The Distinguished Guest (13 page)

After a moment: “Anyway, she looks up and sees this old man who looks familiar. And then she realizes it, it’s her ex-husband.

“And the whatchamacallit, the woman, you know, running the reading is announcing that she’ll take questions, and she sees her husband’s hand go up, along with some others, and
she deliberately doesn’t respond to him first. Or second. She decides she’ll take six or seven questions before she gets around to him—we’ll have some as dialogue, and some
will be summarized. She’ll be saving him for last, in some sense, and aware . . . I want to be very clever about this if I can: she’s aware, don’t you know, of preening a bit in
front of him, of really saying to him in a sense, ‘Now my dear, it’s your turn. Now you must sit and listen to
me
.’ And she’s going along, ignoring him, when the
woman, the bookstore woman, gets up and thanks everyone, says they really have to stop, and begins to read announcements and so forth. And she has to sit there and watch this old man get up and
leave with the rest of them, and that’s it. And I want her thinking, that night, as she goes to bed alone in this lovely hotel—oh, it will have a splendid view, the Golden Gate Bridge,
no doubt—thinking of him, calling up certain images. Wondering, don’t you know, what it was he would have asked her. What it was, after all these years, he would have wanted to know.
And then almost chanting to herself as she gets sleepier, ‘I was coming to you, I was coming to you,’ the way a child does to comfort itself, chanting as though she could stop him from
leaving as he did.”

Lily’s voice had gotten weaker over the course of this near-monologue, and she nearly whispered this last, in a way that made Linnett’s throat ache even as she listened to it for the
third or fourth time on the tape. She remembered Lily’s face too, a faraway look on it, as though she’d moved into the story herself and was recounting a memory—though Linnett was
fairly sure, given the relative timing of Lily’s success and Paul’s death, that these events couldn’t have happened to her.

There’s a long silence on the tape, and then Linnett’s murmuring voice, “Oh, that’s wonderful Lily. Oh!” She claps her hands once here, a strange, flat sound on the
tape. “I can hardly wait to begin. To have my humble little part in it.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Lily says, sounding exhausted, suddenly dismissive.

Linnett asked her how she wanted to work it out, and they talked about possibilities. They decided that they’d try just straight dictation the next Monday and see how that went.

It had gone very badly.

Linnett had sat down in her usual chair next to Lily’s, pen and pad in hand. Noreen had put tea and cups down for them, and a plate of cookies Gaby had brought home the day before. Then,
at Lily’s request, she’d withdrawn to the deck.

As Lily talked, Linnett could see Noreen slowly flip through the pages of her magazine and finally put it aside and stretch out. Lily had been speaking for ten minutes or so by then, and Linnett
hadn’t written anything down. The old woman was again speaking indirectly of the story, of
how it would be
, as written. Linnett decided to let her go through the whole thing once more
before she spoke. Maybe Lily needed this, to launch herself.

“It sounds as wonderful as ever, Lily,” she said when Lily was through. “Just great.”

Lily murmured a thanks.

“Now,” Linnett said, poising her pen over the paper. “What’s her name?”

“Her name?” Lily looked confused.

“Yes. The character’s name.”

“Oh. I hadn’t considered . . .” Her hand rose, in front of her face, then slowly dropped again. “Well. I’d like. Let’s say . . . Eugenia. Eugenia . . .
Weld.”

“Ah, good,” Linnett said. “So. ‘Eugenia Weld was on her way to San Francisco’? Or something like that?”

“No. Oh no.” She nearly recoiled. “Something more . . . in medias res, I should think.”

“Mmm,” Linnett said.

Lily appeared distracted. A stricken, blank look washed her face clean.

Linnett waited.

Finally, weakly, Lily said, “The flight to San Francisco had grown . . . bumpy, over the Rockies, and Euphemia Weld had ordered a manhattan. Isn’t that what you call it?”

Writing, Linnett nodded.

“With the cherry?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I always liked them,” Lily said. “When we used to have cocktails,” she said, after a moment.

Linnett waited again. Finally she said, “Excuse me, Lily.”

“Yes,” Lily said, eagerly.

“Is it
Euphemia
you want, or
Eugenia
?”

“What did I
say
?” Lily asked, irritably.

“Both. At different times,” Linnett said. And then, because Lily looked frightened somehow, she said again, “It’s really a terrific story.” When Lily didn’t
answer, she read back the first sentence to her, using
Eugenia
without hesitating.

Lily pondered a moment, and then took a deep breath. “She had drunk two . . . no, almost three manhattans by the time the plane landed, and she’d forgotten the name of the woman who
was supposed to meet her.”

Linnett wrote, rapidly.

Lily’s hand moved dismissively. “But the way these things work, you know, they hold up your book, so it’s not ever really a problem.”

Linnett stopped writing. After a moment, she said, “ ‘Almost three manhattans’? Is that how you want it?”

“I just want you to write it down as I say it. That seems straightforward enough, surely.”

“Yes. It is. I’m sorry.”

Irritated herself, Linnett determined to wait through the next silence.
Let her do it herself if she thinks she can
. After nearly a minute, she took a cookie and began to eat it, slowly.
She tried not to consider Lily, who sat stalled, her mouth dropped slightly open, her hands wildly vibrating on the armrests of the chair. The cookie was buttery and rich, studded with coconut,
with chocolate and nuts. When she had finished, Linnett wanted another, but she resisted. She picked up her teacup and sipped at the cold dregs. On the deck, Noreen shifted in the lounge, raised a
knee and scratched it.

Linnett began to feel ridiculous. She spoke. “Lily?”

“Yes,” Lily whispered eagerly.

“Shall I read you what we’ve got?”

“Yes.”

Linnett read the first two sentences back, using “almost three manhattans.”

“And then I said something about the woman meeting her. You don’t have that.”

“Yeah. I didn’t write it down, because you weren’t using fictional language.”

“What do you mean?”

“You weren’t speaking as the narrator then. You’d, more or less, lapsed into conversational prose. With me.”

There was a long silence. Then Lily said, “I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.”

Linnett took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m sorry. Can you just . . . say it again? Say that sentence again? I’m ready.”

“It was about . . .” Lily hesitated. “Here, read me back what you have.”

Linnett read it again.

Lily seemed lost in thought. Two sharp vertical lines of fierce concentration formed between her dark eyebrows. She spoke slowly: “But, as it happened, as these things happen, the woman
was holding up a copy of Eugenia’s book, so it didn’t matter. Together . . . they walked, through the airport and out to the parking lot. The woman . . .” Lily paused for a long
moment. “Whose name was Laura, or Laurie. Was a talker, and . . . Eugenia Weld, who had the beginnings of a headache . . .” And here Lily’s hand rose slowly, as if being
levitated, as if being pulled by a wildly trembling marionette string, to her own forehead. “. . . was . . . relieved. Not to . . . have to . . .” The hand dropped slowly. Lily seemed
to slump back. “She didn’t want to talk anymore,” she whispered. “Not about this.”

Something’s happening, Linnett thought. She can’t do this. She let a silence encircle them. Then she said, “Maybe we’ve done enough for today, Lily.”

“Have we?” Lily asked, pathetically eager.

“It’s hard work.”

“Yes,” Lily said. “It is.”

“I’ll type this up tonight, and we can try again tomorrow.”

“Yes.” And then she brightened a little. “Tomorrow is another day.”

“Ah, well put,” Linnett said, smiling. And when Lily didn’t answer, she said, “Have you tried these cookies? God, they’re unbelievably good.”

Lily looked blankly at the plate. “Gaby . . . made them.”

“Mmm. I know.”

“Say what you will about Gaby,” Lily said, drawing herself up. “She is a splendid cook.”

“That
is
what I’ll say,” Linnett answered.

Lily took a cookie and bit it, began the long slow process of chewing and swallowing. When she was done, her hand at her throat as though to help push the food along, she looked brightly at
Linnett and said, “Have I told you that we Fletcherized in my household when I was a girl?”

“No,” Linnett lied.

“We did. Busy, busy. Too busy chewing to talk, virtually. How glad my father would be to see that Parkinson’s has restored me to the habit.” She smiled faintly.

“Just a sec,” said Linnett, fishing in her backpack. “I’ll get out the tape recorder.”

And she set the little box on the table next to the cookies and the teapot. “Tell me about your father,” she said, and watched Lily relax back in her chair. Her expressionless face
somehow relaxed again too. (Later, she thought, she would try to find a way to describe how emotion could be revealed on the blank slate of a Parkinson’s face.)

“A mean man,” Lily said, almost sensually. “A narrow, narrow man. A man of his time, absolutely. He should have worn mutton chops, and it wouldn’t have been out of place.
Or out of character.”

Linnett poured herself another cup of tea as Lily talked—unlocked, chattery, as if released from a spell. Her voice actually gained in strength as she went on, about the airless world she
grew up in, the release into the freedom of her first illness. Linnett reached for the milk pitcher. She tilted it and watched the liquid purl white into the clear, reddish tea.

The next day, they tried again, with the same result, even though Lily took great pleasure, Linnett could tell, in the few typed sentences Linnett gave to her to get them started. Embarrassed
and pained for the old woman, Linnett had turned them even more quickly back to conversation, and Lily, in her relief, was more garrulous, even more open than the day before, while her voice
lasted. She talked contemptuously and at length on Linnett’s tape about the appeal that community organizing “à la Alinsky,” as she called it, had for a man like Paul, so
used to what she called “the feminized world of the church.” “And good works generally,” she said. “After all, it was people like Jane Addams with settlement houses,
you know
women
”—she let her voice nearly curl with disgust—“who’d by and large been engaged in this kind of good works before. Social workers. Social workers,
and the church. Fuddy-duddies. All made fun of behind their backs, as well as to their faces. Poor Paul. And if you think of the civil rights movement at the start, even there there were certainly
as many women as men. As many female martyrs. Rosa Parks. And think of those poor little girls.

“Alinsky didn’t much like women, I think. As participants. And I can’t help believing that some of the appeal his approach had was in restoring a sense . . . well, let’s
just say, juicing the whole thing up with some testosterone. You know, you could be good, doing good, but you could be manly too, at last. Tough. You could
swear
. It was the same thing black
power did in
that
movement.

“Actually, as I think about it, it’s probably why all of the movements on the left took this unpleasant turn. Unpleasant to the likes of me, of course. A woman. Silly me.”
Lily’s hand rose to her unwomanly, flat bosom here; she sounded abruptly bitter. “Suddenly women were there just to provide sexual comfort, or to raise warriors for the race, to offer
secretarial services. But the movements themselves, everyone at the center, was much more aggressively male. Bad guys. Tough guys. And that had tremendous appeal, I think, to these poor old church
fellows.”

Linnett asks an inaudible question here.

“Yes!” Lily says. “Silly. Ridiculous. And certainly not Christian. I was furious at Paul.” She had stopped here, and shaken her shaking head. “That this long slow
labor of love—and of course it
was
long, and slow and often tedious. That it should suddenly seem third-rate and false to him. When it was crystal-clear to anyone, or should have been,
I thought, that they were just going for cheap thrills. Posturing. A mess of pottage indeed.” She snorted. “It still makes me mad to think of it. Even the OEO programs that came along
later finally got sucked into that macho . . .
baloney
, and ended up being discredited. These two-bit hoodlums with their federal salaries!” She paused, and her voice was calmer when
she spoke again. “And it did, of course, absolutely nothing for the neighborhood, all that effort and all that money. I can’t even bear to go over there anymore.”

On Wednesday they’d taken the day off, at Linnett’s suggestion. Noreen had helped Lily into the car, and Linnett sat in back with her crutches, and they went to
Gaby’s shop for a treat. Afterward they drove down to the docks. Noreen got out of the car and talked with several men she knew. Linnett and Lily, “the gimps” as Lily called them,
sat and chatted desultorily. Linnett was fairly sure Lily fell asleep for a little while, her eyes shut against the bright glinting sunlight, surrounded by the voices and the noises of the men
working, muted over water.

Today, Thursday, Linnett had arrived at Lily’s with another idea, one that had occurred to her in the night. She suggested Lily just try speaking the story into the tape recorder by
herself. “Maybe it’s me, Lily. Maybe that’s what’s bothering you. You know, it’s solitary, writing. It’s a solitary process. It’s a big adjustment to share
it with someone else. I’d have a lot of trouble doing it, I’m sure of that.”

Lily agreed to try, and Linnett showed her how the recorder worked and left her alone in her room, with the door shut. After a little more than an hour, she heard the bell ring. She was in the
living room. Noreen had the contents of the refrigerator strewn across the kitchen counters. She was washing the refrigerator out. She had the radio on a talk station. Linnett called over to her.
“It’s Lily, Noreen. She’s ringing for you.”