The Distinguished Guest (15 page)

“Petie . . . ” his wife began. She was big too, stout really, and she treated Peter like a naughty, overgrown child.

“No, I mean it,” Peter said to her. He turned back to Alan. “
You
want it to go in that direction. Why don’t you just say that? I want it to go this way.” He
stabbed at the drawing. “And you want it to go that way. All this talk about
spines
and
wanting
—what are you trying to make yourself believe? That it’s alive? That
you’re some sort of surgeon?” He snorted. “It’s a matter of what you want and what I want. Period.”

Alan had laughed. He had appreciated Peter’s bluntness, and he tried after that to be more conscious of the jargon he sometimes used, he tried to be simpler in his explanations of why he
believed certain things made sense for the house. And in the end, he thought, Peter had come to understand the house he would own better than most clients did. He felt he’d really taught him
something about the building’s integrity, about siting, as well as some simple facts about what could work and what couldn’t.

And now the house they’d argued over was taking shape. Alan loved this stage of the building process, the first sense you had of the reality of the house, of the way this thing you’d
thought so hard about would have its life in three dimensions. He felt an ease, a peace he hadn’t felt in weeks as he moved around in the space.

He carried it home with him. And when he pulled out from under the overhanging trees at the foot of the drive to his own house, he was suddenly freshly pleased with it too, with its modesty,
with the way it hugged the land.

Then he noticed: there was an extra car, a third besides Noreen’s and Gaby’s, parked in the drive. He pulled far over to the right to give it room to get out. Lily’s friend, he
thought. The amanuensis. He tried to remember what Gaby had said her name was, but couldn’t.

When he opened the door, he could hear Lily’s watery, onrushing voice, almost a whisper now. She was usually resting it for dinner at this hour of the day. Alan tried to time it this way:
Lily in bed, Noreen gone or about to leave, Gaby still asleep.

But there was Noreen, doing something in the kitchen. The woman sitting with Lily looked over as he started across the room to the hallway for the bedroom. He tried to signal a greeting with his
uplifted hand and keep walking, but Lily’s looping sentence stopped and she called in an urgent whisper: “Alan!”

He turned and came back. Lily introduced him. The woman, the secretary, grinned up from her chair, her legs stretched out in front of her on a hassock, the toes of one foot sticking out from a
dirty white cast. Her toenails were polished a dark red, Alan noted, narrow crescents of white grown in at the base. “Linnett?” he asked.

She nodded. “Baird,” she said. Lily’s whisper had been exhausted.

Alan reached out his hand to her, taking her in quickly. She was thirty-fivish, maybe a little older. She was slender, but bigboned, with long, wild hair turning gray in a frizzy tent around her
head and shoulders. She had pale skin, touched with pink at the nostrils, the eyelids. She wasn’t really pretty, but she had a kind of palpable sexual confidence that he’d always found
attractive.

She stretched her hand up, and they shook. She withdrew her hand first. “I’d get up, but . . . ” She shrugged.

“What happened?” Alan asked dutifully, withdrawing his hand. Her grip had been strong, firm.

“I was jogging. Now I jog no more.” She seized her thigh above the cast with both hands and made a face. “Flab.” The flesh dropped away from her fingers, marked with red
from their pressure.

“It would be . . . confining,” he said, feeling an odd embarrassment.

“Oh I can do anything I want to,” she said glumly. “As long as I keep my damned
leg
straight out in front of me.” And then she flashed a broad smile.

Alan laughed, and turned to meet Lily’s sharp, appraising gaze in her otherwise blank face.

“
You’re
running late today,” he said. “I thought you’d be napping by now.”

“Oh, I know,” she whispered. Linnett looked quickly at her wristwatch. “But I was going on and on about myself and finding it so fascinating. As one does.”

“Well, I’m getting Gaby up now, so you better quit soon if you want a rest before dinner.”

“And I need to leave in about ten minutes,” Noreen called over.

“Oh God, it’s my fault,” Linnett said. “I was a little late getting here, and we were having fun today, and we just went on much longer than usual.”

“Oh you mustn’t let
Alan
bully you dear,” Lily said. “But I suppose Noreen does need to go home sometime. Noreen!” She tried to call it out, but the extra
effort failed in her throat, the word was a croak.

“Noreen,” Alan said. “I think Lily’s ready to go.”

Lily bowed her head to Alan. “My gallant interpreter,” she whispered.

Alan grinned at her. She wouldn’t bother him today. He felt too celebratory, he wouldn’t let her. He leaned forward and helped her up. Her weight, pulling on his arm, was
negligible.

Noreen was right there, easing Lily away from Alan. “Want your canes?” she asked Lily, a little too loudly.

“Oh, it’s too much bother,” Lily said. “Let’s just do the Parkinson’s shuffle together, shall we?”

“Fine with me,” Noreen said. She smiled at Alan and Linnett Baird.

Together Alan and Linnett watched the two women move slowly back to Lily’s room. Noreen’s head was bent to Lily, and the old woman must have spoken, because Noreen laughed loudly,
and said, “You’re not kidding.” The door shut behind them.

“I’ve been admiring your house,” Linnett said, after a beat. Alan turned to her. She had her arm lifted to gesture around the room. She was wearing a sleeveless red blouse, and
the flesh of her arm was white, the veins a faint blue map within. “Lily tells me it’s yours in every sense—I mean, you designed it, too.”

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you. We’re happy in it. Though there are always things you’d change.” He made a vague gesture.

“Oh yeah, unlike the rest of life,” she said.

Alan laughed. He sat down—just for a moment he told himself—on the edge of the chair Lily had been in. “And what do you do when you’re not taking dictation from my
distinguished mother?”

“More of same, I’m afraid.”

“A sort of traveling secretary?”

“Oh. No, I’m not really a secretary.” She made an odd face. She was a little put off, he thought. “This is just a deal I’ve struck with Lily.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I’m a writer. A journalist. I’m writing about Lily actually. An article.” She watched him for a moment. “Didn’t you know that?” she asked. Then
she smiled, the broad, easy grin. “No, you didn’t. See, I just offered to help her with her mail and writing and stuff as a way to . . . well, I suppose, justify hanging around as much
as I thought I’d want to.”

“I see,” he said. He was startled that he hadn’t known this, and suddenly uncomfortable. “I see,” he said again, and nodded.

“You don’t like that, I think,” she said. “Am I right?”

He shrugged. “It’s not my business, is it? To like it or not to like it.”

“Yeah, but you
don’t
. Like it.” She was smiling at him, but there was a note of irritation in her voice too. “C’mon. ‘Fess up.”

“What do you want me to say? No. I don’t.”

“Oh, I’m not hurt. I’m used to it. People either really, really like you, if you’re a journalist, or they kind of really, really don’t.”

“It’s just I don’t want to be a part of it,” he said coolly. “I don’t want to be quoted, for instance. Or even make an appearance. ‘The son of the
famous . . . ’ Whatever. You know. What Lily does is her business. Whatever . . . use she wants to make of her life. That’s her business. But I . . . I’ve never been a part of any
of it, and I don’t want to start now.”

“I understand.” She was watching him intensely, with light eyes, her face utterly sobered.

“And I so much don’t, that I don’t even want to be quoted, directly or indirectly, as saying that in your article.”

“I understand.” She bobbed her head. “And believe me, Lily
is
my only interest here. This piece I’m doing?” Her eyebrows went up. “I think it’s
going to be pretty much standard fare. I mean, I hope it’ll be better. Deeper. But the stuff that draws me to her is the same stuff”—her hand made a circle—“that
everyone else has written about.”

“Which is?”

“Well, it sure isn’t you.”

“But it is . . . ?”

“Oh, you know.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t read about Lily when I can avoid it.”

“Well, you know. The feminist angle. The woman at fifty, sixty, seventy, striking out on her own. And the racial stuff. Whether integration is a passé ideal. And the religious stuff
too: the patriarchal nature of the church and all that.”

“Patriarchal.” He smiled. “A word I’m sure Lily has never used.”

“Patriarchal?” Linnett tilted her head and smiled back at him. “Nope. You’re right. And I actually don’t either, except
as above
, to describe, to
encapsulate, as it were, a way of talking. Or of thinking really. But you get my drift. What I mean, really, is that you have nothing to fear from me.” She folded her hands neatly in her lap
and rounded her eyes, a parody of innocence. “Honest.”

Noreen came out of the guest suite.

“All set with her?” Alan asked, getting up quickly. He felt, somehow, caught at something.

“Yep. And I’m on my way, once I get my purse.” She crossed the room to the kitchen island, hauled her enormous bag to her shoulder, and started back to the door.

“So long, Noreen,” Linnett said. “I’ll see you Monday.”

Noreen stopped. “Oh, you’re not coming in tomorrow?”

“No. I thought I’d give it a rest. Give Lily the weekend off.”

“Well. Monday then.”

Alan walked to the door, more or less behind Noreen, and stood there momentarily after she’d left in a kind of farewell. Outside, her big station wagon roared to life, unmuffled.

“Noreen doesn’t like me,” Linnett said, behind him.

“You think not?” He turned. “Why?”

“I
interfere
.” She made a stern face. “She’d never say it, but I know it. They have their oh-so-peaceful mornings together. Monastically peaceful,
really—Noreen out here, doing what, I’m not sure, and Lily alone in her room with her
things
, as she likes to call them. And then I hobble in and wind Lily up. In Noreen’s
space, at that.” She gestured around her. “No place to hide, the way you designed it.” She was smiling at him, as though she were teasing him. “But at any rate, she gets an
earful.” She sighed. “You can’t ask for more than that in life. Can you?”

Alan came back and sat down again, again just on the edge of the chair. “I suppose the odd earful is the cornerstone of your business.”

“I suppose it is. Whereas
your
cornerstone is more like your honest-to-god basic cornerstone.”

“I suppose it is.”

They were smiling at each other. My, my, thought Linnett, at the sense of the possibility in the air. Or was she imagining it? “How is business?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, just I know it’s a slow time for construction. I know this ‘cause I
read
the papers.”

How odd her inflections were, Alan thought. Almost as odd as Gaby’s, which came from another language. Linnett’s, though, were her own, a quirk, apparently. “Well, so far
I’ve been lucky,” he said. “It’s slow, certainly. But this is a wealthy community. Well, partially wealthy anyway. And with land prices generally lower now—still
absurdly high by any rational standard, of course—anyway, there’s the occasional house to build. Or addition.” He shrugged. “But I’ve had a couple of mighty slow
years.”

“Oh God, haven’t we all.”

Alan had just started to speak again, to ask her how that went in her business, what “slowness” was, when there was a little mechanical noise, a clicking, and she started abruptly
forward, picked up a small black box he hadn’t noticed from the corner table.

“Oops. Tape’s over,” she said. “I forgot about it.”

“This was all taped,” he said.

“Yeah, I’d been taping Lily, earlier.”

He leaned back, grinning. “Jesus,” he said. “
Trust
me, she says.”

Linnett was smiling too. “I forgot all about it.”

“Yes and no, I suspect.”

“Well, yes and no,” she said. “Hey!” She pointed at him. “You didn’t give me anything anyway.”

“I don’t know anything to give you.”

“Oh, I suspect you do. You’re Lily’s child, after all.”

He snorted. “Motherhood was not Lily’s strong suit.”

“Ah?” she said.

He looked steadily at her, and then shook his head.

She laughed. “I should say ‘Ah!’ I mean,
there’s
a gift, if I wanted to use it. ‘Motherhood was not Lily Maynard’s strong suit,’ and you take off
from there.” She shrugged, watching him.

“Do it, and I’ll break your other leg,” Alan said, smiling back at her.

And now, suddenly, Gaby was there in the open doorway to the back hall, puffy-eyed, looking from one of them to the other, Alan and Linnett, slouched in their chairs. Their voices had finally
waked her, a full twenty minutes past the time Alan usually got her up, past the time he usually sat and talked with her. She was befuddled, still remembering a dream she’d waked with, a
dream that her brain, moving toward consciousness, told her she should save to tell Alan, who wasn’t there. Who was here.

“Hello,” she said. And cleared her throat. “Hello,” she said again.

Linnett started, then turned to reach for her crutches.

Alan stood quickly. “You’re awake,” he said, taking two steps toward her, then stopping almost in the middle of the room to watch Linnett, who was struggling with the crutches,
trying to get up.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m late to the shop.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got talking.”

“
I’m
terribly sorry,” Linnett said. “It’s all my fault, Gaby. I stayed on later with Lily than I was supposed to, and then I waylaid Alan too. I’ve
been
bad
.” She was balanced on one foot now, and she began to shove things into her backpack.