Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (21 page)

Deke hurried past them back into the kitchen, where he poured more wine.

“This ain’t much of an establishment if you pardon my saying so,” he said to Angela. “No steaks in the freezer, no ice cream, sound system inadequate, music fit only to disinform the listener, no point in hearing it twice, towels thin, washcloths worn and most suspect, bed lumpy, poor recycling practices, few spare lightbulbs on hand, fire extinguishers out of date, no playing cards, clocks not set properly—”

“I like them a little fast,” Angela conceded. It was all true. He was in no way exaggerating.

“Potted violets on windowsill in very poor condition, worst case of powdery mildew I ever saw. I could go on.”

“I remember those violets,” Darleen said. “Those violets are from my childhood.”

“Now that’s just plain wrong,” Angela protested.

“Suffering the same fate regardless,” Darleen said.

“You got a considerable amount of canned goods, however.
Can I take some back to my friends?” Deke’s hair was still wet, but already scurf was bedecking his thin shoulders like fresh snow.

“See, Mummy, even though a person has no future to speak of, he can take a moment to think of others. He can trust even in the blackest part of night that the daylight is not going to forget to come back for him.”

“She’s a talker, isn’t she,” Deke said.

“That surprises me, actually,” Angela confessed. “It really does.” She was brooding about that daylight-coming-back business. You couldn’t think that way about daylight, that’s why the ancients were always so hysterical. It was just too mental, too neurasthenic. Certain things just couldn’t forget to come back. And when they finally didn’t, it wasn’t because they
forgot
. They did it with deliberation.

Deke had casually resumed his litany of the inadequacies of Angela’s method of living. “Carpeting not particularly clean—gritty, in fact. No handy cold-care tissues available, no Proust.”

“For godssakes,” Darleen said, “you’re the biggest show-off I’ve ever known for someone who a couple hours ago was begging outside the bus station.”

“Selling newspapers,” Deke said.

“They were giveaway papers,” Darleen said. “They were supposed to be free.” She turned to her mother. “I was kind of not looking forward to us being together. I needed a respite from you at first. So I gave this one fifty dollars to come here with me.”

“You want it back?” From a slit pocket in his shirt he extracted a bill, then proceeded to unfold Benjamin Franklin’s enormous head.

“Yes, she does,” Angela said. “Of course she does.” She sent Darleen a hundred dollars every month for, the word they had agreed upon was
incidentals
, and she certainly did not want her to be disposing of the money in this fashion. “I send you a hundred—”

“Big goddamn deal,” Darleen said. “My roommate gets two hundred each month from her parents, which they earn by collecting cans and bottles. The Garcias search the streets and alleys thirteen hours a day for cans and bottles. It’s their goddamn job. Fifteen thousand cans pay their rent each month and another six thousand nets their little scholar Isabelle two hundred bucks each month, and I am informing you that Isabelle—who’s the biggest goddamn snob I’ve ever met—spends it on fancy underwear. The Garcias are tiny, selfless, worn-out
saints
walking the earth, I’ve seen ’em, and Isabelle buys
lingerie.”
She waved the proffered bill away. “What’s gone is gone,” she said, and laughed.

Deke refolded the bill and placed it back in his shirt. “She’s probably referring to an unfortunate erotic crisis I underwent recently. Otherwise, given its more general application, I would say that she doesn’t subscribe to the gone-is-gone theory one bit.”

Darleen scowled at him. “This is not the appropriate moment.”

Deke sniffed loudly, rotated his arms and clasped his hands together. “Cold in here too. Not cozy. Only thing of interest is this old painting. Where’d you get this? Quite out of place. An odd choice, I’d say.”

It was a large oil of beavers and their home on a lake, painted the century before. It was not in a frame but affixed to the wall by nails. Angela looked at it, resting her chin in her
hand thoughtfully. The colors of the landscape were deep and lustrous. The water was a fervent rumpled barren of green, the trees along the curving shore like cloaked messengers. Everything seemed fresh and clean with kind portent, even the sky. God had poured his being in equal measure to all creatures, Angela thought solemnly, to each as much as it could receive. Beavers were peculiar and reclusive, but that was their nature. They were not frivolous beings. They behaved responsibly and gravely and with great fidelity. Here they were involved in the process of constructing their house, carrying branches and twigs and so forth in their jaws and on their great paddle-like tails, though the structure was already large and in Angela’s view extremely accomplished, a mansion, in fact, the floors of which were carpeted with boughs of softest evergreen, the windows curving out over the water like balconies for the enjoyment of the air.

“Mummy stole that painting,” Darleen said.

“Well, good for you!” Deke said. Clearly, Angela had been elevated in his regard.

“Some years ago, Mummy used to be quite the drinker,” Darleen said.

“Is that so!” Deke exclaimed, more delighted still. “Why’d you give it up?”

The painting had been in a roadhouse she once frequented. Sitting and drinking, pretty much alone in that unpopular place, she would watch the painting with all her heart. Slowly her heavy heart would turn light and she would feel it pulling away as though it wasn’t responsible for her anymore, freeing her to slip beneath the glittering skein of water into the lovely clear beaver world of woven light where everything was wild and orderly and real. A radiant inhuman world
of speechless grace. This was where she spent her time when she could. These were delicate moments, however, and further weak cocktails never prolonged them. Further cocktails, actually, no matter how responsibly weak, only propelled her to the infelicitous surface again. The artist, the bastard, had probably trapped and drowned the beavers and thrust rods through their poor bodies to arrange them in life-assuming positions, as Audubon had done with birds, the bastard, and Stubbs had done with horses, the bastard, to make his handsome portraits.

“Your mother isn’t very forthcoming with the details, is she?” Deke said.

“I would wake up weeping,” Angela said. “Tears would be streaming down my face.”

“You quit, and now they don’t anymore?” Deke asked suspiciously.

Angela stared at him.

“Doesn’t seem much to give up the drink for, a few tears. How long’s it been since you’ve cried now?”

“Oh, years,” Angela said.

“And now her heart’s a little ice-filled crack. Isn’t it, Mummy?” Darleen said.

“Why don’t you leave your mother alone for a while,” Deke said. “Look at you. You’re a vicious little being, like one of those thylacines.”

“The Tasmanian wolf is extinct,” Darleen said. “Don’t show off so goddamn much.”

“Their prey was sheeps,” Deke said. “But the sheeps won out in the end. They always do.”

“Sheeps,” Darleen snickered.

“A vicious little being you are,” Deke repeated mildly. He regarded the painting once more. “I got a friend knew a guy
who lived with a beaver in the Adirondacks. Every time my friend would go visit him, that beaver would be there with its own big beaver house made of sticks and such right in this guy’s cabin. He’d rescued this beaver and they had a really good relationship. You broke bread with my friend’s friend and you’d break bread with that beaver.”

“Mummy, when do you plan on serving supper?” Darleen said. “She never has food in this house,” she said to Deke.

“She’s got a number of vegetables ready to go. Vegetables are good for you,” he said without much conviction.

At dinner, Angela felt impelled to ask him how he and Darleen had met and what, exactly, it was that he did.

“This is what I got to say to that remark. I don’t know if you read much, but there’s a story by Anton Chekhov called ‘Gooseberries.’ And in this story one of the characters says in conversation that there should be a man with a hammer reminding every happy, contented individual that they’re not going to be happy forever. This man with a hammer should be banging on the door of the happy individual’s house or something to that effect.”

“You think you’re the man with the hammer?”

Deke smiled at her modestly.

“If I recall that story correctly,” Angela said, “the point being made about the man with the hammer is that there is no such person.” Angela had attended boarding school herself. She remembered almost everything she had been alerted to then and very little afterwards.

“You’re so negative, Mummy. You dispute anything anyone has to say,” Darleen crouched over the table with her fist wrapped around a fork, not eating.

“The man with the hammer that I recall is in another story, not by Chekhov at all. In
A Mother’s Tale
the circumstances couldn’t be more …”

“Don’t be tiresome, Mummy,” Darleen said.

“Why don’t you leave your mother alone, the poor woman,” Deke said. “This is an ordinary woman here. Where’s the challenge? Why do you hate her so much? Your hate’s misplaced, I’d say.”

“Why do I hate Mummy?”

“Not at all clear. Whoa, though, whoa, I got a question for Angela. You ever confess under questioning from this child that you had considered, if only for an instant when she was but the size of a thumb inside you, not having this particular one at all, maybe a later one?”

“No,” Angela said.

Deke nodded. “That’s nice,” he said. He picked at his potato. “This is a little overcooked,” he said.

“I just want to check on something,” Darleen said. She disappeared into what had been her bedroom. There was the ugly wallpaper in a dense tweedy pattern which would make anyone feel as though they were trapped under a basket. Darleen had selected it at the age of eight. Angela didn’t use the room for storage. Technically, it was still Darleen’s bedroom.

“Dinner was OK, actually OK,” Deke said pleasantly. “Glad you didn’t go the fowl route. You ever had goose? There’s this wealthy woman in town and she’s got this perturberance about nuisance geese. They’re Canada geese but they’re not from Canada, she says, and she’s got the town to agree to capture and slaughter them and feed them to the poor. If you have any influence, would you tell that old girl we don’t like those
geese? The flavor is off. They’re golf course geese and full of insecticides and effluent and such.”

“Betty Bishop!” Angela exclaimed. “Why, I just broke her wrist!”

“Good for …” Deke began, then stopped.

“It was an accident, but what a coincidence!”

“I guess you wouldn’t have the influence I seek then,” Deke said, sniffing. “You ever get the air ducts in this place cleaned? Should be cleaned annually. Dust, fungi, bacteria—you’re cohabiting with continually recirculating pollutants here.”

Darleen returned. “Where’s my little fish,” she demanded.

“Well, it, oh goodness, it’s been years,” Angela said.

“Is that my fish’s bowl in the kitchen filled with pennies and shit?”

“I saw that,” Deke said. “Clearly a fishbowl, now much reduced in circumstances.”

“I had a little fish throughout my childhood,” Darleen explained to him. “I said ‘Good morning’ to it in the morning and ‘Good night’ to it at night.”

Deke stretched out his long, black-wrapped legs.

“For years and years I had this little fish,” Darleen said. “But it wasn’t the same fish! I’d pretend I hadn’t noticed there was something awfully wrong with fishie sometimes before I went to school, and she would pretend she hadn’t slipped the deceased down the drain and run out and bought another one before my return.”

“Oh, I knew you knew,” Angela said.

“If it had been the same fish, you two would have lacked the means to communicate with each other at all,” Deke suggested.

“Mummy, I want to be serious now. Do you know why I’m here? I’m here because Daddy Bruce requested that I come. That’s why I’m here.”

For an instant, Angela had no idea who Daddy Bruce was. Then her heart pitched about quite wildly. Darleen had neglected to put her eyes in full deployment and she gazed at her mother with alarming sincerity.

“I was studying one night. I’d been up for hours and hours. It was very late and he just appeared, in my mind, not corporeally, and he said, ‘Honey, this is Daddy Bruce. I don’t want you cutting yourself off from your mom and me anymore. Your mom’s a painful thing to apprehend but you’ve got to try. She’s living her life like a clock does, just counting the hours. You can take a clock from room to room, from place to place, but all it does is count the hours.’”

“He never talked that way!” Angela exclaimed. “He was just a boy!”

“Well, that’s what happens pretty quick,” Deke said. “They all get to sounding the same. It’s characteristic of death’s drear uniformity. Most difficult to be pluralistic when you’re dead.”

“He said he never loved you and he’s sorry about that now.”

Angela’s heart was pounding hard and insistently, distracting her a little, making a great obtrusive show of itself. Be aware of me, it was pounding, be aware.

“He said if he had to do it all over, he still wouldn’t love you but you wouldn’t know it.”

“It don’t seem as if this Bruce is giving Angela much of a second chance here,” Deke said.

“Daddy Bruce wanted to assure you that—”

“Tell him not to worry about it,” Angela said. There were worse things, she supposed, than being told you had never been loved by a dead man.

Deke giggled. “What else he have to say? Did he suggest you were studying too hard?”

“He would hardly have bothered to come all the way from the other world to tell me that,” Darleen said.

“I suspect there’s only one thing to know about that other world,” Deke opined. “You don’t go to it when you’re dead. That other world exists only when you’re in this one.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Angela said. She took a deep uncertain breath.