Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 ofJuly 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.