The Accomplished Guest: Stories

by Ann Beattie

  Charlotte had noticed none of this. Her eyes were riveted on the scene projected in front of her. The light display was at its apogee, so now all it could do was gradually disappear. She didn’t look her age, Gerald thought. Still, she was hardly young. What must he look like, nearly ten years older? (“Why do you always say ten years? You are nine years and one day older,” she used to say irately.) Had Ed Mitchum propositioned his wife?

  “That was amazing,” she said when the light show was over. “The perfect evening after all. Find me a cab and send me home now, will you?”

  “We could go to the Warwick and have a Perrier, then I could put you in a cab,” he said.

  “No. Just the cab, please.”

  It was now incumbent upon him to find her a cab, on a crowded, blocked-off Fifth Avenue that looked like a double-page spread in Where’s Waldo? It would be next to impossible, though he supposed that if they returned to Sixth—the Avenue of the Americas, as no one called it—they might join the line and get a cab at the Hilton, should they fail to find one sooner. He discovered, though, that they could not retrace their steps. Because of new blockades, they’d need to walk uptown until they found an open cross street.

  She moved where he steered her, less conscious of puddles than he. Stupid to have worn his Belgian loafers when he’d known what a ghastly night it was going to be. Again, he clasped her hand with no resistance. Oh, the feel of that young woman’s skin at the party! He didn’t even know her name. Rudely, Brenda had said only what relationship the woman was to her: her goddaughter.

  They got a cab almost immediately. That was what you had to love about New York: It always defeated your expectations. The driver was letting out someone at the corner of Fifty-third and Sixth who smiled and said, “All yours,” leaving the door open. “Goodbye!” Gerald said as Charlotte dove into the back. She was certainly agile. As slippery as a fish. She was lucky that a boot dangling from her foot didn’t come off entirely. When last he saw her, she was simultaneously pulling the boot back on and closing the cab door.

  * * *

  He stood on the corner. All the talk around him that wasn’t flirtatious or drunken, or flirtatious and drunken, was not about the tree but about the fourteen people dead and more wounded in California: Yet again, helpless people had been shot by crazies who were either terrorists or disgruntled, well-armed workers. One man passing by knew they were terrorists. “How stupid do you have to be not to know that?” he asked his buddy. Gerald thought he heard someone else say that a baby had been left behind by the shooters. He could imagine Obama’s next press conference. Gerald once passed up an exciting job in California because Charlotte wanted to stay on the East Coast. Where had she come from tonight, and where was she returning to? He had no idea. He hoped—he assumed—she’d be fine and not too embarrassed the next day. In any case, the Owl—what a nickname!—could fix her up.

  Of all people, Todd Browne appeared. “Happy to see you again. Sorry we didn’t get to talk earlier,” he said, extending his hand. “I have an aversion to Sarah Mitchum. Every time I was going to come over, she seemed to be there.”

  “Many people feel that way. I understand,” Gerald said, adding, “Lovely party. I was just looking at the tree. You really must see it.”

  “I think they turn it off at eleven-thirty,” Todd said, looking at his watch. “My driver’s around the corner. Can I give you a ride? I was having a quick drink with a client. Imagine running into two people I know on the same corner, on the same night.” He turned his palm outward to indicate that Gerald should precede him to the waiting car. What was this—some moment in a Woody Allen film? Would the car be a chariot? “Awful about what happened today,” Todd said. “My husband had to go back to the office.” Were the two things connected? Todd’s meaningful look suggested that they were. “Apparently both of the killers were shot dead.”

  “Someone was saying there might have been a third person,” Gerald replied.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t hear that,” Todd said. “In any case,” he added, then didn’t finish his sentence.

  The driver was leaning against the car, a shiny black Volvo SUV, smoking. Seeing Todd, he reacted like a marionette being lifted, rushing to open the back door. Todd climbed in after Gerald. Neither spoke as the car pulled into traffic. What if it’s not just my ex-wife? Gerald wondered. What if I can never think of anything to say to anyone ever again? It was really unfair of Charlotte to say that he’d always been an ass. “Your address?” Todd asked. Gerald told him, speaking loudly enough that it didn’t have to be repeated to the driver. Except for Todd remarking that the weather was supposed to get colder the next day, they said nothing else until they got to his building. The ride was a quick one because they made every green light.

  The driver hopped out so fast at the curb that Gerald didn’t even have to figure out how the door opened. “I appreciate the lift, Todd,” he said.

  “Of course. My pleasure,” Todd said, sliding over to take up more of the seat. From out of nowhere, Alonzo had appeared. He was holding his big umbrella over his head and Gerald’s. “I know I probably shouldn’t say this, but my parents pointed you out to me years ago, in one clothing ad or another,” Todd said. “I remember your Breitling ad. That’s what I wear now, so I wonder if you influenced my life more than I realized. I’m always flustered when I meet a celebrity.”

  “Hardly that,” Gerald said, reaching in to shake Todd’s hand. Then the door closed. The SUV pulled away.

  “Welcome back,” Alonzo said.

  “Quite a night,” Gerald replied, walking toward the front door. He was tired. Tired and still more than a little perplexed.

  “It’s another incident that gives foreigners a bad name,” Alonzo said. “That’s what Americans think—that foreigners are the problem. More and more people don’t want to let them in.”

  “Troubling,” Gerald said. In the short walk to the door, he’d stepped in a puddle. Now his shoes were sopping wet.

  In the lobby, Alonzo closed the dripping umbrella and shook it mightily. He stood staring into the street rather than at Gerald. “And I was born in the United States. I was my mother’s first son, born in Buffalo, New York, on her birthday, April eleventh, 1950. Right there, in Buffalo.”

  Gerald nodded. “No one has said anything unkind or prejudicial to you, Alonzo, I hope,” he said. It had been a night of slow thinking and near-paralysis with words, yet he’d managed this, which was essentially what he’d intended to say.

  “Me, somebody else, an African, a Muslim, an Englishman who talks with a funny accent—people have their thoughts, whether they say what they’re thinking or not.”

  “I suppose that’s so. We just have to hope that at least some of them are intelligent and not quick to judge. That they don’t act on their baser instincts, I mean.”

  “You’re not that kind of person at all,” Alonzo said. “But this country? Even our allies are coming to think we’re crazy, with all this shooting! They’re losing heart that we’ll ever change, I think. I wouldn’t say this to anyone but you,” he added, gesturing to the empty space around them: the marble walls, the chandelier.

  Gerald leaned forward to hear what Alonzo was about to say, a sick feeling in his stomach. But Alonzo said nothing; he’d already spoken. Relieved, he nodded, vehemently agreeing with Alonzo. Oddly, he found himself lingering. He said, “You know, tonight was one hell of a night. My ex-wife was at the party. Not even at the party but at the building where the party was given, and do you know what she did? She jumped out from behind a Christmas tree.”

  “What?” Alonzo said.

  “Yes, she did. As a sort of joke. I mean, what else could it have been? To be fair, I went to the party knowing that she might be there, but what sort of a fellow would I be if, after thirty-some years, I was too afraid to be in a room with my ex-wife? That would be ridiculous.”

  “I don’t think I would have gone,” Alonzo said.

  “No? Do you have an ex-wife?
”

  “You don’t know, because I never talk about her, and I still wear my wedding ring.” He took off a glove and held out his hand. Gerald had seen the silver band before. He wore it on his right hand, not his left, but since some European men did that, Gerald had assumed it indicated that he was married.

  “She died eighteen years ago. The same year you moved into the building. She told me, ‘That man’s a model,’ and I didn’t know what she meant. But then she showed me your picture in Esquire. She did! She recognized you from your picture. It was you!”

  “Oh, a lot of people seem to have seen that ad. I think the Jaguar attracted their attention.”

  “Another one was in The New York Times Magazine. The one where you’re standing by a pool table.”

  “Yes. I remember that.”

  The lobby was not yet decorated, though sometime that evening a Christmas tree wrapped in netting had been brought in. Tall and slim in its binding, it lay beside the reception desk. No one staffed the desk at night. When Alonzo went off duty, the building was protected by an alarm system that sometimes went off for no reason. The residents had had many meetings about what should be done, but of course no one wanted to pay for a night person. Alonzo had been given more money to stay an hour later, and the sensors on the alarm system had been tinkered with so that it wouldn’t malfunction. Or, in theory, it wouldn’t. Gerald noticed that the elevator was descending. Someone was coming down, so it was a good time to take his leave. He felt chilled and exhausted—just what he’d tried to avoid all day by being sensible and staying inside.

  He said, “I’m sorry about your wife. She came here, and we apparently saw each other a time or two?”

  “That’s right. She was going to work at the dry cleaner owned by the French people. We moved out of Washington Heights to be closer to my job. Then she got sick. She got too sick to even read a magazine. They tried everything. They sent her to Mount Sinai, but she died.”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “Imagine my not even knowing that.”

  “I’m a professional. I know not to talk about my family or things like that.”

  “Of course,” Gerald said, though he said it only to agree. He didn’t know what to say. Inequality was a problem. Keeping one’s distance wasn’t always a good thing. Any sensible person knew that. “We’re friends, and if there’s anything you’d like to discuss, I’m always ready to listen,” he said.

  “I appreciate that,” Alonzo said.

  The elevator doors began to open.

  “Yes, of course. Let’s talk more tomorrow,” he said. By then he hoped to have sorted out his feelings about seeing his ex-wife. He didn’t think he’d say anything to Timothy. He’d let her do that, if she was so inclined, and let whatever story she told remain uncontested.

  “Al, I am really, really stressed,” a teenage girl said, rushing up to Alonzo, holding an iPhone in one hand and a leash attached to a little white dog in the other. “If you could pretty pretty please take Duckie for a walk, I would totally love you forever.”

  She was wearing an enormous T-shirt over pink leggings. A Celtic cross on an obviously fake gold necklace hung between her breasts, her nipples protruding underneath the shirt. Her toenails were bright red—as smooth and shiny as the surface of that Jaguar. She was standing there in December, barefoot, her hair messily gathered in a sparkly hair clip, the little dog staring up at her, panting. As Alonzo reached for the leash, she heaved a dramatic sigh of relief and pulled some crumpled money out of her waistband. She pressed it into his hand, pirouetted, and raced back to the elevator, her ponytail bouncing.

  “His name is Alonzo, not Al,” Gerald called after her.

  “Pardon?” she said, turning as the elevator doors opened.

  “Alonzo,” he repeated.

  “Whatever,” she said. “You need me to hold the elevator?”

  “No,” he said decisively. “No, thank you.”

  She kept her back turned even after she’d stepped inside. She was heading to the thirty-fifth floor, the penthouse—she was the Baileys’ niece, who’d come to live with them when she was thrown out of private school in D.C. He hadn’t seen her in months. He’d assumed she’d left.

  Outside, Alonzo stood under the umbrella. He turned right and headed toward the nearest tree box, which wasn’t so near. Seen through the lobby’s windows, he seemed to grow smaller quickly, the way people did if you watched them walk away.

  For a while, Gerald waited for the doorman to return. He felt as though their conversation had not really concluded when the girl had so rudely interrupted. But, as time passed, he realized that Alonzo must be taking the little dog for a longer walk. It was a kind thing to do, not to punish the dog because its owner was a mindless young fool.

  How had he and Alonzo’s wife met? he wondered as he summoned the elevator. Had they exchanged pleasantries? Why had none of this ever come up in all these years? He was incurious—an accusation that Charlotte had leveled at him repeatedly, though what hadn’t she accused him of? Well, he supposed she’d never accused him of not loving her. She hadn’t been that irrational. Nor had she said that she’d stopped loving him, even when she’d become so shrill and angry under the tutelage of whatever Owl she’d seen back in the day—just that he was impossible, uptight, set in his ways, a rich, self-satisfied snob. But she’d been delighted that he was rich. It was one of the reasons she’d married him. He shook his head over the illogic of that, unaware that he was doing it until he caught sight of his reflection in the mirrored wall of the elevator, and it was as he’d thought: He’d grown old.

  THE ASTONISHED WOODCHOPPER

  John decided to leave for the wedding on Thursday night in order to avoid the Friday traffic. They’d encounter it on their return, no way around that, with thousands of cars on I-95 regardless of the high price of gas.

  John’s brother, Randolph, was remarrying after seven years living on his own at the family summer house, which absolutely no one was pressuring him to vacate, as none of the children who’d inherited it wanted to sell it or inhabit it, and they weren’t contentious people, anyway. But in his telephone call to John on John’s April Fool’s birthday, Dolph had told him that he’d been seeing a woman for a year—not a local woman; a journalist, who traveled—who lived twenty minutes from the lake house. Ruth had a son in boarding school in Massachusetts, her husband had died prematurely from wounds he’d gotten in Vietnam, and she was fifty-four, which made her several years older than Dolph. John was surprised by the information: His wife had convinced him that his brother was a real loner, not interested in women because they were too dangerous. He himself knew his brother to be shy, inordinately bitter about the breakup of his marriage, and he’d come to agree with Jen. No one in the family except—it turned out—their daughter, Bee, had ever met Ruth, who had gone with Dolph to visit Bee when she started at Harvard. Apparently, Ruth had not only recommended several books Bee might like, but had taken them, after dinner at an Indian restaurant (Dolph?!), to the Harvard Book Store, where she was able to purchase two books as gifts for Bee. At the end of her freshman year, Bee had moved in with her boyfriend in Somerville, behind Porter Square. In the fall she would start her second year of college. Bee gave Ruth a thumbs-up: intelligent, restless in a good way, cryptic in a funny way, and totally devoted to Dolph. (This devotion, too, she might have said, was “in a good way”—one would not want “in a funny way”; since childhood, Bee had offered such elaborations. A third-grade teacher who had urged her to always be specific had really made an impression on his daughter.)

  Bee and her boyfriend, George, would be flying to Portland—these kids: too lazy to drive!—where John and Jen would pick them up for the drive north to the wedding. But tonight John and Jen would be in a Portland hotel; they’d check out the good used bookstores and some antique stores, then have dinner at one of Jen’s favorite restaurants, Back Bay Grill. Maybe there would be something good at the movies. Or some music. In any case, he didn�
�t want to fight Friday-morning traffic heading north, then Saturday-night traffic returning to Boston. The wedding would be at two o’clock on Friday. The couple planned to honeymoon in Virgin Gorda. Dolph would board up the lake house during the winter and move in to his new wife’s house. They would go out on weekends to make sure it was okay. In retrospect, Dolph had told him more about the family house than about his fiancée.

  “I find it hard to believe Dolph would have sex outside of marriage,” Jen said. “He’s such a prude.”

  “Well, we don’t know that they have had sex,” John said. “Let’s try to share one suitcase, and I’ll put our wedding things in a garment bag and lay them flat in the trunk. Don’t pack your big jar of wrinkle cream.”

  A joke: Jen did not use wrinkle cream. She cleaned her face with Neutrogena and used Kiehl’s moisturizer.

  “Don’t pack extra jockstraps,” she said, disappearing into their bedroom.

  A joke: He’d had testicular cancer and—after the double orchiectomy—most certainly did not need a jockstrap. Nor did he play tennis anymore. When he’d stopped smoking, he’d gained fifteen pounds, which showed in his face and in his ass, of all embarrassing things.

  “Who would go all the way to Virgin Gorda and not have had sex?” she called. He could hear the closet door sliding back.

  “What do you mean? No virgins in Virgin Gorda, because it would be too ironic?”

  He stood watching his wife push hangers aside, looking perplexed and preoccupied. This August, they would be married twenty-four years. His wife’s first marriage, to a harmonica player, had “ended in divorce,” as the New York Times wedding column would say. Jen was John’s only wife, though he’d lived with two women, each for about six or seven years, and the last one he’d had to pay to go away. Actually, his father had paid her to go: a not insignificant amount of money. His father had had a lawyer draw up an agreement. The woman had brought a fountain pen to the lawyer’s office and had—as the lawyer told him—deliberately made a big splotch where she was to sign, so that the contract had to be redone. Violet was an English girl he’d met at a photography workshop in Santa Fe when he’d been under the delusion that he might change careers and become a photographer. In addition to money, she’d also gotten the Edward Curtis. The earlier girlfriend’s name had been Bonnie. She had become adamant about a wedding ring and a baby, though not necessarily in that order. He had opted instead for a sports car and a cat. A kitten, actually, an abandoned kitten that showed up one night at his back door, though he’d soon realized he was allergic to it and had taken it to the SPCA when he’d moved from Michigan. Things had worked out so that not only was there no baby, but any lunatic could have adopted the cat. His sports car had broken down as cosmic punishment, no doubt. He’d had to spend three days in Ohio, on the way back to his parents’ house in Boston, getting it fixed. He remembered those frustrating days in a motel much more distinctly than he remembered Bonnie.