The Accomplished Guest: Stories

by Ann Beattie

  “They’re going to their room! That’s their ‘dinner reservation,’ ” Belle joked.

  He couldn’t wait to be out of there, away from the conversation about Dolph replacing pipes in the lake house. And something about a guy who reached in the woodpile and was bitten by a snake, Dolph having to get him in the truck and race him to the hospital, and people in the emergency room seeming to think he should just wait his turn . . . Crazy. But why would there have been a woodpile when the chimney had needed to be fixed for years—rebuilt, really—and they couldn’t light a fire? Dolph seemed to be on very good terms with the man who’d gotten the snakebite, but all the information about how inefficient the emergency room was . . . and all the while John could have been checking his watch secretly, if he’d even remembered their reservation. Which was a reservation to eat dinner. During which he planned to drink a very good bottle of wine with his wife.

  Except that no sooner had they been seated—a lovely table in the front of the restaurant, and to his surprise, the waitress remembered them from the one dinner they’d had there the year before—than Jen took a call during which she looked more and more concerned. At one point, while he was considering the wine list and thinking about a California zinfandel versus the more usual pinot noir, she rolled her eyes at him. Those times she even answered her phone in a restaurant, she always told whoever was calling that she was eating and would call back later, but she was not doing that, nor did she respond when he held up the wine list and pointed to the zinfandel. In fact, it looked like she was about to cry. “I don’t understand,” she said quietly. It wasn’t Bee; this was not the way conversations went with Bee. Something pertaining to Jen’s mother? One of her clients? He meant to order the zinfandel, but the waitress had good manners and was staying away from the table while Jen hunched over her phone. Then, after many murmurings from which he could make out only a few words or phrases, Jen said something he could not hear at all and flipped the phone shut. “George turns out to be a total beast. He’s left her a note; he’s taken off even though he got that summer job in the chemistry lab. He left her a joint and—this is ironic—a bottle of wine, saying she should lighten up and then wise up, I think that was what she said: that she needed to wise up and realize she needed to get her act together, but that whether she did or not, he’d be in California with his former girlfriend. She thought he’d be getting on the plane with her tomorrow—how idiotic, anyway, that they were flying—and she’s devastated. A joint and a bottle of wine, and he goes back to his girlfriend and sticks her with the rent and his cat and breaks her heart without even a conversation?”

  John raised a finger and, when the waitress came quickly to the table, ordered the pinot noir. “Good decision,” she said, nodding, and went away. She couldn’t have been much older than their daughter—their brilliant daughter who had chosen not so brilliantly her first great love. From this vantage point, though, he thought he would advise smoking the joint and drinking the wine.

  He took Jen’s hand and shook his head ruefully. Maybe, just maybe, Jen would recover after a glass of wine. He withdrew his hand. “Is she still coming?” he asked.

  “Yes, but John, she’s in a very bad way. She said horrible things about herself that are completely untrue. Go outside and call her.” She reached in her purse and brought out the phone. “She doesn’t want to upset you, because of everything, you know, but you’re not going to be that upset, are you? Call her. Say something to console her.”

  He crossed paths with the waitress, carrying two enormous stemmed, bowl-shaped glasses to their table. The pinot noir was from a vineyard they’d toured. It was sure to be excellent. But he continued out the door into the humid evening. Except for the restaurant, it wasn’t an interesting neighborhood. Still, he liked the old architecture, the easy parking. He opened the phone and looked at it, looked at someone just around the corner having trouble parallel-parking, felt the urge to go to their car and do it for them—such a good guy; such a humanitarian. He held the phone to his ear but did not make the call. It was even possible he might not get found out. That Bee would show up the next day, or call again, and his not talking to her wouldn’t even be a subject of conversation. He had some curiosity about how cheap the wine was that George had left her. Some dreadful bottle from Trader Joe’s, or had it been a meaningful bottle of wine? A lovely, fresh Fleurie? The mere name danced on your tongue. A crisp Sancerre? Two very pretty young women got out of their now-parked car, the wheels too far from the curb, closed their doors, and teetered in the opposite direction in their high heels.

  Into the phone, he said, “Now, follow Daddy’s advice and sip your wine until you feel better, then light the joint and feel even better, but leave some of the wine until later, in case you wake up in the middle of the night. Tomorrow you’ll alight from the plane and still be our princess, and your mother will say vile things about men she thought she’d forgotten until now, and your daddy will write you a big check for the summer’s rent but make it very clear that you can always come home, you’re always welcome, you’re the point of everything, the reason for living . . . because by then Daddy will have had a good meal and a bottle of wine and escaped his strange brother and all the goings-on that don’t really matter because everything is just a little bit too contrived, isn’t it? A little too superficial, symbolic in a way that assures others, maybe, but not Daddy.” He shut the phone, dropped it in his pocket, and went back into the restaurant, where two glasses of wine had been poured. His wife looked up expectantly.

  “She’s decided that not only can she live through it, she’s glad she found out now how unstable he is. She was already having a glass of wine.”

  “Really?” Jen said. “But even that’s awfully odd, don’t you think?”

  “We’ve forgotten what it’s like to be nineteen. Let’s have a sip of wine and no toast, in honor of my brother.”

  Jen giggled. She said, “You have to wonder what would make someone say a thing like that.”

  Ah, his dear wife had ventured out onto the first crossing stone, stepped onto the erratic path that passed through the river of life’s confusion. There would be another stone, an easy distance away, the one referred to earlier in the evening, then the even more reassuring, flat, “Isn’t the wine good?” stepping-stone, and soon enough she’d have arrived at the final, non sequitur stone, then she’d scurry up the bank into his arms.

  She ordered salmon. He ordered steak. Reassured by the pretty, thin young waitress (who probably lived on crackers and water with lemon) that they had chosen well, they sank a bit deeper into the comfortable seats. The smell of fresh flowers reminded him of inhaling the soap earlier, his seconds of respite. He broke off a bit of bread and breathed in its yeasty aroma; he pushed the point of his knife into some sunflower-yellow butter, well tempered, and smeared it over the bread’s pocked surface. Even the touch of the wine stem in his fingers was lovely, let alone what the glass contained. Which, as he swirled and sipped, would be reassuring. Because really: What could he say to his daughter, who believed her life to be over? That she should see a doctor and get medicine that would alter her mood and, if that worked, dump it out and imitate her improved behavior? She was at Harvard. She would be fine. Her best friend was at BU. Of course Bee would call her, and she would come, like the Red Cross nurse. It would all be fine, a lot of talk trashing men, but what else was new? Daddy was exempt.

  * * *

  Bee arrived in Portland almost on schedule and called with a shaky yet brave voice: Yes, the wheels were really on the ground.

  They drove to get her. Bee was standing outside the terminal in a dropped-waist Laura Ashley dress and bronze T-strap heels, carrying a little cardigan. She didn’t even cry when Jen threw herself into her daughter’s arms. In fact, she looked beseechingly over her mother’s shoulder at her father, who stepped forward and clasped her hands once Jen had relinquished her. “We won’t talk about it unless you do,” he said emphatically, offering Bee what he
hoped was a real possibility, a clue about how he’d like her to behave.

  It worked. On the way to the wedding they talked about Cambridge, about the many bookstores and newsstands that used to be there when they were young, along with record stores—records!—and the wonderful Reading International that had such amazing foreign publications, and literary magazines, and of course there had been the ice-cream store, where the sundaes dripped fudge sauce onto a little plastic tray and the sauce slipped all around when you tried to scoop it up. They talked about the family trip they’d taken to Tortola the year Bee started high school, the snorkeling off of Frenchmans Cay, the Painkillers they’d drunk at Pusser’s, letting Bee sip from their straws every now and then because nobody at the bar really wanted to notice she was only a girl. And those Brits who fell into the water trying to get into their dinghy. It still brought a laugh. But no, they hadn’t taken the boat to Virgin Gorda, though they’d known there was a cave you could snorkel through; they’d just been too lazy, lying in hammocks, snorkeling in the late afternoon, riding around in their Mini Moke.

  “Turn left onto route 302,” the voice on the GPS said, and Jen—who’d felt like driving, she’d simply felt like driving—turned the Lexus onto the road and listened to “arriving at destination in five hundred yards,” just as they all did, each, no doubt, having a different idea of what constituted five hundred yards. Bee sat in the backseat, the way she had as a child. In his Bilzerian suit, John sat more upright than usual, which was the way he responded to a perfectly tailored suit and a tie firmly tied. Jen was wearing her blue dress, which did indeed look lovely. She’d brought her pearl earrings he’d bought her in Paris years ago; she’d cleaned her rings before leaving the house, so they sparkled in the late-morning sunlight. “Arriving at destination on left,” the GPS informed them, and Jen turned it off.

  At the church there was a jumble of cars, and the minister stood leaning into a driver’s window, then almost ran to the next car to poke his head in that window. They couldn’t hear, with the windows up . . . something about parking elsewhere? But why was the minister himself running around like a headless chicken? A woman in a car exiting the grassy parking lot beside the church—not someone they knew—hollered to someone in a sports car, “Ruth fell in the shower and broke her ribs. It’s horrible! Just horrible! She fell.”

  Through the windshield, John saw Belle, in a pink caftan and a picture-brim hat, running from the church with a huge vase of flowers. The minister hollered for Belle to wait for him—he was going to perform the ceremony at the hotel, the very hotel they’d just come from, but no one was invited, Ruth was in terrible pain, she had a concussion, it was all terrible, but he was needed to perform the ceremony anyway. “Who can pick up Ruth’s son?” another man was asking, going from car to car. A line of cars sat empty, many of the drivers and passengers having hopped out to see what was the matter. People in suits and dresses threw their arms around each other and talked, and a small dog ran in circles on the church lawn.

  Right, right: Ruth’s son had flown back as a surprise for his mother, but he’d been in flight when her accident happened, and of course Dolph could not pick the boy up at the airport because he would be getting married, and the minister could not, and the lady in the purple dress with the tawny scarf could not because she didn’t know where the Portland airport was. In any case, why was everyone so sure a transatlantic flight would land on time? But the boy did not have a cell phone, no one could leave a message so he would get it when the plane landed. Who was supposed to pick him up? Couldn’t that person be located—or was that person en route to the airport, unaware of the situation? You kept hearing that everyone on earth had a cell phone, but none of these young people did. Shrieking at another woman, holding yet another, taller vase of flowers, Belle was saying that no matter what, she was not going to miss her sister’s wedding; someone else called out to the minister to ask why the wedding couldn’t be delayed until later in the day. He replied that he was certainly available, would do everything possible to still serve (as he put it), but as he understood it, Ruth and Randolph were awaiting his immediate presence. Some man did, at least, have Dolph on the phone. People cleared the way for Dolph’s brother—Belle had screamed that was who John was—so he walked toward a man holding out a cell phone—truth was, he always called his brother’s landline, he wouldn’t have known how to contact him by cell. He thanked the man and tried to appear not as crazed and unreasonable as the other people, in or out of cars, standing around in suits and newly loosened ties and fancy dresses. The owner of the cell phone was the man who stacked wood, it seemed; the man had made that point very distinctly as he’d handed over the phone. Bee came to hover near John, but Jen was still in what looked like a bumper-car pileup. Someone with an SUV was behaving very rudely, though it seemed that person might not even be part of the wedding, but trying to drive down the road.

  “Dolph, hello,” John said, covering one ear from the crying baby in its mother’s arms nearby, the mother holding her high heels in one hand and clasping her crying baby with her other arm.

  “For once in your life, you’ve got to be helpful,” his brother shouted. “Look, her son was coming back to surprise her. You’ve got to go to the airport and meet the plane. Let me give you the information.”

  “Dolph,” he said, “why do you have to get married right this minute?”

  “The minister’s on his way!” Dolph said.

  “No, he’s not. He’s running around yelling at cars like some L.A. valet who just had a psychotic break.”

  “Then send him! Tell him to get going,” Dolph said.

  “Dolph, do you understand what I’m saying? We’ll go back to the airport, but do you have any way of knowing the plane is going to land on time?”

  “It will be very meaningful to her to have her son here!” Dolph yelled. The volume might have been adjustable, but John didn’t know where to look for the voice control, so he held the phone away from his ear. Bee lost interest in what he was saying to her uncle and scampered toward . . . well, damned if she wasn’t heading toward Belle and some runt in a white tuxedo. A white tuxedo? “For once in your life, do me a real favor,” Dolph said. “His name is Jack, and he’s tall, six foot two, blond, how many tall blond seventeen-year-olds can there be on the plane? Try not to upset him, just get him to the hotel . . .”

  “Okay, okay, what’s the flight information? And why the hell do you keep saying ‘for once in your life’? When did I ever let you down?”

  “When I wanted to go to Colby, and you told Mom it was freezing cold and in the middle of nowhere, like I had to be on the streets of New Haven to be part of the real world—your real world.”

  “Dolph, Jesus, that was eons ago. I don’t even know that I said that, but if I did—”

  “What about the time we hitched and left the skateboard in that guy’s car, and you said we’d been robbed while we were swimming? What about that?” John could almost hear Dolph spitting.

  “You wanted me to say we’d been hitching and get in all kinds of trouble?” John said.

  “You lie about everything. You lie all the time.”

  “What? I don’t lie. That was kid stuff—trying to avoid being punished. So what if I wasn’t always blubbering out the truth, the way you were? I got hit a lot less, didn’t I?”

  “Now you’re trying to insult me and ruin my wedding, even though you’ll say you aren’t. You’ll say this is clearing the air. If you can still fuck your wife, why does she say you can’t?”

  “What?”

  “Bee told me. You live in a fantasy world, John. You always have. You live in a world where things go the way you say they go, for your convenience.”

  “Dolph, fuck you. If you want me to go get this kid, shut up immediately. What the hell would Bee say that for when it’s not even true? I’ve fucked Jen twice since the radiation stopped. Get married and then come watch us, what do you think? We can check back in to the hotel. I can give
you verifiable evidence.”

  The woodcutter’s eyes were wide. Instead of pretending not to hear, he stood where he was, leaning as far forward as possible. In a minute, he’d be the perfect pantomime of a dowsing rod, having located water. Who else had heard? John looked quickly around, but Bee—exasperating, full-of-opinions, wrongly assuming Bee—in fact, all the people around him had retreated; now everyone was leaving in a more orderly way. Screaming Belle had driven off, which he’d seen in his peripheral vision as he and Dolph argued. There were irises scattered like huge pickup sticks on the grass. The minister stood at Jen’s car window, talking.

  “American Airlines 662, arriving in twenty-five minutes. I’ll get the airport to page him. I’ll tell him to wait outside, you’ll be there as fast as you can,” Dolph said.

  “Right. Your impotent brother will round him up because he’s so terribly sorry he said you should go to Yale instead of some liberal-arts college where you read poetry and walk around through snow tunnels. Fine, Dolph. No problem—I’ll race off to Portland International, ferry him back to the hotel. You have your wedding, I’ll just drag my wife and daughter back to our house, where they can both pity me. It’s turning out to be a great day.” He snapped the phone closed. “And you,” he said to the woodcutter. “Explain to me what you’re doing chopping wood when there’s no way to burn it.”

  “There’s a Jøtul stove, potty mouth,” the man said. “And life in the country isn’t the sorry thing you think it is. Your brother is a gentleman. He would be the one to fix that house up, fix it so people from away, like you, could use it.”

  John got the woodcutter squarely in the jaw. The first man he’d hit in his entire life. So it was surprising the way the man grimaced as he sank to his knees, tossing his cell phone free as if it were a grenade. The few people on the lawn looked in their direction, too stunned or frightened to react. He saw Jen’s narrowed eyes, peering around the minister’s back, saw them clearly even though his distance vision wasn’t great. There was going to be hell to pay. After which they’d make up, and he’d fuck her.