The Accomplished Guest: Stories

by Ann Beattie

  “Philip Seymour Hoffman,” she said tiredly. “Spare me.”

  The last word wasn’t out of her mouth when they heard the crash. Larry ran for the stairs and, coward that she was, Lawrence went to the window. At first it seemed like strobe lights were flashing on the porch, but no, it was her mother and sister, engaged in a struggle. The bag with the prettily wrapped present inside was swinging back and forth and finally became airborne, Bett getting it long enough to throw it over her shoulder as she continued to wrestle with Johanna, who’d sunk to her knees. Lawrence raced down the steps, thinking, I only wasted ten seconds looking, I’m getting there now as fast as I can, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m running downstairs. All she could do, more or less, was throw herself onto the heap, her father pinning Bett’s hands behind her back in spite of her screaming protests; Johanna, bleeding from a cut on her cheekbone, running inside the house to call the ambulance, or the doctor, or whomever she’d be calling—Johanna, the tail of her torn blouse pressed to her face, scrambling for the phone, as Lawrence tugged silently on her father’s shirt as if to get his attention, as if she were a desperate child, as desperate as Bett, who was trying to shake off her father’s hands. It was no time until they heard the ambulance siren. So little time that Lawrence thought it must be responding to another call, but it was coming to this house, an ambulance full of what already looked like a lot of people, their eyes searching but their faces rearranged into neutral expressions, everything indicating that this was just another thing to deal with competently, they’d seen it all before, they recognized everything, including the sad trickle of blood, they’d get on those restraints as quickly and painlessly as possible.

  * * *

  An hour later, a bit more, Lawrence and Johanna sat in the same chairs on the porch, having a glass of white wine. “I knew it the minute she was put in my arms in the delivery room. She looked me right in the eye, and I knew I was in for it. You’re our bonus, you’re our present. Do you hate us for bringing you into it? How could you not? But I didn’t understand that at the time. I think I thought Bett would be fine, that she was just prone to tantrums, a strong-willed child intent on getting her way. Hey, what’s in the box, by the way? Anything breakable?” It was clear that if it was breakable, her mother didn’t care.

  “Cowboy boots,” Lawrence said. “Lucchese. eBay, in the box, never worn. Size ten, brown snakeskin. I didn’t think about that before: snakeskin. But since they don’t make us see shrinks anymore, I guess that doesn’t need to be noted. It was un-con-scious.” She pronounced all three syllables of the last word, mocking only herself.

  “Can you bear to pick up the box from the lawn?” her mother asked.

  “Yes. You go take a shower, and when you get into bed, I’ll come rub your shoulders.”

  “Thank you. That’s a good idea.”

  “What was the play Larry was in—the one where you first met in the lobby, after the performance?”

  “What? Oh. It was Our Town. He was the Stage Manager. Do you know the play? A bunch of dead people sitting around at the end, your father gesturing and saying how they all died. It does choke you up, however corny it is. It would have been a low joke to point to one of them and say that so-and-so died of boredom.”

  “Did he gesture with the gun pointed?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” Johanna said. “I’m sure it would have been subtle, the way your father is. Most of the time.”

  “I’ll get the box, but only after you go inside,” she said.

  “Well, far be it from me to have a disagreement with one of my daughters,” Johanna said. She rose and went inside without saying anything else. When Lawrence finally went down the steps and looked back at the house, the light was on in the bathroom. Not like her mother to have forgotten to drop the blind, but she had. And she was standing there looking out the window. She waved, naked. She was a sixty-five-year-old woman, looking beyond Lawrence to the moon.

  Lawrence went over to the big box and picked it up, no differently than if it had been a dropped flower or someone’s litter. Then she did a double take and looked at her hand. She hadn’t realized she had the strength, or the finger spread, to hold such a heavy cardboard box one-handed. She wrapped her other arm around it and brought it in to her body: her present; her shield. In the mode of her father, she gestured to the squirrel running across the telephone wires and said, “And that fellow, in his prime, electrocuted.” The squirrel ran quickly to the end of the wire, jumped into a high bush, and was gone. “Upstairs? That naked lady? She filled the tub full of water and drowned, and on the same night, it turned out her husband was deeply depressed. All kidding aside, he had a real gun, and he used it on himself. The survivor, the so-called normal daughter? She took out her cell phone before she went inside, full of contempt for the idea of birthdays, angry instead of proud of herself that she’d returned ‘home’ for her sister’s birthday, and she did something uncharacteristic, but you don’t see her sitting here, because it didn’t kill her. She called the man she missed most, Lincoln, as nice a man as his namesake, who’d freed the slaves, and in that way she freed herself, and they lived happily ever after.”

  She stopped to look at some feathery green leaves barely illuminated by moonlight and the porch lights. She would not have known what they were, except that her mother had impaled the seed envelope beside them—it would be her mother who’d put the chopstick in the ground, piercing the seed packet like a big needle taking a stitch, wouldn’t it? Of all unlikely things, next to the front steps her mother had planted “Red Cored Chantenay Carrots,” though there was no other garden, and to her knowledge her mother never grew anything, though she did pick from the spreading patch of mint along the fence every now and then and stick a sprig between ice cubes in the iced tea, or she sometimes pulled apart a bit to flavor a fruit salad. It was September, and her mother was growing a patch of carrots. Lawrence ruffled their tops, found them sturdier than they looked but fragile at their tips, and faintly ticklish. They were pretty enough to put in a bouquet.

  She thought she would remember that.

  COMPANY

  Henry Siddis, by the time he turned sixty-two, felt that the difference in ages between himself and those he taught no longer mattered, and that therefore they should call him Henry. When he’d started teaching long ago, only five or six years had separated him from his students, but these days, with the fashion for shaved heads the second the hairline began to recede, and everyone’s hair turning white so much earlier (what was that about?), he sometimes looked more youthful than his students. Quite a few had become real friends, and they appreciated being asked to their professor’s summer house in Maine. “Should I worry?” his wife, Dana, had asked him recently—meaning that the student-friends were exclusively male, except for Shannon Ryan. He supposed he could have interpreted Dana’s kidding in two ways. It was a standing joke in the house that there were at least three possibilities about everything, though that particular comment seemed open to only two interpretations, neither of which his wife would have truly meant. Watching Bruno on DVD the night before, she’d turned to him with alarm when one of the actors—it was not entirely clear sometimes when a real person was being set up and when someone was an actor—said that women jumped all over the place, switching from one topic to another. “I’d forgotten the stereotype!” she’d said. “My God! Do you think that lingers on? It probably does, doesn’t it?”

  At Lobster Lou’s, adjacent to the gym, he was given, for the same price, pound-and-a-half lobsters instead of the pound-and-a-quarters he had ordered because (1) they were probably more plentiful; (2) he had bought a pound of extremely high-priced picked lobster meat the week before; (3) he liked the new clerk, and the new clerk knew it. This was his friend Raymond’s nephew, who had just finished his first year at Harvard. Jasper, the nephew, also worked as a personal trainer at the local gym; in high school, he’d volunteered his time to a physical therapist in need of assistance with clients who pres
ented particular problems, such as being obese. Jasper was useful in hauling them to their feet, after which she could take over. Jasper was thinking about going into medicine, but Henry had his doubts. Perhaps, as Dana had implied with her nervous question about female stereotypes, it was because the usual reasons for things were never stated anymore, as if they were all part of the collective unconscious. He just thought Jasper would want to do something that put him more out in the world than being a doctor. He could also read the young man’s mind as he wrapped up the lobsters: These things are full of cholesterol. It’s not just the butter, either.

  The brown bag squirmed on the passenger seat, and he lowered it out of the sun onto the floor on the passenger side not so much out of respect for the lobster but because he feared spoilage. Two sets of former students would be visiting this evening, Jackson and his fiancée (which made her not really his former student) driving from Portland and arriving at five, and Benoit and Cara around six, assuming their plane got in to Logan on schedule. Dana would have time to show Daphne around the garden, and if he knew Daphne, she’d be coming with a package of seeds and teasing that there was still time in mid-July to plant them. Benoit liked to sit and smoke his pipe on the back porch and bring up topics that were sure to be slightly provocative but would also no doubt elicit a thoughtful response from Henry that was often—as Benoit had told him more than once in e-mails—very helpful in his sorting out certain things. “No advice!” was Henry’s motto, but he supposed that from the way he discussed things, Benoit could extrapolate where he stood. Wasn’t it funny sometimes? The young women were more intense than their young men, more adventurous: mountain climbers, white-water rafters. The men seemed to fade faster. One day they were full of vigor and humor, and a year later—most certainly they did not turn on a dime—but a year later, sometimes a bit more, they’d often be retreating. From their adamant notions; from their aversion to marriage; away from communing with nature and suddenly more inclined to have a lobster and a glass of prosecco on the back porch. Though he had never discussed this directly with Dana, he felt sure she’d noticed it, too. Which made him wonder what she thought of it, what she thought of him. He was still table-thumping and wide-eyed about the fate of the country, the Supreme Court, the threat of Romney—though he, too, went on fewer long walks (four hours was what he meant by “long”) and often sat silently rocking, with The New York Times, if nobody was visiting. One of the many things he appreciated about his wife was that she trusted her perceptions. Even if she found something puzzling or problematic, she wouldn’t think of asking him to explain it to her. To his regret, he had been married three times, though he and Dana had been married now for twenty years and were very happy together. The first marriage had been forced on him—on them—by his college girlfriend’s parents when they found out she was pregnant. A month after being married by a justice of the peace (who was now a fishing buddy), she had miscarried and told him that she did not want to remain married. His second wife had been nine years older, a woman he’d met in Italy who’d wanted to escape her terrible marriage and make a good home for herself and her two-year-old daughter. She had come to his hotel with welts on her legs and begged him to take her back to the United States with him (he’d stayed involved with the agency through Bill Clinton’s presidency) so that she could live with a cousin in Brooklyn and start over. The cousin was real (a nice guy); the child was real, but not her child (to this day, he did not know how she’d seemed to be living in the apartment in Trastevere with the neighbor’s child, presenting herself as the child’s mother). No different than if a gypsy had robbed him outside Termini, he’d been hoodwinked, bought her a ticket to New York City, spent the first night in Cobble Hill with her and the child (he had already met Dana before his trip), then agreed to marry her, thereby making her a legal citizen. They’d flown to Las Vegas, the child left behind with the cousin’s girlfriend, the cousin—his name was Luca—alternating between happiness, gaiety, and a more serious mode in which he twice took Henry aside to ask if he was sure about what he intended to do. It was all over in less than three months, Luca stuck with the problem, a Russian boyfriend suddenly on the scene, the child returned to her family in Rome, and—back in the days when such things still existed—he had called Dana from a phone booth in a little town in Virginia where he was en route to interview for the job in the business school at UVA—somehow it had been decided that she would take a plane to meet him for the weekend, though they’d never officially dated. He rarely pulled rank or asked a favor, but he’d called his friend Peter in New York and asked if Dana could hop aboard his private plane, and so she had, flying in to Dulles, where he’d gone, carrying an armload of daisies, and that was that. To this day, she had little knowledge of his relationship with his second wife. He’d been surprised once, when someone was questioning Dana more than they should have, that she’d said something, however she had put it, suggesting she thought the relationship had been quite long, years and years. How could he possibly correct her and retain any self-respect? Her impression was, in a way, less troubling than the truth.

  These were not usually his thoughts, they certainly were not, but traffic was heavy and slow on Friday afternoon on Route 1, and something about the animated brown bag on the floor and his slight worry that the Allegra seemed not to be working effectively, so that he often had to swallow a few times before he recovered easy breathing . . . well, he was not about to die, he worked out with Jasper for an hour and a half every week and exercised once or twice in the gym in addition, he was not at all overweight, and he knew that the summer heat and humidity affected everyone. But to be honest, what he’d started to think was that he was going to die. As simple as that. He’d done so well in his job because his hunches were usually right on, his instincts reliable.

  Cars were pouring off the exit from 95. He sharpened his senses to make it through the yellow light, neither obviously speeding nor failing to clear the intersection by the time it turned red. To the left was Stonewall Kitchen, impassable in the aisles during the summer, few shoppers having any idea whatsoever why the business was named as it was, and to further obfuscate the issue, there was a stone wall parallel to the road with lovely gardens in front of it. He had an image of the lobsters set free among the plants, some prank, some video that would be shown on one of the late-night talk shows, lobsters crawling through bristling cleome! The audience would laugh and laugh. He, too, could tell the story for laughs, flipping burgers on the grill: I was only releasing them to another form of death, probably better to have boiled them alive. His devoted—the ones who were devoted were so devoted—students, willing to laugh, nowhere near as skeptical as they should be, even if his odd remark became pillow talk among couples at the end of the night.

  Let me try this out, he thought, pulling into the driveway with its bottom-scraping incline, the one Dana always said would eventually force her to get out of the car and walk when she’d piled on the pounds as an old lady. I’ll try this out: I instinctively know I’m sick, I suspect I’m dying, but in a way not remotely heroic, I will nonetheless carry this bag into the house and greet my wife if she’s anywhere nearby, but I will start seeing everything from the point of view of someone looking down on all of it from above (he did not believe in the afterlife, but he did believe in perspective), and perhaps there is solace, even freedom, in seeing everything as if it’s already over. It was like some crazy mental exercise they would have been given in Virginia, one of those what-ifs that turned out to be a nursery rhyme compared to what happened in the real world.

  “Henry,” Dana called from upstairs. He looked up. She had on her white cotton bathrobe that made her look like a big vertical anemic waffle. “Honey, no surprise, they’re caught at the airport in Charlotte and the ETA is seven o’clock, just for Logan. So let’s cook all the lobsters, because who minds cold lobster? We can render more fat when they get here. Poor things,” she added, turning.

  It took him a second to realize that
she’d been saying they could melt more butter.

  He looked at the large pot of water on the stove. Earlier in the summer they’d looked up the cold-water-versus-hot-water controversy on the Internet, although no one truly believed there could be any difference if you set the pot to boil with cold or hot water. He picked up a potholder and lifted the lid. The water was simmering. She was so organized, she’d started it heating before her shower. He put the brown bag in the refrigerator, feeling something hard knock against his knuckle as he shoved it onto the top shelf. He looked at the knuckle as if it had, itself, offended him.

  “Dana!” he called upstairs. “I’m sick of doing errands and spending the rest of my life readjusting to normal life to atone for my pathetic patriotic feelings. From now on, it’s hamburgers on the grill, and I’m not going to round up the cows.”

  He could hear the water pounding down in the shower above the kitchen ceiling. It was a very noisy shower. She loved the new showerhead, which approximated a rainstorm that would fall with enough force to blind frogs.

  He poured himself a glass of wine from the already open bottle of Viognier. It was her favorite, his less so. Less by a factor of 75 percent. Still, it was cold, and he could see that if this was the sort of wine you liked, this would be the sort of wine you liked. He approved his resistance to being civilized by sipping it from a pottery mug. “I only knew that Italian woman for a couple of months, what do you think of that?” he hollered at the ceiling. A cobweb hung from the light above the kitchen island. He looked at his hands. They were trembling slightly. Oh, what chaos his impending death was about to cause, with the rivulets merging together (Cara and Benoit; Jackson and Daphne) to flow into the great sea of regret, and Dana on the shore, Mrs. Ramsay–like in her benign good intentions. He sipped the wine, thinking that wine was never as cold as the water at the beach, which seemed ridiculous but was true. He lived in a town where there was frigid water. As had been observed, its intermittent slight warming had nothing to do with air temperature but rather with the tide. You might drive by the beach below the Stage Neck Inn and see adults in the water, inexplicably, in early June, and then not at all in August. Received wisdom: It had to do with the currents. It was also generally agreed upon that children, whether because of their enthusiasm or blunted nervous systems, could tolerate water no grown-up would wade into.