Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Williams, Joy

  “You’ll have a following in no time,” the taxidermist said. “I’ll finish up with these people and you can start in the morning.”

  There was still a long line of people waiting to get into the museum. Miriam passed them on her way out.

  “I’ve been back five times,” a bald woman was saying to her friend. “I think you’ll find it’s almost a quasi-religious experience.”

  “Oh, I think everything should be like that,” her friend said.

  Carl’s big truck was no longer at the garage. Miriam gazed around but the truck did not resume its appearance and probably, as far as she was concerned, never would. For most people, and apparently Carl and Jack were two of them, a breakdown meant that it was just a matter of time before they were back on the road again. She walked over to the hotel and up the stairs to their room. The door was open and the beds were stripped. The big pillows without their pretty covers looked like flayed things. A thin maid in a pink uniform was changing the channel on a television set. Something was being described by the announcer as a plume of effluent surrounded by seagulls…

  The maid noticed her and said, “San Diego, a sewer pipe broke. A single pipe for one-point-four-million people. A million-four, what do they expect.”

  Miriam continued down the corridor and opened the door quietly to her own room. She looked at the lamp. The lamp looked back, looked at her as though it had no idea who she was. Miriam knew that look. She’d always felt it was full of promise. Nothing could happen anywhere was the truth of it. And the lamp was burning with this. Burning!

  MARABOU

  THE FUNERAL of Anne’s son, Harry, had not gone smoothly. Other burials were taking place at the same hour, including that of a popular singer several hundred yards away whose mourner fans carried on loudly under a lurid striped tent. Still more fans pressed against the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates, screaming and eating potato chips. Anne had been distracted. She gazed at the other service in disbelief, thinking of the singer’s songs that she had heard now and then on the radio.

  Her own group, Harry’s friends, was subdued. They were pale, young, and all wore sunglasses. Most of them were classmates from the prep school he had graduated from two years before, and all were addicts, or former addicts of some sort. Anne couldn’t tell the difference between those who were recovering and those who were still hard at it. She was sure there was a difference, of course, and it only appeared there wasn’t. They all had a manner. There were about twenty of them, boys and girls, strikingly alike in black. Later she took them all out to a restaurant. “Death … by none art thou understood,” one boy kept saying. “Henry Vaughan.”

  They were all bright enough, Anne supposed. After a while he stopped saying it. They had calamari, duck, champagne, everything. They were on the second floor of the restaurant and had the place to themselves. They stayed for hours. By the time they left, one girl was saying earnestly, “You know a word I like is interplanetary.”

  Then she brought them back to the house, although she locked Harry’s rooms. Young people were sentimentalists, consumers. She didn’t want them carrying off Harry’s things, his ties and tapes, anything at all. They sat in the kitchen. They were beginning to act a little peculiar, Anne thought. They didn’t talk about Harry much, though one of them remembered a time when Harry was driving and he stopped at all the green lights and proceeded on the red. They all acted as though they’d been there. This seemed a fine thing to remember about Harry. Then someone, a floppy-haired boy who looked frightened, remembered something else, but it turned out this was associated with a boy named Pete who was not even present.

  At about one o’clock in the morning, Anne said that when she and Harry were in Africa, during the very first evening at the hotel in Victoria Falls, he claimed he’d seen a pangolin, a peculiar anteater-like animal. He described it, and that’s clearly what it was, but a very rare thing, an impossible thing for him to have seen, really, and no one in the group they would be traveling with believed him. He had been wandering around the hotel grounds by himself, so there were no witnesses to it. The group went on to discuss the falls. Everyone could verify the impression the falls made. So many hundreds of millions of gallons of water went over each minute or something, and there was a drop of four hundred feet. Even so, everyone was quite aware it wasn’t like that, no one was satisfied with that. The sound of the falls was like silence, total amplified silence, the sight of it exclusionary. And all that could be done was to look at it, this astonishing thing, Victoria Falls, then eventually stop looking and go on to something else.

  The next day Harry had distinguished himself further by exclaiming over a marabou stork, and someone in the group told him that marabous were gruesome things, scavengers, “morbidity distilled,” in the words of this fussy little person, and certainly nothing to get excited about when there were hundreds of beautiful and strange creatures in Africa that one could enjoy and identify and point out to the others. Imagine, Anne said, going to an immense new continent and being corrected as to one’s feelings, one’s perceptions, in such a strange place. And it was not as though everything was known. Take the wild dogs, for example. Attitudes had changed utterly about the worth of wild dogs …

  Abruptly, she stopped. She had been silent much of the evening and felt that this outburst had not gone over particularly well. Harry’s friends were making margaritas. One of them had gone out and just returned with more tequila. They were watching her uncomfortably, as though they felt she should fluff up her stories on Harry a bit.

  Finally one of them said, “I didn’t know Harry had been to Africa.”

  This surprised her. The trip to Africa hadn’t been a triumph, exactly, but it hadn’t been a disaster either and could very well have been worse. They had been gone a month, and this had been very recently. But it didn’t matter. She would probably never see these children again.

  They sat around the large kitchen. They were becoming more and more strange to her. She wondered what they were all waiting for. One of them was trying to find salt. Was there no salt? He opened a cupboard and peered inside, bringing out a novelty set, a plastic couple, Amish or something; she supposed the man was pepper, the woman salt. They were all watching him as he turned the things over and shook them against his cupped hand. Anne never cooked, never used anything in this kitchen, she and Harry ate out, so these things were barely familiar to her. Then, with what was really quite a normal gesture, the boy unscrewed the head off the little woman and poured the salt inside onto a saucer.

  Someone shrieked in terror. It was the floppy-haired boy; he was yelling, horrified. Anne was confused for an instant. Was Harry dying again? Was Harry all right? The boy was howling, his eyes rolling in his head. The others looked at him dully. One of the girls giggled. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  Two of the boys were trying to quiet him. They all looked like Harry, even the boy who was screaming.

  “You’d better take him to the emergency room,” Anne said.

  “Maybe if he just gets a little air, walks around, gets some air,” a boy said.

  “You’d all better go now,” Anne said.

  It was not yet dawn, still very dark. Anne sat there alone in the bright kitchen in her black dress. There was a run in her stocking. The dinner in the restaurant had cost almost a thousand dollars, and Harry probably wouldn’t even have liked it. She hadn’t liked it. She wanted to behave differently now, for Harry’s sake. He hadn’t been perfect, Harry, he’d been a very troubled boy, a very misunderstood boy, but she had never let him go, never, until now. She knew that he couldn’t be aware of that, that she now had let him go. She knew that between them, from now on, she alone would be the one who realized things. She wasn’t going to deceive herself in that regard. Even so, she knew she wasn’t thinking clearly about this.

  After some time, she got up and packed a duffel bag for Africa, exactly the way she had done before. The bag and its contents could weigh no more than twenty-two pounds. When she was
finished, she put it in the hallway by the door. Outside it was still dark, as dark as it had been hours ago, though this scarcely seemed possible.

  Perhaps she would go back to Africa.

  There was a knock on the door. Anne looked at it, startled, a thick door with locks. Then she opened it. A girl was standing there, not the interplanetary one but another, one who had particularly relished the dinner. She had been standing there smoking for a while before she knocked. Several cigarette butts were ground into the high-gloss cerulean of the porch.

  “May I come in?” the girl asked.

  “Why, no,” Anne said. “No, you may not.”

  “Please,” the girl said.

  Anne shut the door.

  She went into the kitchen and threw the two parts of the salt shaker into the trash. She tossed the small lady’s companion in as well. Harry had once said to her, “Look, this is amazing, I don’t know how this could have happened but I have these spikes in my head. They must have been there for a while, but I swear, I swear to you, I just noticed them. But I got them out! On the left side. But on the right side it’s more difficult because they’re in a sort of helmet, and the helmet is fused to my head, see? Can you help me?”

  She had helped him then. She had stroked his hair with her fingers for a long, long time. She had been very careful, very thorough. But that had been a unique situation. Usually, she couldn’t help him.

  There was a sound at the door again, a determined knocking. Anne walked to it quickly and opened it. There were several of Harry’s friends there, not just the girl but not all of them either.

  “You don’t have to be so rude,” one of them said.

  They were angry. They had lost Harry, she thought, and they missed him.

  “We loved Harry too, you know,” one of them said. His tie was loose, and his breath was sweet and dry, like sand.

  “I want to rest now,” Anne said. “I must get some rest.”

  “Rest,” one of them said in a soft, scornful voice. He glanced at the others. They ignored him.

  “Tell us another story about Harry,” one of them said. “We didn’t get the first one.”

  “Are you frightening me?” Anne said. She smiled. “I mean, are you trying to frighten me?”

  “I think Harry saw that thing, but I don’t think he was ever there. Is that what you meant?” one of them said with some effort. He turned and then, as though he were dancing, moved down the steps and knelt on the ground, where he lowered his head and began spitting up quietly.

  “Harry will always be us,” one of them said. “You better get used to it. You better get your stories straight.”

  “Good night,” Anne said.

  “Good night, please,” they said, and Anne shut the door.

  She turned off all the lights and sat in the darkness of her house. Before long, as she knew it would, the phone began to ring. It rang and rang, but she didn’t have to answer it. She wouldn’t do it. It would never be that once, again, when she’d learned that Harry died, no matter how much she knew in her heart that the present was but a past in that future to which it belonged, that the past, after all, couldn’t be everything.

  THE VISITING

  PRIVILEGE

  DONNA CAME AS a visitor in her long black coat. It was spring but still cool, and she never wore light colors, she was no buttercup. She was visiting her friend Cynthia, who was in Pond House for depression. Donna never had a drink before she visited Cynthia. She shunned her habitual excesses and arrived sober and aware, with an exquisite sinking feeling. She thought that Pond House was an unfortunate name, ponds being stagnant, artificial and small. This wasn’t just her opinion. A pond was indeed an artificially confined body of water, she argued, but Cynthia thought Pond was probably the name of the hospital wing’s benefactor. Cynthia had three roommates, a woman in her sixties and two obese teenagers. Donna liked to pretend that the old woman was her mother. Hi, she’d say, you look great today, what a pretty sweatshirt.

  Donna had been visiting Cynthia for about a week now. She could scarcely imagine what she had done with herself before Cynthia had the grace to get herself committed to Pond House. She liked everything about it but she particularly liked sitting in Cynthia’s room, speaking quietly with her while the others listened. They didn’t even pretend not to listen, the others. But sometimes she and Cynthia would stroll down to the lounge and get a snack from the fridge. In the lounge, goofy helium balloons in the shape of objects or food but with human features were tied to the furniture with ribbon. They bobbed there opposite the nurse’s station, and people would bat them as they passed by. Cynthia thought the balloons would be deeply disturbing to anyone who was already disturbed, yet in fact everyone considered them amusing. None of the people at Pond House were supposed to be seriously ill, at least on Floor Three. On Floor Four it was another matter. But here they were supposed to be sort of ruefully aware of their situations, and were encouraged to believe that they could possibly be helped. Cynthia had come here because she had picked up the habit of committing destructive and selfish acts, the most recent being the torching of her boyfriend’s car, a black Corvette. The boyfriend was married but Cynthia strongly suspected he was gay. He drove her crazy. “He’s a taker and not a giver, Donna,” she told Donna earnestly.

  She said that she was so discouraged that everything seemed vaguely yellow to her, that she saw everything through a veil of yellow.

  “That was in an article I read,” Donna said excitedly. “The yellow part.”

  “You know, Donna,” Cynthia said, “you’re part of my problem.”

  When Cynthia got like this, Donna would excuse herself and go away for a while. Or she would go back to the room and talk with the old woman. She got a kick out of being extraordinarily friendly to her. Once she brought her gum, another time a jar of night cream. She ignored the obese teenagers, but one afternoon one of them deliberately bumped into her as she walked down the hall. The girl’s flesh was hard and she smelled of coconut. She thrust her face close to Donna’s. Her pores were large and clean and Donna could see the contacts resting on the corneas of her eyes.

  “I’m passionate, intense and filled with private reverie, and so is my friend,” the girl said, “so don’t slime us like you do.” Then she punched Donna viciously on the arm. Donna felt like crying but she was only a visitor. She didn’t have to come here so frequently; she was really coming here too much, sometimes two and three times a day.

  There were group meetings twice a week and Donna always tried to be present for these, although she was not permitted to attend them. Sometimes, however, if she stood just outside the door, the nurses and psychologists didn’t notice her right away. Cynthia and the fat teenagers and the old lady and a half dozen others would sit around a large table and say anything they wanted to.

  “I dreamed that I threw up a fox,” one of the fat girls said. Really, Donna couldn’t tell them apart.

  “I shit something that looked like an onion once,” a man said. “It just kept coming out of me. I pulled it out of myself with my own hands. I thought it was the Devil, but it was a worm. A gift from Central America.”

  “That is so disgusting,” the other fat girl said, “That is the most—”

  “Hey!” the man said. “Get yourself a life, woman.”

  The worm thing caused the old lady to request to be excused. Donna walked back to the room with her, and they sat down on her bed.

  “Feel my heart,” the old lady said. “It’s pounding. I wasn’t brought up that way.”

  The old lady liked to play cards, and she and Donna would often play with an old soiled deck that had pictures of colorful fish on it. Donna pretended she was in the cabin of a boat on a short, safe trip to a lovely island. The old woman was a mysterious opponent, not at all what she seemed. Donna had, in fact, been told by the nurses that she was considerably more impaired than she appeared to be. Beyond the window of the cabin were high waves, pursuing and accompanying them. The wav
es were an essential part of the world the boat required, but they bore malice toward the boat, that much was obvious.

  “What kind of fish are these?” Donna asked.

  “These are reef residents,” the old lady said.

  They played a variation of Spit in the Ocean. Donna had had no idea that there were so many variations of this humble game.

  The two fat girls came in and lay down on their beds. The old lady was really opening up to Donna. She was telling her about her husband and her little house.

  “After my husband died, I was afraid someone might come in and …” She passed her finger across her throat. “I bought one of those men. Safe-T-Man II, the New Generation. You know, the ones that look as though they’re six feet tall but can be folded up and put in a little tote bag? I put him in the car or I put him in my husband’s easy chair right in front of the window. He had all kinds of clothes. He had a leather coat. He had a baseball cap.”

  “Where is he now?” Donna asked.

  “He’s in his little tote bag. Actually, he frightened me a little, Safe-T-Man. I think I ordered him too dark or something. I never did get used to him.”

  “That’s racist,” one of the fat girls said.

  “Yeah, what a racist remark,” the other one said.

  “I bet he wonders what happened to me,” the old lady said. “I bet my car does too. One minute you’re on the open road, one excitement after another, the next you’re in a dark garage. I’m not afraid of dying, but I don’t want to die old.”

  She was quite old already, of course, but the fat girls did not challenge her on this. Cynthia came into the room, eating a piece of fruit, a nectarine or something.

  “The first thing I’m going to do when I get out of here is go home and make Festive Chicken,” the old woman said. “I hope you’ll all be my guests for dinner.”

  The fat girls and Cynthia stared at her.