The Distinguished Guest (14 page)

Noreen stepped back from the refrigerator and looked at Linnett. “She rang? God, I didn’t hear a thing.”

“I can tell,” Linnett said.

Noreen peeled off her yellow rubber gloves and went to Lily’s room. She was barefoot, and her feet thudded heavily across the floor. In a moment, she came back. “She wants
you,” she said to Linnett.

Linnett got up and went into Lily’s room. Lily was sitting in her chair, erect and pale. The gray light from the windows fell sideways across her face, cruelly deepening every line.

“Got problems?” Linnett asked.

“It isn’t going to work,” Lily said.

“Is it the machine?” Linnett asked. “You want me to help you with it?”

“No,” Lily said. Her voice was unusually strong. “It’s
my
machine. My brain,” she said. “It’s something Parkinsonian that’s happened in
there.” She tapped her forehead.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I can’t do it, plain and simple. That . . .” She paused, mouth open. “Well, you know, I’d thought it was just the physical act, writing . . . that had
gotten too difficult for me. But, in fact, I
can
write a letter. A weird-looking letter to be sure, but a letter. If I have to. It’s too much work and I’d rather not if I
don’t have to, but I can. But I can’t do this again. This kind of writing. It’s over.”

“You couldn’t dictate it?”

“No. It was much the same as when you and I tried it together. I just can’t make my mind . . . stay on it. I want—or my
mind
wants. To go its own way. I just stop.
It’s . . . it’s Parkinson’s. I feel it. It’s the same way it is with moving. Or talking to you. Or walking with Noreen. If I’m asked to respond, if it’s give and
take, or if I’m moving beside her, it’s fine. But it’s too hard, alone. I just stop.” She shrugged and faintly smiled.

Linnett sat down on the edge of Lily’s bed, thinking. She rested her chin on her crutches. “Maybe there’s a way. Something we could do we haven’t thought of. Maybe some
way
, of talking it back and forth, and then I could, more or less, extract it. Extract the story, from our conversation.”

“My dear. No.” Lily’s lips pressed firmly together. “That would be uncomfortable, and humiliating, and nothing I even wish to try. There has to be some pleasure in it,
after all, or why bother? And what I have discovered, with your help—and I’m honestly grateful to have discovered it—is that there is no pleasure in this effort. It’s an
effort to trick my mind into working in a way it no longer seems to want to work, and I find the trick tiresome.”

“I’m so sorry,” Linnett said.

“You needn’t be.”

“I am, though. I am, because you did have a story you wanted to write, and
I
did want to help you write it.” Linnett felt suddenly swamped by pity for Lily.

Lily clearly heard it. “Now, now,” she said. “The story is writing itself anyway.
On me
, don’t you see?” She smiled faintly, as though trying to get Linnett
to see a joke. “It was a story about an old woman, fooling herself, and then having to see that, and that is what I have seen. And you
have
helped me. There is always something truly .
. . restorative, really, finally comforting, in learning what is true. In coming to the end of an illusion, a false hope. I trust I’m not beyond feeling such a thing honestly. That would be
the proverbial fate worse than death.”

“Oh Lily,” Linnett said. Tears had sprung to her eyes. She had never liked her so well as at this moment.

“It’s perfectly all right, my dear,” Lily said. “And now, I think I’m going to have my rest very early today, and let you have the afternoon off, if you’d be
so kind as to send Noreen back in.”

“Of course,” Linnett said. She picked up the tape recorder and rode her crutches to the doorway. There she stopped and turned back. She was going to say something—she wanted to
say something—that might comfort Lily, something about how much she admired her.

But Lily had leaned her head against the back of her chair and closed her eyes. She looked very much the way she had the first day Linnett had seen her, collapsed in on herself, an abandoned
puppet. Linnett went to fetch Noreen.

When she played the tape back at her house that afternoon, the tape of Lily alone with her story in her room, it was completely empty. Oh, occasionally Linnett could hear on it a clink or
rustle, the stir of the gentle rain outside Lily’s windows, or Lily herself shifting helplessly in her chair or clearing her throat. But of the tale she wanted to tell, not a word, not a
whisper.

This is the article, of course, the article Linnett should write. The old woman who winds down. Who comes to a halt. It has everything she’d have to struggle to inject into
a more ordinary story. Surprise. Pathos. A narrative shape.

She sighs and turns her monitor off. The rushing white noise of the computer itself continues. She pulls her crutches to her and rises onto them, moves to the front door. She opens it and
stands, hunched down with the crutches in her armpits. The rain is steady and sibilant. It has plashed up from the deck and silver-dotted the mesh in the lower third of the screen door.

She could make it utterly sympathetic. That wouldn’t be a betrayal, surely. She could give Lily all the dignity in the world. Make her a true heroine. As she is, Linnett thinks. As she
truly is. For a moment, she considers calling Frank. He’d encourage her. He’d tell her there was no question. No problem. What was the big deal?

What
is
the big deal? After all, Lily had wanted Linnett to write about her, she had wanted the story, she had wanted the attention or the fame or whatever would result. So what if she
hadn’t known this about herself, that her writing days were over?

And hadn’t she herself used other people’s miseries in her memoir? Doesn’t Lily’s own history as a writer give Linnett a kind of permission?

Linnett has thought of asking Lily. But what would she say? “Do you mind if I write up this terrible moment and use it to make my article more sensational?”

Linnett snorts aloud. Come on. That’s hardly the only way to look at it. It could be presented in any number of ways. She could say that it would be helpful to other Parkinson’s
sufferers to have Lily be so open about the disease. She could tell Lily that her audience, knowing so much of her personal life already, had some sort of sympathetic right or claim to this
information too.

Linnett shivers and shuts the door. She moves slowly back to the empty chair facing the fireplace. There’s a powerful, nostalgic odor of damp ashes rising from it. The room is cold, and
Linnett would like a fire, but it’s too much work, too much trouble.

Linnett doesn’t want to ask Lily for permission. She doesn’t want to ask because she’s afraid Lily will say no. As long as she doesn’t ask and Lily doesn’t say no,
she can do what she likes, write the story however she damned well pleases. And it will be a good story. A great story.

If she writes it.

The builder was still there, his red pickup truck angled against the back of the house. Alan hadn’t expected it, and he was annoyed. He’d been coming to the site in
the late afternoons recently, when he was sure to be alone. He’d gotten used to having it to himself. He liked poking around, slowly making notes, things to bring up. And he liked the moments
of solitude just before he returned to his own house. Only the day before, a drizzly afternoon, he’d stopped by at about five. He’d stood in the empty shell of the house, the rain
pelting outside, and looked down to the river. On the steely black water, a jewel glided, the iridescent striped sail of a lone windsurfer. Alan had stood and watched until the glowing colors
rounded the bend in the river and disappeared.

Now Dave hailed him from the front deck. His voice was excited, and suddenly Alan saw why. The windows must have come today, they’d filled in half the wall facing the water.

This house, like Alan and Gaby’s, was set on the riverbank, but unlike theirs, was entirely in an old sloping field, part of what had been one of the last dairy farms around here. It
commanded a wide view down the river and over its other bank, out to the open sea in the distance. The land alone had cost the Admundsens, Alan’s clients, more than three hundred thousand
dollars. The budget for the house was four hundred thousand. Even so these windows were an extravagance—a wall of them at double height facing the view, the panes all three by three. Alan
stood in the open space where the living room would be and grinned with Dave at the way the first four panels looked.

Dave spoke now in a countrified way. “Yep, she’ll do, I guess. In a pinch. Kinda cute really.” He was a short, stocky man with a full black beard.

Dave and Alan had worked together often, and Alan was familiar with the nuances of Dave’s vocabulary. It was only when he was deeply pleased that he was this inarticulate. Disapproval
sharpened his use of language. He’d once called a detail Alan had worked out “hermaphroditic,” because it used elements of two quite different styles.

But you could live with
hermaphroditic
. It was when something was “bogus,” “incredibly bogus,” or “quite extraordinarily bogus” that you had trouble
with Dave. He’d grouse about it regularly. He’d delay doing it. Occasionally he’d complain to the clients, trying to form an aesthetic alliance with them. He’d once said to
Alan that he found something he’d designed so extraordinarily bogus that he wouldn’t be held responsible for building it. “Unless you give me a direct fucking order, I’m not
going to do it.”

“Fine,” Alan said. “This is a direct fucking order then.”

Dave hadn’t spoken to him for several days after that, but he’d done what Alan told him to do, and in the end had to agree it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would
be.

They stood together now in the shell of the house. The meadow had been mowed recently. The air smelled of it, and of the raw wood around them. Alan nodded over and over, nearly giddy with
pleasure. “You’ve made me a happy man, Dave,” he said finally, and then realized, with some surprise, that this was true.

“Hell, this might even make the Admundsens happy, and that’s going some,” Dave said.

“They’ll be out this weekend they think.” Alan gestured to the windows. “Too bad you couldn’t get them all in.”

“You can see how it’s going to look, though. Not a bad design. Not bad at all.”

“Well, we’ll see how he takes it. You can never be sure with him.” Peter Admundsen had stood in the open platform of the house some weekends earlier, looked around slowly, and
made his only comment: “This all feels much smaller than I thought it would.”

Alan had reported this to Dave, and it had become the punch line in a series of dirty jokes the builders tossed back and forth as they worked.

Now Dave’s dog arrived, a clot of wet black fur with a dopey grin, zigzagging through the framing, and it became clear that that’s what Dave had been hanging around for. “Hey,
here
he is,” he said. “Been fishing, you useless sack of bones.” He looked up at Alan. “He spends all day down there and nothing to show for it. Why don’t you
get a paying job, you mutt?” He swiped at the dog affectionately.

“Anything he caught down there would have so much
E. coli
all you could use it for would be fertilizer anyway.”

“Well goddammit Alan, you know, you’re right. That’s what he must do when he catches ‘em, throws ‘em back on account of excess
E. coli
.”

They both laughed.

“He’s not so dumb,” Alan said.

Dave bent over the dog and hooked his finger under its collar. “See you next week, then,” he said, pulling the dog toward the open doorway and then releasing him. “Good
weather, Monday.”

Alan watched him let the dog into the cab of the truck, then swing his tool kit into the back. After Dave had pulled away, Alan moved slowly around inside the building, and then hiked down the
field to the river’s edge and looked back up at it. The new windows glinted in the afternoon light.

It was too big. Sorry, Peter, he thought.

Alan had wanted something smaller or more horizontal on this land, and that was what he’d originally designed. He’d done an elaborate, careful rendering of the plan to try to
persuade the Admundsens. It hadn’t worked. They had been clear about their desires. They wanted a second floor, with a long view. They wanted to lie in bed and watch the light change out over
the ocean.

It was going to be beautiful, Alan knew that, but if he lived in the little shingle house across the river, he’d be pissed—he knew that too—about having to stare across the
water at the glass palace opposite him.

Back inside again on this way to the car, he forgave himself, he forgave the Admundsens. And it could be a lot worse for the people across the water, he thought. It could be some garrison
colonial monstrosity. The Admundsens could be wanting to make a lawn of the meadow. Alan had talked them out of that, and into the ease of keeping it wild, mowing it a couple of times a summer.

He climbed the ladder to the second floor—the staircase wasn’t built yet—and stood looking out through the top of the new windows. Beyond the riverbank opposite, the ocean
darkened in the blue distance. There were several tiny sailboats moving nearly imperceptibly north into the harbor hidden behind the riverbank. The Admundsens would have what they wanted up
here.

In fact, Alan had enjoyed their decisiveness, and even the argument itself. He especially liked Peter Admundsen, a large, unflinchingly direct man. He’d used the word
spine
with
Peter once in talking about the house. A mistake. They were sitting in Alan’s office in town, with the drawings spread out in front of them, and Peter had asked a question about the flooring,
about which way it would run. Alan had indicated the direction he thought it should go in, he’d said it wanted to run in that direction, because of the spine of the house.

“Oh, come on, Alan!” Peter had said. “The
spine
. It
wants to go
. That’s bullshit.”