Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  “Yes, perfectly fine. Good night, boys.” He rolled the window back up. He and Charlie watched each other through the rising pane of glass, then the younger man shrugged, waved, and turned away.

  When their taillights had disappeared down the driveway, Winn went into the house. Someone had turned out the lamp, but Celeste was still on the couch, emitting a low splutter. He passed her by without a second glance. Out on the deck, the lanterns burned unattended, but he left them. He wanted nothing but to be in his bed, next to Biddy, safe in the absolving darkness. He had started up the stairs when he heard, from above, the unmistakable swampy sounds of two people kissing. A woman whimpered softly. He stopped, exasperated. Was there no end to it? When he started to ease back down, the stairs creaked a parody of the feminine cry he had just heard, and he stopped again. The kissing sounds continued unabated. Those brazen, suctioning smacks, the sheer audacity of the stairwell kissers seemed outrageous, and he decided he would not be cowed by whatever lascivious display was being put on in his home. He stomped purposefully up and, rounding the bend, was greeted by the sight of Greyson and Daphne clinging to each other. Daphne, in her nightgown, was leaning against the wall, framed family photos hanging askew around her, and Greyson craned over her belly, his hands braced on either side of her head, kissing her with singular purpose. Winn cleared his throat and edged around them.

  “Oh,” Daphne said. “Daddy. I got up to see if people were still here.”

  “All right,” Winn said. “Good night.” He pushed by with the harried, businesslike air of a man leaving his office and waving farewell with a folded newspaper.

  The bedroom was dark and quiet. Biddy lay still. In the distance, a foghorn sounded, not the deep warning bellow he remembered from childhood but an automated tone, dulcet and polite. He lay watching the lighthouse beam swing across the walls. Livia had been to parties at the Sobek, but she said she’d never seen the portrait of Tipton. Perhaps over the years it had migrated to some inner sanctum. Perhaps it had been thrown out. He counted off five seconds between flashes, his lips moving in the dark. One, two, three, four, five, and then light shot through the window and raced across his robe hanging from the bathroom door, touched the chest of drawers, the oil painting of a crab, the basket of shells the girls had collected long ago, the soft rise in the blankets where Biddy’s legs were. Winn felt honored by the beam’s presence in his bedroom, included. The brief wash of light, flying over the shingled houses and dark salt grass before sweeping out to sea and back around again, was so quick that it might have been a ghost or headlights from a passing car except that it came back every five seconds, like clockwork, exactly as he expected.

  Friday

  Nine · Snakes and Ladders

  After Winn settled into a measured snore, Biddy slipped out of bed. Fog sieved through the window screens and hovered in a cool gauze through which the lighthouse beam swept like an oar. For a moment she stood looking down at her husband, his shadowy mouth agape, and then she went into the dark bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. She was so very tired. She had been lying awake for too long, her thoughts skipping between daughters, rattling down lists of to-dos, ricocheting irresistably into the future, where an infinite number of potential calamities lay in wait for the baby or the girls or herself. Usually, she could control her thoughts; usually, she fell right to sleep, but tonight she couldn’t fight the current. Nor could she stay beside Winn, listening to him sleep.

  She reached out and turned the bath tap, releasing a gush of water. Winn would not wake, not once he had begun snoring. She fit the rubber plug into place, pulled her nightgown over her head, dropped her cotton underwear onto the bathmat. Her shadowy reflection loomed in the half-steamed mirror, setting off a childish thrill of fear along a wavelength that extended back through the decades to when Celeste and Tabitha had held her by the wrists as they chanted in dark bathrooms, summoning spirits. She eased herself into the water, feeling a stinging in her chilled toes and another, blunter shock as her shoulders met cold porcelain. She arched away, bracing the bony crook of her skull on the tub’s edge, and then lowered herself more carefully, settling in, scooping hot water up over her chest and shoulders.

  When the bath was comfortably deep, she reached with a toe to turn off the tap, and silence fell, broken only by the drip of the faucet and the distant tone of the foghorn. She sighed, loudly but only once, purely for her own benefit. Winn, helping Agatha after she’d fallen off the deck, had been so chivalrous, so attentive, so obvious. The obviousness was what she could not tolerate. She had known what he was when she married him, had expected to be the kind of wife who looked the other way from time to time, but she had also expected him to be discreet. And he had been. She assumed there had been other women, but she had never come across any evidence of them, which was all she asked. A simple request, she had thought: cheap repayment for her forbearance, her realism, her tolerance. At times his discretion had been so complete she had allowed herself to think maybe there hadn’t been others, but she didn’t like to risk being foolish enough to believe in something as unlikely as her husband’s fidelity. He must know how comical his lust for Agatha was, how vulgar. Over the years Agatha had never shown any reciprocation beyond the laziest, most reflexive flirting. But tonight she had grasped his shirt after he pulled her back up onto the deck.

  Biddy cupped water in her hands and brought them to her face. There was no way around it—she would be exhausted in the morning. She inhaled, tasting the steam. The bath began to perform the magic she had experienced in water all her life, draining away stress like infection from a wound, restoring balance. After the wedding, her life would go on as it always had. The baby would be healthy. Livia would find a new boyfriend. Winn would go to work and come home. What had Dominique asked? Where she would live if she could live anywhere? Maybe they could move to Waskeke full-time in a few years. Maybe they could go abroad for an extended trip, rent a house in France, visit Dominique’s restaurant, take a river cruise.

  She was walking through a field of lavender, alone except for buzzing bees when something choked her. The air turned thick and terrible, and she awoke, coughing up lukewarm bathwater.

  • • •

  AGAIN, WINN WOKE before dawn. He was too hot, and his heart was beating too quickly, racing along in the futile hurry he remembered from hangovers past. Everything came back. Agatha leaning against the washing machine. The smell of her hair. The feel of her arms and thighs, the shocking lifelessness of her face, the sticky friction of her arid pussy. Bringing his fingers to his nose, he found only a mild sourness that might have been the odor of his own clammy, boozy sleep. Beside him, Biddy breathed evenly, and though the sound shamed him, he couldn’t keep from imagining what would have happened if he had not seen Agatha’s face in that one unguarded moment or if he had ignored its troubling vacancy. If their encounter had reached its natural conclusion, his sin would be more severe, but in the disenchanting postcoital lull, her face with its wine-stained teeth might have summoned the antidotal regret he remembered from the more ill-advised couplings of his youth, a little curative disappointment.

  And Livia. Had she returned? He told himself Sterling would take care of her, and then he told himself not to be ridiculous. Fumbling for his glasses, he picked up the clock, angling it toward the window and waiting for the lighthouse to illuminate its face. Five fifteen. Less than three hours’ sleep, but he saw no possibility of dozing off again. He had a tennis match arranged for nine o’clock, an hour that seemed exasperatingly distant. Rising, he went into the bathroom and flipped on the light. The face in the mirror was haggard, gray skinned, and filmed with a sickly sheen. He gulped some water from the faucet, and the pain in his head expanded like a sponge. There was no oil in his joints, no spring in his step, no bend in his spine, no forgiveness in his stomach. When he was young, he hadn’t appreciated what a marvelous gift it was to be able to shrug off any depravity, upchuck all toxins, and drop back into a contented sleep. T
he towel he reached for was damp, as was, he realized, the bathmat under his bare feet, and indeed the bathtub itself had a shallow puddle around the drain. Biddy must have taken a bath before turning in. Probably she had a lot to soak away. He was sorry for his spat with Livia; there had been no need. Blame the drink.

  He returned to bed, but sleep did not come. Instead, he was bombarded by fantasies, grim ones of Livia floating on the tide, inexplicably drowned, and also lewd visions of Agatha. He was pinned against the mattress, pilloried by dread and longing. He pressed his face into his pillow and groaned with contrition. As though she sensed something amiss, Biddy rolled from her side to her back and made a small, disapproving sound. He turned to face her, studying the dim contours of her brow, nose, lips, and chin, and then he tunneled an investigatory hand under the sheets to her hip. She wore a short tunic of white cotton, plain as a pillowcase, without sleeves or embellishment of any kind, the latest in a long succession of such nightgowns, each indistinguishable from the last, that she had been wearing for all the summers he had known her. The garments had a tendency to ride up and expose the equally white and plain underwear she favored, but now, puzzlingly, he found a naked flank. Never had he known Biddy to go to bed without underwear. Her skin was warm, a little tacky, as though she had just put on lotion. He caressed the bare knoll of her hipbone and slid his hand across her lower belly, her pubic hair tickling the side of his pinky. Agatha’s fantastical, indecent softness flared in his memory, but he scooted closer, pressing his face into the crook of Biddy’s neck. She turned her head away but did not wake.

  “Biddy,” he whispered to the underside of her earlobe. “Bid.” He ran his hand up to her small breast, feeling the lazy beat of her heart under his palm. He touched his lips to her shoulder. The skin there was cool. Suddenly he was desperate. He could not remember when he had last wanted her so badly. Possibly never. The breast under his hand was soft and warm, the skin loose over the convoluted plumbing of its interior, the nipple permanently enlarged by breastfeeding twenty years in the past. If he had only wanted to exorcise his frustrated passions, he would have gone instead to jerk off in the bathroom like a guilty teenager, but this was something else, something surprising. Her body was no longer pristine; her skin had lost its youthful pliancy; she had none of Agatha’s thrilling newness, the black magic he had sucked from her tannic mouth. Every inch of Biddy was known to him. But still her sleeping presence acted on him more powerfully than anything under Agatha’s skirt.

  “Biddy,” he said. “Biddy, wake up.”

  “Hmmm?” she said, stirring under his proddings. “What is it?”

  He kissed her. The gentle fug of her breath only inflamed him more, and he shifted his weight onto her body, nudging her knees apart.

  “I’m sleeping,” she said into his mouth. “I’m so tired.”

  “Please, sweetheart,” he whispered.

  The word “sweetheart” was a signal, used only under cover of deepest privacy and need. Biddy said, “Mmm,” and then nothing more, and Winn wasn’t sure if she was considering her options or if she had fallen back asleep. After a moment he nudged her and said, “Biddy.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re serious. All right, fine.”

  With profound relief, he eased his creaky, lusty, penitent, weary, gin-soaked sinner’s body onto and into the sanctuary that was Biddy. He thought he might embarrass himself by weeping. He would not have much in the way of stamina, but given the pain in his head and the miasmic fumes rising from his stomach, that was just as well. Biddy seemed to have intuited that his requirements were basic and animal, with no room for frills, and she lay without moving, her hands resting lightly on his back, while, breath hissing and shorts tangled around his ankles, he took his succor. He was close to finishing, could hear the harpsongs and see the cloudy peaks, when a reservoir of saliva that had been collecting behind his bottom teeth overflowed and fell in a long, thin string onto Biddy’s chest. He paused. She did not seem to notice that he had drooled on her. In fact, she seemed to be asleep. His first impulse was to wake her, but then again she had not given the impression of being so concerned with the details of this specific sexual episode that she would insist on witnessing its climax. The gentlemanly thing might be to write off the whole attempt as ill-fated and accept his frustration as karmic punishment for being a sorry old goat. But. He could not ignore the fact that he was, at the moment, within hailing distance of the shores of paradise. As his wife, would Biddy begrudge him the use of her body in attaining this one moment of desperately needed release? Well, said the heckler who lived under his bleachers, she would if she knew what you got up to last night. And with that, he went soft.

  HE STOOD in the shower for a long time, but it washed away nothing, neither his shame nor his hangover, and he cranked the water off in desolation. He peed and worried fleetingly about prostate cancer, and then he put on his tennis whites and his bathrobe over them, shuffling his feet into an ancient pair of calfskin slippers. Dense, milky fog filled the house, its infinite particles riding air currents in swirls and swarms that appeared in the yellow pulses of lighthouse light and then vanished again into the dormant gray air. The light was like something breathing. On his way downstairs, he paused outside Livia’s door, listening to Celeste’s snores. Carefully, he turned the doorknob and peeked inside—no Livia.

  In the semidarkness of the kitchen he put on a pot of coffee and poured a glass of orange juice. The regular sound of the foghorn felt suspenseful and jarring, and in between tones his ears rang with silence; the sandpapering of his slipper soles on the kitchen tile was shockingly loud. In the living room, Greyson was asleep on the couch, flat on his face, still fully dressed. Winn crept past him and paused in the doorway to the laundry room, taking in the hospital-white enamel of the washing machine, the nest of twisted linens on the floor. The Band-Aids he had peeled off Agatha’s arm were scattered around, their undersides spotted with blood, and he went in to pick them up, scraping with his fingernails at one that had stuck to the tiles.

  He was still in there when the screen door creaked. Poking his head into the hall, he saw Livia’s back as she set down her sandals and canvas bag and eased the door shut. The immensity of his relief surprised him. She was alive, whole and herself, trying not to be caught, up on tiptoe, slender fingers splayed against the door as she pushed it gently into place. Winn ducked back into the laundry room and hid behind the door, holding his breath as she padded down the hall. He listened to her whispering to Greyson, trying to wake him. Greyson grunted, and the couch springs squeaked. He wondered if they smelled the coffee, if they would discover him, but in a minute, Greyson tiptoed down the hall and let himself out. The Jeep started in the driveway. Gravel crunched; the engine faded; Livia’s footsteps trailed up the stairs.

  Winn settled in his study, in the tall, winged chair behind his desk, and eyed the pull chain of his brass lamp without reaching for it. There was enough light now. A thin stack of envelopes sat on the corner of his blotter, stray mailings periodically collected by the caretakers: advertisements for a cable company, requests for donations, an ancient thank-you note regarding a dinner the previous summer that he could not recall. These he tossed into the wastebasket. He wrote the caretakers their quarterly check and a note requesting possible explanations and remedies for the vegetable garden’s dismal yield, and he sealed these in an envelope that was rippled with damp, its flap already gummy. He wanted the distraction of work, but there was no work to be done. His blotter was pristine and uncluttered. He had left everything at home, bundled and stacked on his desk. If only he could be paying bills, signing his name, squaring stamps, licking bitter flaps. He considered calling in to the office, but no one would be there.

  His eyes passed over the spine of an old photo album on a bottom shelf, and he thought again about the lost photographs from his father’s desk. Over the years he had banished most of his familial artifacts out to this house, where they might peacefully decompose in the salt
atmosphere. Old possessions led to reminiscence, and reminiscence meant reckoning his accounts, scanning his ever-lengthening columns of deeds, being reminded that one day there would be a final total, carved in stone. Such dreary thoughts had no place in his workaday life of commuter trains and industrial averages, and so he sequestered them on the island, where morbidity, like all other things, was tempered by the breezes and contained by the comforting moat of the Atlantic. But now he took the album to his desk and sat with it.

  The first pages were occupied by portraits of his grandfather Frederick as an old man and one of his mother on her wedding day, followed by a series of black-and-white prints of his father and his father’s friends: pale, well-tonsured men standing side by side or sitting, knees crossed, in rooms Winn recognized from the Boston house or from his father’s clubs. He paused over the one he always paused over. It was a small snapshot, three inches square, of his father standing beside the billiards table at the Vespasian Club, cue in hand, smiling broadly at something off to his right, while above him Frederick looked sternly down from the wall. Of all the photos, this was the only one in which Tipton looked happy.

  The Vespasian, on a hill near the State House, had been Tipton’s home, really, much more so than the pallid house where he and his wife dwelt like strangers. He ate most of his dinners there, read his newspapers, and convened his friendships. It was a large, dapper building touched with classical details—acanthus leaves, white pediments over the windows, columns flanking the front door. A bronze plaque on one of the columns read “Est. 1901,” marking the year a Mr. Arthur Andrew Depuis died and bequeathed his home to a collection of industrialists and politicians who had previously been known as the Seahorse Society and who, after moving into their new headquarters, renamed themselves the Vespasian Club.