The Distinguished Guest (5 page)

But then there are the other moments, those moments when Lily seems in one way or another to sneer at Alan. At these times Alan seems unable to resist carping back, and the two of them seem then
to Gaby not so much like mother and son as like jealous siblings, each of them resentful of the very air the other takes in. It reminds her sometimes of the squabbles Ettie and Thomas got into when
they were small; and her irritation now reminds her, too, of the rage she felt at her sons when they bickered and teased each other, when they wailed and called to her to adjudicate. Once, she
remembers, wincing, she had banged their heads together to stop a fight; and then screamed at them in helpless, high-pitched French that they would drive her mad.

Of course, with Alan and Lily, Gaby isn’t free to distribute her anger evenly, and so it’s Alan she feels herself turning away from. Last night, he’d come out from their
bedroom to find her skimming through the Bible. “Jesus, Gaby, what are you
doing
?” he asked.

She’d been annoyed instantly, but she held her voice level. “Looking for something your mother just said to me, about being led around by others when you’re old.”

“It’s in the Bible?” He sounded offended by this very idea.

“She said it was John. Do you know it?”

“I know nothing about the Bible. Nothing.” His voice was flat and absolute. She watched him. Lanky, barefoot, he crossed to the island, went behind it. She watched him often the
refrigerator, stand in front of it for a moment, looking. He shut it without having taken anything out, and left the room. Of course he knew the Bible! Whole passages by heart. How absurd for him
to deny this! Gaby had snapped the book closed.

She sat now at the wide kitchen island that separated the cooking and living areas of the house and lifted her oversized white coffee cup. In the dusky light, the room was beginning to take
shape, the low sleek forms of the furniture Alan had chosen in their familiar places. Among them now loomed the humps and curves of Lily’s furniture, five Victorian pieces come down from her
family that she wanted Alan and Gaby to have. In this half-light, they made Gaby think of the hulking beasts, the imaginary monsters of childhood—
wild things
—and she smiled.

They’d arrived before Lily, sent ahead by train too, along with the dozen or so heavy cartons of books and papers. Alan had assumed that Lily would take the furniture with her when she
left. Thomas had helped Alan, and they’d crammed everything into the guest room to make Lily feel at home. Gaby had directed the removal of a few of their own things, and the placement of
Lily’s possessions.

Lily had been astounded when she’d arrived. Didn’t they realize her intentions? These chairs and tables were gifts! She’d kept what she wanted, she assured them. It was all in
storage at the retirement community until she could move in. These were for Alan and Gaby, to do with as they wished. And she insisted that they be moved right back out into the living room.

Gaby took another swallow of coffee. Odd, she thought. It had taken Lily to add the element that made her feel at home in this house at last. When they’d moved in, they’d discarded
most of their old furniture, things they’d acquired cheaply over the years at yard sales or flea markets, or as friends cast them away. Alan had a vision of how he wanted the house to look,
and the old stuff didn’t fit it. Besides, some of the new furniture was built in, and all of the storage was, so they simply didn’t need the bureaus and wooden boxes and chests that had
held cookware and towels and clothing in their other homes. The result was a clean, bare elegance that made Gaby feel empty-hearted.

The night after they moved Lily’s furniture from the guest room into the living room, she’d lain in bed, excitedly thinking of how she might have it upholstered once the old woman
had left, and remembering the profusion of dark objects and bric-a-brac in her family’s house outside Paris, walking again in her mind through the maze of tables and chairs and screens and
little desks at her grandmother’s house in the country.

Now she was thinking of the other architects they knew, of their houses, uncluttered and serene for the most part. Messy lives, though. Gaby had always suspected that this was more true for
architects than for other professional groups. It was their lack of schedule, she had often thought. Their working days were fluid, changeable, full of people and the whims of people. Full of
women. Look at Alan: what would he do today? He had a house being built, so he’d probably drop over there and make sure it was going well, perhaps be in touch with the clients—the
owners—if there were problems to work out. He was hoping for at least two other projects that Gaby knew about, a little church in Vermont (money was the question there), and a big elaborate
addition onto one of the old houses in the village. So there would be time in the office, time on the telephone, maybe coffee or lunch or a drink with someone or other, charming them, amusing them,
persuading them that this or that detail or surface or type of window was worth the extra cost in terms of what it would give back to them. Persuasion. Aesthetic conversions. Seduction, really. And
it was more often the women than the men who cared, who had to be persuaded. Perhaps that was how architects got into trouble.

Gaby sighed. They’d had their share of trouble certainly. And made it through. Though Gaby, not Alan, had been the cause of the last crisis, with her affair. And this house, as she well
knew, was a seduction too, meant to win her back. She was to have fallen in love with Alan again.

“
Don’t
,” she had wanted to say. “You don’t need to.”

He had needed to though. And she supposed in a certain way it had worked. She did love the house, and he believed in that love. What he might not have believed was that she’d never stopped
loving him, though this was true.

It wasn’t Gaby’s first affair. She’d had one much earlier in their marriage too, before the children were born. Alan had never known about that one. It had happened at a time
of difficulty between them anyway, when Alan himself was having multiple lovers—though they carefully spoke of it then as an “open marriage,” rather than infidelity.

No, Gaby’s real lover, as she thought of him, had come along two years before the house. She hadn’t told Alan about it until it was over. And then, foolishly, she had thought she
could present it as a kind of fait accompli, a reason for having been withdrawn temporarily, and sad. One day, making dinner, she had simply announced it to Alan, that it had happened and now was
done with.

He had been shocked, and then outraged. He had walked away from her, stood with his back to her at the window. Then, abruptly, he’d lifted his arm and the glass exploded.

There’d been blood everywhere. Gaby had grabbed a clean towel and wrapped it tightly around Alan’s hand. She’d called to the boys, told them to finish fixing dinner, to clean
up, that she didn’t know when she and Alan would be back. She’d driven him to the clinic.

After that, there was the wait, not knowing whether Alan’s hand would recover. There were Alan’s questions too, which Gaby tried not to answer. She didn’t want to talk about
it, she told him. She didn’t want to play twenty questions.

Alan did, of course. And slowly he found out most of what he wanted to know.

The man was much younger than Gaby, someone she’d met in the shop—he stopped in for morning coffee and a roll each day. She had thought they would sleep together perhaps once or
twice. She’d supposed because he was younger, “and quite attractive,” she told Alan, that all he was interested in her for was a quick affair.

She reminded Alan that he’d been away a good deal right then, that he’d had that project in Dallas.

Dallas. Dallas had been eight months earlier. “So this, this affair, which has fairly recently ended, began eight months ago.”

Well, yes, she said. But it ended two months ago. And now, no more questions.

But Alan couldn’t let go of it.
Six months!
For six months then, everything had been a lie. Every good moment between him and Gaby. All of it was going on while Gaby thought of
someone else, wanted to be with someone else.

It wasn’t like that, she said. Not at all.

Then what was it like, he wanted to know. What was it like when she made love with
her friend
? What was it like when she made love with Alan in that time?

And then all the other questions. Who was he? What did he do? Where did they go to be together? How often? Did he come to the shop anymore?

Gaby tried to put him off, but as he discovered, when he asked a question that called for a simple yes or no answer, she felt somehow honor-bound to respond. When he asked what they did together
sexually, her lips tightened and she turned away from him, but there was a lot he could find out with another kind of question.

She caught his gaze on her often, appraising, trying to gauge her attractiveness to someone else, she supposed. Someone younger. She had grown a little heavier through the years, though she
wasn’t plump or fat. She was solid, solid and wide. She had a short, strong body that looked better naked, actually, than it did clothed.

It was early spring when she’d told him about the affair. One day in late summer when it seemed his hand was going to be all right again, she’d come into the house they were living
in then, the old, ramshackle house they’d bought in the village. She’d been watering the garden. She was wearing a bikini. She was barefoot, and her feet were wet and flecked with
blades of grass. She’d browned everywhere, as she liked to do in summer, and her short, curling hair was damp at her forehead and her neck.

She had a story to tell Alan. A young couple had been walking past the house just now, teenagers. Their neighbor had mowed his field earlier in the day, and the sweet smell of the fresh grass
was everywhere. “Christ,” the girl had said to the boy, “don’t you just
hate
the smell of new-mown hay?”

Gaby was laughing as she repeated this, and Alan laughed too. Then he stopped and looked hard at her, at her body, at her legs and feet, and she knew what he was thinking of. After a long
moment, he asked his last question. “So, you’re done with him. That’s it.”

Gaby paused and then sighed. She had wanted to spare him this hurt, and herself the hurt of revealing it. But now she said wearily, “My dear, I would say, on the contrary, that he was
quite done with me. But that
is
it.”

She heard him inhale sharply, but he turned away before she could see his response. They never talked about the affair again. He had nothing more to ask.

Gaby couldn’t have said, exactly why, after that, Alan turned from what had happened and began to plan their house—holding it, changing it in his mind until his hand healed and he
could begin to figure it out on paper. It had startled her, the sudden enthusiasm he had for the project. She was still feeling bruised and tentative. The last thing she would have said she wanted
to do was to focus a lot of energy on building a home, on Alan, on windows and countertops and knobs and appliances. Almost immediately she understood, too, that he was wooing her with all this,
showing her his value. Though she began with a distracted toleration of it, slowly she was drawn in, she started to enjoy it, planning the place they would live in together for all the long years
ahead.

Gaby looks around now at Alan’s gift to her, familiar in every detail, and still moving to her when she thinks of how it came to be.

But Gaby also has a picture of the house in her mind that Alan doesn’t know about and couldn’t imagine, a picture that rises occasionally just as she is taking most pleasure in her
surroundings, a cautionary note.

She had gone to the house, alone, two days before they were to have moved in. She was on her way home from the shop, and her decision to turn down their new long drive was pure impulse—to
look one last time at the house empty, to walk through its echoing space in solitude, hearing her footsteps in the bare open rooms. To think of her life as
starting over
again, the illusion
we all need from time to time, the impulse that probably drove her to the affair in the first place. The affair that had led to this: the house they’d made together. That Alan had made for
her. It was strange, she was thinking as she drove under the arching boughs of the driveway, strange how things worked out.

To her surprise, the door stood open, though there were no cars parked in the yard. Gaby felt a tremor of apprehension. A few beer cans had been flung around on the packed dirt. She didn’t
stop to pick them up, but neither did she rush forward. She walked in rhythm with the sound of her pulse, suddenly throbbing in her ears. She had known of houses vandalized around town. Mostly the
houses of summer people, houses at the ends of lanes or long driveways, as theirs was, used for parties or just sport on a weekend night in the off-season when no one would be around to hear it
happening. But the summer people were rich, they didn’t live here. She and Alan did. They were part of this community. They knew everyone. Gaby regularly served coffee to the fishermen coming
off their boats in the morning. She knew their children from Little League, from hockey or soccer or basketball games at the school. Not
us
, she thought.
Not our house.

She stood in the opened doorway. Whoever had done this had worked quite well within the limited means. There was no furniture to wreck, there were no objects to steal, no dishes to break. But
they had poured beer around—the floor was sticky with it and the cans strewn here and there. They’d sprinkled cleanser on it, and Gaby saw the bottle of dishwashing liquid lying on the
floor near the kitchen island, so she assumed that was part of the brew. They’d unfurled toilet paper over the mess, and it lay gaily in streamers everywhere, in some places wet and plastered
down, in others fluttering or trembling in the breeze from the opened windows. Several windows were smeared and printed with their hands, with the usual unimaginative array of dirty words.