“Good lord!” said Biddy. “What could have happened?”
Before Biddy had time to park, Dicky Sr. waved out the window of the white car, gave a cheerful toot of the horn, and sailed off down the driveway, leaving Livia alone. “Stop,” Winn said to Biddy, opening his door. “Just stop here.”
She jolted the Land Rover into park. “I’m stopping, I’m stopping.”
Winn slid from his seat in a hurry and landed awkwardly on his bad leg. “Damn!” he said at the squirt of pain. He limped toward Livia. “What in God’s name happened?”
“A whale exploded on me. What happened to you?”
“A golf cart hit me. A whale?”
She told the whole story while Biddy made exclamations of surprise and Winn looked her over for damage. She seemed fine, if grimy and sandy and odiferous. The ends of her ponytail clumped together like the bristles of a dirty paintbrush. The way Livia looked, the general gruesome mess of her, reminded him of something, but he couldn’t place it.
When she had finished, he said, “Let me make sure I have this straight. You heard there was a dead whale on the beach. You decided you wanted to see it.”
Livia nodded. “Yes.”
“You left your sister behind and walked around the point. You—” He stopped. Ordinarily, he would have repeated the whole story back to her to make sure he had the facts pinned to their proper places in their proper drawers, but his head ached and his leg ached and his usual routine seemed too arduous to bother with.
“Livia,” Biddy said, holding hesitant fingers above her daughter’s hair, “you look just like you did on the day you were born.”
That was it, the thing Winn had been reminded of: Livia as a newborn. He saw her emerging into that tub, underwater like a drowned thing, and then being lifted into the air, bloodied and shrieking, the crimson cloud drifting from between Biddy’s legs, the doctor saying C’est une fille. A more recent memory intruded: he was pacing the front hall of the Connecticut house, waiting for Livia and Biddy to come home from getting it taken care of, and he watched out the window as the car appeared and Livia slid out of the front seat and retched into the flower beds.
“But,” he said, “no major harm done? Everyone’s fine?”
“Well.” She hesitated. “A guy got a shard of bone stuck in his shoulder.”
“What guy?”
“An island guy. An ambulance was there when we left.”
He kneaded his forehead with two fingers. His headache was thriving. “Is there anything I need to do about any of it? Is Francis getting arrested?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Fine then.” He turned to Biddy. “Where are the other girls? The bridesmaids?”
“I don’t know. If they’re not here they’re still out doing makeup practice or getting their nails done—I can’t remember.”
“Makeup practice? Seems extravagant.”
“Well,” Biddy said, “it’s what people do for weddings, Winn.” And off she went, around the side of the house.
Livia looked after her. “Is Mom mad?”
He reached to pat her on the back but stopped short. “Come with me to the garage. I want to bring over some more wine now that the locusts have come and gone.”
“Dad, I’m dying to shower.”
“First we’ll do this, and then of course you’ll use the outdoor shower.”
“Dad.”
“First we’ll do this.”
An exhausted stupor had begun to overtake him, sweeping like a thunderhead after his retreating adrenaline, but he would outrun it. He set off at as rapid a limp as he could manage, following the driveway through the trees to the garage. “Take it easy, Ahab,” Livia said behind him. Usually, he would have gone in at the side door, but he wanted to make a large physical gesture to fight off his grogginess, and he seized the handle of the big up-and-over garage door and heaved.
A moment passed before he understood what he was looking at. In the dusky cave he had so theatrically thrown open were two figures. One figure, really. A mangled centaur: Agatha, naked, on all fours, and Sterling Duff rearing up behind her, also naked, kneeling on an unzipped pink sleeping bag that had belonged to one of the girls. They froze, blinking at the light like animals surprised in their den, and then there was a flurry of covering hands and futile scrambling. Winn stood and watched them. He suspected that later he would feel something about all this, but he also knew that, at the moment, he was too tired to jump and exclaim and hide his eyes. He gazed at Agatha’s bare breasts, her hairless body. Behind her bobbed Sterling’s pale bulk and embarrassing erection. When the two of them finally settled down and were standing side by side like Adam and Eve, shielding themselves with the sleeping bag, Winn said, “I just came for some wine.” He limped past them back to the corner where cases of wine were stacked beside the old refrigerator. Dry black strands of something were scattered on the cement floor—seaweed, but why? He picked up a box of reds and, turning to tell Livia to come get a few whites out of the fridge, was rewarded instead with the sight of Sterling’s and Agatha’s asses: Sterling’s white and flat, Agatha’s round and tan. Livia had vanished. He had not noticed her go. He had only a vague, peripheral memory of her bolting away before the door was even all the way up. What had happened between her and Sterling? He could guess. He didn’t want to guess. The wine was too heavy for him. Wobbling on his bad leg, he set the box down with a clank. Sterling turned so he and Agatha stood back to back, rolled by the sleeping bag into a kind of burrito.
“I can get that,” Sterling said.
Winn tore open the box and pulled out two bottles. “Bring the rest when you come in,” he said. “No hurry.” Without looking at Agatha, he stumped out of the garage and back to the house.
“LOOK WHO’S HERE!” Biddy exclaimed in the kitchen. She was at the sink washing strawberries. Winn, clutching the wine bottles like two clubs, thought at first she was talking about him, not to him, until he realized the eldest Hazzard sister, Tabitha, had arrived and was sitting in the breakfast nook with Celeste. Celeste had a glass of something in front of her; Tabitha was drinking orange juice through a straw so as not to disrupt the precise vermillion lacquer on her lips. “Hello, Tabitha!” he said, bending to kiss her cheek. “Celeste.”
Biddy brushed past him and sat down with her sisters, setting a bowl of strawberries in the center of the table. Celeste took one. “Biddy was just telling us how you were maimed,” she said. “Poor thing. Shouldn’t you be getting off your feet?”
“You’re a real Hazzard!” declared Tabitha.
“I’m fine,” Winn said, setting down the wine.
“And a caddy scooped you up?” Celeste’s face was unreadable, but he thought they had probably been laughing at him.
He turned on Biddy. “Why did you tell them?”
“Was it a secret?” she said, not meeting his eyes.
Tabitha, a practiced changer of subjects, said, “Are you sure you’re feeling well?”
“I’m sure.” He did feel okay, if fuzzy around the edges. He leaned against the counter and looked them over. He had always enjoyed comparing Biddy to her sisters because he liked to be reminded that he’d gotten the best one. On the level of basic armature, the three women were almost identical, all tall and spare with long, elegant bones and an innate economy of movement. They had pointed chins, thin, tan, deliberate fingers, and wrists that expressed queries through small, tidy swivels. As young women they had shared a scrubbed, athletic, flat-chested look, but Celeste had gone to Switzerland for her fortieth birthday and returned with buoyant, inviting, unsettling breasts. Without intervention, Tabitha and Celeste would have had the same two vertical lines between their brows as Biddy did and the same friendly deltas of crow’s feet, but temperament and divorce and lovers had left the elder sisters wealthy and discontented and their foreheads immobilized. Biddy, though she complained about her skin and was touchy about the secret gray cores of her sensibly dyed brown hairs, had elected, wi
th Winn’s encouragement, to face the degradations of age with a minimum of fuss. She wore sunscreen but little makeup, and since her skin was naturally olive and resilient, the effect was not of neglect but of cleanliness and practicality. He would not have had her any other way and told her so, discouraging her from messing around with her disused stash of blushes and lipsticks, but sometimes still she spoke wistfully of her sisters’ visits to doctors in Europe and the Caribbean and their pricey treasure troves of unguents and creams.
“Is something bothering Livia?” Tabitha asked. “She flew through here a minute ago. She didn’t even stop to say hello. I wanted to hear about the whale.”
“She was supposed to shower outside,” Winn said, “not come in here.”
“Did you have an argument?” Biddy asked. She would not have asked in front of anyone but her sisters, and yet he deplored discussing anything of significance in front of them.
“No, we didn’t have an argument.”
“Well, why was she upset?”
“I don’t know. She’s Livia. Tabitha, how is Dryden?”
“Oh,” Tabitha said, “you know. He’s fine. Busy. He’s here—on the island—but as soon as the ferry docked he had to go meet friends for drinks. Gone, just like that. He knows everyone everywhere. Do you think I should go check on Livia?”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Winn said breezily.
Celeste’s face was stretched with curiosity. “You’re hiding something,” she said. “Out with it, Winn.”
Under normal circumstances, he would have resisted longer, at least long enough to tell Biddy in private first, but he had no stamina for the usual thrust and parry with the Hazzards. “I suppose you’ll find out anyway,” he said. “We went to the garage to get wine, and we found Agatha and Sterling …” He gritted his teeth, unable to finish the sentence.
“In flagrante?” Celeste asked.
Winn tilted his head, half a nod.
“No!” Biddy said. “Really?”
“Who are Agatha and Sterling?” asked Tabitha.
Celeste clapped her hands. “Now we’ve got a wedding.”
“No,” Winn said. “A wedding is not an excuse for bad behavior.”
“Who are Agatha and Sterling?” Tabitha asked again.
“You’ve met Agatha,” Biddy said. “She’s Daphne’s friend from Deerfield. Pretty girl.”
“Ah,” Tabitha said archly. “That one.”
“This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen,” said Winn.
“Lighten up, Winnifred,” said Celeste. “Don’t be such a prig.”
Biddy said, “And Sterling is Greyson’s oldest brother.”
“Oh.” Tabitha looked unimpressed, as if Winn had said they’d been discovered playing table tennis. “What did you do?” she asked him.
“I told them to bring in some wine when they were done.”
“That was nice of you,” Biddy said lightly, “to let them finish.”
Uncertain if she was alluding to the interruptus of their morning, he scrutinized her for signs of irony, but she was selecting a strawberry from the bowl and did not look up. Celeste gave him a look that was knowing but not unkind. He frowned at her. So far he felt only an analytical interest in what he had seen. There had been something Olympian about the sight of them, something archetypal: man and woman mating amongst the spiderwebs, amid swirls of dust. There were three Agathas: the one in his fantasies, the one whose body he had kissed and probed, and the one he had just seen naked head to toe, giving herself to a greedy, bumbling, grasping, haplessly engorged male intruder.
“What did Livia do?” Celeste asked.
“She took off,” said Winn. “Tabitha, how was your trip over?”
“Poor thing,” said Celeste.
Biddy looked perplexed. “You mean Livia? Why poor thing?”
Celeste leaned in a conspiratorial way across the table, one coral-nailed hand gripping the edge. “As the kids say, last night Livia and Sterling hooked up.”
SAM SNEAD, the wedding planner, pulled open the screen door (“DO NOT SLAM,” it instructed her) and peered down the hallway. She heard voices from the direction of the kitchen. “Yoo-hoo!” she called. The talking stopped. “Yoo-hoo!”
Biddy called, “In the kitchen! Come on in!”
Sam Snead was not a resurrection of the great dead golfer but a woman named Samantha who had married a man named Snead. She was never known as Samantha or as Mrs. Snead but was someone whose first and last names had become permanently fused and so was only ever referred to as Sam Snead. The absurd label hung over her like a pseudonym although she preferred to think her name had not robbed her of self but given her the gift of inherent branding. She was not Sam Snead the woman; she was Sam Snead®, Elite Wedding Planner. She had considered keeping her maiden name (Rabinowitz) but in the end had decided to shrug her shoulders, find the silver lining (many of her clients had a deep fondness for Sam Snead the golfer and less for people named Rabinowitz), and make do, which, as she told her clients, was how she handled all crises and embarrassments and why she was an excellent and very expensive wedding planner.
The first thing she noticed was the bandage on Mr. Van Meter’s leg and the grubby state of his tennis whites. “Dearheart, your leg! What happened to you?”
Something was afoot in the kitchen. While Mr. Van Meter explained—some business with a bicycle and a golf cart—she kept her face bright and friendly and nodded to show she was listening but studied the group with her expert eye. His leg aside, Mr. Van Meter looked distinctly the worse for wear. He had shadows under his bloodshot eyes and was smeared with blood and dirt. The others, the women, looked evasive, like they’d been caught gossiping. Sam Snead hadn’t gotten to be where she was in the wedding-planning world by being insensitive to human discord. How many disasters had she prevented over the years, how many abandonments? How many cold feet had she warmed with rosy talk about future and family and non-refundable deposits? Too many to count. Perhaps, too, she had aided and abetted a few mistakes, but she didn’t know the statistics because she didn’t like to follow up with her couples. She liked to wave them off on their honeymoon and then never see them again except as a pair of names atop her final invoice.
When Mr. Van Meter finished, she said, “Well then, Father-of-the-Bride, the question is, can you walk the length of an aisle? And if you can’t, can we drug you up so you can?”
“I’m fine,” he said. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, and his manner was less prim and prickly than usual. He would bear watching.
“Wonderful!” she said. “Now, listen, Mother-of-the-Bride, I know you told me you didn’t want to do anything once you were on-island, but do you have the seating charts? Tomorrow’s, and then also the one from Maude for tonight? Because I’m about to whisk tonight’s over to the restaurant if you have it. You do? Wonderful. Homework is done, then, nothing left to do but enjoy, enjoy. Oh, look what you’ve done, clever girl. Perfect. Perfect. Thank you.” She took the seating charts from Biddy, tucked them away in her woven-leather tote bag, and pulled out a cloth-bound planner. “All right, time for a briefing. Currently, it is three thirty. Guests have been arriving all day. No new cancellations that I’m aware of. The wedding party needs to be at the church by five thirty for the rehearsal—two cars will be here at five ten on the dot. Cocktails start at six thirty, and in theory dinner will be at seven thirty, probably closer to eight. All right? Now, I’ve heard from—” She broke off as the French doors opened and one of the bridesmaids, the one who seemed like trouble, stepped inside carrying a case of wine. According to Daphne, this one had missed makeup practice and getting her nails done because of a stomach bug. Why they didn’t call a hangover a hangover, Sam Snead did not know. “Hello, dear!” she said. “Are you feeling better?”
The girl set down the wine. She took in the lanky collection of older women at the table and avoided looking at Mr. Van Meter, who was avoiding looking at her. “Much,” she said. “Thank you.”
> “I’m sorry,” Biddy said. “I didn’t know you were ill.” Her sisters simpered.
“Anyway,” Sam Snead went on, “I was saying I’ve heard from our on-island tailor who’s going to swing by and sneak a last check on the dress with Daphne before we leave for the rehearsal and will stay here and steam it. I just spoke to Daphne—they’re done with manicures, except for Livia, who vanished at the beach, and poor Agatha here, who was under the weather.”
WINN SAW Celeste’s mouth twist and knew she was dying, dying to say it hadn’t been the weather Agatha was under. Agatha leaned on the counter near Winn, the sole of one bare foot pressed against the other ankle like a Masai, her yellow cotton dress falling off one golden shoulder. What insouciance, he thought, what insolence to stand in the middle of all these interlocking rings of knowledge and ignorance and act like she had nothing to be ashamed of. He caught, or thought he caught, the bitter, animal smell of sex. Why hadn’t she slunk off somewhere to wash herself? Was it so simple for her, once rebuffed, to settle for the next available male? Had the memory of their encounter even crossed her mind before she went with Sterling into the garage? He frowned and then turned the frown into a yawn when he caught Celeste watching him.
Biddy was explaining to Sam Snead about Livia and the whale, and Sam Snead was nodding rapidly.
“Okay,” Sam Snead said, absorbing the story with aplomb, “but Livia will be ready for the rehearsal? If she’s having a hard time getting the smell out, tell her to try tomato juice. If it works for skunk, it might work for whale. Great. Anything else? I’m running out the door.”
Seating Arrangements Page 25
