The Accomplished Guest: Stories

by Ann Beattie

  “Green isn’t my color. Why do I buy so many green things?” Jen said.

  “Wear that blue dress. You look great in that,” he said.

  “I do?” she said. “Are you just saying it because you hate to watch me flip through clothes?”

  “I don’t mind watching you flip through clothes unless I’m in a store,” he said.

  She took out the dress he’d pointed to, hung by two narrow blue ribbons from the neck of the hanger. She put the hanger on a hook, tugged lightly at both sides of the waist. “I’d be lucky if it fit,” she said. She pulled down her shorts and pulled her T-shirt over her head. She stepped out of the shorts and tried on the dress, braless. Those weird Frisbee pads would be sticking over her breasts if she wore the strapless dress, he remembered: little white circles that looked like they’d as easily hold falafel as breasts. How did the things adhere to flesh? He realized that she realized that he was staring at her nipples. “There’s a special bra,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “It’s great. You look great,” he said. She handed him the dress and began rummaging through her dresser drawer. He went to his own closet and took out the garment bag, hung the dress inside it. He had only one summer suit, a nice Bilzerian linen one, so he found that hanger and put it in the same bag.

  “Don’t forget grown-up shoes,” she said. “That was ridiculous, that time we went to Jennica’s wedding and we had to stop and buy you oxfords.”

  He liked his clogs, had worn them everywhere for years, even to work. His surgeon had been wearing red clogs encased in bags the day he was operated on. Surgeon’s choice, Mozart, had already been playing as he was wheeled into the OR.

  “I’ll wear those new high-heeled sandals,” she said, mostly to herself.

  “Don’t paint your toenails some color that makes you look like a whore.”

  She turned and threw something that fell far short of striking him. It was a sachet in blue netting, he discovered. Filled with lavender. He closed his eyes as he sniffed. Just a few seconds of nothingness were needed: giving no advice, making no jokes, remembering nothing, anticipating nothing. He told himself to inhale deeply.

  “It was a good idea to avoid the traffic,” she said. “I’ll call the restaurant before we leave. Seven-thirty, eight?”

  He handed back her sachet without answering. It wasn’t really a question, and it didn’t really matter what time they ate dinner. And though his wife wasn’t frantic at the moment, he turned and left the room because he knew she would be soon: Where were her new reading glasses? Should she take her book or leave it as something she’d be dying to get back to? No lipstick would be right: She’d look at the tubes as if she’d never seen such colors before, as if none of them could even exist on the color spectrum, each one very wrong. The sandals . . . who, but a woman as stupid as she, would not place new sandals on the closet floor with every other pair of shoes. At their own wedding, mercifully, they had worn blue jeans and been married on the beach. Now his wife had become rather materialistic, but back then the few guests had stood around in shorts, each with his or her own kite, the coolers holding champagne bottles and plastic glasses resting on the sand, seagulls spreading their big wings, circling for a handout, the JP’s gold bracelet sparkling in the sun. (“Is he under house arrest?” Jen had said wittily after they visited the justice of the peace several days before the event.) Worry was the price Jen paid for materialism.

  His shoes were where he’d stepped out of them in the entryway days before, coming in from the rain. He took them, with the garment bag, out to the car. The neighbor’s strange son was headed down the dirt road with a butterfly net. The young Nabokov, off to capture—and in this case, probably squish—the butterflies that rose like champagne bubbles from the dust at the shoulder of the road.

  John had asked Jen not to tell Bee the details of his surgery, but of course she had—no doubt also cautioning Bee to lie if he asked her directly what she knew. White lies: as prevalent in this family as white noise on the highway that drifted across the meadow toward their house. He had wanted a more secluded house; Jen had said she liked to be nearer to what she called “civilization”—the same environment she now damned as being filled with “idiot tourists and Maine-iacs in their tortoiseshell SUVs, driving like lunatics because they can’t imagine they’d ever go belly-up.” Just the week before, a man had died, not at all protected by his SUV as it rolled.

  “Have you seen that red box that came last week with my sandals in it? Bright red, no one could miss it, but it is not . . .” She realized midsentence that he knew nothing. She went back into the house. He tilted his head, studied the cloudless sky, which almost immediately began to shake—the sky!—as his neck twitched, reacting to the cell phone’s vibration in his pants pocket. But it would be a missed call. He liked that concept. As if by missing a call, you could shape your destiny.

  Lately, he wasn’t interested in talking to anyone. He’d listen if Bee called him, specifically, but if he were around when she called her mother, he’d catch Jen’s eye and move his hand sideways. Had they been at an auction—that was the way they’d bought so much furniture for their house, way back when—he would have been bidding by half-step increments. The phone had stopped vibrating, the sky was safe. Into the house went Chicken Little, silent, as Jen had pointed out that he now so often was.

  “Shall I call the restaurant?” he called.

  “I already did, thanks. Eight o’clock.”

  “Should I double-check with Bee and make sure she knows not to call until the plane actually lands?”

  “You know I hate screaming between rooms,” Jen said, coming out of the bedroom with a patent-leather purse he’d never seen dangling from one hand. “What?”

  “I said, ‘Fantastic weather for what I hope will be a perfect wedding.’ Whatever ‘a perfect wedding’ means.”

  “Remember when an interviewer asked Prince Charles if he loved Diana and he said he did, ‘whatever love means’?”

  “Prince Charles?” He frowned. “What would make you think of him?”

  “I suppose because William just got married.”

  “We’ll bang around for hours if you don’t pack,” he said. “And while you’re at it, would you put in my pajamas and two pairs of socks?”

  “I’m wearing patent-leather pumps,” she said. “I’m not looking for those stupid sandals any longer.”

  As she turned, he thought, She assumes I can always concentrate enough to drive; she’s always up for an adventure, even if that only means leaving a day early; she’d act like she was playing Russian roulette and sweat bullets if her phone vibrated and she didn’t even look to see who was calling. She thinks that if she, personally, is orderly, things will be fine; she’d get implants if, God forbid, she had to have a mastectomy, then she’d tell everyone about every minute of it, holding nothing back. Though if that really happened to her, it might make her look at the sky more often. It certainly might.

  * * *

  The Portland Superior Hotel looked out over downtown. Their room had a king-size bed, both blinds and curtains, and a walk-in shower on one side of the hall and another room with a door and a toilet and a sink on the other side. He picked up the soap and smelled it. It smelled like a field in France. He thought that he would prefer to be buried in France, then corrected his thinking: he wasn’t Jim Morrison. They wouldn’t want him. But she could scatter his ashes. She could be the sad, lovely widow, the ashes disguised as something clever, something that would make it through security. The surgeon in the red clogs emphatically did not think he would die. The chemo had been bearable, as the doctor had said. It was an advantage to have been almost bald for ten years. His hair, what he had of it, had grown back rather coarse and curly. It had pleased him to let it grow until he could make a ponytail that protruded an inch from the rubber band. It could have turned into a horse’s tail for all he cared, but his hair simply grew no longer.

  He regularly picked up the antidepressant
the doctor had ordered, but threw it away and put multivitamins in the bottle in case Jen picked it up and wondered. He thought he deserved to feel sorry for himself and also deserved to realize that he had pretty much made a mess of his life, even if he had earned good money. He was amused to wear the yellow rubber bracelet Bee had given him that said WHATEVER. This was his little joke, though it had no particular point. His wife had said, “Why don’t you get another one that says YOU SAY, and make me happy?” Now, his wife was having a Scotch from the minibar, sipping from the bottle, looking out over Portland. Was she thinking about the wedding? If he hadn’t married her so many years ago, would she want to marry him now? The vitamin pills did not lead him to think she necessarily would. But it was his plan to pretend to be taking the pills, to pretend to be less depressed, so he said, “Shouldn’t we go to the bar upstairs and look out over the city? Or do you really want to drink that here?”

  “Both,” she said, shooting him a sly smile.

  So he flipped through the free USA Today as she stood and sipped—by mutual agreement, neither of them went into a hotel room and automatically turned on the TV—then she smiled and extended her hand. He smiled, genuinely, seeing how bright her eyes were, how lovely her hair. He grabbed the keys and they went out, walked to the elevator, and got on, pushing the button for the top floor. And as the elevator door opened, who should be standing smack in front of them but Dolph and his bride-to-be, who had decided to spend the night at the same hotel. The bride-to-be, Ruth, had been expecting her sister to emerge from the elevator. She’d called—as they learned—from the parking lot to say they’d arrived. Ruth was tedious about details, John could tell from her first minutes of gushing, as if every action needed to be explained or she might be found guilty of something. She wore a miniskirt and had not-bad legs. She was tall, with those overplucked eyebrow arches everybody had now, wearing frameless glasses and what turned out to be a rather impressive diamond engagement ring (Jen’s was modest; it had been a “dinner ring” that belonged to his grandmother). Jen, at least, had the sense to throw herself into Ruth’s arms, while he stood back as if they were being ambushed. He finally gave his brother a man hug, slapping his back, along with a knowing glance about the two squealing women, already exchanging information.

  The sister did not emerge from the next elevator, or the one after that. “Honey, she knows where we are. They’re probably freshening up. Come, let’s sit at a table,” Dolph said. The only “honey” to follow him was John, who was glad that the two women had met and gotten along so well, but really . . . or did only drag queens say “really”? Drag queens imitating actresses in old movies who had cigarette holders and fox stoles. He thought of drag queens because he was used to passing them by, when he and Jen went to their little Key West house, just down the street from the 801 where the “girls” gathered every night. Yes, they’d shriek things like “Re-ah-llllly!,” pointing their big hands with their long red fingernails at any mom-and-pop tourist who walked by in a tropical shirt. John they left alone, except for sometimes asking for a light or giving some perfectly pleasant greeting; they knew he was local.

  He made the magnanimous offer of ordering a bottle of Cristal—in their instant bonding, Jen and Ruth had run off to the ladies’ room—but Dolph said it was an unnecessary extravagance, there would be plenty of bubbly (as he called it) the next day, and he was a bourbon man himself. Yes, of course John knew what his brother drank, but on the eve of his wedding . . . John thought Dolph should simply have said yes, because the women would have liked it so much. But he was not about to order a whole bottle just for the two of them, especially not in their absence. He, too, might have a Maker’s Mark, he supposed. To him, it was indistinguishable from Irish whiskey, but if you ordered that, the bartender would pressure you to try some boutique malt, a hundred years old and packed in cow flops or something, and it was exhausting, protesting that you didn’t want it and knowing the bartender just wanted the big tip, he didn’t care if you drank liquid peat moss from Dingle Peninsula. To hell with the now-suffering Celtic Tiger and its single malts. He’d have a Maker’s, straight up. Dolph ordered a Jim Beam with water on the side.

  John almost said the obvious—that who could imagine such a coincidence?—but it seemed lame, a girly thing to say, and anyway, it wasn’t that much of a coincidence, since the Portland Most Exemplary (as Jen called it) was a big hotel not far from where the wedding would take place the next day. Why shouldn’t Dolph have thought of the same hotel? Yet he wouldn’t have thought Dolph would stay at a new, glitzy place. They were different: Dolph drank Jim Beam; John ordered Maker’s Mark. Their parents had always pointed out how dissimilar their two sons were. If they had more similarities, they probably kept the lid on them because their parents seemed to be so taken with what different people they’d given birth to. Their older sister, from whom both were estranged, had not figured in this equation at all. She was simply, to the parents as well as to the brothers, “troubled.”

  Where were Jen and Ruth? Peeing a waterfall?

  “Last night of freedom!” John smiled, raising his glass. “To your joining the ranks of the sorely oppressed.”

  “That is an idiotic toast,” Dolph said. “I know you’ve been depressed, but don’t take it out on me, and none of that sexist stuff when Ruth gets back.” He added a trickle of water to his glass, stirring with the plastic stirrer before sipping tentatively.

  This remark surprised John, it certainly did. But he thought it would be best to sidestep the whole issue, to change the subject.

  “Will you go to the lake house after your trip, or—”

  “Ruth’s son, who is a senior in high school, will have been there for a week by the time we get back. They’re in Switzerland now, on a class trip—couldn’t make the wedding is the official story, but I happen to know he’s showing up tomorrow as a big surprise. Nice kid. He’s something of an athlete. Very good values, nobody to worry about in the lake house. The father was an alcoholic, and it made both of them super-cautious.”

  “I wasn’t worried about the house.”

  “We have so little to say to each other. I know. I know how it is.”

  “What? Dolph—I have never felt we had little to talk about.”

  “I called you three times through your whole ordeal. I didn’t know what to say. Can you still fuck? That was what I wanted to ask you, and I might as well ask now, so you can’t blame it on my drinking.”

  “Yes, Dolph, I can. I’m not much inclined to, though. But since you’re reaching out for some male bonding, I think it’s sissy to take antidepressants, so I put vitamin pills in the bottle so Jen won’t find me out, and I approximate a contented human being as best I can. Not that you care about that, apparently—only whether I can fuck.”

  “I’m very relieved to hear it,” Dolph said, taking a big sip of his drink and pushing the glass away. “Okay, important business settled before the ladies get back.”

  “You know, Jen didn’t think you’d have sex without being married. So can I tell her she’s wrong?”

  “You most certainly can. My relationship with Ruth is based on sex.”

  “Dolph—is this your first drink?”

  “It is, and it’s my last. She’s always worried every man is going to boomerang her back to the kind of life she had with her husband. I’m going to prove her wrong, but she doesn’t know that yet.” Dolph looked up, but it was Ruth’s eyes he met across the room: Ruth, Jen, and some woman who was a shorter, fatter version of Ruth but otherwise looked very much like her. As they arrived at the table, John saw that Ruth’s sister was wearing cornucopia earrings. The 801 drag queens would have loved them. She was introduced as Belle. Her husband had a headache from so much driving and was lying down. “But that won’t stop me!” she said. John scanned Jen’s face, which was set rigidly in a smile. Where had they been for so long?

  An attentive waiter brought first one and then a second chair to the table, removing the salt and pepper
shakers and giving them every inch of table space he could. Jen sat in a chair next to John, which he was glad of, and Ruth sat next to Belle, who sat—stupidly—next to Dolph. It would have been a grand gesture to insist on Cristal, but he doubted Belle would know what Cristal was, and he’d have to explain himself—how would he?—to Jen, later. She was materialistic, maybe, but Korbel was good enough for her.

  He listened as they placed their drink orders: a white wine, a glass of prosecco (so, really, Jen might have appreciated champagne), and a rum Collins “with extra cherries” for guess who. Dolph still had most of his drink. John ordered another. “Please, no toasts,” Dolph said flatly. Now Jen was searching Dolph’s face—what a remark to make, sotto voce but quite audible. What could it mean?

  John paid the bill on the sly as he and Jen were leaving, but that grand gesture would probably be lost, because Dolph, Ruth, and Belle remained. Belle, it seemed, meant to make it a night of drinking. “Oh, we have reservations at eight,” Jen had said suddenly—and how good she’d remembered. She’d stood immediately, and John had sprung up beside her.