Joy Williams - Honored Guest

“How is school?”

“They’ve completed the new library, and we’re allowed two days off from classes to move the books from the old institution down the hill to the new institution. We are to be utilized as a merry and willing human chain. I resist being so utilized. I’m here to learn.”

“So you’re coming here instead,” Angela said. There was silence.

“Which is wonderful,” Angela said. “Really wonderful.”

“I’m hanging up, Mummy. You can continue with your inanities if you wish.”

That night Angela had a dream. She was in a furniture store and the salesman was speaking about the wood of a bed she was looking at. Angela was not really interested in the bed and had no intention of buying it but she had been staring at it for some time. No wonder the salesman thinks I’m interested in it, she thought in her dream, I keep walking around and around it. Now some people, the salesman said, they look at a thousand-year-old tree and they say, what the hey. They don’t respect it, you know? Thing’s just growing out of the ground. But to cut to the detail, this bed comes to you from Indonesia fresh from a managed forest, what they call a managed forest, and it hasn’t been treated yet so you’ve got to care for it. You’ve got to oil it at least once a year. It’s like it’s still alive. The molecules are still stretching and expanding. I admit it’s not like a fine piece of furniture that your grandmother might have taken pride in and cared for because it isn’t a fine piece of furniture, it’s hacked out by simple Malay Archipelago artisans for export. With fairly crude tools. Now some people like this situation, it’s just what they want. They want to feel they’re doing their part by providing a commitment, a commitment to life, a thwarted life, not just to an inert tyrannical object like the kind your forebears served. And this baby’s cheap. Of course the timber industry is way out of control worldwide, and this price in no way reflects the real costs entailed, the invisible costs you might say. But the opportunity you have right here is to acquire something that’s alive even when it’s dead, do you hear what I’m saying? The salesman had a head that looked like a medicine ball. How heavy that must be, Angela thought. When it began to resemble something more like a brown dog’s head, she woke up.

Darleen arrived with someone she introduced as Deke, her assistant and guide, a man older than Angela with graying, slicked-back hair. He wore a leather shirt and extremely tight-fitting leather pants which suggested no knob. Angela couldn’t help but notice this. Darleen had dyed her hair white and it sprang above her pale face like a web composed of bristles and points. She had not, however, adorned her face with rings or studs, as was so much the fashion among the young. The rings always seemed to presuppose some sort of leash to Angela. She was pleased that Darleen had not succumbed to convention.

“Slippery out,” the man said.

He requested upon arrival a bath. His bathing was noisy and prolonged, and when he emerged from Angela’s bathroom the immediate premises smelled fruity and foul. “Bag?” he said to Darleen.

“I put it in the kitchen.”

Angela heard him opening and shutting drawers, criticizing the color scheme — green and red or “rhubarb”—and bemoaning the dearth of protein. There was then the sound of a bottle being uncorked. He appeared with a single water goblet filled to the brim with wine. “Glasses look as if they were washed on the inside only,” he complained. “Knives badly in need of sharpening.” He stood before them, sipping the wine appreciatively. Angela’s eyes reluctantly strayed to his remarkable leather pants.

“Can’t see nothing for seeing something else,” Deke muttered.

“Dear …,” Angela began.

“I want to marry him, Mummy, I’ll spend years if necessary nursing him back to health. I want a large wedding in an English garden with a champagne fountain.” She chewed on her fingers and laughed.

Angela decided to ignore the subject and presence of Deke, assistant and guide, for the moment. “Is everything going well at school? Tell me about school.”

“We have finished our studies of archaic cultures with the Aztecs. As everywhere else in the world, the Aztec elite had more varied ideas about their gods than the common people.”

“Don’t you go believing that now!” Deke exclaimed.

“Religious thinking among the elite developed into a real philosophy which stressed the relative nature of all things,” Darleen continued briskly. “Such a philosophy can only develop in a sophisticated environment.”

She then lapsed into silence. Deke said he was going to take a peek around if it didn’t disaccommodate anyone.

“What will you be doing this summer?” Angela asked after a while. “Will you be a nanny again for the Marksons?”

“I hardly think so.” Darleen gazed at her critically. At some point in boarding school she had learned how to enlarge her eyes and make them glassy at will, like some carnivore about to attack.

“I was on the island just yesterday but I didn’t walk as far as their house.”

“Am I supposed to find that interesting?” Darleen sighed. “In another class we’re reading Dante. Do you know why he called it a comedy?” She raised a gnawed paw to prevent her mother from replying, although Angela had no intention of interrupting her. “Because it progresses from a dark beginning to redemption and hope.”

“What translation are you using?”

“Oh for godssakes, Binyon. Laurence Binyon. What do you care? That’s not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make is that Dante’s imagination was primarily visual. In his time people didn’t dream, they had visions. And these visions had meaning. We only have dreams and dreams are haphazard and undisciplined, the meager vestige of a once great method of immediate knowing.” She gnawed on her fingers again. “You see visions today and you’re considered abnormal, uncouth.”

Deke hurried past them back into the kitchen, where he poured more wine.

“This ain’t much of an establishment if you pardon my saying so,” he said to Angela. “No steaks in the freezer, no ice cream, sound system inadequate, music fit only to disinform the listener, no point in hearing it twice, towels thin, washcloths worn and most suspect, bed lumpy, poor recycling practices, few spare lightbulbs on hand, fire extinguishers out of date, no playing cards, clocks not set properly—”

“I like them a little fast,” Angela conceded. It was all true. He was in no way exaggerating.

“Potted violets on windowsill in very poor condition, worst case of powdery mildew I ever saw. I could go on.”

“I remember those violets,” Darleen said. “Those violets are from my childhood.”

“Now that’s just plain wrong,” Angela protested.

“Suffering the same fate regardless,” Darleen said.

“You got a considerable amount of canned goods, however. Can I take some back to my friends?” Deke’s hair was still wet, but already scurf was bedecking his thin shoulders like fresh snow.

“See, Mummy, even though a person has no future to speak of, he can take a moment to think of others. He can trust even in the blackest part of night that the daylight is not going to forget to come back for him.”

“She’s a talker, isn’t she,” Deke said.

“That surprises me, actually,” Angela confessed. “It really does.” She was brooding about that daylight-coming-back business. You couldn’t think that way about daylight, that’s why the ancients were always so hysterical. It was just too mental, too neurasthenic. Certain things just couldn’t forget to come back. And when they finally didn’t, it wasn’t because they forgot . They did it with deliberation.