The Accomplished Guest: Stories Read online

  I nodded, registering the beginning of a faint headache as I narrowed my eyes.

  “Writers like to surprise readers, but they don’t like to be surprised, I’ve found.” She grasped my wrist. “Here is why I’m telling you: I’m going to tell Christine about it, and I think it’s going to come as something of a shock for her, so I wanted you to know before we have our drink. You knew we were going to the Carlyle, where I’m staying tonight, the three of us, to have a drink?”

  “I don’t think she told me,” I said, but as I spoke, I vaguely remembered Christine saying something. More as a possibility, though. Her phone call to me a couple of days before had been on the run, pleading: “I’ve got to teach, then run home and walk Walter, then get back to give the talk, so can you please, please, meet her train and see that she gets there okay?”

  Lucia could book a room at an expensive hotel but not offer to pay for the car? She wanted . . . what? For me to be prepared in case her daughter became (improbably) a basket case when she told her? I wished she hadn’t told me. I wasn’t pleased about knowing this information before Christine did. It would make a liar of me if I pretended what I was hearing was news, and I’d be her mother’s confidante if I let on that she’d already told me.

  “This is private. It’s between you and your daughter,” I said. “I’m going to go home and let you two talk.”

  “No, Anna, you have to join us,” she said.

  “You want an audience, just like those writers you’re so suspicious of,” I said. “I’d wonder, if I were you, whether he ever slept with your friend, or whether that wasn’t her imagination, too. You hear about it when a person has a reputation for sleeping around. I doubt that it’s true.”

  I had met his wife at a fund-raiser. She’d quickly confessed that she felt out of place and didn’t know what to talk about. Her pin had fallen on the floor, that was how we’d met. I’d bent to pick it up and had helped her refasten it to the collar of her silky black shirt. When her husband the writer saw us talking, he came up to us. I could tell by the way he put his arm around his wife’s shoulders that he worried I might be too much for her in some way. They’d both grown up in the Midwest, and I’d grown up on the Upper West Side—which was no doubt why Pennsylvania had seemed like Siberia to me in my college days. I’d liked the writer’s protectiveness, and I’d picked up on the fact that he wanted his wife to talk to people on her own, but the minute she did, he wanted to make sure she was comfortable. When he saw that we were giggling and talking about jewelry, he went away.

  “Anna?” Lucia said. “You seem to have turned your attention inward. If I didn’t know you so well, I might think I’d surprised you.”

  “I don’t care who you have a relationship with,” I said. “If you really care what I think about lesbianism, I approve of whatever relationship brings people happiness.”

  I walked away, up the aisle. When I was younger, I would have bought in to it, assumed I was involved just because someone older insisted I be. Now I thought how nice it would be to listen to music I wanted to listen to instead of the tinkling piano at the hotel. I wouldn’t feel I had to offer to pay for my own drink, because I’d already paid earlier in the week, when I’d bought myself a bottle of Grey Goose I could pour from, into my favorite etched glass I’d bought at a stoop sale in Brooklyn. What would Christine think of me disappearing? Maybe that I was smart. I wondered how Lucia would lead in to the subject. By criticizing Christine for being “anecdotal,” then zinging her with an important fact? Lucia was self-important and manipulative, and if Christine didn’t know that by now, I could mention the obvious, by way of consolation, later.

  Outside, I turned the corner and went into my favorite Chinese restaurant. There were only two tables, both taken, so I went to the counter for takeout. “Anna!” said Wang, the waiter, turning the paper menu toward him, pencil poised delicately, like a conductor’s baton, to circle what I wanted.

  “You don’t know she wants shrimp fried rice?” said his brother, who was now known as James. James was taking night classes at NYU and sometimes asked me for help with his homework. “Once, twice a month she has chicken with broccoli, but tonight she doesn’t want that. This is her look when she’s in a hurry. In a hurry, always shrimp fried rice.” He smiled a big smile and circled the correct item and handed the piece of paper through the opening into the kitchen. “Great reading in my course. The poetry of William Butler Yeats. Next time we’ll talk,” James said.

  Wang had walked away from the counter and was standing at one of the tables, where a customer with his hands folded on top of his violin case on the shiny tabletop seemed to be giving him a bad time about the beer not being cold enough.

  When I left, I held the paper bag away from my coat (I always worried I’d stain it). I’d splurged on the coat three years before, a midcalf cashmere I’d resolved I’d take good care of and wear for years. Every time I slipped into it, I felt like something good could happen.

  In my apartment, no husband, no Walter the dog awaited me. Instead of a pet, I had a terrarium with small plastic knights inside, some on horseback, some felled, some still fighting on Astroturf sprinkled with red nail polish—a gift from a boyfriend who’d been a disaster, though he’d had a great sense of humor. I took off my coat, reached in the pocket, ripped up the receipt for the car, and threw it in the trash so I wouldn’t be tempted to do something mean, like send it to Lucia. Christine was still my friend, though I was free of her mother now. I’d been without a family for almost ten years, and I didn’t want a replacement, with all the inevitable surprises and secrets. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that the writer hadn’t slept with Lucia’s friend, but that Lucia’s neighbor/lover was on the make, and if she couldn’t have the writer, she’d decided to move on to Lucia. I was glad he’d thrown a brick through her window, glad she’d had at least a moment of fear, that someone had created a little havoc in her so-well-intentioned Princeton life.

  I sipped the vodka, admiring the glass, enjoying the taste. And then—though this is merely anecdotal—I picked up the phone, called information, and asked for Arthur’s number in Pennsylvania from an operator who said, “Please hold,” followed by an automated voice that gave me the number. He still lived in the same place. Imagine that: He was where he’d been all his adult life.

  Arthur’s wife answered on the second ring. She answered pleasantly, the way people did years ago, when there was no screening of calls, no answering machine to kick in. “Hello,” she said, and I thought: She is completely, completely vulnerable. The winter landscape of the little town outside Pittsburgh where she lived came back to me: the whited-out sky; the frozen branches always about to snap. If I hung up, she probably wouldn’t even know there was such a thing as hitting *69 to find out who the caller was. Or maybe she would, and she’d call back. Maybe she and I would talk and become fierce enemies or even best friends—why not, if neighbors in their sixties became lovers? But that couldn’t really happen, because she and I were just two voices on the telephone. I didn’t have anything against her. Back then all I’d had against her was that she had him.

  “That necklace,” I said, realizing immediately that I needed to raise my voice and speak clearly. “The one with the lapis lazuli. I was your husband’s student—it doesn’t matter who I am. I’m calling to explain. I returned it to you in 1994 because I found it on the floor of his office and knew it must be yours. He didn’t see me pick it up. I was poor, and I wanted to keep it, but I figured it was yours, so I sent it back.”

  I hung up, crossed the floor, and reached into the terrarium. I bent the knees of one of the warriors and put him back in his saddle atop a shiny black plastic horse. I slipped a shield over another’s head, inadvertently toppling him. I delicately stood the figure upright. I decided against a second vodka.

  The phone did not ring. I got into bed, under the duvet, then spread my coat on top, the soft collar touching my chin, as I listened to jazz I wanted to hear
, long into the night. When the storm started sometime after midnight, I imagined the sleet was hard little notes from a piano way across town that had come to pelt my window, telling me to come out. To come out and play, please.

  OTHER PEOPLE’S BIRTHDAYS

  Lawrence got on the plane in Charlottesville and flew to Dulles, a quick flight once airborne, but the reading light above the seat had only a slight inward glow, so no paperwork could be done. At Dulles, the board at her gate gave her the bad news: The flight to Boston was delayed, awaiting crew. The crew was probably trapped somewhere because of the side effects of the hurricane and general bad weather on the East Coast—but when were things much different? Whatever it took to make it an arduous trip, and you couldn’t say the obvious, you had to smile and say there were worse problems blah blah blah. The mediocre glass of wine for thirteen dollars at the airport bar was one of them. The candy bar she’d eaten on top of that an hour later made her sick. Lawry, she had always been called. Her father had insisted the second and last child be named for him. People pronounced it Laurie, though she thought of herself as Lawrence. Her older sister was called Bett, for Bettina. Their late grandmother’s name.

  Finally, finally they boarded, the man with the tall toddler—in a T-shirt, running shoes, and diapers—bemused by the boy’s stomped excitement: “Yeah, we’re going on a plane, that’s what we’re doing, buddy.” Other children were crying or struggling, trying to break free of the hands of parents gripping their wrists. Lawrence knew about that, though she wasn’t a mother. She could easily predict the tantrums about to erupt, as if she were mercury rising in a thermometer.

  Which dated her. They were digital now.

  She had her purse in one hand, a Tumi bag with ingenious inside compartments that meant she could never find anything she reached in for. Why were so many of them narrow? She didn’t smoke cigars. She’d managed to fit her Mac into the bag, though that meant she had to leave it unzipped. In her other hand she carried a canvas L.L.Bean bag embossed with an old ex-boyfriend’s name, Lincoln. She and Lincoln had once been on the verge of moving in together, though she’d refused to look at apartments with him, and when he’d found one he thought was perfect, she’d gotten cold feet and told him it would be better if he completed his first year of medical school before they lived together. Then she’d seen him talking to a pretty girl at a party—talking in a way that made her nervous. “Exactly what gesture did I make? What gesture?” he’d asked afterward as they got in the car. “Do you want to make me inhibited about using my hands in a particular way when I talk? Are you serious?” Maybe she was insecure, but she also trusted her instincts. Would she be in for a lifetime of watching him gesture in that way with pretty women, with nothing she could ever articulate any better than she’d been able to in the parked car?

  Now, waiting in the airport, she saw that there was a missed call from John, her newer ex-boyfriend, which must have come in while she was drinking her sour Italian white wine. He was a lawyer who worked twelve hours a day, minimum, except for Saturdays shopping for groceries, then on to the racquetball court, followed by a massage and a quiet evening reading a mystery on his Kindle. It had been one, but only one, of the reasons they’d parted company a year and a half ago.

  Which also dated her. They had not passively “parted company.” He had screamed at her, standing by the Tidal Basin, “You think you have the hardest life, the worst luck, the only problems worth considering. I’m a so-called workaholic because I’m dedicated to something, and I don’t expect the world to wipe away my tears. It would be one thing if we were in our twenties, but we’re in our forties. Are you ever going to be capable of understanding or even, God forbid, empathy? Or are you just going to protect every minute of your precious time and bounce back and forth from D.C. to Newton to remain the perfect daughter to people who will never thank you for it, who’ll always think you’re the unimportant one?” The ugliness of that night (she had answered back) had been one of the deciding factors: She’d moved from Washington to Charlottesville, where she’d made a couple of friends, and where people treated her more kindly, and to her surprise, she never visited John in Washington anymore, except for one time she’d driven there to be his date at a fund-raiser at the Corcoran. They’d sat at a big round table with his friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and she’d felt sure all of them knew what a handful she was (according to John). An hour or so into the evening, she’d taken one very pink rose from the centerpiece as she excused herself to go to the restroom, a rose with no thorns. She’d carried it there, leaving it by the sink while she peed, then carried it Olympic-victory-style to the parking garage, only to forget it overnight in her car. Back in Virginia, the head hung limply, like a dead bird’s, when she noticed the rose the next day on the passenger seat.

  Starting about the time she’d walked off without saying goodbye, John had called her cell phone, hours later her landline, even her monstrous parents, because for some paranoid reason he’d assumed they’d contacted her and she’d rushed “home” to Newton. All her anger at herself about letting the beautiful flower die had been misplaced in the letter she wrote him, snail mail, saying their relationship was over. He’d continued to call her home phone and her cell, but he’d left her parents out of it, at least. Never once had she called him back, but a few times she’d responded to one of his e-mails. Was that so hard? No, it wasn’t, she admitted, but she’d stuck to answering his questions and not even offering some pleasantry. He certainly did not deserve an apology, because to be honest, at the Tidal Basin he had shoved her, hard, as he raged.

  * * *

  She called her father on his cell phone when she disembarked, telling him she was at Terminal C. He was waiting in a nearby area reserved for just that; with luck, they’d be at the house in under half an hour. She wondered if her mother might be along for the ride, or even Bett. The next day would be Bett’s forty-third birthday, and they would be driving to Bett’s favorite place in the world, Barnacle Billy’s, in Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, Maine, where their father had appeared at the playhouse in several roles, years before he became a father. It was where he’d met Johanna forty-five years ago. She’d been taking a year off from nursing school, living with her aunt in Wells, waitressing during the summer and ushering two days a week at the Ogunquit Playhouse in exchange for sitting in the back row and seeing performances. In her father’s opinion, Philip Seymour Hoffman was the greatest American actor. He’d taken the Acela to New York to see him in Death of a Salesman, and he still talked about little else. Had the play’s run been longer, he would have gone a second time. Come to think of it, he liked to repeat experiences. She herself was the repeat of his experience of fatherhood: Bett; Lawrence. Johanna was his second wife (he’d married his first wife at twenty, been divorced at twenty-five). He always bought Volvos.

  The new dark-blue Volvo was now coasting to the curb, her father flashing his lights even though she’d raised a hand to let him know she saw him. From inside the car, he popped the trunk, though she only tapped it closed and opened the door on the passenger side, dragging her purse and her L.L.Bean bag in after her, dropping them in the ample room to either side of her feet, leaning toward her father for a wordless peck on the cheek.

  “Did you buy the perfect present? Is there a bicycle folded up in that big bag, or a dehydrated horse, maybe?”

  “You’ll see tomorrow. But I’ll give you a hint: You won’t have to teach her how to ride a bike or provide any hay.”

  “Your boyfriend called tonight,” he said.

  She was startled. After months of silence, he’d called her father? “Why?” she asked, surprised at the childlike petulance in her voice.

  “How would I know? I kept waiting to find out. Just a coincidence, it seems. At least he didn’t mention knowing you’d be coming in, and I didn’t say anything about that, either. He wouldn’t know when your sister’s birthday is and put two and two together, would he?”

  “What did he talk
to you about?” she asked. There was no chance he would know the date of her sister’s birthday.

  “The election. He’d heard what some of Clinton’s talking points were going to be and was passing them on. He said it had been the hottest, most humid summer he could remember. We talked about Nora Ephron’s death. He met her once in New York, you must know about that? No? At a movie premiere, he said. She gave him the name of a good moving company in Washington, agreed with him that he should live in New York if he was going to be putting up with big-city hassle in the first place. Who wouldn’t prefer New York, except maybe for the impossibility of parking. Well, you can do it. You just have to be a millionaire.”

  “He claims he’s moving?” Lawrence asked.

  “No, I didn’t get that,” her father said. “It was something he once thought about.” He nodded to himself.

  “I can’t tell you who to talk to,” she said, “but I don’t talk to him anymore.”

  “You’re hard-hearted, we all know that.”

  “Maybe I’ll call your ex-wife and shoot the shit about the heat in the Midwest versus the heat in the South.”

  “She’s not in the Midwest anymore. She kept up with one of Uncle Earle’s kids, to my surprise. Nathan. He told me when we saw him last Christmas that she’d moved. She’s in Santa Monica.”