The Distinguished Guest (8 page)

Alan had had to wake Lily from a deep sleep for dinner, and when she’d opened her eyes, she hadn’t immediately recognized him. She’d seemed frightened. But the tenderness that
this vision of his mother had called up in him had vanished through the course of the meal. “This would be the same dining room, I presume, where the advantages of the class system were so
carefully explained? Where you learned, most of all, how to pour tea so expertly?” He could hear the strain of childish defiance in his own voice.

Lily laughed, a laugh that seemed mirthless because her face didn’t change. “Touché,” she said. “Though if I hadn’t written the book, you wouldn’t have
the ammo, would you?” She turned to Thomas. “A-man-u-en-sis,” she said. “She will write for me, since I can’t do the job myself anymore, for the most part.” And
she held up her hand, clawed and trembling. They all felt compelled to look at it.

She loves this
, Alan thought.
The drama of this illness, the attention it gets her.

When Lily is done for the day with the cereal, with 1935’s letters (and in the end she has torn up all Paul’s letters from that year with what she thinks of as hardly
a pause), she lifts the little silver bell Gaby has given her and rings for Noreen. Noreen yells back, something Lily can’t quite hear, but after a minute, she understands that she is
waiting.

She could get up by herself—at home she had to and she did—but it is a struggle, and she’d just as soon wait. Simply
to be waiting
, though, makes her aware, abruptly, of
the tension in her body, of its wish—she sees her illness this way, as having its
own
will—to turn to stone, to become utterly rigid. She is dying, she is freezing, she feels it
acutely, and stills, her eyes open. Time stops. She thinks to reach for the bell again. But doesn’t. Or call. Or move.

And then Noreen is upon her, talking, sliding the table away, and Lily feels a letting down, her thoughts are flowing again in response to Noreen’s chatter. She’s been baking, yes,
for Lily’s visitor, she says. “I had to get the cookies off the pan or they’d stick, and then I thought, well, I might as well get the last batch in. Come on now, upsy daisy, here
we go.” Her voice is singsong and noisily cheerful.

Lily walks easily on Noreen’s arm to the bathroom. Noreen settles her there and leaves. A few seconds after Lily flushes—they’ve worked this out—Noreen opens the door and
offers her arm to Lily again. As they move back into the guest room, Lily says, “It’s odd, isn’t it Noreen? how well I move with you, when by myself it’s stop-start,
stop-start. Like a robot. We should try out for the Rockettes, don’t you think, dear?”

Lily smiles at Noreen and wins Noreen’s smile back. “Not with my legs,” Noreen says.

Noreen is a solid, plain woman. A no-color woman, Lily thinks. Dishwater hair she has permed so fiercely it looks like the insubstantial dustballs that move under furniture. Grayish, troubled
skin visible under her thick makeup, eyes whose color Lily couldn’t tell you, though they’re fringed with electric-blue mascara. She wears jeans and sleeveless blouses to work in,
sometimes shorts on a hot day. Her flesh is white and soft-looking. But her smile animates her briefly, as it does now.

Once Lily has changed, she sits back in her chair to let Noreen do her makeup. She likes just foundation, a little blush, lipstick, and a touch of pencil to fill in her dark brows. “I feel
more authoritative with darker eyebrows,” she’s told Noreen.

Noreen is smoothing foundation on Lily, and the old woman turns her face greedily to receive the loving stroke. “In my day, you know Noreen,” she is saying, “you were thought
of as cheap if you wore even the amount of makeup you’re putting on me now.” Noreen makes an agreeable noise. “Really until the sixties, it was just lipstick and perhaps a little
eyebrow pencil or mascara. But
rouge
! Unheard of except for ladies of the night. Or actresses. And eyeliner, no, no, no!”

Lily can feel the words trembling almost out of control in her throat, and her mind is rushing too, remembering that time. Noreen’s tongue is protruding slightly in a wet curve between her
lips as she lightly pencils in Lily’s eyebrows. She’s frowning, perhaps not really listening. “When the sixties arrived and my girls began to ring their eyes in black, I felt a
band of gypsies had moved in with me. Who were these slatternly creatures?”

Lily rolls on, the words tumbling out, explaining her misjudgments of people in church based on their makeup, her dawning awareness that everything was changing in this way too. “Well,
why not? I finally thought. The whole world seemed to be falling apart, why shouldn’t it be that young girls chose to look like prostitutes? That they began to wear dresses so short you were
meant to see their underpants? Why shouldn’t there be a thing known as
hot pants
? Why not?” (The bitterness in her voice comes from her quick memory-glimpse of Paul at this
stage, his turning away from their life together—part of this sea-change. Now she clears her throat and tries to move her thoughts away from him. She has put this behind her long since, long
since.)

“Do you know, Noreen, it was actually unthinkable, until the sixties, that any woman would wear blue jeans, or even slacks, to go downtown? Or even on a busy street? Much less those neon
pajamas the women around here wear!” This is a joke Lily has made to Noreen before about the bright-colored exercise suits which the summer people wear around town. Lily is not above an
appeal to class divisions, though she would never allow herself to do anything similar based on race. “How things have changed, wouldn’t you say? We were so ruled, so constricted. And
yet there was a kind of greater attractiveness to life generally then, and one can’t finally say, I think, whether one way is better than the other.”

Noreen is nodding, has been nodding and offering an occasional comment. Now she lifts Lily’s chin. “Hold your mouth still a minute, dear. That’s a girl,” she says.
Carefully she applies Lily’s lipstick.

When Lily stands before the mirror, she’s pleased. She looks erect and imposing, she thinks. She’s wearing a loose, soft cotton tunic of a very light green with three-quarter
sleeves. Her pants are of the same fabric, comfortable. Around her neck are the small gold beads which were her mother’s. Earlier this morning, Noreen did her hair, pulling it back into the
bun on her neck, and the makeup makes her look cared for and alert. She rests her trembling hands on her canes and calls gaily to Noreen, “Onward! Forward, Noreen. To the living
room!”

Noreen is grinning as she takes Lily’s arm. She’s as pleased with her charge as a little girl with a carefully dressed and coiffed doll. Lily
is
her doll, in a sense. She
looks, Noreen thinks, like a sweet little old lady, even though she’s clearly having a bad day, jolting from within as though an electric shock were continually passing through her bones.

She settles Lily in a chair, then pushes the coffee table and the other chair around as Lily directs her to. Lily says she’s to offer wine as well as coffee and tea, she’s to bring
the cookies over now, and once things have settled down with her visitor, she can sit on the deck and relax, or go shopping if she needs to.

As Noreen is assembling the tray in the kitchen, she looks over at Lily in the chair on the other side of the room. The sun is lying across the old woman’s hands, and they have turned up,
as if to grab it. Her canes rest against the chair, her face is blank and open and without intelligence.

Then she sees that Noreen is watching her. Something shifts inside, some chemical change occurs, and she cries out with sudden animation in her rushed, soft voice, “I say bring on the
dancing girl, Noreen! Let’s see what we shall make of Miss Linnett Baird.”

Linnett, actually, had proposed the terms. She wanted to do a long article. She preferred, she’d written Lily, essentially to hang around with a subject for a few weeks
rather than do extensive interviews. But she knew this could be burdensome and wondered if there was some service—secretarial perhaps? culinary? chauffeurial? was there such a word as
chauffeurial?—she could perform for Lily to make it seem less so. And thank God Lily had chosen secretarial. Because, as it turned out, Linnett was in a cast. She had fallen while she was
jogging two weeks earlier.

It was very early in the morning, and she was groggy and angry, and therefore not paying attention to where she was putting her feet. There was a long grassy hill sloping down to the dirt track
that ran around the reservoir near her house. She was running down this hill, her body tilted back against its pull, her hands holding her breasts against the jolting of her descent, when her foot
caught in a hole, a deep animal hole. She heard the sound of the bone breaking just as she began to fall.

She was angry because she’d slept with a man she hadn’t intended to sleep with and certainly didn’t want in her life. She’d drunk a little too much—Linnett often
drank a little too much—and it had just happened. This is how she would describe it later to her friend, Natalie, who came to pick her up at the hospital.
It just happened
. And then
she’d fallen asleep without asking him to leave, so that when she woke, he was there, taking up well more than half the bed, lying on his back, drawing long, stentorian gasps of air.
She’d lain and looked at him for perhaps a minute, flooded by shadowed images of their rough, unloving lovemaking the night before. There was a whitish fleck suspended in one of his nostrils
which fluttered with his every exhalation.

She swung herself slowly and carefully out of the bed, not wanting to wake him. As she pulled on her running clothes and splashed her face with water, she was aware of a rising self-disgust. And
the anger. With satisfaction, she saw how puffy her face looked this morning, how unattractive she was. “Not only is he probably in your life,” she said to her reflection,
“he’s in your
bed
.” And then she laughed silently, quickly, at her perverse priorities. “Jerk,” she said to her own face.

Ten minutes or so later, as she sat holding her ankle on the cool wet grass, with involuntary tears starting down her face, she had the distant, satisfying thought that at least now she would
not have to go home and wake him, or exchange pleasantries over breakfast, or wait for him to leave so that she could begin to work. In her mind’s eye, she emptied the three rooms of her
little house, she saw only the messy sprawl of her minimal possessions waiting for her in the still, dusty sunlight, she saw her bed a blank tangle of rumpled sheets.

And it was true that when Natalie dropped her off at the house three hours later and she eased up the steps and into the kitchen, he was gone. He’d left a note on her pillow in
bed—it crunched under her head as she flopped down. She picked it up, held it high away from her face to read it. “Where’d you go?” it said. “I’ll call you
later.” She groaned aloud. She rocked her head slowly back and forth on the pillow. Her eyes swung around the room, scoured the tongue-in-groove boards of the old ceiling, the cracked
glazing, curling away from the casement windows, the array of pictures tacked to the painted, wood walls: John Lennon curled naked around Yoko Ono, Baryshnikov in mid-leap, Linnett herself in
another incarnation—her hair permed into an Afro, her baby niece on her hip—and photographs of various people she’d interviewed. She was dizzy from medication, tired, and slightly
hung over. She fell quickly into a deep sleep.

The cast ran from mid-calf to her toes. When she woke up, still groggy from the pain pills she’d taken, she lay in bed and thought through the next six weeks in her life, in particular the
arrangement she’d made with Lily Maynard. Briefly she hesitated about it. But too much was already in place. She’d gotten an expense advance from
The New Yorker
. She’d
rented a little house on an estate a few miles down the road from where Lily was staying. There was no reason, really, not to go ahead with it. She’d be slower getting around, there’d
be a certain awkwardness. There wouldn’t be the long walks she’d imagined with Lily Maynard, and she’d have to ask for her patience in certain situations. But it wasn’t as
though she’d need to be waited on, and she could certainly still perform the service she’d arranged to perform for Lily.

No, all this would mean was that she’d have to make a few accommodations. She’d need a backpack or something like it to carry stuff around in. And she wouldn’t be able to
manage her stick shift for the duration, clearly. Who did she know who had an automatic she could trade for her car?

She got up and made some coffee. While it was brewing, she called her ex-husband at the university.

“Baird here,” he said, as though he were still in a newsroom somewhere.

“Baird here too,” she answered.

There was a pause. “Can I call you back?” he said neutrally. “I’m with a student.”

Some gorgeous young thing, she could tell. “Sure,” she said. “Or how ’bout you stop by for a beer this
P
.
M
. when
you’re done?”

“Around five-thirty?”

“Sounds good to me,” she said.

“See you then,” he said, and hung up.

By the time his car pulled up outside, Linnett had made her bed and done some business telephoning. She’d taken a sponge bath and washed her hair. She’d chopped a salsa and dumped
some nacho chips in a bowl. Now she was sitting on her sagging porch couch with a beer in her hand, her legs propped up on the railing. She’d taken a Percocet about half an hour earlier, and
had moved into a territory of vague goodwill toward the world.

“Hey,” he said, climbing the stairs. “Hey, are you wearing one go-go boot or have you broken your leg?” He had on his summertime teaching uniform—a baggy seersucker
jacket, a striped shirt, chinos, and white tennis shoes. No socks. He was a large balding man, just slightly overweight.

“Ankle,” she corrected. “But I’m feeling no pain.”

He came over and tapped on the cast, gingerly. “When? How?”