Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Williams, Joy

  She was sitting alone in a bar one evening after work worrying about the money it was costing to board the dog, who had been at the kennel for a week and a half. Louise had her friends, of course, and she saw them practically constantly, but sometimes she liked to be alone. Occasionally, she even took trips by herself, accompanied only by strangers, cruises or camping trips to difficult places where she was invariably lonely and misunderstood. These trips reminded her of last evenings, one of those last evenings which occur over and over in one’s life, and she thought of them as good training. She had learned a lot from them. More than enough by now, probably.

  In the bar was a long fish tank which served as a wall separating the restaurant beyond. Louise had never been in this place before and would not select it again. She didn’t like to look at the fish, one of which was trailing a cloud of mucus behind it. In the restaurant beyond the fish she saw an older man deep in conversation with a party or parties outside her vision. He had moist, closely cut hair and a Band-Aid high up on his temple. A line of blood extended several inches down from the Band-Aid. Louise became engrossed in watching him chatting and smiling and sawing away at his steak or whatever it was. But she looked away for a moment and when she looked back the blood was gone. He must have wiped it away with a napkin, perhaps dipped in his water glass. Someone in the party he was with was fond of him or even possibly more than fond and told him about the blood. That was Louise’s first thought, though it had certainly taken them long enough to mention it.

  The next morning she went to the kennel. A girl brought the dog out. It had yellowish wavy fur.

  “Is that the right one?” Louise asked. The girl looked at her expressionlessly and cracked her gum. “It’s really not mine,” Louise explained, “it belongs to a friend.”

  The dog crouched miserably on the floor in the backseat of Louise’s car. It didn’t even lie down.

  “You’re going to get sick down there,” Louise said. The dog was clearly not habituated to riding in cars, and had no sense of the happiness it could bring.

  After a week, she had discerned no habits. The dog didn’t seem morose, merely withdrawn. She began calling it Broom with a certain amount of reluctance.

  Every other week, there would be a party at one of their houses, though it wasn’t Louise’s turn just yet. Rent was cheap, so they all lived in these big ruined houses. She went over to Jack’s and everyone was already there, drinking gimlets and looking at a rat Jack had caught beneath the sink on one of his glue traps.

  “I’m not going to use these things again,” Jack said. “They’re depressing.”

  “I use them,” Walter said, “but I never get any rats.”

  “You’re not putting them in the right places,” Jack said.

  The rat watched them in a sort of theatrical way.

  One of the twins, Wilbur, got up and opened a window. He picked up the trap and sailed it with its rat accompanist into the street to fall amidst the passing traffic.

  “I usually take it down to the Dumpster,” Jack said.

  Wilbur and his twin, Daisy, were the only ones who said they remembered Broom. They said that he hadn’t eaten from a bowl but off a Columbia University dinner plate. But in their far-out nods Wilbur and Daisy could picture almost anything. They spent most of their time lovingly shooting each other up. They had not been acknowledged in the note as gift recipients, although of course they didn’t care. They insisted that matters would not have taken such a dreary turn had they been able to introduce Elliot to the great Heroisch, the potent, powerful, large and appealing Heroisch. The twins were so innocent they got on everyone’s nerves. They loved throwing up on junk. A joy develops, they’d say, a real joy. It’s not like throwing up at all.

  They all had their big, quietly rotting houses, even the twins. Louise had a solarium in hers that leaked badly. In the rear was an overgrown yard with a birdhouse nailed to each tree. Some trees had more than one. The previous tenant must have been demented, Louise thought. How could they imagine that birds want to live like that?

  At Jack’s they drank, but lightly except for Dianne, who was drinking far too much recently. She’d said, “I began to wonder if it was worthwhile to undertake what I was doing at the moment. Pick a moment, any moment. I began to wonder. If I only had today and not tomorrow, would it be worthwhile to undertake what I was doing at the moment? I addressed myself to that very worthwhile question and I had to admit, well, no.”

  But no one tried to interfere with Dianne. They were getting over the death of their friend Elliot—each in his or her own way was the understanding.

  “It takes four full seasons to get over a death,” Angus said. “Spring and summer, winter and fall.”

  “Fall and winter,” Andrew said.

  Everyone was annoyed with Angus because he had taken all the photos out of the flat woven basket where they’d always been kept and arranged them in albums, ordered by years or occasions. This pleased no one. It wasn’t the same. The effect was different. Everything had looked like a gala before. Now none of it did.

  They talked about the things Elliot had given them. They could not understand what he had been attempting to say. All his other possessions had been trucked away and stored. A brother was supposed to come for them. He was sick or lived in Turkey or some goddamn place, who cared. In any case, he hadn’t shown up here yet.

  Louise didn’t think it was right that she had been given something alive. The others hadn’t been given anything alive. She made this point frequently but no one had an explanation for it.

  The twins had been reading Pablo Neruda and had come across the line Death also goes through the world dressed like a broom, but they weren’t going to tell Louise that. Dressed didn’t seem right anyway, maybe it was the translation. But Neruda was a giant among pygmies, his mind impeccable. They were going to keep their mouths shut.

  More than a month passed. Louise was working full time in the florist’s shop. She liked working there, at the long cutting table, wearing an apricot-colored smock among the unnatural blooms. A woman came in one day just before closing. She wanted to send a dozen roses to a young veterinarian assistant.

  “My dog bit her when she tried to lift him for an X-ray,” the woman said. “I’m so embarrassed.”

  Louise had never been interested in the reasons people bought flowers. “I don’t like dogs,” Louise said.

  “Really?” the woman said. “I don’t know where I’d be without my Buckie.”

  “You wouldn’t be in here buying these roses,” Louise said.

  Another season insinuated itself. It was Tim’s turn to give a party but things were not going well for him. The lilacs had not survived transplanting. They would never come back. Tim had done his best, but his best wasn’t good enough. He had also had an unhappy experience with a pair of swans. He had been following their fortunes ever since he had witnessed them mating in a marsh beside the highway. “They twined their necks like heraldry afterwards,” he said. “Heraldry.” But after weeks of guarding the nest the male disappeared, and a week later the female vanished. Tim had watched them so arduously and suddenly they were gone. He was sure someone had murdered them. “Remember the lied about the swan?” he asked.

  “Leda and the swan?” Angus volunteered.

  “The German song,” Tim said impatiently. “The lied,” he said, upset.

  It was about a swan who so loved a hunter by the marsh that she became a woman and married him and had three children. Then one night the king of the swans called to her to come back or else he would die, so slowly she turned into a swan again, slowly opened her wide white wings and left her husband and her children …

  “Her wide white wings,” Tim said, weeping.

  Lucretia gave a party out of turn. Everyone came except Dianne and Tim. Walter asked Louise about the dog.

  “Old Broom,” Louise answered. “Poor Broom.” The dog was not demanding. It was modest in its requirements. It could square itself off like a
package in a chair, it could actually resemble a package, but that was about it. Everyone half expected that Broom would have disappeared by now, run away.

  “Listen,” Lucretia said. “I’ll tell you. One of those glasses I was given got a little chip on the rim and I found myself going to a jeweler’s and getting an estimate for filing it down. It cost seventy-five dollars and I paid for it, but I’m not picking it up. I didn’t even give them the right telephone number. I decided, enough’s enough.”

  Walter confessed that he had thrown away the silk pajamas immediately, without a modicum of ceremony.

  “None of it makes a bit of sense,” Betsy said. “What would I want with barbells? I took those barbells down to the park and left them by the softball field. You’re a saint, Louise. I could see you maybe not wanting to take it to the pound, but I always thought, She’s going to take it to a no-kill facility.

  “What do you mean?” Louise asked.

  “A no-kill facility. Isn’t that self-explanatory?”

  “Well, no,” Louise said, “not really. I mean it doesn’t sound all that great somehow.”

  “Most places keep unwanted pets for two weeks and then, if they’re not adopted, they put them to sleep.”

  “Put them to sleep,” Louise said. She didn’t know anybody said that anymore and here was her friend, Betsy, saying it. It sounded like something you’d do with a small child in a pretty room while it was still light out.

  “And these people never do. I’ve just heard about these places, I’ve never seen one. I don’t think there are many of them, but they are around.”

  “I don’t like the sound of it either,” Andrew said, “oddly enough.”

  “You know that woman came into the florist’s the other day to buy roses and I said to her, ‘Oh no! Has Buckie bitten someone again?’” Louise said.

  Her friends looked at her.

  “And she said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’” Louise laughed. “She was pretending she wasn’t the same person.”

  Louise always wanted to talk about Broom with the others until they actually wanted to discuss him, then she didn’t want to anymore.

  Early one evening after work, Louise was sitting on the front steps of her house when a van pulled up across the street and a man got out. Louise was startled to see him walk over to her. He was deeply tanned with a ragged haircut. The collar of his shirt was too big for him.

  “How do you do, Louise?” he said. “I’m Elliot’s brother.”

  Louise cast herself back, remembering Elliot. She found him with more difficulty than usual, but then she had him, Elliot, she could see him. It was still him, exactly. Powerful Elliot. She said to the man, “You don’t look at all like Elliot.”

  He seemed to be waiting for her to say more. When she didn’t, he said, “I’ve been ill and out of the country. I couldn’t travel. Travel was impossible, but I got here as soon as I was able. Elliot and I had quarreled. You can’t imagine the pettiness of our quarrel, it was over nothing. We hadn’t spoken for two years. I will never forgive myself.” He paused. “I heard that he had a dog and that you have it now and it might be something of a burden to you. I’d like to have the dog. I’d like to buy it.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” Louise said simply.

  “I insist on paying you something.”

  “No, it’s impossible. I won’t give the dog up,” Louise said. He could be a vivisector for all she knew.

  “It would mean a great deal to me,” he said, his mouth trembling. “My brother’s dog.”

  Louise shook her head.

  “I can’t believe this,” he muttered.

  “Believe what?” Louise said, looking at Elliot’s brother, if that’s who he was, although there was no reason to doubt him, not really.

  He spoke again, patiently, as if she had utterly misunderstood his situation and the seriousness of his request. His guilt was almost holy, he was on a holy quest. He had determined that this was what must be done, the only thing that remained possible now to do.

  “We were so close,” he said. “He was my little brother. I taught him how to ski, how to drive. We went to the same college. I’d always protected him, he looked up to me, then there was this stupid, senseless quarrel. Now he’s gone forever and I’m all ruined inside, it’s destroyed me.” He rubbed his chest as if something within him really was harrowed. “If I could care now for something he had cared for, then I would have something of my brother, of my brother’s love.”

  “I don’t mean to sound rude,” Louise said, “but we’ve all been dealing with this for some time now and you suddenly appear, having been ill and out of the country both at the same time. Both at the same time,” she repeated, for it seemed, though not unlikely, inane. “It’s just so unnecessary now, your appearance. It’s possible to come around too late.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. He was sallow beneath his tan. “Your friends, Elliot’s friends, said they were sure you’d appreciate the opportunity, that they were sure you wouldn’t mind, that in fact you’d be relieved and delighted.”

  “That just shows how little we comprehend one another,” Louise said. “Even when we try,” she added. “Have you ever had a dog before?” Louise was just curious. She didn’t mean to lead him on, but as soon as she said this, she feared she’d given him hope.

  “Oh yes,” he said eagerly. “As boys we always had dogs.”

  “They’d die and you’d get another?”

  “That’s a queer way of putting it.”

  “Look,” Louise said, “your brother had this dog for about three minutes.” She felt she was exonerating Elliot.

  “Three minutes,” he said, bewildered.

  “I said about three minutes. You should get a dog and pretend it was your brother’s and care for it tenderly and that will be that.” Louise was not going to get up and go inside the house and lock the door against him. She would wait him out. “There’s nothing more to discuss,” she said.

  He turned from her sadly. There were several youths peering into his van. “Get away from there!” he cried, and hurried toward them.

  It was Walter’s turn to give a party. He had a fire in the fireplace although it wasn’t at all cold. Still, it was very pleasant, everyone said so.

  “I ordered half a cord of wood but it wasn’t split, it was just logs,” Walter said, “and one of the logs had a chain partly embedded in it, like a dog chain. The tree had started to grow right over the chain.”

  “Wow,” Daisy said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Sometimes,” Wilbur said, “certain concepts, it’s better not to air them.”

  The twins held each other’s hands and looked into the fire.

  “Who would have thought that Elliot would have such a dreary brother,” Angus said. “I wouldn’t have given him the dog either.”

  “Still, I’m amazed you didn’t, Louise,” Jack said.

  “I guess he got all the things we actually remembered Elliot having,” Andrew said. “I remember a rather nice ship’s clock, for instance. That wristwatch I was given, who’d ever seen that before?”

  “Elliot wasn’t in his right mind,” Betsy said. “We keep forgetting that. He wasn’t thinking clearly. If you’re thinking clearly, you don’t take your own life.”

  Again, Louise marveled at her friend’s way of phrasing things. To take your own life was to take control of it, to take possession of it, to give it a shape by occupying it. But Elliot’s life still had no shape, even though it had been completed.

  “I want to confess something,” Andrew said. “I tossed that watch.” He had crammed it into an overflowing Goodwill bin in the parking lot of a shopping mall. He described the experience of pushing the watch into an open-throated, softly bulging sack as an extremely unpleasant one. Everyone knew the Goodwill bin and the mute congregation of displaced things attending it, too large to have been slipped inside, all those things waiting to be revisited in this life, waiting to be used aga
in.

  That evening everyone drank too much and later dreamed vivid dreams. The twins dreamed they were in the middle of a highway, trying to cross, trying to cross. Angus dreamed he was in a coffee shop where a kindly but inefficient waitress who looked like his mother was directing him to a table that wasn’t there. Lucretia dreamed she was carving Kindertotenlieder as sung by Kathleen Ferrier out of a block of wood with a chain saw. That’s quite good, someone was saying. It’s only a copy, Lucretia demurred. Walter dreamed he was kneeling at the communion rail in the silk pajamas. The cup was working its way toward him but had become a thermometer to be placed beneath the tongues of the devout, and by the time it reached him it was a dipstick from a car’s engine that a mechanic was wiping with a filthy cloth.

  Louise had had the dog for five months now. When she realized how much time had passed, she thought: Seven more months to go. In seven months we’ll know more.

  Someone was putting a house up behind Louise’s house. The yard had been bladed and most of the trees taken down. The banal framework of a house stood there. When Louise gave a party, everyone was shocked at the change.

  “I thought that yard went with this house,” Jack said.

  “Well, I guess not,” Louise said.

  “All those little birdhouses are gone,” Lucretia said. “People put them inside now, you know, as a decorative accent. They paint them in these already fading, flaking colors and put them around.”

  “They’re safer inside,” Angus said.

  “That thing is going to be huge, Louise,” Betsy said. “It’s going to loom over you.”

  They talked for a while about what she could plant to block it out.