Joy Williams - Honored Guest

He spoke again, patiently, as if she had utterly misunderstood his situation and the seriousness of his request. His guilt was almost holy, he was on a holy quest. He had determined that this was what must be done, the only thing that remained possible now to do.

“We were so close,” he said. “He was my little brother. I taught him how to ski, how to drive. We went to the same college. I’d always protected him, he looked up to me, then there was this stupid, senseless quarrel. Now he’s gone forever and I’m all ruined inside, it’s destroyed me.” He rubbed his chest as if something within him really was harrowed. “If I could care now for something he had cared for, then I would have something of my brother, of my brother’s love.”

“I don’t mean to sound rude,” Louise said, “but we’ve all been dealing with this for some time now and you suddenly appear, having been ill and out of the country both at the same time. Both at the same time,” she repeated, for it seemed, though not unlikely, inane. “It’s just so unnecessary now, your appearance. It’s possible to come around too late.”

“That’s not true,” he said. He was sallow beneath his tan. “Your friends, Elliot’s friends, said they were sure you’d appreciate the opportunity, that they were sure you wouldn’t mind, that in fact you’d be relieved and delighted.”

“That just shows how little we comprehend one another,” Louise said. “Even when we try,” she added. “Have you ever had a dog before?” Louise was just curious. She didn’t mean to lead him on, but as soon as she said this, she feared she’d given him hope.

“Oh yes,” he said eagerly. “As boys we always had dogs.”

“They’d die and you’d get another?”

“That’s a queer way of putting it.”

“Look,” Louise said, “your brother had this dog for about three minutes.” She felt she was exonerating Elliot.

“Three minutes,” he said, bewildered.

“I said about three minutes. You should get a dog and pretend it was your brother’s and care for it tenderly and that will be that.” Louise was not going to get up and go inside the house and lock the door against him. She would wait him out. “There’s nothing more to discuss,” she said.

He turned from her sadly. There were several youths peering into his van. “Get away from there!” he cried, and hurried toward them.

It was Walter’s turn to give a party. He had a fire in the fireplace although it wasn’t at all cold. Still, it was very pleasant, everyone said so.

“I ordered half a cord of wood but it wasn’t split, it was just logs,” Walter said, “and one of the logs had a chain partly embedded in it, like a dog chain. The tree had started to grow right over the chain.”

“Wow,” Daisy said. “I don’t think so.”

“Sometimes,” Wilbur said, “certain concepts, it’s better not to air them.”

The twins held each other’s hands and looked into the fire.

“Who would have thought that Elliot would have such a dreary brother,” Angus said. “I wouldn’t have given him the dog either.”

“Still, I’m amazed you didn’t, Louise,” Jack said.

“I guess he got all the things we actually remembered Elliot having,” Andrew said. “I remember a rather nice ship’s clock, for instance. That wristwatch I was given, who’d ever seen that before?”

“Elliot wasn’t in his right mind,” Betsy said. “We keep forgetting that. He wasn’t thinking clearly. If you’re thinking clearly, you don’t take your own life.”

Again, Louise marveled at her friend’s way of phrasing things. To take your own life was to take control of it, to take possession of it, to give it a shape by occupying it. But Elliot’s life still had no shape, even though it had been completed.

“I want to confess something,” Andrew said. “I tossed that watch.” He had crammed it into an overflowing Goodwill bin in the parking lot of a shopping mall. He described the experience of pushing the watch into an open-throated, softly bulging sack as an extremely unpleasant one. Everyone knew the Goodwill bin and the mute congregation of displaced things attending it, too large to have been slipped inside, all those things waiting to be revisited in this life, waiting to be used again.

That evening everyone drank too much and later dreamed vivid dreams. The twins dreamed they were in the middle of a highway, trying to cross, trying to cross. Angus dreamed he was in a coffee shop where a kindly but inefficient waitress who looked like his mother was directing him to a table that wasn’t there. Lucretia dreamed she was carving Kindertotenlieder as sung by Kathleen Ferrier out of a block of wood with a chain saw. That’s quite good, someone was saying. It’s only a copy, Lucretia demurred. Walter dreamed he was kneeling at the communion rail in the silk pajamas. The cup was working its way toward him but had become a thermometer to be placed beneath the tongues of the devout, and by the time it reached him it was a dipstick from a car’s engine that a mechanic was wiping with a filthy cloth.

Louise had had the dog for five months now. When she realized how much time had passed, she thought: Seven more months to go. In seven months we’ll know more.

Someone was putting a house up behind Louise’s house. The yard had been bladed and most of the trees taken down. The banal framework of a house stood there. When Louise gave a party, everyone was shocked at the change.

“I thought that yard went with this house,” Jack said.

“Well, I guess not,” Louise said.

“All those little birdhouses are gone,” Lucretia said. “People put them inside now, you know, as a decorative accent. They paint them in these already fading, flaking colors and put them around.”

“They’re safer inside,” Angus said.

“That thing is going to be huge, Louise,” Betsy said. “It’s going to loom over you.”

They talked for a while about what she could plant to block it out.

“Nothing will grow in time,” Betsy said.

“In time for what?” Walter said.

“Everything takes so long to grow. My god, Louise,” Betsy said, “you’d better just move.”

“Louise,” the twins said, “if you die are you going to leave us anything?” They were sitting on the sofa eating pretzels. Outside, the wind was blowing hard but there were no trees anymore to indicate this with their tossing branches. A door blew open, banging, though.

Louise was going to move. She didn’t want that house going up behind her. Within a week, she had found another place. Walter and Lucretia helped her move. Walter had a truck and they transferred all the furniture in one trip. They transferred Broom too, with his dog bed and his dish for water and his dish for food. Then Louise packed her car with what remained, right up to the roof. Even so, she had thrown away a lot of things. She was simplifying and purifying her life, keeping only her nicest, most singular things. Louise swept the old house clean, glad to be leaving. She looked with satisfaction at the empty rooms, the stark windows and their newly ugly vistas. She slammed the door and headed for her car but it wasn’t where she’d left it. She stared at the place where the car had been. But it had vanished, been stolen, and everything was gone. The sun was bright, still shining on the place where it had been.

It was Betsy’s turn to have a party. They told theft stories — they all had them — and tried to cheer Louise up. She had already bought another car with the insurance money. It wasn’t as appealing but she liked it in a different way. She liked it because she didn’t like it that much, wasn’t as girlishly pleased with it as she had been with the other one.