Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (6 page)

Miriam shook her head. It sounded like something the lamp would like. She would try to acquire it.

“Really? I’m surprised. Well-known broad. She was burned at the stake, but an enormous crowd was converted to her favor after witnessing her attitude toward death.”

“What was her attitude?” Miriam said.

“I don’t know exactly. Thirteenth century. The records are muzzy. I guess she went out without a lot of racket about it. Women have been trying to figure out how to be strong for a long while. It’s harder for a woman to find a way than it is for a man. Not crying about stuff doesn’t seem to be enough.”

Miriam said nothing. Back in the room, the lamp was hovered over
Moby-Dick
. It would be deeply involved in it by now. It would be slamming down Melville like water. The shapeless maw of the undifferentiating sea! God as indifferent, insentient Being, composed of an infinitude of deaths! Nature.
Gliding … bewitching … majestic … capable of universal catastrophe! The lamp was eating it up.

“I’ve been here for ten years,” the taxidermist said. “I built this place up from nothing. The guy before me had nothing but a few ratty displays. Medallions were his specialty. Things have to look dead on a medallion, that’s the whole point. But when I finished with something it looked alive. You could almost hear it breathe. But of course it wasn’t breathing. Ha! It was best when I was working on it, that’s when it really existed, but when I stopped … uhhh,” he said. “I’ve done as much as I can. I’ve reached my oubliette. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“I do,” Miriam said.

“Oh,” he said, “I’m crazy about that word
oubliette
. That word says it all.”

“It’s true,” she said.

“You’re perfect,” he said. “I want to retire, and I want you to take my place.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Miriam said.

“No stuffing would be required. I’ve done all that, we’re beyond that. You’d just be answering questions.”

“I don’t know anything about questions,” Miriam said.

“The only thing you have to know is that you can answer them anyway you want. The questions are pretty much the same, so you’ll go nuts if you don’t change the answers.”

“I’ll think about it,” Miriam said. But actually she was thinking about the lamp. The odd thing was she had never been in love with an animal. She had just skipped that cross-species eroticism and gone right beyond it to altered parts. There was something wrong with that, she thought. It was so hopeless. Well, love was hopeless …

“I have certain responsibilities,” Miriam said. “I have a lamp.”

“That’s a wonderful touch!” the taxidermist said. “And when things are slow you’ll have all the animals too. There are over a thousand of them here, you know, and some of them are pretty darn rare. I think you’ll be making up lots of stories about them.”

It seemed a pretty good arrangement for the lamp. Miriam made up her mind. “All right,” she said.

“You’ll have a following in no time,” the taxidermist said. “I’ll finish up with these people and you can start in the morning.”

There was still a long line of people waiting to get into the museum. Miriam passed them on her way out.

“I’ve been back five times,” a bald woman was saying to her friend. “I think you’ll find it’s almost a quasi-religious experience.”

“Oh, I think everything should be like that,” her friend said.

Carl’s big truck was no longer at the garage. Miriam gazed around but the truck did not resume its appearance and probably, as far as she was concerned, never would. For most people, and apparently Carl and Jack were two of them, a breakdown meant that it was just a matter of time before they were back on the road again. She walked over to the hotel and up the stairs to their room. The door was open and the beds were stripped. The big pillows without their pretty covers looked like flayed things. A thin maid in a pink uniform was changing the channel on a television set. Something was being described by the announcer as
a plume of effluent surrounded by seagulls…

The maid noticed her and said, “San Diego, a sewer pipe broke. A single pipe for one-point-four-million people. A million-four, what do they expect.”

Miriam continued down the corridor and opened the door quietly to her own room. She looked at the lamp. The lamp looked back, looked at her as though it had no idea who she was. Miriam knew that look. She’d always felt it was full of promise. Nothing could happen anywhere was the truth of it. And the lamp was burning with this. Burning!

T
HE FUNERAL
of Anne’s son, Harry, had not gone smoothly. Other burials were taking place at the same hour, including that of a popular singer several hundred yards away whose mourner fans carried on loudly under a lurid striped tent. Still more fans pressed against the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates, screaming and eating potato chips. Anne had been distracted. She gazed at the other service in disbelief, thinking of the singer’s songs that she had heard now and then on the radio.

Her own group, Harry’s friends, was subdued. They were pale, young, and all wore sunglasses. Most of them were classmates from the prep school he had graduated from two years before, and all were addicts, or former addicts of some sort. Anne couldn’t tell the difference between those who were recovering and those who were still hard at it. She was sure there was a difference, of course, and it only appeared there wasn’t. They all had a manner. There were about twenty of them, boys and girls, strikingly alike in black. Later she took
them all out to a restaurant. “Death … by none art thou understood,” one boy kept saying. “Henry Vaughan.”

They were all bright enough, Anne supposed. After a while he stopped saying it. They had calamari, duck, champagne, everything. They were on the second floor of the restaurant and had the place to themselves. They stayed for hours. By the time they left, one girl was saying earnestly, “You know a word I like is
interplanetary
.”

Then she brought them back to the house, although she locked Harry’s rooms. Young people were sentimentalists, consumers. She didn’t want them carrying off Harry’s things, his ties and tapes, anything at all. They sat in the kitchen. They were beginning to act a little peculiar, Anne thought. They didn’t talk about Harry much, though one of them remembered a time when Harry was driving and he stopped at all the green lights and proceeded on the red. They all acted as though they’d been there. This seemed a fine thing to remember about Harry. Then someone, a floppy-haired boy who looked frightened, remembered something else, but it turned out this was associated with a boy named Pete who was not even present.

At about one o’clock in the morning, Anne said that when she and Harry were in Africa, during the very first evening at the hotel in Victoria Falls, he claimed he’d seen a pangolin, a peculiar anteater-like animal. He described it, and that’s clearly what it was, but a very rare thing, an impossible thing for him to have seen, really, and no one in the group they would be traveling with believed him. He had been wandering around the hotel grounds by himself, so there were no witnesses to it. The group went on to discuss the falls. Everyone could verify the impression the falls made. So many hundreds of millions of gallons of water went over each minute or something, and
there was a drop of four hundred feet. Even so, everyone was quite aware it wasn’t like that, no one was satisfied with that. The sound of the falls was like silence, total amplified silence, the sight of it exclusionary. And all that could be done was to look at it, this astonishing thing, Victoria Falls, then eventually stop looking and go on to something else.

The next day Harry had distinguished himself further by exclaiming over a marabou stork, and someone in the group told him that marabous were gruesome things, scavengers, “morbidity distilled,” in the words of this fussy little person, and certainly nothing to get excited about when there were hundreds of beautiful and strange creatures in Africa that one could enjoy and identify and point out to the others. Imagine, Anne said, going to an immense new continent and being corrected as to one’s feelings, one’s perceptions, in such a strange place. And it was not as though everything was known. Take the wild dogs, for example. Attitudes had changed utterly about the worth of wild dogs …

Abruptly, she stopped. She had been silent much of the evening and felt that this outburst had not gone over particularly well. Harry’s friends were making margaritas. One of them had gone out and just returned with more tequila. They were watching her uncomfortably, as though they felt she should fluff up her stories on Harry a bit.

Finally one of them said, “I didn’t know Harry had been to Africa.”

This surprised her. The trip to Africa hadn’t been a triumph, exactly, but it hadn’t been a disaster either and could very well have been worse. They had been gone a month, and this had been very recently. But it didn’t matter. She would probably never see these children again.

They sat around the large kitchen. They were becoming more and more strange to her. She wondered what they were all waiting for. One of them was trying to find salt. Was there no salt? He opened a cupboard and peered inside, bringing out a novelty set, a plastic couple, Amish or something; she supposed the man was pepper, the woman salt. They were all watching him as he turned the things over and shook them against his cupped hand. Anne never cooked, never used anything in this kitchen, she and Harry ate out, so these things were barely familiar to her. Then, with what was really quite a normal gesture, the boy unscrewed the head off the little woman and poured the salt inside onto a saucer.

Someone shrieked in terror. It was the floppy-haired boy; he was yelling, horrified. Anne was confused for an instant. Was Harry dying again? Was Harry all right? The boy was howling, his eyes rolling in his head. The others looked at him dully. One of the girls giggled. “Uh-oh,” she said.

Two of the boys were trying to quiet him. They all looked like Harry, even the boy who was screaming.

“You’d better take him to the emergency room,” Anne said.

“Maybe if he just gets a little air, walks around, gets some air,” a boy said.

“You’d all better go now,” Anne said.

It was not yet dawn, still very dark. Anne sat there alone in the bright kitchen in her black dress. There was a run in her stocking. The dinner in the restaurant had cost almost a thousand dollars, and Harry probably wouldn’t even have liked it. She hadn’t liked it. She wanted to behave differently now, for
Harry’s sake. He hadn’t been perfect, Harry, he’d been a very troubled boy, a very misunderstood boy, but she had never let him go, never, until now. She knew that he couldn’t be aware of that, that she now had let him go. She knew that between them, from now on, she alone would be the one who realized things. She wasn’t going to deceive herself in that regard. Even so, she knew she wasn’t thinking clearly about this.

After some time, she got up and packed a duffel bag for Africa, exactly the way she had done before. The bag and its contents could weigh no more than twenty-two pounds. When she was finished, she put it in the hallway by the door. Outside it was still dark, as dark as it had been hours ago, though this scarcely seemed possible.

Perhaps she would go back to Africa.

There was a knock on the door. Anne looked at it, startled, a thick door with locks. Then she opened it. A girl was standing there, not the
interplanetary
one but another, one who had particularly relished the dinner. She had been standing there smoking for a while before she knocked. Several cigarette butts were ground into the high-gloss cerulean of the porch.

“May I come in?” the girl asked.

“Why, no,” Anne said. “No, you may not.”

“Please,” the girl said.

Anne shut the door.

She went into the kitchen and threw the two parts of the salt shaker into the trash. She tossed the small lady’s companion in as well. Harry had once said to her, “Look, this is amazing, I don’t know how this could have happened but I have these spikes in my head. They must have been there for a while, but I swear, I swear to you, I just noticed them. But I got them out! On the left side. But on the right side it’s more difficult
because they’re in a sort of helmet, and the helmet is fused to my head, see? Can you help me?”

She had helped him then. She had stroked his hair with her fingers for a long, long time. She had been very careful, very thorough. But that had been a unique situation. Usually, she couldn’t help him.

There was a sound at the door again, a determined knocking. Anne walked to it quickly and opened it. There were several of Harry’s friends there, not just the girl but not all of them either.

“You don’t have to be so rude,” one of them said.

They were angry. They had lost Harry, she thought, and they missed him.

“We loved Harry too, you know,” one of them said. His tie was loose, and his breath was sweet and dry, like sand.

“I want to rest now,” Anne said. “I must get some rest.”