The Distinguished Guest (31 page)

“Lily doesn’t.”

“The hell with her then.”

“Alan!”

“I mean it.”

“Hush,” she said. She put her arm around him. “Oh, you’re shivering.”

“My cold upbringing. Just thinking of it.”

“Ah, Alan,” she said.

Her body was hot, and she welcomed him into it, opening the blanket-tent around her. He slid forward, wrapped his legs around her hips, pushed his cold hands under her arms. “God, what
would I be without you, Gaby?”

“Shhh,” she said.

“My little heat pump. My hearth.”

“Heart?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

After a few moments, Gaby tipped back on her buttocks, lifted her solid legs up, swinging them above Alan’s, and pulled herself onto his lap. He saw her thick brown fur, the
injured-looking purple of her genital flesh.

He clung to her, rested his head between her small round breasts. He felt his penis stiffen against her. “You looked like one of those Rodin nudes doing that,” he said. “So
proud of her cleft.”

“Good,” she said. “I am.” She adjusted herself onto him, holding her blanket around his head.

Inside the tent she made, he watched their bodies fit together, he arched forward slightly and she helped him come into her. “Can we do this?” he whispered.

“Not without some pain perhaps,” she said.

“Ah, the best way,” he said. “Mine with pain, please.” It was another joke. They’d seen a sign once in Boston:
Body Piercing: With or Without Pain.

They rocked together slowly for a long time, Gaby sometimes pulling herself forward and back against him, sometimes letting Alan shift them. His big hands moved freely over her body, holding
her, turning her. Near the end he slid them under her solid buttocks, and his fingers found their way into her. She moaned and arched her back to open herself wider to him. He could feel his own
fingers through the wall inside her, he moved them in and out against her, against himself, and she whimpered over and over and he pushed into her.

When they were done, they collapsed against each other, letting their blankets fall. Their flesh was sticky with sweat. Alan released Gaby, stroked her slick back, kissed her. After a few
minutes, she slid backward, off his lap, to the floor again. She hugged her knees and sighed, gustily. Their breathing slowly settled.

“Look,” Alan said. “The sun.”

She turned and looked out the wall of windows. The clouds were shredded open, moving fast across the blueing sky, and the sun shone above them. The wet field and the water of the river sparkled
in its light.

“Mmm!” Gaby said. “How lovely!”

They sat side by side for a while, watching the scudding clouds.

“This will be a wonderful house, Alan,” she said quietly.

“Do you really like it?” he asked.

“This will be a wonderful house,” she said, more slowly this time.

After a moment, he said, “I wonder how ours survived.”

“This gives me hope,” Gaby said, gesturing around her.

Alan didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that there wasn’t necessarily any connection.

“I suppose we should pull on our wet clothes,” he said after a while.

“Yes.”

He got up and went to where they’d both been standing when they stripped down. He bent over his own pile. “Wet, and cold,” he said.

“I should have brought extras,” she said. She was packing the food back into the basket she’d brought it in. Alan tossed her clothes to her and they hit the floor with an
ominously loud
whack
. He was pulling his own pants on, whooping with cold, jumping up and down.

By the time they’d shaken and folded the blankets and packed the leftover lunch and thermoses back in the car, they’d warmed up a little, though the cool breeze gave Alan goose bumps
every time it struck him. Gaby drove him to the top of the Admundsens’ driveway where he’d left his car, and they started home, Gaby following him.

Before they’d gone half a mile, though, they came to a tree lying across the road, tangled in wires. A utility truck was parked beyond it, and several men in hard hats were moving around.
Alan could hear a chain saw.

He leaned out his window. The man walking toward him was shaking his head,
no
, and gesturing Alan back with his hand.

“I’ve got to get to Bowman,” Alan called. “Can I get around by Cobbtown?”

“As far as I know there’s no wires down there, but the bridge over the pond washed out.”

“So you’re saying I can’t
get
to Bowman.”

“Not till we’re done, I’d say.”

“How long do you guess you’ll be?”

The man turned and looked behind him. “Hard to say. At least an hour. Could be longer.”

Alan and the man grinned at each other. “Okay,” Alan said. He got out and went to Gaby’s car, pulled up behind his. “We’re stuck, it looks like. Till they get this
cleaned up.”

After a moment, taking this in, Gaby said, “What do you propose we do?”

“Finish our picnic, I’d say.”

She shrugged and made a moue.

And so it was that they turned around and drove back to the Admundsens’. More formally, more ceremonially, this time they made a bed for themselves out of the blankets. Alan had a sense
almost of shyness as they undressed on either side of this pallet, as though they were teenagers, doing something exciting and illicit. Much more tenderly, they made love again, and slept for a
while afterward on the hard floor. When they woke the sun was gone, and the sky was a dramatic deep pink. They lay side by side, slowly eating the one remaining cookie, the last of the berries, and
when they dressed, their clothes were almost dry. Alan helped Gaby carry the things back to her car once more. The air felt rinsed and cold. They stood for a moment leaned against the car, not
talking, reluctant to let go of this time. Then Gaby reached up and touched Alan’s cheek. “I have missed you, Alan. Lily . . . she divides my loyalty, I’m afraid.”

He nodded. “Well, today was a reprieve.”

“Yes. And I’m glad. I don’t like to feel that way, but I do. She is not easy, poor old woman.” She sighed and opened the car door, and Alan moved off to his car.

They passed the spot where the men had been working. The tree had been cut just enough to open the road, and the pale round ends winked white in the twilight on either side of it. As he drove,
Alan squinted into the shadows around him. At some places along the road everything looked normal, and then there’d be an open cut in the woods carved by the wind, trees would be uprooted or
felled for the length of its long swipe. When he passed houses he looked even more carefully. He saw some damage, and every yard was littered with branches, but it didn’t seem as bad as
he’d imagined it. Candles or oil lamps made a weak yellow light in some windows, and here and there people were working outside in the near-dark.

Their own driveway was open and clear except for a carpet of leaves and sticks his tires crunched over. When he pulled out into the opening at the bottom of the drive, there was just enough
light to see by, a light unfiltered by leaves, which were utterly gone. The yard was a mess, a deep tangle of branches. He pulled over to make room for Gaby and turned off the engine. Then he saw
the huge limb fallen across the porch and steps. He groaned and got out of the car. Carefully he picked his way across the dark yard. He dragged the limb back off the steps. They had splintered
beneath it, as though someone had taken a huge, dull axe and chopped them down the middle.

He grabbed the iron rail and climbed the stairs, putting his weight along their outer edge. The decking on the porch was intact, and he walked around to the front of the house, looking for
damage. The glass in one of the French doors to the living room was broken, but that seemed the extent of what he could see tonight. Tomorrow he’d get up on a ladder and check the roof. He
came back to the steps and helped Gaby up them. “This looks like the worst of it,” he said.

Inside, the house was dark and still, free of all the unnoticed electrical noises that usually hummed and ticked along with their lives.

“I’ll get candles,” Gaby said.

“We’ve got a flashlight somewhere too,” Alan said.

While Gaby set the lighted candles around on the counter, on the table and the collection of yard furniture, Alan felt his way through various drawers in the kitchen, searching for the
flashlight.

“What do you think, Alan?” Gaby was saying. He looked over at her. “I’m going to call Noreen, but I think we should wait until tomorrow to get Lily, if Noreen can keep
her. We’ll never get her across the yard or up the stairs, particularly in the dark.”

“Absolutely,” Alan said.

“If the phone is even working,” Gaby said.

While Gaby made the call, Alan swept up the glass in the corner of the living room. He could hear her voice rise sharply in alarm, and he stood and waited for her to finish.

She put the phone down. “Lily isn’t there,” he said.

“But you took her there,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I asked Linnett to. Lily was having a very good day, and she thought Linnett could manage. But according to Noreen they never made it.”

“Well, then, where the fuck are they?” he asked.

“Noreen thinks maybe Linnett took Lily to her house, that maybe the roads were already impassable then.”

“Christ. Okay. So Linnett. Do you have her number?”

“No.” Gaby rubbed her forehead. “And it won’t be listed either, since it’s a rental.”

“Maybe Lily has it in her room somewhere.” He picked up the flashlight.

“Or, no. Wait a minute. Who was she renting from?”

“The Thayers,” he said.

“I’ll call them. They’ll know.”

“All right. That’s the easiest.”

And while Gaby went back to the phone, Alan took the flashlight down to the storage closet at the end of the hall to find some cardboard and cut it for the broken pane of glass. He had just
gotten out the Exacto knife when Gaby called sharply to him.

“Lily isn’t there either,” she said as he stepped out of the closet. She stood by the phone in the candlelight at the other end of the hall. She looked frightened.

“What do you mean?”

She lifted her hands. “She isn’t there. Linnett didn’t take her. She says Lily told her Noreen was supposed to pick her up.”

“But that wasn’t ever the deal, was it? Was it?”

“No. No. And Noreen. Well, she knew nothing of such a . . . ”

“Jesus, this is crazy. Where is she?” They stood frowning at each other in the strange yellow light. “She can’t just have disappeared.”

Then Gaby’s face shifted. “Alan! She’s here!” she cried. “She must have misunderstood somehow . . . ”

But Alan had already turned back into the utility closet for the flashlight, and now he was striding toward her and then past her, across the room, the skittering oval of the flashlight dancing
on the floor in front of him. Gaby was still explaining it to him, to herself, as he stepped to the door and pushed it open to find Lily.

Every builder and workman in town is booked for at least a month with hurricane repairs, so Alan decides to fix the front steps himself. Since Ettie and Thomas are both home
for the ten days or so until school starts, Alan and Gaby decide that it may be better to wait until they are gone to begin—this is one of those projects that Ettie could do well but Thomas
would have trouble participating in, for fear of hurting his hands. Three or four times in the days he is home, Ettie asks about the steps. “I mean, it’d take us, what? a day? a couple
of days?” But Alan leaves the small stepladder tilted into place against the deck next to the ruined stairs, and that is how they all go in and out. It isn’t until after the boys have
left, and Gaby, who closes the shop for two weeks right after Labor Day each year, has flown to France on what has become an annual visit, that Alan begins the work.

Carefully he unbolts the painted iron rails and lays them on the deck. Then he begins to take apart the stairs. All the risers and treads are gone, he knew that the moment he saw
them—crushed in the center by the branch’s fall. But he discovers when he gets down underneath that only one stringer will need to be replaced. He draws up a careful list for the
lumberyard.

Even so he spends a long time there in its shadowy, cavernous interior, looking over grades of wood, buying the materials. He looks too at specialty woods, at hinges and locks, at tools he has
never used, and now, he supposes, never will. Alan worked for a contractor during the summers in architecture school, and occasionally after that until he had a stable income, and he loves
everything about the working end of the business. He has been looking forward to this project. Perhaps some of the reason he didn’t want to begin while Ettie was home has to do too with this:
he has wanted to be alone, he realizes now, with wood, with tools. He wants to work slowly and carefully and in silence. He wants to lose himself in this, not have it be part of any human
connection. He wants the consoling reasonableness of measurement, the logic of fit and exactitude, the pleasure of the smell and smoothness of wood, its shapeliness under saw and plane, under his
hands.

On Tuesday he brings his tools out from the storage room—his circular saw, plane, clamps, level, hammer, drill. In the odd, December-like sunlight under the stripped trees of the summer
yard he works, fastidiously measuring and remeasuring angles, cutting the jagged jawline of the stringer, slicing and stroking the decking, the risers, smoothing every edge before setting wood in
place.

The air is warm and windy, the curls of wood dance away across the yard. The glimpses of the water in the river below sparkle. Alan takes his shirt off after a while and the bare sunlight heats
his flesh. The naked wood and its shavings smell of beginning, of hope. The magic of building things, he thinks.

His mind wanders freely, unattached, unfocused, over his life. Gaby, his children, Lily, death—even his own death: how it will come to him, whether he will ever be tempted to make
Lily’s choice.

His hands perform their repetitive tasks, and he thinks of his work, of his comfort in it. Of Gaby, with her family in France. Clary, Lily’s ashes. And then Lily’s face, as it was
that night. He sees the flashlight’s trembling dance once more on its slack, gray surface—the eyes slitted open and milky, the jaw slung agape. He stops working, he stands straight for
a moment, looking around the empty yard.