Read The Distinguished Guest Online
Authors: Sue Miller
His friends are laughing again now as Gaby finishes. Laughing at Clary, at poor beautiful Clary who has used such gaudy, foolish tricks to hold herself together, to keep herself going: crystals,
past lives, psychics. The stepwise movement through drugs, then vegetarianism, then analysis, then drink, and now the recovery movement. He feels a pang of loyalty to her.
“Of course,” he says, “Clary’d have her own riff on us, I suppose.”
“Oh come on,” Wade London says. “You lead exemplary lives. Irreproachable.”
“No, no. Much could be made of certain elements here.”
Gaby’s gaze is steady on him, wary. She knows she shouldn’t have talked about Clary that way. He’s too protective of her.
“A certain, perhaps . . . yuppie? obsessiveness about detail. Do you know how long it took me, for example, to choose these knobs?” He gestures behind himself at a low storage wall
of cherry, its doors and drawers studded with square brass knobs. “Or Gaby to plan this meal? To cook it?”
“It
was
a great meal,” Melanie offers. “That couscous, yikes. And the
shrimp
!” Gaby is pleased, even if it is a dutiful comment. She curtsies her head at
Melanie, who is slender and nervous, and always the conciliator.
“Fine. I agree,” says Alan. “But that’s what we’re about, to my sister. Appetites and greed. Comfort. Materialism.”
Gaby’s face lights in delighted recognition. “Oh Alan, that’s not Clara talking. That’s your
mother
.” She has learned to say this exactly as midwestem
Americans do, giving it the doubled or tripled consonant at the end, and everyone laughs with her, even, after a beat, Alan. Pronounced this way, the word itself becomes a kind of joke.
And then Wade says, “I saw that story of hers a couple of months ago in
The Atlantic.
I liked it, actually.”
Alan nods. Stories are what Lily turned to after the memoir. “After all, you can’t do
two
of them,” she’d said. She’s published perhaps ten or twelve
stories. Several in
Ms
, three or four in little magazines, and within the last few years, two in
The Atlantic
, one in
The New Yorker.
They’re fiction, but everything in
them, even the most alien details, seems as familiar as toothache to Lily’s children. (“Of course I use my life,” Lily had said in the one interview Alan had read, “What
else do I have?”
Waspish
, the interviewer had called her. Actually, she’d written, “Alternately waspish and flirtatious.” That was a side Alan knew less well.)
What had made Lily turn to fiction? “I was fed up with being so damned discreet,” she told the interviewer. And it was true that in the stories, more disturbing, more psychologically
violent things happened, as though Lily were acknowledging the dangerous emotions that had been held in check in her life and only hinted at in her memoir. In one, a middle-aged woman flees her
husband and allows herself to be used by a younger man she meets at a cheap resort to reinvigorate his own failing marriage. In another, an older woman discovers, years after the event, that a
beloved, difficult son—a radical—killed, she believed, while building a bomb, was instead present by coincidence when it went off, an accidental victim only, drunk and drugged and
asleep in a corner of the room. In yet another, a young, idealistic minister of an inner-city church is duped and exploited in an outreach to the gangs around him, the church transformed to a
warehouse for guns and drugs—but he’s so thrilled by the romantic turn his life has taken, so moved by the rhetoric of action and violence, that he consents even to this.
Still, neither Alan nor Clary had thought the memoir could have been called discreet. Lily had written:
In those summer Sundays of our new marriage, I could sometimes experience the hour or so in church as a kind of drug, a near-aphrodisiac really. All my senses were
dilated by it, by the gradual and powerful accumulation of layers of physical awareness combined with my own spiritual hunger, my greed, really. The Midwest heat outside was always
intense by eleven o’clock, and the dark little church was cool and damp by contrast. When you entered the doors, there was a long, dizzying moment of welcome blindness, accompanied,
for me, by a near-sexual weakening in my legs. The air inside smelled deliciously of mildew, a mushroomy, earthy odor that changed slowly as the space filled up with people. The odor of
soap was added first, and talc, then perfume, and finally, as the service wore on, a basic but not unpleasant smell of sweat. And, of course, there was always, floating above them all,
the erotic smell of the flowers. Summer flowers, plucked from their gardens by the church ladies on this committee.
I always arrived early because I couldn’t bear the idea of the eyes of the congregation on me as I walked to my place alone.
The young minister’s new wife
: it was
how I thought of myself too. I thought of our sexual delight in each other as being visible in my every gesture, even in my carriage, and I know I myself would have stared with prurient
curiosity. Instead I always tried to be there ahead of the congregation. Except of course for the odd old woman or two, up since dawn, no doubt, chores long since accomplished, and in
need of a way to fill the time. We all dipped our heads—our hats, I should say—at each other. (Of course we all wore hats, and gloves too, which we hoped matched our shoes, or
“went with” our hats somehow.) When I bowed my head to pray after I sat down, I was aware of the brim of my hat—it was a wide-brimmed hat that first summer of my
marriage, a beautiful hat I’d bought to make my young husband love me more—shutting the world out, blocking my view of these ladies. The hat was straw, and it had a faint
straw smell, a clean, farm odor.
The music played by the plump, elderly organist during this interval of sitting was like an odor too: never sharply defined, always meandering, soothing. Occasionally you could hear
through it the leaky wheeze of air from the old pump-organ. It made me catch my breath too when I heard it, it made my sleepy pulse blossom irregularly.
Behind me, I could hear the room slowly filling up, the footsteps, the whispered greetings. And then there was the sudden thump! thump! thump! of the stops being thrown open, the music
would peal out, and Paul would enter, coming down the aisle like a bride. But more determined, more sure of himself by far than I’d been on the day of our wedding, than any bride
ever was. He would disappear around the side of the pulpit, and then appear again in it, above the flowers, transformed by his black robe, his gravity, and magnificent to me: my messenger
from God, my bridegroom. I felt in danger of weeping as I lifted my eyes to look at him.
We had stood by now. Everywhere in the room was the constant rustling sound of shifting feet, of moving flesh, of clothing redraping—the sound people make simply standing still.
The Paul looming above us was and was not my Paul. His face was and was not the face I’d studied from almost the same angle as he rose above me the night before, his lips as they
began to speak were and were not the lips that had sought mine. His voice was and was not the voice that had cried out my name then, over and over. “Let us pray,” he would
say, and I would become, at his command, a prayer.
There were two baptisms that summer, and both times, watching the placid baby lie across my husband’s arm, the yards of sheer white cloth, hemstitched or embroidered, spilling
down over the yards of dull black of Paul’s robe, looking at his face bent over the child’s, pronouncing the holy words—his wet fingertips moving over the child’s
eggshell skull, blessing it—I experienced the purest envy. I was able to conjure it away partially by reassuring myself that we would have a child too, that it too would lie just
this way in Paul’s safe arms as he bent over it. Yet I knew I wasn’t confronting the heart of my feeling, which was that I wanted somehow, too, to
be
that child, to lie
just that still in his arms, to have him hold me as I lay open before him and consecrate me in the name of the Lord.
Could this be called discretion?
Of course, it wasn’t so much for passages like these that Tabor Press was drawn to the book, or to Lily. It was rather the later passages, where she moved away from her husband and from
the notion of a male, commanding God with what seemed in the book a slow but inevitable, triumphal turn.
(What Alan remembers of that time are the anguished, intense talks between his parents that trailed off at his appearance, the excruciating family meeting called to explain the separation, and
after that, for what seemed like years, the sound of weeping from behind closed doors. He was tormented after his father left by his sense of solitary responsibility for Lily. Hearing her weep, he
knew he should knock and offer comfort. She was, after all, his mother. She was, after all, human, and in pain. The one time he finally mustered the courage to do it, there was a long pause before
the door was opened, a pause she clearly used to pull herself together. Because when she stood before him, she was composed, her reddened, swollen eyes the only giveaway. “Yes Alan?”
she had said coolly, as though he had asked a question. “Is there something you need?”)
Now, at the table, they have moved on. They are arguing about an article in the same issue of
The Atlantic
as Lily’s story, an article that proposed a new basis for immigration
laws, connected to maximum feasible populations which would be absolutely set for various areas of the country.
“It’s ridiculous,” Tim is saying. “As long as we measure the health of our economy by housing starts, it just ain’t gonna happen that way.”
“
Is
there such a thing as health without housing starts, without population growth?” his wife, Susan, asks.
“It’s been done. Look at western Europe in the eighties.”
“Yes,” Gaby says. She’s behind Alan, and he can’t see her. She’s getting glasses and bottles of brandy and liqueurs from the storage cabinet. “France had it
for many years.”
“But France is a mess now. And so is Sweden and all those socialist countries.”
“Well, and it’s partly immigration that did it,” Gaby answers.
“Oh horseshit, Gaby,” Tim says. “They
needed
those workers to come from Africa and so forth, because no French people would do those jobs.”
“Yes, but they came and they came and they came,” Gaby says. “That is precisely my point.”
She is angry, Alan can tell as she sets the glasses down just slightly too hard, and he is startled by this, as he often is by her politics as they apply to France. He doesn’t understand
the line she draws—and he’s heard her father and brothers draw it too. They are repulsed by a character like Le Pen, by anything so openly racist, but they speak in a way no educated
American would dream of speaking about the blacks and the foreigners among them—their laziness, their slack morals, their drugs, their smells, their peculiar food.
“Here’s the thing,” Melanie says quickly. “No society should import people to do the dirty work. Ever. Not slaves. Not guest workers. It’s morally reprehensible. And
it leads to big trouble. Like France,” she says to Gaby. She smiles nervously. “Like us. Instead there should be some mandatory, like, dirty-work service. Like the army, or the Peace
Corps. But everyone should have to do a stint.”
“And how would you define dirty work?” Wade asks. “
Who
would define it?”
“Well, it’s obviously those jobs that go unfilled when there’s high employment. Service jobs. Micky D’s.”
“Housework!” Susan says.
Alan looks again at Gaby. She is sitting in her place at the table. Her face has relaxed, she is smiling at Susan. The moment has gone by.
They begin to argue about the implementation of Melanie’s plan. Teenagers, they agree, should be the dirty-workers. They exchange a few stories about their teenagers, their children. They
talk about the pear brandy Gaby has served. Alan is watching Gaby, feeling a sense of her difference, her Frenchness, which he isn’t conscious of most of the time.
And then he is thinking of the story Lily published in
The Atlantic.
A story about an elderly woman who had abandoned her husband and children in middle age to run off with an alcoholic
painter. Now, old and alone and sensing her approaching death, she imagines the lives her children might have led. She calls information in the cities she thinks they might have landed in, and when
there is someone with one of her children’s names, dials the number and listens without speaking. In each case, she is able to argue herself out of the possibility that it is her child whose
voice she hears, and so—Alan felt, reading the story—is also able somehow, magically, to forestall her death another day.
Was it, in some sense, an apology for Lily’s own life? Was it her fictional speculation about the life his father might have led after the divorce? Was it only invention?
Alan couldn’t tell, and he’d felt the same sense of disquiet he felt whenever he read Lily’s work. More her fiction, he realizes now, than the memoir. (Although the stories
have recently been published in a collection Lily had had sent to him—the enclosed card said, “Compliments of the author” and was signed, “Mother”—he
hasn’t read it yet.)
The evening winds down, and when the first couple rises apologetically to go, the others get up too. They have busy days the next day, they have children, yards, boats, cars, tennis games, golf
games to play—possessions and connections which need tending.
After the guests are gone, Alan comes outside to fetch the glasses they left on the deck. They had been sitting here earlier in the evening, watching the sun’s red deepen in the cirrused
clouds in the western sky, and then the mosquitoes descended on them in a faintly whining cloud and they rose almost as one, slapping themselves and laughing, and fled inside.
The air now is cool and smells briny. The river makes a gentle lapping noise below him though he can’t see it, it’s just an energetic blackness out there below the trees. Inside the
house, Gaby is at work in the kitchen, moving with her darting efficiency on the lighted stage he’s made for her life. Watching her, he thinks of a moment earlier in the week when they lay in
bed together in the afternoon, looking out over the other end of this deck into the trees and talking lazily of their two sons, speculating on how they were changing, on what life would hold for
them. (They have spent hours this way over the years, lying here and in other bedrooms of their marriage, talking about their children, always seeing them as in progress—as people who both
are, and yet are still becoming who they are.)