Mating Rituals of the North American WASP (26 page)

December

I
t had all gone remarkably smoothly, Peggy thought the following Friday night, when she’d normally be driving to New Nineveh—from
telling Luke she wouldn’t be coming up, to securing Padma to work extra hours so Bex wouldn’t be stuck there if she started
not to feel well, to successfully booking an eleventh-hour leg-waxing appointment. A different, sunnier person, a Bex or a
Tiffany, would take all this as a sign her weekend with Jeremy would be lovely. But Peggy could see only portentous omens.
She was stumped over what to wear to bed (silk nightgown, too sexy; cotton pajamas, too not-sexy). Now that it seemed she
would be disrobing in front of a new man, she seemed to have gained five pounds. And Luke had been entirely too quick to agree
to a weekend apart. Why did
he
need a weekend apart? She couldn’t bear the answer—to spend it with that detestable redheaded hussy.

On Saturday morning, an hour before Jeremy was due to pick her up, she returned from a desperate, last-minute trip to the
gym to find Bex on the couch, grim-faced, the telephone clutched to her ear, while Josh lingered nearby. “Uh-huh, but it doesn’t
feel normal. I can’t get out of bed,” Bex was saying.

“She’s talking to her OB. She slept sixteen hours last night,” Josh whispered. “Says she’s never been this tired in her life.”

Peggy’s heart
whoosh
ed into her shoes.

Bex hung up. “She says I’m probably working too hard and should go ahead and sleep as much as I need. No, Peggy, do not cancel
your weekend. And Josh, don’t start telling her she shouldn’t go because she’s married.”

“But I
am
married.” Peggy’s legs were already aching from her spin on the elliptical trainer. What had she expected after not exercising
in aeons—that she’d sail through her workout like a marathon runner?

“Get out of here,” Bex ordered. “Have fun. I’m going back to bed.”

At twenty minutes to pickup time, with wet hair and a half-packed suitcase, Peggy answered her cell phone. It was Brock, performing
a desperate monologue: “I have to see you. I can’t stop thinking about you!”

Bad omen number two
. Peggy pleaded a bad connection, turned off her cell, and left a note for Josh and Bex that she’d call with the number of
the inn. She used Bex’s phone to call Padma and told her the same thing, leaving her strict instructions not to bother Bex
with any minor problems.

“Okay, have a blast,” Padma said. “Where are you staying, anyway?”

“I don’t know. He wanted it to be a surprise.”

“Oooh. He must really like you.”

Jeremy showed up fifteen minutes late, apologetic, wearing his cyborg earpiece, saying he’d tried her cell but hadn’t gotten
an answer. They brought Peggy’s suitcase down to the street. There was an orange parking ticket on the windshield of Jeremy’s
double-parked rented car.
Bad omen number three
.

Jeremy stuffed the ticket into the glove compartment and started the car—outfitted, Peggy noticed, with every electronic accessory
yet invented. She looked out the window as Jeremy obeyed the generic female voice of the global positioning system and maneuvered
onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, the same road Peggy took out of town on Friday nights, although he didn’t turn off onto the
Cross Bronx Express-way as she did. After two months of driving to New Nineveh, Peggy was again used to being behind the wheel,
but she was glad to relax in the passenger’s seat, to enjoy the view of the Hudson River.

She addressed Jeremy’s profile. “Where is this mysterious place you’re taking me?”

Jeremy slowed to pay the toll on the Henry Hudson Bridge. “The Colonial Inn, about two hours north.” He fiddled with the satellite
radio. “It was written up in
New York
as best weekend spot. Heard of it?”

Oddly enough, Peggy had, but she couldn’t remember how. She turned her phone back on long enough to leave Bex and Padma the
inn’s toll-free number, then turned it off again and continued to admire the scenery—people had already begun to decorate
their homes for the holidays—as Jeremy sped through the northern suburbs of New York City. She listened to him describe his
Thanksgiving and thought about how perfectly nice he was, exactly the kind of man she’d told herself she wanted, and he was
interested in her—though she did wish he would take that cyborg thing off his ear.

They were an hour into the trip when Peggy spotted a green highway sign with a familiar state outline.

“Connecticut?” she wheezed through constricting lungs. She hadn’t known you could get there this way.

“Merge…onto…Interstate…Eighty…Four…East,” the cool, modulated GPS voice instructed.

Jeremy’s tone was light. “You have a problem with Connecticut?”

She laughed. “Not at all.”
Fiddle-dee-dee. It’s just that my husband lives here.

Jeremy took his right hand off the wheel and laid it on Peggy’s left knee.

Peggy felt it there, heavy, and told herself not to be silly; Connecticut was a big state. But half an hour later, when the
GPS lady exhorted them to “exit…onto…Route Two…Zero…Two,” the alarm bell rang in her head. “We aren’t going to Litchfield
County, are we?”

Jeremy exited onto Route 202. “You have a problem with Litchfield County?” He was taking all of this as banter. She started
to tell him she was serious, but she couldn’t. Anxiety had paralyzed her vocal cords, and she had no credible reason for needing
to go back home to New York this instant. Besides, Jeremy was still talking: “… have lunch in the inn restaurant after we
check in. Or we could go for a drive. There are a lot of really pretty towns up here: Litchfield and Norfolk and New Nineveh.”

“I’m not feeling very well.” It was nothing if not accurate.

“Really?” Jeremy looked at her. “When we get to the inn, you can relax, get a massage at the spa.”

“Turn…right…on…Roxbury…Road,” the GPS lady cooed. Peggy felt like slapping her.

And then she remembered: the Colonial Inn.

She and Luke had supposedly stayed there on their wedding night.

Connecticut probably had hundreds of romantic inns. Thousands, scattered over the countryside between the picturesque farms
and the antiques stores. The entire state was a weekend getaway paradise. America’s Founding Fathers had probably set it up
that way when choosing it as one of the original thirteen colonies:
Two hundred years hence, these vistas shall be a tonic for stressed-out New Yorkers.
And in this state bursting with bucolic quaintness and charming country retreats, Jeremy had chosen the Colonial?

“You…have…reached…your…destination,” the GPS lady announced.

Jeremy drove up to the rambling wood-shingled inn, with its twin gambrel roofs and evergreen-swagged porch. As they crossed
the lobby, festive with white poinsettias and a floorto-ceiling Christmas tree that filled the room with the aroma of fresh
pine, and Jeremy went to check in, Peggy found she was feeling better. She could handle this. She would handle this. What
was her alternative—to crumble? Moreover, the inn was a beautiful old place—lovingly restored, exquisitely appointed, all
that the Sedgwick House ought to be. No wonder Luke had chosen it for their fictional—

Ernestine Riga was walking across the lobby. She stopped, spotted Peggy, and stared.

Peggy darted around the corner into a wood-paneled library nook. Maybe Ernestine hadn’t actually seen her. Maybe she’d been
looking at someone else. No such luck: Ernestine, in a pastel tracksuit, appeared around the corner. “Why, Peggy, what brings
you here? Are you and Luke having lunch?”

Peggy’s heart pounded wildly. Jeremy was going to appear any minute, and the jig would be up. She couldn’t let that happen,
not this far into it. “He’s parking the car.” Peggy was starting to perspire. Was Ernestine here for lunch, too?

“Isn’t that romantic.” Ernestine gave her a syrupy smile. “My daughter-in-law gave me a gift certificate for a massage. Matter
of fact, I’m due at the spa this minute. Toodles!” She patted Peggy on the arm and hustled out of the library nook, the legs
of her nylon pants scritching together loudly. Peggy was beyond grateful for this stroke of good fortune.

Jeremy rounded the corner, his cyborg ear still attached.

“We’re all checked in. Want to take a quick look around the place? We could walk through what’s left of the garden.” He handed
Peggy a brochure.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

Peggy drew the hood of her coat lower over her forehead. In a first, she’d come properly prepared for cold country weather,
and she needn’t have. The day had turned summery warm; the other hotel guests strolling the grounds wore shirts and light
sweaters. The zero-degree attire was for disguise only, in case Ernestine was still around. The alternative was being upstairs
with Jeremy in a room dominated by a canopied, down-quilted bed so seductive that she couldn’t look at it. She’d be expected
to make use of that bed in a few hours and wasn’t ready. As Jeremy had settled in, she’d decided to go for a walk to clear
her head, promising to be back in half an hour. “No problem,” he’d replied, and plugged in his computer.

The brochure had shown the garden maze in its summer glory, a circular layout of immaculately sculpted boxwoods and groomed
gravel paths. But most of the surrounding plants had gone dormant for winter, and the hedges were bleak and tatty. Safely
outside, Peggy took her phone from her pocket and dialed the Sedgwick House. The sound of Luke’s voice, when he answered,
was like deliverance.

“How are you?” she asked.
Do you miss me, even a little?

“The flashing around the northwest chimney is shot,” he said. “It all needs to be ripped out, and the mortar, too.”

“Maybe we can do that next weekend.” Peggy didn’t have the slightest idea what flashing was.

He laughed curtly. “It’s a job for a professional.”

She waited, but he didn’t elaborate. Above her, migrating geese crossed the sky in a moving V.

“If anyone asks,” Peggy said finally, “you and I had lunch today at the Colonial Inn.”

“Who’s going to ask that?”

“Someone might.”

“Where are you?”

“Just please don’t forget.”

She hung up and took a few steps into the maze, contemplating whether Luke had ever been here with that redhead, made love
to her upstairs in one of those giant beds. Behind Peggy’s dark glasses, tears sprang to her eyes. She brushed them away,
angry at herself. She had to stop thinking of Luke as anything but a husband in name only. He wasn’t hers. His heart belonged
to another. When their year was up, she’d never see him again.

She walked deeper into the maze, trying to summon every piece of advice she’d ever gotten. Would Jonah, her acupuncturist,
diagnose her as afraid of moving ahead with her life? Would Orsolya, her Hungarian facialist, call this thoroughly unrequited
fixation on Luke more proof that Peggy only fell for the wrong men? Or was Peggy just creating fantasies in her head to keep
from dealing with this more pressing concern: that Jeremy wasn’t right for her?

Because he wasn’t. Jeremy was likable, treated her well, wanted to be with her—and she wasn’t attracted to him in the slightest.
She looked around for a bench, desperate to rest her workout-weary legs. The realization felt unbearable. If she couldn’t
muster up any enthusiasm for this man, who was everything she’d thought she wanted, there was no man on earth for her at all.
She’d be alone for eternity, while everyone else around her—Bex and Josh, her friends from college, Tiffany and Tom, Liddy
and Kyle, Luke and the redhead—every last human being but her paired off. Even Miss Abigail, tragic as her story was, had
had a taste of true love. Peggy had no one, not even a memory.

With nobody around to see, she took off her sunglasses and buried her face in her hands as tears spilled over her cheeks.

“Peggy!”

The sound of her own name grew closer and louder, an intrusion into the peace of the inn gardens, accompanied by the rhythmic
crunch of running footsteps over the gravel paths. She was just able to dry her eyes before Jeremy burst through an opening
in the hedges. She didn’t want him to see her crying.

It wasn’t Jeremy.

“Peggy!” Her pursuer was rasping, breathless. “I need to talk to you!”

T
he sight of Brock Clovis at the Colonial Inn in Litchfield County, Connecticut, was so exotic that for several seconds Peggy
just took it in. Yes, it was Brock all right, his face shiny with exertion, a massive bouquet of roses in his equally massive
hand.

“I’ve been looking all over for you. I called the store, and they said you were staying at this place, so I drove up and…”
He leaned forward at the waist, trying to get his breath back. How strange that a person who appeared as fit as Brock did
could be winded from running around a garden maze. Peggy opened her mouth, ready to suggest he spend more gym time on cardio
and less on weights.

Brock was now breathing more normally. “I want to set some stuff straight.”

“Why aren’t you working?” It hadn’t yet occurred to Peggy to wonder why he was here, just how.

“I took a day off. I didn’t appreciate you enough when I had you, and now I realize—big mistake. You’re a sweet girl, Pegs.
There aren’t a lot of girls as sweet as you. I shouldn’t’ve messed with what we had.”

“Thanks. That’s nice.” What if Ernestine Riga was watching and recognized her parka? What if Jeremy happened to look out the
window of their room and saw her here? Jeremy might not be Mr. Right, but she dreaded hurting his feelings any more than necessary.

“I brought you a present.”

Peggy’s eyes went straight to the roses Brock was holding. The words tumbled from her mouth. “I don’t want to be mean, and
it was nice of you to drive all this way and go to this kind of trouble to apologize, but I’m not here alone, and so you can
see why it would be impolite of me to show up back in my room with flowers—”