Joy Williams: Honored Guest

“Why do I hate Mummy?”

“Not at all clear. Whoa, though, whoa, I got a question for Angela. You ever confess under questioning from this child that you had considered, if only for an instant when she was but the size of a thumb inside you, not having this particular one at all, maybe a later one?”

“No,” Angela said.

Deke nodded. “That’s nice,” he said. He picked at his potato. “This is a little overcooked,” he said.

“I just want to check on something,” Darleen said. She disappeared into what had been her bedroom. There was the ugly wallpaper in a dense tweedy pattern which would make anyone feel as though they were trapped under a basket. Darleen had selected it at the age of eight. Angela didn’t use the room for storage. Technically, it was still Darleen’s bedroom.

“Dinner was OK, actually OK,” Deke said pleasantly. “Glad you didn’t go the fowl route. You ever had goose? There’s this wealthy woman in town and she’s got this perturberance about nuisance geese. They’re Canada geese but they’re not from Canada, she says, and she’s got the town to agree to capture and slaughter them and feed them to the poor. If you have any influence, would you tell that old girl we don’t like those geese? The flavor is off. They’re golf course geese and full of insecticides and effluent and such.”

“Betty Bishop!” Angela exclaimed. “Why, I just broke her wrist!”

“Good for …” Deke began, then stopped.

“It was an accident, but what a coincidence!”

“I guess you wouldn’t have the influence I seek then,” Deke said, sniffing. “You ever get the air ducts in this place cleaned? Should be cleaned annually. Dust, fungi, bacteria — you’re cohabiting with continually recirculating pollutants here.”

Darleen returned. “Where’s my little fish,” she demanded.

“Well, it, oh goodness, it’s been years,” Angela said.

“Is that my fish’s bowl in the kitchen filled with pennies and shit?”

“I saw that,” Deke said. “Clearly a fishbowl, now much reduced in circumstances.”

“I had a little fish throughout my childhood,” Darleen explained to him. “I said ‘Good morning’ to it in the morning and ‘Good night’ to it at night.”

Deke stretched out his long, black-wrapped legs.

“For years and years I had this little fish,” Darleen said. “But it wasn’t the same fish! I’d pretend I hadn’t noticed there was something awfully wrong with fishie sometimes before I went to school, and she would pretend she hadn’t slipped the deceased down the drain and run out and bought another one before my return.”

“Oh, I knew you knew,” Angela said.

“If it had been the same fish, you two would have lacked the means to communicate with each other at all,” Deke suggested.

“Mummy, I want to be serious now. Do you know why I’m here? I’m here because Daddy Bruce requested that I come. That’s why I’m here.”

For an instant, Angela had no idea who Daddy Bruce was. Then her heart pitched about quite wildly. Darleen had neglected to put her eyes in full deployment and she gazed at her mother with alarming sincerity.

“I was studying one night. I’d been up for hours and hours. It was very late and he just appeared, in my mind, not corporeally, and he said, ‘Honey, this is Daddy Bruce. I don’t want you cutting yourself off from your mom and me anymore. Your mom’s a painful thing to apprehend but you’ve got to try. She’s living her life like a clock does, just counting the hours. You can take a clock from room to room, from place to place, but all it does is count the hours.’”

“He never talked that way!” Angela exclaimed. “He was just a boy!”

“Well, that’s what happens pretty quick,” Deke said. “They all get to sounding the same. It’s characteristic of death’s drear uniformity. Most difficult to be pluralistic when you’re dead.”

“He said he never loved you and he’s sorry about that now.”

Angela’s heart was pounding hard and insistently, distracting her a little, making a great obtrusive show of itself. Be aware of me, it was pounding, be aware.

“He said if he had to do it all over, he still wouldn’t love you but you wouldn’t know it.”

“It don’t seem as if this Bruce is giving Angela much of a second chance here,” Deke said.

“Daddy Bruce wanted to assure you that—”

“Tell him not to worry about it,” Angela said. There were worse things, she supposed, than being told you had never been loved by a dead man.

Deke giggled. “What else he have to say? Did he suggest you were studying too hard?”

“He would hardly have bothered to come all the way from the other world to tell me that,” Darleen said.

“I suspect there’s only one thing to know about that other world,” Deke opined. “You don’t go to it when you’re dead. That other world exists only when you’re in this one.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Angela said. She took a deep uncertain breath.

“That might be correct,” Darleen said, gnawing on her hands again. “The dead are part of our community, just like those in prison.”

“Ever visit the prison gift shop?” Deke said. “Can’t be more than ten miles from here. They sell cutting boards, boot scrapers, consoles for entertainment centers. The ladies knit those toilet-seat covers, toaster covers. Nice things. Reasonable. They won’t let the ones on death row contribute anything, though. They want to sell products, not freak collector items. It’s like that tree used to be outside the First Congregational Church. That big old copper beech they cut down because they said it was a suicide magnet? Wouldn’t use the wood for nothing either, and that was good wood. Threw it in the landfill. Tree was implicated in only four deaths. Drew in two unhappy couples was all. Wouldn’t think they’d rip out a three-hundred-year-old tree for that, but down it went. And now they’ve got a little sapling there no bigger around than a baseball bat.”

Angela dismayed herself by laughing.

“That’s right,” Deke giggled. “If a young person gets it in his mind now passing that spot, he’s got to wait.”

“I should have suspected you two would get along,” Darleen said sourly.

“You sick?” Deke asked Angela. “Is that why you don’t care so much? Some undiagnosed cancer?”

“She’s never been sick a day in her life,” Darleen said. “She has the constitution of a horse.”

“Horses are actually quite delicate,” Deke said. “Lots can go wrong with a horse, naturally, and then you can make additional things go wrong, should you wish, if it’s in your interests.”

“Deke worked a few summers in Saratoga,” Darleen said. She suddenly looked weary.

“A sick horse is a dead horse, pretty much,” Deke said. “I’m going to uncork that other bottle now.” From the kitchen, Angela heard him excoriating the rust on the gas jets, the lime buildup around the sink fixtures, the poorly applied adhesive plastic covering meant to suggest crazed Italian tiles. Goblet once again brimming, he did not resume his place at the table but walked over to the painting. “I can see why you felt you had to have this,” he said. “At first it appears to be realistically coherent and pleasantly decorative, but the viewer shortly becomes aware of a sense of melancholy, of disturbing presentiment.”

Angela wondered if it was possible to desire a drink any more than she did at this moment. It couldn’t be.

“You clearly got an affinity with unknowing, unprepared creatures,” Deke went on.

“Deke used to be an art critic,” Darleen said.

He waved one hand dismissively. “Just for the prison newsletter.”