“Good-bye,” said Winn, extending his arm and herding her toward the hallway.
“Are you going to the restaurant?” Tabitha said. “Our rental house is over there. Could I ask you for a ride?”
Biddy cocked her head. “I thought that was your Jeep out front.”
“No,” Tabitha said, “not mine. Skip dropped me off.”
“Well, whose was it?” asked Sam Snead.
“Sterling’s,” said Agatha. “But he’s gone now.”
A silence fell. Biddy wiped crumbs from the tabletop with a napkin. Agatha picked at her chipped nail polish. Sam Snead smiled at everyone. “Shall we be off?” she said to Tabitha.
“Good-bye,” Winn said again. But the front door slammed, and Daphne and her retinue blew into the kitchen. Daphne wore a white cotton beach dress, strapless and smocked at the chest, bellied out by the dome of Winn’s grandchild.
“Tabitha!” Daphne exclaimed. There were greetings and introductions, and through it all Daphne looked blissfully happy, pink with a bride’s radiance or pregnancy’s glow or perhaps just sunburn, even as she declared she was exhausted and would die without a nap. Winn could not imagine being so happy, not in this kitchen full of women who had all fused together into one entity, one chattering hydra that he had married and fathered and fingered in the laundry room and kissed accidentally while playing sardines and paid to plan a wedding. He wasn’t sure he had ever been as happy as Daphne looked. If he had, he could not remember, nor did he have any hope of being so again in the future. There weren’t any great surprises in store for him, no twists of fate that would uncover new deposits of happiness. Grandchildren would be pleasant, but with his luck they would all be girls and, in any event, named Duff. He had chosen the walls of his prison, and they suited him: this house and the house in Connecticut, his clubs, his station car, the grimy windows of Metro-North, the crystalline windows of his office, the confines of Biddy’s embrace, the words “husband” and “father” on a tombstone. What else was there? He had no unsated wanderlust. He did not want a young wife, a new family, nor did he crave solitude, a cabin in the north woods, a lake to fish. He had almost everything he could think to want, and yet still ambivalence bleached his world to an anemic pallor. Maybe if he had been given a son, life would be different.
Livia, really, did most of the things he had imagined his son doing. Women couldn’t join the Ophidian, but at least she went to Harvard. She was a decent squash player and an avid socializer. She was pretty and sporty and friendly, if also susceptible to cyclical black moods brought on by the lunar rhythm of womanhood. She should have been enough, but when Winn was carrying her bags and boxes up to her room on the first day of her freshman year, he had passed an open door to a suite filled with boys and their fathers, all shaking hands. A maroon banner with a white H already hung above the fireplace. He stopped on the landing, a laundry basket full of Livia’s sheets in his arms, and stared at these strangers who seemed so familiar. He stood long enough that one of the boys turned and asked, “Are you looking for someone, sir?”
“Oh,” Winn said. “I’m sorry. I was just looking.” When they nodded and glanced at one another, he said, “I used to live in this room.”
“No kidding,” said the boy. “That’s cool. They gave us a list of everyone who’s lived here.” He picked a piece of paper up off his desk and held it out to Winn. “Which one are you?”
“Alexander Tipplethorn,” Winn said, pointing. “Nineteen seventy.”
“I think I might have known your brother,” said one of the fathers, a tan, squinty sort of man. “James Tipplethorn, class of seventy-five?”
Winn hefted the laundry basket. “That’s right.”
“What’s James up to now?”
“I don’t hear much from him, actually,” Winn said.
“Oh.” The father hesitated, then asked, “Moving in your kid?”
“That’s right,” Winn said. “Pete Tipplethorn. Keep an eye out for him.”
Winn confessed his lie to no one, but his pleasure in visiting Livia was ruined. He avoided the other freshman parents, and even during Livia’s sophomore and junior years, he was always nervous he might, at any moment, be unmasked as the sad imposter who had once tried to pass himself off as Alexander Tipplethorn, brother of James and father of Pete.
“Here she is!” announced Sam Snead.
Livia was standing just inside the doorway. Her hair, still damp, was braided and pinned in a garland around her head. She wore a black sheath that did nothing to distract from her paleness or her thinness. She looked like a consumptive. Her eyes were lined in black, and they glittered in her strained face.
“I understand you had a little emergency,” said Sam Snead to Livia, “but everything will be fine. The makeup artist is very good. She’ll know what to do tomorrow even without a dry run. Tell her lots of bronzer.”
Livia smiled unhappily. Winn could see the tension running through her. Were she to be plucked, she would sound a very high note. Daphne, Piper, Dominique, and Sam Snead were still jabbering about makeup and nails. Biddy cracked ice cubes from a tray. Celeste and Tabitha spectated from the table, affecting casualness.
Livia moved slowly in Agatha’s direction. Agatha held out her hands palms up in a helpless gesture. The expression on her face was trying to be many things—conspiratorial, amused, apologetic, innocent, defiant—but fear showed through. Livia took hold of one of Agatha’s hands with both of hers. There was a crack. Agatha cried out.
Fourteen · The Sun Goes over the Yardarm
The church stood on the eastern bluffs, white and sharp edged with a white steeple, like a paper cutout set against the sky. Only a short, eroding expanse of green lawn separated the tidy structure from the bluffs’ edge. Grass lapped at its foundations, pushing up blue and white bursts of lupines and snapdragons like the bow wave of a ship, and ran on for another hundred feet until there was nothing more to root in and the last blades peeped out over the precipice. Each of the church’s long sides had five tall, narrow windows of wavy, bubbled glass in a pale, almost colorless blue. A rose window over the altar admitted a disc of sunshine, and its twin at the back of the nave let in the periodic flash of the lighthouse. The walls were white, the pews cherry, and the air was seasoned with old books, flowers, and furniture wax.
Livia stood miserably at the front beside Dominique and across from Sterling. Daphne and Winn appeared in the bright square of the open doors, their forms solidifying out of the dazzle. Daphne was smiling; Winn, who limped, was frowning. In what struck her as a grotesque parody, Livia had been made to walk down the aisle arm in arm with Sterling. He had said nothing except to ask if she’d really broken Agatha’s finger. She had glowered and tried to hustle him along even after Sam Snead stage-whispered from the front, “Slow down! Look serene!” Piper was on Dominique’s other side and then, at a safe distance, Agatha. There hadn’t been time for another trip to the hospital, but Sam Snead had told Agatha she could go after dinner if she wanted an X-ray. Uncle Skip, a doctor, was summoned by Tabitha from the comfort of the rented couch in their rented cottage to set the bone and splint Agatha’s finger to a Popsicle stick. Doctors don’t need X-rays to fix broken fingers, he had assured Agatha, wrapping her hand with some of the white tape sent home with Winn for rebandaging his leg. Especially not a finger like hers, which had snapped neatly as a breadstick. Skip had eyed Livia over his shoulder with twinkling reproach, not minding his chance to show off his resourcefulness while women passed in and out of the kitchen with wet hair, dry hair, wearing towels, wearing dresses. So it was that Agatha held, as a rehearsal bouquet, a bag of ice wrapped in a towel, her hand taped into a scout’s pledge.
Sterling stood with his hands behind his back and stared up and away, off in the direction of the organ pipes and choir loft. The same seersucker trousers that Livia had pushed off his hips and kicked away in the sand were making an encore appearance, miraculously clean and pressed and accompanied by a matching jacket, it
s buttonhole stuck through with a white daisy.
At the steps to the altar, Daphne and Winn stopped. “Now you lift up her veil and kiss her farewell,” said the minister.
“Very well,” Winn said. He did not bother with a practice kiss but nodded at Daphne and stepped sideways into the front pew to sit beside Biddy.
“Okay,” said the minister, “but tomorrow make sure you remember to actually do it. Now the bride comes up here, gives her flowers to the maid of honor, and joins hands with the groom. Good.”
Winn shifted in his seat, leaning to hear something Biddy was whispering in his ear, and the wood creaked. Livia heard the snap of Agatha’s finger again. She had breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, counted to five, and broken it. She remembered the cool digit between her own fingers, Agatha’s eyes expanding with fear. Agatha had begun gasping, almost hyperventilating, cradling her hand against her chest. Her father had gone to Agatha first, his hands hovering uselessly over her shoulders, before he had rounded on Livia, snarling, “What were you thinking? What is wrong with you?” She had not realized she was crying, but later when she went off to collect herself, she saw that run mascara had left dark wings on her cheekbones.
“Livia.” Daphne, her hands joined with Greyson’s, was looking at her. The minister and Greyson and all the groomsmen were looking at her, too. “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Sam Snead told you to straighten out my train when I get up here.”
“Okay.” Livia crouched behind Daphne and mimed arranging an invisible dress. Sterling snorted, and she sprang up and returned to her place. She was only trying to cooperate with this silliness. She and Sterling would hand them pretend rings; they would all retreat down the aisle past pews filled with pretend people in the invisible wake of Daphne’s train and the hummock of her unborn child.
But first Greyson had to pretend to drop his pretend ring and scramble around looking for it beneath the skirts of Daphne’s pretend gown, mugging up at her. When the rehearsal was finally over, Livia walked beside Sterling to the church doors and dropped his arm before they reached the last pew. She marched out and across the lawn until she came to the split-rail fence at the edge of the bluff. Below, the ocean was blue-black and roughed up by the wind. There were dangerous shoals underneath. Dozens of wrecked ships, maybe hundreds, rotted away on the sea floor. At night the light from the lighthouse passed through the water above their bones like a ghost. All those wrecks had been the reason for building the lighthouse in the first place, but now the rescuer needed rescuing. The lighthouse, perched precariously on the crumbling bluffs, had become a quaint reminder of a dead island, where there was no radar or GPS, only a revolving light.
Sterling drew up beside her. They stood in silence. “Starting to look like rain,” he said.
She turned. The others were clustered around the church doors. Her father was nodding at whatever Maude was saying, probably that the rehearsal had been lovely and wouldn’t the wedding just be wonderful. Agatha was holding out her bandaged hand for Dicky Sr.’s inspection and laughing even though Dicky had never said anything funny in his life. “It wouldn’t dare. Not on Daphne Van Meter’s wedding day.”
“Listen.”
Livia picked at some lichen on the fence. “What?”
“I wanted to say—if I had known how much it was going to upset you, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“What is ‘it’?” she asked. “Is ‘it’ her? Or me?” He stared at her, his whiskey-colored eyes flat and expressionless as buttons. “Fine,” she said. “Don’t say anything. Just stare at me.”
“I thought eye contact was a good thing.”
“Eye contact with you is like eye contact with a taxidermied moose head.”
His gaze did not stray from her face as he patted his pockets in search of cigarettes. “Look, I didn’t mean for what happened with us to be this big thing. If I wasn’t clear, I’m sorry.” Finding the pack, he tapped it against his palm. “I don’t think I’m anything to break someone’s finger over.”
“That’s great, but it’s not like I’m so distraught. I didn’t have some grand plan for revenge. I’d just had enough of Agatha.”
“She’s not so bad. Just a little lost.”
“That’s what Daphne always says. It’s bullshit.” Livia picked more aggressively at the lichen. She was a pathetic dupe. She had known Teddy did not love her enough but had plowed ahead anyway. Worse, after one goose-bumped night on the beach, she had let herself hope that Sterling would be the one to exorcise Teddy. She supposed she must be a masochist, drawn to those who didn’t want her. Her mistake had been to fancy herself a prize, a quarry, someone who would stand out from the hoi polloi of Sterling’s conquests. Now she saw that his experience had not given him the choosiness of a connoisseur but the indifference of a glutton. His body, dumpy and flat-footed in the garage, could not have been the body that had pressed her into the sand, and yet it was. The body Teddy was sharing with half of New York—that was the same body she had imagined belonging to her. The indignity was too much. Seeing them humping away beside the old upside-down canoe with bike pumps and forgotten beach toys arrayed around them like props on a rustic porno set, she might have laughed, but instead she found herself converted, suddenly and with a zealot’s certainty, to the belief that sex was meaningless. People spent their lives searching for something beyond the simple friction of skin on skin, but there was nothing. The void between two people could never be closed, and in trying to close it, they would only learn everything that was to be despised in the other. Even the sanctified sheets of the most devoted union were a platform only for empty animal thrustings. Before, she had been too naïve to see, but now the grand farce was obvious.
Whitecaps blew over the hidden sandbars. Sterling smoked. Bits of black and green lichen flaked from the fence. Her nails looked terrible. She would ask Dominique to paint them. “You really embarrassed me,” she said to Sterling. “Men never think about what goes on between women.”
He sighed, making sure she knew he was trying his best to be patient. “What do you mean?”
“You think, well, if this girl doesn’t matter to me, then she doesn’t matter in anyone’s scheme of things. But girls always think they’re the one who mattered, and then you meet up with some other girl who thinks she mattered to the same guy, and even if you hate that girl, if you think she’s stupid or ugly or too beautiful or a bitch or slut or someone you’d otherwise want to be friends with, you now have this very intimate thing in common.”
“So?”
“My point is that it matters who you sleep with.”
Sterling swiveled away from her as though he was about to leave and then turned back. “Of course, you apply these standards to yourself, too. You went to the beach with me after thinking things over long and hard and weighing all the pros and cons.”
“I didn’t let you find me doing it in your garage with some slut, now did I? I thought you were going to apologize.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I accept.” She walked off, leaving him smoking his cigarette on the edge of the cliff.
WINN WENT STRAIGHT to the bar and ordered a gin martini.
“It’ll be just a minute,” the bartender said, drying glasses.
“Winn, what are you doing?” Biddy said, passing by with Maude. “Come outside. They have a little bar set up just for us.”
“Still want it?” asked the bartender.
“Whenever’s convenient for you.”
He tucked his towel in his back pocket. “What kind of gin?”
“The cheap stuff’s fine.”
The bartender took a bottle from the bottom shelf.
Daphne swept through on Greyson’s arm. “Daddy, what are you doing? It’s this way.”
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
For the rehearsal dinner the Duffs had chosen a restaurant in a hotel on the harbor. Winn had warned them the chef was new and the food r
eported to be inconsistent, but there was a broad outdoor deck overlooking the water that Maude said would be divine for cocktails. Through the windows, he saw Daphne being engulfed by Biddy’s relatives and miscellaneous Duffs. There was a hubbub of kissing and chatting. Agatha’s golden arms and wounded hand appeared on the bar beside him.
“Quiet in here,” she said.
Only two other seats at the long mahogany bar were occupied, by two men who had been talking and picking at a tiny silver bowl of mixed nuts but were now studying Agatha.
“You should go out to the party,” Winn told her, giving a one-fingered salute to Dicky Sr. as he passed.
“I’ll have a drink first.” To the bartender she said, “Gin martini with three olives, please.”
He did not ask which brand of gin but poured from a bottle that looked like a cut gemstone.
“Cheers,” Agatha said to Winn.
“I don’t drink these much,” Winn said, allowing her to graze the edge of his brimming glass with her own. “They’re terrible.”
“You might want to think about upgrading your gin,” the bartender chimed in.
“What did he have?” Agatha asked. The bartender pointed, and she laughed.
“Look what was in my gift bag,” she said, lifting her chin so the skin tightened over the hard tube of her throat. With her fingers she indicated a silver necklace in the notch at its base, a starfish.
“Very nice.”
She lavished him with spaniel eyes. “It wasn’t what I wanted.”
The bartender had been wiping the same patch of bar for much too long. Winn cleared his throat, and the man inched away. “I’m sorry to hear that. How is your finger?”
“You could kiss it and make it better.”
He stood up, slopping some martini on the green leather seat of his bar stool. “Shit,” he said, grabbing a handful of napkins to mop it up.
“I was only kidding,” she said. “Just fooling around.”
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