Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  CONGRESS

  MIRIAM WAS LIVING with a man named Jack Dewayne who taught a course in forensic anthropology at the state’s university. It was the only program in the country that offered a certificate in forensic anthropology, as far as anyone knew, and his students adored him. They called themselves Deweenies and wore skull-and-crossbones T-shirts to class. People were mad for Jack in this town. Once, in a grocery store, when Miriam stood gazing into a bin of little limes, a woman came up to her and said, “Your Jack is a wonderful, wonderful man.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Miriam said.

  “My son Ricky disappeared four years ago and some skeletal remains were found at the beginning of this year. Scattered, broken, lots of bones missing, not much to go on, a real jumble. The officials told me they probably weren’t Ricky’s but your Jack told me they were, and with compassion he showed me how he reached that conclusion.” The woman waited. In her cart was a big bag of birdseed and a bottle of vodka. “If it weren’t for Jack, my Ricky’s body would probably be unnamed still,” she said.

  “Well, thank you very much,” Miriam said.

  She never knew what to say to Jack’s fans. As for them, they didn’t understand Miriam at all. Why her of all people? With his hunger for life, Jack could have chosen better, they felt. Miriam lacked charm, they felt. She was gloomy. Even Jack found her gloomy occasionally.

  Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack’s roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why he particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack’s alley, all right.

  “Here’s something for you, Jack,” Miriam said. “You’ll appreciate this. Beckett described tears as ‘liquefied brain.’”

  “God, Miriam,” Jack said. “Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it’s a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone!”

  Then the phone would ring and Jack would begin his daily business of reconstructing the previous lives of hair and teeth when they had been possessed by someone. A detective a thousand miles away would send him a box of pitted bones and within days Jack would be saying, “This is a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who didn’t do drugs and who was tall, healthy and trusting. Too trusting, clearly.”

  Or a hand would be found in the stomach of a shark hauled up by a party boat off the Gulf coast of Florida and Jack would be flown off to examine it. He would return deeply tanned and refreshed, with a crisp new haircut, saying, “The shark was most certainly attracted to the rings on this hand. This is a teen’s hand. She was small, perhaps even a legal midget, and well nourished. She was a loner, adventurous, not well educated and probably unemployed. Odds are the rings were stolen. She would certainly have done herself a favor by passing up the temptation of those rings.”

  Miriam hated it when Jack was judgmental and Jack was judgmental a great deal. She herself stole on occasion, mostly sheets. For some reason, it was easy to steal sheets. As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.

  Jack had no idea that Miriam stole sheets and more. He liked Miriam. He liked her bones. She had fine bones and he loved tracing them at night beneath her warm, smooth skin, her jawbone, collarbone, pelvic bone. It wasn’t anything that consumed him, but he just liked her was all, usually. And he liked his work. He liked wrapping things up and dealing with those whom the missing had left behind. He was neither doctor nor priest; he was the forensic anthropologist, and he alone could give these people peace. They wanted to know, they had to know. Was that tibia in the swamp Denny’s? Denny, we long to claim you … Were those little bits and pieces they got when they dragged the lake Lucile’s even though she was supposed to be in Manhattan? She had told us she was going to be in Manhattan, there was never any talk about a lake … Bill had gone on a day hike years ago with his little white dog and now something had been found, found in a ravine at last… Pookie had toddled away from the Airstream on the Fourth of July just as we were setting up the grill, she would be so much older now, a little girl instead of a baby, and it would be so good just to know, if we could only know …

  And Jack would give them his gift. He could give them the incontrovertible and almost unspeakable news. That’s her, that’s them. No need to worry anymore, it is finished, you are free. No one could help these people who were weary of waiting and sick of hope like Jack could.

  Miriam had a fondness for people who vanished, though she had never known any personally. But if she had a loved one who vanished, she would prefer to believe that they had fallen in love with distance, a great distance. She certainly wouldn’t long to be told they were dead.

  One day, one of Jack’s students, an ardent hunter, a gangly blue-eyed boy named Carl who wore camouflage pants and a black shirt winter and summer, presented him with four cured deer feet. “I thought you’d like to make a lamp,” Carl said.

  Miriam was in the garden. She had taken to stealing distressed plants from nurseries and people’s yards and planting them in an unused corner of the lot, far from Jack’s roses. They remained distressed, however—in shock, she felt.

  “It would make a nice lamp,” Carl said. “You can make all kinds of things. With a big buck’s forelegs you can make an outdoor thermometer. Looks good with snowflakes on it.”

  “A lamp,” Jack said. He appeared delighted. Jack got along well with his students. He didn’t sleep with the girls and he treated the boys as equals. He put his hands around the tops of the deer feet and splayed them out some.

  “You might want to fiddle around with the height,” Carl said. “You can make great stuff with antlers, too. Chandeliers, candelabras. You can use antlers to frame just about anything.”

  “We have lamps,” Miriam said. She was holding a wan perennial she had liberated from a supermarket.

  “Gosh, this appeals to me, though, Miriam.”

  “I bet you’d be good at this sort of thing, sir,” Carl said. “I did one once and it was very relaxing.” He glanced at Miriam, squeezed his eyes almost shut and smiled.

  “It will be a novelty item, all right,” Jack said. “I think it will be fun.”

  “Maybe you’d like to go hunting sometime with me, sir,” Carl said. “We could go bowhunting for mulies together.”

  “You should resist the urge to do this, Jack, really,” Miriam said. The thought of a lamp made of animal legs in her life and turned on caused a violent feeling of panic within her.

  But Jack wanted to make a lamp. He needed another hobby, he argued. Hobbies were healthy, and he might even take Carl up on his bowhunting offer. Why didn’t she get herself a hobby like baking or watching football, he suggested. He finished the lamp in a weekend and set it on an antique jelly cabinet in the sunroom. He’d had a little trouble trimming the legs to the same height. They might not have ended up being exactly the same height. Miriam, expecting to be repulsed by the thing, was enthralled instead. It had a dark blue shade and a gold-colored cord and a sixty-watt bulb. A brighter bulb would be pushing it, Jack said. Miriam could not resist the allure of the little lamp. She often found herself sitting beside it, staring at it, the harsh brown hairs, the dainty pasterns, the polished black hooves, all fastened together with a brass gimp band in a space the size of a dinner plate. It was anarchy, the little lamp, its legs snugly bunched. It was whirl, it was hole, it was the first far drums. She sometimes worried that she would begin talking to it. This happened to some people, she knew, they felt they had to talk. She read that Luther Burbank spoke to cactus reassuringly when he wanted to create a spineless variety and that they stabbed him repeat
edly; he had to pull thousands of spines from his hands but didn’t care. He continued to speak calmly and patiently; he never got mad, he persisted.

  “Miriam,” Jack said, “that is not meant to be a reading light. It’s an accent light. You’re going to ruin your eyes.”

  Miriam had once channeled her considerable imagination into sex, which Jack had long appreciated, but now it spilled everywhere and lay lightly on everything like water on a lake. It alarmed him a little. Perhaps, during semester break, they should take a trip together. To witness something strange with each other might be just the ticket. At the same time, he felt unaccountably nervous about traveling with Miriam.

  The days were radiant but it was almost fall and a daytime coolness reached out and touched everything. Miriam’s restlessness was gone. It was Jack who was restless.

  “I’m going to take up bowhunting, Miriam,” he said. “Carl seems to think I’d be a natural at it.”

  Miriam did not object to this as she might once have. Nevertheless, she could not keep herself from waiting anxiously beside the lamp for Jack’s return from his excursions with Carl. She was in a peculiar sort of readiness, and not for anything in particular, either. For weeks Jack went hunting, and for weeks he did not mind that he did not return with a former animal.

  “It’s the expectation and the challenge. That’s what counts,” he said. He and Carl would stand in the kitchen sharing a little whiskey. Carl’s skin was clean as a baby’s and he smelled cleanly if somewhat aberrantly of cold cream and celery. “The season’s young, sir,” he said.

  But eventually Jack’s lack of success began to vex him. Miriam and the lamp continued to wait solemnly for his empty-handed return. He grew irritable. Sometimes he would forget to wash off his camouflage paint, and he slept poorly. Then, late one afternoon when Jack was out in the woods, he fell asleep in his stand and toppled out of a tree, critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passed through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe. A large portion of his brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent’s coat. A month later, he could walk with difficulty and move one arm. He had some vision out of his remaining eye and he could hear but not speak. He emerged from rehab with a face expressionless as a frosted cake. He was something that had suffered a premature burial, something accounted for but not present. Miriam was certain that he was aware of the morbid irony in this.

  The lamp was a great comfort to Miriam in the weeks following the accident. Carl was of less comfort. Whenever she saw him in the hospital’s halls, he was wailing and grinding his teeth. But the crooked, dainty deer-foot lamp was calm. They spent most nights together quietly reading. The lamp had eclectic reading tastes. It would cast its light on anything, actually. It liked the stories of Poe. The night before Jack was to return home, they read a little book in which animals offered their prayers to God—the mouse, the bear, the turtle and so on—and this is perhaps where the lamp and Miriam had their first disagreement. Miriam liked the little verses. But the lamp felt that though the author clearly meant well, the prayers were cloying and confused thought with existence. The lamp had witnessed a smattering of Kierkegaard and felt strongly that thought should never be confused with existence. Being in such a condition of peculiar and altered existence itself, the lamp felt some things unequivocally. Miriam often wanted to think about that other life, when the parts knew the whole, when the legs ran and rested and moved through woods washed by flowers, but the lamp did not want to reflect upon those times.

  Jack came back and Carl moved in with them. He had sold everything he owned except his big Chevy truck and wanted only to nurse Jack for the rest of his life. Jack’s good eye often teared, and he indicated both discomfort and agreement with a whistling hiss. Even so, he didn’t seem all that glad to see Miriam. As for herself, she felt that she had driven to a grave and gotten out of the car but left the engine running. Carl slept for a time in Jack’s study, but one night when Miriam couldn’t sleep and was sitting in the living room with the lamp, she saw him go into their room and shut the door. And that became the arrangement. Carl stayed with Jack day and night.

  One of the first things Carl wanted to do was to take a trip. He believed that the doleful visits from the other students tired Jack and that the familiar house and grounds didn’t stimulate him properly. Miriam didn’t think highly of Carl’s ideas but this one didn’t seem too bad. She was ready to leave. After all, Jack had already left in his fashion and it seemed pointless to stay in his house. They all three would sit together in the big roomy cab on the wide cherry-red custom seat of Carl’s truck and tour the Southwest. The only thing she didn’t like was that the lamp would have to travel in the back with the luggage.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to it,” Carl said. “Look at dogs. Dogs ride around in the backs of trucks all the time. They love it.”

  “Thousands of dogs die each year from being pitched out of the backs of pickups,” Miriam said.

  Jack remained in the room with them while they debated the statistical probability of this. He was gaunt and his head was scarred, and he tended to resemble, if left to his own devices, a large white appliance. But Carl was always buying him things and making small alterations to his appearance. This day he was wearing pressed khakis, a crisp madras shirt, big black glasses and a black Stetson hat. Carl was young and guilty and crazy in love. He patted Jack’s wrists as he talked, not wanting to upset him.

  Finally, continuing to assert that he had never heard of a dog falling out of a pickup truck, Carl agreed to buy a camper shell and enclose the back. He packed two small bags for himself and Jack while Miriam got a cardboard carton and arranged her clothes around the lamp. Her plan was to unplug whatever lamp was in whatever motel room they stayed in and plug in the deer-foot lamp. Clearly, this would be the high point of each day for it.

  They took to the road that night and didn’t stop driving until daylight disclosed that the landscape had changed considerably. There was a great deal of broken glass and huge cactus everywhere. Organ-pipe, saguaro, barrel cactus and prickly pear. Strange and stern shapes, far stiller than trees, less friendly and willing to serve. They seemed to be waiting for further transition, another awesome shift of the earth’s plates, an enormous occurrence. The sun bathed each spine, it sharpened the smashed bottles and threw itself through the large delicate ears of car-crushed jackrabbits. They saw few people and no animals except dead ones. The land was vast and still and there seemed to be considerable resentment toward the nonhuman creatures who struggled to inhabit it. Dead coyotes and hawks were nailed to fence posts and the road was hammered with the remains of lizards and snakes. Miriam was glad that the lamp was covered and did not have to suffer these sights.

  The first night they stopped at a motel, with a Chinese restaurant and lounge adjoining. Miriam ordered moo goo gai pan for dinner, something she had not had since she was a child, and an orange soda. Carl fed Jack some select tidbits from an appetizer platter with a pair of chopsticks. After they ate Miriam wandered into the lounge, but there was only a cat vigorously cleaning itself who stared at her with its legs splayed over its head. She picked up a couple of worn paperback books from the exchange table in the office and went back to her room. Through the walls she could hear Carl singing to Jack as he ran the bathwater. He would shampoo Jack’s hair, scrub his nails and talk about the future … Miriam turned on the lamp and examined one of the books. It concerned desert plants but many of the pages were missing and someone had spilled wine on the pictures. She did learn, however, that cactus are descended from roses. They were late arrivals, adaptors, part of a new climate. She felt like that, felt very much a late arrival, it was her personality. She had adapted readily to being in love, and then adapted to not being in love anymore. And the new climate was, well, this situation. She put the book about cactus down.

  The other book was about hunting zebras in Africa. I shot him right up his big fat fanny, the writer wrote. She had read t
his before she knew what she was doing and felt terrible about it, but the lamp held steady until she finally turned it off and got into bed.

  The next day they drove. They stopped at hot springs and ghost towns. They stopped on an Indian reservation and Carl bought Jack colored sand in a bottle. They stopped at a Dairy Queen and Miriam drove while Carl spooned blueberry blizzard into Jack’s mouth. They admired the desert, the peculiar growths, the odd pale colors. They passed through a canyon of large, solitary boulders. There was a sign threatening fine and imprisonment for defacing the rocks but the boulders were covered with paint, spelling out people’s names, mostly. The shapes of the rocks resembled nothing but the words made them look like toilet doors in a truck stop. On the other side of the canyon was a small town with two museums, a brick hotel, a gas station and a large bar called the Horny Toad. Miriam had the feeling that the truck’s engine had stopped running.

  “Truck’s stopped,” Carl said.

  They coasted to the side of the road and Carl fiddled with the ignition.

  “Alternator’s shot, I bet,” he said. He took Jack’s sunglasses off, wiped them with a handkerchief and carefully hooked them back over Jack’s ears. He was thinking, Miriam thought. Underneath her elbow, the metal of the door was heating up.

  “You check into the motel,” Carl directed her. “Jack and I will walk down to the garage. He likes garages.”

  Carl helped Miriam get their luggage from the back and carried it into the hotel’s lobby. She arranged for two unadjoining rooms. They were the last rooms left, even though the hotel and town appeared deserted. The museums were closed and everyone was at the bar, the manager told her. One of the museums displayed only a petrified wedding cake, a petrified cat, some rocks and old clothes. It was typical and not worth going into, the manager confided. But people came from far and wide to see the other museum and speak to the taxidermist on duty. He was surprised that they had come here without having the museum as their destination. The taxidermist was a genius. He couldn’t make an animal look dead if he wanted to.