Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  “Sometimes love just ends,” Francis said authoritatively. “Also, I wanted to say, about what I said last night about Hannah’s breasts being too big—I didn’t mean to sound shallow. I would hate for you to think of me that way. Like Hannah was only breasts to me.”

  “I think you said tits.”

  “Spiritually, Hannah and I were all wrong for each other. If she had been the one, I think I would have known. But I also know I’m afraid of opening up and letting myself be vulnerable to another person, so I made everything about her tits.” He was addressing the side of Livia’s head as she walked. “I like talking to you,” he said. “Other girls can be so judgmental, but I feel like I can tell you anything and you’ll understand. You’re very compassionate. Maybe because you’ve been through hard things, too—you don’t have to talk about it, but I know all about what happened.”

  Livia walked faster, trying to hurry him along, but he hung back, forcing her to slow. “Can’t we talk about something else?” she said. “Something a little lighter?”

  “Sure. I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you. Another reason I like you is that I think we have similar roles in our families. We’re the critical ones. We represent a threat to their way of life, a new order.”

  A loose gang of seagulls hung in the air on the other side of the point, circling and diving, croaking at one another. They were picking at the whale, Livia knew. Far above, a trio of turkey vultures carved slow spirals. Watching the birds, she said, “Yeah, Sterling told me about the trouble you got in at school.”

  He stopped. “What trouble?”

  She felt tense ripple of pleasure at getting a rise out of him. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “What trouble?”

  “Sterling said you almost didn’t get to go to Princeton.”

  “I never cheated.” He aimed his big, square sunglasses at her. “Those other kids were lying. They were jealous.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Never mind. It’s none of my business.”

  “I deserved to go to Princeton. I earned it.” He was wheedling, almost begging.

  “Okay,” Livia said again. “I’m sorry. I had no right to say what I did.”

  “That’s true.” He punched her lightly, cheerfully on the arm. “Hey,” he said with hard brightness, “you know, I’ve heard Teddy’s slept with half of New York since word got out about the army. Apparently, the old wisdom is true about girls and uniforms.”

  She gaped at him and then turned and hurried down the beach, struggling in the deep sand. The smell of the whale was getting worse, and as she started panting from her efforts, gasping in the foul air, her stomach turned. Francis was coming after her. “I’m sorry,” he called. “I’m an asshole. Livia. Please. It’s just that I’m not good with rejection.”

  Breaking into a jog, she reached the tip of the point, where the currents came together and made a seam in the ocean. An alcoholic vapor came into her nose, and her mouth filled with saliva, and she knew she was about to puke, which she did, splashing into the water and retching a thin green liquid into the foam. She had skipped breakfast.

  Francis waited on the beach while she rinsed her mouth with salt water. She walked heavily back toward him and when she was close enough said, “Please just shut up.”

  To her surprise, he obeyed and followed a docile two steps behind as she started walking again. In the quiet, her guts still cramping, she wondered if what he really wanted was for some girl, maybe her, to get all suited up in black leather and slap his ass with a whip and make him lick her feet. She wasn’t good with rejection either. She thought of herself at the Ophidian party, shouting and spilling her counterfeit vodka, and she cringed.

  In a minute they rounded the point, and the whale appeared, not far down the beach. A crowd of people and Jeeps surrounded it, and seagulls bombarded from above, but Livia saw only the whale, an onyx teardrop, a great black river rock.

  “Oh,” she said, awestruck, putting her hands over her heart.

  “Fucking Christ,” said Francis, “that’s a smell.”

  The stink of the whale was powerful, gummy, almost tangible. The wind was depositing particles of decay on her clothes and skin, but Livia did not mind. Her nausea had stabilized into something endurable. The whale’s fluke, flat on the sand like a giant discarded spade, filled her with pity.

  THE LAST TIME Biddy remembered waiting in an emergency room was when Livia was fifteen and home for Christmas and had passed through the swinging galley door into the kitchen, where Daphne was attempting to bake a red velvet cake. Livia had become incensed at something Daphne said or did, and a mysterious tussle occurred, at the end of which Livia came running back out through the door with a deep gash in her left thumb. She told them the wound was self-inflicted and accidental, but still she had seemed to cast a glowering blame at her sister and at the meaty hearts of all red velvet cakes. That waiting room and the waiting room where Biddy now sat beside Winn, his injured leg propped up on a chair, were nearly identical—the same linoleum, the same vinyl chairs, the same isopropyl tang in the air. All waiting rooms were essentially the same, not really places in themselves as much as rehearsals for purgatory. On the opposite wall hung a large framed photo of an orange crab held by its claws, its pale belly facing the camera, jointed legs flexed in outrage. A television showing the weather hung high in a corner; a grim-looking ficus tree sheltered beneath it. At the juncture of two hallways, a seen-it-all receptionist with a pencil in her hair reigned over a high, curved desk cluttered with papers.

  The chairs were sparsely occupied. Biddy turned Winn’s wrist so she could look at his watch. Only twelve fifteen, still early in the day for summer injuries. Midafternoon and early evening were probably the prime hours for heads to be koshed by yardarms and softballs, fishhooks to go astray, shucking knives to slip. A young couple waited in seats near the receptionist’s desk. The woman looked green around the gills and was gazing dolefully into an empty plastic grocery bag she held on her lap while the man, who wore a sun visor, rubbed her back and stared at the television. Presently the woman stood and bolted for the bathroom, one hand clapped over her mouth, and the man watched her go with wistful resignation, as though she were a wayward balloon. An old woman and a small boy sat beside the ficus tree, not talking, neither with any obvious injury or malady. The boy’s hair was parted in a severe white line down the middle of his skull, and he was dressed in an oddly old-fashioned way: shorts, kneesocks and brown lace-up bucks. Biddy thought he looked like he should be rolling a hoop down a Berlin street beneath zeppelin-crossed skies. The only other patient was a lanky, gray-haired man in pants the color of Pepto-Bismol. He had a bloody bandage over one eye and was standing in the mouth of one of the hallways practicing his golf swing. Over and over he squared up at an imaginary tee and, focusing with cycloptic malevolence on an invisible ball, torqued back at the waist and then whipped through his stroke, ending with his hands up behind his head and one toe pointed balletically on the linoleum while he gazed down the hall at an illuminated sign that said “NO SMOKING.”

  Flipping through a magazine about home décor, Biddy paused at a spread on a beach house in the Hamptons. Sand and salt grass, a blue swimming pool, rooms with no one in them. “Don’t read that,” Winn said, peering over her shoulder. “You’ll want a new kitchen.”

  “I’ll risk it,” Biddy said, not looking up.

  “Those magazines only exist to foment discontent.”

  She turned a page. “Let them eat cake.”

  “I wonder what those Pequod folks will think when they hear about this,” he said, hoisting up his leg and turning it so she could get a good look. The caddy’s handkerchief, stiff and stained brown in spots, still bound the wound. “Talk about adding injury to insult. They’re probably already worrying about whether or not I’m going to sue. This might turn out to be a nice bit of leverage, when you think about it.”

  He frowned out at the waiting room. The vomiting girl return
ed from the bathroom. The golfer, wary of interference, waited for her to sit before settling into his stance.

  Biddy studied her husband’s profile, his graying eyebrows and thin lips, the chin that concerned him so. Had she only dreamt that they made love in the early morning? After she nearly drowned herself? Her exhaustion had made her brief sleep heavy and thick with dreams. She thought it really had happened, unlikely as that was, but she was too embarrassed to ask him. From the beginning of her romantic life, back when she was a quiet, good-looking, well-liked girl going out with the most staid, earnest sons of her father’s friends, she had accepted that men would not be changed. The boys she danced with at the boat club would never, she knew, turn into men who excited her, nor would their polite hands ever stir her passion. Really, until she went to bed with Winn, she had not experienced anything like passion, but she had known it existed and known she wanted it. Funny that he was the one who lit her up—he was nothing like the exotic lovers she read about in her mother’s stash of risqué novels. Although, admittedly, he was known as a bit of a tail chaser, and since the tail-chasing men never came after her (she supposed she didn’t strike them as a good bet), his reputation gave her a thrill.

  He had sought her out through the crowd of mourners after his father’s funeral; at first she had thought he’d mistaken her for someone else. She remembered his eyes, lit with purpose, finding her among all those black hats and black shoulders, coming closer and closer until he was there shaking her hand and asking her to dinner while she was simultaneously offering her condolences. The very strangeness of his interest had flattered her. How alluring she must be to distract a man from grieving for his own father. How irresistible her sex appeal must be to drive away the pall of death. Her thrill lasted through their first dinner and the ones after that, through their first amorous skirmishes, persisted even after she realized that he was yet another man pursuing her not for fun but with a mind to long-term investment. Occasionally, they ran into some girl or other whom Winn had taken out before her, and those girls thrilled Biddy, too, the way they tried to flirt past her, to get him to betray her by showing some interest, which sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t.

  She knew her tolerance was unusual, but she couldn’t help the way she was. Just like Winn couldn’t help the way he was. “Does it hurt?” she asked, pointing at his leg.

  “Of course it hurts.”

  “Poor dear.” She looked down at her magazine, at a long, empty picnic table between two rows of olive trees somewhere in Spain, set for twelve people. “I couldn’t believe,” she said, “how that man lifted you. Like you were nothing.” His silence in the car had told her he thought a great indignity had been done to him, but she had felt only wonder at the sight of her husband cradled in another man’s arms. She wished he could have seen himself, witnessed the abject confusion on his own face. When he had said her name, it had been the tremulous query of a child seeking reassurance in the night.

  Winn folded his arms over his chest and said, “That was very inappropriate, very intrusive. I’m very troubled that he did that. I’ll be mentioning it to the Pequod as well. You can’t go around picking people up like that.”

  “I think he was trying to help. I asked him to. He wasn’t”—she lowered her voice—“molesting you. I don’t think he’s the brightest bulb in the box.”

  Winn fiddled with the knot in Otis’s handkerchief. “Let’s change the subject,” he said.

  A nurse in lavender scrubs appeared with a clipboard. The vomiting woman looked up hopefully. “Chamberlain,” said the nurse. The boy in the kneesocks and his companion stood and followed her back into the innards of the hospital. The vomiter rested her head on her knees. The golfer whistled softly as he drove another ball toward a green that only he could see.

  “What would you like to talk about?” Biddy asked.

  “I’m thinking,” said Winn, “that maybe I should call Jack Fenn and let him know what the situation is. That seems like the fair thing to do, given that he’s one of the people responsible for the reputation of this club. I think he might like to know that his caddies are going around maiming people without apologizing and picking them up without invitation.”

  Biddy paused before she answered to make sure her tone stayed light and friendly. She didn’t want to give Winn something to push against. “To be honest,” she said, “I don’t think Jack will feel personally responsible.”

  “My leg is just something else to put on his tab.” He fixed his eyes on the photo of the orange crab as though feeling a kinship with it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, after that whole business”—Winn rolled his hand in an etc., etc. motion—“in the winter, with Livia, the Fenns owe us.”

  “Oh, Winn, that’s insane.”

  “No, it certainly is not. Livia’s procedure cost five hundred dollars. Not to mention the damage done to her reputation.”

  “You can’t exploit your daughter’s private life to worm your way into a golf club.”

  “She didn’t keep it private, did she, and I shouldn’t have to worm my way into anything. This whole situation is ridiculous. Untenable. You know, Dicky and Maude seemed to know something.”

  Unable to hide her exasperation, Biddy said, “I don’t think there’s a conspiracy against you, Winn. And Dicky and Maude said Jack Fenn isn’t the problem. To be honest, I have trouble believing that with Teddy about to leave for boot camp Jack is giving either you or the Pequod much thought.”

  “Another poor decision from that boy. I could have kept Teddy out of the Ophidian, you know. Maybe I should have. He’s sure turning out to be a chip off the old block. Jack was so self-righteous about the whole army thing. Jack Fenn the hero, Jack Fenn the brave. I guess Teddy needs something to lord over everyone, too. You would have thought he would have been happy enough to get in the Ophidian after Jack didn’t. Good for the Fenns. They’re just very, very impressive, the whole bunch of them.”

  Biddy could see Winn’s emotions beginning to spin off their reel, something that happened so rarely she had never learned how to stop him from unraveling entirely. He glared around, his lips pressed together as though in defiance of some insidious antagonism buried in the pale hospital walls, the pronged silhouette of the ficus tree, the slow whirligig golfer, the wraiths of weather-report storm clouds swirling over the television. She disliked men when they pouted, and her sympathy silently and invisibly abandoned him, her early morning dream of lovemaking forgotten and replaced by a vision of him as a golf club pariah, a tantrum thrower, a man of so little heft that another man could lift him up and pack him away in a car without the slightest strain.

  “Klausman,” the purple nurse said. The golfer, who had moved on to perfecting his putt, raised a hand in acknowledgment and followed her. The vomiting girl watched them disappear with a castaway’s desolation. She buried her face in her hands. Her boyfriend continued polishing her hunched back with light, circular, reassuring strokes. A new nurse appeared. “Van Meter,” she said.

  “Finally,” Winn murmured, pushing himself up. Biddy rose, too, but he shook his head at her. “Wait here.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, still standing.

  “Very sure.” He hobbled after the nurse, past the weeping girl and her plastic bag, and disappeared down a long, pale hallway of many doors.

  LIVIA WALKED a slow circuit around the whale. From a distance it looked black, but up close she could see its skin had deteriorated to a mottled reddish gray and was marked all over with white scratches and scars, mementoes of a life spent tangling with sharp-beaked squid. It lay on its left side with its belly facing inland. Its right pectoral fin was swollen into a useless flap, a pathetic tab stuck to the bloated side of an immense dark balloon. Half a dozen men in foul-weather gear had begun to peel away the skin and blubber. The whale could not be left to rot on the sand. Thirty or forty tons of fat, meat, and briny offal could not be left to erode according to nature’s sluggish tim
etable when there were summer beachgoers to be kept happy. Probably the museum in Waskeke Town would want the skeleton—they had one already but why not another—and the bones could not be had without digging them out of the oily flesh. The men were sweating and cursing, spattered with particles of the leviathan. It looked like hard work, flensing, but they had made progress. Wide tracts of blubber were exposed along the whale’s side. A cutter in yellow overalls stood on top of the animal, bracing his rubber boots against the slippery skin and leaning on the long handle of his knife (an antique borrowed from the museum) to push the blade through dense strata of fat. A bulldozer, Livia overheard people saying, was coming to help bury the pieces.

  Below the massive, blocky head, the whale’s jaw hung open—long and narrow and studded with conical teeth—and Livia peered into the odiferous cave of its mouth. In its upper jaw there were no teeth, only sockets. The opening to its throat was surprisingly small, no grand, fishy portal leading to a ribbed and lightless cathedral with room for Geppetto and Jonah. It was a female, and she wondered how many calves it had produced, how far it had ranged. Sperm whales dove thousands of feet to feed in total darkness. They could hold their breath for an hour, dive at five hundred feet per minute, slow their metabolisms, collapse their lungs, tolerate huge amounts of lactic acid as their muscles burned through stored oxygen. They allowed cold water into their nasal passages so the oily spermaceti in their heads turned from liquid to solid, helping them descend. They were, in all ways, miraculous diving machines.