Seating Arrangements (34 page)

“That’s right.” Winn pointed out the window at the party on the deck.

“What are you two doing hiding in the bar?”

“Taking a hiatus from humanity,” he said. It was a phrase from when they were dating, when they would sneak out of a crowded
party for some fresh air or when they decided to spend a weekend in his apartment, just the two of them.

Fee’s smile turned brittle. “Is Livia here?”

“Of course.”

“Jack said he told you and her about Teddy.”

“That’s right,” Winn said. “A chip off the old block.”

“We like to think so. He’s here, too. With Jack and Meg in the dining room. I was just on my way to the ladies’.”

“How is the food?” Agatha inquired.

“I don’t know,” Fee said. “There’s a new chef.”

“Say,” Winn said. “Tell Jack I have a bone to pick with the Pequod.”

Fee glanced in the direction of the restrooms but stood her ground. “I’d be happy to.”

“It was the damnedest thing. I was riding my bicycle home from a tennis match this morning—with Goodman Perry—do you know him?—I was on the bike path, and one of your caddies was down there in a cart—on the bike path—retrieving a ball for a couple of gents. Right as I passed by, this caddy put the cart in reverse without even a glance behind him and”—he clapped his hands for effect—“slammed right into me. Knocked me off my bike. Look.” He set his foot on the bottom rung of the bar stool and hoisted up the leg of his bright green pants. A rusty flower of blood had worked its way through the gauze. “I had to go to the hospital and get stitches. Tomorrow I have to walk Daphne down the aisle, and the timing couldn’t have been worse.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Fee said. She gestured at Agatha’s hand. “Were you injured as well?”

Agatha gave her guttural, abbreviated laugh. “Under different circumstances.”

“Otis Derringer,” said Winn. “He was the caddy. And you know, Fee, the most extraordinary thing about it was that he wouldn’t apologize.”

“Wouldn’t or didn’t?”

“Wouldn’t. I told him I would appreciate an apology, no legal strings attached, and he said he hadn’t done anything worth apologizing
for. I don’t know how you make that argument when you’ve sent a man to the hospital, but there you have it.”

Fee had been listening with her chin in the crook between her right thumb and index finger, the other fingers curled against her mouth, obscuring it, but he could tell from her eyes that she was smiling a particular bittersweet, superior smile he remembered. “Sometimes people don’t apologize when they should,” she said. “That’s the way it goes sometimes.”

“Under these circumstances,” he said, faltering, “it seems clear … it seems clear …”

Fee dropped her hand, and that old smile swelled and twisted into a suppressed laugh. “What seems clear, Winn?”

He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I should go outside,” Agatha said. “I’m not being a very good bridesmaid.”

“I shouldn’t keep either of you.” Fee moved toward the ladies’ room. “Please tell Daphne I said congratulations.”

Winn followed Agatha out to the deck, daring to swiftly touch the bare skin between her shoulder blades with one finger as they passed through the doors. She arched her back but kept walking, away to where the young people were. Winn found the little bar set up as Biddy had said, just for them, and ordered a gin and tonic.

“How are you holding up?” Sam Snead said, popping up beside him. “How’s the leg? You were limping a little during the rehearsal, and of course that’s fine. No biggie at all. No one minds if the father of the bride is a little off kilter. But it’s a wedding and everything’s supposed to be perfect, so I got you these from my trusty bag of tricks, my bag of potions, just in case. It’s up to you. They might help. Take them, don’t take them. I’ve given Daphne a little something for tomorrow, too. I give something to all my brides. Takes the edge off. Like I said, take them, don’t take them. I’m here to make sure you have a good time. All right? Okay. We’ll start moving everyone in for dinner in twenty, yes? Good.”

She pressed a small envelope that rattled with pills into his palm. He pocketed it, feeling surreptitious. He had spent more time feeling
surreptitious in the past twenty-four hours than he had in his whole life. Dryden, Tabitha’s son, floated by in a white suit with a sky-blue pocket square. “Uncle Winn! Long time no see.” The young man air-kissed him and drifted toward a group listening to Francis recite the story of the whale. Dryden always made Winn think of his grandfather Frederick. Had he been anything like this young man? He thought of Fee’s father, old Haviland, chalking his cue under Frederick’s portrait like he was sharpening a weapon.

“Boom!” said Francis. “And then it rained blood.”

Agatha sat on the arm of a chair occupied by the groomsman who was not a Duff, Charlie. She laughed and touched the young man’s arm and looked at Winn. Daphne took Greyson’s hand and swung it back and forth. Piper fished a maraschino cherry from her drink and casually flung it over the railing and into the harbor. Sterling stood alone, leaning on the wooden railing and gazing moodily out over the water. A waiter approached him with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, and Sterling stared at the toothpicked morsels as if he had never seen such a thing before. He shook his head and the waiter moved on. Dicky Sr. and Maude were holding court in a circle of their family members. Taking a bacon-wrapped date from the tray Sterling had rejected, Winn chewed and watched Dicky Sr. Why had this man of all men made so many sons who wanted to fuck his daughters? The sun had dropped into the clouds like a flame into a lantern, and in the orange light the tireless breeze was tossing around the cocktail napkins and the hair and skirts of the women. They were blooming, all of them, the young people. Their cheeks were flushed from sun; their eyes were bright from drink; the shoulders of the girls were as smooth and appetizing as marzipan. They laughed so easily. They laughed at everything. They were laying hands on Daphne’s belly, and she was guiding them to where the baby was kicking. “Do you feel it?” she asked.

“Yes!” they said. “Yes!”

Watching Agatha, he felt uneasy, dissatisfied. He had expected, long ago, that marriage would be an antidote to his youthful hedonism—with my body, I thee worship, and so forth—but he had found it
was only a partial balm. The number of years he had lasted without a dalliance seemed like a miracle, or, rather, a feat of miraculous self-discipline. He had always suspected that a little sexual diversion was likely to be more trouble than it was worth. What was the point? However many women he screwed, he would never want to leave Biddy. His life would be unchanged. But now he thought maybe he was due a little adventure for adventure’s sake. He might have underestimated, all these years, how refreshing a new body might be. In the morning he would have done anything to undo his brief grappling with Agatha, but then, when she had walked away from him in the bar, the possibility that they would go no further had seemed unendurable. If he could give this itch a good, thorough scratching, just this once, he might find the relief he needed. And, even better, he might feel really and truly sorry about it—maybe, more than sex, he needed a good scare, a wake-up call. Downing the last of his drink, he snatched a glass of wine from the tray of a passing waiter. Taking out Sam Snead’s little envelope, he shook the pills around—there were three—and then hooked one out with his finger and swallowed it. Yes, he would give in to temptation just this once. Of course, he abhorred weakness in himself, but to look at the thing logically, he had already committed the sin. How much worse could a small escalation make it? Not much. Perhaps not at all.

Agatha had left her perch beside Charlie. Winn could not see where she had gone. He wanted to communicate his decision to her somehow—perhaps a wink would do the trick—and to stop her from filling up her dance card for the evening with Charlie or, heaven forbid, Sterling again. Sterling was still there, on the railing, contemplating the harbor. Winn thought of the garage door flying up, their naked shapes. Despite the nearness of his sixtieth birthday and the dustiness of his bag of lover’s tricks, he was certain he would be able to drive all memory of Sterling or anyone else from Agatha. Too bad Sterling would never know and would only complacently pat himself on the back for having both Agatha and Livia. Winn flinched at the thought of Livia and wondered if he should warn her that Teddy Fenn was in the dining room. He had half a mind to go in there and ask
the Fenns to leave, Pequod be damned, to take their high and mighty selves home to their rented house and let Livia have a nice night for once. Looking around, Winn spotted her sitting alone at a little table with a cocktail, funereal in her black dress. He thought of the garage again, except he saw his daughter instead of Agatha.

STERLING LOOKED
at Waskeke harbor and missed Hong Kong. All the slips at the docks were taken, the outermost ones by a showy fleet of brilliantly white motor yachts and magnificent teak-decked sailboats. Out in the basin, boats on floating moorings bobbed in the chop. The car ferry was on its way out, big and blunt, chugging around the small lighthouse at the harbor’s mouth. A pair of seagulls teetered on the wind. The sight was lovely, but he preferred the grand scale of Victoria Harbor with its crystal garden of skyscrapers. He liked the huge, ugly container ships and the red sails of the tourist junks.

He was not in the mood for small talk. He felt no need to ingratiate himself with Daphne’s family or to see what his own relatives were up to, to find out which colleges his cousin Annabelle was considering or to hear about Uncle Digbert’s boardroom triumphs. He knew he was supposed to store up nuggets of trivia about everyone so he could regurgitate them later and prove to the family that he
cared
, that he was
involved
. Thank God in a few days he would be back in Hong Kong and free again to live without much obligation to anyone. With the other expats, small talk was ritualized; they all knew the script; he could keep up his part without exertion. He only enjoyed chitchat when he was working on a girl, and only for the gamesmanship involved, the razzle-dazzle, the strategy of fitting together words and phrases and laying them out just so until he had paved an inviting path down which he and the girl would walk, arm and arm, to the bedroom. Or kitchen. Or bathtub or car or movie theater. Or bar bathroom. Or fucking freezing beach. Or garage.

Neither Livia nor Agatha had been small-talk girls. Livia was a big-talk girl, and Agatha was a no-talk girl. He’d bungled the situation,
although he didn’t see how he could have avoided that particular bungle except by turning down Agatha, which would have been insane. Still, all evening he’d kept thinking of Livia’s face after Winn had flung up the garage door, infantile and ancient at the same time, full of loss. Her hands had contracted like two claws against her bony clavicle (he remembered kissing it, hard as a copper pipe under her skin). Meanwhile Agatha was popping off him and running around like a headless chicken.

Gazing down into his drink, he shook the bergs of ice so they collapsed and sank below the yellow surface. Something bright flew past his ear. He turned. The albino-looking bridesmaid was giggling with Francis.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was trying to toss a cherry into your drink.”

“I put her up to it,” Francis said, lifting a hand. “Sorry, bro.”

Sterling pursed his lips. Mopsy was sitting down and complaining about the cold; Dicky Jr. was at her side, playing nursemaid as usual. Dicky Jr.’s wife, Mrs. Dicky, who had just arrived, stood nearby, frowning passionately at her BlackBerry and punching it with her thumbs. Grammer was berating Greyson about something. Livia was sitting alone, forbidding as a widow. Sterling appraised his drink and was about to return to the bar when he saw Winn Van Meter heading for him and guessed from the determination on the man’s face that a time of reckoning had come.

“Listen,” Winn said, taking him by the bicep and drawing him toward the least populated corner of the deck, “I wanted to have a talk with you.”

“Oh?” Sterling looked piningly at the bar.

“What you do isn’t any of my business. What you do in my garage, however, starts to become my business, and what you do with my daughter is my business.”

“Really? Does she think so?”

Livia had perked up and was watching them through the crowd.

“This is between us now,” Winn said. “I have to say, you’ve really caused a problem here. Livia is pretty good at going off the deep end.
You probably didn’t know that, but you didn’t get to know her before you … you didn’t get to know her, now did you?”

Sterling shrugged. “Livia wanted to hook up, so we did. Then today the other one wanted to, so we did. I don’t think I did anything wrong.”

“Livia is very upset. She’s had a hard time of it this year and your”—he seemed to search for a word—“philandering didn’t help.”

“Philandering.” Sterling took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket. He offered the pack to Winn, who sneered at it. He pulled out a cigarette and lit up, turning away to shield the flame from the breeze. “Livia and I,” he said, releasing a lungful of smoke, “in no way had a committed relationship, given that we’d only just met, so I don’t think you could call what I did this afternoon ‘philandering.’ Getting greedy, maybe. To which I’d plead guilty. On many counts.”

“But you’ve made all this trouble between the girls. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to limit yourself to one girl per twenty-four-hour period. Just for this weekend. Then you can go back to Hong Kong and your usual schedule of eight or ten girls a day. Because of you, the bridesmaids hate each other.”

“Look, Agatha’s attractive. I don’t need to tell you that. I like Livia, too. She had the bad luck to be first. Nothing personal. If Agatha had happened last night and then Livia was interested today, it would have happened the other way around. Anyway, Livia and I have already talked about this. I’ve apologized.”

“That’s not nearly enough.”

Sterling exhaled, squinting against the smoke. “It’s interesting you think you have the moral high ground.”