Seating Arrangements. Maggie Shipstead

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СКАЧАТЬ house. “I doubt that’s what you were really wishing for,” she said tolerantly.

      Livia considered. “Everyone thinks I should just get over it,” she said. “But I don’t know what’s on the other side of ‘it.’ I’m not even exactly sure what ‘it’ is.”

      “No need to be all metaphysical about it. You know what you’re supposed to do. You just don’t want to do it.”

      “I don’t want to give up prematurely.”

      “No one could accuse you of that. I could read you back the fifty e-mails you sent me this winter detailing the ten million arguments you’d pitched to Teddy for why you should be together. But look, you’ve given it the old college try, he hasn’t come around, so cross your fingers and let go.”

      A cry came from above and a crow swooped from the roof, trying to gobble something down as it flew, pursued by an enraged seagull. The birds disappeared over the trees. Livia said nothing.

      “It’s been a while since you’ve talked to him, right?” Dominique pressed. “Just keep going with that. Invest some time. I mean, think of it this way. How do you think it looks if you go around mooning over him for months after he dumped you?”

      “Why does it matter how it looks?” Livia said hotly, surprised at Dominique. “Why does everyone care so much about how everything looks?”

      Dominique held up her hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m not a member of this Great Gatsby reenactment society you all have going on. I just think it’s possible to trick yourself into feeling better by pretending you feel better.”

      “Yeah,” Livia said. “Yeah, I know, but I keep thinking about how far along I’d be. I’d be just as preggers as Daphne.” Two weeks after her abortion, she had been summoned home for a weekend. Daphne and Greyson were coming up from the city for dinner. They had news. Winn roasted a duck. They were still on the salad course when Daphne bubbled over and announced she was pregnant and she and Greyson were getting married. Livia, to her enduring shame, had burst into tears and run from the table.

      “Women,” Dominique said knowingly. “We measure our lives in months.”

      “People kept telling me that at least now I know I can get pregnant. Like, phew, what a relief. I’d really be spending a lot of time worrying about infertility otherwise.”

      “Yeah, but what do you say to someone about their abortion? The impulse is to grasp for silver linings.”

      “I’m not beating myself up over it. I just want to meet someone else. Barring that, I just want to sleep with someone else. To at least create the sensation of moving on.”

      “Fine,” said Dominique, “but beware the rebound guy.”

      “I just want a distraction.”

      “That’s what they all say.”

      BIDDY WAS COLLECTING the last of Winn’s groceries from the Land Rover when he came walking up out of the trees, frowning and moving his hands to emphasize some speech he was giving in his head.

      “Where did you go?” she asked.

      “To check on the garden,” he said. “Depressing.”

      “You saw Jack?”

      “Livia told you about Teddy?”

      “I’m shocked.”

      “I’m not. Chip off the old block. At least he’ll be far away. Livia won’t have to worry about him anymore.”

      “She thinks he’s leaving because of her. I’m afraid she’ll romanticize this.”

      “Tell her she’s overestimating her own importance. He’s a Fenn. He’s joining up because he thinks it makes him look good. I tried to get a word in about the Pequod with Jack but didn’t get too far. If he’s blackballing me because of this whole business with the kids, I think that’s poor form.”

      “Mmmm.” Biddy was unwilling to enter into another round of the Great Pequod Debate. Was Jack shutting Winn out because Winn had excluded Jack from the Ophidian? Was Fee carrying a grudge over their breakup all those years ago? Were the Fenns so collectively shamed by Livia’s ordeal that they simply had no wish to see the Van Meters around the clubhouse? This last hypothesis, she had pointed out to Winn over and over again, was especially silly since he had been on the waiting list well before Teddy’s hapless sperm found its way to Livia’s egg. To Biddy’s thinking, Winn had done everything he could to make his case with the Pequod, and the rest was up to fate. So there was no cause for angst, no need to spin conspiracy theories. In all likelihood, the holdup had nothing to do with the Fenns and everything to do with the club’s internal workings and quotas. And even if the Fenns were the problem, most likely Winn, not Livia, was to blame, as Biddy was fairly certain the Fenns had been genuinely fond of her daughter and would not be so unjust as to think she had tried to entrap their son. At the end of the day, why would you want to join a club where you are not welcome? But Winn saw the consequences of Livia’s mistake everywhere, as though her womb were the source of all disorder in the universe.

      “I’ll tell you,” Winn said, “I have an itch to call up Jack and have it out, get the straight story once and for all.”

      “No,” Biddy said, “not this weekend, Winn, please.”

      Celeste’s voice clarioned down from the roof. “Winnifred!” Winn grimaced. “Oh, Winnifred! The lobsters are here!”

      A red-faced man in white shirt and pants appeared around the corner of the house, struggling to push a dolly loaded with two cardboard boxes through the gravel. Each box had a large red lobster stamped on it.

      “Van Meter?” he said, consulting something scrawled in black marker on the top box. “Twenty lobsters?”

      “You’ve come to the right place,” said Winn. He stepped forward and lifted the first box off the dolly, setting it on the ground and pulling off the lid.

      The deliveryman watched dubiously. “Everything okay?” he asked.

      “I don’t know yet,” Winn said. “That’s why I’m checking them.” He pulled lobster after lobster out of his box, holding each in the air to make sure it was moving its antennae and rubber-banded claws before adding it to a pile on the gravel.

      “I’m sure they’re all alive, Winn,” Biddy said, blocking one lobster’s escape with her Top-Sider. People said lobsters were just giant bugs, and they looked it, creeping along, probing with their long feelers.

      “Better safe than sorry, dear,” Winn said. To the deliveryman, who had begun to remove lobsters uncertainly from the second box, he said, “Here, I’ll get those if you’ll do me a favor and put these ones back.”

      “No,” Biddy said. She bent and grabbed a lobster by its midsection and dropped it back in the box. There was a bed of seaweed at the bottom. “I’ll do it.”

      “He doesn’t mind.” Winn turned to the deliveryman. “Do you?”

      “No?” the man said, confused.

      Biddy set two more lobsters on top of the first, СКАЧАТЬ