Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (15 page)

Nicki worked a cigarette out from her pack.

“Don’t light that in my car,” he said.

The spell was broken.

Nicki gathered her special yarn from the backseat. “So long, Luke. It’s been fun.” She swung her long legs onto the pavement.
“Have a nice life.” She stepped out onto the sidewalk, not bothering to close the car door behind her.

Luke watched her strut away, her body to lust after, her auburn hair dazzling in the sun. He reached down under his seat for
the ash-filled travel mug. He leaned across to shut the door and turned the car back toward New Nineveh.

Peggy walked to West Seventy-ninth and Amsterdam and bought avocado-and-cheese sandwiches for herself and Bex at their favorite
organic lunch place. Here in New York, the change in seasons was just beginning, and there were still days—today was one—where
it was warm enough to sit outside without a coat. Suddenly too hungry to wait, Peggy decided to eat her lunch in the little
park behind the Museum of Natural History. She made herself comfortable on an empty bench and unwrapped her sandwich, swinging
her feet. On summer weekends, this place was full of museum-goers, but on a weekday afternoon in fall, things were quiet.
A nanny and two children walked by. A homeless woman slept on another bench; her dog, curled on top of a pile of rags and
trinkets, raised its head as a man in an untucked shirt and jeans went past, chattering animatedly to an invisible companion.
Peggy observed this man with mild interest until it became clear he was talking not to himself, but into an electronic device
hooked, cyborglike, over his ear.

The cyborg stopped in front of her bench. “Well, look who’s here!”

Midbite, Peggy looked him over. It appeared he was trying to communicate with her face-to-face.

“The watch, remember?” He held out his wrist, and Peggy recognized him as the man she’d met three weeks ago at Brat-tie’s.
He had a beard—not a beard, exactly, more a precision-trimmed dark stubble. On his belt, a blue electronic light blinked from
inside a leather case. He said, “I’m Jeremy.”

Peggy swallowed and introduced herself, shielding her mouth with her hand in case she had alfalfa sprouts in her teeth. She
made room for him on the bench. He seemed to be expecting her to.

He sat next to her. Even outdoors, she recognized his aftershave, a blend of key lime and cedar she was sure was from Gaia
Apothecary. He said, “Twice in forever I’m north of Fourteenth Street and I see you both times. That’s worth dinner, don’t
you think?”

Nobody had asked her out in seven years. She was saved from having to say no by an insistent cell phone. She waited for Jeremy
to slip on his earpiece again and answer, but he pointed toward her purse: It was her phone, not his.

It was probably Bex, wondering what had happened to her. “I should answer that.” Peggy caught the phone on the second to last
note of its generic, musical ring.

“Have you seen
Field of Dreams
?” Luke asked on the phone.

Jeremy removed his gadget from its clip on his belt and consulted it. Peggy slipped off the bench and stepped a few yards
down the path. “Pardon me?”

“Have you ever seen
Field of Dreams
?” Luke repeated.

Was he calling to apologize, at last? If so, this was a strange way of doing it. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“
Field of Dreams.
A guy builds a baseball diamond in a cornfield—”

“I’ve seen
Field of Dreams
.” Thanks to Brock, Peggy was reluctantly familiar with every sports movie ever made—
Rocky
,
Raging Bull
,
North Dallas Forty.
It might well be his only lasting legacy. She was pretty sure she was getting over Brock. It made her question why she’d
stayed with him so long in the first place. The first two weeks had been rough, but this week she’d had the urge to cry only
once. Her tears had been cursory, lasting less than a minute.

“Did you cry?” Luke asked in her ear.

She was baffled; it was as if Luke were reading her thoughts. On the bench where she’d left him, Jeremy was chattering away
again into his reattached earpiece. “Did I cry about what? Why are you calling?”

“Did you cry at
Field of Dreams
?”

“Everybody cries at that movie.” She was losing patience.

What did this have to do with his behavior at their wedding reception? “Of course I cried.”

“I thought as much. Good.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

By seven, Peggy had her new-old room in reasonable order, and she and Bex sat in the living room, toasting to roommates and
fertility and success at the store. “And to your new single life. And the death of Josh’s couch.” Bex clicked her sparkling
cider against Peggy’s champagne. “Can you believe it’s gone from the sidewalk already? Who would take that hideous thing?”

“Careful. I’m grieving. And Peggy isn’t exactly single.” Josh, just home from the office, set down his briefcase on one of
Peggy’s packing boxes. He kissed Bex and pecked Peggy on the cheek, then rummaged through a drawer in the kitchen. “So I thought
of names for the baby.” He emerged with a fistful of takeout menus and plopped down next to Bex. “I’m thinking Shlomo if it’s
a boy, Tzeitel if it’s a girl.” He squeezed Bex so hard, Peggy could have sworn Bex’s eyes bulged out.

“Oh, nice. ” Bex smiled at him. “What if we have two boys?”

“Shlomo and Yehuda.”

Bex laughed. “Or two girls? Or triplets?”

“I haven’t gotten that far.”

Bex ruffled his hair.

They had the exact relationship Peggy had always wished for. As she had so many times in the past, she forced herself not
to be jealous. “Were you two always this cutesy-poo?”

“Always were, always will be, and now that you’re living with us, you’re going to be subject to shows of cuteness that will
amaze and astound you.” Josh gave his wife a second, flamboyant kiss on the lips, then leafed through the menus. “Who’s hungry
for Szechuan Palace?”

“I have a date,” Peggy blurted.

The two stared at her. “When?” Josh asked, at the same time Bex was asking:

“With whom?”

“Next week.” Peggy shuffled menus aimlessly while she recapped her afternoon. She left out Luke’s phone call and didn’t mention
the only reason she’d agreed to go out with Jeremy was that when he’d again asked her to dinner, an image of Luke sharing
a glass of wine with the redheaded woman in the photograph had flashed into her mind.

When she was finished, Bex proposed a toast: “To new beginnings.”

“New beginnings.” Peggy inclined her glass in Bex’s direction. What did Luke matter, anyway?

“But you’re married,” Josh said.

Bex sighed. “I believe Peggy knows that, sweetie.”

T
he apple harvest had ended last week, yet, with classic city-folk enthusiasm—born of the distinctly urban assumption that
one’s every whim could be satisfied, no matter the time of day or the season, at some nearby shop or club or restaurant—Peggy
and Tiffany Ver Planck had insisted on going apple picking anyway. Luke waited as the two tried to persuade the proprietor
of Bethlehem Farms, who was selling cider and doughnuts behind the counter at his farm market, to give them a basket and picking
pole. The old-timer had already warned there wouldn’t be any fruit left, at least none worth eating. But he gave them what
they’d asked for, and Peggy and Tiffany hauled themselves up into Ver Planck’s gargantuan black Escalade, on either side of
the Ver Plancks’ sleeping toddler, with Luke in the front seat and Ver Planck driving the two hundred feet to the apple orchard.
The two women disappeared over a ridge into the misty Saturday afternoon.

Luke and Ver Planck walked the circumference of the orchard parking area, a dirt lot rutted with tire prints, one car door
open in case Milo woke up. “Pick your own apples—it’s genius,” Ver Planck said. “Plant trees, and people pay for the privilege
of playing migrant farmworker. Low overhead, low labor costs.”

Luke squelched through a muddy patch. “Low profit margin.”

“True.” Ver Planck stopped to survey the haze-shrouded farm, rows of fruit trees undulating with the curves of the hills;
sun yellow scarecrow globes painted with menacing eyes keeping guard from wires strung over the spent cornfields. He framed
his fingers into a rectangle and looked through them as if through a viewfinder. “Better to raze and subdivide.”

Luke detected no irony in his friend’s comment. He walked ahead to the top of the ridge. Below him in the orchard, the doll-size
figures of Tiffany and Peggy flitted from tree to tree like butterflies. Far beyond them, to the north and east, were Hartford
and Providence and Plymouth Rock and Province-town, and the Atlantic Ocean and ultimately England, where the bones of Silas
Sedgwick’s fathers slept.

Ver Planck caught up. “You own the land, don’t you, next to that Pilgrim Plaza on Route 202? It’s part of the holdings you
manage, right? You can do with it as you wish?”

Luke nodded. The land to which Ver Planck referred was the last piece of Sedgwick property the family still possessed—twenty
acres of fallow pasture bordered by a crumbling stone wall. A vocal group of preservationists, organized by Annette and Angelo
Fiorentino, had picketed there during the construction of Pilgrim Plaza on the adjacent woods that had, until half a century
ago, also belonged to the Sedgwicks.

“Ever thought of developing it?” Ver Planck asked. “I played Sebonack last month with Grant Atherton. You know him.”

“The name sounds familiar.” A crow landed a couple of feet from Luke and hopped a few steps on the deserted field.
The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird,
Luke thought: Wallace Stevens.

“Atherton was a few years behind you at Andover. He’s head of new-store development at Budget Club. I told him he ought to
talk to you. They’re looking to put a store in this area.”

“You think there should be a discount superstore on my family’s land?”

“Why not? The property’s just sitting there, going to waste. You give Budget Club a ninety-nine-year lease, and you can still
call the land yours. That strip mall next door is already pulling in customers, there’s a new traffic light—just the infrastructure
a retailer like Budget Club is looking for.” He clapped Luke on the shoulder. “Think about it.”

Luke thought about it. For half a second. “No thanks,” he said. The crow cawed as if laughing at them both.

The farmer hadn’t lied: There was nothing left on the trees. Peggy wound through the orchard, eyeing the crooked, barren branches.
There had to be one good apple left. She wanted only one.

She’d been delighted that morning when the Sedgwicks’ telephone had rung and Miss Abigail had come to get her in the dining
room, where she’d been writing a thank-you to a Mrs. Digby Twombly for a set of seasonally themed tea towels. “Tom Ver Planck’s
wife, for you, dear,” Miss Abigail had announced. It was Peggy’s first call at the house. She’d followed Miss Abigail to the
den, where the phone, black with a rotary dial and a bell, squatted on a cluttered end table, its heavy receiver balanced
on a stack of yellowing telephone books.

“Tom wants to visit with Luke, and Milo is obsessed with going to a farm,” Tiffany said. “Why don’t we make an afternoon of
it?”

Now Peggy appraised the orchard systematically. “Maybe we should go farther down the hill. There might be a tree no one else
noticed.”

Tiffany took the picking pole, a strange tool that resembled a broom handle with a small net attached to a metal ring at the
top. They walked together, the flat tracks of Tiffany’s pink rubber Wellingtons next to the deep holes left by Peggy’s impractical
boot heels, until Tiffany stopped. “Do you hear crying?”

Peggy listened. “I think it’s a crow cawing.”

“Oh.” Tiffany exhaled. “You’re right.” They started walking again through the damp air. “Poor little Milo. He was the one
who wanted to come to a farm, and now he’s going to nap through the whole thing.”

Peggy was quiet, thinking of Bex. This morning she’d had the transfer procedure. All three embryos were now inside her. It
would take about a week before Bex would know if any were growing, and the news could easily be bad—the embryos had failed
to divide; Bex wasn’t pregnant; all the money and time and hope had been for nothing, and she and Josh would have to start
the process all over again. How many tries could their emotions and bank account take?

“There’s one!” Tiffany pointed up into a tree. “Wait, it’s all pecked at.”

Peggy drew her leather jacket tighter around her and looked back up toward the ridge. On top, she could make out Luke and
Tom, pacing back and forth. It was the most animated she’d seen Luke all day. He’d returned to his tight-lipped self, without
so much as a mention of his phone call last week. On the ride over to the farm to meet the Ver Plancks, he’d spoken twice:
to ask if she had closed the car door all the way, and to offer an insightful remark about the weather. Now there he was,
waving his hands, pontificating.

“What do you suppose they’re talking about?” Peggy wondered aloud.

Tiffany’s laugh had a tiny, adorable snort at the end. “Business. Always. I always say, unless my husband is asleep, he’s
putting together a deal, and if he could figure out how, he’d make deals in his sleep, too. Last night he dreamed he bought
the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“What does he do, exactly?”

“He manages the family investments, just like Luke.”

“Like Luke?” As soon as she asked, Peggy wanted to kick herself—if she were really Luke’s wife, wouldn’t she know this already?

But Tiffany just regarded her with a quizzical expression. “Well, you know, they all call it something different. Tom has
his hedge fund, and Luke has his investment portfolio, Kyle has the Hubbard Family Foundation, but really each of them is
just playing around with the inheritance.”

Tiffany couldn’t be right, not about Luke. People with inheritances to play around with didn’t live in mansions that were
falling to pieces. Peggy wished she could ask Tiffany all sorts of questions about Luke, about how he’d come to be living
with his ninety-one-year-old great-aunt, about his poetry, about the sexy redhead in the photograph on his desk who was so
obviously the subject of his poems. “Why is everyone so surprised Luke got married?” she blurted. “All people keep saying
is, ‘I can’t believe he settled down!’ ”