Mating Rituals of the North American WASP

by Lauren Lipton

  “What’s the occasion?” Luke accepted the cigar.

  “No occasion. Just a taste of what you could enjoy if you’d reconsider this Budget Club idea.”

  Luke took a puff. “You talk like there’s something in it for you.”

  “Only the glory of your success,” Ver Planck said. “You could stand to be more aggressive with your assets, Sedgwick, and this is perfect for you. You’d just be leasing the land, not selling it.”

  “Maybe so.” Unlike with the Sedgwick House, there was nothing saying he couldn’t lease the Sedgwick land. “But Abigail would still have my head.”

  The air in the room was blue by the time Kyle Hubbard, Topher Eaton, and Bunny Simmons arrived. Hubbard breathed in deeply, exhaled with a theatrical “Aaaaaaaah,” and tossed his coat across the back of the couch. “Miss the wife during the work week, Sedgwick?” Hubbard laughed. “You’ve got the right idea, friend, with this weekend-only deal. A man would kill for that kind of setup. Too bad it can’t last. She’s planning to move up here, yes?”

  “Eventually.”

  Luke was a burgeoning expert at lies and dodges. Yesterday, Ernestine Riga had asked him when he and Peggy were going to have children, and he’d deftly changed the subject to the New Nineveh Home Tour. Ernestine had forgotten her question entirely and launched into an exhaustive account of the repairs and upgrades she and her husband were doing to prepare the former Sedgwick carriage house for its social debut. What a paradox, Luke had thought: The better-preserved Sedgwick house was the one that no longer belonged to the Sedgwicks.

  “Enjoy your freedom while you can,” Hubbard said. “Speaking of Peggy, Liddy and I want you two to come to the Game with us. We’ll tailgate, the whole thing. Topher and Carrie are coming, too.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Luke said.

  “Loosen up, Sedgwick. Besides, we all want to get to know the little lady.” Hubbard headed toward the Scotch and called across the room, “I trust you brought Cubans for the whole class, Planky?”

  The specials at twig were written in chalk on a monstrous blackboard on the back wall. Jeremy had to turn in his chair to read it, and while he did so, Peggy scrutinized the back of his neck. How quickly her dating days were coming back to her, when she and Bex had used the neck-nails-shoes system to rate men. Jeremy had earned a point for his nails already: They were neither bitten nor dirty nor manicured. His shoes were marginal: They weren’t run down at the heels, but they were motorcycle boots—pretentious, Peggy thought, unless you were actually riding a motorcycle. Half a point. That left his neck: Was it properly groomed or slovenly and unshaven? She leaned over the table to get a look.

  Jeremy turned back around. “The ostrich carpaccio looks good.” Peggy jumped back, toppling the table votive with her sleeve. The candle singed the tablecloth before Jeremy smothered it with his salad plate and grinned. “No girl has burned down a restaurant to get out of dinner with me before.” He flipped over his digital gadget, glanced at it, and flipped it back facedown.

  Peggy subtracted one point for the gadget, two for living in a neighborhood too trendy for its own good, and another for the ostrich carpaccio, which sounded just plain nasty, but she gave him two for self-deprecating humor and decided she’d been on first dates far worse than this. She and Jeremy had an uncanny number of things in common. He was an entrepreneur as well, with his own business setting up computer networks for small companies. He had moved to New York the year after she had. When she asked where he’d grown up, he said, “Sunnyvale, California. It’s near—”

  “San Jose.” Maybe it was the pill she’d taken, but she could feel herself unwinding, her edges blending into the scene around her. “I lived there a couple of years.”

  They learned they’d graduated from rival high schools, that Peggy had taken ballet lessons half a mile from Jeremy’s house. “Do your parents still live there?” she asked once the six-foot-tall, shaved-bald waitress had set down their appetizers.

  “They liquidated everything and moved to Costa Rica.” Jeremy grimaced. “I know what you’re thinking. Normal people wouldn’t do anything that nuts.”

  “My parents’ retirement nest egg is an RV with a bumper sticker that says, ‘Driver Carries No Cash—He’s Married!’ ” Peggy took a bite of her salad. It was a shame she’d ordered so timidly. After weeks of high WASP cuisine, she should be up for something adventurous. “I think they should have gone with the one that said, ‘Driver Carries No Cash—He Blew It All on This RV!’ ”

  “I swear, we’re the same person.” Jeremy tucked into his carpaccio. At least he wasn’t eating a frozen potpie and canned peas. Peggy decided to reinstate his food points.

  When dinner was over, Jeremy walked her to the corner and told her he’d like to see her again. He moved in closer. She stayed still, trying to decide whether to lean forward an inch so he’d kiss her or back an inch so he’d shake her hand.

  A car roared past on the street behind her. She could hear snippets of conversation on the sidewalk: a woman summarizing a column in the day’s Times, two teenagers giddily debating whether to go to this party or that movie.

  She leaned forward.

  It was a fine kiss. Decent softness with respectable pressure—enough to show he was interested, but not intrusive. It was good to be kissed after so long, and her body began to respond even if her heart remained stubbornly detached, her arms wrapping around his neck—shaven, it turned out.

  When the kiss had run its course, Jeremy asked, “What are you doing this weekend?”

  She felt dazed. Why wasn’t she melting with desire?

  “My friend’s band is playing Saturday. Want to go?”

  “Okay,” she heard herself agree, then remembered. She couldn’t go anywhere this weekend, next weekend, or any weekend for another ten months and—fourteen now—days. “I forgot. I can’t. I’m—” She bit off the rest of the sentence. How could she explain?

  “How about…” He removed the gadget from his belt, touched the screen, and studied it. “Next Tuesday?”

  “Okay.” Was it okay? She guessed so. She and Jeremy had so much in common. She hailed a taxi and let Jeremy kiss her on the cheek before she stepped alone into the car and felt her edges merge into the cracked vinyl seat.

  ELEVEN

  Bex felt funny.

  “Funny how?” Peggy asked.

  “Different. I can’t explain. It might mean…you know.” Even over her cell phone, with its usual bad New Nineveh connection made more crackly today by a November wind howling outside, Peggy could hear the emotion trembling in her friend’s voice.

  She slipped her old, holey NYU sweatshirt over her head. “That you’re…?” She didn’t want to say it, either. She didn’t want to jinx it.

  There was a knock on Peggy’s door. “Ready?”

  “In a minute.” Peggy pulled the sweatshirt the rest of the way on. “That was Luke,” she told Bex.

  “Where are you crazy kids going?”

  “To clean fungus in the basement. It’s a nonstop party around here.” Peggy paused. “You’ll keep me posted, right?”

  “You’d better believe it,” Bex said.

  Peggy had only a passing familiarity with the basement. She’d taken a peek at it during the exploratory phase of her first weekends at the house. But it was even darker and spookier than the rest of the place, and as a rule, Peggy considered a basement to be like a spleen: You knew it was in there, you knew it served an important function, but you had no desire to see it. “In California, they don’t have basements,” she told Luke. In one rubber-gloved hand she carried a plastic bucket that had long ago held five gallons of interior house paint. With the other, she clutched the rickety banister and followed Luke down a cramped, plunging pine staircase on which she could imagine breaking her neck. “They build houses on concrete slabs, right on top of the dirt.”

  “No basements?” Luke, who carried a broom, a shovel, and a flashlight, reached up over his head to pull a lightbulb chai
n Peggy hadn’t known was there. “Then where do Californians store their radon gas and toxic mold?”

  They went deeper into the basement, past the finished section with painted walls and a cracked cement floor. Here, the walls were stone and draped with spiderwebs, and the floor was packed dirt, and the damp, stale odor she’d smelled faintly in the house enveloped her. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand. “Maybe we should save this for another day. We could get a couple of those surgical masks.” Better yet, gas masks.

  The basement ceiling was the underside of the floor above: broad boards supported by rough beams. It was low, and Luke walked a little hunched over. “Relax.” He skirted a lumpy shape Peggy identified as a hideous, harvest gold upholstered side chair of the same era as the furniture in the upstairs bedroom Luke had led her to on her first day. Behind it was a dingy antechamber filled with what appeared to be row upon row of folding chairs. “It’s not toxic mold. It’s just basement smell. I’ve been in and out of here all my life, and I’m fine.” He led her past a pile of stacked wood Peggy assumed was for the no-longer-used fireplaces.

  “What are we doing back here? I thought we were starting in the laundry room,” she said.

  Luke was standing next to the strangest door Peggy had ever seen. It was made from vertical boards of unfinished wood, with hammered, triangle-ended black metal hinges extending across horizontally to hold the wood together at the top and bottom. It was like the door of a medieval castle. Luke reached up for another invisible chain above his head, but no light came on. “Guess the bulb’s burned out.” He flipped on the flashlight.

  She set down her bucket. “What’s this, the Silas Sedgwick memorial dungeon?”

  Luke held the light under his chin, casting his face in ghoulish shadow. “You guessed it. We throw all the Sedgwick wives in here once we’re through with them.”

  “That’s not funny!”

  “Peggy, you could really learn to be less nervous.”

  “I’m not nervous. That just wasn’t funny.”

  Luke grinned. “Well, this isn’t a dungeon; it’s the wine cellar. I need to go in for a minute. Want to come?”

  Peggy most definitely did not. The only thing she wanted to do less was wait out here alone in the dark. “Sure.”

  He disengaged the black metal latch and waved one hand in an “after you” gesture. Inside, he turned on another overhead lightbulb.

  Peggy had expected a dusty trove of bottles, but the room was empty, with its gray black stone walls and rows of vacant wine cubbies. She went to inspect a decaying, iron-banded oak barrel at the far end of the room. “Where did all the wine go?”

  “I’m pretty sure into my dear uncle Bink’s liver, may he rest in peace.” Luke had to duck to keep his head from hitting the ceiling. “But come over here.” He knelt in front of one wall and removed a stone, revealing a small, irregular opening. Inside was a black bottle encrusted with grime.

  “It’s 1934 vintage port. The last of the Sedgwick supply. Somewhere along the line, one of my relatives stashed a bottle in this hiding place. I like to think Abby did it to keep it away from Bink. I wouldn’t put it past her. In any case, Hubbard, Eaton, and I stumbled across it one summer when we were kids. I’ve been saving it ever since.”

  “Saving it for what?”

  “The right time.” He reached out and grasped the bottle in his long fingers. There was a scrape of glass against granite as he slowly took it from its place in the wall. “Would you hold this, horizontally, please? Careful, the cork is shot.”

  Peggy cradled the filthy bottle against her sweatshirt, glad she had thought to wear her rubber gloves but not as disgusted as she might have been. This port had been in this house through World War II, the Kennedy assassination, the moon walk, the Gulf War, the collapse of the World Trade Center, the election of Barack Obama. And Luke had chosen to share it with her. She watched him, still kneeling in front of the empty space in the wall. Could it be he cared about her more than he was letting on? And why was the possibility so tantalizing? His gesture seemed packed with meaning, despite his having said nothing.

  Still, he sure was acting peculiarly. He reached into the alcove as if feeling around inside it.

  “What are you looking for?” She hoped she didn’t sound overeager.

  He got to his feet without replying. “Thanks. I can take that now.” He retrieved the bottle and slid it back into place. He replaced the rock in the wall and wiped his hands on his knees. “You ready to tackle some fungus?”

  It seemed that special moment wouldn’t be with her after all.

  The fungus in question was growing up and out from the laundry room baseboards in undulating waves like the ruffles on an old-fashioned petticoat. Luke explained its presence meant there was water seeping in from outside.

  “Euw.” Peggy couldn’t look at it. Her skin was crawling.

  “Do you want the shovel or the broom?”

  They spent the next hour attacking the fungus, Peggy knocking it off with the broom, Luke picking it up with the shovel and depositing it into the paint bucket. When they were done in the laundry room, they moved through the rest of the basement. After a while, because she couldn’t stand not sharing the news with somebody, Peggy asked, “Did you meet my friend Bex in the casino? You know…that night?” She shut her eyes and whacked away at a particularly large fungus formation. When she looked again, she saw with a shudder that the fungus had flown four feet in every direction.

  “I’m not sure.” Luke scraped the shovel along the floor. “I vaguely remember a woman with curly black hair trying to get you to go upstairs.”

  “That was Bex.” Peggy followed Luke as he moved the bucket a few steps down. “She’s my best friend, and she might be pregnant. She and her husband have been trying for so long, and…” Peggy blushed. Luke didn’t want to know the intimate details of Bex’s life. Or hers, for that matter. Personal issues were off the table. “Well, anyway, we’re hoping she is,” she finished self-consciously, and turned back to her chore.

  “Then I hope so, too,” Luke said.

  Surprised, Peggy shut her eyes again and swatted another patch of fungus with her broom.

  When they’d filled the bucket to overflowing, and Peggy feared the fungus’s mushroomy odor had settled permanently onto her skin, Luke took the bucket and they climbed out of the basement, blinking, across the windy back garden.

  He set down the bucket near the far edge of the lawn, which was bordered with trees. Freshly raked leaves were piled at intervals, the wind lifting some and blowing them away; Luke must have gathered them up during the week. It had become clear to Peggy ages ago that the gardener she’d assumed took care of the grounds was as much a fantasy as the ghost that whispered and rustled in her bedroom at night. In fact, she was pretty sure the ghost would appear long before a gardener did.

  “We can dump it here.” Luke made no move to pick up the bucket. Peggy couldn’t tell if he was waiting for her to do the honors. The fungus was heaped so high, one good gust would easily spray it across the yard or onto Peggy. She didn’t want to touch the bucket. She wanted to go inside and boil herself.

  Luke squinted at her.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “You have a big glob of fungus on your face.”

  “Where?” Peggy swiped frantically at her cheeks with her forearms. Nothing fell away. She swiped again, hopping up and down, desperate to get it off.

  Luke picked up the bucket. A few repulsive gray brown chunks of fungus tumbled onto the lawn at her feet. She shrieked and was sprinting to safety a few steps away when a thought occurred to her and she turned back around. Luke stood, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

  “There’s no fungus on my face, is there.”

  He exploded into laughter.

  Infuriated, embarrassed, she turned again, intending to storm up to the house. But a leaf pile caught her eye and she ran toward it instead, catching up an armful and dumping it o
n his head. “Ha!” she yelled with victorious glee, and darted to one side as he heaved his own hastily scooped armful. It missed her entirely, the leaves dancing and swirling in the damp wind, which was delicious with smoke from the Fiorentinos’ chimney. She grabbed up two more handfuls of leaves and lunged, smashing them against the front of Luke’s sweater with a satisfying crunch. She whooped again, leapt out of the way, and sprinted for the house.

  He caught up with her at the kitchen door. He was grinning, crinkles at the corners of his eyes, red patches on his cheeks. “Impressive,” he panted.

  She laughed, also panting. “You have leaves all over you.”

  He brushed off the front of his sweater, his sleeves, his sides. “Any more?”

  “Here.” Feeling daring, she took a bit of leaf from his hair and held it out to him. He carefully accepted the tiny piece in his fingers, held it out, and let the wind carry it away.

  She was breathless for reasons that had nothing to do with her sprint across the back garden.

  “So I take it your friend Bex knows the truth about us—about this,” Luke said after a time.

  “She and her husband, Josh,” Peggy told him. “And Padma, our salesgirl at the shop. But they’re all sworn to secrecy.”

  “That’s it? No one else knows?” Luke was watching her closely. “You said you were engaged to be engaged. Surely you told your boyfriend.”

  Peggy blushed. “Don’t worry about him.” She was about to explain to Luke that she and Brock weren’t together anymore, but Luke wasn’t interested in her personal life, and she decided she wasn’t interested in rehashing it anyway.

  Luke was silent.

  “Have you told anyone?” she asked, the wind whipping a strand of hair into her mouth.

  “Just a friend.”

  “Who?” Peggy couldn’t imagine. “I thought I met all your friends at the party.”

  “She wasn’t at the party,” Luke said as a sprinkling of raindrops fell across the porch.