Seating Arrangements (5 page)

He needed to buy more groceries for dinner and to deliver Biddy’s lunatic flowers to the Enderby, where the Duffs were staying. With the aim of forging an alliance, he sought out Livia to see if she would come along. She was in the bathtub.

“It’s after two,” he said through the door, “so the sooner we go the better.”

“Where’s Celeste?” Livia asked.

“Up on the roof.”

“Communing with the vodka gods?”

“And with your mother.”

A splash. “Give me a minute.”

They rattled back down the driveway in the old Land Rover, the Duffs’ flowers blooming up from between Livia’s knees like a Roman candle.

“What do you say we take the scenic route?” Winn said, pausing at the road.

She shrugged. “I thought we were in a hurry.”

Only to get out of the house, he thought. In the hour since his
arrival, he had managed to offend Biddy by suggesting that all the test runs with makeup and hair and such were an extravagance and also to walk in on Agatha in the downstairs bathroom. He hadn’t seen anything, only her surprised face and bare thighs (the gauzy white dress concealed their crux) and a wad of toilet paper clutched in her hand, nor had he said anything, which made the situation worse. He had closed the door—not slammed it but closed it quietly and deliberately—before fleeing up to the widow’s walk to tell Biddy he was going to the market.

The day was warm and unusually still. Split-rail fences and a thickety layer of brush hemmed in the road. The interior of the island was occupied mostly by scrublands called the Moors, low hills with sharp, rusty vegetation and bony, crooked trees, like a piece of the Serengeti delivered to the wrong address. On the ocean side, shingled houses were scattered among scrub pines, cranberry bogs, and marshes. They drove past the undulating, sand-trapped meadow belonging to the Pequod Golf Club, its ovoid greens marching off like footprints left by an elephant. Distant golfers bent and flexed, launching unseen balls into the blue air.

“Heard anything about the Pequod?” Livia asked.

“No, not yet,” Winn said, trying to sound cheerful. “I’ll have to call up Jack Fenn and get the latest.”

Livia let her head tip back until she was staring up at the Rover’s ceiling. “Would it be so bad not to join? You already belong to a thousand clubs. You hardly even go to half of them. I don’t see why belonging to the Pequod is so essential.”

“It’s not
essential
. Nothing is
essential
. I think we’ll all enjoy the membership, that’s all.”

“Can you leave the Fenns out of it at least?”

“Unfortunately, no. Look, they’re not my favorites, either, but Fenn and I go back long before you and Teddy were even born. We have a relationship that has nothing to do with you.”

“Not to mention Fee,” Livia said snidely, referring to Jack’s wife, Teddy’s mother, who was an ex-girlfriend of Winn’s.

“Ancient history,” said Winn. As a consequence of its selectivity, his
world was sometimes too small. “No need to bring it up. Nothing to do with the Pequod.”

“No one besides you even golfs,” Livia said to the ceiling.

“There’s a gym there, and a bar. They have nice events—dances, silent auctions, theme parties. You’ll like it.”

She let her head roll in his direction. “I do
love
silent auctions.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Livia. It isn’t ladylike.”

For three summers Winn had languished on a secrecy-shrouded wait list for membership in the Pequod. For three summers he had kept bitter evening vigils on the widow’s walk, staring out at what he could see of the course from the house: only a scrap of the tenth hole, but that bit of grass was the gateway to a verdant male haven and confessional. In the decades he had been coming to the island, he had always thought of membership as something obtainable but deliberately left for later. So it was to his bafflement that he had pulled all available strings and schmoozed all relevant parties, including the Fenns, and still he found himself relegated to guest status. He had an excellent track record with clubs. Though no club could equal the pleasures of his college club, the Ophidian—a brotherhood of such importance that he wrote one Christmas newsletter exclusively for its members and another for the remainder of the Van Meter family’s acquaintance—he had joined other clubs, in New York and in Boston, one in London, all places where he could drop in for dinner and feel welcome and sit in a leather chair and read newspapers hinged on long wooden sticks. He belonged to more specialized clubs, too, for the purposes of swimming or golf or racquet sports, and none had ever hesitated to accept him as a member. But Jack Fenn was on the Pequod’s membership committee and Fee Fenn was on the social committee, and, truth be told, Winn never knew where he stood with them, if bygones were bygones or not.

To change the mood, he reached over and patted Livia’s bony knee. “So,” he said, playing jolly, “the big day!”

“It’s not my big day.”

“Don’t be sour. Your day will come.”

She moved her leg irritably, and the flowers trembled. “I wouldn’t
mind if everyone would stop telling me that. I’ll either get married or I won’t. I’m not jealous. I’m looking forward to this weekend being over. End of story.”

“That’s not quite the spirit, Livia.” Yearn as he might for the end of the wedding hoopla, Winn knew he must ride in front of the troops, sword raised, toward a successful event. “Especially from the maid of honor. You’re in charge of honor.”

He meant it as a joke, but she said, grimly, “I thought you weren’t impressed with my honor.”

He refrained from answering. They passed a marshy pond crowded with cattails and bulrushes.

“Look at the egret,” she said

Winn glimpsed a tall, slender shape and a flash of white wings. “It’s a heron,” he said.

“No, it’s an egret. Egrets are white. Herons aren’t.”

“Well,” said Winn in a voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere. “All right.”

In town, the traffic was slow, and without a breeze the car was warm. Livia shifted the flowers, and some greenery tickled Winn’s hand. He pushed it away. Livia sighed and rested her elbow on the window’s edge. “All these people. Too many people.”

“Hopefully they’re not all wedding guests,” he said.

She snorted. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to share a room with Celeste?”

“I think I can imagine.”

“After the lights are out, I hear ice cubes rattling around. Then she tries to get me to girl talk with her and whispers questions about my love life until she falls asleep, which is when she starts snoring. You can’t imagine. She sounds like someone trying to vacuum up a mud puddle.”

Many times in the past, over holidays or vacation weekends, Winn had been kept awake by Celeste’s industrial rumble from several rooms away, but he said, “Buck up, pal. I’d appreciate if you’d contribute by being nice to your aunt.”

“I contribute. I contribute in lots of ways. I’m the maid of honor. I’m a servant to the pregnant queen. Why do I also have to be a companion to the drunken aunt?”

“Celeste has had some rough breaks along the way. The charitable thing would be to cut her some slack.”

“She’s a gargoyle.”

“She’s a ruin.”

“Of her own making. I can’t get away from her. She’s everywhere with her martinis and her stories. She’s like, ‘Roomie, did I tell you about the time my third husband ran off to Bolivia with my best friend’s daughter? You don’t know heartbreak until your third husband has run off to Bolivia with your best friend’s daughter.’ That
clink-clink, clink-clink, clink-clink
that lets you know she’s coming—it’s like the shark music in
Jaws
.”

“Be thankful you weren’t around for that divorce, the Bolivian one. That was a dogfight.”

“I don’t think a divorce that happened twenty-something years ago is an excuse for her to be a complete mess.”

“What do you propose we do?” Winn said. “Should we put her in a burlap sack and push her off the ferry?”

“The sack is probably overkill.”

“If she wants to get drunk and say the wrong thing, then that’s what she’s going to do. And as much as we’d like for her not to exist, she does. Death, taxes, and family, Livia.”

THE FARM
might have been the end of the earth. A thin seam of ocean sealed its fields to the sky, all of it coppered by the sun. The water’s surface, choppy and striated with light, was beautiful, but Livia liked to think about what was teeming underneath: phytoplankton, of course, stripers, bluefish, bonito, maybe tuna, certainly fish larvae and fry, worms and mollusks in the sea floor. Pelicans diving to fill up their huge mouths. Seals. Perhaps a whale, although they were rare around Waskeke. In previous centuries, the islanders had
hunted sperm whales and right whales almost to extinction, and Livia suspected the animals still picked up bad vibes from the surrounding waters.

The older she got, the more claustrophobic she felt within her family. Her father’s desire to join clubs had once seemed perfectly normal but now struck her as grasping and embarrassing. He seemed to believe his various clubhouses, stuffy old buildings full of stuffy old people, were bunkers that would shelter him from the fallout of ordinary life, protect him like the green fence out in the yard was supposed to keep his precious vegetables safe from the menacing deer. Teddy had felt a similar skepticism about his own family, and she had imagined that together they could forge a new freedom, make lives of their own, but then he had left her, an outcome she could not accept. She kept turning the breakup around and around in her mind like a Rubik’s cube, unable to puzzle out what had driven him off. She had never been so happy as she was with him. He had been happy, too—she was sure of it.

“For Christ’s sake,” her father said, waiting for an old lady to maneuver her Cadillac out of a parking space in the market’s gravel lot.

The market building, towering over a clump of greenhouses, resembled an enormous, gray-shingled schoolhouse. Livia got out first and walked ahead. Inside, the market was airy and cool and smelled of field dirt, tomatoes, cold meat, and cellophane. Her father caught up with her, peering over his glasses at a list he’d written on a napkin. “Corn, tomatoes, lettuce, I brought cocktail onions from home, we need pickles, we’ll get shrimp at the seafood place, we’ll get smoked salmon at the seafood place, something-not-shellfish for Dicky, lobsters are being delivered, then bread, cheese, et cetera, et cetera. You get the corn first, please, Livia.”

“How much?”

“We’ve got seventeen for dinner, so why don’t you get twenty ears.”

“Do you have a cauldron to cook it all in?”

Tilting his chin down, he gave her one of his trademark
looks
, half smiling, steely eyed.

“Okay,” she said. “Never mind. No problem.”

She found a cart and was steering it toward a tasseled mountain of corn when she saw Jack Fenn and his daughter Meg standing beside the refrigerated shelves of fresh herbs. Even from the back they were easy to identify because they, like Teddy, were redheads. Six months had passed since she’d last seen Jack, since before the breakup, but he looked the same, like Teddy but older. He wore a blue shirt with the collar undone, and he was handsome in a rough, shaggy-dog way, with full lips and thick marigold hair that was long enough to cover the tops of his ears. He was holding Meg’s hand, a market basket over the crook of his other arm. Meg was a tall girl, a woman really, and she was dressed with perfect neatness, like a child in a school uniform: oxford shirt, webbed belt, broomstick legs poking out of Bermuda shorts and into a set of ankle braces, beneath which her long feet in gray sneakers nosed each other like a pair of kissing trout. Her hair was in a French braid, exposing the hearing aids she wore in each ear, and her face might have been pretty if not for the wide, crooked mouth that slanted open, revealing teeth and darkness. Jack asked her something—Livia could not hear what—and she replied with a round, deep burst of sound like four or five words spoken all on top of one another. Shoppers looked up from their lettuces and bell peppers. Jack set down his basket and reached for a bag of baby carrots, still holding her hand.

Livia turned to find her father. He was holding a tomato in front of his nose and frowning at it. With as much stealth as she could muster, she abandoned her cart and slunk toward him, her back to the Fenns. Catching sight of her, he said loudly, “Livia, would you find me some black peppercorns?” Grasping his arm, she tried to turn him toward the door, but he stood as though hammered into the floor. “What are you doing?” he said. “I need tomatoes.”

“Can we just go? I’m not feeling well.”

That was true enough. Her desperation had become a sort of
nausea. His eyes lit with worry, and he glanced once at her belly as though she were suddenly Daphne and pregnant and the object of great concern and pillow plumping. But Meg Fenn let loose another blast of her foghorn voice, and he looked up.

“Fenn!” Winn called boisterously over Livia’s head. “Jack Fenn!”

Jack lifted a hand and walked in their direction with Meg shuffling beside him, her trout feet tumbling over each other.

“Winn,” Jack said. “Hello, Livia.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek, and she felt the corner of her mouth spasm. She prayed she would not cry. Her father’s hand twitched toward Meg and then veered back and froze into a signpost pointing at Jack. Jack set down his basket and allowed Winn to pump his broad paw. Livia put her arms lightly around Meg, who stood very still to receive her embrace. “I like your belt,” Livia said. She noticed the girl was wearing lip gloss and remembered once seeing Teddy’s mother applying it, holding Meg’s chin in her hand.

Jack turned his green eyes on Livia, Teddy’s eyes, and she blushed, conscious of her thinness. “How are you?” he asked.

At the same moment, her father, radiating a sudden vigor, said, “Can you believe the traffic today?”

“I’m fine,” Livia said.

“Absolute pandemonium,” Winn said in answer to his own question.

Tripped up, they all hesitated, and gradually discomfort saturated the air as though puffed from an atomizer. The cause, Livia knew, would not be named or alluded to, not here beside the tomatoes or anywhere else where her father and Teddy’s father happened to be at the same time. Her father would rather die than acknowledge in Jack Fenn’s presence that, for five short weeks, the two of them had shared an embryonic grandchild. Nor had Livia ever spoken with Jack about her pregnancy. The last time she had seen him was in a different life, back before she had gotten knocked up, when Teddy was still her boyfriend.