The Distinguished Guest (3 page)

He feels far away from that moment now, and he has doubly the feeling of spying on Gaby. First, because he is: watching her when she doesn’t know she’s being watched. And second,
because he has a secret he’s been keeping from her. That isn’t, of course, how he’s framed it to himself. He feels he’s waiting for the right moment to talk about it with
her. But it’s on this account that he has a sense of being uncomfortably distant from her, aware that even the physical world she’s immediately conscious of—the bright hot
kitchen, the sound of water running from the tap, the clash and gong of dishes and pots as she handles them—is utterly different from his.

And how odd, he thinks, that his mother appeared at their table tonight, unbidden—consciously anyhow—by him. For that is the secret, that’s what it is: that Lily is going to
have to come and stay with them for a while.

Thomas wasn’t home. Alan rang three times, then sat down to wait on the stoop. Then he got up, and although he knew this was futile (but maybe Thomas had fallen asleep,
was deep in that late-adolescent sleep), he rang again. He was picturing his son as he’d so often seen him, the long body angled across a bed or a couch, sometimes just slouched back in a
comfortable chair—mouth open, dark hair wildly matted—gone, gone in exhaustion. From the open window to the first-floor apartment, he could hear voices raised in argument over the music
playing on the stereo. He shaded his face and peered through the glass of the outer doorway to the inner door and the darkened hallway beyond that. No one.

He sat down again. The stoop was in sunlight. The stone touched his buttocks with warmth. He bent his knees up and rested his elbows on them. Alan was a tall man, tall and fair, as his father
had been. As he’d aged, he’d gotten almost gaunt. Sitting on the stoop this way, he looked awkward, ill-at-ease in his body, all angles and bones. The music on the first floor throbbed,
a pulsing adagio. Baroque, Alan thought. He could hear the voices too, the slapping venom in them, but not what they were saying. For this he was grateful.

He surveyed the sunstruck street. Boston itself seemed breathless and exhausted today in the heat. Not a car moved on this street, though every parking place was full. Alan had had to park more
than a block away, even then illegally, in a spot designated for residents only. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a legal place for a visitor to park in Thomas’s neighborhood, and this
annoyed him with its unreasonableness. If he got a ticket, he’d give it to Thomas for making him wait.

No, he wouldn’t. He could hear Thomas’s voice: “I mean, I know you’re pissed, Dad, but does this seem logical to you?” Logic, logic. Thomas thought he owned it. He
thought of Alan, and maybe even Gaby, as old and arbitrary creatures.

Two students walked by, carrying instrument cases. Flat, rectangular. Alan thought horns maybe. Clarinet? Oboe? They were dressed the way Thomas dressed, with an unerring instinct for the
homely. As though they were farmers, or carpenters. The girl wore no makeup, and her stringy hair was only slightly longer than the boy’s. Both wore clunky work shoes. Or maybe she
wasn’t a girl. Alan watched their backs moving away. Was that a girl’s walk? Da
dump
, da
dump
. No, in Alan’s book. As he was watching them, the boy tossed a
cigarette into the street.

The street was littered with junk, in fact. This neighborhood was on the edge of the ghetto. It had been infiltrated by students from the conservatory and from Northeastern, and maybe as a
result no one group seemed to care about it or to think it was worth the effort to maintain. There was new junk blowing around—food wrappers, cups, leftover trash—and old junk too,
grayish, cottony pieces of unnameable stuff flattened in the gutters. And when the breeze stirred, you heard, in addition to the leaves’ motion, the whispery rattle of plastic shopping bags
snagged here and there in the trees and bushes.

Alan had grown up on the south side of Chicago and he knew that this was far from squalor, but it bothered him anyway. It bothered him, he thought, because Thomas romanticized it, held it up
against Alan’s life, Alan’s home. Thomas saw this, his own home, as . . . what? real, true, gritty. Authentic. When he came to visit Alan and Gaby, he sometimes asked how things were in
the burbs. In burbsville. The stix. The boonies.

Alan remembered 63rd Street abruptly, their walks across it—Rebecca, Clary, himself—on the way to Sunday school. Lily would still be home, getting Sunday dinner ready, waiting until
the last minute to go to the eleven o’clock service. Paul would have gone over to the church much earlier. The three children went alone, walking through the heart of the ghetto. Rebecca was
in charge, and she drove Clary and the foot-dragging Alan along with terror of the streets, of the people still lingering in front of bars under the elevated tracks after Saturday night: “He
saw
you,” she’d whisper with vicious energy. “He’s going to
get
you. Run! Run!” It was still sometimes the terrain of Alan’s nightmares—a
blasted urban street, glass glittering in the gutters, buildings derelict and stinking, and a black person, a man usually, hunting him. (Though the one time something really threatening did happen,
it was a black woman, waked suddenly from her stuporous sleep in a doorway to see Alan in his Sunday best strolling past. A black woman who cried, “Thas my baby! My chile!” and started
to struggle up, her voice rising in pitch. “You taking my baby. Thas
my
baby!” They did run that time, and Rebecca, perhaps terrified that her tactics would be uncovered, made
them promise never, ever to tell.) From time to time when he thought of Rebecca now, doing her radical good works wherever she was, Alan wondered what she’d say if he could tell her she had
shaped the racist nightmares that pursued him for years afterward.

Thomas came up out of nowhere on a bicycle and squealed to a halt, resting one foot on the curb. He was panting. “Hey,” he said, and grinned at Alan. Alan couldn’t help it, he
grinned back. Thomas’s curly black hair was wet, as though he’d just showered, and pushed back from his face by the wind. The face itself was bony and angular—it had thinned out
this way suddenly four or five years ago and somehow Thomas hadn’t grown into it yet. He also hadn’t shaved in a few days. He swung himself off the bike and lifted it to his
shoulder.

Alan stood up and moved out of his way. “I’ll state the obvious,” he said. “You’re late.”

“Sorry I’m late, Dad.” Thomas looked over his shoulder at his father as he fumbled one-handed with the key in the lock. “I got carried away.” He went in.
“Nah. That sounds like I was doing something maybe responsible. I just didn’t watch the time. I was at a friend’s for breakfast.” Alan grabbed the inner door from
Thomas’s hand and followed him up the wide, dirty stairs. The cracked linoleum formed a shallow scoop of each step. In the hallway, there was the noise of life behind the doors: a TV, a baby
wailing loudly, music—jazz—and then they were in front of Thomas’s apartment. The door was battered and scratched. Thomas unlocked three different locks. He pushed inside, set his
bike down, and yelled, “Hello?” No one answered.

Alan headed down the long narrow hall to the bathroom. In the dim light, he tried not to see how dirty it was, not to look at the scarred toilet bowl, the wisped, dusty hairs curling along the
baseboards, the scummy sink. The toilet’s flush was wheezy.

When he came back, Thomas was standing over the message machine and an adult voice was telling him to make an appointment with someone. A beep off, then on, and a breathless girl left a long
message, mostly preface: “Hello, ducks. If you get this message before Saturday, okay, go ahead, pay attention to it. If you don’t, you’re out of luck, you’re a loser, what
can I say, why aren’t you
ever
home, you should check this machine more often, and the message is . . . ” and she announced a party, gave the place and time.

Alan was standing by the open front door. “Can we go, Thomas? I don’t want to be late.”

“Just a sec.”

Another voice came on, wanting Thomas to join him at Wally’s for a beer. “Miss you, pal,” it said, and clicked off. How long since he’d been home, Alan wondered. And if
he wasn’t sleeping at home, where, with whom, was he sleeping?

None of my business, he reminded himself.

Now there was someone else announcing his name, calling for Thomas’s roommate. Thomas fast-forwarded the machine.

“Thomas, I’d like to go. You can do this when you get back. We’re late, in case you didn’t hear me earlier.”

Thomas flicked the machine off. His face was closed. The child, scolded. “Right. Let’s hit the road.”

On the way to the airport, Alan asked Thomas about the trio. He had stayed in Boston this summer specifically to work in it, with an elderly professor who was retired except for this annual
effort. As Thomas had told Gaby and Alan earlier—they had wanted him to get a job this summer—people killed each other to get into this group.

“It’s good,” he said now. “It’s interesting.” And he talked, for a few minutes openly and with enthusiasm, about the music they were working on, about the old
man, about the differences in musicianship among the three players.

A silence fell. Alan looked quickly over at Thomas. His face had fallen into repose, into the brooding gravity that lurked behind what Alan thought of as the Thomas-mask, the smiling,
happy-go-lucky good guy.

“Have you talked to Ettie lately?” Thomas asked abruptly.

“Your mother did, a few days ago. He’ll try to get home one weekend while Gran is staying.”

Thomas nodded, rocking his whole body a little along with his head. “Yeah, he told me. I just wondered if you knew.”

“You guys talk often?”

Thomas shrugged. “A medium amount. I mean, what’s often?”

This irritated Alan. Everyone knew what
often
meant. He didn’t answer.

“How long
is
Gran staying?”

“I can’t say. We’re waiting, essentially, for some old geezer to die.”

“The guy whose apartment she’s going to move into?”

“Even further down the line than that.
That
guy is in a nursing bed, and the woman who lives now in what will be Gran’s apartment needs that bed. The nursing bed. But she
can’t move there until the old guy kicks the bucket. So to speak. And he was supposed to—he was in intensive care and on the way out—but a miracle of modern medicine pulled him
though.” On the still river, just a few boats, their sails sagged and luffing. Alan smiled at Thomas. “So now we’re all praying for a different kind of miracle.”

“So it’ll be like, what? A year?”

“God, no! A couple of months, at the most. They’ve virtually promised.”

“Well, that’s not bad, Dad.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Come on. She’s cool.”

“Do people still say
cool
?”

“I don’t know. I do, apparently.”

They settled into silence. Alan was thinking of Ettie—Etienne, his other son. Although he was two years younger than Thomas, he seemed older. He was short, like Alan’s wife, Gaby,
and compact like her too, and perhaps that was some of it. Unlike Thomas, Ettie was comfortable in his body, coordinated and graceful and a terrific athlete in those sports where size didn’t
count for so much—baseball, soccer. Sexually too, he seemed older than Thomas. They’d actually caught him with his girlfriend in his bedroom when he was fourteen, and he’d taken
one of Thomas’s girlfriends away from him a year or two later. It was this episode Alan was remembering.

She wasn’t his girlfriend, Ettie had argued. Thomas had never even asked her out.

“But you knew! I told you how I felt.” Thomas had been crying earlier, and now his voice threatened to break again.

They were standing, absurdly, Alan and Thomas, in the hall outside the boys’ bedroom, talking to Ettie through the closed, locked door. This was where Alan had found Thomas when he came
home from teaching at the college—sitting in the hall, his eyes swollen, waiting for the moment Ettie should emerge.

Because he was going to kill him, he said, when he did.

Alan had to piece the story together from their alternating versions on opposite sides of the door, but about the facts there was basically no disagreement. Thomas had adored this girl, a girl
in the class one below his and one above Ettie’s. He’d talked about her to Ettie, sought his advice about the way to approach her. He imagined he might ask her to the movies one day. He
was getting ready, he felt.

And then Ettie moved in on her.

It wasn’t his fault, Ettie said, and he explained all the circumstances, the party, her calling him up, the several times they’d met alone.

While he talked, Thomas had begun to fight tears again, and when Ettie was done, he attacked the door, kicking it, slamming it with his fists. Alan had reached out to restrain him, to embrace
him, but he spun away, crying out in alarm, and sat down on the floor again, his back against Ettie’s door.

Alan sat down too, and slowly they began to talk about it. Thomas answered Alan’s questions in an exhausted, deadened way. Finally Alan persuaded Thomas to come out to dinner with him. As
they were leaving, he called this through the door to Ettie.

“I heard you already,” Ettie said. “I heard everything you said.”

“Tell Mom.”

“I
will
,” he said furiously, and Alan could hear that he was angry at him, that he felt betrayed that Alan had taken Thomas’s side.

When they were driving home after their long, mostly silent meal, Thomas said, “You should know, Dad, that I’m still going to kill him.”

Alan looked at Thomas in the lights reflected from the road. His tone was businesslike, perhaps even casual, his posture relaxed.

“That’s not going to work, Thomas,” Alan said.

“I don’t care.”

“If it came down to it,” Alan said, “you’d be the one to get hurt.”

“I don’t care.”

“You know he’s stronger than you are.”

Now Thomas stirred, a convulsion of his gangly body. “You don’t need to
tell
me that, Dad,” he said furiously. “Of course I know that. Jesus.”