The Accomplished Guest: Stories Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  The Indian Uprising

  For the Best

  The Astonished Woodchopper

  Anecdotes

  Other People’s Birthdays

  Company

  The Debt

  Lady Neptune

  The Caterer

  The Gypsy Chooses the Whatever Card

  The Cloud

  Hoodie in Xanadu

  Save a Horse Ride a Cowgirl

  About the Author

  For Harry and Marie Mathews

  XXXIX

  The soul should always stand ajar,

   That if the heaven inquire,

  He will not be obliged to wait,

   Or shy of troubling her.

  Depart, before the host has slid

   The bolt upon the door,

  To seek for the accomplished guest,—

   Her visitor no more.

  —Emily Dickinson

  THE INDIAN UPRISING

  “There’s no copyright on titles,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a good idea, probably, to call something Death of a Salesman, but you could do it.”

  “I wanted to see the play, but it was sold out. Tickets were going for fifteen hundred dollars at the end of the run. I did get to New York and go to the Met, though, and paid my two dollars to get in.”

  “Two dollars is nicer than one dollar,” he said.

  “Ah! So you do care what people think!”

  “Don’t talk like you’re using exclamation points,” he said. “It doesn’t suit people who are intelligent. You’ve been fighting your intelligence for a long time, but exclaiming is the coward’s way of undercutting yourself.”

  “Cynicism’s better?”

  “I wonder why I’ve created so many adversaries,” he said, then did a good Garth Brooks imitation. “ ‘I got friends in . . . low places . . . ’ ”

  “George Dickel interests you more than any person, every time. We used to come see you and we had a burning desire to talk to you, to pick your brain, find out what to read, make you smile, but by the end of every evening, it’s clear who’s your best friend.”

  “But pity me: I have to pay for that best friend. We don’t have an unlimited calling plan.”

  “How can you still have so much ego involved that you hate it that my father’s company pays for my cell phone and doesn’t—what? Send someone to come rake your leaves for free?”

  “The super does that. He doesn’t have a rake, though. He refuses to think the maple’s gotten as big as it has. Every year, he’s out there with the broom and one black garbage bag.”

  “Made for a good poem,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said seriously. “I was wondering if you’d seen it.”

  “We all subscribe to everything. Unless we’re as broke as I’d be without my daddy, as you so often point out.”

  “If the maple starts to go, the super will be thrilled, and as a good citizen, I promise to chop and burn the wood in the WBF, not let it be made into paper. Paper is so sad. Every sheet, a thin little tombstone.”

  “How’s Rudolph?”

  “Rudolph is energetic again, since the vet’s found a substitute for the pills that made him sleep all the time. I envied him, but that’s what the old envy: sleep.”

  “Is this the point where I try to convince you seventy isn’t old?”

  “I’ve got a better idea. I’m about to turn seventy-one, so why don’t you get Daddy to fly you here and we can celebrate my birthday at the same restaurant where Egil Fray shot the bottle of tequila and then offered the bartender a slice of lime as it poured down from the top shelf like a waterfall. Egil was funny.”

  Egil, back in college, had been the star student of our class: articulate; irreverent; devoted to books; interested in alcohol, bicycling, Italian cooking, UFOs, and Apple stock. He’d been diagnosed bipolar after he dove off the Delaware Memorial Bridge and broke every rib, his nose, and one wrist, and said he was sorry he’d had the idea. That was years ago, when he’d had insurance, when he was still married to Brenda, when everybody thought he was the brightest boy, including his doctors. He’d gotten good with a slingshot—none of that macho shooting the apple off the wife’s head—but he’d caused a significant amount of damage, even when taking good aim. He was finishing medical school now.

  I said, “I wonder if that’s a sincere wish.”

  “It would be great,” he said, and for a second I believed him, until he filled in the details: “You’d be in your hotel room on your cell phone, and I’d be here with my man Rudy, talking to you from the Princess phone.”

  He really did have a Princess phone, and he was no more wrong about that than Egil had been about Apple. Repairmen had offered him serious money for the pale-blue phone. His ex-wife (Carrie, his third, the only one I’d known) had asked for it officially, in court papers—along with half his frequent-flyer miles, from the days when he devotedly visited his mother in her Colorado nursing home.

  “You know, it would be good to see you,” I said. “I can afford a ticket. What about next Monday? What are you doing then?”

  “Getting ready for Halloween. Looking in every drawer for my rubber fangs.”

  “Can’t help you there, but I could bring my Groucho glasses and mustache.”

  “I’ll take you to the finest new restaurant,” he said. “My favorite item on the menu is Pro and Pros. It’s a glass of prosecco and some very delicious hard cheese wrapped in prosciutto. Alcoholics don’t care about entrées.”

  “Then we go dancing?” (We had gone dancing; we had, we had, we had. Everyone knew it, and every woman envied me.)

  “I don’t think so, unless you just wanted to dance around the floor with me held over your head, like Mel Fisher on the floor of the ocean with his buried treasure, or a goat you’d just killed.”

  “You live in Philadelphia, not Greece.”

  “There is no more Greece,” he said. “They fucked themselves good.”

  Pretty soon thereafter, he had a coughing fit and my boyfriend came into the kitchen with raised eyebrows meant to ask: Are you sleeping with me tonight? and we hung up.

  * * *

  I took the train. It wasn’t difficult. I got a ride with a friend to some branch of the Metro going into Washington and rode it to Union Station. Then I walked forever down the train track to a car someone finally let me on. I felt like an ant that had walked the length of a caterpillar’s body and ended up at its anus. I sat across from a mother with a small son whose head she abused any time she got bored looking out the window: swatting it with plush toys; rearranging his curls; inspecting him for nits.

  The North Thirty-fourth Street station was familiar, though the photo booth was gone. We’d had our pictures taken there, a strip of them, and we’d fought over who got them, and then after I won, I lost them somehow. I went outside and splurged on a cab.

  Since his divorce, Franklin had lived in a big stone building with a curving driveway. At first, as the cab approached, I thought there might be a hitching post, but it turned out to be a short man in a red vest with his hair slicked back. He took an older man’s hand, and the two set off, waved forward by the cabbie.
>
  This was great, I thought; I didn’t have to worry about parking, I’d gotten money from a cash machine before the trip and wouldn’t have to think about that until I ran short at the end of the month, and here I was, standing in front of the imposing building where my former teacher lived. Inside, I gave the woman behind the desk his name and mine. She had dark-purple fingernails and wore many bracelets. “Answer, hon, answer,” she breathed into her phone, flicking together a couple of nails. “This is Savannah, sending you her ‘answer’ jujus.”

  Finally he did pick up, and she said my name, listened so long that I thought Franklin might be telling her a joke, then said, “All right, hon,” hung up, and gave me a Post-it note with 303 written on it that I hadn’t asked for. I sent him Royal Riviera pears every Christmas, books from Amazon, Virginia peanuts, and hell, it wasn’t the first time I’d visited, either. I knew his apartment number.

  Though the hallway looked different. That was because (I was about to find out) someone very rich had been irritated at the width of the corridors and had wanted to get his antique car into his living room, so he’d paid to widen the hallway, which had created a god-awful amount of dust, noise, and inconvenience.

  It was funnier in Franklin’s telling. We clinked shot glasses (mine brimming only with white wine), called each other Russian names, and tossed down the liquor. If everything we said had been a poem, the index of first lines would have formed a pattern: “Do you remember,” “Tell me if I remember wrong,” “There was that time,” “Wasn’t it funny when.”

  When I looked out the window, I saw that it had begun to snow. Rudolph had been the first to see it, or to sense it; he’d run to the window and put his paws on the ledge, tail aquiver.

  “I hated it when I was a kid and this happened. My mother made me wear my winter jacket over my Halloween costume, and that ruined everything. Who’s going to know what gender anybody is supposed to be under their Barbour jacket, let alone their exact identity?”

  “The receptionist,” he said, “is a guy who became a woman. He had the surgery in Canada because it was a lot cheaper. He had saline bags put in for tits, but then he decided flat-chested women were sexy, so he had them taken out. I asked for one, to put in a jar, but no go: You’d have thought I was asking for a fetus.”

  The bottle of bourbon was almost full. We might be sitting for a long time, I realized. I said, “Let’s go get something to eat before the snow piles up. How far would we have to go to get to that restaurant?”

  “You’re afraid if we stay here, I’ll have more to drink and try to seduce you.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said indignantly.

  “You’re afraid I’ll invite Savannah to come up and give us all the gory details. Savannah is a former Navy SEAL.”

  “If you like it when I speak in a monotone, don’t tell me weird stuff.”

  “Listen to her! When the only buttons I ever push are for the elevator. I don’t live by metaphor, woman. Don’t you read the critics?”

  He kicked his shoes out from behind the footstool. Good—so he was game. His ankles didn’t look great, but at least they were shoes I’d have to get on his feet, not cowboy boots, and they seemed to have sturdy treads. I knelt and picked up one foot, opened the Velcro fastener, and used my palm as a shoehorn. His foot slid in easily. On the other foot, though, the arch and the ankle were swollen, but we decided it would work fine if the fastener was left open. It was a little problem to keep the Velcro from flipping over and fastening itself, but I folded the top strap and held it together with a big paper clip, and eventually we got going.

  “An old man like me, and I’ve got no scarf, no hat, only gloves I bought from a street vendor, the same day I had a roasted chestnut and bought another one for a squirrel. I can tell you which one of us was happier.” He was holding the crook of my arm. “Only you would take me out in the snow for a meal. Promise me one thing: You won’t make me watch you make a snowball and throw it in a wintry way. You can make an anecdote of that request and use it later at my memorial service.”

  He’d had a triple bypass two years before. He had diabetes. He’d told me on the phone that he might have to go on dialysis.

  “Is this the part of the walk where you tell me how your relationship is with that fellow I don’t consider my equal?”

  “Did I bring him up?” I said.

  “No, I did. So is he still not my equal?”

  “I feel disloyal talking about him. He lost his job. He hasn’t been in a very good mood.”

  “Take him dancing,” he said. “Or read him my most optimistic poem: ‘Le petit rondeau, le petit rondeau.’ That one was a real triumph. He’ll want to know what rondeau means, so tell him it’s the dance that’s supplanted the Macarena.”

  “I wish you liked each other,” I said, “but realistically speaking, he has three siblings, and the only one he talks to is his sister.”

  “I could wear a wig. Everybody’s getting chemo now, so they’re making very convincing hair.”

  We turned the corner. Snow was falling fast, and people hurried along. He wasn’t wearing a hat or a scarf. What had I been thinking? In solidarity, I left my little knitted beret folded in my coat pocket.

  “Let’s go there,” he said, pointing to a Mexican restaurant. “Who wants all those truffles and frills? A cold Dos Equis on a cold day, a beef burrito. That’ll be fine.”

  I could tell that walking was an effort. Also, I’d realized his shoes were surprisingly heavy as I’d put them on.

  We went into the Mexican restaurant. Two doctors in scrubs were eating at one of the two front tables. An old lady and a young woman sat at another. We were shown to the back room, where a table of businessmen were laughing. I took off my coat and asked Franklin if he needed help with his. “My leg won’t bend,” he said. “That’s happened before. It locks. I can sit down, but I’m going to need an arm.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  The waiter reached around us and put menus on the table and rushed away. I pulled out a chair. How was I going to get it near the table again, though? I was just about to push it a little closer to the table when Franklin made a hopping motion with one foot and stabilized himself by grabbing the edge of the table and bending at the waist. Before I knew it, he was sitting in the chair, wincing, one leg bent, the other extended. “Go get those doctor fellows and tell ’em I swallowed Viagra and my leg’s completely rigid,” he said. “Tell ’em it’s been this way for at least ten hours.”

  I dropped a glove, and when I bent to pick it up, I also tried to move the chair in closer to the table. I couldn’t budge it. And the waiter looked smaller than I was.

  “Let’s see,” Franklin said, picking up one of the menus. “Let’s see if there’s a simple bean burrito for a simple old guy, and our waiter can bring a brace of beer bottles by their necks and we can have a drink and make a toast to the knee that will bend, to Egil our friend, to a life without end . . . at least let’s hope it’s not rigor mortis setting in at a Mexican restaurant.

  “Three Dos Equis, and you can serve one to my friend,” Franklin said to the waiter. “Excuse me for sitting out in the middle of the room, but I like to be at the center of the action.”

  “You want me to maybe help you in a little closer to the table?” the waiter said, coming close to Franklin’s side.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Franklin said doubtfully, but he slid forward a bit on the chair, and with one quick movement, he rose slightly, the waiter pushed the chair under him, and he was suddenly seated a normal distance from the table.

  “Gracias, mi amigo,” Franklin said.

  “No problem,” the waiter said. He turned to me. “You’re going to have a Dos Equis?”

  I spread my hands helplessly and smiled.

  At that exact moment, my ex-husband and a very attractive woman walked into the back room, followed by a different waiter. He stopped and we stared at each other in disbelief. He and I had met at Penn, but
for a long time now I’d lived in Charlottesville. Last I’d heard, he was living in Santa Fe. He said something hurriedly to the pretty woman and, instead of sitting, pointed to a different table, in the corner. The waiter complied with the request, but only the woman walked away. My ex-husband came to our table.

  “What a surprise,” Gordy said. “Nice to see you.”

  “Nice to see you,” I echoed.

  “I’d rise, but I took Viagra, and now I can’t get my leg to move,” Franklin said. He had settled on this as the joke of the day.

  “Professor Chadwick?” Gordy said. “Franklin Chadwick, right? Gordon Miller. I was president of Latin Club.”

  “That’s right!” Franklin said. “And back then we were both in love with the same girl!”

  Gordy blushed and took a step back. “That’s right. Good to see you. Sorry to interrupt.” He was not wearing a wedding ring. He turned and strode back toward the faraway table.

  “Why did you say that?” I asked. “You were never in love with me. You were always flirting with Louisa Kepper. You paid her to cut your grass so you could stare at her in shorts and work boots. She knew it, too.”

  “I wasn’t in love with you, but now it seems like I should have been, because where are they now? Who keeps in touch? I never hear, even when a poem is published. It was just a job, apparently. Like a bean burrito’s a bean burrito.”

  “Here you go, three beers. Should I pour for you?” the waiter asked.

  “I’ll take mine in the bottle,” Franklin said, reaching up. The waiter handed him the bottle.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. The waiter poured two thirds of a glass of beer and set the bottle beside my glass. “Lunch is coming,” he said, putting the last beer bottle in front of Franklin.

  “I’ll tell you what I’d like: a shot of tequila on the side.”

  “We only have a beer-and-wine license. I’m sorry,” the waiter said.

  “Then let me have a glass of red wine on the side,” Franklin said.