Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  Lying on his back, leg aflame, Winn stared up at the sky and grimaced. A tall, cauliform cloud blew in front of the sun and then was blotted out by a face. “Hey!” the man from the golf cart said, lifting the bike off Winn. “Are you all right? Did you hit your head?”

  Beneath the brim of the man’s cap and behind thick glasses blinked two small, watery eyes. The ruddy flesh of his snub nose was aerated by deep and abundant pores, and the skin of his face sagged slightly as he leaned over, close enough for Winn to smell his breath. It was musty, horsey, the breath of something that ate only grass. Perhaps he was turned loose at night to graze on the fairway.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Winn said. “Christ, that hurts.”

  The man leaned close and stared into Winn’s eyes like a hypnotist. “Did you hit your head?” he asked again.

  Winn rolled his neck. “I don’t think so. No, my leg’s the problem.” They looked at his leg. It was bleeding.

  “You should put pressure on that,” the man said. He pulled a red paisley handkerchief from his back pocket and handed it over.

  “I agree,” Winn said. He pulled off his signet ring and tucked it in the pocket of his shorts before pressing the handkerchief over his wound. The golfers who had been on the top of the hill were gone.

  The man thoughtfully pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger. “Would you like to use my phone?”

  Biddy was summoned from the beach, and Winn sat in the grass to wait for her, gazing up at his new antagonist. He expected the man to speak, but he just stood in silence, gazing into the distance as though waiting for a bus.

  “Do you belong to the Pequod?” Winn asked.

  “No, I work there.”

  Winn chalked up a point for himself. He could spot a caddy a mile away. “With all due respect,” he said, “you didn’t have the right of way. You were in a motorized vehicle on a bike path.”

  The man looked back at the golf cart in surprise, as though it had tapped him on the shoulder. “Motorized vehicle?” he said.

  “That’s right,” said Winn.

  The man shrugged. “It’s a golf cart.”

  “It has a motor.”

  “But it’s not a car.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “I think it does.”

  “Well,” Winn said, “regardless, it’s dangerous to bring it on the bike path. This is exactly why there’s a separate path for carts in the first place and why you’re supposed to stay on it. If you need to come on the bike path, you are to do so on foot.”

  “Doesn’t say that anywhere,” the man said. He put his hands in his pockets.

  Winn blinked, flabbergasted. This man, he realized, this man who had knocked him off his bike, causing him a wound that would obviously need to be stitched and would give him a limp as he walked Daphne down the aisle in little more than twenty-four hours, this man had no intention of apologizing. An apology was simple courtesy, not necessarily an admission of fault, certainly not of legal liability. He should say he was sorry for causing Winn pain even if he was the kind of person whose understanding of a motorized versus nonmotorized vehicle was, at best, murky.

  “What is your name?” Winn said.

  “Otis Derringer,” the man said.

  “Mr. Derringer,” Winn said, “all this time I’ve been waiting for you to apologize, as would be the natural thing to do given the circumstances and the events of the past few minutes, and you haven’t.”

  Again, Otis looked back at the golf cart, this time like he was appealing for backup, saying to the cart, Get a load of this guy. He took off his hat and wiped at the indentation left in his forehead. A whitewash of old sweat ghosted the brim. “Well, sir,” Otis said, replacing the hat, “I don’t think I need to apologize. I did the right thing. I stopped and asked about your head. I offered you my phone. You asked me to wait with you, and I’m waiting with you. Other than that, I think we can say accidents happen and leave it at that.”

  Winn’s right index finger came up and trained itself on Otis’s face. “But some accidents are caused,” he said, his finger jerking toward Otis like a leashed attack dog, “by people who get off scot-free while other people pay the price.” Winn wondered how much blood he had lost. His fingers were sticky where the handkerchief had soaked through. Lifting the cloth, he watched a bright crescent well up from his flesh.

  “I think you should have braked,” Otis said. “I didn’t see you coming.”

  “You didn’t look.”

  “I believe I did.”

  “All right, how’s this,” Winn said. “Even if you apologize, it doesn’t mean the accident was entirely your fault. I’ll just take it as a gesture of friendship.”

  Otis stuck his jaw forward, making his face even more bulldoggish. “I’m a friendly guy,” he said. “I don’t really think I owe you an apology, but if you’d like me to apologize, I will.”

  “Okay,” Winn said, “I would like you to apologize.”

  “I just did.”

  Winn stared at him in wonderment. “Hey,” Otis said, sitting in the grass beside him. “Hey, you look really pale.” He took one of Winn’s hands and rubbed it briskly between his own. “Here, put your head between your knees.” He pressed Winn’s neck downward. “Deep breath, buddy.”

  “Have I lost that much blood?” Winn asked. “Where is Biddy?” He lifted his head, and Otis gently pushed it back down.

  “You haven’t lost enough to fill a thimble. You’re feeling the shock.”

  “I’ve lost more than that.”

  Otis gave a little puff of laughter, and Winn smelled the warm stable smell of his breath again. “You’re probably from New York.”

  “Connecticut,” said Winn. “I work in the city. But I’ve been coming here for fifty years. Since I was a kid. Back when it was a rough old fishing village. It wasn’t fancy at all.”

  “Yeah.” Otis took his hand off Winn’s neck. “I was born here.”

  Winn said nothing. They sat. In the distance, the ocean was mottled with cloud shadows. One of the things he loved about the island was the sensation of being inside an envelope of sea and sky, how the horizon was a clearly ruled line between one thing and another, entirely different thing. “Do you know Jack Fenn?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Otis said. “Great guy.”

  The familiar shape of the Land Rover shot past. There was a squeak of brakes, and Biddy reversed onto the shoulder. She came toward him over the grass, tall and lean, crisp as a white sail on a blue sea. “You,” she said, touching his head with one finger, “are a real Hazzard!” Biddy had never lost the habit of her old family joke, nor had her sisters, even though it had been decades since any of them had been Hazzards. “Hello,” she said to Otis.

  “This is Otis Derringer,” Winn said. “My assailant.”

  Otis wiped his fingers on his pants before shaking Biddy’s hand. “Sorry. I’ve got a little bit of blood on my hands.”

  “Coming from you that means a lot, Otis,” Winn said.

  Otis hesitated, pinching his lip again and giving it a little twist. Then he said, “If anyone asks, I apologized.”

  After a pause, Winn said, “Like hell.”

  Biddy looked back and forth between the men, alert and friendly. “Come on, ducky,” she said to Winn finally, offering him her hand.

  Because Winn was woozy and the ground soft and uneven, he was of little help to Biddy. The pain, too, was considerable, and each time he put pressure on his injured leg, more blood trickled out of the wound and down into his sock.

  “The muffins,” he said, pointing at the bag where it lay.

  “Let’s get you first.” Biddy turned to Otis. “Would you mind helping him?”

  Winn thought Otis would only take his other arm, but, to his shock, the caddy knelt in the grass and lifted him up. Winn had not been carried since he was a child, and he would never have expected to find himself cradled in the massive arms of a man with breath like a hayloft. He heard himself whimpe
r. Craning his head around Otis’s shoulder, he said Biddy’s name. She was standing motionless, an astonished hand over her mouth.

  Eleven · Flesh Wounds

  The whale was dead, long dead. It had died at sea and drifted in, relatively unmolested by sharks, nudged up onto the beach during the night. A fisherman discovered it at dawn. From passersby Livia had learned it was a sperm whale, but no one could tell her how big it was or if it was male or female or how it had died. Francis was the only one who wanted to come with her to see it, and they walked up the beach together toward an outcropping that made a narrow point. A man coming the opposite direction on an ATV told them they would find the whale on the other side. Couldn’t miss it. Smelled worse than they could possibly imagine. While lying on her towel, Livia had gotten the impression of a steady flow of human traffic heading to the point, but as they walked and left behind the popular section of the swimming beach, they found themselves alone, trudging along beside a crumbling bluff. Occasional wooden staircases built into its sandy face led up to the houses Jack Fenn was trying to save from the ocean.

  Livia found herself in a bleak mood. She wondered what Sterling was doing, why he hadn’t come to the beach—was he avoiding her? She was curious to know how he would have acted. Maybe he would have come with her to see the whale instead of Francis. Maybe they would have paused to sit and kiss on one of these wooden staircases—the thought made her stomach roil with pleasure and anxiety, churning up acidic dregs of liquor.

  Francis wore large, square, cheap black plastic sunglasses and had a Sanskrit tattoo on his shoulder. She had never seen him without his shirt before, and he was stockier than she would have imagined, and hairier.

  “I can’t believe no one else wanted to come,” she said.

  “You probably wish Sterling were here.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not every day you get to see a whale. I would have thought everyone would want to come. But heaven forbid anything should interrupt their pleasant day at the beach. Why go see something dead when you can stay where you are and play paddleball?”

  “Absolutely,” said Francis. “I’m with you on that. Whales aren’t totally my thing, but I see this as a chance for a real experience. I’m trying to be spiritually open to the world.”

  “Right,” Livia said, not sure what he meant. “I mean, this island wouldn’t exist without sperm whales. We all hang wooden whales on our walls and wear whale pants and have whale-tail door knockers and put stainless-steel kitchens in old whaling captains’ houses, but given the chance to stand in the presence of a real flesh-and-blubber whale, we lose interest.”

  “I was wearing whale pants last night,” Francis said, “but ironically.”

  “Sterling said his seersucker was ironic, too.”

  “So he stole my joke, and then he stole you.”

  She had been hoping he would choose to forget his halfhearted attempt on her. “I think your approach to irony might be a little off,” she said. “If everyone expects you to wear seersucker or little whales, and then you do, how is that ironic?”

  He looked at her over his sunglasses. “Why did you choose Sterling? I’m not really mad. I’m just curious.”

  “Francis, you weren’t serious. You don’t have feelings for me.”

  “How do you know? Don’t laugh. Whether I do or not is beside the point. My question is, what’s wrong with me? What makes him more attractive? Because he is. I know that. Even though I’m arguably better looking and probably a better person.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you. I just don’t feel that kind of connection with you.”

  “But you do with Sterling.”

  “I don’t know. I did last night.”

  “Hmm.” Francis walked along in silence. The farther they walked, the less protected the shore became, and blowing sand stung Livia’s shins. “It’s funny how families work,” he said. “Sterling and I are a lot alike, actually. We both have contemplative natures. We’re both drawn to the Far East. But Sterling doesn’t have any kind of belief system, and he’s depressed all the time. I channel my dark thoughts into bettering myself, which explains why I’m a serial monogamist while Sterling—no offense—will sleep with anything. If you want my two cents, you should steer clear of him.”

  “Those aren’t the first two cents I’ve been given today.” Truth be told, she didn’t mind the family gossiping about her and Sterling. If she couldn’t be cool and aloof like Dominique, then she might as well be thought of as a little impetuous, a little wanton, a bit of a man-eater. In her experience, people in a group envied the ones among them who managed to pair off. Even if they criticized a choice of partner or pretended to disapprove of flings in general, most people would rather be the ones fumbling in the dark and then reemerging, sheepish and smug, than the ones who got tired and washed their faces and went to bed just like on any other night. Plus, now she had proven she could move on from Teddy.

  Livia stooped to pick up a pumpkin-colored scallop shell. She turned it over in her fingers and then tossed it away. That morning she had woken in darkness, chilled and shivering. The tide had come up, and her feet were wet. Reaching for Sterling, she found only cold sand. A wavelet washed over her feet, and she felt afraid and profoundly alone, about to be swept away. But then she had scrambled to her feet and tripped over Sterling, who groaned and said he was fucking freezing.

  Francis kept talking. “Sterling acts like this jaded renegade, but he’s not. If anyone is, it’s me. I don’t know how he gets away with all the shit he pulls and yet I’m the family whipping boy.” The first putrid whiff arrived on a gust of wind, and he threw his bicep over his nose. “Oh, Jesus, did you smell that?”

  “If you weighed forty tons and died, you’d smell bad, too.”

  “Why do you love them?”

  “Who?”

  “Whales.”

  “I don’t know.” He wasn’t the first to ask, but she didn’t understand why she was supposed to know the answer. Why did anyone love anything?

  “You must have some idea.”

  She shook her head. “It’s something about their being so big. It makes me sad, how big they are. They’re rare enough that every time I see one I get a thrill. I think they’re beautiful. How can you not love them? They’re fascinating. Did you know they hunt as a team? Humpbacks herd fish by making clicking sounds and blowing bubble nets.”

  “Yeah? Wild.”

  “It is wild.” She thought of the dense, silvery ball of confused fish packed tight together, the lucky eaters rocketing up from underneath with their mouths open wide, yawning portals to the underworld. The whales’ throats, ribbed like elastic, bulged with fish and seawater, billowing from the sloshing and swimming going on inside. When, she wondered, did the herring know that they were not in a new, darker sea but inside another animal? Or were herring too stupid to know that they were being eaten? She thought probably all things knew when they were being eaten.

  “I heard about Teddy joining up,” Francis said, his voice high and thin because he was pinching his nose. “That must be hard.”

  “He can do what he wants.”

  “Sure. You know, in a way I envy you. You really seem to feel things. I’m never sure I’m experiencing genuine emotion because I’m always wondering if I’m only feeling what I think I should be feeling. If that makes any sense.”

  “I guess so.” The smell of the whale was beginning to make her sick.

  “Do you still love him?” Francis persisted. It was another familiar question with an answer that eluded her.

  “No,” she said.

  “What made you stop loving him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe exhaustion.”

  She wondered when she would stop loving Teddy. Before him, she had loved only her mother, her father, and her sister, and love was something to be tamped down beneath decorum. Her father, returning home from work when she was already in her nightgown, hair damp from her bath, would catch her by the shoulders as she ran t
o embrace him and, holding her safely at arm’s length, stoop to kiss her cheek with his dry lips. On the occasions she managed to sneak up on him and hug his legs or waist, her arms were gently detached and the kiss administered from a polite distance. Eventually, she learned what Daphne seemed to have been born knowing: he was happiest if she did not grapple with him but presented herself like a soldier with a stalwart cheek and waited for him to bend to her. As a child, despite her profound girliness, Daphne had not been one for physical affection or declarations of love—those were things she learned, like algebra, at prep school. Livia’s mother was the warmest of the bunch, responding to her “I love you’s” in kind (not with her father’s “All right, dear’s”) and waking her for school with a brisk but gentle rub of her back as if brushing her clean of snow.

  After Daphne had left for her first year at Deerfield, there had been a period of two or three weeks when Livia would come home from school and her mother would take her onto her lap in a deep, plaid armchair and hold her for a whole, silent hour, stroking her hair while they looked out the window at birds and squirrels in the summer-green trees. The first invitation surprised Livia, who was used to being left to her own devices in the afternoons. She had perched gingerly on her mother’s narrow lap, only gradually settling back against her shoulder, letting the tan arms encircle her, breathing the neutral, soapy smell of Biddy’s skin, the sharp hint of bleach from her shirt. Not since the womb had she had her mother so much to herself, nor had she been given such access to the rhythms of her body—the resolute beating of her heart, the swelling of her lungs—and she absorbed them hungrily, her voluptuous pleasure colored with anxiety because the prolonged quiet closeness, never discussed between them or mentioned to her father or Daphne, seemed somehow illicit. Then one day, when the first leaves were turning yellow, Biddy did not go to the armchair but gave Livia her snack in the kitchen and went upstairs by herself, signaling that their time of indulgence had run its course.