The Accomplished Guest: Stories Page 2

“Okay,” the waiter said.

  “Take it easy with the drinking. I’ve got to get you back in one piece,” I said. “Also, I don’t want to feel like an enabler. I want us to have a good time, but we can do that sober.”

  “ ‘Enabler’? Don’t use phony words like that. They’re ugly, Maude.”

  I was startled when he used my name. I’d been “Champ” in his poetry seminar. We were all “Champ.” The biggest champ had now published six books. I had published one, though it had won the Yale Series. We didn’t talk about the fact that I’d stopped writing poetry.

  “I hope you understand that he and I”—he tilted his head in the direction of my ex-husband—“had a man-to-man on the telephone, and I told him where we’d be eating today.”

  “I wonder what he is doing here. I thought he lived in Santa Fe.”

  “Probably got tired of all the sun and the turquoise and coyotes. Decided to trade it in for snow and a gray business suit and squirrels.”

  “Did you see if she had a wedding ring on?” I asked.

  “Didn’t notice. When I’m with one pretty girl, what do I care about another? Though there’s that great story by Irwin Shaw, ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.’ I don’t suppose anyone even mentions Irwin Shaw anymore. They might, if only he’d thought to call his story ‘The Amazingly Gorgeous Femme Fatales Provoke Envy and Lust as Men Go Mad.’ ” He turned to the waiter, who’d appeared with the bean burrito and the chicken enchilada I’d ordered. “Sir, will you find occasion to drop by that table in the corner and see if the lady is wearing a wedding ring?” Franklin said quietly into the waiter’s ear.

  “No problem,” the waiter said. He put down the plates. He lifted two little dishes of sauce from the tray and put them on the table. “No joke, my brother José is the cook. I hope you like it. I’m getting your wine now.”

  The first bite of enchilada was delicious. I asked Franklin if he’d like to taste it. He shook his head. He waited until the waiter returned with the glass of wine, then took a big sip before lifting his burrito, or trying to. It was too big. He had to pick up a fork. He didn’t use the knife to cut it, just the fork. I’d studied him for so long, almost nothing surprised me anymore, however small the gesture. I had a fleeting thought that perhaps part of the reason I’d stopped writing was that I studied him instead. But now I was also noticing little lapses, which made everything different for both of us. I liked the conversational quirks, not the variations or the repetitions. Two months ago, when I’d visited, bringing fried chicken and a bottle of his favorite white wine, Sancerre (expensive stuff), he’d told me about the receptionist, though that time he’d told me she’d had the surgery in Denmark.

  The waiter came back and made his report: “Not what I’d call a wedding ring. It’s a dark stone, I think maybe amethyst, but I don’t think it’s a wedding ring, and she has gold rings on two other fingers also.”

  “We assume, then, she’s just wearing rings.”

  The waiter nodded. “You want another glass of wine, just let me know.”

  “He and I had a man-to-man last night and he promised to keep me supplied,” he said. “I told you the guy with the Messerschmitt gets drug deliveries? Thugs that arrive together, like butch nuns on testosterone. Two, three in the morning. Black guys, dealers. They’re all How-ya-doin’-man best friends with the receptionist. That’s the night guy. Hispanic. Had a breakdown, lives with his brother. Used to work at Luxor in Vegas.”

  “Take a bite of your burrito,” I said, and instantly felt like a mother talking to her child. His expression told me he thought I was worse than that. He said nothing and finished his wine. There was a conspicuous silence.

  “Everything good?” the waiter said. He’d just seated a table of three men, one of them choosing to keep on his wet coat; he sat at the table, red-nosed, looking miserable.

  Leaning forward to look, I’d dropped my napkin. As I bent to pick it up, the waiter appeared, unfurling a fresh one like a magician who’d come out of nowhere. I half expected a white bird to fly up. But my mind was racing: There’d been a stain on Franklin’s sock. Had he stepped in something on the way to the restaurant, or was it, as I feared, blood? I waited until the nice waiter wasn’t looking and pushed back the tablecloth enough to peek. The stain was bright red, on the foot with the unfastened Velcro.

  “Franklin, your foot,” I said. “Does it hurt? I think it’s bleeding.”

  “My feet don’t feel. That’s the problem,” he said.

  I pushed back my chair and inspected the foot more carefully. Yes, a large area of the white sock was bloody. I was really frightened.

  “Eat your lunch,” he said. “And I’ll eat mine. Don’t worry.”

  “It might . . . it could be a problem. Has this ever happened before?”

  He didn’t answer. He was now using both his fork and knife to cut his burrito.

  “Maybe I could run to CVS and find some bandages. That’s what I’ll do.”

  But I didn’t move. I’d seen a drugstore on the way to the restaurant, but where? I could ask the waiter. I’d ask the waiter and hope he didn’t know why I was asking. He might want to be too helpful, he might insist on walking us to a cab, I might not get to eat my lunch, though the thought of taking another bite revolted me now. I’d wanted to say something meaningful, have what people think of as a lovely lunch. Were we going to end up at the hospital? Wasn’t that what we would have to do? There was a fair amount of blood. I got up, sure that I had to do something, but what? Wouldn’t it be sensible to call his doctor?

  “Everything okay?” the waiter said. I found that I was standing in the center of the room, looking over my shoulder toward the table where Franklin was eating his lunch.

  “Fine, thank you. Is there a drugstore nearby?”

  “Right across the street,” he said. “Half a block down.”

  “Good. Okay, I’m going to run to the drugstore,” I said, “but maybe you shouldn’t bring him anything else to drink until—” and then I fainted. When my eyes opened, my ex-husband was holding my hand, and the pretty woman was gazing over his shoulder, as the waiter fanned me with a menu. The man in the wet wool coat was saying my name—everyone must have heard it when Franklin yelped in surprise, though he couldn’t rise, he saw it with his eyes, my toppling was unwise . . .

  “Hey, Maude, hey, hey, Maude,” Wet Coat was saying. “Okay, Maude, you with us? Maude, Maude? You’re okay, open your eyes if you can. Can you hear me, Maude?”

  Franklin, somehow, was standing. He shimmered in my peripheral vision. There was blood on the rug. I saw it but couldn’t speak. I had a headache and the thrumming made a pain rhyme: He couldn’t rise / He saw it with his eyes. And it was so odd, so truly odd, that my ex-husband was holding my hand again, after one hundred years away, in the castle of Luxor. It all ran together. I was conscious, but I couldn’t move.

  “We had sex under the table, which you were kind enough to pretend not to observe, and she’s got her period,” Franklin said. I heard him say it distinctly, as if he were spitting out the words. And I saw that the waiter was for the first time flummoxed. He looked at me as if I could give him a clue, but damn it, all I was managing to whisper was “Okay,” and I wasn’t getting off the floor.

  “The color’s coming back to your face,” my ex-husband said. “What happened? Do you know?”

  “Too much sun and turquoise,” I said, and though at first he looked very puzzled, he got my drift, until he lightened his grip on my wrist, then began lightly knocking his thumb against it, as if sending Morse code: tap, tap-tap, tap. He and the pretty woman stayed with me even after I could stand, after the waiter took me into his brother’s office and helped them get me into an armchair. For some reason, the cook gave me his business card and asked for mine. My ex-husband got one out of a little envelope in my wallet and handed it to him, obviously thinking it was as strange a request as I did. “She didn’t have nothing to drink, one sip of beer,” the waiter said, defend
ing me. “She saw blood, I don’t know, sometimes ladies faint at the sight of blood.”

  “He’s such a crude old coot,” my ex-husband said. “I should be impressed with your loyalty, but I never knew what you saw in him.”

  Savannah the receptionist came for Franklin, and he went to the hospital—but not before paying the bill from a wad of money I didn’t know he was carrying, and not before taking a Mexican hat off the wall, insisting that he was “just borrowing it, like an umbrella.”

  “There might be an Indian uprising if we stop him,” the waiter’s brother said to him. “Let him go.” He called out to Franklin, “Hey, pard, you keep that hat and wear it if they storm the Alamo.”

  I thought about that, and thought about it, and finally thought José hadn’t really meant anything by it, that a little shoplifting was easy to deal with, especially when the culprit announced what he was doing.

  With the worried transgendered woman beside him, and Franklin holding her arm, it was amazing that he could shuffle in a way that allowed him to bend enough to kiss my cheek. “Awake, Princess,” he said, “and thank God our minions were all too smart to call an ambulance.”

  He refused dialysis and died at the end of April, which, for him, certainly was the cruelest month. I spoke to him the day after I fainted in the restaurant, and he told me they’d put leeches on his foot; the second time, several weeks later, he was worried that it might have to be amputated. “You’re the ugly stepsister who crammed my foot into the slipper,” he said. “And time’s the ugly villain that made me old. I was a proper shit-kicker in my Frye boots. I would have had you under the table back in the day. But you’re right, I never loved you. Maybe you’ll find something to write about when I’m dead, because you sure aren’t kicking your own shit while I’m still alive.”

  If you can believe it, that Christmas I got a card from the Mexican restaurant signed by staff I’d never even met. It could have been a crib sheet for remembering that painful day: a silver Christmas tree with glitter that came off on my fingertips and some cute little animals clustered at the base, wearing caps with pom-poms and tiny scarves. A squirrel joined them, standing on its haunches, holding sheet music, as Santa streaked overhead, Rudolph leading the way. Rudolph. What had become of Rudolph?

  There was no memorial service that I heard of, though a few people called or wrote me when they saw the obituary. “Was he still full of what he called ‘piss and vinegar’ up to the end? You kept in touch with him, didn’t you?” Carole Kramer (who’d become a lawyer in New York) wrote me. I wrote her back that he’d had to give up his boots, but I could assure her that he was still full of piss and vinegar, and I didn’t say that it was an inability to piss that finally killed him, and that he’d drunk himself to death, wine, vinegar, it didn’t really matter.

  He’d mentioned squirrels the last day I’d seen him, though, so now when I saw them I paid more attention, even if everyone in Washington thought of them as rats with bushy tails. I even bought one a roasted chestnut on a day when I was feeling sentimental, but the squirrel dropped it like it was poison, and I could see from the gleam in the eye of the guy cooking the nuts that he was glad I’d gotten my comeuppance.

  Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, Even if I don’t believe there’s a poem in anything anymore, maybe I’ll write a story. A lot of people do that when they can’t seem to figure out who or what they love. It might be an oversimplification, but they seem to write poetry when they do know.

  FOR THE BEST

  The Clavells weren’t the sort to play pranks, so the printed invitation to their annual Christmas party arrived after what Gerald and Charlotte’s son, Timothy, would call a “heads-up,” sent by e-mail, letting them know that both were invited to the event, at the Clavells’ apartment, on West Fifty-sixth Street. Gerald hadn’t seen Charlotte since their divorce, thirty-one years before, and this was the first time he’d seen her e-mail address. Whether she was on any social media, he wouldn’t know, as he was not.

  It was a rather jaunty message from the Clavells, who were not jaunty people. Intellectually, they were clear thinkers, and as for jauntiness, Rorra Clavell had never totally recovered from a hip replacement years earlier, and her husband constantly fretted about why anyone would read a book on a Kindle. The brief e-mail message featured not one but two exclamation points and offered no explanation as to why the Clavells had decided to invite them both. It seemed odd, but although Gerald did have some curiosity about how Charlotte looked and what she was doing, it did not keep him awake at night.

  Gerald lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the East Side, next door to his oldest friend and former college roommate, Willers Caton, and his dog, Alexander the Great. A few days before the party, he happened to mention to Willers that he’d accepted an invitation to an event that Charlotte might also be attending. Without a second’s hesitation. Willers said, “She won’t show up. Watch.” Since Willers wasn’t usually a skeptic, Gerald asked how he could be so sure. To his great surprise, he found out that Charlotte and Willers had a psychiatrist in common, a Dr. Frederick Owls, known as the Owl, on Central Park West.

  The day before the party, Gerald got a good jump on the season. He took a cab down to Kiehl’s, then worked his way back uptown, stopping at various stores, including the newly relocated Rizzoli. At each place, he picked out presents to be wrapped and mailed directly to his list of nineteen friends. (He counted his four cousins as friends, since he was not close enough to any of them to consider them family.) Outside the bookstore, he saw a man walking with a cane, his head bent in the wind. Was it Ned Farnsworth, his former accountant? He doubled back and managed to get a look at the man’s long, sharp nose as he was waiting for the light. He said Ned’s name, and the two warmly embraced. If such an embrace had happened with his son, Gerald would have had to suffer a series of violent thumps on the back, since young men who were affectionate in this way tended to act as if the other person were a baby in need of burping.

  Gerald and Ned had coffee and caught up. (Ned had retired years before.) Ned said that he’d sold his beautiful Victorian upstate but was enjoying life on the twentieth floor of a new building in midtown that came complete with a dry cleaner, a lap pool, a gym he never used, and a concierge so eager for tips that he wrote thank-you notes for the simplest kindnesses—such as a resident remembering what team he wanted to win the World Series—then leaned them, in parchment envelopes, against the door to your apartment at night. Ned laughed heartily while telling him this. Years before, it had been Ned who’d recruited Gerald to pose in another client’s ad—almost to be mischievous, initially, but the ad had been so successful that Gerald had made a late career of modeling for others. As Ned gossiped, Gerald’s attention floated away. Might Ned also have been invited to the Clavells’? If memory served, he had been the Clavells’ accountant, too. But how to find out without risking making Ned feel excluded?

  “Tell me the holiday party you’re most looking forward to!” Gerald exclaimed, thinking himself rather clever to have asked in such an open-ended way. “I don’t think I’m invited to any,” Ned replied, crestfallen. How rude of me, really unforgivable, Gerald thought, so he said, “Well, I’d like to invite you to dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, on Fifty-fifth Street. Perhaps early January, when all the craziness has ended?” Oh, Ned said, he couldn’t eat much anymore; such an evening would be wasted on him, though he’d be happy to meet for coffee again. It would be something to look forward to. He produced his card, which Gerald pocketed with thanks. He found, to his surprise, that he had no card of his own in his wallet, so he jotted down his phone number on the back of a receipt. They parted with a firm handshake and a promise to meet again.

  Late that same afternoon, Gerald had another thought. Or not so much a thought as a dream. He and Ned were swimming in the ocean, and he knew, though Ned did not, that a shark was lurking nearby. He tried to warn Ned, but some woman in the dream, an idiotic tourist, kept blocking his vi
ew, telling him that Jaws had scared an entire generation, and he really should shut up. However much he tried to look around her, or move to the side, no one seemed to notice him; nor was his shouting audible anymore. The dream ended abruptly when the heat turned on, with a series of little clicks, as it had been programmed to do, at five P.M. Gerald sat on the edge of the bed, sweating, distressed to have had such a vivid, disturbing dream, which he hoped was not a premonition.

  * * *

  The night of the party, Gerald nicked his cheek—with an electric razor, no less—and had to find the styptic pencil to stop the bleeding. He was perhaps more nervous than he’d thought. He showered, dried off, and dressed, making it a point not to care which of his white shirts he selected, except that regular cuffs seemed fine; hardly anyone still wore cuff links.

  Alonzo got him a cab with the first blow of the whistle. He might have walked to the party had he set out earlier, but it had rained all day, and more was predicted. Also, he didn’t want to arrive sweaty. It was early in the month for a Christmas party, though many people were sure to be out of town, or harder to get, closer to the holidays. His son had asked him to visit, but Seattle was too much in the winter—both the travel and all the rain.

  The Clavells’ lobby already had its Christmas tree up, resplendent in green and white lights, though it dangled no Christmas balls. At the top was an angel with sparkling white wings. She’d fallen forward a bit, so she looked as if she were about to jump. “Darling!” Brenda Hampton called to Gerald, rushing in with a young woman she introduced as her goddaughter. They’d had their hair styled the same way, with a curly tendril hanging below one ear and the rest neatly wound in a French twist. Each wore bright-red lipstick. “Brenda!” he exclaimed. The goddaughter extended her hand as if it were a gift. Indeed it was, with its slim fingers, absent of jewelry, its smooth skin and glossy fingernails. He raised her hand and kissed it, which made her blush. “I’ll have to stick out my hand next time we meet, instead of hurling myself into your arms,” Brenda said, laughing.