Seating Arrangements (28 page)

Flipping through a magazine about home décor, Biddy paused at a spread on a beach house in the Hamptons. Sand and salt grass, a blue swimming pool, rooms with no one in them. “Don’t read that,” Winn said, peering over her shoulder. “You’ll want a new kitchen.”

“I’ll risk it,” Biddy said, not looking up.

“Those magazines only exist to foment discontent.”

She turned a page. “Let them eat cake.”

“I wonder what those Pequod folks will think when they hear about this,” he said, hoisting up his leg and turning it so she could get a good look. The caddy’s handkerchief, stiff and stained brown in spots, still bound the wound. “Talk about adding injury to insult. They’re probably already worrying about whether or not I’m going to
sue. This might turn out to be a nice bit of leverage, when you think about it.”

He frowned out at the waiting room. The vomiting girl returned from the bathroom. The golfer, wary of interference, waited for her to sit before settling into his stance.

Biddy studied her husband’s profile, his graying eyebrows and thin lips, the chin that concerned him so. Had she only dreamt that they made love in the early morning? After she nearly drowned herself? Her exhaustion had made her brief sleep heavy and thick with dreams. She thought it really
had
happened, unlikely as that was, but she was too embarrassed to ask him. From the beginning of her romantic life, back when she was a quiet, good-looking, well-liked girl going out with the most staid, earnest sons of her father’s friends, she had accepted that men would not be changed. The boys she danced with at the boat club would never, she knew, turn into men who excited her, nor would their polite hands ever stir her passion. Really, until she went to bed with Winn, she had not experienced anything like passion, but she had known it existed and known she wanted it. Funny that he was the one who lit her up—he was nothing like the exotic lovers she read about in her mother’s stash of risqué novels. Although, admittedly, he was known as a bit of a tail chaser, and since the tail-chasing men never came after her (she supposed she didn’t strike them as a good bet), his reputation gave her a thrill.

He had sought her out through the crowd of mourners after his father’s funeral; at first she had thought he’d mistaken her for someone else. She remembered his eyes, lit with purpose, finding her among all those black hats and black shoulders, coming closer and closer until he was there shaking her hand and asking her to dinner while she was simultaneously offering her condolences. The very strangeness of his interest had flattered her. How alluring she must be to distract a man from grieving for his own father. How irresistible her sex appeal must be to drive away the pall of death. Her thrill lasted through their first dinner and the ones after that, through their first amorous skirmishes, persisted even after she realized that he was yet another man pursuing her not for fun but with a mind to long-term investment.
Occasionally, they ran into some girl or other whom Winn had taken out before her, and those girls thrilled Biddy, too, the way they tried to flirt past her, to get him to betray her by showing some interest, which sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t.

She knew her tolerance was unusual, but she couldn’t help the way she was. Just like Winn couldn’t help the way
he
was. “Does it hurt?” she asked, pointing at his leg.

“Of course it hurts.”

“Poor dear.” She looked down at her magazine, at a long, empty picnic table between two rows of olive trees somewhere in Spain, set for twelve people. “I couldn’t believe,” she said, “how that man lifted you. Like you were nothing.” His silence in the car had told her he thought a great indignity had been done to him, but she had felt only wonder at the sight of her husband cradled in another man’s arms. She wished he could have seen himself, witnessed the abject confusion on his own face. When he had said her name, it had been the tremulous query of a child seeking reassurance in the night.

Winn folded his arms over his chest and said, “That was very inappropriate, very intrusive. I’m very troubled that he did that. I’ll be mentioning it to the Pequod as well. You can’t go around picking people up like that.”

“I think he was trying to help. I asked him to. He wasn’t”—she lowered her voice—“molesting you. I don’t think he’s the brightest bulb in the box.”

Winn fiddled with the knot in Otis’s handkerchief. “Let’s change the subject,” he said.

A nurse in lavender scrubs appeared with a clipboard. The vomiting woman looked up hopefully. “Chamberlain,” said the nurse. The boy in the kneesocks and his companion stood and followed her back into the innards of the hospital. The vomiter rested her head on her knees. The golfer whistled softly as he drove another ball toward a green that only he could see.

“What would you like to talk about?” Biddy asked.

“I’m thinking,” said Winn, “that maybe I should call Jack Fenn and let him know what the situation is. That seems like the fair thing
to do, given that he’s one of the people responsible for the reputation of this club. I think he might like to know that his caddies are going around maiming people without apologizing and picking them up without invitation.”

Biddy paused before she answered to make sure her tone stayed light and friendly. She didn’t want to give Winn something to push against. “To be honest,” she said, “I don’t think Jack will feel personally responsible.”

“My leg is just something else to put on his tab.” He fixed his eyes on the photo of the orange crab as though feeling a kinship with it.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, after that whole business”—Winn rolled his hand in an etc., etc. motion—“in the winter, with Livia, the Fenns owe us.”

“Oh, Winn, that’s insane.”

“No, it certainly is not. Livia’s procedure cost five hundred dollars. Not to mention the damage done to her reputation.”

“You can’t exploit your daughter’s private life to worm your way into a golf club.”

“She didn’t keep it private, did she, and I shouldn’t have to
worm
my way into anything. This whole situation is ridiculous. Untenable. You know, Dicky and Maude seemed to know something.”

Unable to hide her exasperation, Biddy said, “I don’t think there’s a conspiracy against you, Winn. And Dicky and Maude said Jack Fenn isn’t the problem. To be honest, I have trouble believing that with Teddy about to leave for boot camp Jack is giving either you or the Pequod much thought.”

“Another poor decision from that boy. I could have kept Teddy out of the Ophidian, you know. Maybe I should have. He’s sure turning out to be a chip off the old block. Jack was so self-righteous about the whole army thing. Jack Fenn the hero, Jack Fenn the brave. I guess Teddy needs something to lord over everyone, too. You would have thought he would have been happy enough to get in the Ophidian after Jack didn’t. Good for the Fenns. They’re just very, very impressive, the whole bunch of them.”

Biddy could see Winn’s emotions beginning to spin off their reel,
something that happened so rarely she had never learned how to stop him from unraveling entirely. He glared around, his lips pressed together as though in defiance of some insidious antagonism buried in the pale hospital walls, the pronged silhouette of the ficus tree, the slow whirligig golfer, the wraiths of weather-report storm clouds swirling over the television. She disliked men when they pouted, and her sympathy silently and invisibly abandoned him, her early morning dream of lovemaking forgotten and replaced by a vision of him as a golf club pariah, a tantrum thrower, a man of so little heft that another man could lift him up and pack him away in a car without the slightest strain.

“Klausman,” the purple nurse said. The golfer, who had moved on to perfecting his putt, raised a hand in acknowledgment and followed her. The vomiting girl watched them disappear with a castaway’s desolation. She buried her face in her hands. Her boyfriend continued polishing her hunched back with light, circular, reassuring strokes. A new nurse appeared. “Van Meter,” she said.

“Finally,” Winn murmured, pushing himself up. Biddy rose, too, but he shook his head at her. “Wait here.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, still standing.

“Very sure.” He hobbled after the nurse, past the weeping girl and her plastic bag, and disappeared down a long, pale hallway of many doors.

LIVIA WALKED
a slow circuit around the whale. From a distance it looked black, but up close she could see its skin had deteriorated to a mottled reddish gray and was marked all over with white scratches and scars, mementoes of a life spent tangling with sharp-beaked squid. It lay on its left side with its belly facing inland. Its right pectoral fin was swollen into a useless flap, a pathetic tab stuck to the bloated side of an immense dark balloon. Half a dozen men in foul-weather gear had begun to peel away the skin and blubber. The whale could not be left to rot on the sand. Thirty or forty tons of fat, meat, and briny offal could not be left to erode according to nature’s sluggish timetable
when there were summer beachgoers to be kept happy. Probably the museum in Waskeke Town would want the skeleton—they had one already but why not another—and the bones could not be had without digging them out of the oily flesh. The men were sweating and cursing, spattered with particles of the leviathan. It looked like hard work, flensing, but they had made progress. Wide tracts of blubber were exposed along the whale’s side. A cutter in yellow overalls stood on top of the animal, bracing his rubber boots against the slippery skin and leaning on the long handle of his knife (an antique borrowed from the museum) to push the blade through dense strata of fat. A bulldozer, Livia overheard people saying, was coming to help bury the pieces.

Below the massive, blocky head, the whale’s jaw hung open—long and narrow and studded with conical teeth—and Livia peered into the odiferous cave of its mouth. In its upper jaw there were no teeth, only sockets. The opening to its throat was surprisingly small, no grand, fishy portal leading to a ribbed and lightless cathedral with room for Geppetto and Jonah. It was a female, and she wondered how many calves it had produced, how far it had ranged. Sperm whales dove thousands of feet to feed in total darkness. They could hold their breath for an hour, dive at five hundred feet per minute, slow their metabolisms, collapse their lungs, tolerate huge amounts of lactic acid as their muscles burned through stored oxygen. They allowed cold water into their nasal passages so the oily spermaceti in their heads turned from liquid to solid, helping them descend. They were, in all ways, miraculous diving machines.

And yet they could drown, did drown, tangled in transoceanic phone lines or held under ice or wrapped in fishing nets. The bones of older whales showed lesions from nitrogen emboli caused by ascending too quickly—the bends. Livia wondered if an upside-down cosmology existed for whales, if heaven was something deep and dark and cold, and this bright, sandy beach was hell. She thought again about how she had woken up that morning, the darkness of the beach and the water washing over her feet. The whale was already dead by then, close to shore if not yet beached, rolling in the surf only a few
miles from where she and Sterling had been. Fortunate whales sank to the sea floor when they died and were picked to bare bones by fish, crabs, and worms. This whale had fallen through some loop in the universe and descended from the sky, sinking through the night to be picked at by humans.

Francis was talking to some men clustered around a truck. He was speaking with great animation—probably, she thought, about genuine experience and his desire to have it. Eventually the men shrugged and nodded, and Francis lifted an axe from a pile of tools on the sand. Livia knew at once what he intended. He carried the axe to a spot below the pectoral fin, set the blade in the sand, and grasped the handle with both hands. The man in yellow atop the whale paused in his cutting and looked down. Francis looked like a blinkered horse in his big sunglasses, turning his head from side to side, getting his bearings. “Francis,” she called, walking in his direction. “Wait!”

“Why?” Francis shouted against the wind.

She had no answer. A cut-up whale was a cut-up whale. No one else seemed inclined to stop him. But Livia did not want Francis, someone who didn’t even like whales, to drop an axe into this one’s belly. “Just wait!” she called.

“Here we go!” he said, raising the axe behind his head. The blade sailed down and stuck into the blubber. Francis grinned. He worked the axe free and raised it again. Uneasy, Livia watched. She had almost adjusted to the reek of the whale, but it seemed to have become more pungent. She thought she might vomit again.

“One,” he said, lifting the axe, “two, three!” The blade descended, glinting against the sky. She was never sure if the whale exploded before or after the axe hit home. She would have sworn the weapon was still in flight when she was knocked back by a wall of crimson and pinned to the sand under a heavy rope of intestine. She could never recall the sound of the massive corpse ripping apart. She remembered the axe, and then she remembered being on her back, looking up at the startled seagulls.

Twelve · Fortunate Son

W
inn met Jack Fenn in October 1969. Winn was a senior, and for the members of the Ophidian, October was a flurried month of social sport. In the third week, invitations to an Ophidian cocktail party were bestowed upon likely sophomores, who, as the lingo went, could consider themselves “punched.” Most punches were chosen because they were acquaintances of Ophidian members. Some were chosen out of the freshman register for their last names. The punches who did not irritate any of the members by behaving in a way that was too boyish, boorish, earnest, serious, slick, falsely modest, hammy, eager, or bookish were invited to another event and then another until the pond of potentials was drained down to the last drops of purest blue. The punches whose brothers or fathers had been in the club were considered the nearest thing to shoo-ins that the Ophidian, for all the rigor of its selection, could have. For a legacy to be denied admission was unusual but decidedly possible if the apple fell far from the tree or the tree had been problematic in the first place.