy at the party, everyone had been, and at the time he had panicked because, after all these years, she knew, perhaps had always known. But, that night, lying awake and thinking of her bare knee under the back of his hand, her palm against his, he found he was relieved; now the chips would fall where they may.
Stepping around the flowers, he shut the coat closet and walked down the hall to the kitchen. As children, Winn’s daughters had run through the house upon first arrival each summer to remind themselves of all its singularities and unearth relics of their own brief pasts. They made joyful reunions with the canvas sofas, the insides of closets, the views from all the windows, the books on fish and plants and birds, the bowls of sea glass, the wooden whale sending up its flat, wooden spout on the wall above Winn and Biddy’s bed, the flower patch where the sundial lay half concealed beneath black-eyed Susans, the splintery planks of the outdoor shower. The kitchen cupboards were thrown open so the cutting boards and bottles of olive oil might be greeted and the enormous black lobster pot marveled over. The hammock was swung in and the garage door heaved up to reveal, through cirrus whirls of dust, an upside-down canoe on sawhorses and the ancient Land Rover they kept on the island. The girls would converge on Winn and clamor at him until he unbolted and pulled open the hatch to the widow’s walk so they could stand on top of the house and look out over the island.
But sometime during their teens, they had stopped caring whether everything was as they remembered and moved swiftly and directly to their rooms to arrange their clothes and toiletries. Little blasts of squabbling percussed the walls as they vied for territory in their shared bathroom. Winn had taken up the job of walking around the house to inspect all the nooks and crannies. He breathed lungfuls of salt and mildew and tipped frames back to center with one finger. He opened all the closets. He tested the hammock. He walked blindly through the spiderwebs in the dark garage.
This time on his rounds downstairs he found that everywhere he looked there were more things than there should have been, more stuff, and yet for all the women in the house and all their feminine appurtenances, no one came down to greet him. He went out to the car and brought in the luggage and groceries. Leaving the duffels at the foot of the back stairs, he carried the groceries into the kitchen and pushed aside a layer of magazines to make room on the counter. Makeup pencils and brushes were everywhere, abandoned helter-skelter as though by the fleeing beauticians of Pompeii. He walked around collecting them and then set them upright in an empty coffee mug. He straightened the magazines into piles. From the sink he extracted an object his daughters had taught him was an eyelash curler. A round brass ship’s clock ticked at the top of a bookshelf, its arrow-tipped hands and Roman numerals insisting it was four thirty. He looked at his watch. Not yet one. He pressed his fingers into a puddle of face powder spilled on the dining table and walked them across the varnished top, leaving a trail of flesh-colored prints that he immediately wiped up with a sponge. Even in his study, his cloister of masculine peace and quiet, he found a nail file and the top half of a bikini on his desk.
He was holding the bikini top by its strings and examining it (it was white with red polka dots, the fabric worn thin, the straps looped in a messy knot instead of a bow; he wondered if Agatha’s were the breasts that had last filled its cups and if she could have left it on purpose) when a movement out the window caught his eye. From the side of the house a slope of grass rambled down to the trees, interrupted here by a pair of stray pines with a hammock strung between them and there by a badminton net and there by his vegetable garden, wrapped in flimsy green fencing to deter the deer. After years of taking a bearable tribute from around the edges, the deer seemed to have grown in numbers or appetite, and the previous summer, the family had arrived to find all Winn’s herbs and vegetables eaten down to nubs. He had gone out at once and bought a roll of green plastic mesh and strung it savagely around his plants. The fence was unsightly—Livia said the garden looked like a duck blind—and still the yield was a disappointment. Some condition of soil or climate had stunted the plants into spindly bearers of flaccid leaves and runty fruit. Biddy had broken the news to him over the phone, bridesmaids squealing in the background. “I’m afraid you don’t have much of a harvest,” she said.
“Is it the deer?” he had asked.
“No, everything’s just a little on the sickly side.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Winn, I’m not a botanist,” she had said, sighing.
Livia was lying in the hammock. Blue shade fell over her bare legs and arms, and she had twisted her hair into a dark rope and pulled it around her head and across her neck. A book lay open on her stomach, the breeze ruffling the pages. Her hands were pressed flat against her face. That was the motion that had attracted his attention: the lifting of her hands from the book. She was very still; he did not think she was crying. After a long time she dropped her hands to her clavicle and stared up into the branches. Winn’s softer emotions came upon him rarely, as unexpected visitations from a place he could not guess at. He reached out and touched the window. Flat on her back in the cool shadows, Livia looked like a funeral statue. He knuckled three quick beats on the window and then again, harder, but she didn’t turn her head. His powdery fingerprints ghosted the glass. He wiped them away. He thought he would go out and see her, but a stampeding sound came from above, and when he emerged, it was to a kitchen full of women.
“Hello, dear,” he said, pecking Biddy on the cheek.
“I want to leave those flowers there so I don’t forget to take them to the Duffs’ hotel later,” she said.
“I don’t know how you’d forget them. I thought I was in the Amazon.”
“After the wedding I’ll remember things again. Until then you’ll have to step around the flowers.”
He went around stamping cheeks with his businesslike kisses: first Daphne and then Biddy’s sister Celeste where she stood beside the refrigerator fishing an olive out of a jar with her index finger. Agatha and the other bridesmaids were lolling against the counter, and he kissed each of them, saying, “Agatha, hello again, Piper, Dominique.”
“How was the trip?” asked Biddy.
“Easy. I got an early start. The crossing was smooth.”
Celeste thrust a half-filled tumbler into his hand and clinked it with her own. Three olives drifted around the bottom. “You don’t have any martini glasses,” she said. “Other than that, everything has been fabulous.”
Setting the glass on a stack of magazines, he said, “Is the sun over the yardarm already?” He seldom drank hard liquor anymore, especially not in the middle of the day, but if he reminded Celeste of this, she would want to know for the umpteenth time why not, and he was in no mood to explain that it had to do with his headaches and not at all with any judgment of those who daily embalmed their innards from the moment the sun inched past its apex to the hour when their feet tipped them onto whatever couch or bed was handiest.
“Depends on where you keep your yardarm,” she said. Her smile was localized to her lips and their immediate region. Biddy had explained that Celeste had gotten carried away with wrinkle injections, but the effect was still eerie.
Winn frowned and turned to the bridesmaids. “Having a good time, girls?”
“Yes,” came the chorus from the bridesmaids, who had settled with Daphne in a languid clump against the sink. Like Daphne, Agatha and Piper were blond and short. Dominique was tall and dark, a menhir looming over them. She was the child of two Coptic doctors from Cairo and had spent most of her breaks from Deerfield with the Van Meters. Her face was symmetrical but severe, a smooth half dome of forehead descending to steeply arched eyebrows, a nose with a bump in its middle, and a wide mouth that drooped slightly at the corners in an expression of not unattractive mournfulness. Muscle left over from her days as a swimmer armored her shoulders and back. Her hair, which was not quite crimped and African but also not smooth in the way of some Arabs’, was cut very short. He hadn’t seen her for a few years. After college in Michigan she had flown off to Europe (France? Belgium?) to become a chef. He liked Dominique; he respected her physical strength and her skill with food, but he had never understood her friendship with Daphne, who took no interest in sports or cooking and who seemed diaphanous and flighty beside her.
Dominique pointed one long finger out the window. “Your garden is looking a little peaky,” she said.
“So Biddy told me. I haven’t gone out to take a look at it yet.”
“Were you having problems with the deer?”
“Terrible. They’re glorified goats, those things. But Biddy doesn’t think they’re the culprit this time.”
“Yeah, I didn’t see much nibbling, except around the edges. And I looked for aphid holes and that sort of thing but didn’t see enough to explain why it all looks so sad. Maybe the soil is too acidic.”
“Could be.”
“Did you do the planting?”
“The first time, eight or nine years ago, but a local couple does the basic caretaking when we’re not here. Maybe they tried something different. I hope if they wanted to experiment they wouldn’t do it in my garden.”
Dominique nodded and looked away as though concealing disdain for people who did not tend their own vegetable gardens.
“I’m so psyched for the wedding,” Piper announced out of the blue and in a high chirp, which was her way. She and Daphne had met at Princeton, and Winn knew her less well than the others. Always in motion, propelled along by a brittle, birdlike pep, she seemed a tireless font of chipper enthusiasm. She was pale as bone and dwelt beneath a voluminous haystack of white blond hair, her glacial eyes and red-lipsticked lips adrift in all the whiteness like a face drawn by a child. Her eyebrows were barely discernible, her nose small and sharp. Some men found her powerfully attractive, Winn knew, but she left him cold. Her looks were ethereal and a little strange, but Agatha’s were concrete, radiant, tactile; her limbs could almost be felt just by looking at them. Daphne fell somewhere in the middle. They were three shades of woman arrayed side by side like the bewildering, smiling boxes of hair dye in the supermarket.
“It’s beautiful here,” Agatha said, letting her head fall onto Piper’s shoulder. A male friend of Daphne’s had, years ago, in a moment of drunken gossip, implied that Agatha was a closeted prude—There’s no engine, he’d said. You hit the gas and nothing happens—but Winn had trouble believing something so disappointing could be true.
“Thanks for bringing my dress, Daddy,” Daphne said.
“Yes,” he said to Agatha. “Waskeke is the way the world should be.” He was staring at her too intently and looked away, at Biddy, who was rummaging through the grocery bags. With a grunt, Daphne pushed off from the sink, waddled across the kitchen, and plopped into a Windsor chair behind Winn. “Daphne,” he said, turning, “are you feeling all right?”
“I feel fine,” she said.
“Why did you make that noise?”
“Because I’m seven months pregnant, Daddy.”
He asked for and received a full briefing on the status of the weekend. Where was Greyson? At the hotel with his groomsmen, Daphne said. His parents? They would be arriving around five. The head count for that night’s party, a dinner Winn would be preparing, was seventeen. The get-together would be a casual thing, with lobsters, a chance for everyone to enjoy the island before they had to get serious about matrimony, a sort of pre-rehearsal-dinner dinner. Had Biddy confirmed the lobsters? She had.
Winn nodded. “All right,” he said. “Well, then good.”
“By the way,” Daphne said, “Mr. Duff is allergic to shellfish.”
Winn fixed her with a look. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“It’s no big deal. Just buy a tuna steak, too.”
“Are you going to call him Mr. Duff after you’re married?” asked Celeste.
“I have a hard time addressing him as Dicky,” said Daphne gravely. “He says to call him Dad, but most of the time I don’t call him anything.”
Biddy said, “Everyone calls him Dicky. It’s his name. He won’t think it’s odd for you to call him by his name. You’re being ridiculous.”
“Re-dicky-ulous,” said Dominique, and the women laughed.
“Where’s Livia?” Winn asked, even though he knew.
“Around here somewhere,” said Daphne. “Hating me. You know, I really think her dress is pretty. I really do. I wanted to set her off from the other bridesmaids, which is a nice thing, isn’t it? She’s just being contrary. It’s a green dress. That’s all. She says it’s the exact shade of envy and everyone already thinks she’s jealous even though she’s not, but it’s not the color of envy. It’s more of a viridian.”
“Too late to change it,” said Biddy.
The moment of welcome faded into a lull. The staring half circle of female faces made Winn uneasy. With a loud, contented sigh, he turned to look out the window. Daphne held her hands out to Dominique and was heaved to her feet. “Ladies,” she said, beckoning to her bridesmaids. They wandered off, their voices drifting through the house like the calls of distant birds.
“Nice trip?” Celeste asked, having lost track of the earlier part of the conversation.
“Couldn’t have been smoother,” he said.
“You must have gotten up at the crack of dawn.”
“Just before.”
“Drink up there, Winnifred.” She picked up his glass and handed it to him again with a wink. “You deserve it.”
“If you insist.” He touched his lips to the liquid. Gin.
The house was L shaped, with a planked deck filling the crook and extending out over the grass. Through the kitchen’s French doors, Winn saw Livia walk up the lawn and onto the deck. She wore an old pair of gray shorts, and her legs were thinner than he had ever seen them. When she came through the doors and into the kitchen, a push of salt air came with her.
“Oh, Dad,” she said. “Hi.”
She made no move to embrace or kiss him. In the hammock, she had appeared sepulchral and blue, but that must have been a trick of the shade because she looked fine now, a bit pale but fine. She turned away, chewing the side of her thumbnail.
“Hi, roomie,” Celeste said.
“You two are bunking together?” Winn said. Biddy must have sprung the arrangement on Livia, otherwise he would have already gotten an earful.
“Yes,” said Livia in a neutral voice, inspecting her hand. The nails were bitten to nothing, and the flesh around them was torn and raw.
Celeste jiggled her glass enticingly. “Can I get you a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“Moral support for Daphne?” Celeste asked. “Poor thing not having a drink at her own wedding. I don’t know what I would have done without a drink or two during my weddings.”
“Let alone your marriages,” Biddy said.
“Only you,” Celeste said, swatting Biddy’s flat backside, “could say to that to me.”
“Daphne can have a glass of champagne,” Livia said. “She’s seven months. It’s fine.”
Celeste sipped. “Is it? Shows what I know.”
“Maybe I will have a drink,” Livia said. “I’ll get it myself.”
“How is Cooper?” Winn asked Celeste. “Still in the picture?” He reached out to touch Livia’s hair as she moved away.
“He’s fine. He’s sailing in the Seychelles. He wanted to come but he couldn’t.”
Livia took a bottle of wine from the refrigerator and picked at the foil. “Do you think he’ll be number five?”
“I’m getting out of the marriage business.” Celeste raised her glass as though someone had made a toast. “Though I’ll admit all this is making me sentimental. Nothing beats being a bride. Oh well. Days gone by. I’ll have to live vicariously through my nieces.”
Livia threw the foil into the garbage. “Don’t look at me.”
“Oh, sweetheart, it was his loss. There are so many fish in the sea. You’re only nineteen.”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“You are? Well, then, you’re an old maid.”
Livia put a corkscrew to the bottle and twisted it. Winn watched the curl of silver disappear. Her fingers wrapped so tightly around the bottle that her bones stood out under her skin. Winn wanted to tell her she didn’t need to squeeze so hard, wringing the bottle’s neck like she was. He remembered once watching her shatter an ice cream cone in her hand, crying out in surprise at the cold shards of waffle. “I forgot I was holding it,” she had said. “I was thinking of something else.” Why Livia always had to be so forceful, straining when she didn’t need to, was beyond him, but he held his tongue. She clamped the bottle between her knees and pulled until it exclaimed over the loss of its cork.
Two · The Water Bearer (#ulink_1fe5538c-9aa9-552f-bb1d-7765bef20ea6)
Before he became a father, Winn had assumed he would have sons. He had expected Daphne to be a boy, had lain with his ear against Biddy’s pregnant belly and heard male voices echoing down from future lacrosse games and ski trips. He saw a small blue blazer with brass buttons, short hair combed away from a straight part, himself teaching a boy to tie a necktie. He would drive his son to Harvard when the time came and help him carry his bags through the Yard, would greet his son’s roommates and their fathers with hearty handshakes. His son would join the Ophidian Club, and Winn would attend the initiation dinner and drink with the boy who would live his life over again, affirming its correctness at every juncture.
When the screaming ham hock the doctor pulled from between Biddy’s legs turned out to be unmistakably female, all crevices and puffiness, he felt a deep and essential surprise, not only that the child brewing in his wife those nine months was a girl but that he, Winn, possessed the seeds of a feminine anything. Inside the tangled pipes of his testicular factory there existed, beyond all reason, women. Watching Biddy and Daphne nestle together in the hospital bed, he realized he had been mistaken to think that pregnancy and birth had something to do with him. He had imagined that by impregnating this woman he had ensured she would deliver a son who would go forth and someday impregnate another woman who would, in turn, have a son, and so on and so forth down the Van Meter line into the misty future. But now, instead, there was this girl-child who would grow breasts and take another man’s name and sprout new branches on an unknown family tree and do all sorts of traitorous things a son would not do. The shifting and swelling of Biddy’s boyish body into a collection of spheroids, the quiet communion she lavished on her belly, her new status with her sisters and her covey of friends—all this should have told him he was standing at the threshold of a club that would not have him. Even though women held out their arms and exclaimed, “You’re going to be a faaa-ther!” he suspected they had seen him all along for what he was: the adjunct, the contributor of additional reporting, the lame duck about to be displaced from the center of his wife’s affections. The surprise should not have been that he had a daughter but that any boys were ever born at all.
When, five years later, Biddy announced she was pregnant for the second time, Winn assumed from the first that the baby would be a girl. The deck was stacked; the game was rigged. Daphne was so staunchly female that the possibility of his and Biddy’s genes being put back in the tumbler and coming out a boy seemed too small to bother with. Biddy gave him the news in bed in the morning, and he kissed her once, hard, and said, “Well!” before going downstairs to sit behind the Journal and think about a vasectomy. He was at the kitchen table, staring sightlessly at the pages when he heard the rustling, tinkling sound that announced Daphne. She slid into a chair and sat eating red grapes out of a plastic bag. She wore a piece of crenellated, bejeweled plastic in her hair, and a cloud of pink gauze stood up where her skirt bent against the back of the chair.
“Good morning, Daphne. Going to dance class today?”
“No. That’s on Wednesday.”
“Isn’t that a dance skirt you’re wearing?”
“My tutu? I just threw this on.”
Winn stared at her. She looked back at him and fingered one of the strands of plastic beads that garlanded her neck. Somehow in her infancy she had absorbed a set of phrases and mannerisms that Biddy called breezy and Winn called absurd but that, in any event, had her swanning through preschool like an aging socialite. They left her once with Biddy’s eldest sister, Tabitha, and went to Turks and Caicos for a week, hoping Tabitha’s son Dryden would get her to dirty her knees a little. Instead, they returned to find Dryden draped in baubles and Daphne arranging clips in his hair.
“Dryden,” Biddy said, “you look awfully dressed up for this time of day.”
The boy released a sigh of weary sophistication. He fluttered his blue-dusted eyelids and spread his fingers against his chest. “Oh, this? This is nothing. The good stuff’s in the safe.”
To Winn, Daphne was a foreign being, a sort of mystic, a snake charmer or a charismatic preacher, an ambassador from a distant frontier of experience. The academic knowledge that she was the product of his body was not enough to forge a true belief; he felt no instantaneous, involuntary recognition of her as flesh and blood. Not for lack of trying, either. He had changed her diapers and held her while she cried in the night and spooned gloopy food into her mouth, and certainly he loved her, but she only became more and more strange to him as she got older, and his love for her gave him no comfort but instead made him alarmingly porous, full of hidden passageways that let in feelings of yearning and exclusion. Sitting behind the paper, he imagined with trepidation a house populated by two Daphnes, a Biddy, and only one Winn.
“Daddy,” came the piping voice from across the table, “am I a princess?”
“No,” Winn said. “You’re a very nice little girl.”
“Will I be a princess someday?”
Winn bent the top of the newspaper down and looked over it. “It depends on whom you marry.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, there are two ways for a woman to become a princess. Either she’s born one, or she marries a prince or, I think, a grand duke—although I’m not sure those exist anymore. You see, Daphne, many countries that used to have princesses don’t anymore because they’ve abolished their monarchies, and an aristocracy doesn’t make sense without a monarchy. Austria, for example, got rid of all that business after the First World War. Hereditary systems like that aren’t fair, you see, and they breed resentment among the lower classes. Anyway, the long and short of it is, since you weren’t born a princess, you would need to marry a prince, and there aren’t very many of those around.”
Reproachfully, she ate a grape and then wiped her fingers one at a time on a napkin. He returned to reading.
“Daddy.”
“What?”
“Am I your princess?”
“Christ, Daphne.”
“What?”
“You sound like a kid on TV.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re full of treacle.”
“What’s treacle?”
“Something that’s too sweet. It gives you a stomachache.”
She nodded, accepting this. “But,” she pressed on, “am I your princess?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have any princesses. What I do have is a little girl without any dignity.”
“What’s dignity?”
“Dignity is behaving the way you’re supposed to so people respect you.”
“Do princesses have dignity?”
“Some do.”
“Which ones?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Grace Kelly.”
“Who is she?”
“She was a princess. First she was an actress. Then she married a prince and became a princess. In Monaco. She was killed in a car accident.”
“What’s Monaco?”
“A place in Europe.”
Daphne took a moment to absorb and then asked, “Am I your princess?”
“We’ve just been through this,” Winn said, exasperated.
She looked like she was trying to decide whether her interests would be better served by smiling or crying. “I want to be your princess,” she said, teetering toward tears. Daphne was an accomplished crier, plaintive and capable of great stamina. For a girl so physically delicate and soft in voice, she was unexpectedly stalwart in her emotions. Her tears were purposeful, as were her smiles and pouts. Biddy called her Lady Macbeth.
Ducking back behind his paper, Winn did what was necessary. “All right,” he said. “Daphne, you are my princess.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
Daphne nodded and ate a grape. Then she cocked her head to one side. “Am I your fairy princess?”
Biddy, when Winn went looking for her, was getting out of the shower. Through the closed door he heard the water shut off and the rattle of the shower curtain. She was humming something to herself. He thought it might be “Amazing Grace.” Knocking once, he pushed open the door, releasing a cloud of steam. Her bare body, flushed from the shower, was so close he could feel the heat coming off her back and small, neat buttocks. A foggy oval wiped on the mirror framed her breasts and belly button, the dark badge of hair below, his tight face hovering over her shoulder. After fall stripped away her summer tan, her skin tended toward a certain sallowness, but the hot water had turned her chest and legs a rosy pink. Already, her breasts looked swollen. A white towel was wrapped around her head. Her reflection smiled at him. Biddy, he had planned to say, maybe one is enough. He would suggest they sit down and make a pros and cons list. He was holding a yellow legal pad and a blue pen and had already thought of cons to counter all possible pros.
“What is it?” she asked, her smile draining away. He wondered if she had already guessed that he had trailed her to this warm, foggy room to argue her baby away from her. She had some lotion in her hand, and he watched her rub it on her sides and stomach, across stretch marks from Daphne that were only visible in the pale months. “Winn?” she asked. “What?”
“What was that you were just humming?” he asked.
“‘Unchained Melody,’” she said.
“Oh.”
“And?”
“And what?”
She took another towel and wrapped it around herself, tucking in the end beneath her armpit. “What else?”
“Nothing important.”
“What’s that for?” She pointed at the legal pad.
“I needed to take some notes.”
“About what?”
“A work thing.”
She turned to the mirror and asked, almost casually, “Are you excited about the baby?”
Winn was silent.
“Are you?” Biddy prodded.
“Yes,” Winn said. “No.”
“No, you’re not excited?” She and Daphne had the same way of wrinkling their foreheads when their plans went awry. “What were you going to say when you came in here?”
He tapped the legal pad against his thigh. “I’m not sure.”
“Winn, out with it.”
“Fine. I was thinking about saying we shouldn’t jump into anything. We didn’t exactly plan this.”
“We always said we would have two.”
“We hadn’t talked about it in years. Maybe four years.”
“No, we talked about it last year. On Waskeke. At the bar in the Enderby. You said you’d like to try for a son.”
“We’d been drinking, and that was still a year ago.”
“I didn’t think it was empty talk. We always said we’d have two. I understood our plan was for two. We always said so.”
“I thought … I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that we’d both cooled on the idea.”
“You should have said if you’d changed your mind.”
“You should have said you wanted another one.”
“Let me ask you this, if you could know right now that it’s a boy, would we be having this conversation? Would you have made one of your lists? That’s what you have there, isn’t it?”
He hid the pad behind his back and soldiered on. “I didn’t know you’d gone off the pill,” he said. “Did you do it on purpose?”
She rummaged in a drawer. “I forgot for a week. I know you don’t like to be surprised, but I thought we wanted this. I thought if it happens, it happens. I didn’t realize you had changed your mind. You should have said something.”
“I didn’t know I had to. I didn’t realize I had given tacit approval to conceive a child at the time of your choosing.”
He stepped back in time to remove himself from the path of the slamming door. The bath began to run. Biddy’s sisters said that Biddy was drawn to water in times of need because she was an Aquarius. Winn put no stock in astrology—the whole concept was embarrassing—but he admitted that his wife’s passion for baths, showers, lakes, rivers, ponds, swimming pools, and the ocean was a powerful force. Biddy descended from a line of people who were at once remarkably unlucky and extraordinarily fortunate in their encounters with the sea. Since a grandfather many greats ago had managed to catch hold of a dangling line after being swept by a wave from the deck of the Mayflower and be dragged back aboard, her forebears had been dumped into the ocean one after the other and then, while thousands around them perished, been plucked again from the waves. A grandaunt had survived the sinking of the Titanic; a distant cousin crossed eight hundred miles of angry Southern Ocean in a lifeboat with Ernest Shackleton; her father’s cruiser was sunk at Guadalcanal, and he saved not only himself but three others from shark-infested waters. The grandaunt’s photograph, a grainy enlargement of a small girl wrapped in a blanket and looking very alone on the deck of the Carpathia without her nanny (who had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic) hung in their front hallway.
Whatever the root of Biddy’s affinity for water, as long as Winn had known her, she had been able to submerge herself and come out, if not entirely healed, at least calmed, her mood rubbed smooth. But he could not have anticipated that she would emerge from this particular bath and find him where he had settled with the newspaper in his favorite chair and announce that she was going to have a water birth for this baby.
“A what?”
“A water birth. You give birth in a tub of warm water. There’s a hospital in France that specializes in it. We’re going there.”
Winn felt an “absolutely not” pushing its way up his throat. He had married Biddy partly because she was not given to outlandish ideas, and he felt betrayed. But the rafters of the doghouse hung low over his head. “Sounds like some kind of hippie thing to me,” he said.
“I’ve done research. Candace McInnisee did it for her youngest, and she swears by it.”
“You did research before you knew you were pregnant?”
“We always said we would have two, Winn. And since you’re not the one giving birth, I don’t see why you should mind where it happens.”
Winn lifted his paper and let it fall, a white flag spreading on the floor in marital surrender. He held out his arms. She came close, leaned to kiss him on the forehead, and slipped away before he could embrace her.
LIVIA WAS BORN in France in a tub full of water, and she, like Biddy, had spent the years since her birth returning, whenever possible, to an aqueous state. She had once come home from a fruitful day in the fourth grade and declared that she was a thalassomaniac and a hydromaniac while Biddy was only a hydromaniac, which was true. Biddy’s love of water did not extend past the substance itself, whereas Livia loved all water but especially the ocean and its inhabitants. During her time at Deerfield, she had baffled Winn by organizing a Save the Cetaceans society and by spending her summers on Arctic islands helping researchers count walruses or on sailboats monitoring dolphin behavior in the Hebrides. She had passionately wished to join the crew of a vessel that interfered with Japanese whaling ships, but Biddy had managed to convince her that she would be more helpful elsewhere. Now she was studying biology at Harvard with plans for a Ph.D. afterward. She had made it clear to Winn that she thought his ocean-provoked existential horror was a bit of willful silliness. From the age of eleven, she had insisted on getting and maintaining her scuba certification and was always after Winn to do the same, though the idea held no appeal for him. He had snorkeled a few times and once swam by accident out over the lip of a reef, where the colorful orgy of waving, flitting life dropped into blackness. He felt like he had taken a casual glance out the window of a skyscraper and seen, instead of yellow taxis and human specks crawling along the sidewalks, only a chasm.
Winn had expected Livia’s passion for the ocean to fade away like her other childhood enthusiasms (volcanoes, rock collecting), but a vein of Neptunian ardor had persisted in the thickening stuff of her adult self. She spotted seals and dolphins that no one else noticed, and she was on constant watch for whales. A stray plume of spray was enough to get her hopes up, and after she had stopped and peered into the distance long enough to be convinced no tail or rolling back was going to show itself, she would blush and fall silent, seeming to suffer a sort of professional embarrassment. She claimed she would be happy to spend her life on tiny research vessels or in cramped submersibles, poking cameras and microphones into the depths as though the ocean might issue a statement explaining itself. His selkie daughter. How Livia could feel at home in a world so obviously hostile was beyond him, as was her willingness to lavish so much love on animals indifferent to her existence.
Daphne was the simpler of his daughters to get along with but also the more obscure. By the time she finished college, she seemed to have shed the serpentine guile of her infant self, or else her manipulations had grown so advanced as to conceal themselves entirely. He couldn’t be sure. A smoked mirror of sweetness and serenity hid Daphne’s inner workings, but Livia lived out in the open, blatantly so, the emotional equivalent of a streaker. Livia’s problem was a susceptibility to strong feelings, and her strongest feelings these days were about a boy, Teddy Fenn, who had thrown her over. She had seen too many movies; she did not understand that love was a choice, entered and exited by free will and with careful consideration, not a random thunderbolt sent from above. He had told her so, but she would not listen. She was angry at the world in general and Winn in particular, so he was angry with her in return. In the interest of familial peace, he would try to put everything aside for the wedding, and perhaps Waskeke would exert a healing influence, bring her back to herself.
He needed to buy more groceries for dinner and to deliver Biddy’s lunatic flowers to the Enderby, where the Duffs were staying. With the aim of forging an alliance, he sought out Livia to see if she would come along. She was in the bathtub.
“It’s after two,” he said through the door, “so the sooner we go the better.”
“Where’s Celeste?” Livia asked.
“Up on the roof.”
“Communing with the vodka gods?”
“And with your mother.”
A splash. “Give me a minute.”
They rattled back down the driveway in the old Land Rover, the Duffs’ flowers blooming up from between Livia’s knees like a Roman candle.
“What do you say we take the scenic route?” Winn said, pausing at the road.
She shrugged. “I thought we were in a hurry.”
Only to get out of the house, he thought. In the hour since his arrival, he had managed to offend Biddy by suggesting that all the test runs with makeup and hair and such were an extravagance and also to walk in on Agatha in the downstairs bathroom. He hadn’t seen anything, only her surprised face and bare thighs (the gauzy white dress concealed their crux) and a wad of toilet paper clutched in her hand, nor had he said anything, which made the situation worse. He had closed the door—not slammed it but closed it quietly and deliberately—before fleeing up to the widow’s walk to tell Biddy he was going to the market.
The day was warm and unusually still. Split-rail fences and a thickety layer of brush hemmed in the road. The interior of the island was occupied mostly by scrublands called the Moors, low hills with sharp, rusty vegetation and bony, crooked trees, like a piece of the Serengeti delivered to the wrong address. On the ocean side, shingled houses were scattered among scrub pines, cranberry bogs, and marshes. They drove past the undulating, sand-trapped meadow belonging to the Pequod Golf Club, its ovoid greens marching off like footprints left by an elephant. Distant golfers bent and flexed, launching unseen balls into the blue air.
“Heard anything about the Pequod?” Livia asked.
“No, not yet,” Winn said, trying to sound cheerful. “I’ll have to call up Jack Fenn and get the latest.”
Livia let her head tip back until she was staring up at the Rover’s ceiling. “Would it be so bad not to join? You already belong to a thousand clubs. You hardly even go to half of them. I don’t see why belonging to the Pequod is so essential.”
“It’s not essential. Nothing is essential. I think we’ll all enjoy the membership, that’s all.”
“Can you leave the Fenns out of it at least?”
“Unfortunately, no. Look, they’re not my favorites, either, but Fenn and I go back long before you and Teddy were even born. We have a relationship that has nothing to do with you.”
“Not to mention Fee,” Livia said snidely, referring to Jack’s wife, Teddy’s mother, who was an ex-girlfriend of Winn’s.
“Ancient history,” said Winn. As a consequence of its selectivity, his world was sometimes too small. “No need to bring it up. Nothing to do with the Pequod.”
“No one besides you even golfs,” Livia said to the ceiling.
“There’s a gym there, and a bar. They have nice events—dances, silent auctions, theme parties. You’ll like it.”
She let her head roll in his direction. “I do love silent auctions.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Livia. It isn’t ladylike.”
For three summers Winn had languished on a secrecy-shrouded wait list for membership in the Pequod. For three summers he had kept bitter evening vigils on the widow’s walk, staring out at what he could see of the course from the house: only a scrap of the tenth hole, but that bit of grass was the gateway to a verdant male haven and confessional. In the decades he had been coming to the island, he had always thought of membership as something obtainable but deliberately left for later. So it was to his bafflement that he had pulled all available strings and schmoozed all relevant parties, including the Fenns, and still he found himself relegated to guest status. He had an excellent track record with clubs. Though no club could equal the pleasures of his college club, the Ophidian—a brotherhood of such importance that he wrote one Christmas newsletter exclusively for its members and another for the remainder of the Van Meter family’s acquaintance—he had joined other clubs, in New York and in Boston, one in London, all places where he could drop in for dinner and feel welcome and sit in a leather chair and read newspapers hinged on long wooden sticks. He belonged to more specialized clubs, too, for the purposes of swimming or golf or racquet sports, and none had ever hesitated to accept him as a member. But Jack Fenn was on the Pequod’s membership committee and Fee Fenn was on the social committee, and, truth be told, Winn never knew where he stood with them, if bygones were bygones or not.
To change the mood, he reached over and patted Livia’s bony knee. “So,” he said, playing jolly, “the big day!”
“It’s not my big day.”
“Don’t be sour. Your day will come.”
She moved her leg irritably, and the flowers trembled. “I wouldn’t mind if everyone would stop telling me that. I’ll either get married or I won’t. I’m not jealous. I’m looking forward to this weekend being over. End of story.”
“That’s not quite the spirit, Livia.” Yearn as he might for the end of the wedding hoopla, Winn knew he must ride in front of the troops, sword raised, toward a successful event. “Especially from the maid of honor. You’re in charge of honor.”
He meant it as a joke, but she said, grimly, “I thought you weren’t impressed with my honor.”
He refrained from answering. They passed a marshy pond crowded with cattails and bulrushes.
“Look at the egret,” she said
Winn glimpsed a tall, slender shape and a flash of white wings. “It’s a heron,” he said.
“No, it’s an egret. Egrets are white. Herons aren’t.”
“Well,” said Winn in a voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere. “All right.”
In town, the traffic was slow, and without a breeze the car was warm. Livia shifted the flowers, and some greenery tickled Winn’s hand. He pushed it away. Livia sighed and rested her elbow on the window’s edge. “All these people. Too many people.”
“Hopefully they’re not all wedding guests,” he said.
She snorted. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to share a room with Celeste?”
“I think I can imagine.”
“After the lights are out, I hear ice cubes rattling around. Then she tries to get me to girl talk with her and whispers questions about my love life until she falls asleep, which is when she starts snoring. You can’t imagine. She sounds like someone trying to vacuum up a mud puddle.”
Many times in the past, over holidays or vacation weekends, Winn had been kept awake by Celeste’s industrial rumble from several rooms away, but he said, “Buck up, pal. I’d appreciate if you’d contribute by being nice to your aunt.”
“I contribute. I contribute in lots of ways. I’m the maid of honor. I’m a servant to the pregnant queen. Why do I also have to be a companion to the drunken aunt?”
“Celeste has had some rough breaks along the way. The charitable thing would be to cut her some slack.”
“She’s a gargoyle.”
“She’s a ruin.”
“Of her own making. I can’t get away from her. She’s everywhere with her martinis and her stories. She’s like, ‘Roomie, did I tell you about the time my third husband ran off to Bolivia with my best friend’s daughter? You don’t know heartbreak until your third husband has run off to Bolivia with your best friend’s daughter.’ That clink-clink, clink-clink, clink-clink that lets you know she’s coming—it’s like the shark music in Jaws.”
“Be thankful you weren’t around for that divorce, the Bolivian one. That was a dogfight.”
“I don’t think a divorce that happened twenty-something years ago is an excuse for her to be a complete mess.”
“What do you propose we do?” Winn said. “Should we put her in a burlap sack and push her off the ferry?”
“The sack is probably overkill.”
“If she wants to get drunk and say the wrong thing, then that’s what she’s going to do. And as much as we’d like for her not to exist, she does. Death, taxes, and family, Livia.”
THE FARM might have been the end of the earth. A thin seam of ocean sealed its fields to the sky, all of it coppered by the sun. The water’s surface, choppy and striated with light, was beautiful, but Livia liked to think about what was teeming underneath: phytoplankton, of course, stripers, bluefish, bonito, maybe tuna, certainly fish larvae and fry, worms and mollusks in the sea floor. Pelicans diving to fill up their huge mouths. Seals. Perhaps a whale, although they were rare around Waskeke. In previous centuries, the islanders had hunted sperm whales and right whales almost to extinction, and Livia suspected the animals still picked up bad vibes from the surrounding waters.
The older she got, the more claustrophobic she felt within her family. Her father’s desire to join clubs had once seemed perfectly normal but now struck her as grasping and embarrassing. He seemed to believe his various clubhouses, stuffy old buildings full of stuffy old people, were bunkers that would shelter him from the fallout of ordinary life, protect him like the green fence out in the yard was supposed to keep his precious vegetables safe from the menacing deer. Teddy had felt a similar skepticism about his own family, and she had imagined that together they could forge a new freedom, make lives of their own, but then he had left her, an outcome she could not accept. She kept turning the breakup around and around in her mind like a Rubik’s cube, unable to puzzle out what had driven him off. She had never been so happy as she was with him. He had been happy, too—she was sure of it.
“For Christ’s sake,” her father said, waiting for an old lady to maneuver her Cadillac out of a parking space in the market’s gravel lot.
The market building, towering over a clump of greenhouses, resembled an enormous, gray-shingled schoolhouse. Livia got out first and walked ahead. Inside, the market was airy and cool and smelled of field dirt, tomatoes, cold meat, and cellophane. Her father caught up with her, peering over his glasses at a list he’d written on a napkin. “Corn, tomatoes, lettuce, I brought cocktail onions from home, we need pickles, we’ll get shrimp at the seafood place, we’ll get smoked salmon at the seafood place, something-not-shellfish for Dicky, lobsters are being delivered, then bread, cheese, et cetera, et cetera. You get the corn first, please, Livia.”
“How much?”
“We’ve got seventeen for dinner, so why don’t you get twenty ears.”
“Do you have a cauldron to cook it all in?”
Tilting his chin down, he gave her one of his trademark looks, half smiling, steely eyed.
“Okay,” she said. “Never mind. No problem.”
She found a cart and was steering it toward a tasseled mountain of corn when she saw Jack Fenn and his daughter Meg standing beside the refrigerated shelves of fresh herbs. Even from the back they were easy to identify because they, like Teddy, were redheads. Six months had passed since she’d last seen Jack, since before the breakup, but he looked the same, like Teddy but older. He wore a blue shirt with the collar undone, and he was handsome in a rough, shaggy-dog way, with full lips and thick marigold hair that was long enough to cover the tops of his ears. He was holding Meg’s hand, a market basket over the crook of his other arm. Meg was a tall girl, a woman really, and she was dressed with perfect neatness, like a child in a school uniform: oxford shirt, webbed belt, broomstick legs poking out of Bermuda shorts and into a set of ankle braces, beneath which her long feet in gray sneakers nosed each other like a pair of kissing trout. Her hair was in a French braid, exposing the hearing aids she wore in each ear, and her face might have been pretty if not for the wide, crooked mouth that slanted open, revealing teeth and darkness. Jack asked her something—Livia could not hear what—and she replied with a round, deep burst of sound like four or five words spoken all on top of one another. Shoppers looked up from their lettuces and bell peppers. Jack set down his basket and reached for a bag of baby carrots, still holding her hand.
Livia turned to find her father. He was holding a tomato in front of his nose and frowning at it. With as much stealth as she could muster, she abandoned her cart and slunk toward him, her back to the Fenns. Catching sight of her, he said loudly, “Livia, would you find me some black peppercorns?” Grasping his arm, she tried to turn him toward the door, but he stood as though hammered into the floor. “What are you doing?” he said. “I need tomatoes.”
“Can we just go? I’m not feeling well.”
That was true enough. Her desperation had become a sort of nausea. His eyes lit with worry, and he glanced once at her belly as though she were suddenly Daphne and pregnant and the object of great concern and pillow plumping. But Meg Fenn let loose another blast of her foghorn voice, and he looked up.
“Fenn!” Winn called boisterously over Livia’s head. “Jack Fenn!”
Jack lifted a hand and walked in their direction with Meg shuffling beside him, her trout feet tumbling over each other.
“Winn,” Jack said. “Hello, Livia.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek, and she felt the corner of her mouth spasm. She prayed she would not cry. Her father’s hand twitched toward Meg and then veered back and froze into a signpost pointing at Jack. Jack set down his basket and allowed Winn to pump his broad paw. Livia put her arms lightly around Meg, who stood very still to receive her embrace. “I like your belt,” Livia said. She noticed the girl was wearing lip gloss and remembered once seeing Teddy’s mother applying it, holding Meg’s chin in her hand.
Jack turned his green eyes on Livia, Teddy’s eyes, and she blushed, conscious of her thinness. “How are you?” he asked.
At the same moment, her father, radiating a sudden vigor, said, “Can you believe the traffic today?”
“I’m fine,” Livia said.
“Absolute pandemonium,” Winn said in answer to his own question.
Tripped up, they all hesitated, and gradually discomfort saturated the air as though puffed from an atomizer. The cause, Livia knew, would not be named or alluded to, not here beside the tomatoes or anywhere else where her father and Teddy’s father happened to be at the same time. Her father would rather die than acknowledge in Jack Fenn’s presence that, for five short weeks, the two of them had shared an embryonic grandchild. Nor had Livia ever spoken with Jack about her pregnancy. The last time she had seen him was in a different life, back before she had gotten knocked up, when Teddy was still her boyfriend.
“Have you been out on the links yet?” Winn asked Jack, a note of ingratiating fellowship creeping into his voice. His body was taut, humming with too much enthusiasm. The possibility occurred to Livia that he wasn’t even thinking about her but only about the golf club.
“Just once,” Jack said.
“Good!” Winn said. “Good! Glad to hear it.”
Meg spoke, addressing Winn. “You like golf?” she asked, vowels dwarfing her sticky, guttural k and g sounds. Livia had explained to her father a thousand times that Meg could understand him, but still he froze whenever he had to communicate with her. He stared, neck straining forward, pupils moving over her face in a rapid search for comprehension, and then he gave up and examined his wristwatch.
Meg repeated herself, louder, and Winn looked helplessly at Livia. With an apologetic glance at Jack, Livia translated. “She said, ‘You like golf?’”
“Oh. I do. Very much,” Winn told Livia.
Jack lifted his daughter’s hand and kissed it. Meg’s eyes and her wide mouth closed, making her face look, in its moment of repose, normal.
“Do you like golf?” Livia asked Meg, and Meg laughed like a honking goose.
“Say,” Winn said to Jack, “I heard somewhere that you’re involved in the bluffs project.”
“Unfortunately.”
Winn chuckled. “Fenn versus nature.”
“The lighthouse is set to be moved next summer,” Jack said. “But that’s the easy part.” He went on about some scheme to shore up a disappearing beach with drainage pipes and to reinforce crumbling bluffs with rebar, concrete, and wire baskets of rocks called gabions. A line of expensive houses sat atop the cliffs, and every year their owners paid a foot or so of lawn in taxes to the wind and rain, the brink creeping slowly closer to their cedar porches.
“I hate to say it,” Winn said, “but those houses are goners. Five years and they’re in the drink.”
Livia saw an Atlantis of gray-shingled houses, weather vanes spinning in the currents beneath a white foam sky, fish at the windows and in the attics, the shadow of a whale sweeping over the roofs like the shadow of an airplane. She marveled at the two of them, chattering on like this. Her father claimed things had been awkward with the Fenns since his college years, when he had belonged to the Ophidian and Jack, a legacy, had not been invited to join. Then Winn had slept with Jack’s wife (long before Jack met her, but still), and Livia had slept with Jack’s son. Then Teddy had broken her heart. She had sacrificed their child. What could be more intimate? Probably she should be grateful the conversation was only about rebar and property values even if something in her was longing for them to acknowledge, just once, what had happened. Not likely. Even when she and Teddy were still together, relations between the families had been less than comfortable. The few times both sets of parents came together for dinners in Cambridge they had all bravely skated the hours away on a thin crust of chitchat.
Jack shook his head. “I have to say I hope you’re wrong, Winn. That wouldn’t do the island any good.”
Winn raised a finger. “But you didn’t build there, did you? No sense taking that kind of risk when you’re finally getting your own place. Rent on the bluffs, buy on the flat.”
“I don’t know—we considered building there. Of course, we’re still renting. The new house won’t be livable until the end of the summer. Even that’s not for sure. How is your family? The wedding’s soon, isn’t it?”
“Saturday,” Livia said.
“Just a small affair,” Winn said. “Mostly family.” He touched his chin. Livia guessed he was worried Jack would feel slighted.
Jack said, “Remind me of the groom’s name.”
“Greyson Duff,” said Winn. “It’s a fine match. We’re all very pleased.”
“Congratulations,” said Meg, and Jack kissed her hand again.
Livia was astonished to feel her father’s fingers clasp her own, once, quickly, and then release. The touch was something between a caress and a pinch. She could not remember the last time he had held her hand. “Thank you,” she said to Meg.
“How is Teddy?” Winn asked.
Heat crept into Livia’s face. She willed herself to hold her gaze steady, not to fold her arms. Jack smiled. He had always been kind to her. “He’s fine,” Jack said. “In fact, he’s made a very big decision.” Livia braced herself, though she did not know for what.
“Oh?” said Winn.
WINN WISHED he had gotten more of an opportunity to probe Fenn about the Pequod, but the man had stonewalled him as usual and then dropped the news about Teddy into the conversation like a meat cleaver. Teddy had joined the army. A chip off the old block—Fenn had done two tours in Vietnam. His time in the army was something people always mentioned about him, that and Meg. Now they would talk about Teddy, too, how he had traded Harvard for Iraq, and everyone would feel sorry for Jack and Fee because they must be so worried but thank heavens they had such stalwart spirits. Teddy’s decision seemed rash and odd to Winn, but at least it would take him far from Livia. Let the Fenns do as they pleased. Let them cultivate their moral superiority the way some people grew enormous, prizewinning pumpkins or watermelons that were, when you came down to it, really just freaks.
The damp fragrance of corn silk and the dusty, acidic smell of tomatoes overpowered the perfume of the Duffs’ flowers, which shuddered and bobbed between Livia’s knees. Leaving her in the car, Winn popped into the seafood store, and once he was back in the car, he found he wasn’t sure where he wanted to go. After hesitating long enough at a stop sign to draw the indignant horn of the driver behind him, he turned left.
“Aren’t we going to the Enderby?” Livia asked. She had not spoken since they parted ways with the Fenns in the market.
“First we’re going to take a look at this house of Fenn’s,” he said, choosing to ignore her petulant tone.
“Seriously? What if someone’s there?”
“Is it a crime to visit our friends’ house?”
“I can’t believe Teddy joined the army.” She said “army” as though it were the name of another woman.
“Well,” said Winn, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Jack is the same way, always having to showboat. That family has a holier-than-thou streak a mile wide. Just between you and me, I’ve never cared for it. He uses that girl like a shield.”
“Meg?” Livia said. “I think they’d probably prefer she was normal.”
“We all make sacrifices,” Winn went on, “but they expect everyone to praise theirs all the time. This army thing seems excessive. Why not the navy? Why not the air force? Coast guard? No, the Fenns have to make a show out of humility. Teddy should have gone to West Point if he wanted to go this route.”
“I don’t think this was the plan from the beginning. Not that I know anything, apparently.”
“I don’t see why he has to be a grunt like his father.”
“Wasn’t Jack drafted?”
“Yes, but he handled it in a very odd way. He could have deferred. Men like Greyson have it figured out. Greyson gives up the little things, little luxuries. He doesn’t overdo it. He’ll be good for Daphne that way.”
“I don’t think being selectively cheap is the same thing as enlisting.”
“So you’re on the Fenns’ side now?”
“I wish you hadn’t mentioned Teddy.”
“I was being polite. Better to hear the news from Jack, anyway. Now you won’t be caught off guard.”
“You can’t go around asking about Teddy like he’s just another person, Dad.”
“He is just another person, Livia. He should be, anyway.”
“Well, he’s not!”
“Ah,” Winn said, “here we are.”
In his opinion, the finest houses on the island were marked by dented mailboxes and rutted driveways. Only a chimney or maybe a widow’s walk should be visible from the road. Jack Fenn’s house, however, was a blatant, dazzling Oz set against the blue horizon of Waskeke Sound. Privet plants wrapped in burlap stood in wooden boxes at regular intervals along the road like blindfolded prisoners, holes already dug and waiting for them in the rich-looking soil. After a few years, they would merge into a hedge and provide a semblance of privacy, but the driveway was needlessly wide, a blinding avenue of broken quahog shells that unspooled in a graceful S curve up to the house, where one offshoot led to a garage and the other to the front door, making a loop around a flagpole. To one side of the house, confined by an infant hedge of its own and a cage of dark green chain-link, a mountain of red clay waited to be spread and rolled into a tennis court. Yet another nascent hedge encircled an empty, freshly poured swimming pool and the wooden bones of a pool house.
Winn turned in between two glossy black post lanterns, crunching on the shells. The flagpole at the top of the driveway was the nautical style, a yardarm across a mast, and stood in an oval of dirt. No flags were flying, but the cords were ready, their clips dinging against the metal pole, waiting to hoist the colors when the Fenns were in residence. The windows still bore the manufacturer’s decals. Part of the ground floor had been covered with new, lemony shingles, stark against the tar paper. Two years might pass before they faded to the desirable gray, and until then the house would be a bright imposition on the subtle landscape. The beginnings of a yard—paving stones, sacks of cement, a heap of mulch—loitered in the broad expanse of dirt that would one day be a lawn. Tarpaulins covered bales of shingles on one side of the driveway. The roof was a steep landscape of peaks, dormers, and gables, all sheathed in new cedar shake that shone in the sun. Brick chimneys crowned with terra-cotta pots pointed at the sky. Above the whole mess presided the bright copper sails of the three-masted clipper ship Fenn had chosen for his weather vane. Winn’s weather vane was a man alone in a rowboat.
“Anyway,” Livia said, “Greyson’s sacrifices are completely superficial. They’re not any kind of real loss. They’re just symbolic of loss. You know, like giving up chocolate for Lent or rending garments or something. At least what Teddy’s doing is genuinely hard.”
“Would you look at the size of this place,” said Winn. “I’m surprised. Jack comes from a fine old family. This is … it’s showy.”
Construction debris was strewn around: rolls of wire, crumpled wrappers, twine, tape, pipes, buckets crusted with cements and sealants. Two beige portable toilets stood a discreet distance away. “The house is poorly designed,” he said, pointing up through the windshield. “It must be a swamp up on that roof after a big rain. You see? I can pick out at least two spots where water will pool. They’ll have leaks. They probably already do. Shake is tricky. If you don’t cover the nail holes properly, you get leaks.”
“Fine,” said Livia. “The Fenns have made a mockery of roofs. They join the army just to bug you, and they design their houses to really get under your skin.”
“You disagree?”
“I don’t want Jack Fenn to drive up and find us sitting here staring at his house.”
“It’s a ridiculous house. I’m telling you. Look at that roof. Millions of dollars just to have leaks.”
“Dad, people like living by the ocean. Why shouldn’t they have a nice house if they want?”
“So you think people should have everything they want even if what they want is an ostentatious eyesore?”
“I don’t think it’s an eyesore.”
“This house is an eyesore.”
“I don’t know—to each his own. We could have built a house like this if we wanted to, right? It’s just not our style.”
Leaning forward with his chest pressed to the steering wheel, craning to see the roof, Winn was gratified by Livia’s use of “our,” that she was including herself in his aesthetic of quality, longevity, and simplicity. Since their childhood he had told his daughters he was going to give away all his money before he died, and they should make or marry their own if money was what they wanted. Better that than letting them feel the same disappointment he had after his parents died, when he discovered his inheritance was little more than untenable expectations. He had done well enough, but he was thankful for the way a certain degree of gentle dilapidation could be made to suggest old wealth. Shabbiness of necessity was easily disguised as modesty and thrift. Not that having a simple, hard-won summer-house instead of this castle by the sea would qualify him as shabby by most standards.
“Right?” Livia persisted. “We just do things differently. You aren’t a fancy house kind of guy.”
“What do they need such a big house for?” he said. “Is Teddy going to have a thousand children?”
Livia drew the Duffs’ flowers up onto her lap. “That’s the last thing I want to think about, assuming he lives long enough to have children.”
“Don’t be dramatic. He’ll be fine. Anyway, the girl’s not going to have any.”
“I can’t even wrap my head around … what if I was his only chance?”
The premise, simple enough on its surface, gave way beneath Winn’s consideration, dropping him into a feminine thicket of improbable hypotheses and garbled cause and effect. He clapped her knee. “Now, listen. I don’t want you thinking this army business has anything to do with you.” He drove around the oval and back down the driveway. Livia was obscured by pink and orange flowers and curls of green, leafy things, a tiger in the grass.
“What if Teddy and I get back together?” she said.
“I don’t think that’s very likely.”
“Thanks a lot!”
“Do you think you’re going to get back together?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying.” She pulled the vase even closer to herself. “What would you have done if I had been born like Meg Fenn?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I would have gotten used to it.”
“Really?”
“I think when something like that happens you rise to the occasion.” In truth, Winn could not imagine holding the hand of his grown daughter as she bellowed beside a pyramid of tomatoes.
“If Daphne had been born like that, would you have had another child?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Would you have wished you had never had children?”
“This is a silly conversation.”
At the Enderby, Livia jumped out with the flowers and took them inside. When she returned, she looked naked without her portable jungle, and the car felt empty.
After he’d parked in front of the house, Winn said, “Tell your mother I’ll be in in a minute.” Livia took two of the grocery bags and went inside, and Winn walked along the driveway past the garage and down a path shaded by trees and padded with a russet layer of pine needles. Unseen birds burst into a chorus of jabbering laughter as he passed. He paused beside his garden, peering through the deer fence in consternation. Dominique had chosen the right word: sad. The plants were all smaller than they should have been and drooped on rubbery stems: dwarfish melons, bloodless tomatoes, cucumbers that had not come up at all. There were some acceptable-looking green beans, but he saw no sign of the chervil or hyssop he had requested. Mint, which would grow in the crater left by a nuclear blast, was the only thing flourishing. The idea occurred to him that the caretakers could be sabotaging his little agricultural oasis, mistreating the soil or planting in adverse weather conditions. Poking his fingers through the fence, he rubbed a few leaves of mint together and walked away, farther into the trees. He held his fingers to his nose and sniffed the weed’s sharp, sweet smell.
He walked until he could no longer see the house, and then he looped back, coming to the edge of a dense clump of trees and brush and spotting, through the branches, Agatha sunning herself on the grass near the house. She was lying on a blue and white towel, and he recognized her polka-dotted bikini as the one from his study. She must have gone in there to retrieve it. Perhaps she had left him something else, a hair clip or a scarf. The afternoon sun was dropping lower in the sky, and a serrated front of tree shade advanced across the grass toward her bare toes. Daphne came out the French doors from the kitchen and crossed the deck and then the lawn, carrying a towel. She wore a black bikini, her huge, naked belly protruding brazenly between the two halves. Piper followed, turning to shut the doors behind her and giving Winn a view of wishbone thighs and a derriere so nonexistent that the blue fabric of her bathing suit hung in flaccid wrinkles. As Daphne shook out her towel, Agatha reached up and patted the side of her bare leg in a friendly way. Piper settled crossed-legged on the grass, her face obscured by massive sunglasses like ski goggles. Daphne eased herself down so her feet were facing Winn and the hummock of her pregnancy hid the top half of her body. Her shadow, humped like a camel, drew a smooth, dark curve over Agatha’s flat stomach and golden hipbones.
Watching them, he became aware of the elasticity of his lungs, the hard ridges of tree roots pressing into his feet, the muscular, rippling action of swallowing. His heart raced with stealth and vitality. That was another man’s house, another man’s daughter and her friends. He was a stranger, a prowler, a hunter, a wood dweller excluded from their world. The girls’ obliviousness transformed them, although he couldn’t pinpoint how. He couldn’t decide if they seemed more innocent when left to themselves, or more unabashedly sensual. Or were they unreal, like mermaids caught basking on a rock? They were only sitting—but there was something about them. Daphne, distorted by pregnancy, could not be reconciled with the little girl he remembered. Piper sat erect and unmoving, a sphinx. Agatha was lying on her back with her knees bent, and she moved her legs in a slow rhythm, bumping her thighs together and then letting them fall apart. A narrow strip of polka-dotted material concealed her crotch, and it tightened and slackened as she moved her legs, lifting slightly.
Close in his ear, a voice said, “Boo!”
Three · Seating Arrangements (#ulink_8b60bbc1-d35c-549f-91ee-4e80cba6f1e7)
Biddy stood with her hands on the edge of the kitchen table, leaning over a slew of guest lists, place cards, and seating charts. She felt like a general planning an offensive. Beside her, Dominique, faithful aide-de-camp, mirrored her posture.
“What if,” Dominique said, switching two cards, “we move these like this. Situation neutralized.”
“No,” said Biddy, “because then I’ve got exes sitting at the same table. Here.” She touched the paper.
“They wouldn’t be okay?”
“It’s not ideal.”
Dominique tapped her lips with one long finger and considered. Biddy, seized by affection, patted her on the back. She missed Dominique, especially during the holidays, when she had been a household fixture all through high school and college, Cairo being so far away. Dominique had been the sort of worldly kid who sought out the company of adults and who, at fourteen, had considered herself all grown up. When she stayed with the Van Meters, she behaved more like Daphne’s indulgent aunt than her friend and spent most of her time helping Winn in the kitchen and running errands with Biddy while Livia, little duckling, followed wherever she went and Daphne lay indolently in front of the television. Agatha had spent a few holidays with them, too, but her presence was less comfortable. Biddy was always finding cigarette butts in the flower beds and catching Winn staring and waking up to the sound of Agatha laughing and drunkenly thumping the walls while the others shushed her and tried to convey her to bed. Once Biddy had gotten up and flipped on the light at the top of the stairs, surprising them—Daphne, Dominique, Livia, and Agatha—like a family of possums in the sudden brightness. Agatha was lying on her side and inexplicably clinging to the balusters while Dominique worked to pry her fingers loose and Livia and Daphne grasped her ankles to keep her from kicking.
“What if,” Dominique said, pointing at the seating chart, “we move him to the leftovers table?”
“Yes,” said Biddy. “Perfect. But I feel bad calling them leftovers.”
Dominique pushed the place card across the table with the authority of a croupier. “Le mélange, then.” She stood back and looked at Biddy, her long eyebrows kinked and her long, sad mouth pulled quizzically to one side. “How are you? I mean—really.”
Biddy was so surprised by the question that her eyes began to water. “I’m fine,” she said, fussing with the cards to indicate the unimportance of her tears. “I’m great. I’m so happy for Daphne—I want everything to go well.”
“Of course you do,” said Dominique. “This is an insane amount of work. You’re handling it like a champ.”
Biddy was forced to take a tissue from the box on the counter. She never wore mascara, but she dabbed carefully nonetheless, coming up under her lashes the way she remembered her mother doing. To be seen, really looked at, the way Dominique had fixed on her, was unsettling. Her family barely noticed her, but she couldn’t blame them: she had changed so little over the years that people were never reminded to reconsider her. “It is a lot of work,” she said. “It really is.” Making the confession gave her a small thrill, and she went on, feeling her way. “And sometimes it feels like a natural conclusion to raising a daughter, that you run yourself ragged to make this one day as perfect as possible, even though, for you, the day is bittersweet because she’s leaving—I mean, she’s been living with Greyson, but somehow this is different, more official. I don’t know how those over-bearing beauty pageant mothers do it, you know, keeping track of someone else’s whole physical being: hair, clothes, makeup, all that.”
“Yeah, right?” Dominique concurred. “I think—well, I don’t know, but it seems to me the real backbreaker is being in charge of manifesting someone else’s idea of perfection. Not necessarily Daphne’s, just this idea floating around out there about what a wedding should be.”
Biddy squared a place card with the edge of the table. “Manifesting someone else’s idea of perfection. Hmm. That’s well put.” She wondered if the younger woman was talking about more than just the wedding. Certainly Biddy was no stranger to laboring under another person’s vision for life. Abruptly, her enjoyment of her own honesty peaked and fell away. She had wilted quickly under the spotlight. “I don’t know,” she said. “All I mean is that I don’t want anyone to be disappointed.”
“Well, sure,” Dominique said, switching to an offhand tone, “but there’s only so much you can control. Perfection is overrated, anyway. I’m all about meeting basic needs and seeing what’s left over from there.”
Laughing in embarrassment, Biddy balled up the tissue and hurried to throw it away under the sink. “But you! I want to hear about you,” she said. “You have the most interesting life. Tell me everything about Belgium.”
“Oh, it’s all right. I don’t think it’s my forever home. I just kind of live there. In a way, it could be anywhere. You should see my apartment—it’s completely barren. Every time I think about buying something, like nice sheets or something to hang on the wall or even fancy hand soap, I think, well, no, because I won’t be here for long, and it’ll be one more thing to get rid of.” She gave Biddy another searching look. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a break? You could run away for an hour somewhere. Have some time to yourself. I’d cover for you.”
“No, no,” Biddy said, shaking off the last of her tears. “I’m really fine. It’s not the amount of stuff I have to do, really, it’s—you’re so sweet to ask. I just—where is your forever home, do you think?”
Dominique’s eyebrows climbed a notch higher, but she said, “I’m not sure it exists. Not Egypt, not Belgium. Not France—that’s where my parents live now. They moved a couple of years ago. I don’t know if Daphne told you. I like New York but it exhausts me. Not Deerfield. Not Michigan.”
“That still leaves a lot of places,” Biddy said. “Maybe you’re supposed to live in the Bahamas.”
“I hope so. In a hammock.” They giggled.
“How will you find it?” Biddy asked. “Your home?” She was curious; she had never chosen where to live.
“I think probably I’ll look for a job first. But—I don’t know. In theory I could work most places. You’d think it would be fun, being able to pick more or less anywhere in the world, but when I think about the freedom I usually just end up feeling lonely. There’s nothing pulling me to any particular spot except vague preferences. And sometimes I wonder what it says about me that I can drift like this.” She gave a quick, wry roll of her eyes. “Total first-world problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, like, oh, woe is me, I’m so exhausted and alienated by my globe-trotting life of preparing expensive food.”
“Don’t you have a boyfriend in Belgium? What about him?”
“I don’t think he’s permanent.” Dominique made a slow, sheepish shrug, her shoulders lingering around her ears for several seconds until she abruptly let them fall. “It’ll all sort itself out. Where do you think I should live? Where would you go?”
Biddy was caught off guard not so much by the question as by her inability to process it. She couldn’t think of a single place she might live where she had not already lived. She thought: Connecticut. Waskeke. Maine. Connecticut. Those weren’t answers for Dominique. They were shameful in their timidity, their lack of adventure. But she could not imagine living on a tropical island or in the Alps or in Rome or Sydney or Rio. She could not imagine living in Delaware. “I think you’ll know it when you find it,” she said. “I think you’ll find the perfect place. Or at least one that meets your basic needs.”
The side door slammed, and Livia appeared in the hallway, balancing a paper grocery bag brimming with corn on each of her hips. “Teddy joined the army,” she announced.
“Teddy Fenn?” Biddy asked.
Livia set the bags on the counter. “Teddy Fenn.”
The boy’s name, so familiar, sounded foreign to Biddy when Livia pronounced it all by itself, like the Latin name for a rare species, some kind of wetlands bear. “How do you know?”
“We ran into Jack at the market. He said Teddy just went down to some recruitment center or wherever and signed up. He’s not coming back to school. He’s not graduating. I don’t know why Jack couldn’t stop him. What kind of father would let this happen?” Biddy thought Livia sounded like her own father, though Livia would be offended to be told so. The two of them had the same wrongheaded belief in the power of parents over children. A bag of corn tipped over, and the heavy ears thumped onto the floor. Livia gazed heavenward and flapped her arms in defeat.
Biddy was relieved not to be the object of any more scrutiny. “Easy does it,” she said, approaching her daughter even though she knew her consolation would not be welcome. Since Livia could not admit defeat and accept that Teddy really was lost, she would tolerate no pity. Biddy kept waiting for her to simply get over the boy. As a toddler Livia had been inseparable from her pacifier until the day she was put down for an unwelcome nap and ripped the rubber nipple from her mouth and hurled it to the floor, never to suck on it again.
“Dad was in rare form,” Livia said after allowing Biddy a brief hug and then stepping away. “He got all, you know, forceful and cheerful, and tried to bring up the Pequod and was weird with Meg, and then, then, he goes, ‘How is Teddy?’ Like he was talking about some random acquaintance. And Jack says, ‘Oh, funny you should ask. He’s made a big decision. He’s joined the army.’ And Daddy says, ‘Well. Well, well, well, well, well.’ Like that. ‘Well, well, well, well, well.’”
“Did Jack say why?”
Livia bent to gather up the corn. “No. I’m not sure he knows.”
“Where does he go? Does he go to … boot camp?” Biddy spoke tentatively, uncertain of the expression.
“I don’t know. I have no idea where or when or how. I don’t know. Why would I know? Did he just wake up one morning and decide, Oh, none of this is really working for me? I’d like a one-way ticket to Iraq, please.”
“They’ll give him a round-trip ticket,” Dominique said. She, too, came to hug Livia, and this time Livia seemed grateful, wrapping her arms around Dominique’s strong back and hiding her face in the young woman’s shoulder. Biddy noticed a strand of corn silk on the tiles and bent to pick it up.
“He might have to come back as cargo,” Livia said, muffled. “Why can’t he just finish college?”
“Livia,” said Biddy, “I don’t want you to think this has anything to do with you.” She reached in from the outskirts of the embrace to squeeze her daughter’s shoulder.
“That’s what Daddy said.” Livia released Dominique. “But how could it not have anything to do with me?”
Because, Biddy wanted to say, Teddy didn’t fall apart after this breakup the way you did. Because Teddy’s life no longer includes you. But she could see that Livia was taking Teddy’s decision as some kind of sign, an indication that he was becoming unpredictable and erratic, possibly on the brink of a collapse that could only drive him back to her, regretful and awakened. His flight to the army was the last dying flutter of independence, his last binge of freedom before he saw the light. The army would never love him the way Livia did. “I don’t want you to hope it has something to do with you,” Biddy said.
Livia began breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth and staring off into space. The therapist she saw at school, Dr. Z, had taught her that trick: if you feel like you’re about to lose your temper, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth and count to five or ten, depending on the direness of the situation. Winn hated that Livia saw a shrink. He said she should learn to grin and bear it.
“Anyway,” Livia said after five seconds, “after we saw Jack, Daddy decided we should go check on their new house.”
“The Fenns’ house?” said Biddy. “Why?”
“I think he wanted to sit there and glower at it and think about the Pequod. Not about how Teddy knocked me up and dumped me, no, no. About how unfair it is—what a great injustice it is—that there’s a club out there he can’t join.”
“Maybe it’s easier for him to think about the Pequod,” Dominique said.
Biddy looked at her, annoyed. The casual analysis seemed to violate Winn’s privacy. And Dominique couldn’t possibly understand what his clubs meant to him, what it was like to live inside their particular social world. Hadn’t she just been saying she didn’t belong anywhere?
Dominique was standing at the counter with a bottle of white wine she had helped herself to from the fridge, presumably to pour a nerve-settling glass for Livia. The natural melancholy of her face lent an air of pensive deliberation to even her simplest actions, and she contemplated the bottle as though it were a bouquet of condolence flowers in need of arranging. Thoughtfully, slowly, frowning, she twisted in a corkscrew and then glanced up, catching Biddy’s eye and, surely, some trace of her enmity.
“You know what I mean,” Dominique said levelly. “We all have our safe thing to run back to when we get overwhelmed.”
Biddy remembered that only minutes before she had been grateful enough for Dominique’s presence to have cried. Apologetically, she said, “He likes to keep track of new houses on the island.”
“Honestly, I think the house is great,” said Livia. “They have an amazing location. The house is big, but so what? It’s Fenn Castle.”
“The Fennitentiary,” Dominique said, handing a glass of wine to Livia. “Biddy, may I pour you a glass?”
“No, thanks.”
“Fennsylvania,” said Livia.
Biddy tried to think of a pun but couldn’t come up with anything. Had Dominique ever even met any of the Fenns? Most likely not, though certainly she had heard plenty about them—both Daphne and Livia kept up e-mail correspondences with her, and over the past few days the house had effloresced with girl talk. “Is Teddy on-island?” she asked Livia.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Probably.”
“Well, you won’t run into him.”
“What if he calls me?”
“Do you think he will?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. You’d think he’d want to tell me about the whole army thing.”
Biddy sat back down at the table.
Livia stepped closer and studied the mess of cards and charts. “Shouldn’t Daphne be doing this?”
“Seating isn’t really Daphne’s strong suit,” Biddy said. “She gives everyone the benefit of the doubt. She doesn’t see where conflict might arise.”
“On the other hand,” Dominique said, “I assume the worst.”
“You’re very good,” Biddy said. She reached across Livia to pat Dominique’s hand.
“Do you know all these people?” Livia asked Dominique.
“Not all of them,” Dominique said. “Biddy’s been explaining the web.”
“The web?”
“All the connections between everyone. It is impressively tangled, I will say.”
“Do you think Daphne’s strong suit might be shucking corn?” Livia asked.
“I’ll help you,” Dominique said. “Wine and corn shucking is an underrated combination.” She turned to Biddy. “We’ve pretty much got the seating stuff figured out, right?”
“Sure,” Biddy said, so practiced at concealing her disappointments that she had no doubt she sounded serene, even cheerful, as they abandoned her. “I’m fine here. You girls go on. Have fun.”
Through the French doors, she watched them settle into Adirondack chairs, glasses of wine on a table between them, and take up ears of corn. They ripped the green husks and pale clumps of silk free of the cobs, and dropped the naked yellow ears in one paper bag and the husks in another. Livia was talking, talking, talking, and Dominique was listening as she expertly shucked the corn, her eyebrows curved in tildes of concentration.
Biddy could no longer bear to watch Livia talk about Teddy, her eyes shining with wounded zealotry. Looking away from the girls, she made a few final desultory attempts at seating gambits that would ensure everyone’s happiness at the reception, and then she sat staring into the kitchen, wondering what to do. She could think of no more confirmation calls to make, no more gift bags to fill, no flowers to wrangle, no people to greet until the Duffs showed up for dinner. Usually e-mail was banned from the Waskeke house, necessitating a family trip to the library in town every couple of days, but this time Livia had insisted on having a cable hookup put into Winn’s office. Biddy wandered in that direction although she didn’t really want to know what new obligations were waiting in her in-box, and she only had to open Livia’s laptop and see the photo on the desktop—Teddy was not in the picture, but it was one Livia had taken on a trip with him to Scotland—to decide that, no, she would not check her mail after all. Perhaps she would follow Dominique’s advice and take a quiet moment for herself.
She sat in Winn’s chair, a winged, brooding, swiveling leather thing, and pivoted slowly around. Out the window she saw Daphne, Piper, and Agatha lounging on the lawn, but she had no desire to watch them and continued turning until she was again facing the green expanse of Winn’s blotter, bound at the sides with gold-embossed leather and clean except for a small stack of unopened mail and, all alone out in the middle, a single bobby pin. Biddy picked up the pin and held it in the light, looking for any telltale hairs, but it was clean. She supposed Livia must have left it there, though why she would be fixing her hair at Winn’s desk was a mystery.
She swiveled again to look out the window. At the rate Livia was going, she would end up being as scrawny as Piper, whose shoulder blades cast angular, inhuman shadows as she stretched her knobby arms up and out to the side. Of course she might have been as big as Daphne by now, or bigger, or already a mother. Biddy was afraid Livia was the doomed, clever moth who does not just bump against the outside of the lantern but manages to find a way inside and breaks itself against the glass—maybe trying to escape, maybe trying to merge with the flame. Biddy fiddled with the bobby pin, turning it over and over, pinching her fingertip in its tines. Teddy was a handsome kid, comfortable being noticed, impish and urbane under his red hair, not too pale but freckled, almost golden. He was friendly and charming, too, but Livia seemed unaware of how far she outstripped him in curiosity and sharpness and passion. Yes, Teddy had told Livia he loved her, but Biddy, for all her sorrow at her daughter’s pain, was disappointed and troubled that Livia had allowed herself to become so vulnerable, mulishly ignoring all the warning signs. How had she, Biddy, managed to raise someone so exposed and defenseless, a charred moth, a turtle without a shell, exactly the kind of woman she most feared to be?
CELESTE LAUGHED a hooting, triumphant laugh, pleased to have startled him so completely. Winn, turned pure animal, had bolted off to one side, his body twisting in its unimaginative sheath of polo shirt and salmon-colored pants. His feet, trying to flee, had run afoul of the tree roots, and he had stumbled badly, catching a trunk with both hands. She knew from long experience that taking jokes was not Winn’s strong suit, but still she was unprepared for the intensity of the response that crossed his face: first a very brief flash of something odd, like fear but also like despair, and then, once he had steadied himself, pure rage.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“Come on, Winnifred, just a little prank. You didn’t die.”
He examined the palm of his left hand and held it out for her to see. It was pink and scratched. Tiny white curls of skin stood up like grated cheese. “This is the last thing I need.”
“Good thing you’re not a lefty.” Earlier, Celeste had sensed she was getting too far ahead of the game and had come out for a walk to sober up. She was glad, too, because now she could be confident she wasn’t slurring her words.
His face resolved into a grim smile. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Just the right amount,” she said. She hoped the medically smoothed forehead she wore like a helmet would keep her from betraying the sting of his question. “What are you doing out here, skulking around?”
“I wasn’t skulking. You’re not the only one who can take a walk. It is my property, after all.”
His discomfort intrigued her. Instinct, honed by years of field experience, had rendered her unable to resist sniffing along a trail of male bad behavior once she caught the scent, and she studied him, increasingly certain that, underneath his bluster, something was off. Winn scowled, backed up against his tree. What had he been looking at in the first place? He moved to block her view, but she leaned around him and caught sight of the girls out in their bathing suits, soaking up the last of the sun like three mismatched lizards. “Enjoying the view, Winnifred?” she said lightly. There were worse things than being a Peeping Tom.
He gritted his teeth. “I was taking a walk. I heard a noise, and I went to see what it was. I was about to go up and say hello to the girls when you decided to give me a heart attack. I didn’t realize you were taking a break between cocktail hours to sneak around.”
“No need to get huffy with me, 007,” she said. He would never dare pick on her drinking with Biddy around, but as they faced each other out in the trees, his dignity ruptured and his adrenaline still running high, they were caught up in a primal energy. She thought he was equally likely to strike her or kiss her. He had kissed her once before, supposedly by accident, and he was attractive in his way, in good shape for his age and with a symmetrical, serious, news anchor sort of face and nice gray temples. But then again she had a thing for repressed men (hello, husbands one, two, and four), and she had a thing for men just starting to go gray (three and four), and she had a thing for forbidden men (three, oh lord, three), and, truth be told, she flirted with Winn sometimes for no more substantial reason than that she liked to keep things lively. She had stolen husband number three in the first place—he had been a charismatic trial lawyer, married, and the authoritarian, despised, partnership-withholding boss of husband number two—and then that little tramp, that child with the long, long legs and the horse face, her best friend’s daughter, had gone and stolen him, and off they’d flown to Bolivia.
But Winn was such a square. That was why he and Biddy worked. Ogling through the pine trees was probably the great sin of his life. “I wasn’t sneaking,” she said. “I was walking, just like you.” She attempted a saucy smirk, feeling a curious deadness in the parts of her face that had been injected into submission. “So, which is it?” she asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Is it Agatha or Piper? Oh, don’t tell me. I’ve already guessed.” As she spoke, she realized that she had, in fact, guessed, and scorn rose up in her.
“You are being disgusting,” Winn said with exaggerated deliberateness. “I hope you get all this out of your system before our guests arrive.”
She poked him in the belly, just above the brass buckle of his needlepoint belt, finding more softness there than she expected. “Dirty old man.”
“Screw off,” he growled and stomped away into the trees.
Celeste watched him go and then pushed through the branches and sauntered out onto the lawn. “Hello, ladies!” she called. Piper waved; Agatha propped herself up on her elbows; Daphne lolled on her side like a walrus, her chin lost in the soft folds of her neck. Poor dear. Fortunately, she would be the type to shed the baby weight right away.
“What’s up, Celeste?” Agatha said.
Piper sat up straight as a yogi and lifted her arms over her head. Her swimsuit stretched over the hollow between her ribs and hips. “Isn’t it so beautiful out?” she chirped.
Celeste flopped onto the grass. “Absolutely gorgeous.”
“Make sure you check yourself for ticks later, Celeste,” Daphne said. “Lyme is a problem here.”
“Why would limes be a problem?” Piper asked.
“Not limes,” Agatha said. “Lyme disease. With a y.”
Celeste crossed her arms over her face and wished that a hand would descend from heaven and offer her a cocktail. She was wearing shorts and a striped sailor’s shirt, and the grass pricked her calves. She kicked off her sandals and rolled onto her belly, looking uphill at the girls. “So who’s next, ladies? Who’s after Daphne?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Agatha. “Piper’s the one with a boyfriend.”
“Oh my God,” Piper said. “Don’t jinx it.” She ran a hand through the huge mane of hair that, in Celeste’s opinion, made her look like a member of Whitesnake.
“So marriage is still cool?” Celeste asked. “It’s still something girls your age want? I would have thought you all would be going over to some groovy, Swedish hipster model of commitment.”
“Obviously, marriage is cool,” Agatha drawled. “Otherwise Daphne wouldn’t be doing it.”
Daphne snorted. “If I had a baby out of wedlock, Daddy would die. Literally die.”
“You mean,” Celeste said, “you wouldn’t be getting married if it weren’t for your father?”
“Well, Mom, too. And the Duffs. But, no, if I really had my way, we’d wait a while so I wouldn’t have to be pregnant in the pictures.”
“I really want to get married,” Piper volunteered. “It’s so romantic.”
“Yes, it is,” Celeste agreed. She plucked a blade of grass from the soil and tickled her lips with its waxy edge. “But romantic and prudent are not the same thing.”
“That’s good, though,” Agatha said. “Imagine if there was only prudence.”
“Hmm,” said Celeste. “Then I never would have married, and the world would be a very different place.”
“My parents would have, though,” Daphne said. She had settled on her back again, and her voice drifted over her belly.
“That’s true,” Celeste said.
Agatha crossed one golden leg over the other and bounced her slender, dirty foot. “What was Winn like when he was young?” she asked. “It’s just that I can’t imagine it. Biddy I can picture, but not Winn.”
Celeste felt a prickle. The nymphet was interested. Never one to torture herself, she preferred not to dwell on the charms of young women and had only allowed her eyes to skim the girl before, assessing her as pretty (really, more than pretty but with the kind of looks that would turn vulgar before too long). But now she gave her full attention to the remarkable body on display in that ratty old bikini, worn to near transparency. Agatha was thin but not hard. Long limbed but still small. Totally devoid of pores or cellulite or stretch marks or stray hairs. Even something as mundane as her kneecap was finely wrought, worthy of study, top of the line.
But this girl must have her choice of men. Why would she want old Winnifred? What about him could possibly light her fire except his forbiddenness, his unlikeliness, the very triteness of his middle-aged crush? Not that any of those should be underestimated. Husband number three, Wyeth, had been the least handsome but most loved of her husbands, and now he lived off his fortune in St. Barts, the novelty of Bolivia having long ago worn off, though not, apparently, the allure of long-legged, horse-faced youth. But Wyeth had been stolen property to begin with, an unlucky penny, and Celeste, in the end, had come to accept the bulk of the blame for the sorrows caused by their marriage. Nothing like that should happen to Biddy. Biddy had always been such a docile creature, highly competent but docile, happy to be a kind of ladies’ maid to her sisters through her childhood and then an earnest bluestocking and then a selfless wife. To betray her would be the height of cruelty. But this was crazy. Agatha couldn’t possibly want Winn.
“Oh,” Celeste said, drawing an expansive sigh of phony reminiscence, “let me cast my mind back. I think—I think—yes. I remember now. Winn was exactly the same.”
Piper made a high squawk that Celeste supposed was laughter. “There has to be more. Tell! What was he like?”
“Really. I couldn’t possibly come up with one thing that’s changed.”
Daphne stirred. “Mom once said he had a bad reputation before they met. Apparently he liked the ladies.”
Agatha’s bouncing foot stilled.
“I think he started those rumors himself,” Celeste said. “Your father is a born monogamist. Boring as hell.”
“Mom seemed kind of proud of it,” Daphne said. “She’s funny.”
Agatha uncrossed her legs and sat up. The shade had fully caught her, and she rubbed her arms as though to brush it off. She said, “Some people like a little competition. You want to feel like you have someone desirable.”
“You would say that,” Daphne said. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
But Piper was nodding. “No,” she said, “I think that’s true sometimes. You want to feel like the guy had lots of options but chose you. Like you tamed him a little bit.”
“That is so retro,” said Daphne.
“Don’t you feel that way?” Agatha asked. “It’s not like Greyson was a virgin when you met. It’s not like Greyson was ever a virgin.”
“Well,” Daphne said. “I don’t know. Maybe a little.”
Sadly, but with a certain pleasure of anticipation, Celeste accepted that she needed a drink. “All right,” she said, hoisting herself to her feet and sliding back into her sandals. “I’ll leave you girls to it. Someone has to tell Daphne what’s going to happen on her wedding night, and I don’t have the stomach for it.”
“We’ll be in soon,” Daphne said. “We’ve lost our sun. Check for ticks.”
Celeste walked around the house and greeted Livia and Dominique, who were deep in conversation on the deck beside two bags of shucked corn. Inside, place cards and seating charts were spread over the table, but Biddy was nowhere to be seen. The bottle of gin was out on the counter, and after she poured a little into a tumbler and added ice and a dollop of tonic, she put it away in a cupboard, where people were less likely to monitor its level. The first sip, bitter and fizzy, was unspeakably delicious, and she felt her nerves begin to settle at once. The bottom line was that she was being paranoid about Winn. And even if she wasn’t, what could she do?
After retrieving the bottle and splashing out a tiny bit more gin, she climbed up through the house to the widow’s walk, where she could have some privacy and fresh air and take in the view. Reclining in a chair, she closed her eyes and pressed the sweating glass against her forehead. She wanted to tell herself she had once been as sexy as Agatha, but her delusions were not so strong as that. Still, she had been seductive. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to poach Wyeth from his mousy wife and three children. The best she could say for herself now was that she was the kind of woman people called well preserved. But despite all her restorative efforts, she looked tired. Which she was, in the existential sense. There would be no more seductions for her, no more ecstasy, no more destruction. She and Cooper had a pleasant life together, a sanctuary built by two reformed sinners around a policy of maximal calm and minimal communication. Quiet dinners out, long weeks apart when he was off sailing, compatible taste in TV and movies, mutual tolerance of each other’s friends, agreement that they would never marry. Maybe she had stumbled on the ideal relationship for a woman her age. Maybe, after all these years, she had solved the riddle. Even if things fell apart, she would draft another companion from the bush leagues of washed-up lovers, and they would wait out the violet hour together.
Four · Twenty Lobsters (#ulink_899049fe-694f-5ce3-b332-c4b65c7d7b0c)
I’ve spent the past six months wishing he were dead,” Livia said to Dominique. Immediately, she regretted the melodrama of the statement. Melodrama did not fly with Dominique.
The last of the corn had been shucked, and Dominique was leaning back in her chair and looking out over the lawn. Celeste had walked up the grass a minute before, and they could hear the murmur of bride and bridesmaids from around the corner of the house. “I doubt that’s what you were really wishing for,” she said tolerantly.
Livia considered. “Everyone thinks I should just get over it,” she said. “But I don’t know what’s on the other side of ‘it.’ I’m not even exactly sure what ‘it’ is.”
“No need to be all metaphysical about it. You know what you’re supposed to do. You just don’t want to do it.”
“I don’t want to give up prematurely.”
“No one could accuse you of that. I could read you back the fifty e-mails you sent me this winter detailing the ten million arguments you’d pitched to Teddy for why you should be together. But look, you’ve given it the old college try, he hasn’t come around, so cross your fingers and let go.”
A cry came from above and a crow swooped from the roof, trying to gobble something down as it flew, pursued by an enraged seagull. The birds disappeared over the trees. Livia said nothing.
“It’s been a while since you’ve talked to him, right?” Dominique pressed. “Just keep going with that. Invest some time. I mean, think of it this way. How do you think it looks if you go around mooning over him for months after he dumped you?”
“Why does it matter how it looks?” Livia said hotly, surprised at Dominique. “Why does everyone care so much about how everything looks?”
Dominique held up her hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m not a member of this Great Gatsby reenactment society you all have going on. I just think it’s possible to trick yourself into feeling better by pretending you feel better.”
“Yeah,” Livia said. “Yeah, I know, but I keep thinking about how far along I’d be. I’d be just as preggers as Daphne.” Two weeks after her abortion, she had been summoned home for a weekend. Daphne and Greyson were coming up from the city for dinner. They had news. Winn roasted a duck. They were still on the salad course when Daphne bubbled over and announced she was pregnant and she and Greyson were getting married. Livia, to her enduring shame, had burst into tears and run from the table.
“Women,” Dominique said knowingly. “We measure our lives in months.”
“People kept telling me that at least now I know I can get pregnant. Like, phew, what a relief. I’d really be spending a lot of time worrying about infertility otherwise.”
“Yeah, but what do you say to someone about their abortion? The impulse is to grasp for silver linings.”
“I’m not beating myself up over it. I just want to meet someone else. Barring that, I just want to sleep with someone else. To at least create the sensation of moving on.”
“Fine,” said Dominique, “but beware the rebound guy.”
“I just want a distraction.”
“That’s what they all say.”
BIDDY WAS COLLECTING the last of Winn’s groceries from the Land Rover when he came walking up out of the trees, frowning and moving his hands to emphasize some speech he was giving in his head.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“To check on the garden,” he said. “Depressing.”
“You saw Jack?”
“Livia told you about Teddy?”
“I’m shocked.”
“I’m not. Chip off the old block. At least he’ll be far away. Livia won’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“She thinks he’s leaving because of her. I’m afraid she’ll romanticize this.”
“Tell her she’s overestimating her own importance. He’s a Fenn. He’s joining up because he thinks it makes him look good. I tried to get a word in about the Pequod with Jack but didn’t get too far. If he’s blackballing me because of this whole business with the kids, I think that’s poor form.”
“Mmmm.” Biddy was unwilling to enter into another round of the Great Pequod Debate. Was Jack shutting Winn out because Winn had excluded Jack from the Ophidian? Was Fee carrying a grudge over their breakup all those years ago? Were the Fenns so collectively shamed by Livia’s ordeal that they simply had no wish to see the Van Meters around the clubhouse? This last hypothesis, she had pointed out to Winn over and over again, was especially silly since he had been on the waiting list well before Teddy’s hapless sperm found its way to Livia’s egg. To Biddy’s thinking, Winn had done everything he could to make his case with the Pequod, and the rest was up to fate. So there was no cause for angst, no need to spin conspiracy theories. In all likelihood, the holdup had nothing to do with the Fenns and everything to do with the club’s internal workings and quotas. And even if the Fenns were the problem, most likely Winn, not Livia, was to blame, as Biddy was fairly certain the Fenns had been genuinely fond of her daughter and would not be so unjust as to think she had tried to entrap their son. At the end of the day, why would you want to join a club where you are not welcome? But Winn saw the consequences of Livia’s mistake everywhere, as though her womb were the source of all disorder in the universe.
“I’ll tell you,” Winn said, “I have an itch to call up Jack and have it out, get the straight story once and for all.”
“No,” Biddy said, “not this weekend, Winn, please.”
Celeste’s voice clarioned down from the roof. “Winnifred!” Winn grimaced. “Oh, Winnifred! The lobsters are here!”
A red-faced man in white shirt and pants appeared around the corner of the house, struggling to push a dolly loaded with two cardboard boxes through the gravel. Each box had a large red lobster stamped on it.
“Van Meter?” he said, consulting something scrawled in black marker on the top box. “Twenty lobsters?”
“You’ve come to the right place,” said Winn. He stepped forward and lifted the first box off the dolly, setting it on the ground and pulling off the lid.
The deliveryman watched dubiously. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Winn said. “That’s why I’m checking them.” He pulled lobster after lobster out of his box, holding each in the air to make sure it was moving its antennae and rubber-banded claws before adding it to a pile on the gravel.
“I’m sure they’re all alive, Winn,” Biddy said, blocking one lobster’s escape with her Top-Sider. People said lobsters were just giant bugs, and they looked it, creeping along, probing with their long feelers.
“Better safe than sorry, dear,” Winn said. To the deliveryman, who had begun to remove lobsters uncertainly from the second box, he said, “Here, I’ll get those if you’ll do me a favor and put these ones back.”
“No,” Biddy said. She bent and grabbed a lobster by its midsection and dropped it back in the box. There was a bed of seaweed at the bottom. “I’ll do it.”
“He doesn’t mind.” Winn turned to the deliveryman. “Do you?”
“No?” the man said, confused.
Biddy set two more lobsters on top of the first, and Winn scooped two out of the second box. “Slow down,” she said, “they’re getting mixed up.”
“It doesn’t matter which box they go in, dear, as long as they’re alive.”
“You can go,” Biddy told the deliveryman. “We’re all paid up, aren’t we?”
“Just hang on one minute,” Winn said. “Let me finish here.” Biddy gave up replacing lobsters, and she and the deliveryman watched in silence until Winn pulled out the last one and waved it at them. “Now,” he said, “aren’t we glad I checked? This one’s dead.” The lobster’s claws drooped limply, swinging from side to side like a pair of oversized boxing gloves. Setting it on the ground among its living brethren, Winn straightened up and put his hands on his hips, victorious. They all looked down at the lobster.
“That’s so weird,” the deliveryman said. “I’ve never heard of someone getting a dead one. These things could live on the moon.”
“He just moved,” Biddy said. “He moved his antennae.”
“No, he didn’t,” said Winn.
But Biddy was sure. The lobster had swept his antennae to the side. As they watched, the long, whisker-like appendages flicked again. “See?” she said.
Winn nudged the lobster with his toe. It didn’t move. “It’s sick in any case,” he said. “We don’t want to eat a sick lobster.” He picked up the lobster and held it out to the deliveryman. “How about running back and getting us a replacement?”
“Well,” the guy said, “that might take a while. I have a few other deliveries to make first.”
“Not necessary,” Biddy said, reaching out and seizing the invalid from Winn. “We have more than enough. Winn, Dicky doesn’t even eat lobster.”
“But we paid for twenty,” Winn said.
“I can write you a credit,” the deliveryman said, eying the lobsters, which were slowly migrating off the path and into the grass.
“Fine,” Biddy said. “That will be fine.”
“I don’t know,” said Winn.
“It’s fine,” Biddy assured the deliveryman.
Agatha and Piper emerged from the side door, Piper catching it before it slammed. Both were in their bathing suits, and the men were, for a moment, too startled to remember to hide their interest in the girls’ breasts and legs.
“We heard the lobsters were here,” Agatha said. “Can we help?”
“Good girls,” Winn said. “You can catch the runaways.”
“You don’t have to,” Biddy said.
“No,” said Agatha, “we’ll do it.”
Winn touched Agatha’s elbow. “Sorry about earlier,” he said quietly.
“What happened earlier?” Biddy asked.
Winn and Agatha looked at each other. Agatha laughed.
“I’m afraid I barged in on poor Agatha in the bathroom,” said Winn.
“Oh, Winn,” Biddy said, “you know the lock’s broken. You have to knock.”
“It was my fault,” Agatha offered. “I should have—”
“No,” Winn interrupted, “no, I was careless. I accept full responsibility. Absolutely my fault. I’m not used to so many people being around, that’s all. Won’t happen again.”
“All right,” Biddy said. “That’s enough, Winn.”
“No big deal,” said Agatha with an ingratiating wink at Biddy. She bent to catch a lobster, her bikini nestled fetchingly in her butt crack.
As the deliveryman wrote up a receipt for the price of one lobster, Biddy held the dead or dying crustacean in one hand and, slipping the other into her pocket, found the bobby pin there. She rolled it between her fingertips as the laughing young women collected the other lobsters, scooping them up and daring each other to kiss the rust-colored noses while the creatures flipped their petaled tails.
THIS IDEA of her father’s to cook a lobster dinner for seventeen struck Livia as ill conceived but also immutable. She accepted, too, that he would want her to be his sous-chef and that she would not be able to get out of it. He received the shucked corn without thanks and sent her around to the outdoor shower with a salad spinner, four heads of lettuce to wash and tear up, and an empty laundry basket in lieu of a colander. Agatha and Piper had been in the kitchen in their bathing suits for some reason, padding around like nudists, and Daphne and Dominique came in from outside as Livia was heading out. Daphne had a red sarong tied below her belly. “Daphne,” Livia said, hefting the basket of lettuce, “you must be really stressed out, what with the wedding being so close and all. So much to do.”
“Leave me alone, I’m pregnant,” Daphne said sweetly, reaching to accept a glass of iced tea from Piper.
The shower, a stall of cedar planks around a showerhead that stuck out from the side of the house, was near the back door. Livia turned on the water and picked up a head of lettuce, holding it under the spray while she tore apart the leaves and dropped them in the spinner. She felt the way she always did after she talked about her pregnancy: a little embarrassed and slightly unclean, like she had told a crude joke at a party. The sight of Agatha in her bikini had done nothing for her mood. She found herself imagining Agatha and Teddy together, and, arbitrary though the pairing was, the thought sickened her. She had heard about two or three girls he had been with since the breakup, and she thought of those girls with Teddy, too, fragments and pieces of bodies, the whole too gruesome to contemplate. Teddy was still the lone notch on her pathetic bedpost. She dug her fingers into the lettuce, making ragged rips she knew her father would not like, and then she clapped the lid on the spinner and pulled its cord, yanking as though starting an outboard motor.
“Teddy got me pregnant”—that was what she said even though the bulk of the blame was hers. Pills either nauseated her or caused insupportable mood swings; diaphragms caused constant infections; she was afraid to get an IUD; the shot had made her roommate gain fifteen pounds. That left condoms. She fell into a habit of chancing a few days around her period when they could skip the part where Teddy picked at the foil wrapper with his thumbnail, tore it open, held the small jellyfish close to his face to see which way it unrolled, and finally applied it, like some ludicrous hazmat suit, to his penis, which all the condom-related exertions of his brain had robbed of some tumescence. Her gamble succeeded for eight months or so and, with discipline, might have lasted longer if she and Teddy had not hit a rough patch, caused, like all of their rough patches, by his attention to another girl. In the relief of their reconciliation, Livia allowed herself to imagine that they were in the green-lit pastures of the safe zone.
A week after the breakup, she had decided one night to get roaringly drunk alone in her room and dress up in pearls and a party dress. Snow was predicted, but she chose a summer dress patterned with large, old-fashioned roses. From her roommate’s closet she fished out high, spindly heels that would have frightened her had she been sober, especially given the iciness of the brick sidewalks. She could not get the zipper in back all the way up, and, for one moment, as she stretched and strained with one elbow poking toward the ceiling and the other bent behind her, she was overtaken by wretchedness and sat down on the futon to shed a few tears. Then the gin kicked back in, and she was out the door without a coat, teetering around patches of snow toward the Ophidian, a few inches of her spine framed by the V of her undone zipper. Around her, girls skimmed by in their going-out clothes, underdressed for the cold and, like her, catching their heels in the divoted ice and the grooves between the bricks. Each group of girls was a single, shimmering consciousness, like a flock of birds or a school of fish, moving together in an elaborate, private choreography, their sequins and silks tossing back the streetlights. The boy at the club’s door hesitated when he saw her, but she pushed past him.
She thought she heard him say that Teddy wasn’t there, and she said, “Fuck Teddy,” to no one in particular. She made a tour of the rooms, tripping on the nap of the Persian carpets and the knotty floorboards. Pounding hip-hop filled the clubhouse, at odds with the ponderous, old-fashioned interior, which was all tufted leather, dark paint, carved wood, and grim brass light fixtures. The décor suggested a nostalgic, appropriated Englishness, as though the Ophidian had once possessed faraway colonial holdings. Framed photographs of members, letters they’d written or received, doodles they’d made on cocktail napkins, and other inscrutable ephemera crowded on the walls. “You’re all dead now,” Livia muttered to the class of 1918, “even though you were in the Ophidian.” The club, she thought, was an institution that existed for little purpose other than to select its members. Once you were in, then what? Then you sat around drinking and gossiping until it was time to choose new members, with whom you sat around drinking and gossiping until the time came to choose the next batch. There was no point to it, not really. The Ophidian was a decoy, a façade, a factory that produced nothing. Her father loved that stupid snake swallowing its own tail. He said it was about self-sufficiency, renewal, and rebirth, shedding skins but persisting, having no beginning and no end. She thought it was about going nowhere, about finding no better option than to devour yourself.
People were looking at her, she knew, and she leered back at them, at the looming faces she knew or seemed to know. She found herself sitting on the arm of a leather couch and laughing at something the boy beside her was saying. She laughed so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. She took a sip from the plastic cup in her hand and realized it was full of water.
“This is water,” she announced. “I didn’t ask for water. If I wanted water, I would have asked for it.”
The boy on the couch looked embarrassed. She wondered how she had ever thought he was funny. “Stephen thought maybe you’d had enough.”
“Oh, is that what Stephen thought?” She was standing now. The room went quiet around her, and she swung left and then right to get a good look at it. “What?” she said. “You think I’m drunk? Stephen thinks I’m drunk? Well, you can tell Stephen that I’m drinking for two! Know what I mean? But don’t wait for Teddy to tell you and don’t send any cigars!” Water slopped out of her glass and onto her toes. “Shit.” When she bent down to wipe it away, she lost what was left of her balance and tipped forward, arcing toward the oriental carpet. As soon as she hit (or was it before? did she even fall?), she felt a pair of hands on her sides, righting her. One of them zipped up her dress. “Teddy?” she whimpered.
The hands did not belong to Teddy, though she spotted him then in the doorway, still wearing his coat, flushed pink under his orange hair, staring at her in a way she knew neither of them could recover from. His contempt radiated from across the hushed room, and she could only send back contrition and animal desperation.
Her rescuer was the despised, vodka-withholding Stephen. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough party.”
He took her to a back room, and together they went through her phone until they found a soberish friend who agreed to come get her and walk her home. “Bring a coat she can wear,” Stephen said into the phone. “And a pair of boots.”
As they sat and waited, Livia studying the floorboards and Stephen the ceiling, he said, “I would take you myself, but it wouldn’t look good. Teddy’s my friend. I’m the one who called him. He came here to get you.”
All the way home, through the falling snow and the purple-orange glow of the streetlights, while the world rattled around her, jarred by each clumsy step she took in her too-big borrowed boots, Livia convinced herself that Stephen would e-mail the next day to check on her, and something would begin, growing out of the snow like a crocus.
There were e-mails the next day, but none from him.
LIVIA LEFT HER BASKET of washed lettuce on the deck and went into the kitchen. “Dad?” she called. “What do you want me to do with the lettuce?”
Her father approached from his study carrying a thick book bound in blue canvas. “BIRDS” was stamped in silver on the spine. “I’ve solved our little mystery,” he said. “Listen.” He flipped to a page he had been marking with his finger and read, “Herons are a large family of wading birds including egrets and bitterns. Egrets are any of several herons, tending to have white or buff plumage.” He closed the book. “That settles it. We were both right.”
“That book’s out of date, and that definition is vague, anyway,” she said.
“But egrets are always herons, and white herons are egrets.”
“But there are white herons that aren’t egrets, too. I don’t know—I don’t remember exactly. I’d have to look it up.”
“I already looked it up.”
“That book is old, Dad.”
“Don’t get upset.”
“I’m not upset! I just want to be accurate.”
He looked at her steadily over his glasses as though trying to determine whether she were a heron or an egret. “Me, too,” he said.
Five · The White Stone House (#ulink_7c28035e-9e6f-5e79-a550-8eb70096f9e3)
Dominique found she was suffering from the classic dual anxieties of the well-meaning guest: she wished to avoid being asked to help with the cooking (Winn by himself was already too many cooks in the kitchen), but she did not want to appear lazy or parasitical. Escape was the only solution, and so she took a bike and struck off. She rode quickly, standing on the pedals, overtaking some local kids in basketball jerseys on low-riding BMXs who hooted at her as she passed, then a solitary guy in paint-spattered pants, riding slowly and slugging from a brown paper bag, and then a large family of day-trippers in a single-file line of descending size, Papa Bear to Baby Bear on basketed rental Schwinns. Ahead, she glimpsed a cyclist with churning, spiderlike legs in black spandex. His torso was a blaze of yellow. “Ah, oui?” Dominique said. “Le mail-lot jaune?” She lowered her head and bore down, imagining spectators lining the bike path, snowcapped Alps above, a peloton of BMX kids behind her riding serpentines and pushing one another. The rickety ten-speed she had chosen from the Van Meter bicycle jumble jerked side to side as she pumped. She caught him more easily than she had expected, the silver teardrop of his helmet growing rapidly larger until she drew alongside, disappointed. She dallied a little before passing, hoping he would turn to look at her, but he kept his sunglasses fixed on the path’s vanishing point.
The lighthouse appeared atop a distant bluff, poking up like a solitary birthday candle. In the day, its light seemed feeble and superfluous, a recurring white spark dwarfed and muted by the sun, but Dominique liked the tower’s stalwart shape and jaunty striped paint job. She would ride to it, she decided. She rode a bicycle almost every day at home in Brussels, to and from the restaurant, but she was always having to dodge and dart through fierce swarms of tiny European cars, racing for survival and not pleasure. But this—the air full of salt and bayberry, the sky as iridescent and capacious as the inner membrane of an infinite airship, the slow loosening of her muscles—this was something gorgeous. She needed speed, space, the abrasion of rushing air. Poor Livia was laboring under the illusion of being owed something, some karmic charity, for her pain, but the universe felt no compunction for its cruelties, no sympathy for its victims, especially those who helped misery along with some idiotic bareback sex. Everyone knew, of course; the Ophidian party had become known as “the Baby Shower.” Daphne didn’t seem to have done much to help Livia cope with the situation, but she claimed Livia had been giving her a wide berth, confiding little, taking no interest in her pregnancy or the preparations for the wedding. And Daphne respected other people’s privacy, even her sister’s, a quality sometimes mistaken for a general lack of curiosity. Daphne had told Dominique that during her worst fight with Greyson, the only fight where each had enumerated the shortcomings of the other, he had accused her of not being interested in anything.
These days the chatter about Livia’s pregnancy seemed to have died down, and for the most part, little Fenn–Van Meter had been swept under the communal Aubusson rug. Dominique had almost forgotten how these families worked, how they were set up to accommodate feigned ignorance, unspoken resentment, and repressed passion the way their houses had back stairways and rooms tucked away behind the kitchen for the feudal ghosts of their ancestors’ servants. She was surprised Winn had not leapt from a bridge or gutted himself with a samurai sword after his daughters got knocked up back to back. Daphne’s condition—she imagined Winn, the old Victorian, calling it that—would be grandfathered into the boundaries of propriety by the wedding, but Livia’s phantom pregnancy, the missing bulge under her green dress at the front of the church, was a void that could not be satisfactorily filled in and smoothed over. Good thing he had the Pequod to take his mind off things, setting out on his quest for membership like Don Quixote without a Sancho.
Bearing down on the pedals, she shook her head. These people, this pervasive clique, this Establishment to which Winn had attached himself and his family, seemed intent on dividing their community into smaller and smaller fractions, halves of halves, always approaching but never reaching some axis of perfect exclusivity. As long as Dominique had known her, Daphne had rolled her eyes at her father’s quirks and blind spots, but until the pregnancy, she had done nothing to differentiate her life from his vision for it. At Deerfield Dominique had assumed that college would be Daphne’s time to forge her own way, but then she found herself sitting in her Michigan dorm room, curled up in her chlorine-smelling sweats and watching the snow come down and listening to Daphne natter over the phone about eating clubs and bubbleheaded adventures she had with her new fun friend Piper whom Dominique would absolutely love and fancy charity balls in New York and Greyson, always Greyson. Generally willing to be goaded into competition, Dominique had first tried to turn Daphne against these new people, to reclaim her. “They sound like zombies,” she had said, moving from her bunk to the floor and pulling one arm across her chest, stretching her shoulder. She was always either in the pool or studying or sleeping. The amount of time Daphne seemed to have to get dressed up and drink baffled her. “They sound like exactly the friends your dad would pick for you. Don’t you want to mix it up a little bit? Get out of your rut?”
“My rut?” Daphne had repeated. “I don’t have a rut. This is me. Whether or not you approve. I like to fit in. I like people I fit in with.” Which of course was what had drawn Dominique to her in the first place, back when she was new and lost at Deerfield. Daphne, so certain of her place in the world, had been the perfect antidote to homesickness. She had been a kind of skeleton key to prep school, and Dominique had taken possession of her gladly.
“I just worry,” Dominique said, “that you’re selling yourself short.”
A few weeks of frostiness followed and then reconciliation and then Dominique visited Princeton and did not love all the activities and people that Daphne loved, and then there was a fight caused by Dominique wondering out loud how on earth Piper had been accepted at a supposedly selective school, a fight that included more references to zombies (“entitled zombie brats”) and some harsh words from Daphne about how Dominique was always judging, always thought she was better, thought she was so special, like some kind of fucking pharaoh even though she wasn’t, and sometimes people just liked to go out and have fun with people who were nice and fun.
Distance and time had been good for their friendship. Dominique had come to realize Daphne’s life was not her responsibility, and now, in return, almost a decade later, Daphne seemed to value her precisely because she was less fun than Piper or Agatha, because she was not tiny and blond, because she preferred quiet bars to lounges crowded with bankers, because she tried to be honest. And Dominique liked Greyson—she did, genuinely. She did not love him, but that was fine. She would see him only rarely. Of her friends who were married, none had chosen mates who matched her aspirations for them. Usually the spouses were steady, kind people who wanted to get married, not the thrilling, elevating, inspiring matches Dominique had dreamed up. She had been accused by her own mother, who was always trying to set her up with eligible expat Coptic doctors, of having unrealistic expectations, both for herself and others, but Dominique thought the disjunction was not between herself and reality but between her desires for her own life and her friends’ desires for theirs.
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Мэгги Шипстед
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize, this ebook special edition contains exclusive bonus content.The Van Meters have gathered at their family retreat on the New England island of Waskeke to celebrate the marriage of daughter Daphne to an impeccably appropriate young man. The weekend is full of lobster and champagne, salt air and practiced bonhomie, but long-buried discontent and simmering lust seep through the cracks in the revelry.Winn Van Meter, father-of-the-bride, has spent his life following the rules of the east coast upper crust, but now, just shy of his sixtieth birthday, he must finally confront his failings, his desires, and his own humanity.This ebook edition contains an extended extract of Maggie Shipstead’s second novel, Astonish Me.