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

by Joy Williams

She gazes glumly out the window at an orchard. She is sick of the cold. She is sick of discussing her “interests.” White fields curve by. Her life is out there somewhere, fleeing from her while she is in the backseat of this stupid car. Her life is never going to be hers. She thinks of it raining, back home in the canyon, rain falling upon rain. Her legs itch and her scalp itches. She has never been so bored. She thinks that the worst thing she has done so far in her life was to lie in a hot bath one night, smoking a cigarette and saying I hate God. That was the very worst thing. It’s pathetic. She bangs her knees irritably against the front seat.

Tom slides across the ice, his hands pushed out, then he holds his hands behind his back, going back and forth in the space where the light is cast. There is no skill without the skates, he knows, and probably no grace without them either, but it is enough to be here under the black sky, cold and light and moving. He wants to be out here. He wants to be out here with Annie. From a window, Molly sees her father on the ice. After a moment, she sees her mother moving toward him, not skating but slipping forward, making her way. She sees their heavy awkward shapes embrace. Molly sees them, already remembering it.

Heather looked across the Dunes’ yard into the one behind her little rented house. Her diaphanous nightie hung on the clothesline, barely moving. Time to go, Heather thought. She sat in her chair, chewing on her sun-blistered lip. Lu-Lu slithered toward them. She placed her spade-like head on Debbie’s knee.

Gloria proceeded to the rear and sat quietly, thinking that every person is on the brink of eternity every moment, that the means of leaving this world are innumerable and often inconceivable. She thought in this manner for a while, then ordered a drink.

The land falling back from the highway was green and still. It seemed to her a slightly lugubrious landscape, obelisks and cemeteries, thick drooping forests, the evergreens dying from the top down.

Her problem was that she had never figured out exactly where she wanted to go to die. Some people knew and planned accordingly. The desert, say, or Nantucket. Or a good hotel somewhere. But she hadn’t figured it out. En route was the closest she’d come.

Aurora leads her to one of the rooms at the rear of the building. The room has a mirror, a sink, a small stool, a white rotating fan and the bed, a long bronze coffin-like apparatus with a lid. Pammy is always startled when she sees the bed with its frosted ultraviolet tubes, its black vinyl headrest. In the next room, someone coughs. Pammy imagines people lying in all the rooms, wrapped in white light, lying quietly as though they were being rested for a long, long journey.

Her lungs are clear. She is not ill but has an illness. The germs are in her body but in a resting state, still alive though rendered powerless. Outwardly, she is the same, but within, a great drama has taken place and Pammy feels herself in possession of a bright, secret and unspeakable knowledge.

When she had been little she bought a quarter of an acre of land in Canada by mail for fifty cents. That was two years ago.

Pammy coughs. She doesn’t want to hear other people’s voices. It is as though they are throwing away junk, the way some people use words, as though one word were as good as another.

Bliss had been born in Florida too. Now he’s a dentist. People think that dentists are acquisitive and don’t care, but Bliss cares.

In New England, Joan discovered that if she slept while it was light she didn’t dream, so she slept in the afternoons and stayed up all night, putting together immense puzzles of Long Island Sound. She lived in terror, actually, but it was rootless, because the worst had already happened. She referred to the days behind her as “those so-called days.”

“White is a distinctively modern color,” Daniel said, finishing his drink. “It takes the curse off things.” “Its neutrality is its charm,” Joan said.

“I never would’ve guessed you were from the South. Do you miss Florida?” “My father always used to call it Floridon’t,” Joan said. This was how it was supposed to be, she thought. Memory and conversation, clarification and semblance, miscalculation and repentance, skim and rest.

They watched the two boys playing catch, the younger one darting from side to side, never looking backward to calculate the space, his eyes only on the softly slowly falling ball released from his brother’s hand. “That’s nice, isn’t it?” Edith said. “That little kid is so trusting it’s kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.”

She liked the town, which was cut off from other places. People came here only if they wanted to. You couldn’t find this place by accident. The town seemed to be a place to visit and most people didn’t stay on. There were some, of course, who had stayed on. May liked the clear light of the town and the trees rounded by the wind. She liked the trucks and the Jeeps with the dogs riding in them. When the trucks were parked, the dogs would stare solemnly down at the pavement as though something there was astounding.

It never grows dark in the desert, the writing said. The night sky is a deep and intense blue as though the sun were shut up behind it. Her child had been a thoughtful tourist once, sending messages home, trying to explain things she would never see. He had never written from the prison. The thirst for explanation had left him. May thought of death. It was as though someone were bending over her, trying to blow something into her mouth.

Tommy liked rope. Sometimes he ate dirt. Lightning storms thrilled him. He was small for his age, a weedy child. He wore blue jeans with deeply rolled cuffs for growth, although he grew slowly. Weeks often went by when he didn’t grow at all.

Walter, Jr., had girlfriends too. For a time, his girl was Audrey, only Audrey. She had thick hair and very white, smooth skin and Tommy thought she was beautiful. Together, he thought, she and his brother were like young gods who made the world after many trials and tests, accomplishing everything only through wonders and self-transformations. In reality, the two were quite an ordinary couple. If anything, Audrey was peculiar looking, even ugly.

The sun would be setting in a mottled sky over the wet woods and the light would linger in a smeared radiance for a while.

“I had a boy tell me once my nipples were like bowls of Wheaties,” Audrey said. “When?” Tommy said. “No.” “That’s a simile. Similes are a crock. There’s no more time for similes. There used to be that kind of time, but no more. You shouldn’t see what you’re seeing thinking it looks like something else. They haven’t left us with much but the things that are left should be seen as they are.”

She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show.

Under the circumstances, it was amazing that Helen thought of suicide at all. It was seriously not cool. You only made a fool of yourself. And the parents of these people were mocked too. They were considered to be suicide-enhancing, evil and weak, and they were ignored and barely tolerated. This was a small town. Helen didn’t want to make life any harder on her mother than it already was.

She shouldn’t try to say anything at night. Words at night were feral things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She did learn, however, that cactus are descended from roses. They were late arrivals, adapters, 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.

“We’re here with those we love because something big is going to happen here, we think,” Irene said. “We want to be here for it. Then we’ll have been here.” “You never know,” Vern said. “Next year at this time, we might all have ridden over the skyline.” “But we’re not ready to ride over the skyline yet,” Irene said, patting his hand.

I find that beliefs about reality affect people’s actions to an enormous degree, don’t you? Have you read Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls?”

But when I finished with something it looked alive. You could almost hear it breathe. But of course it wasn’t breathing. Ha! It was best when I was working on it, that’s when it really existed, but when I stopped…uhhh,” he said. “I’ve done as much as I can. I’ve reached my oubliette. Do you know what I’m saying?”

He spoke again, patiently, as if she had utterly misunderstood his situation and the seriousness of his request. His guilt was almost holy, he was on a holy quest. He had determined that this was what must be done, the only thing that remained possible now to do.

“Elliot wasn’t in his right mind,” Betsy said. “We keep forgetting that. He wasn’t thinking clearly. If you’re thinking clearly, you don’t take your own life.” Again, Louise marveled at her friend’s way of phrasing things. To take your own life was to take control of it, to take possession of it, to give it a shape by occupying it. But Elliot’s life still had no shape, even though it had been completed. “I

“I don’t know what that policeman was talking about,” Richard said. “He was trying to express something spiritual.” “Don’t you get tired of that out here? Everything’s sacred and mysterious and for the initiated only. Even the cops are after illumination. It wears me out, to be quite honest.”

Pauline prefers to be in control of our life and our friendships. She’s a handsome woman, canny and direct, never unreasonable. I suppose some might find her cold but I am in thrall to her because I had almost been crushed by life.

Every year brings the summertime tragedy of schools of whales grounding on the shore. It’s their fidelity to one another that dooms them, as well as their memories of earlier safe passage. They return to a once navigable inlet and find it a deadly maze of unfamiliar shoals. The sound of their voices—the clicks and cries quite audible to their would-be rescuers—is heartbreaking, apparently.

The pilot whales hadn’t wished to kill themselves, of course. But one was in distress, the one first to realize the gravity of the situation, the dangerous imminence of an unendurable stranding, and the others were caught up in the same incomprehension. In the end they had no choice but to go where the dying one was going.

Dusk arrived. A dead-bolt gold. Francine maintained an offended silence as vermilion clouds streamed westward and vanished, never again to be seen by human eyes.

“OK, you go on inside,” Dennis said. “Close the blinds. Put on this music I’m going to give you. Put this in your tape player. Take whatever’s in there and throw it away. You’ll never care for it again.” He unbuttoned the pocket of his denim shirt and removed a plastic baggie containing a tape. “It’s Darla playing the piano. It was in the lodge at the dude ranch right where Galore is, as I’ve told you. We didn’t have a piano in St. Louis. This is pure Darla. She was so talented! When you hear this you’ll recognize everything for the first time.” “Music can’t do that.” “It can’t?” He pressed the tape into her hand. “Since when?”

My point is that Dante’s imagination was primarily visual. In his time people didn’t dream, they had visions. And these visions had meaning. We only have dreams and dreams are haphazard and undisciplined, the meager vestige of a once great method of immediate knowing.” She gnawed on her fingers again. “You see visions today and you’re considered abnormal, uncouth.”

Deke’s hair was still wet, but already scurf was bedecking his thin shoulders like fresh snow.

The painting had been in a roadhouse she once frequented. Sitting and drinking, pretty much alone in that unpopular place, she would watch the painting with all her heart. Slowly her heavy heart would turn light and she would feel it pulling away as though it wasn’t responsible for her anymore, freeing her to slip beneath the glittering skein of water into the lovely clear beaver world of woven light, where everything was wild and orderly and real. A radiant inhuman world of speechless grace. This was where she spent her time when she could. These were delicate moments, however, and further weak cocktails never prolonged them. Further cocktails, actually, no matter how responsibly weak, only propelled her to the infelicitous surface again.

It seems very difficult to describe a new baby. Jones has seen quite a few new babies in his years of serving a congregation and he has held them and gazed into their eyes. These experiences, however, cannot help him picture this child, his only grandchild, this harmonious and sweet thought that he carries green and graceful in his mind.

The poems have been translated but the essays have not. He takes out his German grammar and begins to search for the phrase that came to him so magically earlier in the evening. Jones enjoys the feel of the grammar. He enjoys the words of another language. He needs another language, other words. He is so weary of the words he has. He enjoys the search. Is not everything the search?

The one story she told concerned her hair. She had lovely hair as a child as well and had worn it in a long braid. She had cut it off one morning and given it to a man she had a crush on, a married man, a post office employee or some such thing. It had not been returned and the man had moved away. The girls loved that story. It was so droll it was practically retarded.

It seemed he had known more about everything before his father’s death, which had just been six days before, and now he would know less and less.

I had been drinking Manhattans all afternoon for reasons that remain obscure and when returning home had driven off the road into the city’s largest cemetery, demolishing seven headstones before my old Suburban stopped. If one of those girls had a friend or family member whose marker had been so desecrated, God himself wouldn’t be willing to help me.

He had taken the boat from the mainland when he was still a young man and stayed on. He remembered the first night being the hardest, as they say the first night of being dead must be. But he was not newly dead, he was entering for the first time what would become his life.

In the southern dusk, the dark grew out of the sky like a hoof of mud dissolving in a clear pool. But on the island, dusk seemed to grow out of nothing at all. Dusk and night being a figment of fog, an exhaustion of wave, the time when blackness sank into the town as if buildings and trees were a pit to be filled.