Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  Peggy turned the book over in her hands. “But this should stay in your family.”

  “Well, you’re in the family.”

  “Only for now. I can give it back to you, along with the brooch, when I—” The word caught in her throat. “When I leave.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You can keep the book.”

  It was the best present anyone had ever given her. Peggy knew this without hesitation. She didn’t know how to thank him. She saw he was searching her face, his hazel eyes deep and serious behind his glasses. In the house’s stillness, she imagined she could hear his heart beating in time with hers. If he were my husband for real, she thought, this would be when I would throw my arms around him.

  She looked away. “I can’t believe I was scared of a cat. I almost forgot he existed. How can a person not see a cat for three whole months?”

  Luke’s laugh was hoarse, almost nervous. “He pretty much keeps to himself.”

  “Like you,” Peggy said quietly. “Alone in your study so much of the time. My being here must be hard on you. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m not in there to hide, Peggy.” The lamp lit the edges of his hair into a halo around his face. I should get out of here, she thought. “I write poetry. Or I try to. And I’m responsible for what’s left of the family money—for making more of it—a talent it seems I don’t possess. I’m in there trading and dealing, trying to stop this house from falling down and to keep Abigail and me fed and clothed. And I’m failing miserably at both—poetry and Family Asset Management. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You can’t do anything about it.”

  “Sometimes just talking about it can make you feel better.”

  “Not in my world,” he said.

  He rose from the bed. She was disappointed until she realized it was only to take a sweater from his bureau. She was surprised when he began to talk again. “It’s cold in this house,” he said, pulling the sweater over his pajamas. “If I kept it any warmer, the bill would be four or five thousand dollars a month. There are property taxes I can barely keep up with and maintenance costs I clearly can’t keep up with, and all these obligations fall on me. I was born into them, and from the moment I was aware of my family name, I knew, like it or not, I would inherit them. When I really wanted to be like…you.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “You’re free. You can live wherever you want and work at whatever you want. You haven’t had several generations of your family telling you from birth, ‘You will choose a career in finance, and you will live in the Sedgwick House,’ and this is the college you’ll attend, and these will be your hobbies and here’s whom you’ll be friends with. You’re not tied down to a family home—hell, your parents don’t even have a home.” He sighed. “Abigail would call what I’m doing complaining. We Sedgwicks don’t complain.”

  “Well, it is complaining. If you’re so worried about money, why don’t you get a job?”

  “I had a job. I was an economist at Hartford Mutual. I left to care for Abigail and this house. Even if I’d stayed, I didn’t make nearly enough to keep this place running.”

  Peggy tried to imagine Luke playing office politics, going on team-building retreats, golfing with his superiors on weekends. She couldn’t picture it, any more than she could picture herself in that kind of environment. Still, she couldn’t fathom why he would want to trade lives with her. “We all have obligations, Luke. All right, I got to choose mine, but they’re still obligations. In a few months, the rent on our store will double, which we’re pretty sure will put us out of business, unless the competitor moving in across the street ruins us first. And when I was growing up, we moved seven times. The minute I got used to a new school, my dad would decide he was bored and we’d be off to a new town. I think you’re the luckiest person in the world to live in a place where everyone has known you from before you were born, where your presence actually matters. Okay, end of tirade.” She took a breath. Luke was staring at her. She buried her face in her hands.

  With exquisite tenderness, Luke peeled her hands from her face and tilted up her chin with the tip of a finger.

  Before she could waver, before she could say a word, before she could clarify what was happening, he moved closer—the bedsprings creaking absurdly—cupped her face in his hands, and touched his lips to hers.

  They were soft. Impossibly soft and warm, and it was the softest and warmest of kisses, the sexiest, most romantic kiss ever, the tip of Luke’s tongue tracing her lips, his hands playing across the small of her back, his longing hidden behind a restraint Peggy knew would soon dissolve—evolve—into devouring hunger. Peggy and Luke were there within moments, falling onto the bed, he loosening the sash of her robe and slipping his hands beneath her long underwear to brush against her skin, she with her arms tight around him, drawing him closer…until the phony diamond on her prop wedding ring snagged in his sweater.

  It took all her willpower to disentangle herself and move away from the kiss.

  “What is it?” He was breathless.

  She didn’t want to say it. More than anything she wished not to have to, or that, at the very least, she could have kissed Luke Sedgwick for a few more minutes until reality intruded and ruined everything.

  EIGHTEEN

  She might as well have sucker-punched him.

  Luke scrambled up from the bed to a less vulnerable position, glad the conservative cut of his pajama bottoms allowed him to preserve his dignity. God bless Brooks Brothers. “You’re engaged?” He was like Milo, teetering on the edge of a tantrum. “You told me you were engaged to be engaged, and now—”

  Peggy appeared to flinch. “When did I tell you that?”

  “In September. The first time we spoke on the phone.” He pointed at her hand, at the hated gaudy diamond. “I take it you’re now calling that an engagement ring, not a promise ring?”

  The flash of Peggy’s eyes was reminiscent of Nicki when she was angry. “This isn’t an engagement ring. It’s supposed to be my wedding ring. Mine, from you.”

  Luke was stunned. He gathered himself, surveyed his room, bare except for Peggy’s knicknacks. “You don’t know me at all,” he said, more for his own sake than hers, then asked wearily, in his normal voice, “Who is he?”

  “His name is Brock.” Peggy was looking at the floor. “He’s a sports cameraman.”

  “Ah,” Luke said. “The football fan.”

  Her palpable misery gave him no satisfaction. The lips he’d savored moments before were trembling, the bright heat in her cheeks might have been the flush of passion, not shame.

  He yearned to take her in his arms and peel off her long underwear—how had he never considered how erotic long underwear could be?—and make love to her until she forgot there was any other man in the universe.

  She adjusted her—his—robe where the lapels had fallen open in the front. “It wasn’t sudden.” She sounded far steadier than she looked. “We’ve been together for years.”

  “If he loves you so much, why did it take him this long to propose?”

  Peggy’s shoulders dropped, her face fell, and she wrapped her arms around herself in the self-protective way he recognized. Some writer he was. He couldn’t imagine being able to articulate how sorry he was, how to say he was angry not at her, but at himself for letting her get away; but before he could try, she began to uncrumple before his eyes, raising her head and unfolding her arms. “I broke it off with him in October, right after my first weekend here. But you didn’t do the same thing with your girlfriend, did you? You think it’s perfectly fine to keep seeing her. That redhead.”

  He was surprised. “Nicki?”

  She flinched again. “If nothing else, don’t you think your great-aunt might hear gossip around town?”

  He should set the record straight—explain he’d ended his relationship with Nicki soon after the wedding reception, that since then he, unlike Peggy, had honored their wedding vows. “What about you? I suppose you were with the
sports fan at the Colonial Inn the weekend you decided you and I needed some time apart.” The jealousy he’d forced down erupted in him again. “Whose brilliant notion was it to go there, so all of Litchfield County could see you? Why not just pitch a tent with him on Ernestine Riga’s lawn?”

  “Great idea. Then that Nicki person could have driven by in her little green car and waved.” She rewrapped her arms around herself. “Just tell me. You have been seeing her, haven’t you?”

  “Fine. Yes.” Luke was tired of arguing. He was just plain tired. In an hour or so, it would be light outside. “Are we done here?”

  “We’re done.” She crossed to his door for the second time in the past hour. The poetry book he’d given her lay forlornly on his bed. “We may be stuck with each other until September, but as far as I’m concerned, this friendship—whatever you call it—” Peggy glanced back at the book one last time. “It’s over.”

  The morning of New Year’s Eve, after half a dozen wordy parting speeches, much sloppy bear hugging and cheek kissing, and twenty minutes devoted to backing the Fifth Wheel painstakingly out of the narrow service driveway along the north side of the Sedgwick House, Peggy’s parents drove off, back out west, into the warm weather. Luke was sorry to see them go. Peggy had returned to New York on Christmas afternoon, and without the distraction of Max and Madeleine there was nothing to do but think, only one thing to think about, and he didn’t want to think about it. The house seemed more forlorn than ever. He spent the morning buying and selling stock and came downstairs to pick at the last of the overcooked Christmas leftovers. When he stepped on the squeaky third step in the front staircase, it seemed to whimper.

  Luke was despondently jotting poetry in the margin of one of Abigail’s grocery lists when his great-aunt came into the kitchen to fix herself a cup of tea. She scorned his offer of help and shuffled to the sink to fill the old kettle and set it on the stove. There was the tick-tick-tick of the old gas burner struggling to ignite, and then a ring of blue flame leapt up to meet the kettle.

  “Quiet in here,” Abby commented.

  “Very.” Luke put down his pen. He’d been thinking of a walk in the woods he’d taken with Abby one New Year’s Eve afternoon when he was a boy. On that afternoon, the sun had already begun to set behind an ancient tree whose snow-dusted branches bowed, veil-like, toward the forest floor. The Widow in the Woods, Abby had called the old oak, and pointed out the carcass of a second oak nearby: Only the trunk remained, destroyed by lightning years earlier.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Adams certainly are exuberant.” Abby took her soggy, used teabag from its stained saucer on the counter and set it in her cup. Then she turned on Luke with the Look.

  Luke decided to ignore it. “Would you care for a gingerbread man? There are a couple left in Peggy’s cookie basket—” He stopped. His heart was heavy at the thought of the widowed tree, and of Peggy, and Abigail was not about to stop looking at him. “All right. What is it?”

  “What’s wrong with your marriage?”

  The directness of her question threw him—he wondered whether a bit of Max and Madeleine’s freewheeling, get-itall-out-in-the-open style had rubbed off on her. He wouldn’t mind so much if it had, although perhaps not regarding this particular subject. His brief kiss with Peggy had stirred something in him; he had, for a gossamer instant, finally known what real love was, why people chose to marry and pledge forever to each other. He recognized the desire to prolong that forever with children who carried forward one’s name, and with it the promise of eternity.

  And then the moment had ended, and he understood that with Peggy there would be no forever.

  Abigail was observing him; he could tell. He spun lines in his imagination, stalling for time: Her light-struck mate turned to moss. Her bolt-cracked mate transformed to moss. The widow tree would be gone now, he thought, bulldozed for the Pilgrim Plaza parking lot.

  “I asked a question, young man.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” He didn’t, truly. There was so much wrong with his marriage. It could be anything.

  “Why did she leave on Christmas? Why didn’t she stay the week?”

  “People who own stores can’t up and leave work for a week.” Especially the week after Christmas, when stores were filled with shoppers spending their gift money and buying themselves everything they hadn’t gotten for the holidays. Peggy had explained this to Luke when he’d asked the question himself.

  “They do in New Nineveh.” Abby’s face had that set, stubborn look.

  “New Nineveh isn’t New York.”

  His great-aunt clucked her tongue. “And why is Peggy still living in New York? She shows no interest in moving in with us permanently. Meanwhile Ernestine spotted that Pappas girl driving past the house last month. This is no way to conduct a marriage.” She stopped for a breath of air. “Neither do I believe Peggy’s parents are of the New Nineveh Adamses.”

  Luke knew he was squirming under her unflinching certitude.

  “I’ve been thinking”—he slipped the shopping list with his poetry into his pocket—“that we—Peggy and I—might be better off ending things.”

  “Ending your marriage?” Abby rubbed her ears, as if she’d heard wrong.

  “We’re nothing alike.”

  The old woman tsked.

  “It’s true. We shouldn’t have married in the first place, and we shouldn’t have stayed married. We rushed into it without considering whether we were good for each other.” Each word was a blow to Luke’s already battered heart. But admitting the truth to Abigail was, in its own way, cathartic. “I know you care for her, and I know you want me to settle down, but…” That was as far as he could go. He could hardly explain he couldn’t stay married to Peggy because she was engaged to another man.

  The teakettle whispered breathily.

  “Do you care for her?”

  The kettle’s whisper climbed a few decibels.

  “Yes,” Luke replied after a moment. “But it’s not that easy.”

  “If it’s easy, you’re doing it wrong.”

  The kettle had worked up its full head of steam. “I’d like you to consider changing your will again,” Luke continued more loudly. “Now that you’re more comfortable with the idea of selling the house, we could still sell it—”

  Abigail took the kettle off the burner.

  “—without Peggy!” Luke shouted into the now quiet kitchen. He stopped, gestured at the stove, and continued in his regular voice, “The burner.” It was still on.

  Abby poured boiling water into her cup and poured the rest, hissing, down the drain. “My will stands.” She set the empty kettle in the sink basin. “You and Peggy are to remain married for a year.”

  “The burner, Abby.” Luke pointed.

  “Otherwise there’s no selling the house.” She sat at the table across from him. Behind her, the burner continued to blaze, a perfect crown of fire.

  “Abigail, the stove!” Luke shoved his chair back and, with hands he hadn’t realized were clenched into fists, twisted the burner knob to “Off.” “You can’t just forget the stove is on! Do you want to burn the house down?”

  “It was a mistake.” His great-aunt stirred her tea. “You were here to take care of it. Now, you do understand me about the will?”

  “You can’t make that kind of mistake!” It was unfair to shout at her, but he was weary of pretending everything was fine. Everything was not fine. Everything was an abject disaster. “We have no insurance, Abby. I had to let the policy lapse. If this house burns, you’ll have nowhere to live and, more to the point, nothing to live on! Do you understand?”

  “We have my box with the star. We can live on that.”

  “There is no box.” He looked her straight in the eye. “I’ve been searching for weeks. I’ve found nothing. If Charles did give you a gift, and I’m not saying he didn’t, it can’t possibly have any value. I’m sorry, Abby.” He was simply unable to fly off the handle. To remain even-tempered was to
o deeply ingrained in him.

  Abigail simply sipped her tea. “A box with a star,” she repeated, and for the second time Luke wondered if some of his great-aunt’s dementia was an act. If she wanted a way to distract him from his talk of divorce and selling the house, she couldn’t have chosen anything more effective. He dropped the subject.

  Brock was a born host. He strode across his father and stepmother’s New Jersey living room, utterly at ease, stopping every few steps to shake a hand, clasp a shoulder, or freshen a drink. He was brilliant at it. So different from—

  No way. Peggy would not waste her New Year’s Eve thinking about Luke.

  “Refill. Who all needs a refill? Bex? Josh?” Brock had a big voice Peggy could imagine bouncing off the room’s vaulted two-story ceiling during more intimate gatherings. He held a champagne bottle and tilted it toward Bex.

  Bex put her hand over her plastic champagne coupe, which Peggy knew held sparkling water, and declined without explanation. Bex still hadn’t gone public with her pregnancy and wouldn’t until the first trimester was over. It was one of many secrets Peggy felt terrible about keeping from Brock, especially since she’d already confided in Luke. Dammit, Peggy. Stop thinking about him. Him and Nicki. She wished she didn’t know that woman’s name.

  “Josh, then. Here you go, big guy.” Brock paused as Josh polished off the last of his champagne, then he refilled Josh’s glass to the brim. “Glad you both made the trip out here. We should move to Jersey, Pegs. Look at how much space this house has. And our kids will need a yard to play in.”

  Peggy couldn’t argue with the space, but the house was horrible, with its hollow decorative columns and wood laminate floors and gas-burning fireplace, all brand-new and synthetic. It, and the other identical houses in its development, seemed to have sprung up fully formed, like shiny plastic pieces in a Monopoly set. But the place was in excellent repair; she’d give it that. Luke would kill for the ceiling, a pristine expanse of white plaster free of stains and bulges. Sealed, watertight perfection. She blinked back the floating circles the sunken lights had left in front of her eyes. “We’ll see,” she said. She had no intention of living in a house like this.