The Hazards of Good Breeding by Jessica Shattuck Page A

and a video camera. He looks over as Faith stares and catches her eye. The blood rushes to her cheeks. They have been talking about her. Or about her and Jack and Caroline standing here in this awkward configuration.
    â€œSo how’s New York?” Jack says.
    â€œFine,” Faith says. “All right.” The words are beginning to return, limping back like injured animals. “And Concord?”
    Jack grunts dismissively—as if it is a foolish, inappropriate question.
    Behind him, the red setter streaks past, followed by even more yelping children.
    â€œYou still see the Delaneys?” Jack lets his eyes touch on Faith, the real Faith, not the one he wants to see beside her. Quickly he redirects them at the ceiling.
    â€œOh,” Faith says. She is surprised that he remembers them—old friends of her family whose Christmas party she used to force Jack to attend with her, long ago, when they were first married. “I do. They still live in that same place with the lions outside and they still have—I went to their Christmas party.” She stops, somewhat breathless. It was a sad affair, really—with all the same people, only everyone was so much older.
    â€œAha,” Jack says, with a spark of genuine interest, and for a moment Faith feels something break free from the dark discarded heap their married life has become in her mind—some ragged but still-sparkling streamer. “The De-stingys,” he used to call them, on account of their serving nothing but melba toast and sardines with their highballs—and he and Faith would go out to the Oak Bar for steaks and chocolate mousse cake afterward.
    â€œI saw George Burt, actually,” Faith offers. George Burt is Jack’s lawyer. “It was so strange to see him there. . . .” Faith feels herself coloring again. It was strange because the only context she knows him in is the litigation over their divorce, which Jack is perfectly well aware of. Why has she started down this path?
    Jack’s expression has frozen over. “Well,” he says coolly. “That must have been”—he pauses significantly—“overwhelming.”
    Faith stares at him. No , she would like to say. No, it was not . But she can only stand there in tense, terrible silence, looking at the space where only a moment ago she could see this sweet, heartbreaking flutter.
    â€œCoffee, anyone?” Caroline asks, clearing her throat.
    Faith shakes her head and looks down, begins working the clasp on her purse open and closed between her pale fingers. It was funny, for a moment, how she had almost forgotten.
    S ITTING AT A WHITE-CLOTHED table in the inventively named Garden Restaurant of Belmont Center with Caroline, Faith, and Eliot Dunlap, Rock has an almost uncontrollable desire to get high. He has gone out to his car twice, under the pretense of needing to use the “gents’,” to check whether there might possibly—in the glove compartment, under the passenger-side floor mat, in the first-aid kit in the trunk—be at least some small, mostly smoked joint. But there is nothing. Nothing.
    The Garden has a generic, movie-set-like quality, which, Caroline has explained, is exactly why she chose it: it contains nothing familiar, no possibilities of running into anyone. Since her breakdown, Faith Dunlap brings out a fierce, take-charge side of Caroline; in her presence, Caroline is suddenly protector and vigilante, the kind of person who knows how to cure hiccups and steer conversations, whether to treat a spill with salt or soda water. Just watching her is making Rock tired. And the weird blandness of the restaurant makes him feel edgy; the decor looks as if it were assembled by aliens following a set of instructions: a restaurant must have potted palm trees in the corners, chef’s salad on the menu, unremarkable watercolors of beaches and wild animals . Rock is sure the place is a front for something