Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (9 page)

“Suit yourself,” said Miss Abigail.

Forcing herself to walk, not run, Peggy wound her way through the house and back out into the bright afternoon.
Get in that car,
a part of her whispered. In two hours she could be in the city, having dinner with Bex and Josh and laughing about her five
minutes of impetuousness. She unlocked the Pontiac and slipped into the driver’s seat, fumbling for the ignition.

“Going so soon?”

She jumped, a nascent scream dying in her throat. Luke Sedgwick had caught the edge of the car door in one hand. A battered
Volvo sedan she assumed was his stood in the gravel driveway in front of her rental.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Peggy lied. “I was about to pop the trunk.” She reached down, intending to open the trunk dramatically
as she said “pop,” but she had to grope around. Her fingertips came into contact with a latch. She pulled up on it. The trunk
stayed shut, but the car’s hood rose.

Curved lines bracketed Luke’s mouth, as if he were about to laugh at her.

“Could you close the hood?” Peggy would have liked to tell him to wipe that smirk off his face, but the most important thing
was for the two of them to get along. It would be a long year otherwise.

Luke let go of the car door and deftly shut the hood, and Peggy located the correct latch and disengaged the trunk. She had
been prepared to carry her own luggage, but Luke lifted out her suitcase and set it at the top of the driveway. Peggy brought
over two totes, a shopping bag, a gift basket for Miss Abigail of bath products from the store—tea rose, always a crowd-pleaser—and
a pillow.

Luke looked at her strangely. “We have linens.”

She decided not to try to explain her strange-bed phobia and followed him as he loped back toward the house with her suitcase.

At the front door, she paused. “Aren’t you supposed to carry me over the threshold?” She laughed at her own joke, but Luke
looked stricken, as if she’d just suggested they swing naked from the Sedgwick maple. She turned away so he wouldn’t see her
embarrassment, took a breath, and went in alone.

L
uke returned to his study, on edge. Yesterday had been a terrible day in the market. The Dow had fallen by five percent, which
was bad enough, but he had managed to do even worse, losing seven percent from the already dismal Sedgwick family portfolio.
At this rate, its most valuable asset would soon be the worthless few acres the family still owned out on the highway. In
just the past two weeks, with his time and energy taken up by this marriage business, Luke had lost his focus completely.
On top of it all, he had poetry running through his head. Phrases, lines, whole stanzas—as if a rusty tap had been reopened
and water was flowing crazily every which way. All he wanted to do was sit quietly and write it all down.

“An aphrodisiac that vanishes,” he whispered. “An aphrodisiac that fades away. An aphrodisiac that disappears.”

Somebody coughed.

The sound startled him only slightly; in the back of his mind, he’d made note of footsteps clacking down the hall. He scrawled
the aphrodisiac lines on the back of an envelope.

Peggy stood in the doorway. “I thought we should talk.”

A talk already? Eight minutes into their marriage of convenience? “Have a seat.” Luke sounded more genial than he felt.

“There’s nowhere to sit.”

She was right. The space was a cavernous rectangle—Luke liked to annoy his great-aunt by threatening to convert it into a
squash court—running the whole front length of the house, with a high, vaulted ceiling that followed the sloping roofline.
It was empty except for his desk and chair and a massive old mirror leaning against a wall. He rose and offered his seat to
her, but she declined. That meant he’d have to remain on his feet, because it would be impolite to sit back down. The two
stood awkwardly next to the desk.

She looked around. “What is this room for, anyway?”

“It used to be the ballroom. That’s the half-moon window you see from the street, over the big Palladian window on the second
floor. I come here to work.” He waited for Peggy to get the hint. Another line came to him:
Delusional, like permanence, or wealth.
And another:
A shimmering, as if love were a ghost.
He wrote both down.

“I want a room upgrade.”

He put down his pen and laughed.

“Why is that funny?” She folded her arms across her chest.

He folded his arms over his chest, mimicking her stance. “I’m not running an inn.”

“You gave me the worst room on the whole floor, with a twin bed and old seventies furniture. I counted three empty bedrooms
on my way here. They all have queen-size beds and chandeliers and fireplaces.”

“How do you know?”

“I opened the doors and looked.”

He switched on his desk lamp. As a child, she would have been one of those thin-skinned, bookish girls who were almost too
easy to tease, and certainly not the sturdy, suntanned field hockey player, of the sort he’d never been attracted to, with
whom his parents and great-aunt had always expected he’d settle down nevertheless.

But Peggy’s uneasy mix of shyness and aggression was interesting, in an anthropological sense. He studied her. “I know you’re
not an Adams, but you’re not even a Yankee, are you?”

“Sure I am. I was born and raised in California.”

He laughed again. “That doesn’t count.”

“If you’re not from the South, aren’t you a Yankee?”

“Only to people in the South,” he said.

She looked out the crescent window at the waning afternoon. “Well, I’m a New Yorker now, and no self-respecting New Yorker
would settle for that room.” She faced him. “Like it or not, I’m not a guest. I’ll be living here weekends until our year
is up.” By the terms of Miss Abigail’s offer that would be next September, the day of their wedding anniversary. “And I’m
your business partner with a legal interest in this house.”

As if it had been waiting, the sheet of plaster that had been threatening for weeks to fall from the ceiling dropped resignedly
into one corner.

“Um…,” Peggy faltered. “We also need to talk about your great-aunt’s party next weekend—how we’re going to behave as a, you
know, couple.” She was blushing again. “Like, what we’ll do if people start tapping on their glasses. You know how people
do that at wedding receptions? So the couple will”—she hesitated—“kiss?”

A reception. Just what he needed. Abigail hadn’t mentioned a thing about it. Two hours of cocktails and small talk and pretending
to be married. It would take a Shakespearean actor to pull it off, and Luke was no actor. He supposed Peggy was enjoying this,
that she was yet another of those women, like Nicki, who thrived on drama. “There will be no glass tapping, I assure you.
Lesson one about Yankees: We don’t like public displays of affection.”

“What a relief,” Peggy said.

Luke thought of their wedding chapel photo, recalled suddenly the dress she’d worn—conservative in front, daringly low in
the back. She’d knocked the breath out of him, he remembered now, this demure blonde with a smoldering sensuality lacking
in any Yankee girl he’d ever met, but not overtly sexual, like Nicki. Sugar and spice. Naughty and nice. Intriguing. “Do you
want
people to tap their glasses?” He had to admit, the thought of kissing her wasn’t at all offputting.

“No! Absolutely not!” She crossed her arms over her chest again and glared at him.

“All right, then.” His unsavory thoughts vanished as quickly as they’d arrived. “Is there anything else?”

“I want a new room.”

He was desperate to get back to his three lines of poetry. There were still a few minutes left to work on them before dinner.
Abby liked to eat promptly at five-thirty, and he knew she was preparing something celebratory. He thought about explaining
that he’d given Peggy the best room available, the one with the working heat and no evidence of mice. He’d spent the past
three days cleaning it. He’d aired the mattress outside and rolled back the rug to mop underneath.

“Pick any room you like,” he said.

Climbing the stairs that evening, Peggy couldn’t decide whether she’d done well at dinner or not. Miss Abigail had been welcoming,
regaling her with tales of the Sedgwick family history and of Luke’s exploits as a teenager. But at one point, she’d set down
her fork and beamed at Peggy. “I was fond of your grandmother Tippy, dear.”

“Tippy?” Peggy had asked, swallowing, with relief, the last bite of a bland, leaden biscuit.

Luke said, “Tippy
Adams,
your grandmother.”

Luckily, at least from a conversational perspective, Miss Abigail had just decided they needed more biscuits. When she’d left
the room, Luke muttered, “Play along. She really believes you’re a descendant of an old Connecticut family.”

“But I’m not,” Peggy protested. “My dad’s family came over from Russia. They were named Adams at Ellis Island. I don’t want
to lie to her.”

“What does it matter? It makes her happy. For all we know, there never was a Tippy Adams, and Abby’s imagining the whole thing.
Besides, we’re already stretching the truth to the breaking point.”

“Then I don’t want to stretch it any more than we have to.”

Miss Abigail returned with a refilled basket of biscuits. “Now, Peggy, tell me,” she said. “How did you and my great-nephew
meet?”

Peggy’s mind went blank. In their negotiations over the past two weeks, Luke had provided her with the fictional outline of
their phony romance, but just then, at the dinner table, she was unable to dredge up a single detail, except that she and
Luke had supposedly dated for only a month before getting married. Peggy accepted another biscuit to buy time, and racked
her brain for the gist of the story.

“Oh! Through our mutual friend, Thayer Whittaker!” she exclaimed at last, like a quiz show contestant. Luke looked up at the
ceiling, as if praying for patience.

“Isn’t that nice,” Miss Abigail said, then wrinkled her forehead. “Remind me, please, dear. Who is Thayer Whittaker?”

Peggy was certain of this one. “He was a classmate of Luke’s at Harvard.”

“Yale,” Luke said quietly. “She of course means Yale.”

“I’m not sure I’ve met Thayer.” Miss Abigail buttered a piece of biscuit. “Have I?”

“I don’t think so,” Peggy said. She knew for a fact that there was no such person.

The meal was a grayish roast with boiled potatoes and mushy green beans. Miss Abigail hadn’t turned on the overhead light
but had set a single candle on the long dining room table, and Peggy had used the near darkness to her advantage, shuttling
the food back and forth across her plate instead of eating it. It had been too early for dinner anyway; she hadn’t had much
of an appetite. Now it was eight o’clock, and Peggy’s stomach was growling. A small triumph—she had packed an energy bar in
one of her tote bags.

She had chosen a new room a few doors up from her old one, with light blue floral wallpaper that, though peeling at the corners,
was attractive and feminine. She ran her hand along the wall until she located the light switch, saw Luke had left linens
on top of the bare bureau, and turned to the making of the bed. The mattress had no cover, and Peggy shuddered a little as
she lifted it to tuck the sheet under a corner. When she dropped the mattress back down, it exhaled a cloud of dust.

She coughed and made the bed quickly, glad she’d thought to bring her own pillow. At last, she spread out the comforter. It
was a hideous masculine plaid that didn’t go with the room, but, Peggy thought, at least she’d busted out of her jail cell.
Bex would be proud.

Something wasn’t right.

Peggy awoke in pitch darkness, straining her ears for the noise. She heard nothing. She’d been dreaming. Sleep tugged at her,
and she closed her eyes again.

There it was—a faint, sibilant whisper. A ghost, gossiping. A thing in her room.

She ought to flip on the light, to surprise it in its tracks, but doing so would mean getting up and putting her feet on the
floor, where the Thing could grab her ankles and drag her under the bed.
Don’t be an idiot. Get up and turn on the light.
She poked a foot out from under the covers.

Wait—was that it again?

Peggy jerked her foot back, her useless eyes stretched wide. It could be a burglar. Who knew if Luke bothered to lock the
front door. On the way in with her luggage, when she’d relocked the car, he’d looked at her and said, just as his great-aunt
had, “This isn’t New York City.”

The room was freezing. If the light were on, she’d probably be able to see her breath—quick, shallow gulps she was trying
hard to silence. She strained to listen while noiselessly counting sixty one-one-thousands. She counted out another sixty
seconds, and another. Surely, if the Thing was a burglar or murderer, he would have made himself known by now.
Count for five more minutes, and if nothing happens, it was your imagination. One, one thousand…two, one thousand…

But the numbers tangled up in themselves, and she was back in Manhattan, in front of Brattie’s Sports Pub on Amsterdam Avenue,
which she’d been passing by on the rainy November afternoon she’d first met Brock. And then she was on their first date at
Undine’s, the warm, solid pressure of Brock’s hand on her back as he escorted her to their table, making her forget how nervous
she was. She thought about the wedding they’d have with the money she’d earn from sticking it out until next September twenty-sixth
in this strange, cold house with a man she didn’t know and didn’t especially like. This was the deal she’d made. She pulled
the ugly comforter up to her chin.
One weekend down,
she thought.
Only four dozen or so more to go.

It wasn’t a sound that woke Luke; it was the quality of the light. New Nineveh nights were black, especially when there was
no moon, but tonight the darkness outside his window seemed illuminated artificially, as if a New York City streetlamp had
sprung up among the trees that lined the sidewalk. He got up to look out the window. Below him, the side yard shone with bright
streaks he knew were coming from the ladies’ parlor windows. Odd, to be sure; he’d been the last to go to bed, and the house
had been dark.