Seating Arrangements (11 page)

These days the chatter about Livia’s pregnancy seemed to have died down, and for the most part, little Fenn–Van Meter had been swept under the communal Aubusson rug. Dominique had almost forgotten how these families worked, how they were set up to accommodate feigned ignorance, unspoken resentment, and repressed passion the way their houses had back stairways and rooms tucked away behind the kitchen for the feudal ghosts of their ancestors’ servants. She was surprised Winn had not leapt from a bridge or gutted himself with a samurai sword after his daughters got knocked up back to back. Daphne’s condition—she imagined Winn, the old Victorian, calling it that—would be grandfathered into the boundaries of propriety by the wedding, but Livia’s phantom pregnancy, the missing bulge under
her green dress at the front of the church, was a void that could not be satisfactorily filled in and smoothed over. Good thing he had the Pequod to take his mind off things, setting out on his quest for membership like Don Quixote without a Sancho.

Bearing down on the pedals, she shook her head. These people, this pervasive clique, this Establishment to which Winn had attached himself and his family, seemed intent on dividing their community into smaller and smaller fractions, halves of halves, always approaching but never reaching some axis of perfect exclusivity. As long as Dominique had known her, Daphne had rolled her eyes at her father’s quirks and blind spots, but until the pregnancy, she had done nothing to differentiate her life from his vision for it. At Deerfield Dominique had assumed that college would be Daphne’s time to forge her own way, but then she found herself sitting in her Michigan dorm room, curled up in her chlorine-smelling sweats and watching the snow come down and listening to Daphne natter over the phone about eating clubs and bubbleheaded adventures she had with her new fun friend Piper whom Dominique would
absolutely love
and fancy charity balls in New York and Greyson, always Greyson. Generally willing to be goaded into competition, Dominique had first tried to turn Daphne against these new people, to reclaim her. “They sound like zombies,” she had said, moving from her bunk to the floor and pulling one arm across her chest, stretching her shoulder. She was always either in the pool or studying or sleeping. The amount of time Daphne seemed to have to get dressed up and drink baffled her. “They sound like exactly the friends your dad would pick for you. Don’t you want to mix it up a little bit? Get out of your rut?”

“My rut?” Daphne had repeated. “I don’t have a rut. This is me. Whether or not you approve. I
like
to fit in. I like people I fit in
with
.” Which of course was what had drawn Dominique to her in the first place, back when she was new and lost at Deerfield. Daphne, so certain of her place in the world, had been the perfect antidote to homesickness. She had been a kind of skeleton key to prep school, and Dominique had taken possession of her gladly.

“I just worry,” Dominique said, “that you’re selling yourself short.”

A few weeks of frostiness followed and then reconciliation and then Dominique visited Princeton and did not love all the activities and people that Daphne loved, and then there was a fight caused by Dominique wondering out loud how on earth Piper had been accepted at a supposedly selective school, a fight that included more references to zombies (“entitled zombie brats”) and some harsh words from Daphne about how Dominique was always
judging
, always thought she was
better
, thought she was so
special
, like some kind of fucking
pharaoh
even though she
wasn’t
, and sometimes people just liked to go out and have
fun
with people who were
nice
and
fun
.

Distance and time had been good for their friendship. Dominique had come to realize Daphne’s life was not her responsibility, and now, in return, almost a decade later, Daphne seemed to value her precisely
because
she was less fun than Piper or Agatha, because she was not tiny and blond, because she preferred quiet bars to lounges crowded with bankers, because she tried to be honest. And Dominique liked Greyson—she did, genuinely. She did not love him, but that was fine. She would see him only rarely. Of her friends who were married, none had chosen mates who matched her aspirations for them. Usually the spouses were steady, kind people who wanted to get married, not the thrilling, elevating, inspiring matches Dominique had dreamed up. She had been accused by her own mother, who was always trying to set her up with eligible expat Coptic doctors, of having unrealistic expectations, both for herself and others, but Dominique thought the disjunction was not between herself and reality but between her desires for her own life and her friends’ desires for theirs.

Yet Daphne had accused her of aiming too low. Dominique’s boyfriend, Sebastiaan, was a Belgian chef who would brook no shortening of his name. All four syllables must be pronounced, creating a conversational speed bump, a navigational hazard. His name dragged at her tongue and always made her anxious she was talking about him too much even though she rarely mentioned him at all. He was a devotee of traditional, master-sauce French cooking and was moved to actual rage when her North African spices or Thai herbs invaded his
boeuf bourguignon
or
homard à la Normande
. “What is this?” he
would say, shaking a duck leg at her that bore traces of
baharat
. “If you want to experiment, then use someone else’s goddamn duck!”

“He has a sort of culinary xenophobia,” she had told Daphne their first night on the island, before Agatha and Piper had arrived, when the two of them were sitting alone on the widow’s walk. “But I think he’s fascinated by the exoticism, too. Once he came home smelling like Ethiopian food, absolutely reeking of turmeric, and I asked him where he’d been, and he said, ‘Oh, just to have a beer.’ ”

“Better he cheats with food than with another woman,” Daphne said.

“I’m not sure the difference is so big. I think he likes me because I’m dark and spicy and forbidden. I’m
the other
. He gets to feel like he’s breaking a taboo. I can tell from the way he is in bed.”

“How can you be serious about someone like that?”

“I’m not. Not really.”

“Then why date him at all?”

“I like him. He suits me for now.”

“Greyson and I were just talking about how you aim too low.”

“Really?” Dominique was equal parts insulted and intrigued. “I don’t know if that’s true. I like to think of myself as making do with what’s interested and available.”

“No.” Daphne shook her head and pursed her lips in a way that reminded Dominique of Sebastiaan sampling one of her soups: the distaste, the sureness of opinion. “You’re not choosy enough.”

How, Dominique wondered, had she come to be embroiled in the Van Meters’ lives again? To care about their opinions? Before she had come over for her first year at Deerfield, she had packed her suitcases full of European club-rat clothes and scarves and jewelry from the souks so she could show everyone she was Egyptian and exotic and different. But when she got to her dorm and opened her bags, they were full of clothes she’d never seen before. In her jet-lagged delirium, she had experienced a terrified nausea at finding her things inexplicably swapped out for corduroys, kilts, oxford shirts, and puffy down vests as though her life had been swallowed by someone else’s. The old Dominique was gone, left like a vapor trail over the Atlantic.

Eventually she figured out that her mother had spent months plotting and stockpiling and ordering new things from catalogs. Biddy Van Meter had been her accomplice; the school had given Dominique’s mother the Van Meters’ telephone number when she asked for someone she might call for advice. After she became friends with Daphne and Daphne invited her home for Thanksgiving, Dominique had felt, upon meeting Biddy, that she was meeting her creator, the one who had custom designed her for a prolonged but tangential role in their family life.

The Van Meters were so charming at first. Daphne was sweet and serene. Livia was just a kid then and worshipped Dominique. Biddy was practical, brisk, kind. Winn wore bow ties and pocket squares and attacked all parts of his life with a certainty and precision that Dominique found reassuring. There were no weeds in the Van Meter garden, no unmatched socks in their laundry room. A tennis ball hung from a string in the garage to mark the exact location where the car must be parked. The milk was thrown out the day before it expired. Yet everything they did—playing tennis, cooking dinner, making friends, getting dressed—seemed effortless. Years had to pass before Dominique could see the strain they placed on themselves or, rather, what their grand goal was. They wanted to be aristocrats in a country that was not supposed to have an aristocracy, that was, in fact, founded partly as a protest against hereditary power. That was what Dominique could not understand: why devote so much energy to imitating a system that was supposed to be defunct? Any hereditary aristocracy was stupid, and Americans didn’t even have rules for theirs, not really. Lots of the kids Dominique knew at Deerfield came from families dedicated to perpetuating some moldy, half-understood code of conduct passed along by generations of impostors. But, she supposed, people who believe themselves to be well bred wouldn’t want to give up their invented castes because then they might be left with nothing, no one to appreciate their special clubs, their family trees, their tricky manners, their threadbare wealth.

She couldn’t explain her lingering interest in these people, her patience with them. As a member of an unpopular minority in her
home country, secular though she and her parents were, she thought she should be outraged by WASPy illusions of grandeur and birthright, their smugness, the nepotistic power they wielded. But the worst she could summon was a bleak, mild pity, and more often, she felt a bleak, mild amusement. Her sense was that the Van Meters had to throw more elbows than some to keep their status, and at times she caught herself feeling sorry for them. They lived a bit on the fringe—she wasn’t sure why and would have been hard pressed to explain the sense of inferiority that she caught wafting through their house every once in a while like a foul wind. Thank God for Belgium, Dominique thought. For Sebastiaan. Thank God she had given up the corduroy and kilts in college and gone back to her tunics and scarves.

A Jeep blew past on the road, then braked with a squeal, veering onto the shoulder. She slowed, wondering if she should speed on by. An unfamiliar head popped out of the passenger window. “Dominique?” he said as she came alongside. “Hey. Dominique?”

“Yes?” She stopped and stood straddling the bike, peering in. Greyson was behind the wheel. “Oh, hey!” she said.

“I thought that was you,” he said, leaning across his passenger. “How’s it going?”

“You could pick out my butt at five hundred meters?”

“Not your butt, your determination. From a mile away. This is my brother, Francis.”

“Hey,” said the passenger.

“Why do you guys have the top up on such a beautiful day?” Dominique said. “Are you worried about your hair?”

“I don’t like convertibles,” said Francis. He wore old man spectacles and had a vague, placid air about him. “They give me a headache. I think it’s the wind.”

Greyson smiled in his gracious way, acknowledging the oddness of his brother’s statement while also indulging it.

“Well,” said Dominique, “
carpe diem
.”

“We’re going to squeeze in a few sets before we have to get ready for dinner,” Greyson said. “Do you want to throw the bike in the back and come along?”

She noticed they were both dressed all in white. She was wearing orange soccer shorts and a gray T-shirt from a quiche cook-off she had entered on a dare in culinary school and won. “No thanks,” she said, even though she had no doubt Greyson would be able to scrounge some whites for her. He probably carried them around with him the same way Sebastiaan, a sometime mountaineer, carried a silver emergency blanket. “You’d have to put the top down to make room for the bike, and I don’t think I know poor Francis well enough to risk causing him a headache.”

Francis fixed her with a yogic stare. “I don’t mind. Really.”

“No, it’s cool. I’m going to ride out to the lighthouse.”

They drove away, Greyson tapping the horn twice in salute, and she rode on, again catching the yellow-shirted cyclist, who had passed her while she stood talking. Sweat rolled down her back as she pushed up the final hill to the lighthouse, and she relished it. Dropping her bike on the grass, she walked a slow circle, kicking out her legs and craning up at the light. Up close, the tower was less than perfect. The broad red stripe around its middle had faded to a dull, pinky red. The sun had worn all the shine from the black paint on the dome and balcony, and the glass panes of the lantern room were clouded with salt and streaked with bird shit. Paint flaked from the bricks lay scattered in the grass like red and white confetti. Beyond, behind a discolored chain-link fence and perilously close to the disintegrating bluffs, the rusted skeleton of an ancient swing set stood on a patch of scrubby grass, a relic of the days when there had been a lighthouse keeper and a house for him and playthings for his children. A split-rail fence ran back toward the parking area to keep people away from the edge of the bluffs. “
3,048 MILES TO SPAIN
” read one of the cautionary signs. She looked out over the water and wondered how many miles to Egypt. How many to her parents’ house in Lyon? How many to Belgium? What was Sebastiaan doing? Was he rolling around in an orgy of garam masala and
ras al hanout
? Everything that mattered, that was real, was somewhere across that sheet of ocean, not here in this half-imagined place, this nesting colony for bustling,
puff-chested Americans where she, the dark seabird, happened to be breaking a long and uncertain journey.

The yellow-shirted cyclist reached the end of the road, paused, and then reversed course, heading back the way he had come. A propeller plane buzzed overhead, and she shaded her eyes and followed its descent across the island toward the little airport, calculating how much of a head start she would need to give the yellow shirt before catching him would be a challenge.