Seating Arrangements (32 page)

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Winn said breezily.

Celeste’s face was stretched with curiosity. “You’re hiding something,” she said. “Out with it, Winn.”

Under normal circumstances, he would have resisted longer, at least long enough to tell Biddy in private first, but he had no stamina for the usual thrust and parry with the Hazzards. “I suppose you’ll find out anyway,” he said. “We went to the garage to get wine, and we found Agatha and Sterling …” He gritted his teeth, unable to finish the sentence.

“
In flagrante
?” Celeste asked.

Winn tilted his head, half a nod.

“No!” Biddy said. “Really?”

“Who are Agatha and Sterling?” asked Tabitha.

Celeste clapped her hands. “Now we’ve got a wedding.”

“No,” Winn said. “A wedding is not an excuse for bad behavior.”

“Who are Agatha and Sterling?” Tabitha asked again.

“You’ve met Agatha,” Biddy said. “She’s Daphne’s friend from Deerfield. Pretty girl.”

“Ah,” Tabitha said archly. “That one.”

“This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen,” said Winn.

“Lighten up, Winnifred,” said Celeste. “Don’t be such a prig.”

Biddy said, “And Sterling is Greyson’s oldest brother.”

“Oh.” Tabitha looked unimpressed, as if Winn had said they’d been discovered playing table tennis. “What did you do?” she asked him.

“I told them to bring in some wine when they were done.”

“That was nice of you,” Biddy said lightly, “to let them finish.”

Uncertain if she was alluding to the
interruptus
of their morning,
he scrutinized her for signs of irony, but she was selecting a strawberry from the bowl and did not look up. Celeste gave him a look that was knowing but not unkind. He frowned at her. So far he felt only an analytical interest in what he had seen. There had been something Olympian about the sight of them, something archetypal: man and woman mating amongst the spiderwebs, amid swirls of dust. There were three Agathas: the one in his fantasies, the one whose body he had kissed and probed, and the one he had just seen naked head to toe, giving herself to a greedy, bumbling, grasping, haplessly engorged male intruder.

“What did Livia do?” Celeste asked.

“She took off,” said Winn. “Tabitha, how was your trip over?”

“Poor thing,” said Celeste.

Biddy looked perplexed. “You mean Livia? Why poor thing?”

Celeste leaned in a conspiratorial way across the table, one coral-nailed hand gripping the edge. “As the kids say, last night Livia and Sterling hooked up.”

SAM SNEAD
, the wedding planner, pulled open the screen door (“
DO NOT SLAM
,” it instructed her) and peered down the hallway. She heard voices from the direction of the kitchen. “Yoo-hoo!” she called. The talking stopped. “Yoo-hoo!”

Biddy called, “In the kitchen! Come on in!”

Sam Snead was not a resurrection of the great dead golfer but a woman named Samantha who had married a man named Snead. She was never known as Samantha or as Mrs. Snead but was someone whose first and last names had become permanently fused and so was only ever referred to as Sam Snead. The absurd label hung over her like a pseudonym although she preferred to think her name had not robbed her of self but given her the gift of inherent branding. She was not Sam Snead the woman; she was Sam Snead
^®
, Elite Wedding Planner. She had considered keeping her maiden name (Rabinowitz) but in the end had decided to shrug her shoulders, find the silver lining (many of her clients had a deep fondness for Sam Snead the golfer
and less for people named Rabinowitz), and make do, which, as she told her clients, was how she handled all crises and embarrassments and why she was an excellent and very expensive wedding planner.

The first thing she noticed was the bandage on Mr. Van Meter’s leg and the grubby state of his tennis whites. “Dearheart, your leg! What
happened
to you?”

Something was afoot in the kitchen. While Mr. Van Meter explained—some business with a bicycle and a golf cart—she kept her face bright and friendly and nodded to show she was listening but studied the group with her expert eye. His leg aside, Mr. Van Meter looked distinctly the worse for wear. He had shadows under his bloodshot eyes and was smeared with blood and dirt. The others, the women, looked evasive, like they’d been caught gossiping. Sam Snead hadn’t gotten to be where she was in the wedding-planning world by being insensitive to human discord. How many disasters had she prevented over the years, how many abandonments? How many cold feet had she warmed with rosy talk about future and family and non-refundable deposits? Too many to count. Perhaps, too, she had aided and abetted a few mistakes, but she didn’t know the statistics because she didn’t like to follow up with her couples. She liked to wave them off on their honeymoon and then never see them again except as a pair of names atop her final invoice.

When Mr. Van Meter finished, she said, “Well then, Father-of-the-Bride, the question is, can you walk the length of an aisle? And if you can’t, can we drug you up so you can?”

“I’m fine,” he said. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, and his manner was less prim and prickly than usual. He would bear watching.

“Wonderful!” she said. “Now, listen, Mother-of-the-Bride, I know you told me you didn’t want to do anything once you were on-island, but do you have the seating charts? Tomorrow’s, and then also the one from Maude for tonight? Because I’m about to whisk tonight’s over to the restaurant if you have it. You do? Wonderful. Homework is done, then, nothing left to do but enjoy, enjoy. Oh, look what you’ve done, clever girl. Perfect. Perfect. Thank you.” She took the seating
charts from Biddy, tucked them away in her woven-leather tote bag, and pulled out a cloth-bound planner. “All right, time for a briefing. Currently, it is three thirty. Guests have been arriving all day. No new cancellations that I’m aware of. The wedding party needs to be at the church by five thirty for the rehearsal—two cars will be here at five ten on the dot. Cocktails start at six thirty, and in theory dinner will be at seven thirty, probably closer to eight. All right? Now, I’ve heard from—” She broke off as the French doors opened and one of the bridesmaids, the one who seemed like trouble, stepped inside carrying a case of wine. According to Daphne, this one had missed makeup practice and getting her nails done because of a stomach bug. Why they didn’t call a hangover a hangover, Sam Snead did not know. “Hello, dear!” she said. “Are you feeling better?”

The girl set down the wine. She took in the lanky collection of older women at the table and avoided looking at Mr. Van Meter, who was avoiding looking at her. “Much,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry,” Biddy said. “I didn’t know you were ill.” Her sisters simpered.

“Anyway,” Sam Snead went on, “I was saying I’ve heard from our on-island tailor who’s going to swing by and sneak a last check on the dress with Daphne before we leave for the rehearsal and will stay here and steam it. I just spoke to Daphne—they’re done with manicures, except for Livia, who vanished at the beach, and poor Agatha here, who was under the weather.”

WINN SAW
Celeste’s mouth twist and knew she was dying,
dying
to say it hadn’t been the weather Agatha was under. Agatha leaned on the counter near Winn, the sole of one bare foot pressed against the other ankle like a Masai, her yellow cotton dress falling off one golden shoulder. What insouciance, he thought, what insolence to stand in the middle of all these interlocking rings of knowledge and ignorance and act like she had nothing to be ashamed of. He caught, or thought he caught, the bitter, animal smell of sex. Why hadn’t she slunk off somewhere to wash herself? Was it so simple for her, once
rebuffed, to settle for the next available male? Had the memory of their encounter even crossed her mind before she went with Sterling into the garage? He frowned and then turned the frown into a yawn when he caught Celeste watching him.

Biddy was explaining to Sam Snead about Livia and the whale, and Sam Snead was nodding rapidly.

“Okay,” Sam Snead said, absorbing the story with aplomb, “but Livia will be ready for the rehearsal? If she’s having a hard time getting the smell out, tell her to try tomato juice. If it works for skunk, it might work for whale. Great. Anything else? I’m running out the door.”

“Good-bye,” said Winn, extending his arm and herding her toward the hallway.

“Are you going to the restaurant?” Tabitha said. “Our rental house is over there. Could I ask you for a ride?”

Biddy cocked her head. “I thought that was your Jeep out front.”

“No,” Tabitha said, “not mine. Skip dropped me off.”

“Well, whose was it?” asked Sam Snead.

“Sterling’s,” said Agatha. “But he’s gone now.”

A silence fell. Biddy wiped crumbs from the tabletop with a napkin. Agatha picked at her chipped nail polish. Sam Snead smiled at everyone. “Shall we be off?” she said to Tabitha.

“Good-bye,” Winn said again. But the front door slammed, and Daphne and her retinue blew into the kitchen. Daphne wore a white cotton beach dress, strapless and smocked at the chest, bellied out by the dome of Winn’s grandchild.

“Tabitha!” Daphne exclaimed. There were greetings and introductions, and through it all Daphne looked blissfully happy, pink with a bride’s radiance or pregnancy’s glow or perhaps just sunburn, even as she declared she was exhausted and would die without a nap. Winn could not imagine being so happy, not in this kitchen full of women who had all fused together into one entity, one chattering hydra that he had married and fathered and fingered in the laundry room and kissed accidentally while playing sardines and paid to plan a wedding. He wasn’t sure he had
ever
been as happy as Daphne looked. If
he had, he could not remember, nor did he have any hope of being so again in the future. There weren’t any great surprises in store for him, no twists of fate that would uncover new deposits of happiness. Grandchildren would be pleasant, but with his luck they would all be girls and, in any event, named Duff. He had chosen the walls of his prison, and they suited him: this house and the house in Connecticut, his clubs, his station car, the grimy windows of Metro-North, the crystalline windows of his office, the confines of Biddy’s embrace, the words “husband” and “father” on a tombstone. What else was there? He had no unsated wanderlust. He did not want a young wife, a new family, nor did he crave solitude, a cabin in the north woods, a lake to fish. He had almost everything he could think to want, and yet still ambivalence bleached his world to an anemic pallor. Maybe if he had been given a son, life would be different.

Livia, really, did most of the things he had imagined his son doing. Women couldn’t join the Ophidian, but at least she went to Harvard. She was a decent squash player and an avid socializer. She was pretty and sporty and friendly, if also susceptible to cyclical black moods brought on by the lunar rhythm of womanhood. She should have been enough, but when Winn was carrying her bags and boxes up to her room on the first day of her freshman year, he had passed an open door to a suite filled with boys and their fathers, all shaking hands. A maroon banner with a white
H
already hung above the fireplace. He stopped on the landing, a laundry basket full of Livia’s sheets in his arms, and stared at these strangers who seemed so familiar. He stood long enough that one of the boys turned and asked, “Are you looking for someone, sir?”

“Oh,” Winn said. “I’m sorry. I was just looking.” When they nodded and glanced at one another, he said, “I used to live in this room.”

“No kidding,” said the boy. “That’s cool. They gave us a list of everyone who’s lived here.” He picked a piece of paper up off his desk and held it out to Winn. “Which one are you?”

“Alexander Tipplethorn,” Winn said, pointing. “Nineteen seventy.”

“I think I might have known your brother,” said one of the fathers, a tan, squinty sort of man. “James Tipplethorn, class of seventy-five?”

Winn hefted the laundry basket. “That’s right.”

“What’s James up to now?”

“I don’t hear much from him, actually,” Winn said.

“Oh.” The father hesitated, then asked, “Moving in your kid?”

“That’s right,” Winn said. “Pete Tipplethorn. Keep an eye out for him.”

Winn confessed his lie to no one, but his pleasure in visiting Livia was ruined. He avoided the other freshman parents, and even during Livia’s sophomore and junior years, he was always nervous he might, at any moment, be unmasked as the sad imposter who had once tried to pass himself off as Alexander Tipplethorn, brother of James and father of Pete.

“Here she is!” announced Sam Snead.

Livia was standing just inside the doorway. Her hair, still damp, was braided and pinned in a garland around her head. She wore a black sheath that did nothing to distract from her paleness or her thinness. She looked like a consumptive. Her eyes were lined in black, and they glittered in her strained face.

“I understand you had a little emergency,” said Sam Snead to Livia, “but everything will be fine. The makeup artist is very good. She’ll know what to do tomorrow even without a dry run. Tell her lots of bronzer.”

Livia smiled unhappily. Winn could see the tension running through her. Were she to be plucked, she would sound a very high note. Daphne, Piper, Dominique, and Sam Snead were still jabbering about makeup and nails. Biddy cracked ice cubes from a tray. Celeste and Tabitha spectated from the table, affecting casualness.

Livia moved slowly in Agatha’s direction. Agatha held out her hands palms up in a helpless gesture. The expression on her face was trying to be many things—conspiratorial, amused, apologetic, innocent, defiant—but fear showed through. Livia took hold of one of Agatha’s hands with both of hers. There was a crack. Agatha cried out.

Fourteen · The Sun Goes over the Yardarm

T
he church stood on the eastern bluffs, white and sharp edged with a white steeple, like a paper cutout set against the sky. Only a short, eroding expanse of green lawn separated the tidy structure from the bluffs’ edge. Grass lapped at its foundations, pushing up blue and white bursts of lupines and snapdragons like the bow wave of a ship, and ran on for another hundred feet until there was nothing more to root in and the last blades peeped out over the precipice. Each of the church’s long sides had five tall, narrow windows of wavy, bubbled glass in a pale, almost colorless blue. A rose window over the altar admitted a disc of sunshine, and its twin at the back of the nave let in the periodic flash of the lighthouse. The walls were white, the pews cherry, and the air was seasoned with old books, flowers, and furniture wax.