The Accomplished Guest: Stories

by Ann Beattie

  Why should he go to Portland airport after what Dolph had said to him, dragging up all that garbage from over thirty years ago? He’d be a chump to do it. Let the kid figure it out, let him figure out how to get where he wanted to go—just the way Bee’s fine fellow had figured out things for himself—starting with paying to get a cab to the hotel, where he could be the human equivalent of a gift box, all tied up in shiny paper with a big ribbon as long as his umbilical cord. If the world belonged to the young, it was time for the kid to start coping.

  ANECDOTES

  “My husband and I were in Tivoli, and we went to the gardens at Villa d’Este. He’d been to Italy before, but it was my first trip. There were rails in front of the fountains because the water was so polluted, they wanted to keep you from being splashed.”

  “I went to Italy when they were almost giving shoes away—shoes made of leather as soft as gloves—and there were no tours being given of the Forum. I don’t think there was one Japanese tourist in all of Rome. Maybe my trip was before cameras were invented.”

  Lucia and I were playing the Italy-One-Upmanship game in the backseat of a Carey car. I knew I was going to be the one to pay the fare. I was doing my friend Christine a favor. Lucia, her mother, had come in from Princeton on the train to hear Christine’s talk at Columbia about Margaret Bourke-White. Christine would also be showing slides of newly discovered photographs, printed from Bourke-White negatives that had been mislabeled at Life. She was hoping to be hired full-time at Columbia, and this was one of several talks she would be giving there and elsewhere, aiming to impress.

  Christine had hoped to be a model when she came to the city, but she’d been diagnosed with diabetes shortly thereafter and hadn’t been able to keep up the pace. There were still problems with her energy; she felt like she was having what she’d heard were classic menopausal symptoms at thirty-four. She was pretty, though, as you’d imagine. I’d met her in college when we’d been two-timed by the same guy, who also happened to be our professor. I overheard the tantrum she threw, late one evening. I’d gone back to school because I’d forgotten my raincoat, and the forecast was for a weekend of rain. Arthur was in his office; Christine was yelling, and as I came up the stairs, I heard my name mentioned. Loudly. She and I went to a bar when she’d finished confronting him. He went home to his wife. Christine and I lost touch but met up several years later in New York, when she called to compliment me on an article I’d written for The New York Times Magazine.

  Earlier in the week Christine had asked me to pick up her mother before she realized that my car was in the shop (hit from behind at a red light on West End Avenue), and she probably also called because I did better with her mother, generally, than she did.

  “Let me ask you this, Anna,” Lucia said. “Was there a moment when you knew your marriage wasn’t going to work, or was it more gradual, the realization?”

  “He took the puppy back to the breeder. That didn’t help.”

  “You always say something unexpected. That’s why you’re a good writer, I guess. Let me ask this: Do you think Christine didn’t marry Paul because all her women friends are independent, or do you think she just got tired of him? He sent me a Christmas card, and his heart is still broken.”

  I thought for a moment about poor brokenhearted Paul. Though ostensibly monogamous for the three-plus years he and Christine had lived together, he’d given her herpes. Another thing I knew about him was that he’d put a pillow over his head and stayed in bed the night she had food poisoning. I also thought that when she stopped wearing makeup and pulled her hair back in a French twist, the little tendrils that escaped still didn’t make her feminine enough for him. He’d kept a picture from her modeling days in his wallet.

  “Lucia,” I said, “I don’t think women break up with their boyfriends because other women are without boyfriends.”

  “But think: The diabetes made her angry, didn’t it? She wanted somebody to take it away. I find significance in the fact that she started to go out with her doctor.”

  “You’re as funny as I am,” I said. “Shall I recommend you to my agent?”

  “Funny? Nothing funny about that awful disease,” she said, missing my point because she found it necessary to correct everyone.

  “Which side?” the driver said.

  “On the right,” I said. “Far corner.”

  He gave me a quick look in the rearview mirror; the light had just turned red, and by the time he got to the far corner, cars in back of him would start honking the minute he stopped.

  * * *

  The young man setting up the slide projector looked up, assuming one of us must be the speaker. He held a clip-on mike, awkwardly, as if courting someone with a little unwanted flower.

  Lucia sat in a chair midway down the aisle. She looked vaguely irritated, or simply tired. She had not wanted Christine to be a model, but neither had she wanted her to be in the academic world, which Lucia felt was full of pseudo-intellectuals hiding from society. As far as I could tell, Lucia had some vague notion that her daughter should be working outside the system, to save the world.

  “Wasn’t this scheduled for seven?” I said. “Where is everybody?”

  “I’m just here to set up,” the young man said. “You’ve got nothing to do with this?”

  I shook my head. That was so often my situation with Christine: She insisted I was indispensable, though I had nothing directly to do with what was going on. In school, I hadn’t known she was seeing Arthur, but when I’d found out, she’d insisted that we have a drink because only I could fill in the pieces of the puzzle.

  Lucia had taken off her enormous scarf—cashmere, certainly—and folded it on her lap, her hands clasped on top. She looked at me with quiet attention, as if I might start singing. Her hair, streaked with silver, was windblown. The way the wind had messed up her part made her look less austere. Where Christine had gotten her cheekbones, and her lips, I couldn’t imagine. (Her father had left before Christine began school, and I’d seen him only once in a snapshot she carried in her wallet.) Lucia was attractive but in a quite ordinary way. Like many women her age, she diverted attention from her face by swirling scarves around her throat and shoulders, wearing big necklaces or turtlenecks that seemed like perfect soufflés just lifted from the oven. I was rummaging in my bag, trying to find the piece of paper on which I’d written the time and place. Yes; the talk was taking place here—that’s what I’d written down—at seven P.M.

  Suddenly there were voices in the corridor, and students rushed in like horses spooked by firecrackers. There had been another lecture—this was part two of their evening. I stared into the crowd, hoping to see Christine. The person who’d set up the slide projector paced the aisle, talking on his cell phone. The microphone sat in a tangle of wires back on the table.

  Lucia beckoned to me. I walked back a few rows, jostled by students—though I noticed none of them had disturbed the elderly lady who sat in the aisle seat, her garments piled in her lap. Lucia had slipped out of her coat, which was a shade somewhere between beige and butter.

  “Listen: You have always been such a good friend to Christine that I want to tell you something. Will you sit?” She patted the chair next to her.

  Almost none of the students seemed to be wearing winter clothes. A few had on unzipped jackets. I sat next to Lucia, carefully stepping over her elegant shoes.

  “Here is what I want to talk about,” Lucia said. “You remember Thanksgiving in Princeton? I pointed out my neighbor—the lady who had been so sweet on the visiting writer?”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “Vaguely! I made an apple tart from scratch, with crème fraîche!”

  “It was delicious. Your meals always are. I just couldn’t remember the face of the woman who’d—what? She’d written love notes to him or something? To the writer?”

  “She wanted him to come live there. She said, ‘Bring your wife, there is a whole separate house. Don’t commute the way you do,
it will wear you out. I love having young people around. I will teach your wife to cook—whatever she wants.’ Which is true, by the way. Edwina cooks better than I do.”

  “I didn’t know all that. I think you whispered to me who she was. That she’d made trouble by writing letters to him.”

  “She wrote letters, and he finally came over to have a drink. They hit it off, and he decided he and his wife should take her up on her offer.”

  “So what happened?” I said.

  “His wife got on a small chartered plane in Michigan, and that was the end of her. It went down in a storm, the pilot killed, everybody. Two other people, I think. And he came over to Edwina’s house and picked up bricks from the new walkway that was being laid and threw them through her picture window. The police were called. He was completely crazy. He couldn’t ever go back to teach his classes. And Edwina was devastated.”

  Christine had come into the auditorium. From nowhere, the man with the tangled microphone charged up to her, getting much too close, so that before she understood who he was, she jumped back. She had a bulging bag slung over her shoulder, and carried another bag. It must have started raining, because her hair was matted to her head. A clump of it curved down her cheek like the top of a big question mark. Her earring stud might have been the point that completed the punctuation.

  “Your friend shouldn’t feel bad,” I said. “You’re right. It wasn’t her fault, of course.”

  “Yes, but she thinks it was,” Lucia said. She did not follow my eyes to Christine.

  I waved. Christine didn’t see me at first, but then she did. “There she is,” I said to Lucia, wondering why she wasn’t turning as I waved.

  “What I understand of the situation is that he’d slept with Edwina once. She’s old enough to be his mother! She was offering her home anyway, so I don’t think he was calculating. . . .”

  A girl and a boy pushed past us, trailing jackets. The girl had on pink UGGs.

  I stood to walk toward Christine, who looked a little disoriented. When she saw me, she gave me a nervous smile. She said, “I washed my hair, and my dryer broke. Can you believe it?”

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  “Thanks for getting her,” Christine said, squeezing my shoulder as she walked past, the microphone already clipped to her lapel, the receptor in her coat pocket. “Hi, Mom,” she said, smiling but not bending to kiss her mother’s cheek. They were more affectionate privately, I’d noticed. In public, there was some awkwardness.

  The row Lucia sat in was almost full. She frowned as more students pushed past her seat. It was a small auditorium, but this was a good crowd.

  Christine stood behind the podium, her coat tossed on a chair, the bags slumped beside it.

  “The person who was going to introduce me has laryngitis, so I’m just going to introduce myself—I’m Christine Liss, from the English department—and thank you for coming on such a cold night. There is exciting new work by the eminent photographer Margaret Bourke-White that I’ve gotten access to as it’s being cataloged, some of which you’ll see tonight. Ms. Bourke-White was a fearless photographer who did the first cover for Life magazine—a very influential picture magazine of its time, with a reputation that still elicits great respect. She worked downtown, in the then newly built Chrysler Building—a building with a terrace where she kept two small alligators she was given as gifts, until they grew large enough to devour the tortoise she had also been given. Some people wouldn’t visit the studio. She was married twice, the last time to Erskine Caldwell, whose name might not be as recognizable to you now as he would have hoped. Her photographs can be seen many places in New York—currently at ICP Midtown. What you’re going to see tonight are mostly aerial shots. . . .”

  I probably should have returned to sit with Lucia, but I’d trailed Christine halfway down the aisle, and when the lights had begun to dim, I’d sat as if I’d been playing musical chairs. Down the row, someone was videotaping Christine, the little square of light distracting and mesmerizing. Rows back, a cell phone played music and was quickly turned off. The projection screen was filled with aerial views of destruction: Germany after the war.

  Christine’s hair had begun to dry, and she looked different with her hair down and her glasses on. Her earnestness made her look younger and took me back to the bar where we’d sat in Pennsylvania years ago. Christine cursing Arthur, pulling a necklace with a lapis stone out from under the neckline of her blouse, pulling so hard she broke the chain, the gold puddling on the tabletop, the little stone flashing in the fluorescent light. She had scooped it up and later addressed an envelope to Arthur’s wife and mailed it to her without comment.

  Slide after slide, when seen from a high vantage point, the world was transformed into abstract art. The photographs were pattern and shape before they became slowly distinguishable as the landscape—the wreckage—they depicted then; as you stared, they devolved into abstraction again, making your eyes skate figure eights. Margaret Bourke-White had no fear of heights, Christine told us, and couldn’t have worried about being in a helicopter when she thought nothing of crawling out on the gargoyles atop the Chrysler Building to photograph the city. There she was, bent over her camera, high up, like a steelworker. She photographed machines. She photographed Stalin, who didn’t give her an inch until she nervously dropped her flashbulbs, and then he laughed.

  Christine talked about industry, mass production. She talked about photographs in black and white, about silver halide crystals and how photographs were processed. The images at the end of the talk were back in the world—dams and wheels, enormous things. When the lights came on, people applauded. Christine smiled, unclipping the mike, pushing her hair out of her eyes. A few people called out to each other; cell phones appeared immediately, hats and scarves were left behind, picked up by someone else who ran up behind them, like a relay race in reverse. I saw one of Christine’s colleagues, whose name I couldn’t remember, and said hello. He said, “God, Bourke-White photographed Stalin’s mother, you know. I’d think that was a dangerous assignment—unless the guy didn’t like his mother. And since he didn’t like anybody . . .” He shook his head as he passed by to congratulate Christine. The person operating the slide projector was removing the tray, putting it in a box, his cell phone clamped between his chin and shoulder. Lucia stood, her row empty.

  “Why do they wear those boots like horse hooves?” she said, looking at the departing students. “Pastel-pink horse hooves.”

  “Comfortable, I guess,” I said. “Sort of like big bedroom slippers. They love pajama bottoms, too.”

  “It used to be that every generation had its style. I guess this generation’s style is what you’d wear if you spent your day in the bedroom. In my day, that would have been a negligee and makeup, which is just as silly, I suppose.”

  “What a fascinating talk Christine gave,” I said.

  “Too many anecdotes,” Lucia said.

  I looked at her, surprised. She was often hard on Christine, but the talk had been so obviously good, I hadn’t been expecting such a remark.

  “It doesn’t matter how many husbands a woman has or doesn’t have. I don’t know why she felt she had to mention that,” she said. “I thought she was going to digress and tell us about the man she loved the most, a soldier she was going to reunite with except that he was in a military hospital in Italy, and they bombed his wing of the hospital. The other wing was intact, but he was killed instantly.”

  “You know about Margaret Bourke-White?” I said.

  “I read autobiographies, Anna. It’s all there in her book.”

  “Well, I thought Christine did a very good job, talking about how Bourke-White got into the workforce, and—”

  “Getting the job done is what’s important. Not how you got the job.”

  “You’re too hard on her,” I said.

  She looked at me. “Do you think so? I just don’t have much patience with anecdotes.”

  “She was explain
ing that Margaret Bourke-White had a lot of sadness in her life, just like the rest of us.”

  “Yes, I think we could assume that everyone experiences sadness,” Lucia replied.

  I thought: Why do you never offer to pay, like you’re a princess? Why not arrange your own transportation in the city? Why don’t you cook your own Thanksgiving dinner for fewer people, rather than having two Mexican women in the kitchen all day, and you making only your perfect apple tarts?

  My face must have clouded over; she put her hand on my arm and said, “Sit down for a second. We’re friends, you and I. I have something important to tell you.”

  I sank rather than sat. Was she going to tell me she was sick? She had seated herself one chair in, giving me the aisle, gesturing grandly, as if the seat were a gift. The last cluster of students stood talking to Christine.

  “You’re a writer. Writers have become celebrities, haven’t they? Whether they want to be or not. Well, the visiting writer did want to be the center of attention, it seemed to me. Writers are so often insecure. So let me tell you: In my one conversation with him, it seems he’d never even heard that Bruce Chatwin hadn’t told the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Didn’t know Chatwin had made things up—including the information about what killed him, we now know. If I’d talked about James Frey, I suppose I could have made some of the same points. From what the visiting writer revealed about himself, I thought he was a literary lightweight. I wouldn’t have offered him, and his wife, my house. But that’s neither here nor there. Edwina, my friend, has been taking one of those mood-altering drugs, and she’s calmer now, so she understands she isn’t responsible, but you know, she’d gotten to the point where she imagined him and his wife in her house. She imagined them sitting by the fireplace, she looked at her window and saw the shattered glass even though it had been replaced, she saw the dead woman standing in the kitchen doing dishes—she didn’t really see her, she’s not crazy, but she imagined her. I told her, ‘Come to my house. Get out of there; get out of that environment for a while.’ I guess I did just what she did, didn’t I, offering my house? But she was impulsive, and I was her friend of over twenty-five years. So it came as quite a surprise to both of us that we fell in love. We did. Your eyes are as big as saucers, Anna. If we did, we did.”