Seating Arrangements (23 page)

And Livia. Had she returned? He told himself Sterling would take care of her, and then he told himself not to be ridiculous. Fumbling for his glasses, he picked up the clock, angling it toward the window and waiting for the lighthouse to illuminate its face. Five fifteen. Less than three hours’ sleep, but he saw no possibility of dozing off again. He had a tennis match arranged for nine o’clock, an hour that seemed exasperatingly distant. Rising, he went into the bathroom and flipped on the light. The face in the mirror was haggard, gray skinned, and filmed with a sickly sheen. He gulped some water from the faucet, and the pain in his head expanded like a sponge. There was no oil in his joints, no spring in his step, no bend in his spine, no forgiveness in his stomach. When he was young, he hadn’t appreciated what a marvelous gift it was to be able to shrug off any depravity, upchuck all toxins, and drop back into a contented sleep. The towel he reached for was damp, as was, he realized, the bathmat under his bare feet, and indeed the bathtub itself had a shallow puddle around the drain. Biddy must have taken a bath before turning in. Probably she had a lot to soak away. He was sorry for his spat with Livia; there had been no need. Blame the drink.

He returned to bed, but sleep did not come. Instead, he was bombarded
by fantasies, grim ones of Livia floating on the tide, inexplicably drowned, and also lewd visions of Agatha. He was pinned against the mattress, pilloried by dread and longing. He pressed his face into his pillow and groaned with contrition. As though she sensed something amiss, Biddy rolled from her side to her back and made a small, disapproving sound. He turned to face her, studying the dim contours of her brow, nose, lips, and chin, and then he tunneled an investigatory hand under the sheets to her hip. She wore a short tunic of white cotton, plain as a pillowcase, without sleeves or embellishment of any kind, the latest in a long succession of such nightgowns, each indistinguishable from the last, that she had been wearing for all the summers he had known her. The garments had a tendency to ride up and expose the equally white and plain underwear she favored, but now, puzzlingly, he found a naked flank. Never had he known Biddy to go to bed without underwear. Her skin was warm, a little tacky, as though she had just put on lotion. He caressed the bare knoll of her hipbone and slid his hand across her lower belly, her pubic hair tickling the side of his pinky. Agatha’s fantastical, indecent softness flared in his memory, but he scooted closer, pressing his face into the crook of Biddy’s neck. She turned her head away but did not wake.

“Biddy,” he whispered to the underside of her earlobe. “Bid.” He ran his hand up to her small breast, feeling the lazy beat of her heart under his palm. He touched his lips to her shoulder. The skin there was cool. Suddenly he was desperate. He could not remember when he had last wanted her so badly. Possibly never. The breast under his hand was soft and warm, the skin loose over the convoluted plumbing of its interior, the nipple permanently enlarged by breastfeeding twenty years in the past. If he had only wanted to exorcise his frustrated passions, he would have gone instead to jerk off in the bathroom like a guilty teenager, but this was something else, something surprising. Her body was no longer pristine; her skin had lost its youthful pliancy; she had none of Agatha’s thrilling newness, the black magic he had sucked from her tannic mouth. Every inch of Biddy was known to him. But still her sleeping presence acted on him more powerfully than anything under Agatha’s skirt.

“Biddy,” he said. “Biddy, wake up.”

“Hmmm?” she said, stirring under his proddings. “What is it?”

He kissed her. The gentle fug of her breath only inflamed him more, and he shifted his weight onto her body, nudging her knees apart.

“I’m sleeping,” she said into his mouth. “I’m so tired.”

“Please, sweetheart,” he whispered.

The word “sweetheart” was a signal, used only under cover of deepest privacy and need. Biddy said, “Mmm,” and then nothing more, and Winn wasn’t sure if she was considering her options or if she had fallen back asleep. After a moment he nudged her and said, “Biddy.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re serious. All right, fine.”

With profound relief, he eased his creaky, lusty, penitent, weary, gin-soaked sinner’s body onto and into the sanctuary that was Biddy. He thought he might embarrass himself by weeping. He would not have much in the way of stamina, but given the pain in his head and the miasmic fumes rising from his stomach, that was just as well. Biddy seemed to have intuited that his requirements were basic and animal, with no room for frills, and she lay without moving, her hands resting lightly on his back, while, breath hissing and shorts tangled around his ankles, he took his succor. He was close to finishing, could hear the harpsongs and see the cloudy peaks, when a reservoir of saliva that had been collecting behind his bottom teeth overflowed and fell in a long, thin string onto Biddy’s chest. He paused. She did not seem to notice that he had drooled on her. In fact, she seemed to be asleep. His first impulse was to wake her, but then again she had not given the impression of being so concerned with the details of this specific sexual episode that she would insist on witnessing its climax. The gentlemanly thing might be to write off the whole attempt as ill-fated and accept his frustration as karmic punishment for being a sorry old goat. But. He could not ignore the fact that he was, at the moment, within hailing distance of the shores of paradise. As his wife, would Biddy begrudge him the use of her body in attaining this one moment of desperately needed release? Well, said the heckler who
lived under his bleachers, she would if she knew what you got up to last night. And with that, he went soft.

HE STOOD
in the shower for a long time, but it washed away nothing, neither his shame nor his hangover, and he cranked the water off in desolation. He peed and worried fleetingly about prostate cancer, and then he put on his tennis whites and his bathrobe over them, shuffling his feet into an ancient pair of calfskin slippers. Dense, milky fog filled the house, its infinite particles riding air currents in swirls and swarms that appeared in the yellow pulses of lighthouse light and then vanished again into the dormant gray air. The light was like something breathing. On his way downstairs, he paused outside Livia’s door, listening to Celeste’s snores. Carefully, he turned the doorknob and peeked inside—no Livia.

In the semidarkness of the kitchen he put on a pot of coffee and poured a glass of orange juice. The regular sound of the foghorn felt suspenseful and jarring, and in between tones his ears rang with silence; the sandpapering of his slipper soles on the kitchen tile was shockingly loud. In the living room, Greyson was asleep on the couch, flat on his face, still fully dressed. Winn crept past him and paused in the doorway to the laundry room, taking in the hospital-white enamel of the washing machine, the nest of twisted linens on the floor. The Band-Aids he had peeled off Agatha’s arm were scattered around, their undersides spotted with blood, and he went in to pick them up, scraping with his fingernails at one that had stuck to the tiles.

He was still in there when the screen door creaked. Poking his head into the hall, he saw Livia’s back as she set down her sandals and canvas bag and eased the door shut. The immensity of his relief surprised him. She was alive, whole and herself, trying not to be caught, up on tiptoe, slender fingers splayed against the door as she pushed it gently into place. Winn ducked back into the laundry room and hid behind the door, holding his breath as she padded down the hall. He listened to her whispering to Greyson, trying to wake him. Greyson grunted,
and the couch springs squeaked. He wondered if they smelled the coffee, if they would discover him, but in a minute, Greyson tiptoed down the hall and let himself out. The Jeep started in the driveway. Gravel crunched; the engine faded; Livia’s footsteps trailed up the stairs.

Winn settled in his study, in the tall, winged chair behind his desk, and eyed the pull chain of his brass lamp without reaching for it. There was enough light now. A thin stack of envelopes sat on the corner of his blotter, stray mailings periodically collected by the caretakers: advertisements for a cable company, requests for donations, an ancient thank-you note regarding a dinner the previous summer that he could not recall. These he tossed into the wastebasket. He wrote the caretakers their quarterly check and a note requesting possible explanations and remedies for the vegetable garden’s dismal yield, and he sealed these in an envelope that was rippled with damp, its flap already gummy. He wanted the distraction of work, but there was no work to be done. His blotter was pristine and uncluttered. He had left everything at home, bundled and stacked on his desk. If only he could be paying bills, signing his name, squaring stamps, licking bitter flaps. He considered calling in to the office, but no one would be there.

His eyes passed over the spine of an old photo album on a bottom shelf, and he thought again about the lost photographs from his father’s desk. Over the years he had banished most of his familial artifacts out to this house, where they might peacefully decompose in the salt atmosphere. Old possessions led to reminiscence, and reminiscence meant reckoning his accounts, scanning his ever-lengthening columns of deeds, being reminded that one day there would be a final total, carved in stone. Such dreary thoughts had no place in his workaday life of commuter trains and industrial averages, and so he sequestered them on the island, where morbidity, like all other things, was tempered by the breezes and contained by the comforting moat of the Atlantic. But now he took the album to his desk and sat with it.

The first pages were occupied by portraits of his grandfather Frederick as an old man and one of his mother on her wedding day, followed
by a series of black-and-white prints of his father and his father’s friends: pale, well-tonsured men standing side by side or sitting, knees crossed, in rooms Winn recognized from the Boston house or from his father’s clubs. He paused over the one he always paused over. It was a small snapshot, three inches square, of his father standing beside the billiards table at the Vespasian Club, cue in hand, smiling broadly at something off to his right, while above him Frederick looked sternly down from the wall. Of all the photos, this was the only one in which Tipton looked happy.

The Vespasian, on a hill near the State House, had been Tipton’s home, really, much more so than the pallid house where he and his wife dwelt like strangers. He ate most of his dinners there, read his newspapers, and convened his friendships. It was a large, dapper building touched with classical details—acanthus leaves, white pediments over the windows, columns flanking the front door. A bronze plaque on one of the columns read “Est. 1901,” marking the year a Mr. Arthur Andrew Depuis died and bequeathed his home to a collection of industrialists and politicians who had previously been known as the Seahorse Society and who, after moving into their new headquarters, renamed themselves the Vespasian Club.

The building was grand, gloomy, and overheated. From the front door, a long entranceway led into a round sort of foyer, floored with black-and-white tiles from which a nautiliform staircase twisted upward. The foyer was referred to as the Keep and was the hub of all the other rooms, tall, square chambers lit by chandeliers with burned-out bulbs and dusty crystals. From the street, the club looked like four stories, but it also had an attic that accommodated a small but functional theater and a sublevel made possible by the angle of the hillside that held a swimming pool with a mosaic bottom depicting a chariot race. Glass doors wrapped in wrought-iron ivy gave access to a walled, sloping garden.

The major alterations to the Vespasian since Winn’s boyhood were the acceptance of female members in the early 1980s and, in 1991, the replacement of the pool’s treacherous and eroded marble deck with cement. But otherwise, little had changed. The same huge copy of
Canaletto’s mossy
Colosseum
still hung in the dining room. Vichyssoise was still offered for lunch every day in summer. At meals, diners still scooped their own side dishes from silver trays held low by uniformed staff. For Christmas there were still Yule logs, pine boughs, carols, and buttered rum, and every year on the attic stage members put on an impromptu (though not really) pageant with a red-nosed old man draped in tablecloths as the Virgin Mary and, as the baby Jesus, a ham. A certain Mr. Grimshaw, more spots appearing each year on the hands that proffered the pen for the registry, still presided in gartered shirtsleeves over the front desk, which was not really a desk but a room off the entrance hall—Grimshaw’s little fiefdom, crowded with trays of loose papers, battered mahogany mailboxes, and a hanging row of keys with heavy brass fobs that opened the handful of rooms on the fourth floor where members could spend the night. In one of these rooms, the key stolen when Grimshaw wasn’t looking, Winn had been relieved of his virginity by sixteen-year-old Lucette Winters (not a virgin) while downstairs his father and her parents finished dinner.

In his bachelor years, he found the club was a good place to bring dates. Girls who were not part of his world were impressed by it, and those who already belonged felt reassured. They thought that by bringing them to the club he was making a promise to abide by the rules of their common caste. If you fit in here, they reasoned, and I fit in here, then we are two puzzle pieces molded by nature and nurture to fit nicely together, me with you and you with me. If you take me up to the billiards room and show me the portrait of your grandfather, you are showing me that you are mindful of family, that you are someone who has a line to carry on, as I do. If you stand when I leave the table and stand again and pull out my chair for me when I return, then you are telling me you take me seriously and that this is a serious courtship, and later, when we are standing on my doorstep, I will understand that what you are asking for is not a freebie but a deposit on our future.

Before Biddy, the only girl who got at all under his skin was Ophelia Haviland (the future Fee Fenn, wife to Jack and mother to Teddy),
whose father had been in the Ophidian and had chosen her cruel name because its first syllable reminded him of his club. Haviland Sr. had many clubs in common with Tipton, and though Haviland’s passion for the Ophidian and Tipton’s failure to gain admission was a source of tension, the two men were friendly. Winn had been dimly aware of Ophelia for years but thought of her as a kid until he was twenty-eight and she twenty-three and they kissed at the Vespasian’s New Year’s Eve dance. She was not as beautiful as he would have liked (her eyes bulged slightly), but she was intelligent and athletic and always light and pleasant in social situations and could be counted on never to embarrass him by being overly serious or overly flighty. Plus, he was still holding out hope that his twenty-eighth year would be the witching hour when he gave up his boyish ways, and he took his regard for Ophelia as a sign of his own growing maturity, even though he remained troubled by the possibility that he might find an equally compelling woman whose eyes did not bulge.