The Distinguished Guest (17 page)

She wasn’t home. He left a note for her. To his surprise, he had a message waiting by the time he returned to the hostel at the end of the day. It stated a place and a time she would meet
him the next day. He almost didn’t recognize her in the cafe. She’d cut nearly all her hair off, and gotten very thin.

But she didn’t disappoint him. She’d ordered a drink, a clear liquid in a small glass, and she was smoking a strong-smelling, unfiltered French cigarette. She talked, excitedly, in
her rhythmic, lilting French, slowed down for his benefit, about her tutoring job. She mocked the businessmen she worked with—their accents, their clothing. She asked him about himself and
expressed interest in his project, her eyes steady on him, her mouth slightly opened, a faint smile sometimes playing on it. She was as nervously animated, as brittle and charming, as Alan
remembered her.

What Alan couldn’t tell was that this was an effect he was having on Gaby. She had thought her life was over. She had unfitted herself, as she saw it, for every universe she might have
occupied. She had made a mistake too, in taking an apartment near the Sorbonne. It pained her to be surrounded by students. Though many of them were the same age as she, or only slightly younger,
Gaby felt used up, damaged, as she moved among them. She was twenty-five.

Now here came Alan, offering her a version of herself she had thought no one—not even herself—believed in anymore. And Gaby became for him the person she’d once been. What she
thought about it was that this was fun, this was good for her. She would flirt with him and repair herself.

But Alan wasn’t willing just to be flirted with, just to adore her, though it wasn’t actually until a few days before he left for the summer’s project, having idled much longer
than he meant to or was supposed to in Paris, that he talked to her openly about it. He insisted, actually, on taking her to dinner, which she knew was a great expense for him. They went to the
tiny, very good neighborhood place near St. Sulpice (the same place the picture would be taken later, in September), and before the meal even started—they had eaten only the
appetizer—he blurted out that he wanted her to think about coming back to America with him.

“What!” She laughed, excitedly. “You mean, to live with you?”

“Yes. Exactly. No, to marry me, actually.” His hands nervously played with the heavy silverware at his place.

“Alan.” Her head tilted. Did he mean it? “But this is mad.”

“It is not mad. It’s what I want. I’m sure of it.”

Gaby’s face was flushed with pleasure. She was flattered and thrilled, though she didn’t take him seriously.

She persisted in her amused resistance. They argued first in the abstract—was this mad or not? Could this be a way people began a marriage or not? How well did you need to know someone to
be in love?

Finally Gaby leaned forward, her elbows on the table, and said in a lowered voice, “But Alan. My dear. We haven’t even slept together.”

He smiled at her. “Well, that’s easily remedied.”

“No, no. What I mean to say is, you don’t even know really, if we’re compatible in that way.”

“Yes, I do. We are,” he said.

“Pffft,” Gaby made a dismissive noise, and a gesture with her hand. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. And then what? If not?”

“Gaby.” His voice was intense. “I’ve watched you move. I’ve watched you . . . set a table. Light a cigarette. Walk away from me down the street. I know. I’d
be only too happy to demonstrate this, how right I am. How
correct
I am, about this. Any time you’d like a demonstration. But I don’t want to get distracted here. I want you to
think about this while I’m gone. And what I want, when I come back in September, is for you to say you’ll come home with me.”

Gaby sat across the table and looked at him with her mouth open. There was a candle on the table. Its light glittered in the tears that suddenly sat on the lower rims of her eyes. He felt that
she was truly seeing him for the first time, that she was feeling the stirrings of what would be a deep and abiding love for him.

She was thinking of the last argument she’d had with Gerard, which had begun when she told him she’d slept with both of the other men they were living with. He had said carelessly,
“As you wish, Gaby. I don’t own you,” and she had slapped him.

She looked away, now. Down at her hands, back at Alan. Here he was, this beautiful child, really, from another universe, saying the things she’d wished to hear from someone else.

“I think we’d better have the demonstration,” she said.

At this moment, the waiter came with their dinner plates. They both looked up, startled, as if they’d been under a spell he’d just broken.

“Oh, waiter!” Alan said. “Look, we’ll just have the check please.”

“But you’ve ordered the prix fixe, sir.”

Gaby grinned.

“Yes, that’s fine. We’ll pay for the prix fixe. We’ll have coffee.” Somehow Alan felt this was a compromise. “And then the check. Please.”

In the dark of the little hallway that opened into Gaby’s two attic rooms, he held her. He whispered, “You’ll tell me what to do to please you. Whatever you want, I want to do.
You be the French woman, I’ll be the American boy.”

Gaby knew this was a kind of joke, and she laughed, hoarsely, but it thrilled her too, the idea of the power she had over him, a power she’d never had before, with anyone. She was panting
a little from the long climb up the stairs, from excitement. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest. “Kneel down,” she said.

He did. She placed her hands on his head for balance and stepped out of her shoes. She kept her hands in his hair—this thick hair, longer than hers! His face was tilted up to her in the
dark, she could see its whiteness, the black hole of his mouth. He was panting too. She touched his lips.

“Lift my skirt,” she whispered, and when he did, she moved her own hands to push down the black tights she wore.

How could Alan have been so sure? How could he have loved Gaby so convincingly when, in fact, he did hardly know her? Perhaps it was the idea of Gaby he loved, and the idea of
someone loving her that she loved.

He knew very precisely, of course, where she came from: the old suburban house with its ordered garden, the lush vines hugging the trellises, the windows curtained in lace. He knew the concern
for grace that marked the way she’d lived in that house, the particular way coffee was always made in the morning, the careful presentation of food, the long ritual meals. He knew very
precisely her relations to those people who lived there, he knew the formal solicitudes that marked these relations.

And these were the very things Alan had never had. Even before his parents’ divorce, there had been nothing encircling, nothing comforting or sensual in his home. Lily was a terrible cook
and an indifferent server of meals. The things they did together, as a family, usually involved going out to something uplifting—to hear music, a preacher; to see paintings. Though Paul
Maynard could often be a warm and loving man—it was he who read to the children, who played games with them, Parcheesi and Monopoly, and later chess, until they got the TV—both he and
Lily felt that the raising of the children was her job, as the church was his. But Lily’s capacity for affection unfortunately seemed exhausted by the single-minded and intense focus she had
on him, her husband. There was always a sense among her children of feeling shut out from that love. It seemed to make everything Lily and Paul shared—their religion, their joint intellectual
pursuits, certainly anything sexual—very much a secret between them. (Later Clary and Alan had talked about this, actually, about how Lily and Paul seemed to assume that the children would
understand and partake of their lives’ deepest meaning without anything ever having been made explicit about that, without any effort having been made to include them. They would be offered
the things that Lily and Paul had had, a fine education, a religious upbringing—in the sense of Sunday school and confirmation and prayers at home on a regular basis. They would have sexual
information from excellent books written specifically for this purpose. But there would be a great silence about what all this was to mean or what it had meant to Lily and Paul. And the divorce
then held all of it up for questioning anyway.)

When daylight slowly filtered into Gaby’s tiny apartment, Alan hungrily watched the objects in the room emerge from darkness. There was a little bamboo chair in the comer,
spindly and knuckled, and hooked over its back, a furled umbrella slowly revealed as red. There was a striped cloth draped over the tall, narrow chest of drawers, and a vase of flowers resting on
that. The walls were a deep, intense blue. Even the laundry strung neatly on a line across the opened casement window, a bra, black tights, two pairs of white underpants—glowing flags in the
dawn—seemed arranged to give pleasure.

The tiny table he could see through the doorway to the other room had a white cloth on it. And when Gaby had gotten up between their bouts of lovemaking in the night—they were both
ravenous since they’d eaten so little dinner—there were bread and cheese in the next room she could fetch. There was wine. They sat cross-legged on the bed and Gaby served them,
spreading the cheese on the ovals of bread she lifted one by one from a little basket she’d carried in. In all of this Alan felt a sense of order, of sacrament, as strong as anything
he’d ever felt in church.

And so it was that Alan lay in Gaby’s bed for the next two and a half days—except for those hours she was at work—and used all his powers of persuasion, his body, his words, to
try to win her. And when he came back from his travels at the end of the summer and she said yes, they went to the same restaurant they’d gone to in July to finish the meal they’d begun
then, and an American friend of Alan’s happened by as they sat there and took a picture of this extraordinary moment in their lives.

It wasn’t until they were living in the United States, in his apartment just over the Somerville line from Cambridge, that Alan thought to ask Gaby much of anything about her life, that he
found out that she’d needed him as much as he’d needed her, that she’d taken the life he’d been imagining her in for the three years he waited to woo her and smashed it up
with a deliberate and reckless abandon equal to that of all the students who had hurled paving stones at the police. Perhaps most wounding was to learn that Gaby’s engagement to Gerard had
ended not because she left him, as her brother had reported in a letter to Alan—it was, after all what Gaby told the family—but because of his indifference to her.

They married anyway, but Alan couldn’t help believing at that time that something had changed in him forever, some capacity for deep feeling. Gaby had been like a bright flame burning
within him for more than three years. Everything he knew about her was holy to him, and something hardened in him when she explained those years of her life. He felt like a child. He felt
humiliated. He felt he’d needlessly, uselessly given Gaby some power over him that he wished to seize back.

And after a fashion, he did. It was the early seventies, after all. There was the sense abroad that all vows, all institutions were worth reexamining or reinterpreting, even a marriage vow newly
made. Alan began sleeping with others.

This was something Gaby could understand, though it hurt her. She felt by acceding to it she was helping Alan do something necessary for himself. And she didn’t feel it was important to
tell him the one time she too took a lover—though it also felt like something necessary for her.

By the time Thomas was born in 1972, they felt settled enough, sure enough of themselves and each other to put all that behind them, to turn eagerly, tempered by fire, they felt, and truly
adult, to the life they could make together.

Now Thomas sat on the deck his father had designed to woo his wife a second time and talked to Linnett about his parents. By coincidence, he was almost exactly the same age Alan
was when he went to France to win Gaby the first time. “Their
lives
I mean, are just so . . . ordinary,” he said. He had gotten them each a beer from the refrigerator. The sun
was still high in the far western sky, but the sky itself was beginning to be touched with pink above the trees on the opposite bank of the river. Linnett was facing him. Her long frizzy hair was
lighted from behind in a wild corona around her head.

She made a face that pinched her features. “Come
on
! Everyone says that about their parents. More originality please.”

He grinned. He was taken with Linnett, delighted to have found her here on what he’d thought would be the standard night at home. (She’d applauded from the deck when he’d
finished playing. He’d spun around on the bench to stare at her, hunched over the crutches, standing in the open screen doorway to the deck. “Who
are
you?” she’d
said.

“More important,” he’d answered, “who are you?”)

“Okay, here’s the thing,” he said. “You know about my grandparents, right?” She nodded. She’d told him she was writing an article on Lily. “Well, their
marriage was like, this intense thing.”

“Intense, schmintense. As it happens, your parents’ marriage is the one that lasted.”

“
Lasted!
” he said contemptuously.

She smiled. “Someday you won’t think of it as such an easy achievement.”

A thought occurred to him. He drank his beer, watching her. He set the bottle down on the arm of his wooden chair. He hadn’t brought out glasses for them, and Linnett hadn’t
objected. “Are you married?” he asked.

“No longer.”

“Oh, you’re divorced.”

“Yes. Like half the rest of the world. And I wouldn’t ever look down my nose at someone who’d made it work.”

“Hey. I wasn’t looking down my nose. It’s just not what I want for myself, is all. You know, the house in the little town.” He gestured vaguely around him. “The
kids, the routine.”

“Well, if you get your wish, you probably won’t be able to have those anyway.” He’d told her he was studying piano, that he hoped, maybe, for a career playing.