Seating Arrangements (37 page)

She was pretty, after all his cruelty. Was she prettier than Biddy? He couldn’t decide. A memory came to him of her as a young woman: she was sitting in a chair beside the window in her Beacon Hill apartment, her ankles propped up on the sill, rooftops and green leaves outside. She wore a white cotton robe patterned with yellow dragonflies; it was barely closed; he could see the flatness of her sternum, the curve of her breast, her pale thigh. She turned to look at him: green eyes, their slight protuberance suddenly without importance. He had been so silly. She had been good to him; she
was
good. She cut her daughter’s food without complaint. He had lectured Sterling on being a gentleman, and yet he himself was someone who would not be welcome at the Pequod, not now and not ever.

Maude followed Francis to give a toast, the words “lovely” and “wonderful” punctuating her sentences like cymbal crashes, and he noticed that his leg was feeling better, perhaps thanks to the booze or to Sam Snead’s pill. He took a bite of crème brûlée. The burnt sugar ground loudly in his ears. Livia offered something short, witty, and heartfelt, putting on a good show of sororal happiness. Dicky Sr. told a story about Oliver Wendell Holmes. Piper wove an endless, tipsy yarn about Daphne’s adolescent exploits, ex-boyfriends, clandestine dorm sneakings, and covert drinking until Dominique reached out a long arm and pulled her back down into her chair. Then Dominique stood, her orange dress catching the candlelight. “Daphne and Greyson,” she said, “a bouquet of clichés for you. May you be healthy, wealthy, and wise. May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back, and may you always have a guest room open for me.” She sat down.

“Hear, hear!” called Dryden from the other table.

Dicky Jr. tapped his coffee cup with a spoon and, explaining that he was a newlywed himself, shared a few tired lines about the wife always being right. Mrs. Dicky sat stony faced beside him, her fingers drumming the tablecloth, staying limber for her BlackBerry. Next would be Winn’s turn. Biddy hated making toasts. One of the longstanding amendments to the constitution of their marriage was that, when a toast needed to be made, Winn would be the one to make it. Usually he enjoyed toasting. He liked the courtliness, the requisite self-possession, the public display of wit and graciousness. Standing over a room of people at the end of a feast, he felt like a real patriarch. But now he was drunk and stoned and had not thought about what he was going to say. Still, when Dicky Jr. had at last subsided back down into his seat, he clinked his glass a few times and, pushing so hard on the table that he dragged the tablecloth and all the dishes and glasses a few inches toward himself, got to his feet.

“Well,” he said. The upturned faces waited. He looked down at the cracked shell of his crème brûlée and searched for something to say. Nothing came. He cleared his throat. “Well.”

He sat back down. And then he was up again at once, not because
he had thought of something to say but because during his descent he had seen a look of hurt bewilderment come over Daphne’s face. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “Francis isn’t the only one who had a misadventure today. I’m a little woozy. I feel … a little foggy. But … I wanted to say … I wanted to say .… congratulations to Daphne and Greyson. What a fine match this is. I couldn’t be more pleased that these two fine young people have found each other. I don’t claim to be an authority on love, but I’ve been married for almost thirty years, almost half my life.” He paused. He thought someone might applaud, but no one did. “And I will say to Daphne and Greyson that marriage is difficult, perhaps the most difficult thing you can ever do, besides being a parent, which you’re also about to learn something about, but I think these two fine young people are up to the challenge. Here are two steady, responsible people who, I believe, understand the dire commitment they are about to make and will choose to keep that commitment. Because it turns out to be a choice, commitment—not some done deal. When you leave the altar tomorrow, there will still be a lifetime of choice and temptation and doubt and uncertainty in front of you. I didn’t know that at my wedding. Getting married doesn’t change you. Marriage changes you, though. Imperceptibly. Over time. You don’t notice the change until you are changed. I don’t know who that person is, back there. I mean the person I was before I got married. I thought I’ve stayed the same all along, but I’m beginning to think I’ve turned into someone else. Or maybe just everything around me has changed.

“That’s neither here nor there. What I want, all I want, is for my daughter to be happy, and I think happiness comes from realistic expectations. It seems to me that what people want from romantic love is perfect understanding and infinite forgiveness. But if you want that, you should probably ask God for it. That’s what people used to do, isn’t it? I guess some people still do. People place demands on their husbands or wives that no human can meet. We’re not divine. We’re human. In my experience, we should be grateful for constancy and continuity and companionship. Let’s call them the three C’s—you heard it here first. Because we are the kind of people who get married.
What else is there to do? You can’t date forever. We don’t want to be alone. We marry, and we live out our lives. Then … well, marriage, even a happy marriage like my own and like I’m sure yours will be, Daphne, is a precursor to death. If you never leave your partner and you’re faithful, marriage has the same kind of finality. There is nothing else.”

He sat, took up his spoon, and tapped at his crème brûlée, breaking what was left of the sugar into brown shards. The result was gritty and creamy in his mouth, sweet with a faint, burnt acridness. The room seemed very quiet and, beside him, Biddy was very still, but he did not look up until he heard the chiming of a glass.

“Well,” said Greyson, standing, “thank you, Winn. For those of you who haven’t heard, Winn was knocked off his bicycle today and sustained some injuries for which I think he’s probably been given some painkillers. Hopefully he has enough to share with us all. Getting back on track, Daphne and I wanted to thank you all for making the trip out to the island and for being here tonight. We’re very excited about our marriage, which, incidentally, we hope will be nothing like death, and about the new baby.” He paused. Daphne was staring at her lap. Greyson rested his hand on the back of her neck, and she looked up at him. He raised his eyebrows, and she gave a timorous nod. “We were planning to wait and surprise you all,” he said, “but we decided this afternoon that we wanted you to know the baby is a girl.”

A pleased murmur raced along the tables, and then Dicky Sr. burst into applause, standing and clapping and grinning, thrilled to have a change from all those boys. Cheers and whoops rose from the relatives and bridesmaids. Daphne was beaming again and twisting in her chair to take in all her well-wishers, offering each one the chance to bask with her in the beautiful idea of a baby girl. Winn half rose from his seat, wanting to kiss her, to touch her hand, but as her eyes passed over him, he felt her anger push him away, exiling him from her joy.

Sixteen · A Weather Vane

A
s Winn drove, hunched forward and staring with bleary intensity through the windshield, the road tilted from side to side. For a tantalizing moment it balanced on the level before pitching over in the other direction as though trying to tip him off the earth. The world was alive and unstable. The upraised branches of the trees waved like drowning arms; orange tails of mist swept down through the streetlamps and up into the low maroon sky; a cacophony of wind chimes jangled from porches and balconies. Beside him, Agatha rode in silence. The dinner was only fifteen minutes behind them, but Winn pushed at it, trying to drive it farther into the anesthetized ward of his memory. He had told everyone he was taking her to get her finger X-rayed, and when first Dominique and then Greyson pointed out that he might not be in tip-top driving condition, he had blustered and reassured and argued that he should be the one to take her because he wanted someone to check on his leg and it didn’t make sense for a whole crowd of them to go back to the hospital. To prove his point, he had hoisted up his trouser leg and again displayed the dark blossom of blood seeping through the bandage. Wordlessly, Biddy had handed him the keys.

Of course, he thought as they escaped from the shingled labyrinth of town onto longer, darker roads, of course Daphne’s baby was a girl. Of course, of course. What else could it be? He would have a granddaughter named Duff. Hearing his name and hers said together, no one would be able to tell they had anything to do with each other.
She was the green shoot, the furled purple rocket of a crocus, and he was one of the withered leaves she would have to fight her way past.

“I don’t think we’re really going to the hospital,” Agatha said, looking out the window.

“No.”

“Very naughty.” She shifted, crossing her legs. The hem of her dress rode up, and he dared to put one shaky hand on her warm thigh. “That was some toast,” she said. “I thought Maude Duff was going to drop dead. Did you see her face?”

“No.” While he was talking, he had focused on odd, arbitrary things: the edges of the table irises that were beginning to bruise and furl, the round spot on Dicky Jr.’s head where his scalp gleamed like a worn patch on the elbow of an old coat, the chipped edge of a coffee cup. Mostly he had stared at the black panes of the windows as they pulsed in the wind, seeming to bow inward into the room.

“Maybe if you had said that marriage was like death but was also
lovely
and
wonderful
, she wouldn’t have minded so much. I’m with you, though. I’m never getting married. It’s a crock.”

She uncrossed her legs, parting them. Uncertainly, he inched his hand up until it brushed the edge of her dress. “In the bar,” he ventured, “when you said you were only kidding, what did you mean?”

“I thought I should give us both an out.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not some kind of predator,” she said. “I’m not a home wrecker.”

But she was. She had to be, or else why was he doing this? She had brought them here; she had made an offer he couldn’t refuse, no man could. Sterling must think he was either the biggest hypocrite who had ever lived or else a lunatic. Winn wasn’t sure which he preferred, but he was with Agatha now and Sterling wasn’t.

“Anyway,” Agatha said, “I really get what you were saying, about marriage being like death. That’s probably why you’re here with me. What else could be so fucking boring, you know? The same person, the same conversations with that person, the same conversations
about
that person. The same body. No, not for me. Not ever.”

“Is that what I said?” he asked. He couldn’t quite remember. He
had meant more that he could not have remained single, that there was a cultural imperative for him to marry. Indeed, he had wanted to become A Husband and Father, but he had never felt the raptures that were supposed to come to husbands and fathers, nor did he feel any less alone than before he married. But what else could he have done? Remaining a bachelor forever would have been unseemly, and he had no evidence that a solitary life would have been more satisfying than what he had. Still, he felt, beyond the edges of his life, the presence of some unidentifiable dark matter, some fate or path he had not seen, still could not see, but that would have led him somewhere better.

No lights marked the driveway to Jack Fenn’s house, and Winn passed the gap in the hedges and had to stop and reverse, the shell driveway blazing up under the headlights. Billows of aubergine sky hid the peaks and gables of the roof. Brazenly, he parked as near as he could to the front door. When he turned off the car, the night became very dark.

“Whose house is this?” Agatha asked.

“It belongs to a friend of mine.”

“Are we going inside?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we stay in here? In the back? Or we could find somewhere at your house?”

“Where? The garage?”

She didn’t reply. Decisively, he patted her knee and then opened the glove compartment to retrieve the flashlight he kept there. Leaving the keys in the Land Rover’s ignition, he got out and walked around to open Agatha’s door. A clanking came from the flagpole, toggles on the rope rapping against the metal. Agatha took his hand and stepped down onto the shells.

The front door was locked, but a nearby window slid easily upward. “After you,” he said, aiming the flashlight through the void.

“If you say so.” She grasped the sill and thrust one leg into the house, bending to follow it, disappearing inside with a flash of lavender underthings and the scuffed underside of a high heel.

•    •    •

LIVIA SAT ALONE
outside on the deck, in the same chair she had occupied during cocktail hour, gripping the arms so hard that pain radiated up her wrists. Wind whistled around her, working her hair loose from its braids. Squeezing something felt good, felt right, just like it had when she had decided to squeeze Agatha’s finger. If she could have the day back, probably she would not choose to break it again, but the sensation of another person’s skeleton cracking under her grip had been darkly electrifying. The bone had broken so easily, almost as easily as a turkey wishbone, except Agatha kept both halves: the good luck and the bad luck, the wish and the dud.

Her father had not understood—how could he? Crimes of passion could not possibly make sense to him. He lived in a baffled, stilted world; he had said so himself in that toast, in front of everyone. He had known only to be angry with her for disrupting the day, and she found she pitied him for his limitations. As a young child, while out on a sailboat belonging to family friends, she had glimpsed the curving gray flash of a dorsal fin. “A dolphin!” she had cried, pinching her nose closed with two fingers before leaping overboard. In the years since, she had come to doubt that she had actually managed to touch the animal, but at the time she would have sworn she felt its rubbery flank slip by beneath her reaching fingers. That was why she had not heard the splash of her father diving into the water after her: she was too busy yelling, “I touched it! I touched it!” through mouthfuls of seawater. Even when he had one arm around her and was holding her against his chest and the small, hard buttons of his shirt, she kept trumpeting her jubilation. “I touched it! I touched it!”