Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  “How do you know it’s a him?”

  “Here.” She held out her handfuls of seaweed to him.

  He accepted them. “Hey, thanks.”

  Brushing off her hands, she picked up the lobster and turned it over, pointing to the swimmerets on the underside of its tail. “I didn’t. But it is a he. These ones closest to the body would be soft and feathery if it were a girl. Female lobsters are called hens.”

  “What are the males called?”

  She put the lobster on the floor. “Cocks,” she said. She wondered if he had already known that and was teasing her. She began stacking the displaced beer bottles back in the salad crisper. “This is weird for Mom,” she said. “Usually she’s not so tenderhearted. She’s more practical.”

  “People get weird at weddings.”

  When the beer was put away, she looked around. “Do you have the lobster?”

  “No, I have the seaweed.” He shook the bunches of dark strands like sinister pom-poms.

  “Didn’t I put him right here?”

  “Maybe he ran away.”

  “He was dead. Wasn’t he?”

  “Can we turn on some more lights?”

  Livia opened the freezer, widening the wedge of light on the floor. One long, whiskery antenna swept across the cement, almost brushing her foot. “There he is,” she said. Grateful the lobster’s claws were still banded, she reached into the darkness and found its cold carapace. When she picked him up, his claws did not droop as they had; there was life in his body. “He’s alive. Wow.”

  “It’s the Christ lobster,” said Sterling.

  “Now what do we do? After all this, it seems like a shame to kill him, and I don’t just want to leave him.”

  Sterling tossed the seaweed into the air like confetti. Bits of it landed on Livia, cold and slick. “Obviously,” he said, “we have to set him free.”

  THEY WALKED DOWN the driveway and along the bike path beside the road, bound for the nearest salt water, a marshy inlet off the long harbor. Livia had gone inside for a flashlight and had also retrieved a canvas bag monogrammed with her mother’s initials for the lobster to ride in.

  “I don’t know if he’ll survive in the marsh,” she said to Sterling, who was carrying the lobster bag. “Crabs do. I don’t actually know very much about lobsters. I know they like rocky places, and they move around quite a bit, in different depths, but I don’t know about this kind of brackish environment. We’d have to drive to the marina for anything better, though, and neither of us is in any shape for that.”

  “I could drive,” Sterling said. “You should have said so.”

  “Really?” she said, skeptical but not wanting to sound prissy. “Next time.”

  “What’s the matter, Jacques? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Jacques?”

  “Cousteau.”

  “Oh.”

  “The majesty of la mer,” he said in a French accent. “The genius of zee lobster oo pretends to be dead zo as not to be for zee eating. ’E waits in his silent refrigerator tomb, ’oping zat rescue will arrive.”

  “Lobsters have really simple brains,” she said.

  They walked on, the flashlight bobbling over the asphalt path and the sand and sharp grass at its edges. She should have been playing along, she knew, keeping the flirtation going the way Agatha would have, but she was beginning to sober up and to worry that Sterling was slipping off the hook. If she were with Teddy, she would know what jokes to make, what to say and do. She was always missing Teddy at the wrong times. “I weesh,” she said, putting a lame, semi-Gallic elongation on her vowels, “zat I could be sure ee could survive in zee marsh. I simply do not know.”

  Sterling was silent. She wanted to shine the flashlight full in his face to see what he was thinking. “Well,” he said finally, “starving in a marsh beats getting boiled.”

  “Does it?”

  The few inches of darkness between their shoulders seemed to widen as they walked, spreading into a gulf, and by the time they reached the marsh, he might have been miles away, out to sea even, in a boat she had not been invited aboard. The flashlight, as though powered by the energy between them, began to dim and flicker. “Come on,” Livia said, shaking it. The beam steadied, and she led the way down a side path, through a clump of maples and down to where reeds and cordgrass took over and the soil turned oozy and pulled at her sandals. She stopped where the water began: inert and ominous, punctured by reeds and steamed over with fog. It was no more than a thin black membrane on the silt, but it stretched to become the surface of the harbor and then the skin of the open ocean, touching all the continents. “This is no good,” she said to Sterling. “It’s too shallow and mucky. He’ll just die.” She turned and shone the dying beam down another path. “I think, though, if we go this way, there’s a little beach at the end of the marsh. It’s not too far.”

  She expected he would say no, even mock her for wasting so much effort to save a lobster identical to the one making its way through her digestive tract, but he said, “Okay,” and they walked ahead, following the wan, bobbling light. By the time they reached a strip of clear sand, the flashlight was in its death throes, but Livia knew they were in the right place because she could hear the water moving in the harbor and, farther out, rolling waves.

  “So,” Sterling said, “we just put him on the beach, and he goes galloping in?”

  “I think he’ll have the best chance if we toss him out a ways.”

  “Assuming he’s not already dead.” Sterling opened the bag, and as Livia shone the light on what looked to be a dead lobster, the last of the batteries ran out, leaving them in the dark. “I think we knew that was going to happen,” Sterling said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s do what we came to do.”

  For the second time, Livia’s blind fingers found the lobster’s shell, which was still cold but now dry. She lifted him out of the bag, willing him to give some sign of life. “We have to take the bands off his claws,” she said to Sterling.

  “Sure.”

  “Can you do it?”

  His fingers found her arms and traveled up them to the lobster. She felt him tugging. “If I had never seen a lobster,” he said, “I don’t know what I would make of the thing I’m touching right now.”

  “Careful not to pull his arms off.”

  “I’m trying.” He grunted. “Okay. Done. He seems dead to me, but he’s tricked us before.”

  “Agreed.” She stepped out of her sandals and walked toward the sound of the water until its coldness lapped over her feet and then up to her ankles and knees. The hem of her dress dragged in the water. Under her feet the harbor sand was pebbly and a little slimy. Holding the lobster with both hands, she drew him back to her hip and then flung him out over the water, trying for a long, low toss. A splash in the dark. She felt a tremendous relief, as though she had done a great and necessary good. They were having an adventure, she and Sterling. They were going to great lengths, silly lengths, to treat an animal with dignity, but he hadn’t complained once. And if he had come along this far, he must want her. Striking off into the dark, back toward shore, she felt almost giddy, overflowing with anticipation. But quickly she realized she wasn’t sure she was heading in the right direction. How simple it seemed to get back to dry land—not far—but the darkness under the fog was absolute. She walked a few steps this way, a few steps that way, trying to follow the rise of the sand, but she stepped into a sudden hole and her dress was soaked up to the thighs. She climbed out in the direction she thought was shore, but the water only got deeper. She stopped. “Sterling?” she called. A sensation of precariousness came over her, a feeling that he was gone, that land itself was gone, and she was wandering along the edge of a great depth.

  “I’m here.”

  His voice was farther away than she had expected and muffled by the fog, which was settling in droplets on her hair and eyelashes. She hugged herself, chilled. The water around Waskeke was always cold,
even in summer. “Keep talking so I can follow your voice,” she said.

  A silence, and then he began to sing her name. “Livia,” he sang. “Livia, Livia, Livia.” His voice was pleasant, baritone, not reedy like Greyson’s but gruff and sly.

  She moved toward him, and the water receded to her knees and then her ankles. He stopped singing. She stopped moving. “Don’t stop,” she said.

  A tiny light appeared, like a distant lighthouse, diffusing through the fog in a soft, pale sphere and then fading to something smaller, like a firefly. He had lit a cigarette. She was close enough that she could smell the tobacco and hear him take a drag. The firefly floated in a little curlicue, enticing her. Or maybe it was not a firefly but the bioluminous lure of an anglerfish, lighting the way to a set of nasty jaws. Maybe she had stumbled out of an ordinary night and into a benthic underworld. “Livia,” he sang again. “Livia, Livia.”

  WINN SAT in the driveway behind the wheel of the Land Rover. He had needed a place to hide, somewhere smaller and safer than the outdoors but not in the house, which had been such a welcome sight when he arrived but now loomed like an enemy fortress. The window of his bedroom was still lit. Biddy must be reading. That warm yellow room seemed so far away, the bed with its white sheets, the wooden whale spouting on the wall, his wife propped up on her elbow, her face shiny with nighttime lotions. A while before, he had seen Livia and Sterling go walking down the driveway, her with a flashlight and him with a canvas bag. Ordinarily, he would have accosted them, asking what was in the canvas bag and where they were going and why (although the why was obvious enough), but tonight he lacked the heart and, after the laundry room, the authority. So he sat, alone in the car, trying to think of nothing. He wished for his father. If he could have been anywhere in space and time, he would have been sitting across from his father in the lounge of the Vespasian Club, reading the newspaper and not speaking.

  After Winn’s wedding, his mother refused to venture outside the white stone house ever again, preferring to live out her days sequestered on the top floor. When he came to Boston for Ophidian dinners or business meetings, he had sometimes detoured past the house at night and stood on the sidewalk or peered out from the back of a taxi, looking up at the lit window of his mother’s room atop the dark mass of the sleeping house, an eerie beacon of unseen life. His mother did not once leave in the two years she lingered, and he saw her only three times: twice when she summoned him to what she imagined was her deathbed and then the last time when, after a sickly lifetime of false alarms, she died. Her room, even at the end, was perfectly tidy, kept in order by her Ukrainian nurse. When he thought of his mother, he always imagined her surrounded by hypochondriac squalor: jars of foul-smelling tinctures, balled tissues, rows of potion bottles, trays of mold-covered food. But those three times he went to bid her farewell, she was sitting upright in a bed of worn but fresh-smelling blankets in a clean room, her withered hands folded neatly on a crisp strip of turned-down sheet.

  “What does she do all day?” he had asked Eva once as he left.

  “She is waitink for God to find her,” Eva said, crossing herself. “Every day she wait. She is a saint, your mama.”

  The house, when Winn sold it after his mother’s death, was a wintery landscape of sheeted furniture. He hired an appraiser to go through the whole place, taking away whatever could be sold, and then he went in to sort out the personal debris left behind in rooms where missing lamps and chairs were memorialized by clean, dark voids on the faded carpets and dusty floors. The Vespasian had politely declined his offer of Tipton’s portrait, and so it had still been in the dining room, wrapped in brown paper and propped against a wall, waiting for some boys from the Sobek Club to come pick it up. They had promised to give the painting a place of honor in their clubhouse and to fix a plaque on the frame with Tipton’s name, dates, and graduation year.

  “Why don’t we take it home with us?” Biddy had said.

  “No,” said Winn, having already considered and rejected the idea of installing his father’s judgmental gaze in their newly purchased Connecticut house. “He would want it to go to one of his clubs.”

  In his father’s study Winn found a decades-long paper trail of soured investments and minutely recorded household expenses, antiseptic letters from longtime friends, playing cards, unidentifiable currency, stationery from clubs and hotels, clipped newspaper articles about people Tipton knew. Opening an Exeter yearbook from 1926, Winn found, written in his father’s spidery hand across the youthful faces of the boys, “deceased, 1943,” “deceased, 1965,” “deceased, 1941.” There were bits of ephemera from Winn’s school days: a program from his turn as Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady, a stained necktie patterned with the Ophidian crest that Tipton must have rescued from the trash, a poorly typed essay on the financing of World War I.

  The appraiser had taken away Tipton’s desk—a vast, oaken extravagance with as many nooks and cubbies as a dovecote—and left behind stacks of papers and boxes of miscellaneous junk on the floor. One box was topped with a note that said its contents had come from a locked drawer and to excuse the intrusion but the key had been found in another drawer. Inside was a thin stack of hopelessly quaint girly magazines, a chrome tube of old lipstick that had acquired a translucent yellow rind, a palm-sized photo album mostly containing black-and-white snapshots of women Winn did not recognize, a cryptic letter signed only “L,” and an old photo case, its velvet dappled and squashed with age. This held a portrait of a smirking teenage boy and a stern old man. The image was faded, the background erased except for a floating piece of drapery, bound with a fat cord and tassel, part of a photographer’s set. The figures had turned so ghostly and transparent that the grain of the paper showed through their clothes. Winn knew that his grandfather, Tipton’s father, Frederick, was the boy, although his longish hair and old-fashioned suit were unfamiliar and his features, heavy and morose by the time he became the old man Winn remembered, the man beneath whose painted visage the Vespasian billiard balls spun and clacked, were tender and wicked as a faun’s in the photograph. Pretty and slight, he stood leaning against the old man’s chair, and his sardonic eyes were trained on some spot above the camera, his narrow mouth pursed. The old man stared into the lens with what might have been defiance, scowling beneath a voluminous thicket of white eyebrows and the twin tusks of his long moustache. He had one leg stretched out into the obliterated white space of the photo’s perimeter. His hands were balled in fists on his lap. This was Winn Cunningham, source of Winn’s name and of the white stone house and whatever fortune still rolled around the increasingly empty Van Meter vaults. Winn took the photo from its case and turned it over. The reverse was blank.

  He had delegated Biddy, six months pregnant with Daphne, to go through his mother’s clothes—what she would find he could not imagine, perhaps a wedding dress and then fifty years of nightgowns—and floorboards creaked above him. He put the picture in the trash and, after he leafed through them, also the magazines with their plump, bare-breasted pinups. Taking up the other photos and the letter from L, he wondered, as he often had, if his father had strayed. Surely he must have. Winn found himself hoping that he had, that Tipton had known some flicker of human warmth in those long years between marriage and death. The little photo album might have been a trophy case for conquests. He paused over one woman whose portrait had been tinted by an inexpert hand, her cheeks painted a feverish red and her irises a light green that bled out to her lashes, giving her a blind, alien appearance. He set the album on top of the magazines.

  Many times Winn had regretted discarding the contents of that drawer, especially the photo of his grandfather, and as he sat in the musty darkness of the old Rover, he wished again that he hadn’t. The act of dropping those bits of paper in the garbage seemed, in retrospect, unutterably cruel. He had discarded the image and the letter and the photos to prove his own lack of sentimentality, not pausing to consider that they were reliquaries of his forefathers’ secret hear
ts. He would, he knew, leave behind no trace of his encounter with Agatha, his one physical infidelity in a lifetime of mental adulteries, bodies he had touched only with the curious fingers of supposition. As he looked up at the lit window of his bedroom, the full weight of shame settled on him: guilt for having betrayed someone as fine as Biddy, fear that he would be exposed, sadness that the dignity and restraint he prided himself on were illusions, embarrassment at the tawdriness of the washing machine, the girl half his age, the lustful murmurings and groans she had heard escape his lips. He needed some air. He cranked down the window, letting in damp air and the sound of crickets. Biddy’s light upstairs went out.

  A movement at the side of the house, and a male voice said, “Don’t slam it. The sign says.” Three figures emerged to the sound of crunching gravel. He couldn’t quite make out which boys they were, what iteration of Duffs. Ordinarily, he would have hounded them for proof of sobriety, or at least a convincing imitation, and threatened to call a taxi until one of them swore he had stopped drinking hours before and was by now as unpolluted as a Shirley Temple. But he sat as still as he could, hoping they would not see him. It was Francis, Dicky Jr., and Charlie. They had almost passed safely by when Charlie did a double take and peered at him from across the driveway.

  “Mr. Van Meter?” he said.

  “Heading out, boys?” Winn said. “Is one of you fit to drive?”

  Listing sideways, Francis raised an imaginary drink in a toast. “I am.”

  “Good,” said Winn. “All right then.”

  Charlie stepped closer. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine. Just came out to listen to the radio, check the news.” Winn gestured at the dashboard. The radio was not on.

  “Cool,” said Charlie. Behind him, Francis turned abruptly and rushed into the darkness.

  “I think he had to puke,” said Dicky Jr.

  “Are you sure you’re okay out here?” Charlie asked.