Seating Arrangements (26 page)

“Are you okay?” Daphne called from her chair.

Piper, sitting in her crater, flapped one hand in response. “Is she laughing or crying?” Livia said.

Dominique shaded her eyes with her hand and watched the boys haul Piper to her feet, spindly as a child. “Beats me.”

“Where are all these people
going
?” Daphne asked, watching another Jeep cruise by. “Hey!” she called. “Hey! Where are you going?”

One of the men in the back of the Jeep cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled over the wind. “There’s a hail!”

“What?”

“There’s a
wha-le
! Around the point! Beached!”

“Is it alive?” Livia shouted. He was getting farther and farther away. He pointed at his ear. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Is it alive? Is the whale alive?”

WINN, RESPLENDENT
in his tennis whites and triumphant after beating his old friend Goodman Perry in straight sets, was pedaling home with a bicycle-basket cargo of blueberry muffins when he rounded a bend and saw a golf cart parked on the side of the bike path. He was in high spirits. His hangover had lifted sometime during
their warm-up rallies, and the magnificent relief of no longer feeling awful was enough to get him off to a good start, winning the first three points and then the first set. Perry was the better player, and Winn’s tidy dominance had puzzled them both at first and then, by the middle of the second set, elated Winn and lowered Perry into a sulk. Between points, Perry prowled the net, running his racquet along the tape and scuffling the red clay, keeping up a steady mumble to himself. “It’s this wedding,” Winn had called. “I have more pent-up aggression than usual.”

Perry nodded and swung through a courtly backhand. “Your serve,” he replied.

Winn won the next point with a dainty tap that brought Perry swooping up from the baseline with racquet outstretched as though trying to net a butterfly. “Good hustle,” Winn said. Perry only glowered. Pressing his hand against the strings of his racquet, Winn watched his flesh bulge through the gaps. His sudden genius for tennis suggested he might be full of physical talents not yet discovered or fully realized. As he bounced the ball and watched Perry take up a determined crouch at the opposite end, the perverse thought surfaced that his conquest of Agatha—and he considered it to be a conquest because, really, a woman’s permission was the central obstacle—was responsible for his improved game. He wondered if their tryst was acting on his masculinity like some Chinese herb or voodoo powder, making him stronger and more agile, able to—and here he reared back and sent an ace past Perry and ringing into the links of the fence—assert himself.

He celebrated by stopping at the market and buying five of the good muffins, not enough for everyone but all the store had left. Then, on the stretch of path that skirted the twelfth hole of the Pequod, before he was even halfway home, he saw the golf cart. It had no business being where it was. There were separate paths for bikes and for carts, and this cart was most certainly on the wrong path. Winn’s habit was to ride quickly but casually, leaning back on the seat and taking occasional practice swings with his racquet. As he went zipping along, knees pumping a lively rhythm, swatting at the air to fight off
the sight of the rogue cart, he saw there was a man behind the wheel and above him, at the top of a slope, two more in visors and pleated shorts, leaning on clubs. The man in the cart was bending sideways to extract a tiny white ball from a mess of grass and poison ivy. Winn steered out to the edge of the path and glared at the golfers.

Perhaps he ought to have called out or thumbed a peal from the silver bell on his handlebars, but as it happened, just as he passed behind the cart the driver popped upright with golf ball in hand and went whizzing into reverse without a glance behind him. Escape was impossible. There was the flip of a lever, the high whine of the machine’s warning buzzer, and then the square plastic bumper flipped Winn and his bicycle sideways off the path. Later he remembered a series of crooked, trapezoidal images, like the feed from a damaged antenna: the sky, the asphalt, the back of the driver’s head, the grass where he landed. In the aerial instant of the crash, one pedal spun viciously around and sliced into the flesh of his calf, leaving a sickle-shaped wound, and, to add insult to injury, his tennis racquet flew out of his hand and up onto the road, where it was promptly run over by a passing van. Two muffins escaped from the bag, one coming to rest in the gutter and the other standing upright in the grass like a stout toadstool.

Lying on his back, leg aflame, Winn stared up at the sky and grimaced. A tall, cauliform cloud blew in front of the sun and then was blotted out by a face. “Hey!” the man from the golf cart said, lifting the bike off Winn. “Are you all right? Did you hit your head?”

Beneath the brim of the man’s cap and behind thick glasses blinked two small, watery eyes. The ruddy flesh of his snub nose was aerated by deep and abundant pores, and the skin of his face sagged slightly as he leaned over, close enough for Winn to smell his breath. It was musty, horsey, the breath of something that ate only grass. Perhaps he was turned loose at night to graze on the fairway.

“Ah, Jesus,” Winn said. “Christ, that hurts.”

The man leaned close and stared into Winn’s eyes like a hypnotist. “Did you hit your head?” he asked again.

Winn rolled his neck. “I don’t think so. No, my leg’s the problem.” They looked at his leg. It was bleeding.

“You should put pressure on that,” the man said. He pulled a red paisley handkerchief from his back pocket and handed it over.

“I agree,” Winn said. He pulled off his signet ring and tucked it in the pocket of his shorts before pressing the handkerchief over his wound. The golfers who had been on the top of the hill were gone.

The man thoughtfully pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger. “Would you like to use my phone?”

Biddy was summoned from the beach, and Winn sat in the grass to wait for her, gazing up at his new antagonist. He expected the man to speak, but he just stood in silence, gazing into the distance as though waiting for a bus.

“Do you belong to the Pequod?” Winn asked.

“No, I work there.”

Winn chalked up a point for himself. He could spot a caddy a mile away. “With all due respect,” he said, “you didn’t have the right of way. You were in a motorized vehicle on a bike path.”

The man looked back at the golf cart in surprise, as though it had tapped him on the shoulder. “Motorized vehicle?” he said.

“That’s right,” said Winn.

The man shrugged. “It’s a golf cart.”

“It has a motor.”

“But it’s not a car.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“I think it does.”

“Well,” Winn said, “regardless, it’s dangerous to bring it on the bike path. This is exactly why there’s a separate path for carts in the first place and why you’re supposed to stay on it. If you need to come on the bike path, you are to do so on foot.”

“Doesn’t say that anywhere,” the man said. He put his hands in his pockets.

Winn blinked, flabbergasted. This man, he realized, this man who had knocked him off his bike, causing him a wound that would obviously
need to be stitched and would give him a limp as he walked Daphne down the aisle in little more than twenty-four hours, this man had no intention of apologizing. An apology was simple courtesy, not necessarily an admission of fault, certainly not of legal liability. He should say he was sorry for causing Winn pain even if he was the kind of person whose understanding of a motorized versus nonmotorized vehicle was, at best, murky.

“What is your name?” Winn said.

“Otis Derringer,” the man said.

“Mr. Derringer,” Winn said, “all this time I’ve been waiting for you to apologize, as would be the natural thing to do given the circumstances and the events of the past few minutes, and you haven’t.”

Again, Otis looked back at the golf cart, this time like he was appealing for backup, saying to the cart,
Get a load of this guy
. He took off his hat and wiped at the indentation left in his forehead. A whitewash of old sweat ghosted the brim. “Well, sir,” Otis said, replacing the hat, “I don’t think I need to apologize. I did the right thing. I stopped and asked about your head. I offered you my phone. You asked me to wait with you, and I’m waiting with you. Other than that, I think we can say accidents happen and leave it at that.”

Winn’s right index finger came up and trained itself on Otis’s face. “But some accidents are
caused
,” he said, his finger jerking toward Otis like a leashed attack dog, “by people who get off scot-free while other people pay the price.” Winn wondered how much blood he had lost. His fingers were sticky where the handkerchief had soaked through. Lifting the cloth, he watched a bright crescent well up from his flesh.

“I think you should have braked,” Otis said. “I didn’t see you coming.”

“You didn’t look.”

“I believe I did.”

“All right, how’s this,” Winn said. “Even if you apologize, it doesn’t mean the accident was entirely your fault. I’ll just take it as a gesture of friendship.”

Otis stuck his jaw forward, making his face even more bulldoggish. “I’m a friendly guy,” he said. “I don’t really think I owe you an apology, but if you’d like me to apologize, I will.”

“Okay,” Winn said, “I would like you to apologize.”

“I just did.”

Winn stared at him in wonderment. “Hey,” Otis said, sitting in the grass beside him. “Hey, you look really pale.” He took one of Winn’s hands and rubbed it briskly between his own. “Here, put your head between your knees.” He pressed Winn’s neck downward. “Deep breath, buddy.”

“Have I lost that much blood?” Winn asked. “Where is Biddy?” He lifted his head, and Otis gently pushed it back down.

“You haven’t lost enough to fill a thimble. You’re feeling the shock.”

“I’ve lost more than that.”

Otis gave a little puff of laughter, and Winn smelled the warm stable smell of his breath again. “You’re probably from New York.”

“Connecticut,” said Winn. “I work in the city. But I’ve been coming here for fifty years. Since I was a kid. Back when it was a rough old fishing village. It wasn’t fancy at all.”

“Yeah.” Otis took his hand off Winn’s neck. “I was born here.”

Winn said nothing. They sat. In the distance, the ocean was mottled with cloud shadows. One of the things he loved about the island was the sensation of being inside an envelope of sea and sky, how the horizon was a clearly ruled line between one thing and another, entirely different thing. “Do you know Jack Fenn?” he asked.

“Sure,” Otis said. “Great guy.”

The familiar shape of the Land Rover shot past. There was a squeak of brakes, and Biddy reversed onto the shoulder. She came toward him over the grass, tall and lean, crisp as a white sail on a blue sea. “You,” she said, touching his head with one finger, “are a real Hazzard!” Biddy had never lost the habit of her old family joke, nor had her sisters, even though it had been decades since any of them had been Hazzards. “Hello,” she said to Otis.

“This is Otis Derringer,” Winn said. “My assailant.”

Otis wiped his fingers on his pants before shaking Biddy’s hand. “Sorry. I’ve got a little bit of blood on my hands.”

“Coming from you that means a lot, Otis,” Winn said.

Otis hesitated, pinching his lip again and giving it a little twist. Then he said, “If anyone asks, I apologized.”

After a pause, Winn said, “Like hell.”

Biddy looked back and forth between the men, alert and friendly. “Come on, ducky,” she said to Winn finally, offering him her hand.

Because Winn was woozy and the ground soft and uneven, he was of little help to Biddy. The pain, too, was considerable, and each time he put pressure on his injured leg, more blood trickled out of the wound and down into his sock.

“The muffins,” he said, pointing at the bag where it lay.

“Let’s get you first.” Biddy turned to Otis. “Would you mind helping him?”

Winn thought Otis would only take his other arm, but, to his shock, the caddy knelt in the grass and lifted him up. Winn had not been carried since he was a child, and he would never have expected to find himself cradled in the massive arms of a man with breath like a hayloft. He heard himself whimper. Craning his head around Otis’s shoulder, he said Biddy’s name. She was standing motionless, an astonished hand over her mouth.

Eleven · Flesh Wounds

T
he whale was dead, long dead. It had died at sea and drifted in, relatively unmolested by sharks, nudged up onto the beach during the night. A fisherman discovered it at dawn. From passersby Livia had learned it was a sperm whale, but no one could tell her how big it was or if it was male or female or how it had died. Francis was the only one who wanted to come with her to see it, and they walked up the beach together toward an outcropping that made a narrow point. A man coming the opposite direction on an ATV told them they would find the whale on the other side. Couldn’t miss it. Smelled worse than they could possibly imagine. While lying on her towel, Livia had gotten the impression of a steady flow of human traffic heading to the point, but as they walked and left behind the popular section of the swimming beach, they found themselves alone, trudging along beside a crumbling bluff. Occasional wooden staircases built into its sandy face led up to the houses Jack Fenn was trying to save from the ocean.

Livia found herself in a bleak mood. She wondered what Sterling was doing, why he hadn’t come to the beach—was he avoiding her? She was curious to know how he would have acted. Maybe he would have come with her to see the whale instead of Francis. Maybe they would have paused to sit and kiss on one of these wooden staircases—the thought made her stomach roil with pleasure and anxiety, churning up acidic dregs of liquor.

Francis wore large, square, cheap black plastic sunglasses and had
a Sanskrit tattoo on his shoulder. She had never seen him without his shirt before, and he was stockier than she would have imagined, and hairier.