The Distinguished Guest (30 page)

With a sharp scissors Gaby had loaned her for her desk work, with sure fingers at her command—at the wind’s command, they were as steady as you could wish—she slit open the
worn silk lining of the bed jacket (the slice of the blade through the ancient cloth as easy as the sigh of the wind) and spilled the bright-colored capsules onto the bed. Children’s colors.
Mexican jumping beans
, Lily murmured, remembering the children’s fascination with those mysterious, bright-colored things and their ceaseless dance. Her eyes unexpectedly filled with
tears, and she spoke to herself reassuringly again.

She had far too many. In her wish to be thorough, to avoid the bad luck of being pumped alive again, she had seen several different doctors for prescriptions. She knew she risked being ill if
she took too many, but she wanted a few more than the book recommended anyway, just to be safe. Carefully she counted what she thought was the correct dose into a pile, then fetched her water glass
from the bathroom and scooped them into that. The rest she threw away.

While the wind shuddered against the house, she floated on its force into the kitchen. She found a knife to cut the capsules, heavier and sharper than any she’d used in her life. She
barely needed to grip it to push it through the bright little shells. How useful, she thought, to have such a knife! And her own hands, how useful they were today too! She made herself admire their
sure grip on the tiny, pretty pill-cups of powder, the way they turned each one so neatly out, pouring its contents into her glass.

When she’d emptied them all, she went in search of vodka to the cupboard where Gaby kept liqueurs. Yes, clear and cold-looking. And then to the freezer for some ice cream. It had been
there awhile—it glittered with crystals when Lily opened it. But she dug down below the twinkling surface and scooped out enough to fill a small bowl with the stuff.

Her problem, she knew, would be eating fast enough to get all the pills down before she passed out. She had thought it all through, that she’d let the ice cream get good and soupy before
she started, that she’d wait to drink the vodka until the very end.

She set everything down on her bedside table and went into the bathroom, whispering encouragement to herself. Carefully she repinned her hair, and put on lipstick. She sat on the toilet, then,
and waited to move her bowels. She had read of the loosening of the sphincter at the moment of death, and wished, if she could, to avoid that indignity.

When she was through, she came out and arranged her pillows. She shut the door to her room; she came back to the bed and opened the edge Gaby had smoothed down. She sat down and slowly lifted
her legs up and stretched them out. “
There
you go,” she murmured. She pulled the covers neatly across her midriff. Then she reached for the ice cream and stirred it until she
could no longer see the granules of the drug. She began to eat.

Of course, Lily had planned too what she would think of during these moments. She had assumed that she wouldn’t have arrived at this point unless there were losses, sorrows, that brought
her here, but she had been determined not to dwell on those—they were inevitable, after all—and to remember instead all the places she’d loved being in. And this is where she
traveled now, as she drank the ice cream spoonful by spoonful (in spite of its odd, bitter taste, it went down more easily than she could have hoped) and then sipped slowly at the full glass of
vodka.

She remembered sitting in the tent formed by the skirt of her mother’s dressing table while Violet got ready to go out. A wonderful fleshy light came through the sheer pink fabric of the
table, making Lily’s hiding place seem like the inside of a shell. And the dizzying floral smell of Violet’s perfume! Or perhaps it was her powder. Everything, at any rate, that was
safe and encircling and female.

And then the nearly empty bedroom in the parsonage in Belvaine—they had so little furniture then. The astonishment of physical love in the long afternoons they stole together that first
summer of their marriage. The girl who did the laundry couldn’t be persuaded to use less than far too much bleach, and the trousseau sheets, dampened with their sweat, transferred that odor
to Lily and Paul. Later in the day Lily would often catch a whiff of herself smelling bleachy and innocent, a well-scrubbed woman, and she’d blush in the midst of whatever else she was
doing.

The nave at Blackstone Church, soaring and dark. The creak of the wooden pews, the little four-holed trays for the tiny communion glasses—the children loved to poke their fingers through
them—the deep red-velvet cushions, worn to white on the welting and around the buttons. The woolly, wet smells in winter of people’s coats and scarves and gloves, the welcome chill of
the dark, damp space in summer.

Lily’s eyes were closed now, and she’d stopped reaching for the vodka. The storm around her raged fully. Her room had darkened, and the windows were smeared with a paste of seawater
and rain and the leaves the storm had stripped from the trees and chewed alive. As she slipped deeper into her drugged slumber, her will was affected too, her grip on her visions loosened. Her
father was there, silent and angry at something she’d done. She couldn’t get him to speak to her, he kept his face averted.

And then she was a bride, young and also old somehow, faltering on her canes as she made her way down the long dark aisle at Blackstone. The faces, black and white, were turned to her in
judgment, in dislike. She whimpered. Someone was waiting for her—the bridegroom—at the end of the rows of pews, but she couldn’t see who it was, every step forward drew her
somehow farther back, she was losing control of her limbs.

Perhaps it was the noise of the branch falling thunderously on the front stairs, splintering them, that called her back. Perhaps not. But suddenly she resisted the pull of her own ending. There
were things she had left undone, and her mind struggled now to make sense of them. It was Paul, calling her, telling her that she’d left one of the children—the boy she
thought—left him alone in his room somewhere. She stirred, her hands fluttered on the coverlet. She struggled back up to near consciousness.

And then the center of the storm passed over her, and there was a great, hollow stillness. Lily had recovered just enough of herself to know what this was: the eye.

The
I
, she thought.
Lily
.

And was amused at this joke. Her joke. God’s joke. A nearly invisible smile twitched on her face.

Though after a few minutes the storm moved on, for her, miraculously, usefully, the world stayed as still as it had been in that moment, as still and deep as a lost meadow. She heard a voice she
took to be her mother’s calling “
Lily? Lily?
” And she rose from the sunstruck field she sat in. “Coming,” she thought she said. “Coming.”

But she didn’t.

As she’d pulled out onto the main road from Alan’s driveway, Linnett watched a car with a boat on a trailer behind it pass, going in the other direction, away from the
sea, the boat swaying wildly, ominously, in the wind. Already limbs were strewn here and there on the road, and Linnett’s own car moved sideways frequently with the slam of the storm. She was
hung over, she was frightened, and she decided not to stop anywhere for batteries or bottled water. Several other cars driving inland passed her as she drove along, one other of them also pulling a
rocking boat. Of course, she thought, you’d want to get them out of the water.

The village was deserted except for two teenage boys on rollerblades, holding up what looked like towels as sails to catch the wind. Their yelping, breaking voices were swallowed by the din of
the storm, they sounded like distant barking dogs.

The Thayers’ house looked abandoned. All the lawn furniture, antique-looking, white-painted wooden chairs and tables and curving benches—all of it had been removed. A lone shutter on
an upstairs window banged repeatedly against the house, its sound diminished by the storm’s roar, a faraway tocking hammer.

At Linnett’s cottage, the deck table and chair had been removed too. Or perhaps had blown away, she thought. She parked as close to the deck as she could, directly on a little garden of
some kind of ground cover. She braced herself carefully against the wind on her crutches before she moved beyond the shelter of her car. Even so she was nearly blown over as she took the three or
four steps to her door.

Inside she went to the bathroom to run water into the tub and get some aspirin. When she turned on the faucet in the sink though, there was a little burst of water, then only a suck and gurgle
and the slow weakening dribble of what had been in the pipe.

“Shit,” she said.

She took the aspirin to the kitchen area, and opened the little half-refrigerator. The light, of course, did not come on, although what was left of the seltzer water was still cold in the
bottle. Linnett took three aspirin with a glass of the water, and returned the bottle to the refrigerator.

Something fell hard on the roof of the house and she started wildly and cried out. When she’d calmed a bit, she said aloud, “Jesus!” and moved directly to her bed. She leaned
her crutches against the wall next to it and got in. Her head throbbed with her pulse and her mouth felt dry even though she’d just had the water.

How tired she was of this! Of herself, of this endless cycle of vague remorse, quasi-resolution, and then within a week or two, another night like the last one. “Quasi-resolution,”
she murmured, and swung her head slowly on the pillow. The storm’s roar was steady now, an astonishing constant racket. She opened her eyes for a moment, and saw that the tree outside her
window had been completely stripped of its leaves. Its branches were sharply articulated, an old woman’s limbs. It looked barren and wintry. She shut her eyes against the sight, and for a
short time crooned softly to herself.

Then she slept, through the thud of branches above her, through the peeling away of part of the roof.

It wasn’t until the eye passed over, that sudden, shocking peace, that she was jolted awake. “What?” she cried aloud, jerking herself up. And then lay back. Something grievous
and painful pulled at her, she didn’t know what. Her leg, trapped in its heavy carapace. Her drinking. Her emptiness. Tears formed in her eyes, and her throat ached. Something she
hadn’t done, all the things she had. She wept.

There were no large trees around the Admundsens’ house—it stood in what had been a field dotted then with cows lazily making their way down to the river—so the
only real risk from the storm was that the wind itself would take apart some of the pieces Bill and his crew had so painstakingly nailed and bolted together, would break glass, or throw the
remaining piles of lumber and materials around, at worst, of course, through the new windows.

By the time Gaby got there, Alan was taping the window wall. He’d already climbed the scaffolding and thrown the boards down from it. Then he’d brought them into the house, along
with the other loose lumber lying around. They worked together on the windows as long as they could, and when the wind got too strong, they came inside to watch what would happen. They were wet and
cold, but Gaby had brought towels and blankets. She’d brought a portable radio too, and food—thick sandwiches of cheese and basil leaves and green olive paste, and cookies and berries.
She’d brought three thermoses too, one of water, one of coffee, one of the yellow-pepper soup. They stripped and wrapped up in blankets, and sat huddled against the back wall of the house,
eating their picnic and listening to reports of the hurricane’s progress on the radio—the litany of power outages, roads washed out, dunes breached, phone lines down, harbors
ruined.

Alan imagined he could hear a certain logic in this announced chaos—the logic of the hurricane’s chosen path. But he knew there was an element of luck, even within that path. There
were those places which would feel the first brunt of the wind’s force, and others which would escape. By luck—or the exact angle of the wind, or the rise of the land, or the distance
to the open sea. It was this he hoped for.

And the Admundsens were lucky. Alan and Gaby could watch their luck hold as the wind hit the top half of the other bank of the river and a swath of trees—a wide stripe mounting the
crest—was felled in a kind of thrilling and violent slow motion. The house vibrated with the wind’s force, and the new windows buzzed in place, but that was all. A little later there
was the astonishing quiet of the eye, and then slowly, slowly everything grew calmer and the sky began to lighten. They had been sitting for perhaps an hour.

Alan got up, cramped, and walked around, holding his blanket like a cape over his shoulders. “I think that was it,” he said. He stood in front of the wall of windows and watched the
river below. “That
was
it,” he said finally. He turned and grinned at Gaby. He began to dance, Isadora-Duncan-like in his blanket-robe. “That was it, that was it Gabs,
Gabs, Gabs.” He swept the blanket this way and that. Around him, and then away, swirling sawdust and wood shavings along with it, dramatically revealing, then concealing himself. He cast the
blanket on the floor and leaped back and forth across it, his long skinny body in sharp articulation, his penis flopping and dancing wildly on its own. He ended with a dramatic flourish, on one
knee, his body thrust forward, his arms and head arched back.

Gaby had been laughing, crying out for him to stop. He stood and shook his blanket out, rewrapped himself in it, and came to sit down beside her again. She was wiping tears from her eyes. The
radio jumped to another reporter, on Point Judith, his rapid-fire account of damage.

“That was terrible, Alan,” Gaby said. “How can I take you seriously?”

“Why should you take me seriously? It’s nothing I’ve ever been interested in.”

“But why not? Everyone wishes to be taken seriously.”

“Not I. I had entirely too much of that growing up. So serious. So lofty. So elevated. I say the hell with it.”