The Distinguished Guest (27 page)

“You’d better take a parka,” Alan said. He sat down on the long built-in couch under the window, his strong-featured face shadowed harshly by the lamp next to him.

As Gaby clumped back and forth in her clogs, Alan and Marcea began to talk again.

How long had it been, Linnett wondered, since he’d entertained a black person in his home? And then she thought that was unfair. She had no idea. Maybe he had black colleagues where he
taught. Or clients. They wouldn’t be neighbors, though. She couldn’t recall seeing a black person in town. She reached over and carefully spread some cheese on one of the fragile
crackers.

Now Gaby stopped outside their circle again on her way out, snapped up in a bright green parka. “Anyone who is still here on my return must stay for supper.”

“That’s not a punishment,” Alan said. “That’s an invitation.”

“It’s a
reward
,” Linnett said.

“I’ll have to get going by then,” Marcea said. “But thanks.”

“Oh, I am sorry,” Gaby said. “But maybe you’ll change your mind. You could wait the storm out with us. And you, Linnett.” Gaby turned her brown eyes to Linnett.
“It’s too terrible outside to go home and eat alone. We count on you.”

“Thanks,” Linnett said. “I will.”

Gaby flipped the hood of the parka up and left then, shutting the inner door, too, on her way out. And it was suddenly quieter in the room.

There were a few seconds of silence. Then Alan said, “Well, what has Lily called upon me to bear witness to?”

Later it would be hard for Alan to remember many of the things he said—so much else went on that night and for the next few days. The young woman, Marcea McKendrick (when
she called him months later he instantly remembered her name, how she’d looked, the firm grip of her hand), had described the basic argument between them. Lily had exhausted herself already,
he could see, but she had insisted on having Noreen sent away without going in for her nap, and she sat through Marcea’s explanation, stony-faced, drained-looking. Marcea was clear and
concise, and, he thought, fair-sounding in her summation.

“So, if your perspective could offer us anything new . . .” she said. He thought there was something faintly amused in the way she suggested this possibility.

He remembered later that he talked about his high-school friend, Clayton Davis, his one good black friend. He remembered telling Marcea about the time he’d said to Clayton that he’d
felt overwhelmed by the rapid influx of black kids straight up from the delta into his grammar school. That Clayton had said to him, “
You
were overwhelmed. Imagine how
we
felt.” That it had not occurred to him until then that the great migration happened also to a stable, middle-class and working-class black community with much to lose. He knew, even as he
told this story, that part of the point of it was to let her know that he’d had a black friend.
You see, I am not prejudiced
. He felt again the odd sense of falseness and shame about
Clayton—who had disappeared, whose name was included on the list of the lost at class reunions. “We’d appreciate having any information about the following class members, who have
dropped off the face of the earth.” If Clayton was his friend, why didn’t he have any idea what had happened to him? Why had he moved so completely beyond Alan’s ken shortly after
they both graduated from college?

As he thought about it later, it seemed he must have been talking about Clayton by way of agreeing with Marcea that yes, there was a black language that middle-class blacks were cut off from,
that connected more directly to the black experience.

But what of Clayton’s black experience then? Had Alan said he thought it was inauthentic? He couldn’t have said that, could he? And not to Marcea, surely, with her smooth delivery,
her barely accented voice?

Maybe he mentioned Clayton as a way of agreeing with Lily that the notion of integration could work as long as the black community aspired to the middle class, maybe he said that his comfort
with Clayton had to do with that.

He couldn’t remember, he couldn’t remember. What he remembered most clearly was Lily earlier when she asked him to speak for her, whispering with dislocated urgency over the sound of
the rain and wind outside. She had dropped her charm. She seemed merely insistent, and physically wasted. Gone. “Tell her,” she whispered when he bent over her. “I want you to
tell her how it was.”

But insistent on what? What had she wanted from him? What could he have given her that would have helped?

At any rate, he hadn’t. He talked of Clayton, yes. And he knew he’d spoken of his relief when the black power movement essentially threw whites out of the civil rights business, that
he’d said, in fact, that the clarity then was like a good hard kick in the head. In the ribs? He couldn’t recall. He’d met Linnett’s eyes, though, and saw that she
recognized his reference. And this is what set things in motion. Something lighted in her face, and after a few minutes of his talking of other things, she leaned forward, set her glass down, and
spoke to Marcea.

Her voice was pleasant, conversational. “You know, maybe the difference, the difference in the way Alan and Lily feel, has to do with his having been beaten up, did you know that?”
Alan could tell that she was excited, she saw dramatic possibilities here. Instantly he regretted having brought it up, even as obliquely as he had. Especially as obliquely as he had. “By
black kids,” she said. “As a kid. When he was a kid.”

Marcea’s expression tightened, closed. “Oh?” she said.

Alan felt his pulse thicken. He was angry at Linnett, furious at himself.

Lily whispered fiercely, “You’re not going to flog that old horse again, are you?”

And instantly, freshly, Alan’s rage was redirected and he felt it once more as his anger at Lily’s silencing him then, as the true rage he’d felt at the time and not been
allowed to shape in words. “I’d like a chance to flog it
once
, Lily,” he said, with forced geniality. And then his voice grew harder. “I’d like to be able to
say, just once, in front of you, that yes, I was beat up, and yes, that it was wrong, it was wrong.”

Her trembling hand waved vaguely in front of her. She croaked, “It’s hardly even relevant in the sense of larger wrongs, larger . . .”

“But it’s relevant to me. To what goes on between me and you.”

“But you mustn’t seize on that. That isn’t . . .”

“Mother, I don’t think I did. I didn’t. But don’t you see . . .” She started to shape a word and he held his hand up. “No, here it is. You felt there was this
one black community to respond to, which you insisted I respond to. You heard one message from the black community. One.” He raised a finger. “But I grew up hearing, I don’t know.
Four or five? Sure, at first, ‘Be my friend.’ But then ‘Stay away from me.’ Sometimes ‘Help me.’ Then ‘Hands off.’ Then ‘Fuck off.’
That’s what the beating said, Lily. It said ‘Fuck off. Fuck off, and die.’ ”

It was as though some final peg that held her together had been pulled. Her mouth slackened, her hands hung, wildly dancing. They all sat in silence. The rain pelted the window. Finally Lily
whispered hollowly, “I wish you’d felt more as I did.”

Alan looked away sharply. He understood that Lily had spoken from her heart, and he was instantly ashamed. And he felt—her tone, her collapse made him feel, viscerally—how alone
she’d been too, deeply alone, in much of what she’d lived through. He felt, in spite of his anger, a sense of understanding her. He was silent for a long moment. Then he reached forward
and touched her dangling, trembling hand. He said, “How much easier life would have been for all of us if I had.”

She didn’t respond. After another few seconds’ silence, he stood up. “I’m going to take you in for your rest now, Lily. No arguments. Let’s go.” He reached
down and pulled his mother up next to him. They didn’t speak as he guided her to the bathroom. He waited for her outside the door as he always did in the mornings, and then he led her to bed.
She seemed barely able to move, to recognize him. He took off her shoes, he lifted her legs onto the bed, he eased her back against the mounded pillows. Her eyes didn’t meet his, but this
didn’t seemed deliberate. She was long gone in exhaustion, beyond anger or mischief.

He could hear the voices from the living room as he spread the afghan over Lily, and he wondered what they might be talking about, Linnett and Marcea. What they might be saying about him, about
Lily.

When he came out, Marcea stood up immediately. “I really need to go,” she said. “I’d like to get home before it gets too dark.” She gestured. At this time of
evening the sky was usually still lemony blue. Today the rain had brought an early night. There seemed to be no sky at all above the black, tossing trees.

“We can’t persuade you to stay for dinner?”

“I’d like to,” she said. “But really, I can’t.” She was already putting her notes away.

Alan watched her. “I hope what I said . . . Well, that I haven’t offended you.”

“Not
me
,” she said, and laughed. As though, what? she was beyond taking offense. Perhaps as though it was only Lily he’d offended. Or none of the above. She was a child
after all. Thomas’s age. Most likely just that careless too, about the tone of what she said, about the ways people might understand it.

She and Linnett were saying goodbyes, chatting briefly. She’d look for the article. Linnett wished her luck with the thesis. Alan went to get an umbrella from the coat closet in order to
walk her out to her car. They went through a ritual of insistence and refusal, but in the end, of course, he walked with her across the dark yard and held the umbrella open above the car door while
she slid in. After she’d shut it, she rolled the window down partway. “Thank you,” she said primly, politely.

He looked at her. He felt she had stumbled into something that might have been painful for her because of his anger at Lily, because of his shabby effort to flirt with Linnett. He didn’t
want her to leave. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What?” She squinted up into the wet air at him.

“I’m sorry.” He spoke loudly over the noise of the driving rain. “I’m sorry to have talked about that. About being beaten up. It wasn’t important. It
wasn’t . . . to the point. It was stupid.”

She looked up at him steadily, measuring him, he felt.

“It was a stupid thing to say. To talk about. It was aimed at Lily, to hurt her.”

“I think I knew that,” she said.

Alan put his hand on the door handle and smiled at her. “It’s just I was raised to feel being white was itself a kind of sin, and I’ve never figured out how to expiate
it.”

“Well,” she said. She didn’t smile back. She looked away, toward the lights of the house through her windshield. She shrugged. “I hope one day you do.” And then she
bent forward and turned on the engine.

As she drove away, Alan stood alone in the dusky downpour, watching the red lights disappear into the shrubbery of the driveway. Then he turned under the umbrella and looked back at his house,
the warm yellow lights inside, Linnett sitting on one of Lily’s chairs looking blindly back out at him. He had never felt less drawn to it, to its comfort and warmth. He started back across
the wet, dark yard.

He avoided talking to Linnett when he went in. He put a CD on, one Thomas had recommended to him, and excused himself to work. In the kitchen, he got out a thick, yellow-pepper soup Gaby had
left in the refrigerator, and turned the heat on low under it. With deliberated care, he chose bright red paisley placemats for the table, matching napkins, Slowly he laid out the thick white
plates and bowls, the old silver from Gaby’s family. He washed the mâche, the frisée, as Gaby had asked him to do, picking carefully through the pale green leaves.

By the time Gaby came back, breathless from her run across the yard, he’d settled himself a little. She fixed him coffee, which they usually had together when they came back from the shop,
and Alan offered Linnett more wine. She accepted.

Gaby had asked about Marcea, and Linnett explained her departure. Now she was trying to explain, too, the basic issue between Lily and Marcea, the point about black English.

Gaby seized on it. She was sitting with Linnett. As Alan came over to join them, she began to speak of her sense of losing a part of herself in English.

Linnett argued that this was different, that black English wasn’t a different language, but a different dialect.

Still, still Gaby said. Alan watched her. She was gesturing broadly, she was excited. One cast oneself as differently in a different dialect surely, she said, as in a different language. The
French of Paris caused her to pitch her voice higher, to be less determined in her enunciation, more rhythmic. “There is a particularly feminine way of speaking French. It’s a much more
sexually divided language than English, which men and women speak just the same way. I have always felt . . . less female, less attractive, when I speak English. Listen.” And she translated
those words into French. Alan could hear the rise in pitch in her voice, the slightly singsong quality. He wondered that he hadn’t thought about this before, about what she had lost when she
decided to become his wife. To become American. And hearing her speak in French now reminded him that it was also his loss. He was shocked that he hadn’t realized this, and for the first time
was aware of how much he too missed her, the Gaby who spoke French.

“But doesn’t Alan speak French too?” Linnett asked. “Can’t you be sexy, anyway, with him?”

“Oh no,” Gaby said. She looked at him. “Alan had a little French, and we used to try to talk together, remember dear?”

“I remember the struggle,” he said.

She smiled broadly, and turned back to Linnett. “But you see, after all, we had made our choice. We were in America. And I think you have to choose, one language or the other. So he lost
it, his French.”

“Still,” Linnett said, “your accent in English is mighty sexy.”

Gaby waved her hand dismissively. “Ah, but I don’t control that, you see. It’s purely accidental that I sound one way or another. I felt . . . I don’t know how to say
it—
in charge of
my own sexiness, in French.”