Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (14 page)

D
ANNY LOOKED TRIM
in shorts and a white T-shirt. He had been ill the previous year—the heart—but the operation was a success and he was now absolved of illness. It was remarkable, the skill of surgeons. Her sickness—her malady, she called it lightly—was of another sort, quite minor really. She had a form of arthritis, a syndrome called Polymyalgia rheumatica, and it was not known whether it was a disease of the joints, the muscles or the arteries. Statistically, she was rather young to be suffering from it. Though it wasn’t particularly painful, she could barely move her limbs. Some of their friends had immigrated to Mérida for a good part of the year, and they too were now trying it out. The place was warm, cheap and genial, and the gardens could be lovely.

For breakfast there was sliced papaya, sweet rolls and good strong coffee. Their young man, their houseman Eduardo, was breakfasting comfortably with them, eating cereal, his favorite, Cap’n Crunch.

“Thank you,” she said as Eduardo cleared away the plates.

She wanted to put more effort into the days, into the living of them. She was aware of the effort Danny was making. The days seemed very much the same here but this was just the seeming of them. Each delivered its own small surprise. Yesterday, sitting in the garden with only her aching body for company, she saw not just one but three motmots on the sloping tiled roof. They perched close together, their long, partially featherless tails flicking back and forth. The one in the center was being groomed by the other two. His feathers were ruffled and he looked dazed. Their heads were a lovely turquoise color. They preened and pecked at the one, drawing its feathers between their beaks. A frond from a royal palm slipped free and fell and two of the birds scattered at the sound, leaving the one upon whom their attention had been conferred alone, swaying, its beak open. Eduardo had hurried out and cut up the frond quickly with his knife. He hoisted the sections on his shoulder and trotted to the courtyard next door, the annex they had acquired to hold their construction and yard debris.

When he returned for the frond’s heavy boot—almost as big as he was—Lilly called out, “Eduardo, you are not putting any pesticides in the garden, are you? Any poisons?”

“If it is not your wish, no.”

“It certainly is not my wish.”

“I do not,” he said. He took off the floppy hat he wore and looked steadily at her.

The motmot then took flight, to her relief. It looked all right.

She liked Eduardo’s little daughter, Stephanie, who was four. She was small and stout, not timid or incurious but solemn, with large dark eyes.

It was a new crowd here, though she could recognize them. There was the chatterer, the flatterer, the wag, the silent one. There was Stephen, who had found a new love. His other woman had been a horror, a terrible alcoholic, and that was a story. She’d passed out yet again and Stephen insisted that she see a doctor. With difficulty, he got her in the car. “You need help, Lucille,” he shouted at her. He drove her to the doctor, the good one on Colón, but the office would not accept her because she was a corpse. He had to drive the body to the hospital himself. Neither would that institution receive her; no, she must be returned to where she died, their home, and only then could the authorities confirm her death and the proper procedures commence. Stephen was in traffic for an hour, making his ghastly circuit of the city, his dead wife beside him.

That, however, had been three years ago, and now another had found him, a good one, an American near his age with tremendous energy. They were restoring a hacienda on the road to Uxmal. Lilly and Danny had gone out there for lunch. The place was lovely but far from finished, of course. There was a chapel, and two of the stables were being turned into comfortable suites for tourists. They had ripped out all the henequen, which was not merely agave here, it was political. In the great courtyard a black garbage bag was caught in the topmost branches of a poinciana tree. Stephen’s woman explained that it was not trash but a kite that one of the children had lost. They permitted the children to take a shortcut through the walled hacienda on their way to school. It was a kite. They were on good terms with the people of the village.

At lunch, one woman said, “I’m ordering a black lucite bed
with little lights embedded everywhere, and I’m seventy-two years old.”

A man was talking about the coast. “In the morning, the ceviche is wonderful. Lunch, too, can be good. But dinner? Never. The sea’s gifts begin to stink.”

It was May 14, the day of St. Matthias, the thirteenth disciple, who was chosen by lot to replace the puzzle, Judas, that dark ordained deceiver. Matthias was a figure not of mystery but of disinterest. Nevertheless, he had his day.

Lilly was venturing out that morning to the English library, which was just around the corner, to take out storybooks for Stephanie. She wanted to teach the child how to read but had no idea of how to go about it. Stephanie was bright. Together they would find a way. They enjoyed each other’s company immensely.

By the time Lilly reached the library, she was exhausted. She sank into a chair and the librarian was kind enough to offer her a glass of water. Her whole body ached. A small television set was on, tuned to an American news program. A man of much experience in strategic planning in both Republican and Democratic administrations, was discussing a matter of grave importance. He was calm, stunningly articulate, erudite. He slumped a little as he spoke. One could not argue with his analysis; no appeal was possible. He proceeded with the phrase
on the other hand
. Relentlessly, dispassionately, like a great weight falling.
On the other hand
. He reminded Lilly of the surgeon who had saved Danny, or rather repaired him. That had been a frightening time for them.

No, she reconsidered this. The surgeon had been worldly, certainly, but this man was of another cast. No dread was left unanticipated. Nothing had to be true. His thought was of a stunning circularity, seamless, unassailable. He was a man unconfused by the corrupting shapes of destiny.

“Feeling better?” the librarian asked.

“Oh … yes,” Lilly said, startled. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Thank you for the water.”

“Shall I turn this blowhard off?”

“I’ve had quite enough of it, thank you,” Lilly said.

He was a lanky American with a thin, amused voice, rough skin and white, exceptionally white, teeth. His glasses were boyishly smudged. Betty Boop was tattooed on his forearm. “A symbol of my Jewish heritage,” he said when he saw Lilly glancing at it. “Father’s side.” He put his hands on his hips.

“I’m looking for one or two simple storybooks,” she said. “I’m trying to teach a little girl—a little friend of mine—the alphabet.”

“I’ve just been organizing the children’s section. Not my specialty. Half the books should be discarded, in my opinion. They look as though they’ve been eaten by goats.” He frowned. “Someone gave us a whole set of Ant and Bee.”

“I’m not familiar with that series,” Lilly said.

“Twits from Great Britain. The rage for decades. I can’t believe it’s washed up here. An alphabetical story for tiny tots. Ant and Bee live in this goddamn cup and have a dog for a friend, get it?”

Lilly laughed.

“And the
dog
takes them for a ride on his back but they crush an
egg on
the road, not seeing it because of the
fog
which is so thick it causes him to trip over
a gun
and knock his
hat
off.”

“A gun!” exclaimed Lilly.

“The illustrator’s got the gun looking like a goddamn cannon, which is so confusing.”

“I guess not Ant and Bee, then,” Lilly said. “You’re quite convincing.”

“I was never the most reasonable child, but those two simply outraged my sense of the appropriate. My mother said again and again, ‘Why are you fighting Ant and Bee?’ Eventually she had to admit to the other mothers, ‘Rockford simply hates Ant and Bee. Nothing can be done.’”

Lilly laughed.

“You’re a good audience,” he said, peering at her. He removed his smudged glasses and held them up to the light. “Wow,” he said, “no wonder.”

“There’s some explanation as to why children’s stories are so nonsensical,” Lilly said, “but I can’t remember it.”

He was violently rubbing the glasses on the hem of his guayabera. “You’re new here,” he stated. “When people first come here they want to
do
something.”

She walked stiffly to the shelf that held a ragged selection of picture books. “How many of these can I borrow?”

“Are you kidding! Take them all. No one’s been in this place since the Second Annual Chili Cookout we had in the garden last week, a great turnout. People love their food booths. May I suggest what I believe? There was once a single language which all creatures possessed. It was highly complex and exceedingly beautiful. Latin was but a gross simplification of its glories. Then some sort of cataclysm, we can’t even guess. Overnight, a soiled, simpler world of cruder possibilities. Words had to be invented, they became artificial. Over centuries we appeared to evolve but our language didn’t. Words
aren’t much more than a waste product now, space junk. We’re living post-literately. It’s all gleanings and tailings. It’s boring, it’s transitory, but a counterliterate future is at hand. It’s what’s coming. The only thing language does now is separate us from the animals. We require something that separates us from ourselves.”

“You’re some librarian,” Lilly ventured.

“I’m not the librarian. The librarian is imprisoned in the back. Furious, frightened. Gagged, bound.”

“I’m smiling uncertainly now, I suppose,” Lilly said.

“You’re a nice lady,” Rockford said. “Everyone will tell you I’m a foolish man. People can actually find me annoying.” He raised his hands and pressed his fingers together. “Forgive me.”

He took the books she had selected to a desk, put his glasses back on and wrote the titles down in a ledger. He consulted a calendar on the wall and recorded the date as well. Indeed it was St. Matthias’s day, he for whom little had been imagined.

Walking home, she saw a thin donkey pulling a flat cart stacked with bags of cement. The reins were red.

“You know that prednisone is making your face puffy.”

She didn’t raise her hand to feel her bones. She would have once.

“Your lovely face,” Danny continued. “A blurring.”

“It’s your glasses.”

“What! I don’t wear glasses.”

“A joke,” Lilly said.

“I wish I hadn’t mentioned it.”

“It’s just a side effect. A known side effect. Nothing unusual.”

“Of course. If it’s helping you. That’s the important thing.”

“I don’t know that it is. I’ve got to give it a chance to work, the doctor said.”

“I’d read that the benefits were supposed to be more or less immediate.”

She turned her head to the left, then to the right.

“See, you couldn’t do that two weeks ago.”

“I feel like a puppet,” Lilly said.