The Distinguished Guest (33 page)

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He shifts forward in the chair, abruptly, rests his elbows on his knees and grips his hands together for a moment. “Look,” he says,
“I think this is a mistake, my seeing you.”

“Well, what did you think I was coming for, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Facts, you said. I guess I thought date of birth, date of marriage, places, names. That kind of thing.”

“Well, it is that kind of thing, really. I mean, date of death, cause of death, circumstances. That’s the same kind of thing.”

He sits back and looks at her. He makes his voice businesslike. “Okay, date of death, August 26th. Natural causes, died in bed.”

“She was in
bed
. What was she doing in bed?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Resting? She lay down and she died. Can’t you leave it at that?” He sounds genuinely angry, Linnett thinks.

“Well, I suppose I could. It’s just that she lied to me, you know?”

“What do you mean? She lied to everyone, a little.”

“No, I mean, that day. She told me Noreen was coming for her, and that was simply not the case. I’ve spoken to Noreen.”

“Oh, fuck it, Linnett. There was a hurricane. All of that, all of those . . . arrangements, got confused that day.
I
was confused. I thought Gaby had taken her to Noreen’s.
It’s not surprising Lily got confused.”

“This wasn’t confusion. It was a lie. She told me Noreen spoke to her. Called her, spoke to her. Told her things. And it just never happened. Period. That’s different,
that’s
way
different, from not being sure of what Gaby told her. And it implicates me.” After all, she can be angry too. She can take the high moral ground here as well as he
can. “Do you think I’d have left her by herself if I wasn’t sure Noreen was coming? It made a difference to me that Noreen had supposedly called her. And as it turned out, she
hadn’t.”

“Lily was ill. She was sometimes confused, even about what happened. As opposed to what didn’t. She . . . You didn’t see her over the weekend. The weekend before she died. She
was very confused. She was having . . . She was
in
, a bad time. A bad time.” And suddenly the memory of Lily entering the room on her canes, spiderlike, grotesque, her features drawn
on with palsied strokes, comes clearly back to Alan. He turns away from Linnett.

Linnett can see that he is affected, somehow. She gentles her voice. “You know, Alan, I knew her a little too. And I think I could tell you something about the nature of Lily’s bad
times. And I can also tell you that the day of the hurricane was not one of those times. It was, if anything, a good time.”

After a moment, he says quietly, “Even if you’re right, even if she lied, what difference does it make?”

“If I’m right, she was not confused. That’s what difference it makes.”

“And so? So what?”

“Did she kill herself?” Linnett asks.

“What are you talking about?”

“Because that’s my theory.
My
theory. That Lily arranged to be alone, by lying to me, and somehow killed herself when she was alone.”

“If you write, or publish, anything like that, I will sue you.” He has picked up his glass again, and now he sets it down, too hard.

“Hey, come
on
, Alan. I’m just
talking
to you. To
you
. This is
me
.”

“You’re talking about my mother. I wish you would remember that. Not just some fascinating . . . subject.”

“I do. I do remember that. And this piece will be nothing, I can promise you, if not sympathetic to Lily.” She thinks of a new tack. “Did you know she couldn’t write
anymore?”

He looks over sharply at her. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know how she’d kind of taken me on as a secretary, in exchange for the interviews?”

He nods.

“And I was supposed to help her write a story. That was the deal. She had this story all mapped out, in her head or whatnot. And maybe others too, for all I know. Anyway, we tried about
six different ways and we couldn’t do it.
She
couldn’t do it. She couldn’t . . . I don’t know. It felt like she couldn’t hold on to a train of thought. That
wasn’t, you know, concrete. Real. She couldn’t . . . access her imagination, somehow. It felt neurological. And she actually said she thought it was, that it felt that way to her, as
though the disease, the Parkinson’s, had destroyed whatever the connections were that let that happen.”

After a moment, he says, “I see.”

“This all happened that week before the hurricane. We tried that whole week, one way or another. I tried taking dic
ta
tion, I tried leaving her alone to talk it into the
tape
recorder. Nothing.”

Alan’s gaze has turned out the window.

“So you see, that’s why it seemed to me that she might feel . . . at the end of something. She might have thought her life, or a substantial part of her life, was over.”

“Lily didn’t kill herself, Linnett.” He’s looking back at her. He seems, suddenly, old, fatigued.

“Okay.” She waits. “I just wanted to explore my theory.”

He nods stiffly. Linnett believes he is still angry at her. He isn’t. He isn’t really even thinking of Linnett, just of what she’s said about Lily, the increase of emptiness
it’s brought to him. That, and then a sweeping, bitter pity, the purest emotion he’s felt for his dead mother.

“Did she leave, like papers and letters?”

He looks at her. “Some.”

“And what will happen with those?”

“The letters I destroyed.” He hears her intake of breath, but her face doesn’t change. “She’d been going through them, you knew that. There were only a last few she
hadn’t destroyed herself. Recent ones. Not very interesting.”

“And the papers? What were they?” A quick thought. “You didn’t chuck them too!”

“No. She has a literary executor. Trix, I guess you say. Her agent. I sent them on to her. So some of them may find their way into print, I suppose. I don’t know, though. It seemed
like old stuff to me. Very early things. Story starts. Things like that. Juvenalia, really. As if she’d ever been young.”

He tries smiling at her, but she’s all business now. “I’ll probably call her then. The agent.”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

“And the rest of her estate is, like . . . ?”

“Furniture, books, jewelry. A trust. All to be divided three ways.”

“
Three
ways.”

“Yes, Rebecca has her share. In case she ever comes back. So she won’t feel deprived.”

She shakes her head. “Jesus. After, what? Thirty-five years?”

“Well, you know the line. ‘There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than ninety-nine righteous people who don’t need to.’ ” He is surprised, and
then not surprised, that he can call this up, something he would have said he didn’t remember, something lost to him forever.

After Linnett leaves, Alan tries to work again, but can’t. The bright buildings, their forms, their interiors rising up against the blank wall of his study, mean nothing to
him. He turns the projector off, he roams the house.

He goes into the guest room, Lily’s room, and stands staring out the window. He thinks of what Linnett said, that Lily couldn’t write. He wonders why he didn’t want to tell
Linnett that Lily took her own life. Killed herself. Why does it matter whether Linnett knows?

It does. Not from shame. But it does.

In part, Alan supposes, because he wants to impose some limit for himself on how much of Lily’s life can be made public. She might not have minded, but he is in charge of this part of the
story—her silence about it has given him that right, he feels—and he has decided, he realizes, that it will remain private, something only his family will know. He smiles, understanding
that there may be an angry aspect to this kindness too, that this may be the very opposite of what Lily would have wanted.

Also (he’s trying to be honest with himself, thinking of Linnett now, of how newly and differently attracted he was to her without the cast, without the crutches), perhaps it was useful to
him, in an immediate and tawdry sense, to have the wedge of indignation to drive between himself and her. If so, he isn’t sorry.

He doesn’t know. He feels he doesn’t know anything.

When the doctor finally arrived that night—their family doctor, an old friend—they went together into the guest room. Gaby had taken away the dishes Lily had used by
then, had closed Lily’s eyes, and then her jaw too, by tying a kerchief around Lily’s head. She’d set several candles around in the room so that the doctor—whose name was
Greg Halliday—could see. It looked like a nineteenth-century deathbed, and Lily looked completely at peace, her features thrown into deep shadows by the flickering light, her hands resting on
the sheet at her bosom.

Alan was still in a kind of hysteria of disbelief, unable to stop talking, to stop telling his story, full of the most irrelevant details—the way the raw tree ends on the road had looked
in the twilight, the way the hurricane had moved, the series of phone calls they’d made trying to find Lily.

Greg was used to this kind of thing, though, and he listened politely to Alan as he moved around. He did a cursory examination, asked a few questions, and called an ambulance. He gave Alan
instructions about contacting the funeral home in the morning. He said he was terribly, terribly sorry. He had a quick bourbon with them, sitting in the crowd of extra chairs in the candlelit
living room, and then he left. He said his house was a real mess.

After the ambulance took Lily’s body away, Gaby and Alan sat up in the candlelight until almost four, talking. Alan felt, as he told Gaby three or four times, that at any moment Lily could
just walk into the living room and begin to speak to him.

In bed, Alan fell into a strangely light sleep, full of waking dreams of all that had happened. And then, sometime after dawn, a deep, bottomless slumber.

Gaby woke him at about ten. She’d been to the shop and found that, as she’d expected, their electricity was off too. She’d made a sign and posted it. Then she came home, and
when she opened the trash can to dump out the grounds from her earlier cup of coffee, she saw the brightly colored plastic casings of the capsules lying over the top of yesterday’s garbage.
She reached down and picked up one of the little halves. Then she went to the sink and picked up the dishes Lily had used—she’d left them there, unwashed, the night before, since there
was no running water. She smelled them, noted the peculiar odor in the bowl. She sat awhile by herself, thinking it through, before she woke Alan.

They talked about it together for several hours. About whether they were honor-bound somehow to call Greg and start Lily’s death again.

No, they decided. Gaby was especially firm. It was done. It was obviously something Lily had planned to do for a long time. There was no point in complicating it now. It was a kind of
achievement, really—
ahsheevmante
, she said, and for a few seconds Alan didn’t know the word—that Lily had managed it as well as she had. Alan called the funeral director
and arranged for a cremation. Then he and Gaby went for a long walk.

When they got back, Alan went into Lily’s room. Gaby had stripped the bed, he saw, and he was grateful. Lily’s bed jacket was tossed casually over the back of her chair, and he hung
it up. A file folder lay on her worktable, the papers sliding out. The wastebasket was full.

Alan began to go through the papers on her desk, looking for a note to him, a farewell, an explanation.

There was nothing. The last letters, the ones she hadn’t read, were from fans, people who were moved to tell her something of their stories too. Alan read two or three with interest, but
then began to sense the repetitive quality in them. There were a few other letters too, he saw as he flipped through this last folder, from newer friends, from her agent. Nothing important. He
dropped them all into the wastebasket on top of the letters she had herself dropped there.

He moved around the room, picking up any scrap of paper. There were reminders:
Tell Linnett no talks. Letters:
and a list of names he didn’t know.
Call Dr. Freilich.
A list:
Toothpaste, Gaviscon, calcium.
And then one with his name alone, at: the top of the little sheet. It said “Alan:”

He could hear Gaby’s voice on the telephone in the next room. He looked out over his ruined yard, the bare branches of the trees, the smeared windows. “Alan:” He imagined
Lily’s voice, saying it, saying his name. Her old voice, before the Parkinson’s, strong and deep and urgent. “Alan!” What might have followed? He stared again at his
name.

And then he crumpled the paper and dropped it too, into Lily’s wastebasket, and went to get a trash bag to throw it all away.

By now Alan would have said that he’d thought about Lily’s death, explored it from every angle. Confronted it. But the pity, the sympathy he felt when Linnett told him
that Lily couldn’t write, when she offered him this new reason for Lily’s choosing death, has made him realize he hasn’t. That he’s not done. That he can still, even now,
have new feelings about Lily, feelings he doesn’t fully understand.

When Gaby comes back from France, she has four days before she needs to return to work. She has come back early, in fact—rearranging her ticket at some expense—because she wants to
take this time to be with Alan. But she finds herself glad to leave earlier than planned on other grounds too. Her father, while he wasn’t quite sick, wasn’t quite well either, and the
days in France were long ones of the entire household’s servitude to his comfort, his endless round of petty complaints. The house needed work, and everything in it looked shabby and grimy to
Gaby. The kitchen hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned in years. And Paris itself seemed noisy, crowded with cars. The air stung her eyes, she imagined it coating her lungs.

When the plane landed at Logan and she looked across the yellowing marsh grass to the white frame houses and the clear, piercing blue of the sky behind them, she felt at home, eager for her life
here.