Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  “What do you mean?” asked Winn, the finger creeping back up and swinging toward Maude like a dowser’s stick. Biddy grabbed his hand and held it, squeezing.

  “Young love, it’s so dramatic, isn’t it?” Maude said. “That’s all I mean. Greyson and Daphne are so lucky to be settled.” She glanced between Winn and Dicky. “I’m sure you’ll be teeing off at the Pequod before you know it.” This last was spoken so kindly, like a nurse telling a doomed G.I. he’d be going home soon, that Winn was sure she knew something. Suddenly, he felt very drunk.

  Biddy was talking about Teddy. “I was so shocked when Livia told me. She was shocked. His mother must have been shocked. Or maybe not. What do I know? The decision just seemed so sudden.”

  “Chip off the old block,” said Winn.

  “With four sons,” Maude said, “the draft is my biggest fear. If they ever came for my boys, I don’t know what I would do. I would be a lioness. I would bundle my babies off to Canada.”

  “Dicky would be all right,” Dicky Sr. said. “And Greyson. Francis couldn’t hack it, though.”

  “Maybe Sterling could be a medic,” Winn said bitterly. They all looked over at Sterling pressing a row of Band-Aids onto Agatha’s arm.

  Maude shook her head. “I hate even to think about any of them going. It’s a terrible, terrible thought.”

  Winn stopped listening. The light from the lanterns was ghoulish, and the scene swung slowly from side to side as though they were on a ship. There were Agatha’s bare knees, and there was Celeste’s glass catching the light and Mopsy’s dark shape in the window. The young men wore shirts the colors of saltwater taffy and drank from bottles of beer. Their ankles were bare beneath the cuffs of their pants. He couldn’t tell them apart. There was Maude gesturing, drawing a jagged heartbeat in the air.

  “Must be hard for Livia, though,” Maude said. “After everything.”

  “Livia,” Winn said, doggedly trying to restore order, “is laboring under the illusion that Teddy’s joining the army had something to do with her.”

  There was a pause. “We don’t need to get into it,” said Biddy.

  She was right, of course, but her rightness only prodded Winn into elaborating. He said, “It’s time she faced the fact that men break up with women because they don’t want to plan their lives around them. Teddy isn’t thinking about her.”

  Livia appeared from nowhere, standing over them. “Thanks, Dad,” she said. “Glad you’re on my side.”

  “Livia!” said Biddy. “Where were you hiding?”

  “I was right there,” Livia said. “I was lying in the grass. I heard everything you said.”

  “Make sure you check for ticks,” said Maude.

  Winn reached for Livia’s arm, but she brushed him off. “Pal,” he said, “we might as well be realistic. He isn’t planning a future with you.”

  “I didn’t say he was. Is this your idea of party chitchat?”

  “If that’s what he wanted,” Winn floundered on, “he wouldn’t have broken up with you. End of story. This isn’t about you. You and Teddy are no longer connected. He has his life and you have yours. You’ll be better off as soon as you accept it. End of story.”

  She lifted her chin very high. “Well,” she said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “then you should get it through your head. You are never going to be in the Pequod. They don’t want you to join. They don’t like you. They have a golf course, and you can’t play on it. End of story.”

  The deck seemed very quiet. Winn felt sour, shriveled, and old. “I think you ought to apologize,” he said.

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Biddy,” Winn said, “don’t you agree that Livia owes me an apology?”

  Biddy looked miserable. “Let’s just enjoy the party,” she said. “Let’s talk about all this later.”

  He glared at her and then around the deck. Agatha was watching, but Sterling, who was mummifying her head in gauze as a joke, went on with his task, covering her nose, her lips, her chin. Her eyes blinked out of the whiteness. “I need some air,” Winn said, standing. “I need to take a walk.”

  Bringing his drink, he passed through the wasteland of the kitchen, piled with dirty plates and crumpled paper napkins like little dead birds, and climbed the stairs, all the way up to the widow’s walk, leaving the hatch open behind him. The air felt fresher on top of the house; the day had been flaccid and still, but now a breeze stirred along the roof. He should have been angry, but drink had always dulled his temper, leaving him thwarted and bitter when, sober, he would have been furious. The island was always being buffed clean by salty air and rolling fog, its colors softened, its surfaces rubbed smooth, and he gave himself over to the same process, closing his eyes and breathing in and out like Livia’s shrink had taught her. Beyond the wash of light seeping from the house, the island was dark, but he knew the view so well he could picture the patchwork perfectly: windswept interior, green amoeba of golf course, shrubs and low trees punctuated by chimneys and gables. On the edge of it all stood the lighthouse. The beam flashed across, heading out to sea. When he was young, he would bring his girlfriends out to the tower just after sunset, and, standing at its base with the island at his feet, he had felt he was at the center of the compass, the horizon a perfect circle drawn by the revolving beam.

  “The silent flight of the lighthouse light,” he whispered to himself, liking the sound. “The silent flight of the lighthouse light.” From below, he heard the clinking of ice cubes drawing nearer. Celeste climbed the stairs one-handed, plunking her glass down on the planks and hauling herself out after it.

  “Winnifred,” she said, emerging from the floor. “There you are, naughty boy, up here like the bell ringer.”

  “Whose dog was that?” Winn said. “Who lets their dog run loose like that?” He knew that Celeste, through long experience, could gauge drunkenness the way the older salesmen at Brooks Brothers could fit him for a suit with a single glance, and he didn’t bother disguising the gliss that hitched his words into one long chain. He trusted her not to comment, not even in retaliation for his cheap shots at her drinking that afternoon out in the trees.

  “Everyone loved the dog. He just added a little spice to the party, something to talk about, just like your little tiff with Livia. Don’t worry about it, old friend. Come on back down. The Duffs are getting ready to leave.”

  “I need some fresh air,” he said. “Did Biddy send you up to get me?”

  Her tight, painted face floated out of the gloom, seeming to precede the rest of her. “No,” she said. “I needed some air, too. So much talking down there, you can’t breathe. I love these widow’s walks. They’re very romantic.”

  “I’m told the correct term is ‘roof deck.’ ‘Widow’s walk’ is a salesman’s idea. Romantic, like you said. So people can think of themselves as seafarers.”

  “I like it,” Celeste said. “It’s all about loss and female fortitude. If I were out at sea, I’d want to know someone was waiting for me, wouldn’t you?” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. “Do you want one?”

  He hadn’t smoked in years. “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to light it in this breeze,” she said, putting the stalk between her lips. She produced a lighter and turned away from him, her cupped hand an orange band shell behind the flame. “There,” she said, handing him the lit cigarette. “All yours.”

  He took a drag. The sensation was marvelous. She lit another for herself.

  “Do you think,” he said, sorry for having been harsh with her earlier, “that Livia thinks she and Teddy will wind up together?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “I hate the irrationality of it.”

  “Where’s the fun in being rational all the time?”

  “I’m not talking about fun.”

  “Fun’s not your thing. Let Livia think what she wants. It won’t change anything.” Celeste gave his arm a gentle punch. “The wedding is goi
ng to be beautiful,” she said. “Just beautiful. I can tell. I wish my wedding had been so beautiful.”

  “Which one? To Wyeth?” She had married Wyeth furtively, in a municipal courthouse.

  “No, no. The first one. Mother and Daddy hated David so much I had to beg every last rose out of them. We had chicken at the reception. Chicken. Not that an entrée should matter when you’re starting your life and so on, but it seemed like a big deal at the time. Maybe David and I were doomed from the first.”

  Winn thought the problem with Celeste and David had been rooted more in her drinking and his prolonged and petulant unemployment, but he said, “Your wedding to Herbert was a great bash, though.”

  “And the marriage was still doomed? Is that what you mean? It’s a fair point. Four thousand dollars on oysters alone, and we were done in two years.”

  Winn drank from his bottle and Celeste from her glass. She leaned over the railing. “Look at that,” she said, pointing down. He could just make out the shapes of Sterling and Agatha sitting close together on the edge of the deck. “A perfect match. Trouble and trouble.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, trying to seem unconcerned.

  Celeste was quiet. Then, in a low voice and without looking at him, she said, “Do the right thing here. Make sure Biddy has a nice weekend.”

  He stiffened. “Of course Biddy will have a nice weekend.”

  “Just please think of her. I know I have no right to lecture anyone on self-control, but I have a lot of experience with mistakes.” She exhaled through her nose, suggesting mirth.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  She slapped his cheek lightly with the backs of her fingers. “The girl, Winn. Stay away from the girl.”

  Decades earlier, during a drunken game of sardines at the Hazzard ancestral home, Winn had mistaken Celeste for Biddy in the darkness of a closet and kissed her. Not until she pulled away and whispered, “Well, I do declare!” did he realize his mistake. Though he had apologized profusely, he had never been sure if she believed the kiss was an accident, and he had not confessed it to Biddy. He wondered if there was any grand pattern to who blunders into whom in the dark. After kissing Celeste, he had been troubled that someone who was not his wife, who resembled her in neither vice nor virtue, could be so identical to her in the dark, redolent with Biddy’s smell and presence, the sound of her breath.

  “Winn!” called Biddy from below. “Come down! The Duffs are leaving!”

  BY MIDNIGHT the party had burned down to its embers. The elder Duffs had departed amid a flurry of kisses and garbled promises about the next day, and Biddy had gone up to bed without a word. Wading through the mess in the kitchen, Winn filled a garbage bag with a pungent hash of lobster carcasses, corncobs, lurid bits of tomato, scraps of lettuce, blobs of cheese. He took another bag and filled it with beer cans, beer bottles, wine bottles, gin bottles. He dismantled skyscrapers of dirty pots and pans and dishes, loading what he could into the dishwasher and piling the rest in the sink. Murmurings and burbles of laughter drifted in from outside, where the young people were still sitting in their circle. He admired their stamina, but he wondered what the point was. There wasn’t much to be gained from dragging the party out. A worse hangover, maybe. The chance to say something ill considered. Of course, there was the tantalizing mirage of sex, always shimmering just out of reach until, sometimes, if you waited long enough, it unexpectedly engulfed you, turned tangible.

  He had once relished all those prospects; indeed he recognized that a similar drunken need to do something, to channel his blurry impulses into activity, was spurring him through the sponge-smelling calisthenics of the compulsive cleaner. When he married he had turned his back on boozy, nocturnal abandon, learned to resist the tinkle of a beaded curtain, the alluring, subterranean racket of female laughter and popping corks. He rinsed tomato residue from Maude’s thermos. A spoon, examined for signs of use, showed him the upside-down balloon of his face. He wiped the counters and the backsplash and gathered up the tablecloth and dish towels for the wash.

  Celeste lay asleep on a couch in the living room, her silver sandals and a bag of pretzels on the floor beside her. At the top of the bookshelf, the ship’s clock still insisted it was half past four. A lamp blazed down on her face, but she had always been someone who could sleep anywhere, under any circumstances, without registering discomfort. She was curled on her side with her head resting on her folded hands, and she would have been a vision of peace if not for the deep, arrhythmic splutters issuing from her open mouth. Hugging his laundry with one arm, Winn tiptoed nearer. The harsh beam of the lamp exposed the fissured and spotted topography of her face, the leavings of her makeup, the brittleness of her bleached hair, the faint tracery of blue veins at her temple. Her toenails were painted shocking pink. He reached and switched off the light.

  All day the house had seemed to have a honeycombed permeability. Every bathroom contained a woman; everything he did was observed; every hallway was a gauntlet of girls to smile at and scooch around. The joists hummed and resonated with chatter. And Celeste’s warning on the widow’s walk had unsettled him. He had no desire to be the aging dog, limping and panting after the mocking young thing.

  On the floor of the laundry room he found a tangled heap of beach towels and bedsheets that, after dumping his kitchen cargo into the washer, he bent over and began trying to sort, stepping from side to side in a slow, drunken elephant dance. The room had one window, a tall rectangle of black panes that threw back a flimsy violet portrait of himself, hollow eyed and anxious looking. When Agatha spoke from the doorway, he had already seen her purple ghost slide across the glass, but still he jumped in surprise.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “You scared me.” He stepped back, bumping up against a narrow counter cluttered with half-empty bottles of bleach, clamshells holding safety pins and buttons, and a box of detergent that gave off the bright scent of phony springtime. He put his hands in his pockets.

  “I was looking for a room that wasn’t spinning. But this doesn’t seem to be it.” She leaned against the washing machine. She was barefoot, as she had been all night, and there was a maroon stain down the front of her white dress.

  “No,” he said. “This is as bad as anywhere else.”

  “I want to go on a walk. Do you want to take a walk?” She smiled. Red wine had dyed the insides of her lips burgundy and her teeth a chalky lavender.

  “Sterling wouldn’t take a walk with you?”

  “I haven’t asked him. I wanted to ask you first.”

  He was unprepared for the surge of lust that caught him, and he grasped the edge of the counter and held on as though it were his only handhold over a chasm. “I shouldn’t.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said. He was so accustomed to seeing her look confident and unconcerned that he was shocked when her face puckered into a knot of distress. She put one tan hand over her eyes.

  “Agatha,” he said. “Come on, now.” He stepped across the laundry pile and patted her shoulder. When she uncovered her face, the unsightliness of her first tears was gone, and she wore an expression of beguiling desolation. Her lips were swollen and flushed, and a few plump tears dropped from her eyelashes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just drunk. And the dog didn’t like me. And now I’m embarrassed.”

  “There’s no need to be embarrassed.”

  “You’re always so nice,” she said.

  “It’s easy to be nice to you,” Winn said. He found himself squeezing and petting her upper arm.

  “I’ve always had a crush on you.” She hung her head.

  “Really?” he said.

  “You’re so nice to your family. They’re lucky. They don’t even know how lucky they are.”

  “Well,” he said. She understood, this girl. She saw him. Her allure for him, perhaps, wasn’t just December lusting after May but one familiar recognizing another. He wanted to tell her that, but instead he sai
d, “Maybe.”

  “You cooked that dinner,” she went on. “You made everyone feel welcome, and everything you do seems so effortless, like you don’t even have to try. Livia shouldn’t have said those things. They’re not true.”

  “I thought you liked Sterling,” he said.

  “I was just flirting with him to make you jealous.”

  Winn reached out and took hold of her wrist as he had after her kamikaze leap after the dog. He bent her elbow back and examined the row of Band-Aids Sterling had used to cover her scrape. With his thumbnail, he separated one from her skin and tore it off. He did the same to the next one and the next until they were all gone. He pressed his thumb hard against her raw skin, and she twisted her wrist free. Her arms wrapped around him. He burrowed his face into her neck, inhaling her smokiness. She turned her head, searching for his mouth, and as soon as he kissed her, he knew all his fortifications, his safeguards, his laws and bylaws were for nothing. He pinned her against the washer and bit her mouth while his hands pulled at her thighs, ran up them to clutch at her ass. His fingers raced along the elastic frontier of her underwear and breached it. When he touched her, lost as he was in his rapacious frenzy, he registered the uncanny absence of pubic hair. The sensation shocked him. He had known, through hearsay and his rare ventures into the cybermetropolis of pornography, that this was common now, but his sexual heyday had been during an era of bush. Agatha could have been a different species from the other women he had touched. Thunderstruck, he bent down to look at her, pulling up her dress. Her naked sex, plaintive and exposed, reminded him of children and animal paws and the noses of horses and the word “pudenda.”

  “You like it?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Yes.” He straightened up and, closing his eyes, kissed her. Tentatively, after a moment, he touched her again, prepared this time for her hairlessness but not for her dryness. He opened his eyes.

  She was gazing over his shoulder at an equestrian print that hung on the wall, an arbitrary decoration in an unimportant room: a mottled river of hounds flowing after a fox. Leggy horses with red-coated riders stuck like boulders out of the white and tan waters. Her face bore no trace of arousal, no particle of interest in what was being done to her. She might have been in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, idly wondering what unpleasantness awaited both her and the beleaguered fox. She must have sensed the change in him, his moment of recoil, because she threw back her head and released a whimper. Her throat pulled tight. When she looked at him again, her face was a wanton mask of pleasure: eyelids at half mast, wine-stained incisors gripping her lower lip. He jerked his fingers from the soft mousetrap that had caught them and stumbled backward, the laundry dragging at his feet, until he was again clinging to the tenuous safety of the sink.