Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (20 page)

Luke felt like anything but. He thanked her anyway.

Peggy couldn’t have imagined she’d see the day when Brooklyn would become a destination for people who lived in Manhattan.
But when the taxi dropped her off for her date with Jeremy at the corner of Bedford Avenue and North Sixth Street, under an
orange flag that spelled “twig” in lowercase fuchsia letters, Peggy realized her simple black dress was as wrong here as it
had been in New Nineveh, if for entirely different reasons. Williamsburg was teeming with thrift store girls in brocade coats
and lace-up boots and scruffy boys with artfully disarranged Guatemalan knit hats. Peggy decided she hated trying to keep
up with trends. She probably always had.

She hung back on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, took out her vial of emergency Ativan, shook a tiny white house-shaped
pill into her cold palm, and swallowed it without water.

Jeremy was waiting at the bar, absorbed with his electronic gadget. Next to him a group was singing “For She’s a Jolly Good
Fellow” to a tattooed woman in a “You Say Dyke Like It’s a Bad Thing” T-shirt.

“I hope you weren’t waiting long,” Peggy apologized to her date. She could only imagine how Luke—Luke again; why did she insist
on thinking about him?—would react to her being six minutes late, stranding him next to a raucous hipster birthday party.

“Not a problem.” Jeremy rose and kissed Peggy European style on each cheek. “We’re here now,” he told the hostess, who tossed
her blond, waist-length dreadlocks and walked them to their table. Peggy clandestinely wiped her cheeks with the backs of
her hands. She supposed this was one good thing about being a repressed Yankee: Luke wouldn’t subject anyone to an overly
familiar Euro-kiss.

With a jolt, she realized he must have kissed her. She tried to recall how his lips had felt on hers. Was he a good kisser?
Did the Yankee restraint hide a passionate heart? The partial poem on his desk had made it seem that way.
Staid genes worked hot from your electric charms.
He might be with his girlfriend right now. She pushed the unwelcome thought from her mind as Jeremy pulled out her chair.

It was Luke’s turn to host poker night. At seven o’clock on Wednesday, half an hour before the rest of the players arrived,
he ushered Ver Planck into the gentlemen’s parlor. Ver Planck produced two comically oversize cigars. He clipped off the end
of the first one with a gold Dunhill cutter and offered it to Luke. “Montecristo A. Best smoke money can buy.”

“What’s the occasion?” Luke accepted the cigar.

“No occasion. Just a taste of what you could enjoy if you’d reconsider this Budget Club idea.”

Luke took a puff. “You talk like there’s something in it for you.”

“Only the glory of your success,” Ver Planck said. “You could stand to be more aggressive with your assets, Sedgwick, and
this is perfect for you. You’d just be leasing the land, not selling it.”

“Maybe so.” Unlike with the Sedgwick House, there was nothing saying he couldn’t lease the Sedgwick land. “But Abigail would
still have my head.”

The air in the room was blue by the time Kyle Hubbard, Topher Eaton, and Bunny Simmons arrived. Hubbard breathed in deeply,
exhaled with a theatrical “Aaaaaaaah,” and tossed his coat across the back of the couch. “Miss the wife during the work week,
Sedgwick?” Hubbard laughed. “You’ve got the right idea, friend, with this weekend-only deal. A man would kill for that kind
of setup. Too bad it can’t last. She’s planning to move up here, yes?”

“Eventually.”

Luke was a burgeoning expert at lies and dodges. Yesterday, Ernestine Riga had asked him when he and Peggy were going to have
children, and he’d deftly changed the subject to the New Nineveh Home Tour. Ernestine had forgotten her question entirely
and launched into an exhaustive account of the repairs and upgrades she and her husband were doing to prepare the former Sedgwick
carriage house for its social debut. What a paradox, Luke had thought: The better-preserved Sedgwick house was the one that
no longer belonged to the Sedgwicks.

“Enjoy your freedom while you can,” Hubbard said. “Speaking of Peggy, Liddy and I want you two to come to the Game with us.
We’ll tailgate, the whole thing. Topher and Carrie are coming, too.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Luke said.

“Loosen up, Sedgwick. Besides, we all want to get to know the little lady.” Hubbard headed toward the Scotch and called across
the room, “I trust you brought Cubans for the whole class, Planky?”

The specials at twig were written in chalk on a monstrous blackboard on the back wall. Jeremy had to turn in his chair to
read it, and while he did so, Peggy scrutinized the back of his neck. How quickly her dating days were coming back to her,
when she and Bex had used the neck-nails-shoes system to rate men. Jeremy had earned a point for his nails already: They were
neither bitten nor dirty nor manicured. His shoes were marginal: They weren’t run down at the heels, but they were motorcycle
boots—pretentious, Peggy thought, unless you were actually riding a motorcycle. Half a point. That left his neck: Was it properly
groomed or slovenly and unshaven? She leaned over the table to get a look.

Jeremy turned back around. “The ostrich carpaccio looks good.” Peggy jumped back, toppling the table votive with her sleeve.
The candle singed the tablecloth before Jeremy smothered it with his salad plate and grinned. “No girl has burned down a restaurant
to get out of dinner with me before.” He flipped over his digital gadget, glanced at it, and flipped it back facedown.

Peggy subtracted one point for the gadget, two for living in a neighborhood too trendy for its own good, and another for the
ostrich carpaccio, which sounded just plain nasty, but she gave him two for self-deprecating humor and decided she’d been
on first dates far worse than this. She and Jeremy had an uncanny number of things in common. He was an entrepreneur as well,
with his own business setting up computer networks for small companies. He had moved to New York the year after she had. When
she asked where he’d grown up, he said, “Sunnyvale, California. It’s near—”

“San Jose.” Maybe it was the pill she’d taken, but she could feel herself unwinding, her edges blending into the scene around
her. “I lived there a couple of years.”

They learned they’d graduated from rival high schools, that Peggy had taken ballet lessons half a mile from Jeremy’s house.
“Do your parents still live there?” she asked once the six-foot-tall, shaved-bald waitress had set down their appetizers.

“They liquidated everything and moved to Costa Rica.” Jeremy grimaced. “I know what you’re thinking. Normal people wouldn’t
do anything that nuts.”

“My parents’ retirement nest egg is an RV with a bumper sticker that says, ‘Driver Carries No Cash—He’s Married!’ ” Peggy
took a bite of her salad. It was a shame she’d ordered so timidly. After weeks of high WASP cuisine, she should be up for
something adventurous. “I think they should have gone with the one that said, ‘Driver Carries No Cash—He Blew It All on This
RV!’ ”

“I swear, we’re the same person.” Jeremy tucked into his carpaccio. At least he wasn’t eating a frozen potpie and canned peas.
Peggy decided to reinstate his food points.

When dinner was over, Jeremy walked her to the corner and told her he’d like to see her again. He moved in closer. She stayed
still, trying to decide whether to lean forward an inch so he’d kiss her or back an inch so he’d shake her hand.

A car roared past on the street behind her. She could hear snippets of conversation on the sidewalk: a woman summarizing a
column in the day’s
Times,
two teenagers giddily debating whether to go to this party or that movie.

She leaned forward.

It was a fine kiss. Decent softness with respectable pressure—enough to show he was interested, but not intrusive. It was
good to be kissed after so long, and her body began to respond even if her heart remained stubbornly detached, her arms wrapping
around his neck—shaven, it turned out.

When the kiss had run its course, Jeremy asked, “What are you doing this weekend?”

She felt dazed. Why wasn’t she melting with desire?

“My friend’s band is playing Saturday. Want to go?”

“Okay,” she heard herself agree, then remembered. She couldn’t go anywhere this weekend, next weekend, or any weekend for
another ten months and—fourteen now—days. “I forgot. I can’t. I’m—” She bit off the rest of the sentence. How could she explain?

“How about…” He removed the gadget from his belt, touched the screen, and studied it. “Next Tuesday?”

“Okay.” Was it okay? She guessed so. She and Jeremy had so much in common. She hailed a taxi and let Jeremy kiss her on the
cheek before she stepped alone into the car and felt her edges merge into the cracked vinyl seat.

B
ex felt funny.

“Funny how?” Peggy asked.

“Different. I can’t explain. It might mean…you know.” Even over her cell phone, with its usual bad New Nineveh connection
made more crackly today by a November wind howling outside, Peggy could hear the emotion trembling in her friend’s voice.

She slipped her old, holey NYU sweatshirt over her head. “That you’re…?” She didn’t want to say it, either. She didn’t want
to jinx it.

There was a knock on Peggy’s door. “Ready?”

“In a minute.” Peggy pulled the sweatshirt the rest of the way on. “That was Luke,” she told Bex.

“Where are you crazy kids going?”

“To clean fungus in the basement. It’s a nonstop party around here.” Peggy paused. “You’ll keep me posted, right?”

“You’d better believe it,” Bex said.

Peggy had only a passing familiarity with the basement. She’d taken a peek at it during the exploratory phase of her first
weekends at the house. But it was even darker and spookier than the rest of the place, and as a rule, Peggy considered a basement
to be like a spleen: You knew it was in there, you knew it served an important function, but you had no desire to see it.
“In California, they don’t have basements,” she told Luke. In one rubber-gloved hand she carried a plastic bucket that had
long ago held five gallons of interior house paint. With the other, she clutched the rickety banister and followed Luke down
a cramped, plunging pine staircase on which she could imagine breaking her neck. “They build houses on concrete slabs, right
on top of the dirt.”

“No basements?” Luke, who carried a broom, a shovel, and a flashlight, reached up over his head to pull a lightbulb chain
Peggy hadn’t known was there. “Then where do Californians store their radon gas and toxic mold?”

They went deeper into the basement, past the finished section with painted walls and a cracked cement floor. Here, the walls
were stone and draped with spiderwebs, and the floor was packed dirt, and the damp, stale odor she’d smelled faintly in the
house enveloped her. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand. “Maybe we should save this for another day. We could get
a couple of those surgical masks.”
Better yet, gas masks
.

The basement ceiling was the underside of the floor above: broad boards supported by rough beams. It was low, and Luke walked
a little hunched over. “Relax.” He skirted a lumpy shape Peggy identified as a hideous, harvest gold upholstered side chair
of the same era as the furniture in the upstairs bedroom Luke had led her to on her first day. Behind it was a dingy antechamber
filled with what appeared to be row upon row of folding chairs. “It’s not toxic mold. It’s just basement smell. I’ve been
in and out of here all my life, and I’m fine.” He led her past a pile of stacked wood Peggy assumed was for the no-longer-used
fireplaces.

“What are we doing back here? I thought we were starting in the laundry room,” she said.

Luke was standing next to the strangest door Peggy had ever seen. It was made from vertical boards of unfinished wood, with
hammered, triangle-ended black metal hinges extending across horizontally to hold the wood together at the top and bottom.
It was like the door of a medieval castle. Luke reached up for another invisible chain above his head, but no light came on.
“Guess the bulb’s burned out.” He flipped on the flashlight.

She set down her bucket. “What’s this, the Silas Sedgwick memorial dungeon?”

Luke held the light under his chin, casting his face in ghoulish shadow. “You guessed it. We throw all the Sedgwick wives
in here once we’re through with them.”

“That’s not funny!”

“Peggy, you could really learn to be less nervous.”

“I’m not nervous. That just wasn’t funny.”

Luke grinned. “Well, this isn’t a dungeon; it’s the wine cellar. I need to go in for a minute. Want to come?”

Peggy most definitely did not. The only thing she wanted to do less was wait out here alone in the dark. “Sure.”

He disengaged the black metal latch and waved one hand in an “after you” gesture. Inside, he turned on another overhead lightbulb.

Peggy had expected a dusty trove of bottles, but the room was empty, with its gray black stone walls and rows of vacant wine
cubbies. She went to inspect a decaying, iron-banded oak barrel at the far end of the room. “Where did all the wine go?”

“I’m pretty sure into my dear uncle Bink’s liver, may he rest in peace.” Luke had to duck to keep his head from hitting the
ceiling. “But come over here.” He knelt in front of one wall and removed a stone, revealing a small, irregular opening. Inside
was a black bottle encrusted with grime.

“It’s 1934 vintage port. The last of the Sedgwick supply. Somewhere along the line, one of my relatives stashed a bottle in
this hiding place. I like to think Abby did it to keep it away from Bink. I wouldn’t put it past her. In any case, Hubbard,
Eaton, and I stumbled across it one summer when we were kids. I’ve been saving it ever since.”

“Saving it for what?”

“The right time.” He reached out and grasped the bottle in his long fingers. There was a scrape of glass against granite as
he slowly took it from its place in the wall. “Would you hold this, horizontally, please? Careful, the cork is shot.”