He frowned and shook his head, looking muddled. She wondered if he had a concussion from his fall or if he was still working through the booze and pills or what. She thought she had been clear enough. “Biddy,” he said. He reached for her chin and brought his face so close to hers that their noses were almost touching.
“No,” she said, pulling away. “I’ll look the other way, Winn, but you have to give me some time.”
“Look the other way?”
She spoke slowly, wishing he had not chosen this particular moment to hash all this out. She wanted to enjoy Daphne’s wedding, for them all to have a nice day. “You said you were going to the hospital. But, instead, you took Agatha to a construction site. I’m not asking you why. What would you have done if I had just gone off with some man?”
“You would never do that.”
“I know—you can’t even conceive of it. I made up my mind about these things a long time ago. Of all people, I don’t think I placed unreasonable demands on you. I don’t think I asked things that—how did you phrase it?—could only be expected from God. But that doesn’t mean I want to talk about it. I want you to go to bed.”
He leaned back, and something appeared to dawn on him. “You think I was cheating on you?” he said, looking astonished. “All these years?”
“Well,” she said, “you didn’t seem to be in love with me or to want me very much, and you were gone so often. Obviously, you must have had opportunities. I just assumed … I thought … well, people need more than what you wanted from me.”
“They do?”
“Don’t they?”
They stared at each other. He went slightly cross-eyed in his effort to bring her face into focus. “Did you,” he asked, “ever need more?”
She had been faithful to him, always, but she had also always been prepared to imply the opposite if only to level the playing field. “Does it matter?” she said after a pause.
BIDDY WAS WEARING a white sweater, and to Winn’s exhausted, uncorrected eyes, she looked angelic, soft and insubstantial, floating beneath the painful fireball that was the lamp. He had no answer to her question, and she seemed to expect none. He wanted to stop talking about these things, these hard things, to stop thinking about them. He couldn’t tell her that he’d never felt more bound to her, that they had become too elaborately and permanently tangled for any sins to extricate them. We are included in all of our days, he thought. And he would be in all of Biddy’s days, and she in his. They sat in silence. Winn remembered he had a spare pair of glasses in his desk and heaved himself up from the armchair to retrieve them, following an awkward, tentative path to his study and fumbling through the drawers. When he returned, sighted, to the living room, he sat beside his wife and patted her feet through the blanket. The ship’s clock atop the bookshelves still said it was four thirty. “I’m never going to get into the Pequod,” he said in a conversational tone, beginning the arduous task of hauling them back to normality. “Jack Fenn told me. I ran into him in the bathroom.”
“Really?” she said. “Did he say why not?”
“Apparently, they just don’t like me.”
She nodded. The clock ticked, but its hands remained in place. After a minute, she said, “You smell like manure.”
He tented his shirt over his nose and breathed in. Yes, it was there, earthy and pungent over the sourness of his armpits and the faintest trace of Agatha’s musk. “I landed on a pile of mulch.”
“You really could have died.”
“I think so. I fell a long way.”
“Were you afraid?”
“I think I was lonely.”
• • •
AFTER LIVIA HAD BEEN in bed for ten or fifteen minutes, the door opened and Celeste came in. Where she had been all this time, Livia had no idea. Probably she had fallen asleep somewhere else, then woken and trailed upstairs like a sleepy child. Celeste went into the bathroom and turned on the light, leaving the door ajar, and once the sound of peeing had ceased and the toilet flushed, Livia watched through slitted eyes as Celeste stood at the sink in her underwear, leaning close to the mirror and then stepping back from it, turning to one side and then the other to appraise the flatness of her belly and the height of her fake breasts in their white lace bra, craning back over her shoulder to scrutinize her butt. Her legs were tanned to the color of Peking duck, and although she was thin as a whippet, her skin hung slack in places—at the junction of ass and thigh, on the inside of the knee—in tiny, pleated wrinkles.
Celeste clambered onto the other bed, pulled up the covers, and began her night’s snoring. Livia’s thoughts drifted toward Teddy, but she pushed them away, sending them, like a toy boat drawn to treacherous rapids, gliding toward Sterling. She nudged them again, and they seemed to float toward her father but settled instead on the tumulus of Daphne’s belly, on the girl inside it, the feeling of the tiny foot pressing against Daphne’s flesh. The whale was on the ocean floor, and the crabs and fish and worms were feasting. After a while, she heard her parents come up the stairs and go down the hall into their room, first the light, rapid steps of her mother and then the heavier, uneven tread of her father. Their door shut behind them, and she heard the murmur of their voices, the unknowable language they spoke only to each other.
Saturday
Eighteen · The Ouroboros
The ceremony was lovely and wonderful. Everyone said so. The rain had stopped in the early morning, and the island seemed new and green, the ocean replenished. Winn had escorted Daphne down the aisle without bothering to disguise his limp. He was the walking wounded, after all, his riven leg held together only by a flimsy panacea of gauze and tape applied by his wife. He had remembered to kiss Daphne when they reached the altar, leaning into the airy, pale space beneath her veil and touching his lips to her powdery cheek.
Under a white tent on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic, the guests sat on gilt chairs at round tables. The sky purpled and then blackened, and the moon, lopsided and waning, drew a gleaming white shell driveway on the water, showing the way to Spain. Sam Snead was in his ear: time for the father-of-the bride and the bride to dance. He faced Daphne on the parquet. The music began, and he entwined his fingers with hers. The bones and tendons of her hand seemed like the exquisite rendering of some mechanically perfect puppet. He was aware of the hardness of her small fingers between his own, the movement of blood through her veins. His other hand rested on her back, and her white-shrouded belly filled the space between them. While the band played the opening measures and the singer in a white dinner jacket pulled the microphone from its cradle, Winn did not move but stood looking over Daphne’s shoulder at the faces of the people at the tables, a wall of expectant ovals punctuated here and there by the glitter of jewelry and candle flames. Then the bandleader was singing and Daphne was stepping backward and pulling him with her, tipping him into the familiar steps. As they danced, Daphne stared over his shoulder. He turned them so he could see what she was looking at, but there was nothing. Only tables and faces. She was still looking at the same spot, now on the other side of the room, her face calm but wistful, like someone watching a receding shoreline. He turned her again. He wanted to see it, too, what she was looking at, but he saw only tables, only faces.
Maude and Greyson joined them, then Biddy with Dicky Sr. Francis had Agatha under his grasping hands, and Dryden expertly propelled a twirling Dominique. Livia pivoted by in the arms of Charlie the groomsman. Winn spun Daphne out, and she returned obediently, her hand on his shoulder. The flowers, the candles, the easy swing of the music, his daughter’s perfectly made-up face, her artfully arranged hair, the swell of her pregnancy—it all cried out for love, for pride, for fatherly tenderness, even if Daphne would not look at him, even if she had walled herself up with her happiness and left him outside. He did not know how to make her forgive him. He would have to wait. But, in the meantime, he knew how to dance, had danced this same dance as a little boy in cotillion, had danced it with Ophelia Haviland
on New Year’s Eve at the Vespasian Club and as a bridegroom on a spring evening in Maine and a thousand other times.
The song ended and another began. Greyson came to claim Daphne, and Winn stood alone among the dancers before he found himself holding Livia in her green dress. At first she looked over his shoulder as Daphne had, but then her eyes met his. For the first time, he wondered what she thought of him, really thought, and the question was enough to make him dizzy, to spin the faces and candles and flowers around him, her eyes the still point at the center of it all. For an instant he felt with nauseating clarity what it was like to breathe through his daughter’s lungs, to peer out from inside her skull, to be animated by a life that was just like his but also nothing like it. He had to look away, up at the underbelly of the tent, before he could fall back into himself.
Dancing demanded no thought, only habit, but her presence in his arms had become a burden, a reminder of a vastness he could not contemplate. Finally, when he could bear no more, he lifted his arm and spun her away. When her revolution was complete and they were separated by the length of their arms, joined only by their fingertips, he let go, releasing her into a life of her own making.
Acknowledgments
Thanks, first, to my agent, Rebecca Gradinger, who has been an invaluable reader and treasured pal and correspondent since I was a grad student with a handful of half-finished stories. I’m privileged to be on the receiving end of her remarkable counsel. Thanks, also, to Connie Brothers (a known wizard) for sending me on that errand to the airport.
I am indebted to Jordan Pavlin for her vision of and enthusiasm for this novel. The 3M Corporation is indebted to her for boosting sales of Post-it notes, and thank goodness, because every one of those little yellow barnacles made my manuscript better and pushed me to be a more clear-headed writer. Thanks also to Leslie Levine and Caroline Bleeke at Knopf and to Amy Ryan for her careful and attentive copyediting/detective work. Patrick Janson-Smith at Blue Door has been a tireless advocate and utter delight. Sara Eagle and Laura Mell deserve some good publicity of their own and many thanks.
Grainne Fox, Melissa Chinchillo, and Mink Choi—your names all make me think of small, fur-bearing mammals, and you are all wonderful. Thank you so much for your help and guidance.
I have been fortunate to have had many brilliant teachers over the years, but in the context of this book I would most like to thank Sam Chang, Ethan Canin, Elizabeth Tallent, and Toby Wolff for their wisdom and patience. When I was in high school and probably pretty annoying, Dallas Clemmons was unfathomably generous with his time, encouragement, and fine mind, and I am grateful to him for starting me down this path.
A Stegner Fellowship comes from above like a bolt of really sweet lightning, and there’s no way to sufficiently thank the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, especially its Zeus, Eavan Boland. Speaking of institutions that have kept me fed and sheltered for the past five years, I am also grateful to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Truman Capote Literary Trust, the Leggett-Schupes Fellowship, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Matthew Rossi, the true founder of the Ophidian, is a genius at naming imaginary final clubs.
My family and friends have supported me in all possible ways and even some impossible ones. My debt is bottomless, as is my love.
A Note About the Author
Maggie Shipstead was born in 1983 and grew up in Orange County, California. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, VQR, Glimmer Train, The Best American Short Stories, and other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.
Seating Arrangements
Maggie Shipstead
Reading Group Guide
About This Guide
The questions below are intended for use in facilitating discussions of Maggie Shipstead’s novel Seating Arrangements in which a romantic three-day wedding weekend on an idyllic New England island erupts in a summer blaze of adulterous longing and salacious misbehavior as the bride and groom find themselves presiding over a spectacle of marital failure, familial strife, and monumental loss of faith in the rituals of American life.
About the Book
Keenly intelligent, commandingly well written, and great fun, Shipstead’s deceptively frothy debut is a piercing rumination on desire, on love and its obligations, and on the dangers of leading an inauthentic life. Richard Russo says Maggie Shipstead is “an outrageously gifted writer, and her assured first novel is by turns hilarious and deeply moving.” J. Courtney Sullivan declares, “Seating Arrangements is bursting with perfectly observed characters and unforgettable scenes. This gorgeous, wise, funny, sprawling novel about family, fidelity, and social class is the best book I’ve read in ages.” From a brilliant new literary voice, an irresistible social satire that is also an unforgettable meditation on the persistence of hope, the yearning for connection, and the promise of enduring love.
Questions for Discussion
1. “The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends / Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. / And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors; / Departed, have left no addresses.” This is the novel’s epigraph, from “The Wasteland,” T. S. Eliot’s epic poem of ruin and desolation. How does this verse relate to Seating Arrangements? Why has the author elected to place it at the front of her novel?
2. Winn is obsessed with status, with matters of appearance and pedigree and joining all the right clubs. What do you think the author thinks of Winn? What did you think of him? Is he sympathetic? Does your view of him change over the course of the novel? Do you think Winn himself changes or grows over the course of the novel?
3. How is Daphne different from her father? Is her world view different or is it the same? How do Daphne’s and Livia’s values differ?
4. Discuss Dominique’s role in Seating Arrangements. How is she different from the other characters in the novel, and how does this alter the reader’s perspective?
5. Discuss the scene where the whale explodes. What do you think the whale symbolizes for the author? What do you think the explosion is meant to dramatize or represent?
6. On this page, Biddy draws herself a bath and spends a quiet moment reflecting on her predicament and her marital expectations after Winn’s inescapably obvious attentions to Agatha following her fall from the deck. “The obviousness was what she could not tolerate. She had known what she was when she married him, had expected to be the kind of wife who looked the other way from time to time, but she had also expected him to be discreet. And he had been. She assumed there had been other women, but she had never come across any evidence of them, which was all she asked. A simple request, she had thought: cheap repayment for her forbearance, her realism, her tolerance. At times his discretion had been so complete she had allowed herself to believe maybe there hadn’t been others, but she didn’t like to risk being foolish enough to believe in something as unlikely as her husband’s fidelity.” What is Biddy’s view of marriage? Does the author share this view? Do you? Is fidelity essential to a good marriage? What exactly is a good marriage, in your view? In Shipstead’s?
7. Aunt Celeste brings levity, acerbic wit, and a rather dark personal history to a host of subjects that are often treated sanctimoniously, among them, romantic love and the possibility of living happily ever after. What is Celeste’s contribution to the Van Meter family, and to the novel as a whole? What is your opinion of her? The author’s?
8. In what way does the Duff family differ from the Van Meter family? How are they aware of their differences, whether social, financial, or historical? Do you think the author is pointing out their differences primarily, or their similarities?
9. On this page, Winn recollects a story he was told one night at the Vespasian, while still a young man, about his grandfather’s inheritance. How is this story significant, and how has it informed the truths and myths of
his family history?
10. In chapter eleven, Livia and Francis have a fascinating conversation in which the author provides several nuanced reflections on varieties of love: maternal, filial, familial, romantic. How do these ruminations embody—or shape—our perception of love and its obligations, in the world of Seating Arrangements and in the world at large?
11. Following the aforementioned conversation, Francis says to Livia, “Another reason I like you is that I think we have similar roles in our families. We’re the critical ones. We represent a threat to their way of life, a new order.” What does he mean? How, in particular, might Livia be perceived as a threat to her family’s way of life? Is she more or less of an iconoclast than her aunt Celeste?
12. Discuss the debacle of Winn’s bridal toast in which he equates marriage with death. Do you think the author intends the reader to perceive this as farcical or tragic?
13. Look at the end of chapter seventeen, which closes with Livia listening to her parents in their bedroom and the line, “Their door shut behind them, and she heard the murmur of their voices, the unknowable language they spoke only to each other.” How does this recast our sense of Winn and Biddy’s marriage?
14. Discuss the epilogue and, in particular, the final image of Daphne and Winn dancing. What note does the author strike at the novel’s conclusion? How has the novel, and the family, recovered from its various catastrophes and regained its balance after the tawdriness of the events that preceded it and the spectacularly deflating effect of the patriarch’s wedding toast? Is this a happy ending? Do you think the author intends it to be so?
15. Is it surprising, given the novel’s themes and its central voice—an older, patrician male—to discover that its author is a twenty-eight-year-old woman? Why or why not?
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