Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  “I don’t think we’re really going to the hospital,” Agatha said, looking out the window.

  “No.”

  “Very naughty.” She shifted, crossing her legs. The hem of her dress rode up, and he dared to put one shaky hand on her warm thigh. “That was some toast,” she said. “I thought Maude Duff was going to drop dead. Did you see her face?”

  “No.” While he was talking, he had focused on odd, arbitrary things: the edges of the table irises that were beginning to bruise and furl, the round spot on Dicky Jr.’s head where his scalp gleamed like a worn patch on the elbow of an old coat, the chipped edge of a coffee cup. Mostly he had stared at the black panes of the windows as they pulsed in the wind, seeming to bow inward into the room.

  “Maybe if you had said that marriage was like death but was also lovely and wonderful, she wouldn’t have minded so much. I’m with you, though. I’m never getting married. It’s a crock.”

  She uncrossed her legs, parting them. Uncertainly, he inched his hand up until it brushed the edge of her dress. “In the bar,” he ventured, “when you said you were only kidding, what did you mean?”

  “I thought I should give us both an out.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not some kind of predator,” she said. “I’m not a home wrecker.”

  But she was. She had to be, or else why was he doing this? She had brought them here; she had made an offer he couldn’t refuse, no man could. Sterling must think he was either the biggest hypocrite who had ever lived or else a lunatic. Winn wasn’t sure which he preferred, but he was with Agatha now and Sterling wasn’t.

  “Anyway,” Agatha said, “I really get what you were saying, about marriage being like death. That’s probably why you’re here with me. What else could be so fucking boring, you know? The same person, the same conversations with that person, the same conversations about that person. The same body. No, not for me. Not ever.”

  “Is that what I said?” he asked. He couldn’t quite remember. He had meant more that he could not have remained single, that there was a cultural imperative for him to marry. Indeed, he had wanted to become A Husband and Father, but he had never felt the raptures that were supposed to come to husbands and fathers, nor did he feel any less alone than before he married. But what else could he have done? Remaining a bachelor forever would have been unseemly, and he had no evidence that a solitary life would have been more satisfying than what he had. Still, he felt, beyond the edges of his life, the presence of some unidentifiable dark matter, some fate or path he had not seen, still could not see, but that would have led him somewhere better.

  No lights marked the driveway to Jack Fenn’s house, and Winn passed the gap in the hedges and had to stop and reverse, the shell driveway blazing up under the headlights. Billows of aubergine sky hid the peaks and gables of the roof. Brazenly, he parked as near as he could to the front door. When he turned off the car, the night became very dark.

  “Whose house is this?” Agatha asked.

  “It belongs to a friend of mine.”

  “Are we going inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t we stay in here? In the back? Or we could find somewhere at your house?”

  “Where? The garage?”

  She didn’t reply. Decisively, he patted her knee and then opened the glove compartment to retrieve the flashlight he kept there. Leaving the keys in the Land Rover’s ignition, he got out and walked around to open Agatha’s door. A clanking came from the flagpole, toggles on the rope rapping against the metal. Agatha took his hand and stepped down onto the shells.

  The front door was locked, but a nearby window slid easily upward. “After you,” he said, aiming the flashlight through the void.

  “If you say so.” She grasped the sill and thrust one leg into the house, bending to follow it, disappearing inside with a flash of lavender underthings and the scuffed underside of a high heel.

  • • •

  LIVIA SAT ALONE outside on the deck, in the same chair she had occupied during cocktail hour, gripping the arms so hard that pain radiated up her wrists. Wind whistled around her, working her hair loose from its braids. Squeezing something felt good, felt right, just like it had when she had decided to squeeze Agatha’s finger. If she could have the day back, probably she would not choose to break it again, but the sensation of another person’s skeleton cracking under her grip had been darkly electrifying. The bone had broken so easily, almost as easily as a turkey wishbone, except Agatha kept both halves: the good luck and the bad luck, the wish and the dud.

  Her father had not understood—how could he? Crimes of passion could not possibly make sense to him. He lived in a baffled, stilted world; he had said so himself in that toast, in front of everyone. He had known only to be angry with her for disrupting the day, and she found she pitied him for his limitations. As a young child, while out on a sailboat belonging to family friends, she had glimpsed the curving gray flash of a dorsal fin. “A dolphin!” she had cried, pinching her nose closed with two fingers before leaping overboard. In the years since, she had come to doubt that she had actually managed to touch the animal, but at the time she would have sworn she felt its rubbery flank slip by beneath her reaching fingers. That was why she had not heard the splash of her father diving into the water after her: she was too busy yelling, “I touched it! I touched it!” through mouthfuls of seawater. Even when he had one arm around her and was holding her against his chest and the small, hard buttons of his shirt, she kept trumpeting her jubilation. “I touched it! I touched it!”

  “Shut up, Livia.” His lips were close against her ear. “That was a stupid thing to do. Look what you’ve gotten us into.” Livia looked and saw the tall white sails heel over as the distant boat began to come around. “You’ve inconvenienced everyone. You could have drowned.”

  “But there was a dolphin,” she had said, startled that he didn’t understand.

  Her father had not replied, and Livia felt his body start to shake. The day was warm, and the top layer of water was cold but not intolerable. She wasn’t shaking. He was treading water with short, jerky kicks, sometimes catching her with a pointed knee, breathing too fast. But she knew he could swim. She had seen him swim lap after lap in his red swim trunks at the racquet club, his perfectly regular strokes punctuated by flashes of raggedy hair under the overarching arm, each lap terminating in a tidy flip turn. The knowledge that he was afraid came in a burst of intuition. He was afraid of the ocean, of the darkness below their feet, of drowning. It had never occurred to Livia that he could drown. It was terrible to know her parents were going to die but worse to know they were afraid to die.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him, craning back to see his face. “I’m here.”

  Without taking his eyes off the approaching sailboat, he had said, “Don’t patronize me, Livia.”

  In Waskeke Harbor, a few red and green running lights bobbed up and down with the chop, and the yellow glow of town rippled across the water. Far away, toward the distant end of the harbor where she had thrown the lobster to its fate, lights from scattered houses winked behind waving tree branches. Everyone had scattered after dinner. Daphne said she was tired and needed to go home; some of the others had gone to a bar; her father had insisted on taking Agatha to get the infamous finger looked at. But Livia had not wanted to leave. She did not want to make small talk over drinks with the Duffs—she had more than enough drinks in her already—nor did she want to go home and rattle around the house with her mother and sister. She knew Teddy was in the restaurant. Dryden had let the cat out of the bag, and then she had glimpsed him for herself on her way to the bathroom, held his eye from across the room. She would not stoop to seeking Teddy out, but she saw no prudence in rushing away. Her gut told her he would find her. She gripped the arms of her chair even more tightly. A door opened behind her.

  “Livia?” Teddy said, coming to crouch beside her chair.

  • • •

  WINN FOLLOWED
AGATHA through the window, pulling it shut behind him. The roar of the wind dropped to a low murmur, interrupted by the creaking of the house timbers and unidentifiable rattles.

  “Good windows,” he said. “Nice and tight.”

  Agatha’s arms encircled his waist. “Like me,” she said.

  Jesus Christ, he thought, both aroused and appalled. He kissed her briefly and stepped away, casting the light around. “Let’s take a look at this place.”

  The room they were in was tall and square with a skeletal staircase curving up one side and bundles of wiring growing like anemones from the walls and ceiling. Sawdust filtered through the flashlight’s beam like plankton. Agatha appeared and disappeared, a pale wraith. The floors were coated with sawdust and sand, and their footsteps made sliding rasps. A long great room took up most of the ocean side. It had a vaulted ceiling and tall windows that, in the daytime, would be full of blue but now revealed only blackness and the white traveling star of the flashlight, their dim silhouettes lurking behind it. Boards perforated with notches and peg holes, future bookshelves, were stacked beside a table saw, but besides those and a fieldstone fireplace only halfway grouted, the room was empty.

  “This is a ridiculous house,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s too damn big. They don’t need this much space. The size is downright silly. Everything’s for show. Make the house big and splashy so everyone will know how much money you have, but your roof still leaks.”

  “The roof leaks?”

  “Look at this,” he said, training the beam on the cathedral heights of the ceiling. “Absurd.”

  “Maybe for some people size does matter.”

  He shined the light into her face, but she didn’t wince. “Does everything always have to be about sex?” he said.

  “Isn’t that why you brought me here?”

  “You could tone down the innuendo.”

  “I’m just playing around.”

  “I don’t know how to play around.”

  “I like that about you.”

  He smiled but realized she couldn’t see him behind the light. “That’s fine, then,” he said.

  In the kitchen, the cabinets had no doors; there were no counters; the empty spaces where the appliances would go gave the room a vacant, gap-toothed look. For a year, all the way from Connecticut, he had sensed this house rising up, plank by plank, shingle by shingle, and now here it was, almost complete, an enemy fortress on his island.

  “What now?” Agatha said. She raised one hand to shield her eyes from the light. In the presence of so much darkness and all the spooky maracas and tambourines played by the wind, she seemed young and uncertain.

  “Let’s keep going.”

  Beyond the kitchen, through a narrow door, was a tiled, spigoted space that looked like it would be a mudroom. A narrow back staircase of bare plywood disappeared up into the second floor. Winn sent Agatha up first, lighting her way as best he could. She climbed bent over, her thighs making a lancet arch through which he watched her hands find each step. The light bobbled over the exposed lower curves of her ass, and though he did look and though now, more than any other time, he was free simply to grasp her by the ankles and reach up and push aside that purple scrap under her skirt, his desire had unaccountably slackened. Maybe he was too old for all this debauchery, the sex and drugs and trespassing. Maybe, but he wasn’t ready to admit defeat.

  Upstairs, she let him pass and then grasped the back of his belt, tethering herself to him as he wandered through another set of abyssal rooms like a diver on a wreck. The floor was a mess, crowded with coiled wire, folded assemblages of cardboard, tubes of caulk, pleats of clear plastic sheeting. A bathroom mirror, propped against a blank wall, surprised them with its sudden flash. They came to another staircase and climbed to the third floor, up under the eaves, its ceiling the inverted twin of the roof’s complicated geometry. The dormer windows rattled more in their frames than the downstairs windows had—maybe Fenn was trying to save a buck—and Winn could hear the waves rolling in from Waskeke Sound. With Agatha still hanging from his belt like a dinghy, he was moving toward another staircase, more like a ladder, built into the far wall when something hard and heavy caught him across the shins. He pitched forward with a shout, carrying Agatha down with him. They landed in a tangle, him on his stomach with her sprawled across his back. Gasping, he rolled out from under her, pushed his glasses back into place, and cast the flashlight around accusingly. The culprit was a toilet, white and gleaming, sitting alone in the middle of the empty plywood floor. Pain erupted in his leg. “Jesus!” he said. “My leg!”

  “Fuck!” Agatha said. “My finger!” He trained the light on her. She was lying on her side, holding her white-taped hand in front of her face. For a moment, he fought the urge to laugh, every muscle clenched, until intense, vibrating need overwhelmed him, and he curled into himself, undone, letting the flashlight roll out of his grasp, covering his face with his hands as tears rolled down his cheeks. The feeling was vertiginous, euphoric, hysterical—like he was traveling at a wild speed, braced against the sensation, his stomach dropping, bright lights flowing through his veins. Agatha had caught the bug. She threw her arm over him, and he felt her breasts shuddering low on his stomach. This was not her usual laugh. There were no husky ha ha’s, just gasps and quivering.

  The pain in his leg had disappeared. He was flying. He grasped her twitching shoulders and rolled onto her, finding the stickiness of her tear-streaked cheeks before he found the wetness of her mouth. For a moment, she continued to laugh, but then she latched on with the determination of a suckling foal. The flashlight had come to rest at a short distance, illuminating a strip of floor and a disc of wall. Her hair, spread out above them in a tangle, caught some of the light in its yellow ends. As his fingers strayed from her breast to her ribs to her crotch, he felt a thrill of foreboding that she might be dry again, but this time she was in working order. He let a cry of relief out into her mouth.

  “What?” she said, angling her head away.

  “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Why?”

  “Well. You’re not hard.”

  It was true, he realized. He wasn’t. All the signs of arousal had been fizzing away in his brain, but apparently the message had been waylaid somewhere on its way to his groin, washed away in a flood of booze. “God,” he said. “I didn’t even notice.”

  She struggled to shift underneath him. He became aware that he was resting his full weight on her, an inert sack. He propped himself onto an elbow. His face was still spasming with the aftershocks of his laughing jag.

  “Maybe you just weren’t meant to be unfaithful,” she said.

  “It’s a little late for that.”

  “Then, here.” In one deft movement she insinuated her hand between them and undid his belt. He had never before allowed her to touch him—he had only touched her—and now, when it finally happened, her fingers tugging on his limp dick felt deeply inappropriate, humiliating, even grotesque. He was a married man approaching his sixtieth birthday, lying on the floor of an unfinished beach house belonging to his imagined nemesis, being jerked off by a school friend of his daughter’s. He let out a kind of sob.

  “Yeah?” Agatha said, misunderstanding. “Yeah?”

  “No,” he said.

  She yanked her hand away. “What is it?”

  “I need some air.” He scooped up the flashlight and made a break for the ladder he had seen before he tripped over the toilet. The rungs smelled of resin and the saw blade. He hadn’t seen a widow’s walk from the front of the house, but there could be no other explanation, and, indeed, he found that they led to a metal hatch. He needed to be out of this room, this place where someday Meg Fenn would wander with her open mouth and her pigeon toes, where Ophelia Haviland would make up beds for her guests, where Livia might have chased after his grandchild. He
threw open the hatch, and a gust of wind bloomed into the attic, an inverted parachute of air. Angling the light down, he saw sawdust whirling around Agatha, who was still sitting beside the toilet, braced on one arm and squinting up at him. The hand with the broken finger rested in her lap. He pointed the light up, out through the hatch, a searchlight against the clouds, and then followed it up into the bluster. The widow’s walk was on the beach side of the house, hidden from the driveway by shingled peaks and outcroppings. He heard a squeaking sound from above and cast the beam over the three masts and proud copper sails of Jack Fenn’s weather vane.

  Behind a thin veil of cloud, the moon was a pale smudge, and then, when the wind tore a hole, it emerged as a perfect round marble of light, its mountains and craters making a stricken face. In the white light, the ocean was a confusion of foam, and the shell driveway, of which he could see only the outermost curve, shone briefly like a path to heaven, white and broad and gleaming. But the clouds knit themselves back together, and the moon was bundled off again, leaving darkness and the sound of surf. The wind abraded his cheeks. He closed his eyes. How unfair to fail even at adultery. That he had not been able to consummate his crime was a meaningless technicality. His guilt was in no way lessened, only his pleasure, and, clinging to his desolate, wind-blasted aerie, he could not imagine that he would ever find relief. The weather vane squeaked. He trained the beam on it again. Slowly, it turned half a revolution before jerking to a stop and inching back the other way. Without thinking, he swung one leg over the railing onto a curve of roof and began to climb.

  THE WHALE, since Livia had last seen it, had ceased to be a whale and become a grisly, ruined thing. The beach was lit from above by two generators on a low dune, out of reach of the tide, their blinding bulbs set in chrome bowls atop tall metal stalks. The whale’s ribs shone white with black, meaty valleys between them. The jawbone was gone and most of the blubber, trucked off somewhere to rot. A few men waded around the corpse in rubber overalls, their hoods drawn against the wind and blowing spray.