The Distinguished Guest (16 page)

Gaby watched her stupidly for a moment before saying, “Oh, it hardly matters.”

Alan stepped back toward Linnett. “Can I help you with that?”

“Yes,” said Gaby, suddenly seeming awake, moving toward Linnett too. “Let us help.”

“Oh, thanks, no,” Linnett said, “I’ve learned to manage it.” She looked at Gaby again. “Really, I’m so sorry to have stayed this long. The time just
kind of flew by with Lily, and I didn’t notice how tired she was getting, how late it was.”

“It’s all very nourishing to Lily, I’m certain of that,” Gaby said.

Linnett swung her backpack up over one shoulder and propped herself on her crutches.

“Do you have far to go?” Alan asked her in a new, polite voice.

She looked at him, amused, he thought. “Oh no. I’m just down the road a couple of miles.”

“Where are you staying?” Gaby asked.

“I’ve rented a little house. A little cottage kind of thing. At the Thayers’? Do you know them? On their sort of enormous property. It’s charming, really.”
They’d begun to follow behind her as she clumped to the door.

“So you’re all alone?” Gaby made it sound tragic.

Linnett turned around and laughed quickly. “Yes,” she said. “Completely solitary.”

“Well, but this isn’t right,” Gaby said. She looked over at Alan, who was already by the door, waiting to hold it open for Linnett. Linnett could sense a kind of signal pass
between them. “I didn’t realize you were . . . At any rate, why don’t you stay? Stay for dinner. You can wait here, if you don’t mind.” She gestured back toward the
open room. “And have some wine or something, while we go to the store. We have to close it up, but we won’t be much more than forty-five minutes or so, really.”

Linnett turned to Alan, behind her at the door. His face was as blank as a child’s. As Lily’s. He didn’t want her to stay then.

“It’s no trouble, I promise you,” Gaby was saying. “I work with food, you know, and often I bring dinner home, which is what I planned for tonight. It will be simple, but
good. If I say so myself.”

“Well,” Linnett said, looking back at Gaby. “That’s a tempting offer, all right.”

“Then it’s settled,” Gaby said. She looked at Alan again, and then quickly back to Linnett.

“Well,” Linnett said. “Thank you. That’s lovely.” She turned and smiled brilliantly, warmly, at Alan. “That’s so kind of you all.” Her voice
became a little Southern, suddenly. “Ah will.”

After Alan and Gaby had left, Linnett got up again and hobbled slowly around the big room. Though she’d been coming to Lily for three weeks, she hadn’t yet been
left alone in the house. Now she hunkered on her crutches in the kitchen area. She pulled open the handsome drawers, noted the array and arrangement of gleaming utensils—the matching knives,
the whisks, graduated in size, the measuring things. There were two fancy ovens, she saw. More amazingly, two dishwashers. The refrigerator was one of those huge, stainless steel things with the
freezer on the bottom. When she slid open the packed freezer drawer, the first thing that caught her eye was a package of frozen duck breasts, round and white as snowballs. Duck breasts! She
snorted and shut the drawer.

She came out from behind the island. At the other end of the long living room was the piano. Linnett worked slowly over to it and sat down. She leaned her crutches against the bench. She struck
a few chords. Who played? she wondered. The son—Alan—seemed somehow an unlikely candidate, but you never knew. Linnett had had a lover once who’d never mentioned such a talent in
the months they’d slept together, but at a party at someone else’s house sat down and improvised the blues expertly for more than an hour. Linnett had felt betrayed, somehow, that she
hadn’t known he could do this.

Betrayed, and aroused, she recollected now.

Linnett herself played a little, but the only things she knew by heart were leftovers from long ago: “Für Elise.” The opening bars of the “Moonlight Sonata.” The
piano’s tone was marvelous though. It made even her primitive fumbling sound musical and rich. Quite a little toy indeed.

Then she remembered Lily and stopped abruptly. No need to wake her. An affectionate and unlikely picture rose quickly in her mind of the old woman, curled like a baby on her side in sleep.
She’d worn her out today.

After yesterday’s final defeat at writing and Lily’s brave acceptance of it, Linnett had arrived this afternoon determined to make the time easy for Lily, easy and lighthearted.
She’d concocted a series of harmless questions that would lead Lily into those corners of her life she seemed most relaxed in.

And it had worked. Lily had talked at length and animatedly about her mother, about her college years and Paul’s courtship of her, about the first inkling she had that she might have a
gift as a writer. Linnett had kept her going with one open-ended question after another, and hadn’t really even noticed as Lily’s voice lost strength.

Nor had Lily. She’d been taking something, Linnett felt, from the memories, from the sense of herself they brought to her, and Linnett was unwilling to stop her, she wanted so much to
help. She’d been amazed when she looked at her watch after Alan arrived, to see how late it was, how long she’d kept Lily at it.

She got up now and made her way down the hallway to the room Gaby had emerged from. The bedroom. The door was open. The bed was unmade, a tangle of white sheets with a faded, frayed quilt
sliding off to the floor. The view out these windows—they were French doors, really, left flung open to the winds—was over the deck toward the river too, but it was a little more
overgrown at this end than in front of the living room windows.

What was she looking for? She didn’t know, but she couldn’t not have looked.

There was a group of family pictures sitting in tilted frames on the bureau top. Linnett crossed to them and picked them up one by one. Children and parents in various combinations over the
years, the kids gradually becoming young men. There was a picture too of Alan and Gaby, very young, in what looked like a French restaurant.

Of course, they must have met in France. This American life, this house on a river in a town of comfort and bourgeois safety, was just the way it had all turned out. In the picture, Alan’s
hair was longer than Gaby’s: it must have been the sixties or early seventies. They were bent toward each other, each resting elbows on the table, and the person taking the photo seemed to
have startled them.

Gaby was ready to be startled. Her quick glance toward the camera was sly, flirtatious: oh, me? Alan had had to turn a little over his shoulder to see the person taking his picture. Maybe
he’d been saying something intimate to Gaby. I adore you. I must have you. At any rate, he was frowning at the intrusion, he seemed almost alarmed.

He was incredibly handsome, Linnett thought. She felt a pang of resentment for Alan and Gaby, for the romance implicit in this picture. For the luck of the way it had all turned out.

Linnett set the picture down and pushed the door next to the bureau open: the bathroom. It was all tiled in here, a pale greenish-blue. There was no tub, per se, but a tiled box you stepped down
into. Room for two, Linnett saw. Cozy. Next to it, on the floor, a stack of sumptuous big towels in a matching color. There was a bidet, a pedestal sink. Who had this sybaritic taste? The pretty,
slightly plump French wife, formerly of the gamine charm? Or Alan, so skinny and seemingly sober?

Until he laughed, Linnett thought. Then he was a very attractive man. And he’d been attracted to her too, she could tell.

Linnett went back into the bedroom, stood at the foot of the bed. Each of them had a nightstand. The one she took to be Alan’s was neat, books stacked just so, the clock squared against
them. On the other side of the bed, closer to the French doors, the books and magazines were splayed out on the table and even on the floor around it. Down there too, a pair of flowered underpants.
A sock. Some cooking magazines, Linnett saw. She started to move toward the heap, when a door banged in the house.

A voice, male: “Anybody home?”

Linnett teetered, then decided quickly: the deck. She will have been out on the deck. Yes, looking at the view. She moved herself carefully toward the screen doors. She pushed them gently open
with her body and eased herself out. She was breathing deliberately, slowly and evenly.

Once she made it safely outside, she exhaled. Ah. No rush now. The question occurred to her only after a moment, her heart calming in the light hiss of the breeze through the pine trees at this
end of the deck: who was this? Some friend, meandering in for a drink, maybe. Someone connected with Alan’s work. Or Gaby’s. Mighty familiar, in any case. Linnett moved down the deck
toward the glass wall to the living room.

And then a wash of rich sound, of music—the piano!—poured over her and she stilled. It was some adagio, Linnett didn’t know it, but the yearning chords slowly pulsed out the
opened doors at the living room end of the deck. Linnett, suddenly cradled in the lush sound, was caught unawares. Tears sprang to her eyes. She closed them and stood frozen for several minutes,
letting herself be held in the sound, in the light air, in the sense of deep desire and loss the music carried.

Then there was a hitch. The music stopped abruptly. “Ah,
fuck
!” the voice said, and there was a deedley jazz riff, a little ragtimey dance. Linnett felt as though someone had
slapped her. She opened her eyes and moved down the deck to where she could see through the reflection of herself to the figure inside on the piano bench. A big kid: dark, curly hair, gangly body,
all elbows from the back.

After a minute of that fooling around, the music, the real music, started again. Linnett, more cautious now, hobbled to one of the wooden chairs on the deck and lowered herself slowly. The music
swelled around her once more, and she closed her eyes again and leaned back in the chair, greedy for it. The audience.

The Gaby in the picture Linnett had looked at with envy was about to step from one world into another. Alan had been in Paris for only a few weeks this time. It was early
September, and he had to go back to architecture school in only a few days. And Gaby had decided to go with him, to go to America.

In the photograph they’re sitting in a little restaurant near St. Sulpice. They’re celebrating. Alan is spending nearly all the money he has left on their meal. It is a moment of
unalloyed happiness for him, a moment he always remembers for that, for the purest joy he’s ever known. Looking at this photograph now sometimes has the power to call him back to a sense of
that possibility.

Gaby, happy as she was then, was also more practical. She saw Alan more simply as the answer to the dilemma that was then her life.

She had met him three years before, when she was in love with someone else. Alan was in France for a semester with an American exchange program, and he was placed for six weeks in her house
because she had a brother two years younger—Alan’s age—and her parents thought it would be a wonderful opportunity for him to perfect his English. What she remembered of Alan then
was how handsome he was, and how shy, how silent around her. She was home only a few times a week for family meals, to do her laundry and the like, so she couldn’t have been said to have come
to know him, but she understood he had a crush on her. Everyone in the family understood that. They joked about it sometimes in French too rapid, too idiomatic for him to catch, and he sat among
them and smiled sweetly, waiting for their laughter to be explained. She thought of him at that time as the beautiful American. She spoke of him that way to her lover, Gerard. “Be
careful,” she would say, “or I’ll run off with the beautiful American.”

Alan, actually, knew a great deal more about her. The brother his age—there were three other, younger children as well—was a font of willing, scandalous information. And of course,
there were family photographs around, stories he pumped from her mother about her childhood. When he went back to the States, he wrote her occasionally, very short, friendly notes. His intention
was simply to keep himself alive in her memory. The first one thanked her for her kindness to him while he was in France. He said he would never forget her. It was signed, “Your American
brother, Alan.” Later notes would report that he thought of her, would tell her about whatever was changing in his life—he had decided to become an architect, he was accepted at
graduate school, he finished college.

Meanwhile, Gaby’s life was unraveling. In the explosions of the late sixties, she was trapped and divided by her loyalties. She wasn’t bold enough for Gerard, and she was far too
radical for her parents. While all of Paris, all of France—all of the world, it seemed—convulsed, she stood and watched. When it was over, she followed Gerard to the country near Dijon
where he and five or six friends of his had rented a house they were all going to live in together, communally. But sex was part of what was being shared, and this was impossible for Gaby, as she
discovered. She came back to her parents, where she lived for a few weeks surrounded by chilly silence; and then she found an attic apartment off the Rue Monge, and a job tutoring foreign
businessmen in French.

She had sent a postcard or two to Alan in response to his notes the first year after he’d left. Nothing after that. But her brother had kept him informed in a general way of Gaby’s
path in life. (Not of her misery, because her brother couldn’t see that.) When Alan came back to France in 1970, he had a tiny grant from architectare school to research the shape and
functioning of town squares in various medieval villages in Europe, but his aim, his goal, was to present himself as an adult to Gaby and to win permission to woo her.

In mid-June, he checked into a youth hostel near the Marais, and walked the distance to Gaby’s apartment, wishing, actually, that it were even farther, that the approach would take even
longer. He wanted to be walking toward her forever. He saw himself from time to time in a storefront window, and was startled that he looked so much himself, striding along, tall and skinny in blue
jeans and an old jacket, his long pale hair lifting in the light breeze that stirred too in the fresh green of the trees. He felt so transformed by his mission, his desire, that it seemed he should
also, somehow, look different.