Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (29 page)

Luke slipped his glasses back on.

Peggy dove into his bed, yanking the covers up to her neck.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said.

“This isn’t what it looks like.”

“What
does
it look like?”

“Like I just jumped into your bed. Which is not what I did. Well, it’s what I did, but not for the reasons you might think.”
Peggy, please, shut up.
She began again. “I’m not properly dressed. If you wouldn’t mind loaning me your robe, I’ll be on my way. Just don’t look.”

“I pretty much saw. In the hall. My eyes aren’t
that
bad.”

Don’t think about it.
“A robe, please.”

His robe was camel colored, like the coats in the window of the Toggery. He held it out to her and averted his eyes, and she
slithered out of his bed and into the garment, which enveloped her in Luke’s clean, manly smell.

She was as light-headed as she had been in the hallway, only this time it had nothing to do with panic or anxiety and everything
to do with this feeling of being in Luke’s bedroom, in his bathrobe. She cinched the belt tightly around her waist. “I’ll
return it tomorrow morning.” She started again for the door.

“Wait.” He removed a wrapped present from the closet. “It’s past midnight. Christmas Day. You can open it.”

Peggy was touched and ashamed. She’d blown most of her holiday budget on an overpriced rolling suitcase for Brock, leaving
little left over. She’d found items from the shop for her parents and the Ver Plancks. But she’d hesitated over Luke—what
did one give a husband of convenience? In the end, she’d bought a joint gift for him and Miss Abigail. Now she wished she’d
tried harder.

“All I got you was a cookie basket,” she admitted.

“That’s fine.” Luke sat on the bed. “Go ahead, open it. It won’t bite you.”

She sat, too, and tore away the wrapping paper to reveal a book:
William Butler Yeats: Early Poems
, its cover faded, its pages yellowed, a leather bookmark marking the poem “When You Are Old.”

“It’s the book I read from at the party,” Luke said. “I thought you should have it. To make up for my behavior the rest of
that evening. It belonged to my aunt Beatrice. We called her Beebee.”

Peggy turned the book over in her hands. “But this should stay in your family.”

“Well, you’re in the family.”

“Only for now. I can give it back to you, along with the brooch, when I—” The word caught in her throat. “When I leave.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “You can keep the book.”

It was the best present anyone had ever given her. Peggy knew this without hesitation. She didn’t know how to thank him. She
saw he was searching her face, his hazel eyes deep and serious behind his glasses. In the house’s stillness, she imagined
she could hear his heart beating in time with hers.
If he were my husband for real,
she thought,
this would be when I would throw my arms around him.

She looked away. “I can’t believe I was scared of a cat. I almost forgot he existed. How can a person not see a cat for three
whole months?”

Luke’s laugh was hoarse, almost nervous. “He pretty much keeps to himself.”

“Like you,” Peggy said quietly. “Alone in your study so much of the time. My being here must be hard on you. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not in there to hide, Peggy.” The lamp lit the edges of his hair into a halo around his face.
I should get out of here,
she thought. “I write poetry. Or I try to. And I’m responsible for what’s left of the family money—for making more of it—a
talent it seems I don’t possess. I’m in there trading and dealing, trying to stop this house from falling down and to keep
Abigail and me fed and clothed. And I’m failing miserably at both—poetry and Family Asset Management. I don’t know why I’m
telling you this. You can’t do anything about it.”

“Sometimes just talking about it can make you feel better.”

“Not in my world,” he said.

He rose from the bed. She was disappointed until she realized it was only to take a sweater from his bureau. She was surprised
when he began to talk again. “It’s cold in this house,” he said, pulling the sweater over his pajamas. “If I kept it any warmer,
the bill would be four or five thousand dollars a month. There are property taxes I can barely keep up with and maintenance
costs I clearly can’t keep up with, and all these obligations fall on me. I was born into them, and from the moment I was
aware of my family name, I knew, like it or not, I would inherit them. When I really wanted to be like…you.”

“Me? Why?”

“You’re free. You can live wherever you want and work at whatever you want. You haven’t had several generations of your family
telling you from birth, ‘You will choose a career in finance, and you will live in the Sedgwick House,’ and this is the college
you’ll attend, and these will be your hobbies and here’s whom you’ll be friends with. You’re not tied down to a family home—hell,
your parents don’t even have a home.” He sighed. “Abigail would call what I’m doing complaining. We Sedgwicks don’t complain.”

“Well, it is complaining. If you’re so worried about money, why don’t you get a job?”

“I had a job. I was an economist at Hartford Mutual. I left to care for Abigail and this house. Even if I’d stayed, I didn’t
make nearly enough to keep this place running.”

Peggy tried to imagine Luke playing office politics, going on team-building retreats, golfing with his superiors on weekends.
She couldn’t picture it, any more than she could picture herself in that kind of environment. Still, she couldn’t fathom why
he would want to trade lives with her. “We all have obligations, Luke. All right, I got to choose mine, but they’re still
obligations. In a few months, the rent on our store will double, which we’re pretty sure will put us out of business, unless
the competitor moving in across the street ruins us first. And when I was growing up, we moved seven times. The minute I got
used to a new school, my dad would decide he was bored and we’d be off to a new town. I think you’re the luckiest person in
the world to live in a place where everyone has known you from before you were born, where your presence actually matters.
Okay, end of tirade.” She took a breath. Luke was staring at her. She buried her face in her hands.

With exquisite tenderness, Luke peeled her hands from her face and tilted up her chin with the tip of a finger.

Before she could waver, before she could say a word, before she could clarify what was happening, he moved closer—the bedsprings
creaking absurdly—cupped her face in his hands, and touched his lips to hers.

They were soft. Impossibly soft and warm, and it was the softest and warmest of kisses, the sexiest, most romantic kiss ever,
the tip of Luke’s tongue tracing her lips, his hands playing across the small of her back, his longing hidden behind a restraint
Peggy knew would soon dissolve—evolve—into devouring hunger. Peggy and Luke were there within moments, falling onto the bed,
he loosening the sash of her robe and slipping his hands beneath her long underwear to brush against her skin, she with her
arms tight around him, drawing him closer…until the phony diamond on her prop wedding ring snagged in his sweater.

It took all her willpower to disentangle herself and move away from the kiss.

“What is it?” He was breathless.

She didn’t want to say it. More than anything she wished not to have to, or that, at the very least, she could have kissed
Luke Sedgwick for a few more minutes until reality intruded and ruined everything.

S
he might as well have sucker-punched him.

Luke scrambled up from the bed to a less vulnerable position, glad the conservative cut of his pajama bottoms allowed him
to preserve his dignity. God bless Brooks Brothers. “You’re engaged?” He was like Milo, teetering on the edge of a tantrum.
“You told me you were engaged to be engaged, and now—”

Peggy appeared to flinch. “When did I tell you that?”

“In September. The first time we spoke on the phone.” He pointed at her hand, at the hated gaudy diamond. “I take it you’re
now calling that an engagement ring, not a promise ring?”

The flash of Peggy’s eyes was reminiscent of Nicki when she was angry. “This isn’t an engagement ring. It’s supposed to be
my wedding ring. Mine, from you.”

Luke was stunned. He gathered himself, surveyed his room, bare except for Peggy’s knicknacks. “You don’t know me at all,”
he said, more for his own sake than hers, then asked wearily, in his normal voice, “Who is he?”

“His name is Brock.” Peggy was looking at the floor. “He’s a sports cameraman.”

“Ah,” Luke said. “The football fan.”

Her palpable misery gave him no satisfaction. The lips he’d savored moments before were trembling, the bright heat in her
cheeks might have been the flush of passion, not shame.

He yearned to take her in his arms and peel off her long underwear—how had he never considered how erotic long underwear could
be?—and make love to her until she forgot there was any other man in the universe.

She adjusted her—his—robe where the lapels had fallen open in the front. “It wasn’t sudden.” She sounded far steadier than
she looked. “We’ve been together for years.”

“If he loves you so much, why did it take him this long to propose?”

Peggy’s shoulders dropped, her face fell, and she wrapped her arms around herself in the self-protective way he recognized.
Some writer he was. He couldn’t imagine being able to articulate how sorry he was, how to say he was angry not at her, but
at himself for letting her get away; but before he could try, she began to uncrumple before his eyes, raising her head and
unfolding her arms. “I broke it off with him in October, right after my first weekend here. But you didn’t do the same thing
with your girlfriend, did you? You think it’s perfectly fine to keep seeing her. That redhead.”

He was surprised. “Nicki?”

She flinched again. “If nothing else, don’t you think your great-aunt might hear gossip around town?”

He should set the record straight—explain he’d ended his relationship with Nicki soon after the wedding reception, that since
then he, unlike Peggy, had honored their wedding vows. “What about you? I suppose you were with the sports fan at the Colonial
Inn the weekend you decided you and I needed some time apart.” The jealousy he’d forced down erupted in him again. “Whose
brilliant notion was it to go there, so all of Litchfield County could see you? Why not just pitch a tent with him on Ernestine
Riga’s lawn?”

“Great idea. Then that Nicki person could have driven by in her little green car and waved.” She rewrapped her arms around
herself. “Just tell me. You
have
been seeing her, haven’t you?”

“Fine. Yes.” Luke was tired of arguing. He was just plain tired. In an hour or so, it would be light outside. “Are we done
here?”

“We’re done.” She crossed to his door for the second time in the past hour. The poetry book he’d given her lay forlornly on
his bed. “We may be stuck with each other until September, but as far as I’m concerned, this friendship—whatever you call
it—” Peggy glanced back at the book one last time. “It’s over.”

The morning of New Year’s Eve, after half a dozen wordy parting speeches, much sloppy bear hugging and cheek kissing, and
twenty minutes devoted to backing the Fifth Wheel painstakingly out of the narrow service driveway along the north side of
the Sedgwick House, Peggy’s parents drove off, back out west, into the warm weather. Luke was sorry to see them go. Peggy
had returned to New York on Christmas afternoon, and without the distraction of Max and Madeleine there was nothing to do
but think, only one thing to think about, and he didn’t want to think about it. The house seemed more forlorn than ever. He
spent the morning buying and selling stock and came downstairs to pick at the last of the overcooked Christmas leftovers.
When he stepped on the squeaky third step in the front staircase, it seemed to whimper.

Luke was despondently jotting poetry in the margin of one of Abigail’s grocery lists when his great-aunt came into the kitchen
to fix herself a cup of tea. She scorned his offer of help and shuffled to the sink to fill the old kettle and set it on the
stove. There was the
tick-tick-tick
of the old gas burner struggling to ignite, and then a ring of blue flame leapt up to meet the kettle.

“Quiet in here,” Abby commented.

“Very.” Luke put down his pen. He’d been thinking of a walk in the woods he’d taken with Abby one New Year’s Eve afternoon
when he was a boy. On that afternoon, the sun had already begun to set behind an ancient tree whose snow-dusted branches bowed,
veil-like, toward the forest floor. The Widow in the Woods, Abby had called the old oak, and pointed out the carcass of a
second oak nearby: Only the trunk remained, destroyed by lightning years earlier.

“Mr. and Mrs. Adams certainly are exuberant.” Abby took her soggy, used teabag from its stained saucer on the counter and
set it in her cup. Then she turned on Luke with the Look.

Luke decided to ignore it. “Would you care for a gingerbread man? There are a couple left in Peggy’s cookie basket—” He stopped.
His heart was heavy at the thought of the widowed tree, and of Peggy, and Abigail was not about to stop looking at him. “All
right. What is it?”

“What’s wrong with your marriage?”

The directness of her question threw him—he wondered whether a bit of Max and Madeleine’s freewheeling, get-itall-out-in-the-open
style had rubbed off on her. He wouldn’t mind so much if it had, although perhaps not regarding this particular subject. His
brief kiss with Peggy had stirred something in him; he had, for a gossamer instant, finally known what real love was, why
people chose to marry and pledge forever to each other. He recognized the desire to prolong that forever with children who
carried forward one’s name, and with it the promise of eternity.

And then the moment had ended, and he understood that with Peggy there would be no forever.