The Distinguished Guest (12 page)

It strikes him, suddenly, as nearly apocalyptic that those feelings, that sense of purposeful certitude connected to belief, has lasted in one form or another in the history of this New World
until his generation, and then seemingly stopped dead. Rebecca, Clary, himself—none of them has felt
called
in the same way to do anything. Even Rebecca with her radicalism was mostly
just expressing rage. Surely some sociologist, some historian, has worked out why this has happened, what has happened. Alan wonders about it now just for himself: what
has
happened, what
has changed, to make him, the son of such people as Paul and Lily, what he is?

On another day he heads north and then due west, never even going to the office in the morning. He weaves along the narrow roads in southern Massachusetts, in and out of the old towns from
another century, another time, finally arriving at the edge of the Berkshires. He is hungry—he hasn’t eaten since he had a quick piece of toast at home this morning, and it’s
early afternoon by now—but in each town something keeps him from stopping. Here there doesn’t seem to be a coffee shop. Here there is, but it’s a Dunkin Donuts. And with each
town, he’s barely into its center before he’s out again anyway, back on the twisting wooded roads that break open, suddenly, onto rolling fields with long vistas, the mountains riding
low and blue in the distance.

And then he comes to a town, Emmett, whose name seems instantly familiar. He slows below the speed limit, trying to think why. And sees the faded, bedraggled pink ribbons tied here on a tree,
there on a mailbox, decorating the newel posts on the front steps of the Emmett Inn. Yes: there’s a little girl missing in this town. Missing, he thinks now, for a month or so—he
hasn’t read about it for at least that long, but he remembers when it happened. Before Lily came: the photographs in the paper of the grieving parents, of the police with dogs straining at
their leashes, of the dozens of neighbors who fanned out into the woods that rose steeply behind the town. And of course, the picture of the little girl herself, a school photo, he remembers
thinking—the smiling, dark-haired child in front of an artificial sky, wearing glasses that were too big for her. He had been compelled to read each article about her, and there was a flurry
of them for the first four or five days.

He’s parked now in front of the Emmett Inn, and he sits in the car for a moment. He remembers the description of the girl, and how struck he was that the parents knew exactly what clothes
she was wearing, mentioned that she had on new sneakers. It had made him think of his sons at a younger age and the intense awareness he had had then of them physically. Yes, the very clothing they
picked to wear each day—a hat one insisted on, a jacket the other wouldn’t give up even as it got too small, the new shoes that had magical importance for them. He could imagine
himself, like these parents, saying, “He had on black high-tops, with striped laces.” The kind of thing you knew about your child, the kind of thing that would tear at you. He could
imagine their panic. He could imagine too several nightmare versions of what had happened to the little girl, though he tried to call himself back from that each time. But there was a seductive
power to such evil, to imagining it.

He goes into the Emmett Inn. It’s a shabby, worn place with linoleum in the front hall. He finds this, oddly, a relief—that it’s not furbelowed and spiffy. He steps into the
dining room to the left of the wide hallway. The ten or so empty tables are covered with red-checked cloths, and they are all set for dinner with silverware, with paper napkins and glasses. The
coffee cups are turned upside down in their saucers. “Hello?” he calls.

There’s no answer. In the hall again, he sees the bell on the desk and hits it. From somewhere deep in the building, he hears a responsive noise, a thump. After a moment, a woman about his
age, plump, in a plaid shirt and blue jeans, comes sprinting down the wide, curving stairs. She’s breathless, and her lank, straight hair is drooping loose from a ponytail. Her sleeves are
rolled up and her arms are solid and strong-looking, tanned. Lunch is over, she tells him. “I can give you some coffee and dessert, if you like. We’ve got pie. But that’s it until
dinner. There’s no one in the kitchen right now.”

“That’s fine. Pie is fine,” Alan says. “What kinds do you have.”

“Exactly one kind.” She grins. She has a pale, delicate moustache, but she’s pretty in some surprising way. “Blueberry. It
is
homemade.” It’s her
voice, he realizes. Its pitch, its softness. It belongs with another woman, and it’s strangely arresting on her.

“Blueberry it is,” he says. “And coffee. Great.”

“Okay.” She gestures him into the dining room. “Sit anywhere,” she calls out musically as she heads toward the back of the hallway.

Alan takes a seat near the front windows, looking across the wide porch to his car parked outside and the main street beyond it. There are rockers painted white and set in a row on the porch.
They stir slightly in the breeze as though invisible old ladies were sitting in them. Lilys. In a moment, the woman emerges through the swinging doors at the back of the dining room, carrying a
tray. She sets the blueberry pie in front of Alan, turns his cup over, and fills it with coffee from a steaming glass pot.

She puts his check down next to his place. “If you could pay me now, I’ll just leave the coffeepot with you and you can help yourself to more if you want it.” She smells
lemony, bleachy.

Alan stands, fishes four ones from his wallet. “That’s fine,” he tells her.

“Thanks,” she says. “I’ve still got some chores to do upstairs.” She leaves through the wide doorway to the hall. He hears her heavy tread going up the worn
staircase.

Alan sits there for half an hour or so, slowly eating the pie and drinking two cups of the coffee. He feels, oddly, at home and comfortable. The pie tastes wonderful to him, and he realizes,
abruptly, how famished he was. Gaby, he knows, would find it too sweet, the crust too chewy. He eats all of it, pushing his fork onto the plate to gather the last crumbs in its tines. Above him
from time to time, he can hear the noise of the woman moving around, once her voice in distant, brief song.

Outside the window, the tall trees—horse chestnuts, with their beautifully shaped leaves—flutter suddenly in a breeze. The houses he can see are all painted white, white with black
shutters, just as they are in Bowman, in hundreds of New England towns. This could be a life, he thinks, a different life from his own. A solitary man, a man on the road. A man with no mother, no
wife and children. Is this what he’s been trying to create for himself with these long drives? An illusion of just this freedom, this emptiness? Is this somehow what he would like, to move
across this landscape unattached?

And would it have been such a man who would have taken the little girl, taken her in his car someplace and done whatever it was he did to her? A man with no ties, no connections?

Or maybe, he thinks, it was someone here, in the town. Someone like him. Someone everyone trusts, someone living among them now. Someone who tied his own pink ribbons around the trees in his
front yard. Someone who joined the search party, who commiserated with the parents. Someone, perhaps, with children of his own. After all, isn’t that what history had taught us—that men
could be deeply evil, while also being, in a domestic sense, ordinary, or even good?

A woman walks past on the sidewalk, pushing a baby in a carriage. The baby wears only diapers and sits up, sucking on a bottle one-handedly, the other hand twirling a strand of blond hair. The
mother is young. She wears blue jeans and she is smoking a cigarette. Her bare midriff shows below a short stretch top. She looks tough, mean. And then she’s gone, and the street is back to
the nineteenth century again. The illusion of the nineteenth century.

We
are what wrecks it, he thinks: this landscape, the stillness and beauty of these towns. The escape they might represent from all that’s wrong with contemporary life, with urban
America. You can’t get far enough away.

The horse chestnuts stir, the ribbons dance on the newel post.

And then he remembers that, in the end, what he is fleeing from is only Lily.

It is probably fair to ask to what extent Lily Maynard is conscious of the effect she makes, but it’s not a question you’ll easily find the answer to. There are
moments, yes, when it all seems deliberated, when there’s a pause and what seems a long, sly glance before something provocative or beguiling is said. About her marriage: “Of course,
neither my husband nor I really knew anything about each other before we were married—nothing. But then, it was impossible at that period for men and women to know each other at all.”
Of her success: “I enjoy it absolutely, as I never could have earlier in life. It’s taken me this long to understand that what I wanted all along was revenge.”

But there are moments too when the dark eyes swim abruptly with tears, when she falls silent in the middle of a sentence and cannot—or will not?—finish it.

“Where is this going?” Linnett had typed. And tried again.

“
Merde
,” Linnett says aloud now.

Another beginning:

Linnett is in her rental cottage, drinking tea and reading through her various starts on the article about Lily as they come up in the amber glow of the computer screen. It’s raining
outside, a light, misty rain off the ocean that leaves the windows blurry with the salty air. She’s spent the afternoon, the whole week, with Lily, a Lily who seems not at all to have landed
on her feet, not at all a mystery or a sly, self-contained woman. Instead she’s been faltering, vague, and then finally today, firm, even noble, Linnett would say, in her renunciation of the
life Linnett had intended—no,
contracted
—to write about: her life as a writer.

Over. Like that.

After two weeks of interviewing Lily, of taping their conversations, of helping her with her correspondence, Linnett finally suggested the Friday of the week before that it was time for her to
repay her debt to Lily, time to help her write the story she’d talked about on and off since Linnett arrived. She’d been looking forward to this, she realized. Partly because
she’d come to like and admire Lily and truly wanted to help her; and partly out of curiosity about her writing processes. And then, of course, there was the possibility that it would generate
material for her article.

But three times this week they’ve tried. And three times they’ve failed.

Lily was fine summarizing it—Linnett has that on last Friday’s tape, when they first discussed doing it. “It’s an idea I’ve had as I’ve been reading through
Paul’s letters from California,” she says. “I’m working my way through them, as you know, all those old letters, one last time.”

Linnett asks something that’s inaudible on the tape.

Lily laughs, gaily. “Yes, if it’s the last thing I do on earth.” There’s a clinking—they were drinking iced tea, Linnett remembers—and then Lily says, more
slowly than usual, “You know, the older you get, the closer to death, the more all those old clichés seem expressive of truth.”

Linnett says clearly, “Oh poo, Lily. You’ll live forever.”

Lily, firmly: “Not if I have anything to say about it. And I will. I do.” Her voice grows a little more distant here, and Linnett remembers that she looked away at this moment, out
the window.

After a pause, Linnett’s voice—flat, slightly Southern—calls her back. “But the story, Lily.”

“Ah! the story,” she says. “Well, it involves, naturally, a woman not unlike myself.”

“Naturally,” Linnett says.

“A semi-famous woman, elderly, who’s on tour, you know, publicity. Traveling around, doing readings and signings and the like. Interviews. We’ll follow her as she arrives at
the airport in San Francisco, and is met, and driven to her hotel. She’s tired, of course. She has a nap. And a little forgetful. Wakes, can’t think for a minute where she is. And then
does, and gets ready, goes to her reading at some bookstore.” Lily clears her throat.

“And I want her to . . . you know, she puts on her reading glasses, so she can’t really see the audience. Just a blur of faces, really. And then when she removes them, at the end of
the reading, to answer questions—she’s very vain, poor thing, nothing like me in that regard of course.”

Noreen calls something over from the kitchen, and they all laugh. (Noreen’s kitchen noises are a remote and intermittent punctuation to this whole conversation. She’s cleaning up for
the day, getting ready to go home.)