Seating Arrangements (21 page)

“Is everything all right?” Dominique asked.

“Yeah,” said Livia. “My father has disappeared, and Mom just put a hit out on a lobster.”

Dominique was unfazed. “He sleeps with the fishes.”

“My dad?”

“The lobster.”

“I think he’s sleeping with the beer in the garage,” said Livia.

Francis frowned. “Your dad?”

“The lobster,” said Livia and Sterling together.

LIVIA LED THE WAY
around the back of the house with Sterling following behind her, Indian file they had called it when she was little, as though by walking one after the other any group of schoolchildren was transformed into a band of hunters creeping silently through a forest. Sterling’s silence bore down on her, heavy with what was to come, and she was aware of the muscles in her legs working and the damp springiness of the grass under her feet. Patches of fog obscured the stars. She turned onto the path that led to the garage and heard Sterling stumble and land hard in the gravel. “Fuck,” he said. “These little rocks sting.”

A flashlight would have been a good idea. She was not fully prepared, either logistically or psychologically, to embark on a drunken mission to kill a lobster, but Sterling had offered to come with her and, as he said, do the dirty work, and she had been so eager to be off the deck and away from the late-night grumpiness brewing there that she had immediately accepted. She wanted to make good on the promise of the early evening and their easy, carnal rapport, which had felt so adult, so mutually recognized and accepted but then had been tainted by the bitter anticipation of a letdown. Was it possible that Sterling had, in fact, already hooked up with Agatha and now
was going for her as a nightcap? No, he wouldn’t. But she did wish he were more obviously the aggressor.

As soon as they were out of sight of the deck he should have seized her and kissed her to break the ice instead of just trudging along in her wake.

Only a faint light filtered through the trees from the porch, and as she reached to help him up, her fingers accidentally found the softness of his face. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to poke your eye out,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.” He squeezed her hip as he stood, whether to steady himself or as an overture, she couldn’t tell. “We’ve got a lobster to kill.”

In the garage, she did not turn on the lights but told him to wait and ventured alone into the musty darkness. She set her course by the refrigerator’s hum, moving slowly with her arms stretched out, worrying about spiders and rodents but more about how she would look in the harsh fluorescent overheads: tired, and with smudged mascara and an oily nose. She caught her shin on one of the sawhorses that held the canoe and cried out in surprise. “Did the lobster get you?” Sterling asked.

“Just a canoe.” She made the final blind crossing to the refrigerator and pulled it open, wincing at the sudden light. There was no lobster she could see, only beer and wine and cartons of orange juice and liter bottles of tonic, but then she found the unfortunate crustacean on a bed of seaweed in the salad crisper, its mottled purple claws limp as the gloves of a passed-out boxer. A troop of beer bottles stood in even ranks on the floor, and Livia supposed her mother had taken them out of the drawer to make room.

“Is it dead?” Sterling asked from close behind her.

“I think so.” Grasping the lobster by its thorax, she held it up and studied it. Its claws and antennae dangled. None of its legs so much as twitched. “Yeah,” she said. “Looks like it.”

“Kind of sweet that your mom put that seaweed in there.”

Livia set the lobster on the cement floor and reached in to scoop out the seaweed. “I guess. I don’t know what she wants us to do with him.”

“Bury him?”

“Seems like she might as well have left him in the fridge until morning. I don’t think she wants us to dump him in the trash.”

“How do you know it’s a him?”

“Here.” She held out her handfuls of seaweed to him.

He accepted them. “Hey, thanks.”

Brushing off her hands, she picked up the lobster and turned it over, pointing to the swimmerets on the underside of its tail. “I didn’t. But it is a he. These ones closest to the body would be soft and feathery if it were a girl. Female lobsters are called hens.”

“What are the males called?”

She put the lobster on the floor. “Cocks,” she said. She wondered if he had already known that and was teasing her. She began stacking the displaced beer bottles back in the salad crisper. “This is weird for Mom,” she said. “Usually she’s not so tenderhearted. She’s more practical.”

“People get weird at weddings.”

When the beer was put away, she looked around. “Do you have the lobster?”

“No, I have the seaweed.” He shook the bunches of dark strands like sinister pom-poms.

“Didn’t I put him right here?”

“Maybe he ran away.”

“He was dead. Wasn’t he?”

“Can we turn on some more lights?”

Livia opened the freezer, widening the wedge of light on the floor. One long, whiskery antenna swept across the cement, almost brushing her foot. “There he is,” she said. Grateful the lobster’s claws were still banded, she reached into the darkness and found its cold carapace. When she picked him up, his claws did not droop as they had; there was life in his body. “He’s alive. Wow.”

“It’s the Christ lobster,” said Sterling.

“Now what do we do? After all this, it seems like a shame to kill him, and I don’t just want to leave him.”

Sterling tossed the seaweed into the air like confetti. Bits of it
landed on Livia, cold and slick. “Obviously,” he said, “we have to set him free.”

THEY WALKED DOWN
the driveway and along the bike path beside the road, bound for the nearest salt water, a marshy inlet off the long harbor. Livia had gone inside for a flashlight and had also retrieved a canvas bag monogrammed with her mother’s initials for the lobster to ride in.

“I don’t know if he’ll survive in the marsh,” she said to Sterling, who was carrying the lobster bag. “Crabs do. I don’t actually know very much about lobsters. I know they like rocky places, and they move around quite a bit, in different depths, but I don’t know about this kind of brackish environment. We’d have to drive to the marina for anything better, though, and neither of us is in any shape for that.”

“I could drive,” Sterling said. “You should have said so.”

“Really?” she said, skeptical but not wanting to sound prissy. “Next time.”

“What’s the matter, Jacques? Don’t you trust me?”

“Jacques?”

“Cousteau.”

“Oh.”

“The majesty of
la mer
,” he said in a French accent. “The genius of zee lobster oo pretends to be dead zo as not to be for zee eating. ’E waits in his silent refrigerator tomb, ’oping zat rescue will arrive.”

“Lobsters have really simple brains,” she said.

They walked on, the flashlight bobbling over the asphalt path and the sand and sharp grass at its edges. She should have been playing along, she knew, keeping the flirtation going the way Agatha would have, but she was beginning to sober up and to worry that Sterling was slipping off the hook. If she were with Teddy, she would know what jokes to make, what to say and do. She was always missing Teddy at the wrong times. “I weesh,” she said, putting a lame, semi-Gallic elongation on her vowels, “zat I could be sure ee could survive in zee marsh. I simply do not know.”

Sterling was silent. She wanted to shine the flashlight full in his face to see what he was thinking. “Well,” he said finally, “starving in a marsh beats getting boiled.”

“Does it?”

The few inches of darkness between their shoulders seemed to widen as they walked, spreading into a gulf, and by the time they reached the marsh, he might have been miles away, out to sea even, in a boat she had not been invited aboard. The flashlight, as though powered by the energy between them, began to dim and flicker. “Come on,” Livia said, shaking it. The beam steadied, and she led the way down a side path, through a clump of maples and down to where reeds and cordgrass took over and the soil turned oozy and pulled at her sandals. She stopped where the water began: inert and ominous, punctured by reeds and steamed over with fog. It was no more than a thin black membrane on the silt, but it stretched to become the surface of the harbor and then the skin of the open ocean, touching all the continents. “This is no good,” she said to Sterling. “It’s too shallow and mucky. He’ll just die.” She turned and shone the dying beam down another path. “I think, though, if we go this way, there’s a little beach at the end of the marsh. It’s not too far.”

She expected he would say no, even mock her for wasting so much effort to save a lobster identical to the one making its way through her digestive tract, but he said, “Okay,” and they walked ahead, following the wan, bobbling light. By the time they reached a strip of clear sand, the flashlight was in its death throes, but Livia knew they were in the right place because she could hear the water moving in the harbor and, farther out, rolling waves.

“So,” Sterling said, “we just put him on the beach, and he goes galloping in?”

“I think he’ll have the best chance if we toss him out a ways.”

“Assuming he’s not already dead.” Sterling opened the bag, and as Livia shone the light on what looked to be a dead lobster, the last of the batteries ran out, leaving them in the dark. “I think we knew that was going to happen,” Sterling said.

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s do what we came to do.”

For the second time, Livia’s blind fingers found the lobster’s shell, which was still cold but now dry. She lifted him out of the bag, willing him to give some sign of life. “We have to take the bands off his claws,” she said to Sterling.

“Sure.”

“Can you do it?”

His fingers found her arms and traveled up them to the lobster. She felt him tugging. “If I had never seen a lobster,” he said, “I don’t know what I would make of the thing I’m touching right now.”

“Careful not to pull his arms off.”

“I’m trying.” He grunted. “Okay. Done. He seems dead to me, but he’s tricked us before.”

“Agreed.” She stepped out of her sandals and walked toward the sound of the water until its coldness lapped over her feet and then up to her ankles and knees. The hem of her dress dragged in the water. Under her feet the harbor sand was pebbly and a little slimy. Holding the lobster with both hands, she drew him back to her hip and then flung him out over the water, trying for a long, low toss. A splash in the dark. She felt a tremendous relief, as though she had done a great and necessary good. They were having an adventure, she and Sterling. They were going to great lengths, silly lengths, to treat an animal with dignity, but he hadn’t complained once. And if he had come along this far, he must want her. Striking off into the dark, back toward shore, she felt almost giddy, overflowing with anticipation. But quickly she realized she wasn’t sure she was heading in the right direction. How simple it seemed to get back to dry land—not far—but the darkness under the fog was absolute. She walked a few steps this way, a few steps that way, trying to follow the rise of the sand, but she stepped into a sudden hole and her dress was soaked up to the thighs. She climbed out in the direction she thought was shore, but the water only got deeper. She stopped. “Sterling?” she called. A sensation of precariousness came over her, a feeling that he was gone, that land itself was gone, and she was wandering along the edge of a great depth.

“I’m here.”

His voice was farther away than she had expected and muffled by the fog, which was settling in droplets on her hair and eyelashes. She hugged herself, chilled. The water around Waskeke was always cold, even in summer. “Keep talking so I can follow your voice,” she said.

A silence, and then he began to sing her name. “Livia,” he sang. “Livia, Livia, Livia.” His voice was pleasant, baritone, not reedy like Greyson’s but gruff and sly.

She moved toward him, and the water receded to her knees and then her ankles. He stopped singing. She stopped moving. “Don’t stop,” she said.

A tiny light appeared, like a distant lighthouse, diffusing through the fog in a soft, pale sphere and then fading to something smaller, like a firefly. He had lit a cigarette. She was close enough that she could smell the tobacco and hear him take a drag. The firefly floated in a little curlicue, enticing her. Or maybe it was not a firefly but the bioluminous lure of an anglerfish, lighting the way to a set of nasty jaws. Maybe she had stumbled out of an ordinary night and into a benthic underworld. “Livia,” he sang again. “Livia, Livia.”

WINN SAT
in the driveway behind the wheel of the Land Rover. He had needed a place to hide, somewhere smaller and safer than the outdoors but not in the house, which had been such a welcome sight when he arrived but now loomed like an enemy fortress. The window of his bedroom was still lit. Biddy must be reading. That warm yellow room seemed so far away, the bed with its white sheets, the wooden whale spouting on the wall, his wife propped up on her elbow, her face shiny with nighttime lotions. A while before, he had seen Livia and Sterling go walking down the driveway, her with a flashlight and him with a canvas bag. Ordinarily, he would have accosted them, asking what was in the canvas bag and where they were going and why (although the why was obvious enough), but tonight he lacked the heart and, after the laundry room, the authority. So he sat, alone
in the car, trying to think of nothing. He wished for his father. If he could have been anywhere in space and time, he would have been sitting across from his father in the lounge of the Vespasian Club, reading the newspaper and not speaking.

After Winn’s wedding, his mother refused to venture outside the white stone house ever again, preferring to live out her days sequestered on the top floor. When he came to Boston for Ophidian dinners or business meetings, he had sometimes detoured past the house at night and stood on the sidewalk or peered out from the back of a taxi, looking up at the lit window of his mother’s room atop the dark mass of the sleeping house, an eerie beacon of unseen life. His mother did not once leave in the two years she lingered, and he saw her only three times: twice when she summoned him to what she imagined was her deathbed and then the last time when, after a sickly lifetime of false alarms, she died. Her room, even at the end, was perfectly tidy, kept in order by her Ukrainian nurse. When he thought of his mother, he always imagined her surrounded by hypochondriac squalor: jars of foul-smelling tinctures, balled tissues, rows of potion bottles, trays of mold-covered food. But those three times he went to bid her farewell, she was sitting upright in a bed of worn but fresh-smelling blankets in a clean room, her withered hands folded neatly on a crisp strip of turned-down sheet.