Seating Arrangements (31 page)

Now the crowd began to look less like castaways and more like a band of Gothic villagers, armed with flensing knives instead of clubs and torches. Francis sized them up with a shifty, darting glance. Then, as though pulled by a falling weight, his face slid downward into an expression of deep grief.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was me,” he said, looking at Samuel’s wife through lowered lashes. “I am so sorry—I didn’t realize. I should have been more careful. I acted without thinking, and now this poor man is gravely injured. I feel terrible. I don’t know how I’m going to live with this. I just wanted to feel like a part of the island, you know? I just wanted to participate. And now look what I’ve done. I ruin everything I touch. I’m cursed.”

He brushed at the sand that encrusted his cheeks and sniffed. Then he plopped onto the beach, wrapping his arms around his shins and lowering his head to his knees.

“Francis?” Livia said.

He pressed his hands over the top of his head. His voice was muffled. “I deserve to go to jail. I deserve whatever’s coming to me.”

Livia looked at Samuel’s wife, recognizing her to be the arbiter of their fates. The woman narrowed her eyes and looked out to sea like a captain considering a change in course. Finally, gruffly, she said, “Get up, kid. Only a lunatic would have done that on purpose. You’re not a psycho. You’re just a little dumb.”

With the wonderment of a condemned man granted a last-minute reprieve, Francis lifted his chin and gazed up at her. Livia nudged
him with her toe, urging him to his feet, and he stood and reached to shake the woman’s hand. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been more generous than I could have possibly expected or deserved.”

“Yeah,” Samuel’s wife had said. “Go on and get out of here.” And they had obeyed, trailing away down the beach like two outcasts.

“Still. You got lucky,” Livia said to him as they walked, turning inland, out of sight of the ambulance. “They were ready to string you up.”

He shrugged. “The trick is to be sorrier than anyone could expect you to be. Then they feel bad and want to do something nice for you.”

“Is that what the Buddha would do?”

“I never said I was the Buddha,” Francis said. “The best anyone can do is to
try
to emulate him. The trying is what matters. I live in a constant state of failure.”

They traversed a narrow, sandy trail and came to a wider track that led through a gathering of beach cottages and eventually joined the road where Dicky Sr. had agreed to pick them up.

“What I don’t get,” Livia said after a long silence, as they stood on the graveled shoulder and peered into the distance for Dicky’s rental car, “is why you would choose that particular religion, when it’s so easy for people to call foul on you. You have to know everyone’s going to wonder why you’re not a vegetarian, why you don’t meditate. You’re supposed to be eliminating desire, but, as a person, you seem pretty willing to indulge all kinds of desires. Why do that to yourself? Why not just say you’re a nihilist and be done with it?”

They were both caked with a fine layer of powdery sand, blown onto them by the persistent wind. Francis glittered in the sun as though sugared. “I like the struggle,” he said, “even if I never make any progress. At least this way I have an aspiration. I’m set in contrast to
something
. Otherwise, I would just blend into the scenery, and no one would ever have anything to say about me.”

ON THE DRIVE HOME
, Winn wanted the windows open in hopes that fresh air might dispel the headache and nausea that had settled
in shortly after Dr. Finlay resuscitated him with an acrid packet of smelling salts and stitched up his numb flesh. Biddy’s hair, bobbed in a blunt and practical line at her shoulders, streamed backward and flew around her ears before standing straight up in an electrified coxcomb. The morning breeze had gathered force, and clouds advanced under full sail, more of them than before, merging to block out the sun and then sliding apart in a burst of light.

Some vital part of him had been depleted, if not by his wound alone, then by his fainting spell on the doctor’s table, by Otis scooping him up like a damsel in distress, by Agatha and her wine-red mouth, by all the people in his house sucking lobsters out of their shells. Agatha had been driven from his thoughts, but now her decoys started popping up everywhere, like targets in a shooting range. She was the blond jogger they overtook and the visored driver of the car behind them; she was in a tennis skirt holding the leash of a dog lifting its leg on a stop sign. Again the trees waved him up his driveway with evergreen fans. As it had when he first arrived, the house looked strange, like an impostor house. A Jeep was parked to one side of the driveway, and a white car was stopped near the front door, a bedraggled version of Livia standing beside it and speaking to the driver.

“Good lord!” said Biddy. “What could have happened?”

Before Biddy had time to park, Dicky Sr. waved out the window of the white car, gave a cheerful toot of the horn, and sailed off down the driveway, leaving Livia alone. “Stop,” Winn said to Biddy, opening his door. “Just stop here.”

She jolted the Land Rover into park. “I’m stopping, I’m stopping.”

Winn slid from his seat in a hurry and landed awkwardly on his bad leg. “Damn!” he said at the squirt of pain. He limped toward Livia. “What in God’s name happened?”

“A whale exploded on me. What happened to you?”

“A golf cart hit me. A
whale
?”

She told the whole story while Biddy made exclamations of surprise and Winn looked her over for damage. She seemed fine, if grimy and sandy and odiferous. The ends of her ponytail clumped together like the bristles of a dirty paintbrush. The way Livia looked, the general
gruesome mess of her, reminded him of something, but he couldn’t place it.

When she had finished, he said, “Let me make sure I have this straight. You heard there was a dead whale on the beach. You decided you wanted to see it.”

Livia nodded. “Yes.”

“You left your sister behind and walked around the point. You—” He stopped. Ordinarily, he would have repeated the whole story back to her to make sure he had the facts pinned to their proper places in their proper drawers, but his head ached and his leg ached and his usual routine seemed too arduous to bother with.

“Livia,” Biddy said, holding hesitant fingers above her daughter’s hair, “you look just like you did on the day you were born.”

That was it, the thing Winn had been reminded of: Livia as a newborn. He saw her emerging into that tub, underwater like a drowned thing, and then being lifted into the air, bloodied and shrieking, the crimson cloud drifting from between Biddy’s legs, the doctor saying
C’est une fille
. A more recent memory intruded: he was pacing the front hall of the Connecticut house, waiting for Livia and Biddy to come home from
getting it taken care of
, and he watched out the window as the car appeared and Livia slid out of the front seat and retched into the flower beds.

“But,” he said, “no major harm done? Everyone’s fine?”

“Well.” She hesitated. “A guy got a shard of bone stuck in his shoulder.”

“What guy?”

“An island guy. An ambulance was there when we left.”

He kneaded his forehead with two fingers. His headache was thriving. “Is there anything I need to do about any of it? Is Francis getting arrested?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Fine then.” He turned to Biddy. “Where are the other girls? The bridesmaids?”

“I don’t know. If they’re not here they’re still out doing makeup practice or getting their nails done—I can’t remember.”

“Makeup
practice
? Seems extravagant.”

“Well,” Biddy said, “it’s what people do for weddings, Winn.” And off she went, around the side of the house.

Livia looked after her. “Is Mom mad?”

He reached to pat her on the back but stopped short. “Come with me to the garage. I want to bring over some more wine now that the locusts have come and gone.”

“Dad, I’m dying to shower.”

“First we’ll do this, and then of course you’ll use the outdoor shower.”

“Dad.”

“First we’ll do this.”

An exhausted stupor had begun to overtake him, sweeping like a thunderhead after his retreating adrenaline, but he would outrun it. He set off at as rapid a limp as he could manage, following the driveway through the trees to the garage. “Take it easy, Ahab,” Livia said behind him. Usually, he would have gone in at the side door, but he wanted to make a large physical gesture to fight off his grogginess, and he seized the handle of the big up-and-over garage door and heaved.

A moment passed before he understood what he was looking at. In the dusky cave he had so theatrically thrown open were two figures. One figure, really. A mangled centaur: Agatha, naked, on all fours, and Sterling Duff rearing up behind her, also naked, kneeling on an unzipped pink sleeping bag that had belonged to one of the girls. They froze, blinking at the light like animals surprised in their den, and then there was a flurry of covering hands and futile scrambling. Winn stood and watched them. He suspected that later he would feel something about all this, but he also knew that, at the moment, he was too tired to jump and exclaim and hide his eyes. He gazed at Agatha’s bare breasts, her hairless body. Behind her bobbed Sterling’s pale bulk and embarrassing erection. When the two of them finally settled down and were standing side by side like Adam and Eve, shielding themselves with the sleeping bag, Winn said, “I just came for some wine.” He limped past them back to the corner where cases of wine were stacked beside the old refrigerator. Dry black strands of
something were scattered on the cement floor—seaweed, but why? He picked up a box of reds and, turning to tell Livia to come get a few whites out of the fridge, was rewarded instead with the sight of Sterling’s and Agatha’s asses: Sterling’s white and flat, Agatha’s round and tan. Livia had vanished. He had not noticed her go. He had only a vague, peripheral memory of her bolting away before the door was even all the way up. What had happened between her and Sterling? He could guess. He didn’t want to guess. The wine was too heavy for him. Wobbling on his bad leg, he set the box down with a clank. Sterling turned so he and Agatha stood back to back, rolled by the sleeping bag into a kind of burrito.

“I can get that,” Sterling said.

Winn tore open the box and pulled out two bottles. “Bring the rest when you come in,” he said. “No hurry.” Without looking at Agatha, he stumped out of the garage and back to the house.

“LOOK WHO’S HERE!”
Biddy exclaimed in the kitchen. She was at the sink washing strawberries. Winn, clutching the wine bottles like two clubs, thought at first she was talking about him, not to him, until he realized the eldest Hazzard sister, Tabitha, had arrived and was sitting in the breakfast nook with Celeste. Celeste had a glass of something in front of her; Tabitha was drinking orange juice through a straw so as not to disrupt the precise vermillion lacquer on her lips. “Hello, Tabitha!” he said, bending to kiss her cheek. “Celeste.”

Biddy brushed past him and sat down with her sisters, setting a bowl of strawberries in the center of the table. Celeste took one. “Biddy was just telling us how you were maimed,” she said. “Poor thing. Shouldn’t you be getting off your feet?”

“You’re a real Hazzard!” declared Tabitha.

“I’m fine,” Winn said, setting down the wine.

“And a caddy scooped you up?” Celeste’s face was unreadable, but he thought they had probably been laughing at him.

He turned on Biddy. “Why did you tell them?”

“Was it a secret?” she said, not meeting his eyes.

Tabitha, a practiced changer of subjects, said, “Are you sure you’re feeling well?”

“I’m sure.” He did feel okay, if fuzzy around the edges. He leaned against the counter and looked them over. He had always enjoyed comparing Biddy to her sisters because he liked to be reminded that he’d gotten the best one. On the level of basic armature, the three women were almost identical, all tall and spare with long, elegant bones and an innate economy of movement. They had pointed chins, thin, tan, deliberate fingers, and wrists that expressed queries through small, tidy swivels. As young women they had shared a scrubbed, athletic, flat-chested look, but Celeste had gone to Switzerland for her fortieth birthday and returned with buoyant, inviting, unsettling breasts. Without intervention, Tabitha and Celeste would have had the same two vertical lines between their brows as Biddy did and the same friendly deltas of crow’s feet, but temperament and divorce and lovers had left the elder sisters wealthy and discontented and their foreheads immobilized. Biddy, though she complained about her skin and was touchy about the secret gray cores of her sensibly dyed brown hairs, had elected, with Winn’s encouragement, to face the degradations of age with a minimum of fuss. She wore sunscreen but little makeup, and since her skin was naturally olive and resilient, the effect was not of neglect but of cleanliness and practicality. He would not have had her any other way and told her so, discouraging her from messing around with her disused stash of blushes and lipsticks, but sometimes still she spoke wistfully of her sisters’ visits to doctors in Europe and the Caribbean and their pricey treasure troves of unguents and creams.

“Is something bothering Livia?” Tabitha asked. “She flew through here a minute ago. She didn’t even stop to say hello. I wanted to hear about the whale.”

“She was supposed to shower outside,” Winn said, “not come in here.”

“Did you have an argument?” Biddy asked. She would not have asked in front of anyone but her sisters, and yet he deplored discussing anything of significance in front of them.

“No, we didn’t have an argument.”

“Well, why was she upset?”

“I don’t know. She’s Livia. Tabitha, how is Dryden?”

“Oh,” Tabitha said, “you know. He’s fine. Busy. He’s here—on the island—but as soon as the ferry docked he had to go meet friends for drinks. Gone, just like that. He knows everyone everywhere. Do you think I should go check on Livia?”