The Distinguished Guest (18 page)

After a moment, looking at her, he asked, “When you were married, what kind of life did you have?”

“On balance”—she nodded judiciously—“I’d have to say shitty.”

He laughed and she smiled back at him. Then she said, “But only because it took so long, so very long, to fall apart. We had a lovely beginning. Lots of fun.” She shook her head,
remembering Frank then. Herself.

“Was he a writer too?”

“Yeah. And a teacher.
My
teacher, as a matter of fact. Of journalism. Therein lies the et cetera, et cetera. Once I began to be as successful as he was, the shit hit the fan, as we
used to so charmingly say.” She took a deep swig of the beer. “It reminded me, actually—my marriage—of your grandmother’s marriage. Or rather, Lily’s book
reminded me of my marriage. I think that’s partly why I wanted to write about her. Because of that pattern, you know, of catching up with the person who’s taught you something? Maybe
even passing them, or surpassing them—this is as I
saw
it of course. And of course how Lily saw hers too. Anyway, how that all plays out. I really identified with their conflicts,
Paul’s and Lily’s. With her disillusionment. You know, I saw why that made it end.”

“But it was so fucking high-minded in the meantime, that’s what interests me about it. God, even the way it ended was high-minded.” His legs and feet, as he spoke, were in
constant, jiggling motion.

“Well, yes and no.”

“Yes! I mean, you’ve read it, right?”

“Yeah, and so I know how Lily saw it anyway. But maybe she was just tired of him.” Linnett was peeling the damp label off her beer bottle with her fingernail. “Let’s say
she started to think he was kind of a . . . jerk, really. And used that high-minded stuff as a way of . . . being high-minded about that. Instead of just saying, ‘Gee, you know, I actually
find you kind of dorky now.’ I’ve heard of worse strategies.”

“God, you’re cynical.”

She shrugged and smiled at him. “I need to be cynical in my job. Or at least very, very careful whenever anybody uses the word—hmm: the words?—high-minded around me.”

“I would hate that. Being that way.”

Thomas spoke fiercely, and in the conviction, Linnett could hear it, that he would escape this.
Oh my dear
, she thought, but she said to him, “Sometimes I do.” And gripping
the edge of the label, tore a jagged strip straight down through its middle.

In the shop, Gaby and Alan worked with a practiced ease, silently. They hadn’t really spoken on the way over, either. Alan was annoyed with her, Gaby knew, for having
invited Linnett to dinner. Well then, he shouldn’t have flirted with her. Gaby could tell the moment she entered the room that that’s what had been going on. It was an unconscious gift
of Alan’s, flirtation—Gaby saw Ettie as having inherited it from him—and she never even thought about it when he used it with their friends, or with clients. But every now and
then it startled her, as it had this afternoon, and before she’d really even taken it in, she’d asserted her claim on Alan by transforming Linnett into a guest of both of theirs.

Though she might have asked her to stay anyway, even without the sparks in the air. It was always Gaby’s impulse to enlarge the table, and now, with Lily here, she welcomed almost any
addition, to keep Alan from getting angry or upset with his mother over the meal.

She looked at him now. He was wiping the shop counters, bending, putting all of himself into it. Ah Alan. He was so dear to her, and she’d been feeling so far apart from him. She moved to
him, encircled his waist from behind, and when he stopped, rested her head on his back. Her head came just between his shoulder blades, and she could feel the broad, flat muscles of his back under
her cheek.

“Don’t be angry,” she said, after a moment.

He turned around in her arms and cupped her cheeks in his hands, tilting her head back. “I thought we’d be alone after we got old Lil to bed.”

“Ah.” She nodded. “Well, we wouldn’t have anyway in all likelihood. Thomas phoned this afternoon, and he’s probably coming down for the night.”

“You mean, if nothing better turns up.”

She smiled. “That wasn’t precisely what he said. He needs to borrow a car to get down here, and he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to.”

“Nonetheless.”

She swayed against him. “You were having a nice time flirting with Miss Whatyoumacallit.” Gaby pronounced this very exactly, as no American would, and Alan was charmed, suddenly, and
intensely aware of the pressure of her compact body against him.

He smiled at her. “I was thinking of you. Every moment.”

“Hmm. I shall try to believe you. Still, she seems a nice woman.”

“Nice enough, I guess.”

They rocked slightly in each other’s arms for a moment.

“What is it Lily is telling her, do you suppose?” Gaby asked dreamily. “I mean, it’s all there in the books, wouldn’t you say?”

He lifted his shoulders. “Dark secrets.”

“But there are precisely no secrets anymore.”

Alan sighed. “One would think. But there’s always more to come, with Lily.”

“Hmm.” Gaby leaned her head back and looked at him. “What would you like for dinner? Out of all you survey.” It was her habit to bring home parts of dinner from the shop.
Soups and vegetable dishes in winter. Salad, cold pastas in summer. Cheeses. Breads, desserts.

He bent down and bit her earlobe. “A little of this,” he said. “A little of that.”

She moved her body against him and felt, slowly, the stirring of his erection. Her hand reached down and rested on it. “Hmph. Perhaps you could make yourself a little
more
useful,
dear.”

Alan smiled. This was a joke between him and Gaby, a joke on Lily. She’d said it to Gaby the first time they’d met. They’d been trying to converse—Gaby’s English
was still fairly rudimentary at this stage—and Lily, visibly impatient, had finally left the room to prepare dinner. Gaby, not knowing what else to do, trailed her to the kitchen. After a
moment of watching Gaby stand there awkwardly, Lily had taken pity on her. She’d thrust some onions and a knife over the table toward her. “Here, perhaps you could make yourself useful,
dear,” she said.

The knife was unspeakably dull, had probably never been sharpened, and was flimsy to boot, not intended for this task. The onions were being cut up for kidney stew, one of Lily’s morally
edifying meals. On the table in front of Gaby, there was an opened can labeled
gravy
, with a horrible, brownish pudding in it. Gaby realized abruptly that this was a two-way street, that if
she was failing Lily on the basis of some standards she couldn’t have named or guessed at, Lily was likewise a failure in a world she understood and Lily knew nothing of. Lily had used paper
napkins that evening too, and as she unfolded hers and laid it across her lap, Gaby had the sense that she would not have to be afraid of her mother-in-law again.

Now she and Alan separated and went back to their chores. Gaby disappeared into the kitchen, carrying a tray of cheeses. Alan finished wiping off the counters, and then began to bag the day-old
bread. He was lost in thought: the Admundsen house. Peter. Gaby’s hand, warm on him. Linnett Baird.

The door rattled. He looked up. It was one of the kids who seemed to hang around the center of town all day, Alan recognized him. He wore the uniform they’d taken to—the baseball cap
turned backward, the voluminous shorts that hung below the knees. Alan pointed to the sign in the door. “Closed,” he shouted.

“C’mon man,” he heard the kid whine.

Alan shook his head and went back to work.

There was the sharp slam of the kid’s fist on the door, the rattling vibration of the glass. “Asshole!” (he kid shouted.

Alan felt the adrenaline of rage so powerfully he didn’t even want to look at the kid again. He quickly turned and went into the kitchen, his breathing slightly accelerated.

Gaby was moving around back here, from the counters to the big walk-in refrigerator. Watching her, he tried to calm himself, but abruptly he saw the kid’s face again, the sullen, stupid
look under the half-moon of the baseball cap’s opening. He wanted to hit him, to cause damage.

He remembered Linnett Baird then, the cast on her leg, her fingers gripping the white flesh above it, leaving their red print on it as it fell back. He had been coming on to her a little, but he
meant nothing by it. It was Gaby he wanted. They hadn’t made love for several weeks, and he knew it had to do with Lily. Or not so much Lily maybe, as his response to Lily. Today, though, she
seemed to be signaling an interest.

His eyes followed her now. She’d taken her shoes off—she liked to go barefoot in the summer—and her small, wide feet made a light noise as she padded back and forth. She was
talking to him, but it was more a conversation with herself: she was speaking about food, what would work with what. He tried to relax into her voice, its familiar off-rhythms. Slowly he felt it
work on him. He thought of her body. There was nothing about it he didn’t know, intimately—its quiet colors, its rich smell. He felt as encircled, as surely embraced, he realized, by
the familiarity of Gaby’s body, as he did by their house, or their bed, or the sound of the river in their room at night. It was where he lived, he thought. Where he’d made himself at
home. In her.

She squatted to put something onto the lowest shelf of the refrigerator, and he watched the flexion of her strong thighs, imagining his fingers pushing at the flesh, imprinting it.

“Just bread and cheese afterward, I think, no dessert,” she was saying now, and he was breathless suddenly with the strength of his desire.

When Linnett began to talk about herself, what she’d wanted for herself in life, everyone else fell silent. They watched her attentively. She was their outsider, after all,
their news from another world. Besides, they had all talked too much about themselves—Linnett had somehow made this happen—and there was some sense of a balance being restored with her
revelations.

“It was an absolute wall,” she said. She pressed her pale lips together. “I could not surmount it. I mean
bang
!” She clapped her hand on the table, and the
silverware and dishes jumped. “That was it. It was devastating to me. See, here all along the whole reason I was writing at all was ‘cause I was going to write this novel, and finally,
to find out, with the time and money, that I just
didn’t
have it, well . . .” She shook her head, and looked around the table at them. “It was devastating.”

The table was covered with crumbs—Gaby had brought out the promised crusty French bread and several soft cheeses after the meal—and all their empty coffee cups sat tilted at oddly
different angles on their saucers. The short, fat candles on the table were flickering low in their little glass dishes. Here and there on the brightly printed tablecloth were wine stains or
dollops of food from their earlier courses. Lily’s voice was long gone and she’d hardly eaten a thing. Every now and then through the meal she whispered something to Thomas, seated next
to her, and he announced to the table what she was saying, but she’d been silent for a long while. Now she was almost nodding off in her fatigue, but she wouldn’t be put to bed.
She’d refused twice.

Linnett focused on Thomas. “It’d be like if you ended up playing cocktail piano for the rest of your life. Or”—she turned to Alan—“if you never did anything
else but kitchen renovations. You know, like you’d never have an important building.”

“I wouldn’t mind playing cocktail piano for the rest of my life.” Thomas was grinning at Linnett.

In the dimmed light, he looked older, she thought. You could see how handsome he’d be in a few years. “Oh you would too,” she said.

“No, I like cocktail piano. There’s some great music.”

“But for the rest of your life?”

“Sure.”

“What absolute horseshit.”

He shrugged, a carefree, stupid expression on his face.

She shook her head, and her tent of hair swayed as a mass. “You know you’re fully as unpleasantly ambitious as I am. As I
was
,” she corrected to the table at large.

Thomas shook his head. “Not so,” he said. “I’m innocent of all charges.”

Linnett had a moment, looking at him, of seeing him as innocent. As pure. She looked quickly at Alan, then Gaby, what she saw as their open, good faces. How had she come to inhabit a world so
different from theirs?

“I think in France we don’t suffer so much from this idea,” Gaby said conversationally. “From this kind of ambition. We are much more realists. It makes for an easier
life.”

“It’s not realism, Mom. C’mon,” Thomas said.

She stared at him, focusing. “What is it then? What would you call it?”

“It’s . . . like,
fatalism
. It’s that everything is . . . ordered. You don’t have the choice.”

“That is changing all the time.”

“It’s changing maybe in Paris or a few other big cities. But most places it’s not. Most places, I bet, you do what your father did. If your father was the butcher, then you
become the butcher.”

“If that were true, why has the number of farms dropped so since the war?”

Thomas squinted in thought. There was a moment of silence.

“What’s your argument, Gaby?” Alan asked then. “That the French
are
ridden by ambition? I thought you were on the other side.”

Gaby looked puzzled. She’d drunk too much, in her pleasure at not being alone for another meal with Alan and Lily. Abruptly she laughed. “Well, I seem to have painted myself a little
into a corner.” She shook her head. “Perhaps I was just arguing. Enjoying the argument.”

“But I know what you mean,” Linnett said. “It would be nice not to feel responsible for
inventing
yourself all the time.”

Gaby was grateful. She smiled warmly at Linnett. “Yes! That is what I mean. Americans take this responsibility so seriously. If they are not absolutely . . . great, or something, they feel
to blame.”

“It’s all or nothing,” Linnett said.