Seating Arrangements (27 page)

“I can’t believe no one else wanted to come,” she said.

“You probably wish Sterling were here.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not every day you get to see a whale. I would have thought everyone would want to come. But heaven forbid anything should interrupt their pleasant day at the beach. Why go see something dead when you can stay where you are and play paddleball?”

“Absolutely,” said Francis. “I’m with you on that. Whales aren’t totally my thing, but I see this as a chance for a real experience. I’m trying to be spiritually open to the world.”

“Right,” Livia said, not sure what he meant. “I mean, this island wouldn’t exist without sperm whales. We all hang wooden whales on our walls and wear whale pants and have whale-tail door knockers and put stainless-steel kitchens in old whaling captains’ houses, but given the chance to stand in the presence of a real flesh-and-blubber whale, we lose interest.”

“I was wearing whale pants last night,” Francis said, “but ironically.”

“Sterling said his seersucker was ironic, too.”

“So he stole my joke, and then he stole you.”

She had been hoping he would choose to forget his halfhearted attempt on her. “I think your approach to irony might be a little off,” she said. “If everyone expects you to wear seersucker or little whales, and then you do, how is that ironic?”

He looked at her over his sunglasses. “Why did you choose Sterling? I’m not really mad. I’m just curious.”

“Francis, you weren’t serious. You don’t have feelings for me.”

“How do you know? Don’t laugh. Whether I do or not is beside the point. My question is, what’s wrong with me? What makes him more attractive? Because he is. I know that. Even though I’m arguably better looking and probably a better person.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you. I just don’t feel that kind of connection with you.”

“But you do with Sterling.”

“I don’t know. I did last night.”

“Hmm.” Francis walked along in silence. The farther they walked, the less protected the shore became, and blowing sand stung Livia’s shins. “It’s funny how families work,” he said. “Sterling and I are a lot alike, actually. We both have contemplative natures. We’re both drawn to the Far East. But Sterling doesn’t have any kind of belief system, and he’s depressed all the time. I channel my dark thoughts into bettering myself, which explains why I’m a serial monogamist while Sterling—no offense—will sleep with anything. If you want my two cents, you should steer clear of him.”

“Those aren’t the first two cents I’ve been given today.” Truth be told, she didn’t mind the family gossiping about her and Sterling. If she couldn’t be cool and aloof like Dominique, then she might as well be thought of as a little impetuous, a little wanton, a bit of a man-eater. In her experience, people in a group envied the ones among them who managed to pair off. Even if they criticized a choice of partner or pretended to disapprove of flings in general, most people would rather be the ones fumbling in the dark and then reemerging, sheepish and smug, than the ones who got tired and washed their faces and went to bed just like on any other night. Plus, now she had proven she could move on from Teddy.

Livia stooped to pick up a pumpkin-colored scallop shell. She turned it over in her fingers and then tossed it away. That morning she had woken in darkness, chilled and shivering. The tide had come up, and her feet were wet. Reaching for Sterling, she found only cold sand. A wavelet washed over her feet, and she felt afraid and profoundly alone, about to be swept away. But then she had scrambled to her feet and tripped over Sterling, who groaned and said he was fucking freezing.

Francis kept talking. “Sterling acts like this jaded renegade, but he’s not. If anyone is, it’s me. I don’t know how he gets away with all the shit he pulls and yet I’m the family whipping boy.” The first putrid whiff arrived on a gust of wind, and he threw his bicep over his nose. “Oh, Jesus, did you smell that?”

“If you weighed forty tons and died, you’d smell bad, too.”

“Why do you love them?”

“Who?”

“Whales.”

“I don’t know.” He wasn’t the first to ask, but she didn’t understand why she was supposed to know the answer. Why did anyone love anything?

“You must have some idea.”

She shook her head. “It’s something about their being so big. It makes me sad, how big they are. They’re rare enough that every time I see one I get a thrill. I think they’re beautiful. How can you not love them? They’re fascinating. Did you know they hunt as a team? Humpbacks
herd
fish by making clicking sounds and blowing bubble nets.”

“Yeah? Wild.”

“It is wild.” She thought of the dense, silvery ball of confused fish packed tight together, the lucky eaters rocketing up from underneath with their mouths open wide, yawning portals to the underworld. The whales’ throats, ribbed like elastic, bulged with fish and seawater, billowing from the sloshing and swimming going on inside. When, she wondered, did the herring know that they were not in a new, darker sea but inside another animal? Or were herring too stupid to know that they were being eaten? She thought probably all things knew when they were being eaten.

“I heard about Teddy joining up,” Francis said, his voice high and thin because he was pinching his nose. “That must be hard.”

“He can do what he wants.”

“Sure. You know, in a way I envy you. You really seem to feel things. I’m never sure I’m experiencing genuine emotion because I’m always wondering if I’m only feeling what I think I
should
be feeling. If that makes any sense.”

“I guess so.” The smell of the whale was beginning to make her sick.

“Do you still love him?” Francis persisted. It was another familiar question with an answer that eluded her.

“No,” she said.

“What made you stop loving him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe exhaustion.”

She wondered when she would stop loving Teddy. Before him, she had loved only her mother, her father, and her sister, and love was something to be tamped down beneath decorum. Her father, returning home from work when she was already in her nightgown, hair damp from her bath, would catch her by the shoulders as she ran to embrace him and, holding her safely at arm’s length, stoop to kiss her cheek with his dry lips. On the occasions she managed to sneak up on him and hug his legs or waist, her arms were gently detached and the kiss administered from a polite distance. Eventually, she learned what Daphne seemed to have been born knowing: he was happiest if she did not grapple with him but presented herself like a soldier with a stalwart cheek and waited for him to bend to her. As a child, despite her profound girliness, Daphne had not been one for physical affection or declarations of love—those were things she learned, like algebra, at prep school. Livia’s mother was the warmest of the bunch, responding to her “I love you’s” in kind (not with her father’s “All right, dear’s”) and waking her for school with a brisk but gentle rub of her back as if brushing her clean of snow.

After Daphne had left for her first year at Deerfield, there had been a period of two or three weeks when Livia would come home from school and her mother would take her onto her lap in a deep, plaid armchair and hold her for a whole, silent hour, stroking her hair while they looked out the window at birds and squirrels in the summer-green trees. The first invitation surprised Livia, who was used to being left to her own devices in the afternoons. She had perched gingerly on her mother’s narrow lap, only gradually settling back against her shoulder, letting the tan arms encircle her, breathing the neutral, soapy smell of Biddy’s skin, the sharp hint of bleach from her shirt. Not since the womb had she had her mother so much to herself, nor had she been given such access to the rhythms of her body—the resolute beating of her heart, the swelling of her lungs—and she absorbed them hungrily, her voluptuous pleasure colored with anxiety because the prolonged quiet closeness, never discussed between them or mentioned
to her father or Daphne, seemed somehow illicit. Then one day, when the first leaves were turning yellow, Biddy did not go to the armchair but gave Livia her snack in the kitchen and went upstairs by herself, signaling that their time of indulgence had run its course.

“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.
”