The Distinguished Guest (19 page)

“Yes, that’s it,” Gaby agreed.

“No way!” Thomas said. “Americans
forgive
themselves for everything. That’s why we’re the inventors of the dysfunctional family. True!” he proclaimed.
“ ‘Nothing’s
my
fault. My mother drank too much and my dad was an asshole.’ Oops!” he said to Lily. “ ’Scuse me.” She seemed not to have
noticed.

“It’s both, I think,” Alan said.

“Both what?” Gaby was confused.

“It’s both that we feel uniquely responsible for our fate, for what we are, and that, on account of that, we try to put the blame everywhere else. Anywhere else.”

“So when I do become a cocktail pianist, I can blame you guys.” Thomas was grinning.

“Please do,” Alan said. “I’d like to feel I influenced you somehow.”

“Well, you’d hear it from this group if you really settled for that, I bet.” Linnett tried to smile at Gaby and Alan, and met their serious frowning gazes. “I mean,
really, you have a kind of
investment
, I would guess, emotional and otherwise, in Thomas’s career. Don’t you?”

There was a few seconds’ silence. Then Gaby said, “Of course, we hope both our children”—she pronounced it
shildrun
in a way that moved Alan—“can
achieve what they’ve set their hearts on. Whatever it would be.”

“Oh yes! you’ve another child.” Linnett suddenly remembered the photographs she’d lifted and looked at in the bedroom, and she blushed, though in the dim yellow light no
one could see this.

“Yeah. Ettie,” Thomas offered.

“A girl, how nice. A woman, I mean,” Linnett said, and rolled her eyes at her own correction.

“
Not
,” Thomas said. “Etienne. A boy.” He grinned. “A man.”

Alan cleared his throat. “He’s interested in business. In finance, actually—there’s a difference, as we’ve learned.”

“Yeah, he’s out there in some bank wearing a suit and tie every day. God.”

“We know it’s not what you would choose, my dear,” his mother said. “But every profession has its liabilities, Thomas. Even yours.”

“But see, Mom, the thing is, I don’t see mine.”

“No,” Alan said. “Everyone has blinders at the start, or we wouldn’t be able to start. Later there are the things you regret.”

“What is it you regret, Dad?” Thomas was serious suddenly, the mask dropped.

Alan looked over, startled. He hadn’t thought it through. “Well. I suppose . . . I don’t know. I think, though, at the time I was a student, I thought that architecture could
do
more. We all thought that. That it could change the world.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was self-important, but we thought, at the time, that it would be a great force for social
change. We thought, I guess, of architecture as revolution. We talked about it that way. We were radical young men. And the odd woman.”

Thomas and Alan, frowning seriously at each other across the table, suddenly seemed like mirroring images to Linnett, their family resemblance was so strong—Thomas the negative, though,
the dark one.

“But everything was politicized then,” Alan said, more lightly. “You know, journalism.” He nodded to Linnett. “Education. Since we believed we could change the
world, that we
would
change the world—that even
we
would all be changed eventually—well, we thought of every profession, every . . . activity nearly, as radical. Or
potentially radical. It was the same in music, in the arts.”

“Not, I think, cooking,” Gaby said.

“Oh, I don’t know. What about that whole discovery of ethnic food, peasant food from every corner of the world. Remember, suddenly everyone had a wok?”

“Were woks then?” Gaby asked. “Were they before or after everyone slept around?” She looked deliberately puzzled.

“Gaby! C’mon!” Alan laughed for a second, like the sound of a quick clearing of his throat. “Children are present.”

Gaby turned to her son. “We were observers, of course, Thomas dear,” she said. “Amazed observers.” She smiled at Alan.

“So, Dad, you don’t feel that way anymore?” Thomas hadn’t made the shift to the lighter mood. He had leaned forward now in his earnestness, elbows on the table.

“What way?”

“That, you know, that your work is important in that way.”

Alan shook his head. “No. I think not. As I’ve practiced architecture—as most people practice it, I think—it’s been often of interest, aesthetically, or
intellectually. Or both. But more a personal consolation than anything else.” He looked around the table. The faces—all except Lily’s, which seemed utterly remote—had opened
in sympathy to him.

“That’s a great deal to get from work, my dear,” Gaby said gently. “Work that also interests you.”

“Yes.” Alan shifted back in his chair and smiled. “But it is a bit like playing cocktail piano for the rest of your life.”

Thomas was serious a moment, his head nodding. Then he jumped up, and in two leggy strides was at the piano. He sat down and turned on the lamp which arced over the keyboard and started to play
a tune Linnett recognized after a moment as “Tea for Two.”

Gaby leaned forward and smiled in the candlelight. Alan began to tap the table in rhythm with his spoon. The music bounced along regularly, Thomas’s left hand striding over the bass keys
in octaves, the right teasingly dancing around the melody.

Suddenly Linnett felt Lily’s hand trembling on her arm. She leaned across Thomas’s empty seat to the old woman, but couldn’t hear the whisper over the music. She raised her
hand, and Gaby, reading the signal, called out, “Thomas, wait a moment. Gran has something to say.”

The music stopped. “What?” His face was shadowy in the light from the piano lamp when he turned.

“Gran has something to say,” Gaby repeated.

They all watched Linnett and Lily. Linnett nodded as Lily whispered breathlessly. Then the old woman sat back. Linnett looked at her, at the smoothed false guilelessness of her face. She turned
to the table.

The room was silent, waiting. Linnett made her voice brisk and, she hoped, inconsequential. “Lily says there’s no surer or shorter route to heartbreak than having high expectations
for your children.”

There was a moment of silence. All of them except Lily would have thought it lasted longer than it actually did. Time enough for Alan to feel a quick shock of anger, and the impulse to respond
by hurting his mother. Time for Gaby to check him with a cautioning frown. Time for Linnett to feel oddly ashamed of herself, and furious at Lily for making her repeat such a hurtful remark, surely
a deliberately hurtful remark.

And Thomas. Whatever it was he felt, he did the only useful thing, a beautiful thing. He began to play again. Not “Tea for Two,” but the third movement from the Schumann Fantasy
he’d mastered for his performing tryout at the conservatory. It began with somber broken chords in the bass, and then a light singing voice in the right hand.

They were all silent. Thomas’s face had changed at the piano, the careless, affably goofy expression he wore to meet the world had vanished, and a look of fiercest concentration took its
place. One foot danced on and off the pedal, the other moved freely in the air several inches off the floor, in connection with the music somehow.

He looked, Gaby thought, like a man. To Linnett, he looked compellingly attractive.

Alan wasn’t looking at his son. He had bent his head, resting his forehead in his hand, listening.

The music moved forward, the voices in it somehow gradually merging into a triumphant, yet grave, song, which burst forth once and then retreated; and then came forward again, insisting on the
possibility of a joy made deeper by sorrow, offering, somehow, a vision, musically, of a boundlessly wide and painful beauty.

Thomas’s playing had always been marked by a singing quality, a grace and clarity, and Alan could hear now what it gave to this music. He felt, listening to Thomas play, that his son was
answering Lily, was telling her that what she had said and done was not so much wrong as irrelevant.

Alan was moved, grateful beyond measure to his son. Thomas’s
gift
: he understood the word newly. It had been given to Thomas to give to others, and he was doing that now, at this
unexpected and necessary moment, in a way perhaps no one at the table could have set in words, but which each of them, in some way or another, understood.

Linnett drove slowly home, preoccupied. As a result, she missed her driveway and was in the village before she realized it. She went all the way down to the docks and made her
turn in the lot there. Even now there were a couple of pickup trucks parked against the concrete abutment, the men in them drinking beer and shouting their conversation from vehicle to vehicle
under the single, glaring light high overhead. Linnett drove even more slowly back up the dark road. There was one couple walking on the sidewalk in the village, startled and squinting in her
headlights. Otherwise the occasional lighted house was the only sign of life.

She spotted her driveway this time—
Thayer
on the mailbox—and turned into the woods. In a hundred yards or so, the drive opened out to the meadow and the vast shingled house,
every window hot with light tonight it seemed, and the driveway still studded with cars. A party. Linnett kept on the gravel, past the house, and headed down the hill to where her cottage was.

In the dark she used her crutches as probes, sweeping them over the ground ahead of her, surveying it for rocks or knolls before she put her weight down. Her head was tilted up to the sky, the
way a blind person’s sometimes is. She could hear the noise from the Thayers’, the music, the raucous voices raised above it carrying through the still night air. When she reached the
safety of the little deck at her cottage front, she heaved a sigh of relief and relaxed for a moment, slumped on her crutches.

In the light of the small wall lamp she flicked on, the cottage interior looked tiny and messy. It consisted of one room, with a double bed in the corner, a large table taking up most of the
space. There was a fireplace with two chairs facing it (one covered with Linnett’s clothing), and a kitchenette on the opposite wall—no stove, but built-in burners, a sink, and a
half-refrigerator. Linnett thumped over to the one available chair, swung her backpack down to the floor, and sat.

Her mind whirled for a moment with the evening’s events. She shut her eyes and saw again the table in candlelight, felt the warmth of the conversation; the shock, then, of Lily’s
remark.

A burst of laughter from the Thayers’ floated down, and she looked around herself again at the cheerless little room, the nicked furniture, cast off from the big house, no doubt.

Linnett didn’t like the Thayers. Their vegetable garden was near her cottage, and occasionally they came down with friends carrying drinks to survey it, to pick blueberries or the earliest
tomatoes. Usually this occurred at the cocktail hour, when Linnett was just back from being with Lily, when she was trying to make rapid notes on things she’d noticed—gestures, the
minimal shift in Lily’s facial expression—things she couldn’t get on tape. It was for this reason that the Thayers irritated her.

And others too. She had heard them explaining once to a guest with a kind of pride of possession that she was a writer. “We’ve got a writer living there now.” Just before she
heard this, she had been thinking that she might make the effort to heave herself out to the tiny front deck and stare at them to let them know they were bothering her; but it occurred after they
spoke that if she did this, she would become part of the tour—the appearance of the frazzled writer: the greetings, then the comments and speculation afterward.

A writer. She smiled, grimly. Well, she’d certainly blown her cover tonight.

But maybe Lily had seen through her all along, had known that Linnett must have failed at whatever it was she truly wanted to do to be trailing around in borrowed cars, in rented housing, on
spec, on spec, on spec, sucking up to people like her.

She reminded herself that she liked Lily, that she’d been enchanted with her in a sense.

And now? Well, now she saw that Lily could be a bit of a bitch. More than a bit.

But she’d known that all along, hadn’t she? And been charmed by that too? The elderly woman who was
not
sweet and kind, who did not think it was a perfectly lovely day.

Tonight, though, she had seen how damaging that quality could be. She’d felt for the first time a genuine dislike for Lily. And to be unkind to Alan, who seemed so defenseless.

Linnett laughed aloud, recognizing her first symptom of being attracted to someone. A very married someone, she told herself. She pushed herself painfully up. She’d better get ready for
bed before she dropped off right here.

Once she’d slid into the rumple of sheets, her hair yanked fiercely back into a ponytail, she reached out for Lily’s book, her memoir, which was lying on the floor by the bed. A
woman’s voice was audible in a long monologue from the Thayers’, angry and
on a roll
—Linnett recognized the spiteful, percussive quality. Remembering again Lily’s
innocent, bright commentary on children, her blank face after its delivery and the sudden shift in mood at the table, she flipped through to the section of the book which dealt with the end of
Lily’s marriage.

We fought daily.
Yes, this was what she’d been remembering. This high-minded ending, as Thomas had characterized it. She adjusted the pillows behind her, and propped the book on her
knees.