Seating Arrangements (22 page)

“What does she do all day?” he had asked Eva once as he left.

“She is waitink for God to find her,” Eva said, crossing herself. “Every day she wait. She is a saint, your mama.”

The house, when Winn sold it after his mother’s death, was a wintery landscape of sheeted furniture. He hired an appraiser to go through the whole place, taking away whatever could be sold, and then he went in to sort out the personal debris left behind in rooms where missing lamps and chairs were memorialized by clean, dark voids on the faded carpets and dusty floors. The Vespasian had politely declined his offer of Tipton’s portrait, and so it had still been in the dining room, wrapped in brown paper and propped against a wall, waiting for some boys from the Sobek Club to come pick it
up. They had promised to give the painting a place of honor in their clubhouse and to fix a plaque on the frame with Tipton’s name, dates, and graduation year.

“Why don’t we take it home with us?” Biddy had said.

“No,” said Winn, having already considered and rejected the idea of installing his father’s judgmental gaze in their newly purchased Connecticut house. “He would want it to go to one of his clubs.”

In his father’s study Winn found a decades-long paper trail of soured investments and minutely recorded household expenses, antiseptic letters from longtime friends, playing cards, unidentifiable currency, stationery from clubs and hotels, clipped newspaper articles about people Tipton knew. Opening an Exeter yearbook from 1926, Winn found, written in his father’s spidery hand across the youthful faces of the boys, “deceased, 1943,” “deceased, 1965,” “deceased, 1941.” There were bits of ephemera from Winn’s school days: a program from his turn as Colonel Pickering in
My Fair Lady
, a stained necktie patterned with the Ophidian crest that Tipton must have rescued from the trash, a poorly typed essay on the financing of World War I.

The appraiser had taken away Tipton’s desk—a vast, oaken extravagance with as many nooks and cubbies as a dovecote—and left behind stacks of papers and boxes of miscellaneous junk on the floor. One box was topped with a note that said its contents had come from a locked drawer and to excuse the intrusion but the key had been found in another drawer. Inside was a thin stack of hopelessly quaint girly magazines, a chrome tube of old lipstick that had acquired a translucent yellow rind, a palm-sized photo album mostly containing black-and-white snapshots of women Winn did not recognize, a cryptic letter signed only “L,” and an old photo case, its velvet dappled and squashed with age. This held a portrait of a smirking teenage boy and a stern old man. The image was faded, the background erased except for a floating piece of drapery, bound with a fat cord and tassel, part of a photographer’s set. The figures had turned so ghostly and transparent that the grain of the paper showed through their clothes. Winn knew that his grandfather, Tipton’s father, Frederick, was the boy, although his longish hair and old-fashioned suit were unfamiliar
and his features, heavy and morose by the time he became the old man Winn remembered, the man beneath whose painted visage the Vespasian billiard balls spun and clacked, were tender and wicked as a faun’s in the photograph. Pretty and slight, he stood leaning against the old man’s chair, and his sardonic eyes were trained on some spot above the camera, his narrow mouth pursed. The old man stared into the lens with what might have been defiance, scowling beneath a voluminous thicket of white eyebrows and the twin tusks of his long moustache. He had one leg stretched out into the obliterated white space of the photo’s perimeter. His hands were balled in fists on his lap. This was Winn Cunningham, source of Winn’s name and of the white stone house and whatever fortune still rolled around the increasingly empty Van Meter vaults. Winn took the photo from its case and turned it over. The reverse was blank.

He had delegated Biddy, six months pregnant with Daphne, to go through his mother’s clothes—what she would find he could not imagine, perhaps a wedding dress and then fifty years of nightgowns—and floorboards creaked above him. He put the picture in the trash and, after he leafed through them, also the magazines with their plump, bare-breasted pinups. Taking up the other photos and the letter from L, he wondered, as he often had, if his father had strayed. Surely he must have. Winn found himself hoping that he had, that Tipton had known some flicker of human warmth in those long years between marriage and death. The little photo album might have been a trophy case for conquests. He paused over one woman whose portrait had been tinted by an inexpert hand, her cheeks painted a feverish red and her irises a light green that bled out to her lashes, giving her a blind, alien appearance. He set the album on top of the magazines.

Many times Winn had regretted discarding the contents of that drawer, especially the photo of his grandfather, and as he sat in the musty darkness of the old Rover, he wished again that he hadn’t. The act of dropping those bits of paper in the garbage seemed, in retrospect, unutterably cruel. He had discarded the image and the letter and the photos to prove his own lack of sentimentality, not pausing to consider that they were reliquaries of his forefathers’ secret hearts. He
would, he knew, leave behind no trace of his encounter with Agatha, his one physical infidelity in a lifetime of mental adulteries, bodies he had touched only with the curious fingers of supposition. As he looked up at the lit window of his bedroom, the full weight of shame settled on him: guilt for having betrayed someone as fine as Biddy, fear that he would be exposed, sadness that the dignity and restraint he prided himself on were illusions, embarrassment at the tawdriness of the washing machine, the girl half his age, the lustful murmurings and groans she had heard escape his lips. He needed some air. He cranked down the window, letting in damp air and the sound of crickets. Biddy’s light upstairs went out.

A movement at the side of the house, and a male voice said, “Don’t slam it. The sign says.” Three figures emerged to the sound of crunching gravel. He couldn’t quite make out which boys they were, what iteration of Duffs. Ordinarily, he would have hounded them for proof of sobriety, or at least a convincing imitation, and threatened to call a taxi until one of them swore he had stopped drinking hours before and was by now as unpolluted as a Shirley Temple. But he sat as still as he could, hoping they would not see him. It was Francis, Dicky Jr., and Charlie. They had almost passed safely by when Charlie did a double take and peered at him from across the driveway.

“Mr. Van Meter?” he said.

“Heading out, boys?” Winn said. “Is one of you fit to drive?”

Listing sideways, Francis raised an imaginary drink in a toast. “I am.”

“Good,” said Winn. “All right then.”

Charlie stepped closer. “Everything okay?”

“Fine. Just came out to listen to the radio, check the news.” Winn gestured at the dashboard. The radio was not on.

“Cool,” said Charlie. Behind him, Francis turned abruptly and rushed into the darkness.

“I think he had to puke,” said Dicky Jr.

“Are you sure you’re okay out here?” Charlie asked.

“Yes, perfectly fine. Good night, boys.” He rolled the window back
up. He and Charlie watched each other through the rising pane of glass, then the younger man shrugged, waved, and turned away.

When their taillights had disappeared down the driveway, Winn went into the house. Someone had turned out the lamp, but Celeste was still on the couch, emitting a low splutter. He passed her by without a second glance. Out on the deck, the lanterns burned unattended, but he left them. He wanted nothing but to be in his bed, next to Biddy, safe in the absolving darkness. He had started up the stairs when he heard, from above, the unmistakable swampy sounds of two people kissing. A woman whimpered softly. He stopped, exasperated. Was there no end to it? When he started to ease back down, the stairs creaked a parody of the feminine cry he had just heard, and he stopped again. The kissing sounds continued unabated. Those brazen, suctioning smacks, the sheer audacity of the stairwell kissers seemed outrageous, and he decided he would not be cowed by whatever lascivious display was being put on in his home. He stomped purposefully up and, rounding the bend, was greeted by the sight of Greyson and Daphne clinging to each other. Daphne, in her nightgown, was leaning against the wall, framed family photos hanging askew around her, and Greyson craned over her belly, his hands braced on either side of her head, kissing her with singular purpose. Winn cleared his throat and edged around them.

“Oh,” Daphne said. “Daddy. I got up to see if people were still here.”

“All right,” Winn said. “Good night.” He pushed by with the harried, businesslike air of a man leaving his office and waving farewell with a folded newspaper.

The bedroom was dark and quiet. Biddy lay still. In the distance, a foghorn sounded, not the deep warning bellow he remembered from childhood but an automated tone, dulcet and polite. He lay watching the lighthouse beam swing across the walls. Livia had been to parties at the Sobek, but she said she’d never seen the portrait of Tipton. Perhaps over the years it had migrated to some inner sanctum. Perhaps it had been thrown out. He counted off five seconds between flashes,
his lips moving in the dark. One, two, three, four, five, and then light shot through the window and raced across his robe hanging from the bathroom door, touched the chest of drawers, the oil painting of a crab, the basket of shells the girls had collected long ago, the soft rise in the blankets where Biddy’s legs were. Winn felt honored by the beam’s presence in his bedroom, included. The brief wash of light, flying over the shingled houses and dark salt grass before sweeping out to sea and back around again, was so quick that it might have been a ghost or headlights from a passing car except that it came back every five seconds, like clockwork, exactly as he expected.

Friday

Nine · Snakes and Ladders

A
fter Winn settled into a measured snore, Biddy slipped out of bed. Fog sieved through the window screens and hovered in a cool gauze through which the lighthouse beam swept like an oar. For a moment she stood looking down at her husband, his shadowy mouth agape, and then she went into the dark bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. She was so very tired. She had been lying awake for too long, her thoughts skipping between daughters, rattling down lists of to-dos, ricocheting irresistably into the future, where an infinite number of potential calamities lay in wait for the baby or the girls or herself. Usually, she could control her thoughts; usually, she fell right to sleep, but tonight she couldn’t fight the current. Nor could she stay beside Winn, listening to him sleep.

She reached out and turned the bath tap, releasing a gush of water. Winn would not wake, not once he had begun snoring. She fit the rubber plug into place, pulled her nightgown over her head, dropped her cotton underwear onto the bathmat. Her shadowy reflection loomed in the half-steamed mirror, setting off a childish thrill of fear along a wavelength that extended back through the decades to when Celeste and Tabitha had held her by the wrists as they chanted in dark bathrooms, summoning spirits. She eased herself into the water, feeling a stinging in her chilled toes and another, blunter shock as her shoulders met cold porcelain. She arched away, bracing the bony crook of her skull on the tub’s edge, and then lowered herself more carefully, settling in, scooping hot water up over her chest and shoulders.

When the bath was comfortably deep, she reached with a toe to turn off the tap, and silence fell, broken only by the drip of the faucet and the distant tone of the foghorn. She sighed, loudly but only once, purely for her own benefit. Winn, helping Agatha after she’d fallen off the deck, had been so chivalrous, so attentive, so
obvious
.
The obviousness was what she could not tolerate. She had known what he was when she married him, had expected to be the kind of wife who looked the other way from time to time, but she had also expected him to be discreet. And he had been. She assumed there had been other women, but she had never come across any evidence of them, which was all she asked. A simple request, she had thought: cheap repayment for her forbearance, her realism, her tolerance. At times his discretion had been so complete she had allowed herself to think maybe there
hadn’t
been others, but she didn’t like to risk being foolish enough to believe in something as unlikely as her husband’s fidelity. He must know how comical his lust for Agatha was, how vulgar. Over the years Agatha had never shown any reciprocation beyond the laziest, most reflexive flirting. But tonight she had grasped his shirt after he pulled her back up onto the deck.

Biddy cupped water in her hands and brought them to her face. There was no way around it—she would be exhausted in the morning. She inhaled, tasting the steam. The bath began to perform the magic she had experienced in water all her life, draining away stress like infection from a wound, restoring balance. After the wedding, her life would go on as it always had. The baby would be healthy. Livia would find a new boyfriend. Winn would go to work and come home. What had Dominique asked? Where she would live if she could live anywhere? Maybe they could move to Waskeke full-time in a few years. Maybe they could go abroad for an extended trip, rent a house in France, visit Dominique’s restaurant, take a river cruise.

She was walking through a field of lavender, alone except for buzzing bees when something choked her. The air turned thick and terrible, and she awoke, coughing up lukewarm bathwater.

•    •    •

AGAIN, WINN WOKE
before dawn. He was too hot, and his heart was beating too quickly, racing along in the futile hurry he remembered from hangovers past. Everything came back. Agatha leaning against the washing machine. The smell of her hair. The feel of her arms and thighs, the shocking lifelessness of her face, the sticky friction of her arid pussy. Bringing his fingers to his nose, he found only a mild sourness that might have been the odor of his own clammy, boozy sleep. Beside him, Biddy breathed evenly, and though the sound shamed him, he couldn’t keep from imagining what would have happened if he had not seen Agatha’s face in that one unguarded moment or if he had ignored its troubling vacancy. If their encounter had reached its natural conclusion, his sin would be more severe, but in the disenchanting postcoital lull, her face with its wine-stained teeth might have summoned the antidotal regret he remembered from the more ill-advised couplings of his youth, a little curative disappointment.