The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joy Williams

Jones, the preacher, has been in love all his life. He is baffled by this because as far as he can see, it has never helped anyone, even when they have acknowledged it, which is not often.

She is going to Mexico, where soon, in the mountains, she will have a nervous breakdown. Jones does not know this, but his daughter has seen it in the stars and is going out to meet it.

He wants to apologize but does not know for what. His life has been devoted to apologetics. It is his profession. He is concerned with both justification and remorse. He has always acted rightly, but nothing has ever come of it.

The music is Bruckner’s Te Deum. Very nice. Dedicated to God. He plays the other side. A woman, Kathleen Ferrier, is singing in German. The music stuns him. Kindertotenlieder. He makes no attempt to seek the words’ translation. The music is enough.

This is the day he baptizes the baby. He has made arrangements with one of the ladies to hold her and bring her up to the font at the end of the first hymn. The baby looks charming in a lacy white dress. Jones has combed her fine hair carefully, slicking it in a curl with water, but now it has dried and sticks up awkwardly like the crest of a kingfisher.

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly. Jones adores the baby. He sniffs her warm head. Her birth is a deep error, an abstraction. Born in wedlock but out of love.

Sometimes the child travels with them. She sits beside them, pretending to do something gruesome to her eyes. She pretends to dig out her eyes. The girl ignores this. The child is tanned and sturdy and affectionate although sometimes, when she is being kissed, she goes limp and even cold, as though she has suddenly, foolishly died.

The man turns his head toward her for a moment. “I love you,” she says. “Ditto,” he says loudly, above the clatter of the airboats. “Double-ditto.” She begins to giggle. Then she sobs. She has not cried for many months. Everyone is astounded. The man drives a few more miles and then pulls into a gas station. The girl feels desperate about this man. She would do the unspeakable for him, the unforgivable, anything. She is lost but not in him. She wants herself lost and never found, in him.

Ben came in the kitchen door, chewing gum. Since his heart attack, he had given up smoking and chewed a great deal of gum. He was tanned and smiling, but he moved a little oddly, as though he were carrying something awkward. Constance got a little rush every time she saw Ben.

“Are you in love with Steven,” Constance asked. Aster shrugged. Constance thought about this. Perhaps love was neither the goal nor the answer. Constance loved Ben and what good did that do him? He had just almost died from her absorption in him. Perhaps understanding was more important than Love, and perhaps the highest form of understanding was the understanding of oneself, one’s motives and desires and capabilities. Constance thought about this but the idea didn’t appeal to her much. She dismissed it.

Bronwyn took Charlotte and Jill out to collect money to save marine mammals. They stood on the street and collected over thirty dollars in a Brim coffee can. “Our salvation lies in learning to communicate with alien intelligences,” Bronwyn said. Constance wrote a check.

Jackson tends bar until long after midnight. Sometimes he steals a bottle of blended whiskey and brings it home with him. He wears saddle shoes and a wedding ring. His clothes are poor but he has well-shaped hands and nails. Jane is usually asleep when Jackson gets in bed beside her. He goes at her without turning on the light. “I don’t want to wake you up,” he says.

The house is always a mess. It is not swept. There are crumbs and broken toys beneath all the furniture. There are cereal bowls everywhere, crusty with soured milk. There is hair everywhere. The dog sheds. It is a collie, three years older than David. It is Jane’s dog. She brought him with her into this marriage, along with her Mexican bowls and something blue.

She is waiting for Jackson to become an architect. His theories of building are realistic but his quest is oneiric, he tells her. He sometimes talks about “sites.”

Jane and Jackson lie in bed. “I love Sundays,” Jane says. Jackson wears a T-shirt. Jane slips her hand beneath it and strokes his chest. She is waiting. She sometimes fears that she is waiting for the waiting to end, fears that she seeks and requires only that recognition and none other. Jackson holds her without opening his eyes.

The dog walks slowly back to the kitchen, swinging his high foolish hips.

Elizabeth’s child reminded Sam of Hester’s little Pearl even though he knew that her father, far from being the “Prince of the Air,” was a tax accountant.

The battle is always between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, is it not? Imagination is not what it’s cracked up to be. Sam decided to forget the petty, bourgeois rite of eating food out of another’s orifices for a while. He decided to just love Elizabeth instead.

Sam’s wife grew depressed. She lay in bed for most of the day. She pretended she was dying. She wanted Sam to make love to her and pretend that she was dying. She wanted a baby. She was all mixed up. Sam suggested that it was the ions in the Mexican air that made her depressed. He kept loving her but it became more and more difficult for them both. She continued to retreat into a landscape of chaos and warring feelings.

The yard boy worked for several very wealthy people. In the morning of every day he got into his pickup and drove over the causeways to the Keys, where he mowed and clipped and cut and hauled. He talked to the plants. He always told them what he was going to do before he did it so they would have a chance to prepare themselves. Plants have lived in the Now for a long time but they still have to have some things explained to them.

Tao is standing between the yard boy and Mrs. Wilson with an oleander flower in his mouth. It is pink. Tao’s hair is golden. His eyes are blue. The yard boy removes the flower from the little boy’s mouth. “Poisonous,” the yard boy says. “What is it!” Mrs. Wilson cries. “Oleander,” the yard boy says. “Cut it down, dig it out, get rid of it,” Mrs. Wilson cries. “My precious child!” She imagines Tao being kidnapped, held for an astronomical ransom by men with acne.

The yard boy is mowing the grass around Johnny Dakota’s swimming pool. Dakota is into heroin and intangible property. As he is working, the yard boy hears a big splash behind him. He looks into the swimming pool and sees a rock on the bottom of it. He finishes mowing the grass and then he gets a net and fishes the rock out. It is as big as his hand and gray, with bubbly streaks of iron and metal running through it. The yard boy thinks it is a meteorite. It would probably still be smoldering with heat had it not landed in the swimming pool.

Once his mother had dreamed of losing a tooth and two days later her cousin dropped dead.

A moment passes. The message of retribution is received along the heated air.

Three days before the shepherd had drowned, Chester had asked the girl to marry him. They had known each other almost a year. “Let’s get married,” he said. They had taken a Quaalude and gone to bed. That had been three weeks and three days ago. They were going to be married in four days. Time is breath, the girl thought.

The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, “Do you love me?” he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight.

The girl wished the moment were still to come, that she were there, then, waiting, her empty arms outstretched, saying, “Do you love me?” Dogs hear sounds that we cannot, thought the girl. Dogs hear callings.

When she reached her own house, she went into the bedroom and lay down there. There was a yawning silence all around her, like an enormous hole. Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.

Dan’s mother wanted to hear from her twice weekly throughout the summer. She had married a man named Jake, who was a carpenter. Jake had already built Dan several bookcases. This seemed to be the extent of what he knew how to do for her.

Dan could still be impressed by adults. Their mysterious, unreliable images still had the power to attract and confound her, but Jane was clearly not interested in the young man. She demanded much of life. She had very high standards when she wanted to. Mr. Muirhead ordered the girls ginger ales and the young man and himself another round of drinks. Sometimes the train mysteriously would stop and even reverse, so they would pass unfamiliar scenes once more. The same green pasture filled with slanty light, the same row of clapboard houses, each with the shades of their windows drawn against the heat, the same boats on their trailers, waiting on dry land.

Dan felt like bawling. She could feel the backs of her eyes swelling up like cupcakes. She was surrounded by strangers saying crazy things. Even her own mother often said crazy things in a reasonable way that made Dan know she was a stranger too.

“I know you don’t know what a pheromone is, Crystal. To put it grossly, a pheromone is a smell that a person has that can make another person do or feel a certain thing. It’s an irresistible signal.” Dan thought of mangrove roots and orange groves. Of the smell of gas when the pilot light blew out on Jane’s grandmother’s stove. She liked the smell of the Atlantic Ocean when it dried upon your skin and the smell of Jim Anderson’s fur when he had been rained upon. There were smells that could make you follow them, certainly.

She is propelled by sidereal energies. Loving, for her, will not be a free choosing of her destiny. It will be the discovery of the most fateful part of herself.

The cold didn’t invent anything like the summer has a habit of doing and it didn’t disclose anything like the spring. It lay powerfully encamped—waiting, altering one’s ambitions, encouraging ends. The cold made for an ache, a restlessness and an irritation, and thinking that fell in odd and unemployable directions.

Judy Cushman and Julep Lee felt that loving him was a success in itself.

On the court she played extravagantly, her hard white head cresting above the others crowded beneath the board, her bony elbows shocking the girls in the ribs. Her nostrils filled with dust and the tapping heat of the radiators. Julep’s team was far ahead. The cords of the net creaked as the ball floated through. Basketball was serious business and Julep felt no levity. Life was what you figured out for yourself.

Magazines told her terrible things and she believed in most of them.

Everyone spoke about the end of summer as though it were a bewildering and unnatural event.

Over the years, Sarah suspects, Tommy has floated to the surface of her. They are swimmers now, far apart on the top of the sea.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance. And how one witnesses things when drunk is different as well. It is like putting a face mask against the surface of the sea and looking into things, into their baffled and guileless hearts.

Genevieve continued to sit and talk. Sarah found herself concentrating desperately on her articulate, one-sided conversation. She suspected that the words Genevieve was using were codes for other words, terrible words. Genevieve spoke thoughtlessly, dispassionately, with erratic flourishes of language. Sarah couldn’t believe that they were chatting about food, men, the red clouds massed above the sea.

Her life seemed so remote to her. She had sought happiness in someone, knowing she could not find it in herself, and now her heart was strangely hard.

I had a dream about the car. My mother and I were alone together as we always were, linked in our hopeless and uncomprehending love of each other, and we were driving to a house.

She stood up and came around the table and kissed me. She smelled then like the glass that was always in the sink in the morning, and the smell reminds me still of daring and deception, hopes and little lies.

My mother spoke about happiness. She told me that the happiness that comes out of nowhere, out of nothing, is the very best kind.

My mother had not yet returned when the performance began again. She was having a little drink, I knew, and she was where she went when she drank without me, somewhere in herself. It was not the place where words could take you but another place even.

The Aquarium was where a baby seal had been put to sleep because he was born too ugly to be viewed by children. He had not been considered viewable so off he went.

She thought about the Thunderbird most often at night when she was in bed lying beside Dwight and then she would marvel at its silent, unseen presence in the room beside them, taking up space, so strange and shining and full of rot.

Colored slides are flashed on a screen showing children earnestly learning and growing and caring through the seasons. These things have been captured.

Tom and Annie and Molly sit around a small table in their motel room. Snow accumulates beyond the room’s walls. They are nowhere. The brochure that the school sent them states that the school is located thirty-five miles from Boston. Nowhere! They are all exhausted and merely sit there regarding their beverages.