Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Williams, Joy

  Angela had known few men after her impetuous young husband, whose name had been Bruce. She lived in the house she had returned to as a widow in the town she’d always lived in. Despite the dislike her daughter felt toward her, Angela was devoted to Darleen and awaited the day when their estrangement would be over, for surely that day would come. At the same time she feared that something would break then in Darleen, never to be made good again.

  Ever since the girl insisted on going off to boarding school, Angela had worked as a masseuse in an old spa on the outskirts of town. She found the work distasteful and yet persisted in it, kneading and pummeling, rapping and slapping, the trusting hides presented to her. The old bodies became delusionarily flattered and freshened beneath her cool hands. Still, she was not as popular as the other masseuses. She spoke little and had no regulars. In her white cubicle on a white wooden table beside the high white-sheeted table was an envelope with her name written on it, a reminder that a gratuity would be appreciated. Seldom did it contain anything at the end of the day, though once an extraordinarily long and vigorously curling eyebrow hair had been deposited there.

  On a cold morning in late February, Angela had a single appointment. She knew the woman, a wealthy and opinionated patron of the arts who was dedicated to social inclusion, moral betterment, sculpture in the parks and dance. She smiled at Angela thinly, disappointed that she was not being served by Margaret, everyone’s favorite. Outside the sky was dark, almost cyclonic, but inside a warm, optimistic light bathed everything. There was an orange on the table which really ought to be thrown out, and Angela left the room for a moment to dispose of it.

  Midway through the session, just as Angela’s tape was about to end—it was Schweitzer playing Bach’s Fugue in G Minor, and she was dreamily placing the shaggy-haired theologian thumping away on an organ in the jungle, pulling out all the stops in a green and unreconciled jungle, which he was not doing at all of course—she snapped her prosperous client’s wrist bone, and before the ambulance arrived she’d been fired.

  “I have no choice, Angela,” the manager said.

  “What if the others signed a petition to keep me on?” Angela asked.

  “They wouldn’t do that, Angela. They wouldn’t trouble themselves, you know that.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Angela said.

  “Of course it doesn’t,” he said.

  Angela did not return home that night. Instead, she drove to the coast several hours away and boarded a ferry that served a number of weedy, unremarkable islands that were popular with the very rich, who maintained large and hidden homes there. In the tiny lounge of the ferry, people were talking about a dog that had fallen overboard during the previous night’s crossing and had not yet been found. It was a chocolate-colored Lab named Turner. The owners, a young couple just married, were practically keening with distress, according to the purser. Angela stared at the water with the four other passengers. Occasionally, the ferry’s searchlight would cast a broad beam over the waves.

  Angela checked into the inn closest to the ferry slip on the first island. She had come here before in times of distress, usually when she was trying to stop drinking. The following day, in her old wool coat and with a borrowed scarf over her head, she walked along the beach. The few people she encountered referred to the drizzle as mizzle, which had been more or less constant since New Year’s Day. Angela’s thoughts floated beside her. The vigorous eyebrow hair in the envelope appeared more than once, seemingly determined to show its jurisdiction over her most recent months. It had quite attached itself to Angela, though only in spirit, for she certainly hadn’t kept the damn thing.

  When she boarded the ferry the next morning, people were talking about the brown Lab that had been rescued the night before, on the boat’s last run. He’d actually slipped below the waves just before they’d got a flotation ring around him. He was an instant from being gone but they’d hauled him in, and he’d smiled the way Labs do, pulling back his lips in a black, rubbery grin. After he’d been warmed and fed, the distraught couple had been called, and when the ferry returned to the mainland the three of them were reunited. But the couple said it wasn’t Turner. In their minds they had endured with Turner the weight of the stinging sea, the whipping of the starless dark, the bewilderment and despair that this animal too must surely have suffered. But this was not their Turner, and they were not going to take him home with them.

  “I never saw a dog looked more like another dog in my life then,” the cashier in the galley was saying. “That Turner came in here three days ago with those people and he ate a fried egg sandwich.”

  The couple apparently had been heckled off the boat.

  “They weren’t crying anymore,” the cashier said. “They were stubborn about it, they’d made up their minds. It was the captain took the dog.”

  Angela pressed herself against the rail and looked at the water in much the same way she had earlier, waiting for something to appear. This time she would be the first to glimpse it. There! she imagined herself calling out to the others. Though it was unlikely now. No, it would never happen now.

  She drove home, detouring through the grounds of the old spa, which looked as ruined and complacent as it had when it was a big part of Angela’s life. Smoke rose from one of the chimneys. The fireplace in the game room frequently harbored a meager fire. The immense moribund pines, dying because of the town’s controversial road-salting practices, loomed protectively over the winding narrow road.

  The phone was ringing as she opened the door. It was Darleen, who announced that she was arriving the next day for a brief visit.

  “It would be thoughtful of you if you canceled your appointments at that vile place you work so we could spend some time together,” Darleen said.

  “What would you like to do?” Angela said.

  “I thought I’d help you put in a garden, Mummy.”

  “I don’t have a garden, dear. There was never … I mean nothing’s changed much since you were here last.”

  “I know the conditions under which you live, Mummy. I was just being annoying.”

  “How is school?”

  “They’ve completed the new library, and we’re allowed two days off from classes to move the books from the old institution down the hill to the new institution. We are to be utilized as a merry and willing human chain. I resist being so utilized. I’m here to learn.”

  “So you’re coming here instead,” Angela said. There was silence.

  “Which is wonderful,” Angela said. “Really wonderful.”

  “I’m hanging up, Mummy. You can continue with your inanities if you wish.”

  That night Angela had a dream. She was in a furniture store and the salesman was speaking about the wood of a bed she was looking at. Angela was not really interested in the bed and had no intention of buying it but she had been staring at it for some time. No wonder the salesman thinks I’m interested in it, she thought in her dream, I keep walking around and around it. Now some people, the salesman said, they look at a thousand-year-old tree and they say, what the hey. They don’t respect it, you know? Thing’s just growing out of the ground. But to cut to the detail, this bed comes to you from Indonesia fresh from a managed forest, what they call a managed forest, and it hasn’t been treated yet so you’ve got to care for it. You’ve got to oil it at least once a year. It’s like it’s still alive. The molecules are still stretching and expanding. I admit it’s not like a fine piece of furniture that your grandmother might have taken pride in and cared for because it isn’t a fine piece of furniture, it’s hacked out by simple Malay Archipelago artisans for export. With fairly crude tools. Now some people like this situation, it’s just what they want. They want to feel they’re doing their part by providing a commitment, a commitment to life, a thwarted life, not just to an inert tyrannical object like the kind your forebears served. And this baby’s cheap. Of course the timber industry is way out of control worldwide, and this price in no way reflects t
he real costs entailed, the invisible costs you might say. But the opportunity you have right here is to acquire something that’s alive even when it’s dead, do you hear what I’m saying? The salesman had a head that looked like a medicine ball. How heavy that must be, Angela thought. When it began to resemble something more like a brown dog’s head, she woke up.

  Darleen arrived with someone she introduced as Deke, her assistant and guide, a man older than Angela with graying, slicked-back hair. He wore a leather shirt and extremely tight-fitting leather pants which suggested no knob. Angela couldn’t help but notice this. Darleen had dyed her hair white and it sprang above her pale face like a web composed of bristles and points. She had not, however, adorned her face with rings or studs, as was so much the fashion among the young. The rings always seemed to presuppose some sort of leash to Angela. She was pleased that Darleen had not succumbed to convention.

  “Slippery out,” the man said.

  He requested upon arrival a bath. His bathing was noisy and prolonged, and when he emerged from Angela’s bathroom the immediate premises smelled fruity and foul. “Bag?” he said to Darleen.

  “I put it in the kitchen.”

  Angela heard him opening and shutting drawers, criticizing the color scheme—green and red or “rhubarb”—and bemoaning the dearth of protein. There was then the sound of a bottle being uncorked. He appeared with a single water goblet filled to the brim with wine. “Glasses look as if they were washed on the inside only,” he complained. “Knives badly in need of sharpening.” He stood before them, sipping the wine appreciatively. Angela’s eyes reluctantly strayed to his remarkable leather pants.

  “Can’t see nothing for seeing something else,” Deke muttered.

  “Dear …,” Angela began.

  “I want to marry him, Mummy, I’ll spend years if necessary nursing him back to health. I want a large wedding in an English garden with a champagne fountain.” She chewed on her fingers and laughed.

  Angela decided to ignore the subject and presence of Deke, assistant and guide, for the moment. “Is everything going well at school? Tell me about school.”

  “We have finished our studies of archaic cultures with the Aztecs. As everywhere else in the world, the Aztec elite had more varied ideas about their gods than the common people.”

  “Don’t you go believing that now!” Deke exclaimed.

  “Religious thinking among the elite developed into a real philosophy which stressed the relative nature of all things,” Darleen continued briskly. “Such a philosophy can only develop in a sophisticated environment.”

  She then lapsed into silence. Deke said he was going to take a peek around if it didn’t disaccommodate anyone.

  “What will you be doing this summer?” Angela asked after a while. “Will you be a nanny again for the Marksons?”

  “I hardly think so.” Darleen gazed at her critically. At some point in boarding school she had learned how to enlarge her eyes and make them glassy at will, like some carnivore about to attack.

  “I was on the island just yesterday but I didn’t walk as far as their house.”

  “Am I supposed to find that interesting?” Darleen sighed. “In another class we’re reading Dante. Do you know why he called it a comedy?” She raised a gnawed paw to prevent her mother from replying, although Angela had no intention of interrupting her. “Because it progresses from a dark beginning to redemption and hope.”

  “What translation are you using?”

  “Oh for godssakes, Binyon. Laurence Binyon. What do you care? That’s not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make is that Dante’s imagination was primarily visual. In his time people didn’t dream, they had visions. And these visions had meaning. We only have dreams and dreams are haphazard and undisciplined, the meager vestige of a once great method of immediate knowing.” She gnawed on her fingers again. “You see visions today and you’re considered abnormal, uncouth.”

  Deke hurried past them back into the kitchen, where he poured more wine.

  “This ain’t much of an establishment if you pardon my saying so,” he said to Angela. “No steaks in the freezer, no ice cream, sound system inadequate, music fit only to disinform the listener, no point in hearing it twice, towels thin, washcloths worn and most suspect, bed lumpy, poor recycling practices, few spare lightbulbs on hand, fire extinguishers out of date, no playing cards, clocks not set properly—”

  “I like them a little fast,” Angela conceded. It was all true. He was in no way exaggerating.

  “Potted violets on windowsill in very poor condition, worst case of powdery mildew I ever saw. I could go on.”

  “I remember those violets,” Darleen said. “Those violets are from my childhood.”

  “Now that’s just plain wrong,” Angela protested.

  “Suffering the same fate regardless,” Darleen said.

  “You got a considerable amount of canned goods, however. Can I take some back to my friends?” Deke’s hair was still wet, but already scurf was bedecking his thin shoulders like fresh snow.

  “See, Mummy, even though a person has no future to speak of, he can take a moment to think of others. He can trust even in the blackest part of night that the daylight is not going to forget to come back for him.”

  “She’s a talker, isn’t she,” Deke said.

  “That surprises me, actually,” Angela confessed. “It really does.” She was brooding about that daylight-coming-back business. You couldn’t think that way about daylight, that’s why the ancients were always so hysterical. It was just too mental, too neurasthenic. Certain things just couldn’t forget to come back. And when they finally didn’t, it wasn’t because they forgot. They did it with deliberation.

  Deke had casually resumed his litany of the inadequacies of Angela’s method of living. “Carpeting not particularly clean—gritty, in fact. No handy cold-care tissues available, no Proust.”

  “For godssakes,” Darleen said, “you’re the biggest show-off I’ve ever known for someone who a couple hours ago was begging outside the bus station.”

  “Selling newspapers,” Deke said.

  “They were giveaway papers,” Darleen said. “They were supposed to be free.” She turned to her mother. “I was kind of not looking forward to us being together. I needed a respite from you at first. So I gave this one fifty dollars to come here with me.”

  “You want it back?” From a slit pocket in his shirt he extracted a bill, then proceeded to unfold Benjamin Franklin’s enormous head.

  “Yes, she does,” Angela said. “Of course she does.” She sent Darleen a hundred dollars every month for, the word they had agreed upon was incidentals, and she certainly did not want her to be disposing of the money in this fashion. “I send you a hundred—”

  “Big goddamn deal,” Darleen said. “My roommate gets two hundred each month from her parents, which they earn by collecting cans and bottles. The Garcias search the streets and alleys thirteen hours a day for cans and bottles. It’s their goddamn job. Fifteen thousand cans pay their rent each month and another six thousand nets their little scholar Isabelle two hundred bucks each month, and I am informing you that Isabelle—who’s the biggest goddamn snob I’ve ever met—spends it on fancy underwear. The Garcias are tiny, selfless, worn-out saints walking the earth, I’ve seen ’em, and Isabelle buys lingerie.” She waved the proffered bill away. “What’s gone is gone,” she said, and laughed.

  Deke refolded the bill and placed it back in his shirt. “She’s probably referring to an unfortunate erotic crisis I underwent recently. Otherwise, given its more general application, I would say that she doesn’t subscribe to the gone-is-gone theory one bit.”

  Darleen scowled at him. “This is not the appropriate moment.”

  Deke sniffed loudly, rotated his arms and clasped his hands together. “Cold in here too. Not cozy. Only thing of interest is this old painting. Where’d you get this? Quite out of place. An odd choice, I’d say.”

  It was a large oi
l of beavers and their home on a lake, painted the century before. It was not in a frame but affixed to the wall by nails. Angela looked at it, resting her chin in her hand thoughtfully. The colors of the landscape were deep and lustrous. The water was a fervent rumpled barren of green, the trees along the curving shore like cloaked messengers. Everything seemed fresh and clean with kind portent, even the sky. God had poured his being in equal measure to all creatures, Angela thought solemnly, to each as much as it could receive. Beavers were peculiar and reclusive, but that was their nature. They were not frivolous beings. They behaved responsibly and gravely and with great fidelity. Here they were involved in the process of constructing their house, carrying branches and twigs and so forth in their jaws and on their great paddle-like tails, though the structure was already large and in Angela’s view extremely accomplished, a mansion, in fact, the floors of which were carpeted with boughs of softest evergreen, the windows curving out over the water like balconies for the enjoyment of the air.

  “Mummy stole that painting,” Darleen said.

  “Well, good for you!” Deke said. Clearly, Angela had been elevated in his regard.

  “Some years ago, Mummy used to be quite the drinker,” Darleen said.

  “Is that so!” Deke exclaimed, more delighted still. “Why’d you give it up?”

  The painting had been in a roadhouse she once frequented. Sitting and drinking, pretty much alone in that unpopular place, she would watch the painting with all her heart. Slowly her heavy heart would turn light and she would feel it pulling away as though it wasn’t responsible for her anymore, freeing her to slip beneath the glittering skein of water into the lovely clear beaver world of woven light where everything was wild and orderly and real. A radiant inhuman world of speechless grace. This was where she spent her time when she could. These were delicate moments, however, and further weak cocktails never prolonged them. Further cocktails, actually, no matter how responsibly weak, only propelled her to the infelicitous surface again. The artist, the bastard, had probably trapped and drowned the beavers and thrust rods through their poor bodies to arrange them in life-assuming positions, as Audubon had done with birds, the bastard, and Stubbs had done with horses, the bastard, to make his handsome portraits.