The Accomplished Guest: Stories

by Ann Beattie

  “I have just got the best feelin’!” the woman said as Emil steered her toward the house. “Can’t we even ask him if he was really happy here?” Bradley heard her say as the front door closed.

  Had he been really happy there? His wife had allowed him not to think about such a question at all. They’d carved out days and never realized that they were limited in number. “Carved” days. Why had he used that word? He didn’t know. He could “get in touch with his feelings,” an expression he detested, if he had to. But to whom would he reveal them? Not Sterne, who was afraid of his own shadow. Had Donna not died, he wasn’t sure they’d be close at all. There had been years in which they’d seen little of each other. His brother had also been in Vietnam, though his collapsed lung had gotten him sent home early. Sterne had been present for their mother’s death, just as Bradley had been there for their father’s.

  As he pulled out of the driveway, he reversed so abruptly that the bag of vegetables toppled off the passenger seat and spilled onto the floor. He’d automatically reached out, as he had so many times to brace Donna when she’d sat there, but it wasn’t her; it was only a bag of kale, tomatoes, and corn, all of it bought for under ten dollars. At the stop sign around the corner, he leaned over and picked up most of the things, which seemed more ordinary and less fascinating now than they had at the market. The truck in front of him inched and braked, inched and braked, waiting for an opening in the traffic. A sticker on its back window said, in big red letters, SAVE A HORSE RIDE A COWGIRL. What was it with America and saving things? Yes, he got the slightly dirty joke. But really, Americans felt they had to save everything from tadpoles to foreign countries. The argument was always that it was in their interest to do so; no one was naive, no one a romantic. He supposed he should be thinking in terms of “we” rather than “they.” He was, after all, an American, too.

  A little girl peeked out the back window of the truck and waved just as the truck lurched forward, taking off with squealing tires and a backward spray of gravel. No crash followed. Now Bradley watched for an opportunity to accelerate, but no one was giving an inch. A steady string of cars stretched in both directions, drivers feigning obliviousness of anyone trying to enter the stream. He wondered if he would ever be able to make the turn, if any car would flash its headlights or simply stop. Was there even one civilized person left on the planet? He felt he might sit there until he turned to stone or drew his last breath. Until he died of old age—which was, of course, better than dying of someone’s ineptitude. These were the things that went through his mind as he sensed something bearing down on him from behind. His eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. With that slight motion, he became conscious of a headache forming. It was the idiots, continuing their dance, emerging from some clever shortcut, since he hadn’t seen them turn onto the road leading to the stop sign.

  Time passed. A convertible hesitated but sped up when he removed his foot from the brake. Stone, he thought. Death. He and his car would be covered by the dust of time, just as his new hostas had been buried under the avalanche of hail. Eyes up! The couple was gaining on him, though he couldn’t imagine—and hoped he wouldn’t have to find out—whether they’d acknowledge his presence or merely dance around him. Were they completely in their own world? How much of it was a taunt? That had always been one of the crucial questions you needed to consider before you made a move in-country: Was something really happening, or was it a mirage, a hallucination?

  The dancers came close, her smile lipsticked red. His crazy neighbor’s eyes blazed. They’d dance around him. He was invisible, the car a mere shell. His sense that he was idling at a stop sign in his old neighborhood in Maine, where some middle-aged Southern belle was inspecting his house and oohing over Donna’s Persian carpets, was just an illusion. He would exist only as long as the dancers didn’t blink, and so far, wild-eyed and disheveled, they seemed not to.

  They were almost upon him when he finally had a chance to shoot into traffic. Eventually the road would take him to his new house, just as, years before, a plane had lifted him out of Saigon: plunk. There you go. Sweet dreams. Or better yet, none at all.

  How long could people dance that way? How far could you get, pushing yourself beyond exhaustion? He knew the answer. He’d learned it. He’d learned also that whenever you thought you were having your moment, life tapped you on the shoulder and cut in. That was the cruel blink of fate’s eye. You were all wrapped up in each other, dancing? Oh, no, you don’t get to do that.

  SAVE A HORSE RIDE A COWGIRL had pulled in to the local ice-cream stand. He gave a two-fingered salute as he passed, in case the little girl was watching. It would have been nice to see her fine blond hair again. Her little fingers. But things didn’t work like that. He was inside an anonymous car. He’d been only a moment’s diversion for her. Still, he wiggled his fingers in imitation of the way she’d moved hers, remembering as he did the horrible Chinese bird spiders, bigger than her palm, the poisonous spiders for whose bite there was no antivenom—one of which had once so startled Callahan by springing out of his empty boot that he’d screamed and raced into Bradley’s arms.

  Another time. Another country. The stakes were so different now, though the old life-or-death thing still took its toll.

  What would he dream, if he could determine his dreams? Years ago, he’d seen a man named Dr. McCall who had asked him just that. The man had written with a pencil with a sharp point. He wrote only when something impressed him. It didn’t seem very professional, in retrospect, that he had let his patient see how infrequently his pencil moved. “Oh, a nice trout stream with burbling water and leaping fish, and wading boots in the right size for once, and clouds to block the sun but not the light,” Bradley had said. No movement of the pencil. “Or the opposite: working in a skyscraper in New York City, beautiful women throwing themselves at me, the whole male-fantasy thing.” Nothing. McCall had said, “You’re just going with the usual all-American fantasy? You don’t wish to banish any memory of the dead?” McCall sat behind his desk in a wheelchair. He was said to be the best shrink at Walter Reed. He’d once been a patient there himself, and he had a low tolerance for fairy tales. “Any answer?” the doctor had persisted.

  McCall must not have been married. In those days, shrinks were cagey: If it worked to wear a wedding ring, they wore it; if it didn’t help, they left it on the dresser. Still, there was often the telltale white circle. What he wouldn’t give for one more chance to look at the doctor’s hand. But McCall had disappeared from the VA. Maybe the guy had found his own trout stream. Maybe he was happily married to some woman who sewed his buttons back on and gave him a push uphill when he needed it. Back then Bradley had been just one of thousands of Humpty Dumptys who needed to be put back together.

  Now he wore Donna’s gold wedding band on the chain from which he’d removed his dog tags. It dangled so low that no one could mistake it for a necklace. Not that he ever showed it to anyone. No one could have known that the way the ring warmed up or cooled reminded him constantly of her. She’d been killed, as so many had, by friendly fire. That girl—the so-called nurse—was on Facebook. She was married, with a son and a daughter. He wished her nothing good: no dream answered, no summer vacation. A terrible illness, of the kind that so often ironically befell those in her profession, could not make her sick enough to satisfy him. His thoughts were nothing but uncharitable. And if her children grew up to fight in their own war? Well, it would certainly be sad if they never came home.

  In his living room, he raised the binoculars and looked across the river. No sign of the dancers. Maybe—because his own life seemed to move so excruciatingly slowly—Miller Ryall and the girl were living in sped-up time. They had already married, had children, sent them off to college, attended their weddings, and were waiting excitedly for grandchildren, who’d come to play on the wooden contraption that could dangle them upside down for hours, or break their ribs if they sprang free.

  * * *

  The house s
old for almost eighty thousand dollars more than the asking price. Bradley and Emil drank a Newman’s Own lemonade at the ice-cream place to celebrate, sitting under a big umbrella. Emil was riding high, astonished at his good luck. “I don’t know, man,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, it’s funny now, but the four of us standing there, watching that weird mating ritual going on down the middle of the street? It’s something I’ll tell the grandkids, and we haven’t even gotten around to having our own kids yet.”

  “Don’t do it. Enjoy your lives with each other,” Bradley said.

  “Beg pardon?” Emil said.

  He didn’t repeat himself. Anyone who didn’t want to hear didn’t have to. His own brother never asked him any personal questions. Not about what had happened in the war, not about why he and Donna had never had kids (how would he dare ask that, since he’d never married?), not about his sessions with Dr. McCall. It was really cowardice that Sterne asked nothing. It almost made Bradley want to call his brother and force him to talk about those things, but his hostility was misplaced. His brother was a fuckup and had been all his life. It had protected him from many things, so who was Bradley to say that it wasn’t an effective defense strategy? Sterne couldn’t speak Donna’s name, but Bradley forgave him for that.

  Donna had never taken pleasure in anyone else’s pain, but she might have been intrigued by the mental breakdown that resulted in their old neighbor being carted off to the hospital. Emil had been there, working the night shift as a nurse’s aide when Miller Ryall was admitted, and he gave Bradley the details the next day. Bree had disappeared as quickly as she’d come.

  “Why would we live on a street called Seagull Way?” Donna had asked him when they were young and they’d first made an offer on the house. She would have been surprised by the last-minute bidding war that drove up the price, and surprised as well that when Ryall’s house was listed, Bill and Margie moved instantly to buy it, later constructing an enclosed passageway that led from one house to the other. Bill’s sister lived there for a while, following her stroke. But Donna would have thought Bradley silly for giving Sterne her expensive binoculars. He’d decided that he wanted to know less, not more, about his former life. He gave his brother the truck, too; he really didn’t need it anymore. When he stopped returning Margie’s calls, she stopped calling and only nodded if they crossed paths. What had he said to Donna when she’d asked that question about living on Seagull Way? He forgot so much. Not his feelings toward her, just what, exactly, they’d said. Maybe he’d answered, “Because that’s what this pretty street happens to be called.” Once it had seemed an unusually pretty street, safe, predictably quiet, a street where—even if some pride was involved in assuming such a thing—everyone else seemed worse off than they were. She had no doubt nodded in agreement.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © SIGRID ESTRADA

  ANN BEATTIE has been included in four O. Henry Prize collections, in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and in Jennifer Egan’s The Best American Short Stories 2014. Her collection The New Yorker Stories was selected as one of the ten best books of 2010 by the New York Times. She received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction and the Rea Award for the Short Story. She was the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine and Key West, Florida.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

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  ALSO BY ANN BEATTIE

  Distortions

  Chilly Scenes of Winter

  Secrets and Surprises

  Falling in Place

  The Burning House

  Love Always

  Where You’ll Find Me

  Picturing Will

  What Was Mine

  Another You

  My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

  Park City

  Perfect Recall

  The Doctor’s House

  Follies

  Walks with Men

  Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

  The New Yorker Stories

  The State We’re In: Maine Stories

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Ann Beattie

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  First Scribner hardcover edition June 2017

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  Jacket photographs: Suitcase/Wallpaper © Devon Opdendries/Moment/Getty Images, Floor © Steven Taylor/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images

  Versions of these stories previously appeared elsewhere: “The Indian Uprising” (Granta); “For the Best” (The New Yorker); “The Astonished Woodchopper” (Paris Review); “Anecdotes” (Granta); “Other People’s Birthdays” (Virginia Quarterly Review); “Company” (Little Star); “The Debt” (Virginia Quarterly Review); “Lady Neptune” (Granta); “The Caterer” (Narrative); “The Gypsy Chooses the Whatever Card” (The American Scholar); “The Cloud” (Salmagundi); “Hoodie in Xanadu” (Paris Review); “Save a Horse Ride a Cowgirl” (The New Yorker).

  “The soul should always stand ajar” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

  ISBN 978-1-5011-1138-9

  ISBN 978-1-5011-1140-2 (ebook)

 

 

 
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