The Distinguished Guest (34 page)

Alan has missed her and is glad for her return, but he finds he can’t respond to the sympathy she offers about Lily, he can’t make use of it. His feelings about his mother have
gotten too complicated, too difficult, for Gaby to reach. They talk about her death a little, and each time he finds himself trying to change the subject, to move on to something else. He
doesn’t think she notices this. He hopes not, at any rate. Though sometimes after one of these exchanges he feels her eyes lingering on him.

He continues to work a little through these days of her vacation, but mostly in his study at home—on his lectures, primarily, but also on the plans for the addition to the big house in the
village, the project he has gotten. (The church in Vermont is mired in politics and has put off trying to raise the funds for a while. Three different people have written Alan of this decision,
“so I guess maybe they really, really mean it,” he tells Gaby.)

He usually stops work in time for lunch. They go swimming twice. They make love each afternoon, and then they lie in bed and talk together—about the children, about what they might do with
the money from Lily’s estate, about a cookbook Gaby thinks she might try to write.

They have friends over one night, and on their last free evening, they take a walk together after dinner, all the way into the village. It’s nearly dark when they turn from the dock and
start back. Two black dogs who rose from the sidewalk in front of one of the old houses in town and trailed them companionably lag a little behind them now, sniffing at the various delights of the
docks; but then catch up. The windows are lighted in only about half the houses—the summer people have gone, though the air off the water now is still humid and warm. In the houses that are
occupied, they can hear the music and the portentous intonation of television dialogue, sometimes with human conversation rising above and around it. Far out over the water a bell clangs. In the
distance a dog starts barking, and the two black dogs begin barking too, in response, circling Gaby and Alan as though protecting them.

A few other dogs here and there in the village pick it up, and the black dogs run excitedly ahead into the dark, into the calls sounding back and forth. Gaby and Alan pass a house where someone
is practicing the piano, a beginner’s piece. The air smells heavily of the sea.

They haven’t talked much on their walk, just pointed here to a stand of fall flowers, there to the birds lined up on the telephone wires in silhouette against the fading light like so many
quarter-notes. Now Gaby pulls her sweater tighter around her and sighs. “Ah, Alan, this is such an
American
night.”

What part of his history, of his surprising grief, of his abiding connection to Lily, is at work in him then to make him want to say that this is not America, this dream?

But he doesn’t. Because he loves her, he doesn’t. “Is it?” he answers.

The months go by for Alan, months of forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering. In mid-November, Lily’s chairs come back recovered. Gaby has chosen a very
rich, brocadelike fabric for one, and a silk stripe for the other. Alan didn’t notice when they left, actually, but on the day of their return, he stops as he’s crossing the living
room, and stares at them, as though, literally, seeing a ghost. Lily is there, it suddenly seems.

And then the feeling is gone, and what he is aware of is the mystery of the difference between the living and the dead, the absolute closing of the door between them, the finality—why
should it be so amazing from time to time?—of her being gone.

When he goes in to wake Gaby and the light from the hallway falls in across the bed and onto the old quilt, across her strong hands lying on it, he remembers the flashlight’s beam on
Lily’s face when he found her, that terrible final relaxation that left her looking shocked and yet waxy, her eyes slightly open in the deepest sleep. He bends over Gaby and smells her
familiar yeasty smell, feels the heat of her life, her responsive stir and whimper as he touches her. He feels nearly as though he has willed this awakening, and he is so grateful for it that when
her eyes open to meet his, she sees tears in them.

In December, Gaby and Alan drive up to Boston on a Sunday afternoon to hear the
Messiah
performed. Ettie is still in school, not due home for ten days, and though they have invited
Thomas, he’s not going to join them—he has tickets to something else that day, a performer they have never heard of, in a tiny hall whose name they don’t recognize. They have
agreed to meet him afterward for dinner.

It’s a bright cold day, with a frosty, light, early snow lying like glittery powder on the ground. White gulls circle high above the city buildings, calling, something Alan always loved
about Boston. On Newbury Street they sometimes landed outside the mansard windows, startlingly huge and ugly, a primordial, nightmare version of
bird
. And then flew off into grace again.

Under the marquee at Symphony Hall, the crowd shuffles and stamps. It’s pleasant to move into their hubbub, to feel encircled by their body warmth, their groomed smells, their bursts of
laughter. They slowly press with the group into the warm building, then beyond, into the sanctuary of the large performance hall with its huge, twinkling chandeliers high overhead, the brightly
lighted stage with the rows of chairs across the back for the singers. Alan and Gaby find their seats, arrange their coats, scan their programs. Their conversation is only intermittent, as it has
been in the car on the way up too. Alan is preoccupied with end-of-semester problems at school, with the last interior details at the Admundsens’ house, which they want to be in for
Christmas.

Gaby is just tired, having catered a big party in town the night before. She is thinking, too, though she hasn’t told Alan this, of selling her share in the business. This fall the routine
has suddenly seemed too demanding to her—overwhelming, really. She might continue to work, just part-time, she thinks, and perhaps at last start to write her cookbook. She has no idea yet
whether all this is practical, but she’s begun to make inquiries.

And so they sit side by side in the hall full of the dull roar of thousands of conversations, the underlying sibilance as others too flip through their programs.

The performers enter and settle themselves, and then the soloists and the conductor. The music starts.

Alan finds himself not as moved as he thought he’d be by the first section, or then the second. Perhaps this is because the music is being played on early instruments, which give the
impression of great restraint. The voices too must apparently be controlled, to mix with the more subdued instrumentation. Alan is used to the no-doubt musically incorrect
Messiah
, the
overblown, overdramatic version—it was what he heard and thrilled to several times in his youth at Rockefeller Chapel. This version feels curiously bloodless to him.

He lets his mind float while the beautiful, distant music traces Christ’s birth and betrayal, his death, his resurrection. He is seeing the work left to be done at the Admundsens’;
he is imagining the face of the student he particularly dislikes, who will, he is sure, protest the grade Alan is going to give him, probably taking it to higher levels.

After the Hallelujah Chorus and the second intermission, about a quarter of the audience doesn’t return. Alan and Gaby, actually, are alone in their row, and she makes a joke about the
possibility of lying down and having her usual nap before dinner.

The music in this section is less familiar to Alan, he hasn’t heard it piped in seasonally at grocery stores and bookstores as he has the choruses from the first two sections. He opens the
text to follow the words, and is struck, when he gets to the phrase about our being changed, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” by the homeliness of the expression. And then
realizes that the expression is as homely and familiar as it is precisely because it comes from Scripture. The bass is singing his beautiful duet with the trumpet now. “We shall be
changed,” he sings, over and over, in hopeful insistence, the trumpet eloquently punctuating his claim; and Alan is hearing with Lily’s ears, hearing this promise she believed
in—praying for her, in some sense, with his intense listening, but also feeling his own sorrowful distance from this certainty, and from her.

And now the contralto and tenor move into their duet, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” Their voices twine, calling again and again, “O
death!” “O grave!” He is undone by the beautiful rending harmonies, the plaintive but joyous dance the voices do, the belief. The belief. And for him, the end—of Lily, of
Paul, and of all they kept alive for him.
In
him, he sees. His throat swells. He bends his head, closes his eyes, and keeps his head bent through the chorus’s sprightly thanks to God,
through the joyful pronouncement of Christ’s great worth, through the amazing, soaring last amen. Through the beginning of the applause, which doesn’t end it for him.

It’s dark when they come out, and lightly snowing again. They walk south on Mass Ave, past the subway station, past the bowfront brick houses, most thick with apartment life, the
fluorescent lights inside many, where once there were chandeliers. They have agreed that the music was wonderful, they have both claimed their favorite performers. And now Gaby, as though she had
some sense of what was happening to him, speaks of the passage that stirred his feelings. “It’s odd, truly, to speak of death’s ‘sting,’ isn’t it? ‘O
death, where is thy
sting
.’ ”

Don’t
, he wishes to say. But he keeps his voice conversational. “What’s odd about it?”

She wrinkles her nose. She looks, for those few seconds, like a girl. “It’s an odd word. It’s little, and puny. I know! It’s like
stink
, that’s it!” He
doesn’t answer. “At any rate, it doesn’t sound . . . correct, to me.”

“What is it in French?” he asks after a moment. “Sting?”

“It’s ... I think in the Bible, in that passage, it’s
aiguillon
. And that’s better, isn’t it? It has more . . . depth than
sting
. More meaning of
power, really.” Their feet make regular crunching bites in the snow. “I almost felt like giggling a bit when they were singing.”

“I didn’t,” he says. “It moved me.”

She looks at him quickly then, and quickly turns away. She feels chastised and angry, shut out, again, from his sorrow, if sorrow is what it is.

The wind cuts through Alan’s wool coat, and he hunches his shoulders against it. They pass a bar, a pizza place. The black faces. Except for the architecture, he could be in Chicago.

They turn down Columbus Avenue into the South End. They’re meeting Thomas at a restaurant here, one Gaby has read about and wants to try. This neighborhood was marginal at best when Gaby
and Alan lived in Boston. It has come back a good deal by now, but still varies from block to block, house to house. It feels familiar to Alan, he likes it.

The restaurant is in a storefront on the ground floor of one of the brick town houses. It’s warm and crowded, bright with noise. When they come in, Thomas stands up at a table in the front
window and waves to them. After they hang up their coats, they weave their way through the tables to him. He is buoyant and energetic, thrilled by the music he’s heard, even excited a little
by the snow. As though he were still a child, Alan thinks.

Alan feels remote, locked away in his own earlier experience. Gaby and Thomas appear not to notice. They are talking of the music, then of the upcoming holidays, then of the menu—what
looks good. Alan is facing the street, Gaby and Thomas are turned in to him. As they talk, Alan stares out behind them at the snow, carried sometimes nearly horizontally on the wind. Under the
streetlights the air is thick with the mothy flakes, but in the black valley beyond their light, the snow seems to disappear, or to become just a light fog through which he can see this
world—the tall red buildings, the lighted apartment windows, the bundled pedestrians. The thought of home, of the house he has made, seems, from here, isolated and chilling—the long,
lonely ride back, the wooded dark drive, the house set by itself on the cold, black river. He wishes he could stay here, in these lights, this city.

After dinner, they take a cab back to the parking garage, and Alan gives Thomas money for the rest of his ride. Silently they retrieve their car, drive to the expressway and head south on it,
toward home.

Gaby speaks, finally, even though she knows this is dangerous. “What are you thinking, Alan? About the music, still?”

Alan looks over at her. The heater has finally gotten the car warm and she has relaxed, unbuttoned her coat, and taken off her gloves.

“Some, the music. Boston, I guess.”

“Mmm.”

“Would you ever think of moving back?”

Ah, here it is. She shifts in her seat, looks out her window. “No. I wouldn’t. I like my life precisely as it is.”

“Just a question.”

She turns to him quickly. “No, it’s not, Alan. It’s more than that and you know this.”

He is startled. “What is it, do you think?”

“I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “I wish I did, so I could help you. But I don’t. It’s part of Lily’s death, I think. But since we cannot talk of
that . . . ”

He doesn’t answer her. She is watching him, but he keeps his eyes steady on the dark road ahead.

She shrugs, finally. “At any rate, no, I have no wish to change my life.”

And he realizes, suddenly, what he has been asking her. Realizes that the version of life he has offered Gaby—their life together—is a gift he has given her and has no right to take
away. He reaches over and touches her hand. “Of course you don’t.”

The boys will come home for Christmas, Thomas for five days, Ettie for two weeks. They will sleep late every morning, and then wander the house until at least noon in pajamas and
slippers, carrying sections of the paper into odd corners. Gaby will leave bags of scones out for them, of muffins, of what she calls “breakfast cookies,” and they will carry these
around, along with orange juice or coffee, scattering crumbs, leaving sticky circles. The house will ring with Thomas’s music from noon until evening, and sometimes Alan will thrill to it,
and sometimes he will think of it simply as noise to be endured.