Read Online The Distinguished Guest by Sue Miller - Free Book Online Page B

stopped at their table and was introduced, holding a plate of food
heaped so high Lily wondered he wasn’t embarrassed to admit such hunger (he was always hungry, she discovered later), she saw that he had thick pale eyebrows and lashes. That with his keen
gray eyes, his sloping jaw and long nose, he looked, in fact, like a wolf. And hungry indeed! His eyes ate her, and it was she who looked away.
    This picture arrives as news to Lily; it shakes her. She is flooded, suddenly too, with the memory of her youthful self—she would have been twenty-five at this point—of her
unquestioning love for Paul. He asked . . . no, he didn’t even need to ask! She sensed what he wanted and stepped forward in anticipatory offering.
    Lily’s face, though she doesn’t know it, is a mournful mask.
    And then it shifts, just slightly.
She will not
. She shakes her head.
This cannot
.
No
. (There is no need for her to think this thought through, but she feels a kind of door
willed shut inside her, and then the welcome sense that she is safe again, that she need not consider any longer the feelings which threatened.)
    She snorts and reaches for another small spoonful of the cereal.
    Lily will take all morning to eat the cereal. This is what it’s come to. Parkinson’s. Worst so far in her face, which is frozen in blank, childish expectancy; and in her throat, so
that swallowing is a slow, consciously controlled activity. She has been taking the evening meal with Gaby and Alan, but she eats almost nothing, preferring to wait until she’s alone again to
struggle with solid food (though Gaby, seeing how little Lily manages to get down even then, has recently begun to put her dinner into the blender before she brings it in to Lily). She can drink
more easily, and she does, and several times has wound up a little tipsy by the end of the meal. When Alan expressed concern the night before, she said, “It’s all calories, dear
boy.”
    Of course, Lily reminds herself ruefully, she is like a child. It’s worth remembering that. Not reduced to diapers yet, but it will come, if she allows it to. The gloppy food has, the
purées of what the grown-ups had for dinner. The baby-sitter to make sure she gets to the toilet when she needs to, to help her dress and fix her meals.
    She likes Noreen, she reminds herself. She has spent herself lavishly, actually, considering her diminished energy, charming Noreen, because she would find the merest hint of distaste for
herself on Noreen’s part unbearable. And it has worked, to a degree. Noreen believes herself to be caring for a distinguished guest, a famous author, a
personage
, and Lily has subtly
encouraged this.
    Though she saw that Noreen was peeved when she mentioned her guest for tea today.
    Guests are Lily’s vice, the only one now but drink left to her. Writing was a vice, but in the last year, Lily has had trouble indulging it at all anymore. Guests are the residue of that
life. She wouldn’t have them if she hadn’t done the writing, and now she finds life unimaginable without them.
    The possibility of feeding in this way on their attention was revealed to her so slowly that she didn’t initially appreciate what it might mean. At first there were just a few letters,
people wanting to know if they could meet her, have a drink or coffee, or lunch; do an interview for this literary magazine or that newspaper. Lily always said yes; and slowly she discovered that
the encounters animated her, renewed her. She felt she was uncovering a version of herself—strong, opinionated—that she hadn’t fully understood before. She was playful. She
invented things sometimes. Or changed them. Distorted them.
    Then the Parkinson’s started and it gradually grew harder for her to write. In fact, the last two stories Lily has published were written years earlier. She revised them a little before
she sent them off, and pretended to everyone that they were her latest productions. Privately she knew