Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  Luke shook the last cobweb out of his head. “It’s two in the morning. It’s freezing in here. Where are your robe and slippers?”

  She looked at the floor, as if the robe and slippers had been there moments ago. “I’ve gone and lost it, Charles!”

  Abigail had never before confused him with anyone else. “Let’s rest awhile,” Luke said, putting his arm around her shoulders.

  She pushed it off, marched over, and took out a few more books.

  “You shouldn’t exert yourself like this. You heard what the doctor said.” Luke swept aside a pile of detritus in a chair—the dial from an old telephone, a ball of rubber bands, a yellowed, half-finished needlepoint canvas tangled in thread. He would be up the rest of the night straightening the room. It would embarrass Abby to have Peggy see it like this. “Sit here and let me look.”

  Abigail was trembling, frustrated, and upset. This woman who’d never asked him to care for her, who’d never so much as spent a day in bed until her hospital stay last month, swayed on her feet and plucked at the sleeves of her nightgown. “But you can’t help, Charles! You’re gone, too!”

  “Abby.” Luke took a breath. “I’m Luke, your great-nephew. Trip’s son, remember? Charles isn’t here, but I am. Tell me what you’re trying to find.”

  All at once, the frenzy left Abigail’s movements. “Oh,” she said in a small voice. “I’ve done it again, haven’t I?”

  A discarded book lay facedown on a side table—a faded copy of The Story of Philosophy by Will and Ariel Durant. Abigail picked it up and turned it around and around in her hands. Luke waited for her to tell him the story behind the book: which family member had acquired and owned it—perhaps his Socialist great-uncle William, of whom the family had been terribly ashamed; or Aunt Beebee, Luke’s late father’s late sister, who’d fancied herself an intellectual.

  All Abigail did was set the book back down.

  “What were you looking for?” Luke asked again softly.

  “I don’t know.” Defeat etched his great-aunt’s lined face. “I don’t remember anymore.”

  SIX

  Everyone at Brattie’s Sports Pub called the bartender “the Commissioner,” except for the regulars, who got to call him “the Commish.” Peggy could never bring herself to use the abbreviated name. She was convinced the Commissioner hated her. It had started with an unfortunate incident early in her relationship with Brock in which, at the bar, she’d referred to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Commissioner had pointed to the “B” on his stained baseball cap and avoided her eyes ever since. From then on, she’d let Brock go up and get the drinks.

  But this Wednesday evening, Bex and Josh had joined her and Brock for a rare couples get-together, and Peggy intended to demonstrate what an insider she was at Brattie’s, to impress her friends with her ease in this other world, Brock’s world. Besides, Brock was at the foosball table. So here she was, waving her money, saying, “Excuse me,” trying to get the Commissioner’s attention. It was hopeless. Peggy smiled at her neighbor at the bar. “Could you please order me two soda waters?”

  “If I could ask your opinion.” The man held out his left wrist. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re wearing two watches,” Peggy said. One was all dials and gauges, like controls in an airplane cockpit. The other had a plain face with Roman numerals.

  “Good eye. Which do you like better?”

  Peggy pointed to the old-fashioned watch. It was not only simpler and more elegant, but it seemed familiar. She stared at it, trying to place where she’d seen it before.

  The man laughed. “That’s the one I’m getting rid of.” He flagged down the Commissioner and ordered Peggy’s waters.

  Luke. That’s what it was. Luke wore a watch like this. Peggy thought back to him on Saturday, in his enormous study, sleeves pushed up, the glint of red gold hair next to a leather watchband.

  The man tapped the dials-and-gauges model. “I just bought this one. It’s titanium, water-resistant to ten thousand feet, and look, it has an altimeter.”

  Peggy was chagrined to feel the blood rush to her cheeks—not from choosing the wrong watch, but from the memory of Luke. It wasn’t as if he were attractive—all right, he was kind of nice-looking, but his personality was a disaster, and her weekend had hardly been a success. She’d slept far too late Sunday morning and had run to take a shower, only to discover that her bathroom had only a tub, had given herself a quick sponge bath when the tub appeared to be out of order, the water a feeble trickle from its lime-crusted faucet, and had rushed downstairs to cold white toast and stilted small talk. Luke had hardly glanced up from the business section of the Hartford Courant. She’d left for the city the moment she’d finished her lukewarm coffee, and he’d barely said good-bye. To think, starting this weekend, she’d be stuck with him Friday night and Saturday morning, too.

  The Commissioner set two glasses in front of the watch man, who started to pay for them, but Peggy handed him her money and thanked him for his help.

  “Thanks for your help…” The man waited for Peggy to introduce herself.

  “I should get back to my friends,” she said.

  Bex was by herself at their table. “Look at my husband. Look at him.” At the moment, Josh, still in shirt and tie from his day at Legal Aid, was doing a victory dance with a guy in a CBS Sports logo cap. “And to think I want to have that man’s baby.”

  “He’s just having fun.” Peggy gave Bex one of the waters and took the other for herself.

  Bex drank and made a face. “This isn’t Perrier.”

  “We’re in a sports bar.”

  “As I’m painfully aware. Hi, sweetie,” Bex greeted Josh, who’d come to the table to stuff a chicken wing in his mouth. He belched loudly, laughed, kissed Bex’s forehead, and returned to the foosball table.

  Apprehension rose in Peggy’s chest. In seven years she’d heard a thousand variations on Bex’s theory that Brock brought out the worst in Josh. She didn’t want to hear it tonight. “I bought a wedding ring for Connecticut,” she said. “It doesn’t feel right to wear Brock’s ring there.” She checked to make sure her boyfriend’s attention was elsewhere and slipped a tiny velvet bag from her purse to show Bex what was inside: a glittering square stone framed in a marquee of tiny stones, with more dotting the slender band.

  “Stunning,” Bex said. “It’s, like, five carats.”

  “It’s fake.” Peggy replaced the bag in her purse. “A simulated ring for a simulated marriage.”

  “Having fun, girls?” Brock appeared at the table, two other foosball players in tow, and put his big hand on Peggy’s head and mussed her hair.

  One of Brock’s cohorts said to her, “Way to go. This is huge.”

  “Thanks, Sean!” Peggy was pleased. Brock must have told his friends of their pre-engagement.

  “Huuuge.” The other buddy socked Brock in the bicep.

  “Peggy, if you start missing him too much, you can always come by my place.”

  “Or mine. Four months is a long time. A lady might get lonely.” Sean squeezed Peggy’s arm.

  Brock laughed. “Cool it, guys, she doesn’t know yet.”

  Confused, Peggy looked at Brock for a clue.

  “Doesn’t know what?” Bex asked.

  “I’m not sure how to break this to you, friend.”

  Having lost his chips early, Hubbard, who was hosting Poker Night at his home in Westport, had appointed himself cocktail czar, pouring whiskey from an age-hazed crystal decanter into whatever odd glass he could find behind the bar. “Liddy got a card in the mail, a party invitation from your great-aunt. I’m afraid the dear girl has finally lost her mind. Not my wife, your great-aunt.”

  To Luke’s relief, Abby had been her old self on Sunday morning, if still not able to remember what she’d been seeking so desperately the night before. She’d spent several hours in the library retidying Luke’s work, rearranging the cabinet drawers with a methodology Luke had chosen not to que
stion.

  “Abby’s fine,” he told Hubbard.

  Hubbard held a ceramic mug with a golf club manufacturer’s logo. He refilled it and leaned against a wall. “She seems to think you’ve gotten married. To someone named Megan, Liddy said.”

  Despite his performance in Las Vegas, Luke wasn’t much for liquor. On a normal poker night, he might have a single drink. You’re a disgrace to the tribe, Hubbard would say, shaking his head. Tonight Luke needed to occupy his hands and fortify his resolve. He tipped back his glass, etched with the silhouette of a floating mallard. The Scotch tasted like turpentine. Perversely, this pleased Luke. “It’s Peggy.”

  Hubbard raised an eyebrow a questioning millimeter.

  At the table, Simmons, who had the dealer button, had paused, his hand angled toward Luke’s empty chair. “You playing cards, Sedgwick, or working on getting laid over there?”

  The other men in the room laughed, startling Toby, Hubbard’s twelve-year-old golden retriever, who lifted his head, thumped his tail twice, moved to a spot closer to his master, and went back to sleep.

  “You go ahead. I’ll sit out this hand.” Luke swirled the liquid in his glass, an amber lake rising to drown the etched duck. With their friends back to their hands, he muttered to Hubbard, “Her name is Peggy. Not Megan.”

  “Ha! You’ve gone and married a papist, no less. Isn’t Peggy short for Margaret, or Mary Margaret, or Margareta Maria Madonna—”

  “Get off it. She’s not Catholic.” Or maybe she is, Luke thought. “And what difference would it make if she were?”

  Hubbard chortled, enjoying what he thought was Luke’s joke.

  “I’m serious.”

  Hubbard laughed for a moment longer, until it became clear humor wasn’t what the situation called for. His mouth dropped open. “Christ.” He topped off Luke’s glass and led him to a pair of club chairs beneath a painting of one of Toby’s dead relatives. “When? Why? Who the hell is she?”

  Luke settled himself into a chair, downed his drink, and told the lie he’d rehearsed.

  “She knocked up?” Hubbard asked when Luke was finished.

  Luke stared down his friend over the rim of the empty mallard glass.

  “Come on. A shotgun wedding to a girl nobody’s heard of?”

  There was a minor commotion from the table: Ver Planck was scraping a substantial pot to his chest. Distracted, Hubbard got up to pour himself another round, then brought the decanter to refill Luke’s glass. He sat back down. “Is she us?”

  The phrase was shorthand; no explanation was necessary. Hubbard meant, Did Peggy measure up to the coded list of criteria that determined whether a girlfriend or wife was “our kind”—a list compiled within, Luke imagined, five minutes of the Pilgrims stepping onto Plymouth Rock, dubbing themselves America’s ruling class, and mixing themselves a congratulatory round of gin and tonics. It took into account family background, appearance, alma mater, occupation, hobbies, and behavior, plus scores of other, subtler cues someone not “us” would never think to look for—participation in the right childhood etiquette classes; a family beach key at Martha’s Vineyard. To be “us” was to claim one’s place in a club whose members were utterly convinced of their own moral and social superiority. A club that couldn’t exist unless it excluded anyone whose background, religion, or genetic code didn’t measure up.

  Luke, as he always did, wondered why any of it mattered.

  “Don’t tell me she’s a Tiffany,” Hubbard continued, watching the poker table. It was a reference to Ver Planck’s spouse, whom Hubbard secretly derided as a social climber.

  An odd sensation prickled up the back of Luke’s neck: That’s my wife you’re talking about. He looked at Hubbard, saying nothing.

  “Damn, Sedgwick. Why? Why now, after all this time?”

  The game was winding down; Ver Planck had most of Simmons’s and Eaton’s chips. Luke had been playing well before Hubbard had insisted on pouring him a drink. On a percentage basis, he’d made more this evening at cards than he’d made this week in the market, which for the past two days had fallen dizzyingly, risen again, and settled out at about where it had started. Luke was comfortable with his conservative portfolio, though he’d noted that a technology stock into which Ver Planck had bought heavily had doubled in value in forty-eight hours. Then again, it was easy to take Ver Planck–style risks, to make volatile investments, to marry a woman who wasn’t “us,” when you were Ver Planck and had more money than God.

  Hubbard was still waiting for an answer.

  “It just felt right,” Luke said.

  To his ears, the words sounded laughable, cheap, but Hubbard let it go. He leaned back in his chair. “Well, congratulations, old boy. I suppose Liddy will want to have her for tea or something.” He rubbed the retriever’s stomach with his foot. “Just one more question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Does this mean Nicki’s available?”

  Brock didn’t get it. He couldn’t understand why she was upset. “It’s not like I wasn’t going to tell you,” he kept repeating. He’d said it three times so far on their walk home from Brattie’s.

  Jog home was more like it. It wasn’t easy to stay a few self-righteous steps ahead of a man whose legs were half again as long as yours. “When?” Peggy panted. “Packing to catch your flight to Sydney? ‘By the way, I’m off to work on a surfing movie, see you in June’?”

  “Come on.” Brock had caught up and was at her side again. “You know I’m booked with football through the Super Bowl. I’m not leaving for three months. I would of told you before then.” Under the streetlights, Brock swung his camera-carrying arm, circling it first forward, then back, as he always did when he’d worked too many days in a row. “Anyway, it’s Hawaii first, then Brazil, and then Australia.”

  “That’s not the point.” Peggy regarded him out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to poke him in the chin dimple, sock him in his Disney-prince jaw, tell him it was would have, not would of. “The point is we’re a couple. Couples don’t make big decisions without talking to each other first.…”

  Her indignation dissolved there, at the corner of Amsterdam and Sixty-eighth Street. Brock wasn’t the deceitful one. He hadn’t gone and accidentally gotten married. He wasn’t conning an old lady. He wasn’t carrying on a false relationship behind her back. Peggy was hardly in a position to claim the high ground.

  She stopped walking, no longer angry. “Did you mean what you told me, that you’re working to save money for our wedding?”

  “Well,” Brock said. “Yeah.”

  A block behind them, a trio of young women erupted in shrieks of laughter. They were falling all over one another, doubled up over some private joke. They were twenty-two or twenty-three, maybe. As she waited for Brock to elaborate, Peggy envied them. They had a few years left before it was time to agonize over where their lives were going.

  “Brock.” Peggy couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t wait any longer. She had to ask. “What if I paid for our wedding?” She had to know. “What if I could raise the money for the big wedding you say you want by, say, next fall?”

  Brock swung his arm.

  “Just theoretically. If the cost weren’t a problem anymore, then could we get married?”

  The three women broke out in fresh peals of laughter.

  Brock turned to look at them.

  Peggy wanted to scream, to run around him in mad circles.

  He turned back to Peggy. She held her breath.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The trio walked around them on the sidewalk—split up and passed them on either side without looking at them, as if Peggy and Brock were no more than a physical obstacle in the landscape. A boulder. A sinkhole. A vortex that would devour them the way this relationship had devoured seven years of Peggy’s life.

  Seven years she wouldn’t get back. And for what?

  “I think I should move out,” Peggy said.

  Brock stopped rotating h
is camera shoulder. “Out of where?”

  “Our apartment.” Peggy couldn’t believe she was saying it. “I can’t do this, Brock. You and I want completely different things. I’ve been waiting and waiting, thinking you’d come around, that you’d come to want the life I want. But I don’t think you will come around, and I’d be an idiot to wait any longer. You can keep the apartment. I’ll move back in with Bex.”

  Brock scratched his head. “You want to take a break?”

  “I think it’s a breakup.” Peggy removed her pre-engagement ring and held it out to him, one part of her on the verge of tears, another amazed at how free she felt, a third aware that despite her resolve, Brock would try to talk her out of leaving.

  She’d go to Bex’s. The building was back in the direction she and Brock had just come. Peggy started walking. Brock would say something before she reached the end of the block. He would call after her, and she would explain, kind but resolute, that her decision was final.

  But he didn’t call, and she continued walking, until there were so many blocks between them that she wouldn’t have heard him if he had.

  On Friday afternoon, after market close, Luke telephoned Nicki to set up a Monday-night date.

  “Why can’t I see you tonight?” Nicki countered. “There are all sorts of things I’d like to do to you…” She left the rest of the sentence to his imagination.

  Luke was no longer listening. Out of nowhere, he’d remembered a line from his wedding vows in Las Vegas, something about committing himself constantly and faithfully.

  “Come over tonight,” Nicki repeated.

  “I can’t,” he told her. Peggy was set to arrive in a few hours, and it would seem strange to Abigail if he wasn’t home.

  Yet Abby had long since retired to bed by the time Peggy showed up. Luke was immersed in paying bills when he heard a noise. He found her on the doorstep, pounding the massive knocker hard enough to wake the dead.