Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (13 page)

“The only place I’m going now, Dennis, is inside my home. I don’t feel well.”

“You don’t look as good as you do sometimes. You got a headache? Darla used to have the cruelest headaches. I’d soak cloths in cool vinegar and put them on her head.”

She probably had tumors the size of goose eggs in that head, Francine thought. Any operation was bound to be futile.

“OK, you go on inside,” Dennis said. “Close the blinds. Put on this music I’m going to give you. Put this in your tape player. Take whatever’s in there and throw it away. You’ll never
care for it again.” He unbuttoned the pocket of his denim shirt and removed a plastic Baggie containing a tape. “It’s Darla playing the piano. It was in the lodge at the dude ranch right where Galore is, as I’ve told you. We didn’t have a piano in St. Louis. This is pure Darla. She was so talented! When you hear this you’ll recognize everything for the first time.”

“Music can’t do that.”

“It can’t?” He pressed the tape into her hand. “Since when?”

There was still no coffee. She wasn’t going to waste her time looking for coffee when there wasn’t any. A moth was floating in the sheltie’s water bowl. This was one of those recurrent things. She went into the bedroom and lay on the unmade bed. She wanted to sleep. She could no longer fall asleep! Insomnia, of course, was far worse than just being awake. She thought longingly of those two stages—the hypnagogic and the hypnapompic, although she could never declare with confidence which was which once she’d been informed of their existence—on either side of sleep, the going into and the coming out when the conscious and the subconscious were shifting dominance, when for an instant the minds were in perfect balance, neither holding dominion. But she couldn’t sleep, she lacked her escorts, the hypnapompic and the hypnagogic—who had of late been acting more like unfriendly guards.

The sun was slipping into the afternoon, exposing the dirtiness of the windows, which she never cleaned in the hope of dissuading doves from crashing into the glass. The doves flew
undissuaded. The many blurred impressions of their dove bodies depressed her but she was convinced that sparkling windows would be even more inviting to them as they attempted to thread their way among the houses in their evening plunge from the foothills to the valley below.

She had removed the tape from the dusty little bag and played it. It was a formal exercise—familiar, pleasant, ordinary playing. It didn’t cast a spell or create a mood. It was not the kind of music that tore hungrily at her. It did not appeal to her at all. Much of the tape was empty of all but hum and hiss. The playing had simply stopped and had not resumed again. There was no applause, no exclamations of approval, no sense of an audience being present, least of all an impressionable child. Darla had certainly taken that kid for a ride. Had she confounded everyone she met in her brief life or only him? Probably him alone. She didn’t think Dennis even knew this Darla very well, not really. He had a collection of queer memories—a girl leaping in place to what avail—of no more value than bits of broken glass. He had nothing. Darla inhabited his world more than he did, for she infused it, doing what the dead would like to do but in most cases couldn’t, which in Francine’s opinion was a very good thing. As far as she was concerned, though, Darla, her quenched double, was a disappointment.

She played the tape again and it sounded even less interesting than before and briefer as well. She didn’t know what was missing, it had just become, was becoming, more compressed. She began to play it once more, then thought better of it. She ejected it from the machine and put it back in the Baggie. Locating a pencil, she tore an envelope in half—another unpaid bill!—and wrote:

Her sentiments were not at all sincere but such were the means by which one expressed participation in the world.

Dennis was scrubbing the swimming pool tiles with a pumice stone.

“Here’s your tape back,” Francine said.

“It’s something, isn’t it,” Dennis said.

“I found it a little repetitive.”

“Yes, yes, those final chords can never be forgotten quickly enough.” He seemed pleased.

“Dennis, I’m curious about a number of things.”

“Darla was curious.”

“You are from St. Louis and Darla is buried there?”

He nodded. “My family once owned half of St. Louis but they don’t anymore.”

“It seems a lot to be responsible for,” she agreed. “But my point is, with you treasuring the memory of Darla so, I would think you would find her more present back there.”

Dennis opened his mouth in a wide grimace. “Sorry,” he said. “Darla always told me I eat too fast. Sometimes I can’t catch my breath. I just had lunch.”

“You could visit her grave and such,” Francine went on relentlessly.

“That would be unhealthy, wouldn’t it?” Dennis said. “Besides, Darla never liked St. Louis. She didn’t care for vernacular landscapes. You couldn’t see the stars in St. Louis. Darla liked a pretty night. No one liked a pretty night more than that girl did.”

“She sounds like an exceptional young woman,” Francine said dryly.

“She was beautiful and smart and kind and generous.”

“I don’t see her, Dennis. I can’t picture her at all.”

“And when she looked at you, she did it with her whole heart. You existed when she looked at you. You were …” He appeared to be short of breath again.

“I’m not a particularly nice person, Dennis. I’ve had to admit that to myself, and I’ll admit it to you as well. I might have been nice once but I get by the best I can now. I don’t even know how you’d look at someone, anything, with your whole heart. Why, you’d wear yourself out. You’d become nothing but a cinder. Life would become intolerable in no time. Now, it sounds as though you had a very fortunate childhood until you didn’t. It’s what I always think when I see cows grazing in the fields or standing in those pleasant little streams that wind through the fields or finding shade beneath the occasional tree, that they have a very nice life until they don’t. An extreme analogy, perhaps—well, yes, forget that analogy, but you have to move on, Dennis. Your life’s not assimilating your days and that’s not good, Dennis.”

“What?” Dennis said.

“Now I want you to read the note I’ve given you. And I really must find Freddie. He and the sheltie have been gone for an unusually long while.”

Francine walked briskly through the patio to the garage. The door was open and Freddie’s large dour Mercedes was gone, leaving only “her” car, an unreliable convertible she professed to adore. She would go to the dog park. She stepped into the convertible, turned on the ignition and studied the gauges. It was very low on fuel.

At the gas station, the attendant inside said, “What would you do if this wasn’t a real hundred-dollar bill?”

“What would I do?”

“Yeah!” The girl had unnaturally black hair and a broad unwinning smile.

“Of course it’s real. Do you think I’m trying to pass off a counterfeit?”

“Nah,” the girl said, “I’m not going to take it. I’m using my discretion.”

“It’s a perfectly good bill,” Francine said. “Don’t you have a pen or a light or something that you pass over these things?”

“You have to give me something smaller. I’m using my discretion.”

Francine was about to continue her protests but realized this would only prolong the girl’s happiness. She returned to her car, annoyed but not so shaken that she failed to offer the moribund palm on the pump island her customary sympathy.

There was no dearth of gas stations. She broke the hundred and filled up the gluttonous little car. Then, after driving for miles and making several incorrect turns, she arrived at the dubious park. When she and Freddie had first moved to Arizona they had taken a rafting trip and everyone had gotten sick. The guide had not lost enthusiasm for his troubled industry, however. “Nobody likes to get sick from a little sewage!” he’d said. “But you’re on the river! Some folks only dream of doing this!” This was another river, though, or had been.

A half dozen dogs rushed up to her. One had a faded pink ribbon attached somehow to the crown of its head, but none of them had collars. She tried to befriend them with what Freddie referred to as her birthday-party voice, though they seemed a wary lot and disinterested in false forms of etiquette.
She wondered which one of them had the hallucinations and what he thought was going on around him right then. She waded through the pack and approached a group of people sitting on a cluster of concrete picnic tables.

“Has a man with a sheltie been here today?”

“The sheltie,” a woman said. “Congratulations!”

“I’m sorry?” Francine said.

“No need to be. It was a dignified departure, wasn’t it, Bev?”

“As dignified as they come,” Bev said. “We all almost missed it.”

“I find it so much more convincing to see how things just happen rather than to observe how we, as human individuals, make them happen,” a man said.

“Yeah, but we still almost missed it,” Bev said, “even you.” She winked at Francine. “He thinks too much,” she confided.

“A swift closure,” another man said. “One of the best we’ve seen.”

Francine began to cry.

“What’s this, what’s this,” someone said fretfully.

Francine returned to the car and drove aimlessly, crying, around the sprawling city. “Poor old dear,” she cried. “Poor old dear.” But I might have misunderstood those people completely, she thought. What had they said, anyway? She stopped crying. When it was almost dark she pulled up to a restaurant where she and Freddie had dined when they did such things. She went into the restroom and washed her face and hands. Then she opened her purse and studied it for a long moment before removing a hairbrush. She pulled the brush through her hair for a while and then replaced it. Slowly she closed the handbag, which as usual made a decisive click.

In the dining room, the maître d’ greeted her. “Ahh,” he said noncommittally. She was seated at a good table. When the waiter appeared she said, “I’m starving. Bring me anything, but I have no money. Tomorrow I can come back with the money.” She was a different person. She felt like a different person saying this.

The waiter went away. Nothing happened. She watched the waiters and the maître d’ observing her. On the wall beside her was a large framed photograph of a saguaro that had fallen on a Lincoln Brougham in the parking lot and smashed it good. Save for such references, one hardly knew one was in the desert anymore.

People came into the restaurant and were seated. They made their selections, were served and then left, all in an orderly fashion. A glass of water had been placed before Francine when she first sat down and she had drunk that and the glass had not been refilled.

She left before they flipped the chairs and brought out the vacuum cleaner. When she arrived home the garage door was still open and Freddie’s Mercedes was not there. There would probably be a reminder in their mailbox the following morning that subdivision rules prohibited garage interiors to be unnecessarily exposed. No one likes to look at someone else’s storage, they would be reminded. Francine very much did not want to go into the house and face once more, and alone, the humming refrigerator and the moth floating in the sheltie’s water dish. Given Freddie’s continued absence, she would probably have to call the police. But she did not want to call the police after her experience with the fire department. She considered both of these official agencies and their concept of correctness of little use to her. She eased the car into gear—it sounded as
though something was wrong with the transmission again—and drove off once more into the dully glowing web of the city, lowering the roof and then raising it again, unable to decide if she was warm or cold. Finally she left the roof down, though no stars were visible. The lights of the city seemed to be extinguishing them by the week.

Stopped at a light at a large intersection, she saw the Barbeques Galore store. The vast parking area covered several acres and was dotted with dilapidated campers, for the store was not closed for the evening but had gone out of business, providing welcome habitat for the aimless throngs coursing through the land.

She turned and, threading her way among the vehicles, heard the murmur of voices and saw the silhouettes of figures moving behind flimsily curtained windows. Some trucks had metal maps of the country affixed to the rear, the shapes of the states colored in where the people had been. Dangling from the windshield mirrors were amulets of all kinds, crosses, beads, chains. On the dashboards were cups, maps, coins and crumpled papers, even a tortoise nibbling on a piece of lettuce. And there, swooping in a graceful arc on the darkened margin of the place, Galore, the ineradicable locus of what had been his happiness, was Dennis on his waxed and violet Fat Boy. He hadn’t seen her yet, of that she was sure. But if she went to him, what could be the harm? For he was no more than a child in his yearnings, and his Darla was just an exuberant young girl who could never dream she didn’t have a life before her.