The Unfortunates (2 page)
“Should have gotten around to it years ago, no excuse,” he said.
She’d thanked the mayor and the board and without notice stopped payment on a check to the County Development Foundation for the restoration of the town’s second, older marina, ensuring the jetty remain a dilapidated grave of rotting posts rising out of the water, cleaved from the body of the dock by a chain-link fence, which the kids who are townbound and time idle still scale with beers jammed down their pants, to swim the water slick with oil, and after, under the idiot moon, to lie on the dock in the dark, listening for the cruiser on night patrol rolling past with its lights off.
Thus, the Stockport locals among the sixty-five to receive the Somners’ invitation, which read
A Day at Sea!
in royal-blue cursive across heavy card stock, were surprised.
CeCe lifts her feet to avoid a pool of water rolling at the bottom of the motorboat.
“Insecure tub! George, go faster. If I drown out here, they’ll call it you-know-what.”
He gives the cord another yank. They putt along the curve of the cove out toward the Sound. A modest blue house comes into view where the land opens to ocean, a figure by the door.
“Mrs. Barnes, smoking,” George says.
“No, the time! Who smokes at dawn?”
“Dana Barnes, I guess.”
“Cigarettes are disgusting.”
“Isn’t a cigarette.”
“Ah.” CeCe laughs. “We invited her, didn’t we? Do you think she’ll be stoned on the boat? Now I’m looking forward to this brunch.” But her face bunches into sadness. “So drive already.”
Javier sees them coming and readies himself on the metal steps, unfolded into the water.
They board and take breakfast on the stern because the captain advises that from there they can watch the sunrise. It’s pink and blue. They descend belowdecks to change. Ridiculous, George feels, to be on board so early, to dress so early, and then do nothing for hours but bicker and look at the sky. But she’d insisted: to supervise. He does his mother the courtesy of putting on a jacket he knows she won’t like, asking her opinion, and descending again to shave and change into the poplin laid out on the bed.
CeCe puts on a sleeveless sheath of cerulean crepe. Bending carefully, she puts on the ballet flats of soft, blue leather with white soles she had ordered for the day, dark soles and heels being unacceptable on a boat, though she doesn’t expect her guests to know the old rules. At the top of each of her flats is a gold sailor’s knot with two tiny pearls-of-the-sea, a gold anchor nestled into the knot, too much whimsy for her taste, but discreet enough. Shopping, that demoralizing endeavor. Especially once she crossed into her seventies, five years ago. With increasing regularity, her shopper at Bergdorf urges her toward items of themed exuberance, clothing with pictures, as if she were a toddler, as if older women and toddlers are alone together in having so little of interest or coherence to say that instead they might point to their shoes or their chests with cheer. She feels tired. Don’t think about it, she thinks, as she struggles to clasp the pearls at her neck. She wills herself, schools herself, so often it’s almost a mantra: she’ll not indulge the shake in her hands, the shake in her legs. They are
not
invited. She will not invite the most humiliating, the aerobic shake of her neck: a tiny, smiling quiver as friendless as a match fired on a hill. She’s learned to play a trick on herself this last year, which sometimes works—she imagines herself inside a kind of farmyard pen, encircled by a strong wire fence. The world outside the fence is sonic, an earthquake, but she is still.
The shakes, when they do come, are preceded by an unnerving sensation and sound inside her ears like the metal hum of a train track before the train appears—her ties, her spine; their rattle—a minute, alien music—her neck. As if she is agreeing, agreeing forever, with some small point. And what point might this be? She will not use the wheelchair, refused George’s plea to bring it on board—the absurd comedy of a wheelchair on a boat! She pretended, and he pretended with her, that the crawl down the lawn had been easy, that she was playing a game as quaint as
—
what is its name? The one where you must move sideways to move forward.
“Good morning,” says a young woman in a white apron, passing with a tray of juice glasses. Chaos, CeCe thinks, for the server’s hair is down. No time to ruminate. She must round up the staff, remind them how to comport themselves. The micromanaging one must do to have it right.
* * *
George shaves. If he were home right now, he’d be by the pool, drinking coffee and reading the paper, watching Iris swim. Across the deck he sees Javier, assembling the catering staff for CeCe. They make a checkerboard of black and white. George could mark the passage of his life in speeches he’s heard his mother give to caterers. As she surveys the brunch buffet—“Dears. You are all dear to me today—” he escapes to the other end of the boat. Still, he can hear:
“—and you are to do more than pass around the food and keep tidy. You are in control. Do you know you must be in control? Of the very mood. The enjoyment of the guests is yours to bear. I can see from here—is there mustard somewhere to go with the lamb? Cold meat? Mustard? If I see but one wilting lily draped over the rail with nothing to drink—have these—star fruit?—been sliced neatly enough? Daisy, is it? Daisy, go get a knife and tidy them. If anyone drinks too quickly, you will forget to pour every other time, and if they look slighted, pour half as much as usual. We know how to pour for me, nothing but air or water and stand directly in front of the glass so this goes unnoticed—those oysters—that one, that one, look where I am pointing. Women do not like to swallow oysters as large as these! Your thumb, no longer than your thumb.”
George leans as far over the water as he can. He dares himself to jump. He contemplates the authenticity of his sadness. An hour ago he was full of the courage and pleasure of Iris, of all their life to come. How is it he’s now so low? His mother, pretending to be frail, only to cause him grief. He could jump. He could! Debating an act so serious and miserable binds a dark delight to his sorrow. He waves a waiter over, requests a Bloody Mary. He doesn’t want to die. However, there is the pleasant vision of them weeping at his funeral. He checks his watch, his hand over the blue. It has a crack across its face he’s certain wasn’t there the day before—could it be from when he tugged the throttle of the motorboat? Had he not noticed, in the dark with the roar of the outboard? Next week he’ll take it to the repairman on Lexington. He can’t let his mother see—an heirloom, not John Stepney Somner’s but John’s son, CeCe’s father, Edward George, and George’s namesake. Once more he’s overcome by the child’s dream of witnessing them mourn at his funeral, and he knows, though he can’t say it to himself so directly, that for a man of middle age some other dream should long have replaced this one. His mother’s voice returns to him on the wind.
“—And don’t be afraid to give a compliment. There’s a story underneath or behind every hat or brooch a lady wears. Dress the greens there only at the last minute! But never speak in a way that forces a guest to indulge
your
interests—Blue Point? Kumamoto? To indulge the tastes of others you must reveal no tastes of your own. I hope the eggs, over there, are underpoached to account for the heat of the sun?
Madame
is a forbidden address. It’s old-fashioned! Fruit should not be next to salmon tartare. Try not to fret if a guest takes out some frustration on you. It may not be pleasant, but you are a repository. George? Young miss, please set yourself to extracting those Brazil nuts from the mix. No one ever wants a Brazil nut. Perhaps the cheese is oozing out of the figs and overpowering the surrounding dishes because someone’s put that plate in the sunniest spot on the table? Find and use the shade! When the boat turns, find it again. For the vegetarians—should tomato consomm
é
be next to carpaccio? We shall all be clean, clean and invisible, yes? Invisible, but you must watch with an intimacy that allows you to foresee each desire. Try to abstain from using the restroom—edible flowers? Is this a luau? Javier, toss—yes, overboard is fine—
smile
, I’m
teasing
—but if you must use the restroom take a clean towel so that if anyone sees you going in, they will assume you are improving it for their benefit. Bartenders, we will not serve anything with a straw. Mr. Antonopoulos. I am glad to see we no longer have the scuffed-shoe problem of our last engagement. I know there is a tendency to let off steam when you think you are amongst yourselves. I am not a fool. This is absolutely forbidden. It is always possible we are being heard or seen without our knowledge. This is good life-advice, dears, not just for today.”
Well, George thinks, that’s one point she’s got right. He can tell she’s finished and rejoins her, sewing on the warm smile that says,
What’s that?
—his hands amiably pocketed, his chin and eyebrows up like a birder on a walk full of ordinary sparrows.
Thank you
, the staff says. They disband to their stations. Javier nods in the direction of the shore. The first load of guests is shuttling over from the dock.
Iris’s dog is first out of the shuttle, which bounces against the starboard of the
Matador
as it’s tethered for ascent. He’s part Akita or mastiff, an unlikely red—dried blood or old iron, with a long, solemn face, the flesh drawn toward the jowls and loosening around the neck as if tied with butcher’s string. He has big mutt paws, long, yellow teeth. Barrel ribs, and the kind of attenuated belly that tapers and disappears into the top of the hindquarters. Tie-dyed by the devil, Esme said when she first saw 3D. A strange name for such a serious creature.
George respects but does not like the dog. His frank gaze, his dark eyes, unnerve George. The dog has known Iris longer than George has known Iris, has witnessed versions of her that will forever remain unknown to George. There she is, he thinks, when he looks into 3D’s face. Younger, hotter, a million moving pictures of Iris suspended in the spinning web of dumb-dog neurotransmission, forever doing whatever 3D watched her do from the threshold of her darkened bedroom door. Her past is the vaulted property of 3D. Though dogs, George knows, can’t tell time, at least not the way men can.
3D scrabbles up the metal stairs and pushes past George, who is standing at the top, smiling and waving over the water.
“Champagne?” he calls. “Wet shoes? Everyone’s shoes stay dry?”
“My feet got wet, and so did 3D’s, but he doesn’t care, and neither do I,” Iris says, her voice low and full of cheer, the dog racing back down to accompany her as she climbs the stairs, a little after the rest. Her wedding ring scrapes against his cheek in greeting, an old habit, turning the stone toward the palm. Why? he once asked. To keep it safe, she’d said, and shrugged, disappearing behind the golden curtain of her hair. Lucky is the man whose greatest rival is a dog.
Today, Iris has gathered her hair into a mussed knot at her nape. Her mouth is bright. To George, she lifts her fine, crescent brows—brows so light she seems to him always to be wearing a hopeful, open expression, wakeful, unwritten—to ask,
How shit has your day been so far?
He answers, with an eye roll,
Shit
, and once again all is well. She shakes her head quickly—
Don’t tell me now
. To stop his laugh, she raises her voice to the guests collecting around them.
“Any chance, George, you packed an extra pair of shoes for me? You forgot? Don’t anybody ask this guy to be useful before noon, am I right? I’m taking mine off. Let’s make a shoe pile. Hey, look! I’ve started a trend.”
* * *
CeCe arranges herself in a canvas lounge chair in the middle of the boat. The weather is complying, the sun high on the horizon and a crisp early-summer breeze fluttering the sails. She doesn’t understand why so many are going around with bare feet, and at
lunchtime
, but the roll of the collective voice is right. The cause will net a good number of contributions, beyond what her guests have already pledged. The ocean view is behind her and an iced plate of shrimp has been placed on the stool beside her knee. She has chosen her place carefully. With any luck they won’t see she isn’t standing too often, isn’t moving around. Has anyone noticed? They come to her in such an orderly fashion. She wonders if they are looking at her too carefully, too long. And then they look away.
She’ll never tell them, never, not a one. She’s told no one beyond her household. Multiple system atrophy, a name too straightforward to say out loud. She would have preferred a more abstrusely titled affliction. Something named after the doctor who discovered it, like, say, MSA’s symptomatic cousin Parkinson’s. Something that might allow her to minimize her disease’s exact evil. Parkinson’s—her initial, incorrect diagnosis. No, she won’t endure the look of horror. Or, that greater horror, sympathy. She’d appreciated it when the doctors began abbreviating it to MSA; by some aural dyslexia, MSA puts her mind to NASA and rocket launches, which allows her to feel hopeful about innovation and progress and the human endeavor. At least she doesn’t have PSP, progressive supranuclear palsy, another early candidate, ruled out due to her lucidity of mind—PSP taking the inner life along with the body. With MSA, she might make it five years. With PSP she’d already be mindless as a jellyfish washed onto a rock, dead before the tide.
No, no one’s staring at her. It’s only the way people look at each other at parties. Here is Mr. Holbrook, to update her on his most recent work in the Assembly. The Conrads join them and the subject changes to the problem of children texting each other ungrammatical cruelties during school. Soon enough three of her favorite people are beside her: Annie Mason, the director of the Somner Fund, twenty years her junior, steady and sharp; Annie’s assistant, a young man built like a mechanical pencil, from Louisville; and the foundation’s head of programs, Clifton Franks. Her favorite people, not because they are her friends, but because they are, as Clifton once nonsensically said, her octopus of righteousness—it was the seventies when he said it—doing the work of which Cecilia is proud. The fund’s endowment is modest compared to the likes of the Fords’ or the Rockefellers’. But she’s made sure over the years that her contributions are brave, offer seed money, risk supporting fledgling efforts. If Cecilia Somner gives her approval to a cause, other donors follow. It is for this reason she’s worked so long to keep her name alive, to keep the table set.
