Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Confident of her friendship, I saw more of Mrs. Everest, nearly always in the ritualistic restaurant-going way, and the paradox was always her ordering three courses and seldom eating anything. Junior’s restaurant, where we often met, was a casual place, with excellent food, that was nicknamed “the kitchen” because the old-time islanders gathered there. In the summer, no one made lunch at home, and the islanders were sociable, so it was always lunch at Junior’s.

A meal in most societies on earth represents a peacemaking gesture. But you have to eat something — anything, a nibble is enough. Mrs. Everest seldom swallowed. I took this to be hostile. A concentrated thought darkened her face, and she used her fork and knife as though she was killing and mutilating the food on her plate, lingering over it, always with her mouth open, seeming to utter a curse. And then at last the slow, disgusted way she ate, masticating it like a gum chewer, not swallowing. She had a habit of spitting food onto her plate, turning her whole meal into dog food. No one mentioned this, perhaps because, like me, they stopped looking. And here is the irony: she once said to me, “I hate watching people eat. And I can’t stand to see them laughing.”

My wife was off-island for the day. I was sitting with Mrs. Everest, and we were about to order, when I saw at a nearby table a man I had met in England on one of my trips, an American Foreign Service officer, Harry Platt. He’d kept in touch as he’d been moved from one post to another, and over six years or so he’d been to three countries in the Middle East, Turkey the most recent.

Seeing Harry Platt’s face from far off in our local seafront restaurant made him seem gaudily familiar, like an apparition. He must have felt the same about seeing me, because he smiled broadly and got up. He was with an older woman, who stared but did not rise from her chair.

“Well met!” The pretentious expression was not pretentious the way he said it, but suited his old-fashioned Ivy League manner. “How great to see you. What brings you to the island?”

“My wife and I have had a place here for a few years. She’s away at the moment.”

He explained that he was catching the ferry in the morning, and then he became self-conscious and nodded at the older woman at his table.

“Will you join us? This is my mother.”

I glanced at Mrs. Everest, who had been eyeing the other woman, perhaps sizing her up. She said, “Absolutely not.”

Harry Platt was an experienced diplomat, a charming man in his late fifties. He had been helpful to me, putting me in touch with various people, once helping with a visa, another time explaining a tricky piece of foreign policy. He knew presidents, he had sat with prime ministers. But hearing Mrs. Everest’s rebuff (and his mother had heard too), he became flustered, his face reddening, his eyes frantic, as though he’d been slapped. His mother looked furious and chalky-faced.

“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“We’re leaving at seven,” he said with a desperate smile.

At that, his mother got up and went to the door, and Harry seemed to lose his balance, actually to topple, as if yielding to the gravitational pull of his mother in her heaving herself out. Harry’s embarrassment made him fumble his farewell, and I saw, just a flicker — the glint in his eyes, the set of his mouth — that he was enraged.

Mrs. Everest said, “I think I’ll have the peekytoe crab salad. You should have the lobster mac and cheese — it’s one of Junior’s specialities.”

She did not allude to Harry or his mother, but the whole encounter upset me so badly I couldn’t eat.

There were the men she called “the boys.” Tony was an antiques dealer and a stickler for decorum. “Dickie’s such a goddess. She served a raw ahi amuse-bouche without putting out fish knives.” He was a name-dropper — Jackie this, Gloria that — but a reliable friend to Mrs. Everest, and like her, a gossip.

Tony fed her stories. She was in general not a listener, except to malicious tattle, and then she was all ears, smiling in anticipation, her mouth half open like a dog awaiting a treat. It might be something simple. The Callanders, for example. Biff had been in the State Department, and Mrs. Everest liked to say, “He was in the CIA.” She said this with an admiring whisper when they’d been on speaking terms, and when she rejected him she said it as blame, revealing his disgrace — the spy as sneak — taking away his power by stating the fact: I know his secret.

But Tony had a better piece of gossip. Biff’s wife was Peruvian. At one of the dinner parties Tony was seated next to Lara, being charming, asking all the right questions, mentioning how he had gone to Cuzco and loved Machu Picchu, letting Lara talk, refilling her glass, smiling, probably a bit of “Jackie once told me…” and the question he asked all couples, pure hostility masked as genial inquiry, “You must tell me how you met.” That had to have come up, because afterward he had a present for Mrs. Everest: “Guess who was a flight attendant before she married James Bond?”

Another of Mrs. Everest’s boys was Sanford — Sandy — whom no one liked. Even Tony was afraid, always steering clear of him, and he warned me to be careful of Sandy.

Sandy was small like Mrs. Everest, very thin, rather vain in his choice of shoes (“I have hundreds of pairs”), stylish in his clothes — expensive black suit with black T-shirt — and his skin was a strange color, possibly the result of a tanning salon that over the years had turned him a shade of purple, or maybe he had poor kidney function.

He had a hostile habit of starting sentences, “Don’t take this the wrong way,” and then following it with something insulting. In his talk he was much noisier than Tony, and he won the gossip competition. If Tony knew a mild scandal about someone, Sandy knew a disgrace. This disposed Mrs. Everest to Sandy, who was in his sixties but had the look — skinny, pouting, bug-eyed, small — of a bad boy. When I saw him with Mrs. Everest, he put me in mind of Iago, his purply face twisted in telling a story, his hands contorted and shielding his features like a mask of claws. I thought of the expression “motiveless malignancy.” I did a sketch of Sandy, which I titled I Am Not the Man I Am.

Perhaps there was a motive, and it might have been Iago’s motive too. Mrs. Everest was Sandy’s only source of income. He was no better at his installations (hand-fired bricks) than anyone else she exhibited, but he was a far more malevolent gossip, and that was something that delighted Mrs. Everest. Like Tony and some of her other boys, he acted as her formal male companion, her walker. Even so, she was outrageously disloyal. After one party she said, “He was at it all night with that young waiter, dropping hairpins.”

Knowing that Sandy would quote me, I was wary when I spoke to him. I made a point of praising Mrs. Everest’s taste, her hospitality, her humor, her food. I spoke approvingly of Tony, because in those days Tony was in Mrs. Everest’s good graces.

And why was I part of her circle? Perhaps it was my success: other people — important people, Andy Wyeth — cared about my work. And she had something to give, lunches, the dinners, the parties, with us in attendance. We were glad to belong, and then — knowing her better, becoming uncertain, seeing how she cut or dropped people — we were even better behaved.

I said to Izzy, “She’s awful, but that’s not the worst of it. My fear is that to keep her friendship we’ll become just like her.”

Even after all my travels I realized that I’d never known anyone like her. On an impulse, just doodling, I roughed out in pencil a sketch of her, with Tony and Sandy and some of the others, a capriccio of faces. But when I added some emphasis in ink, I got scared and tossed it.