Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Online Free PDF

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 repeatedly; 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 thatthought 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