The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  The girl touches her lover’s face. She runs her fingers across the bones. “Of course I love you,” he says. “I want us to have a life together.” She is so restless. She moves her hand across his mouth. There is something she doesn’t understand, something she doesn’t know how to do. She makes them a drink. She asks for a piece of gum. He hands her a small crumpled stick, still in the wrapper. She is sure that it is not the real thing. The Answer Man has said that Lewis Carroll once invented a substitute for gum. She fears that is what this is. She doesn’t want this! She swallows it without chewing. “Please,” she says. “Please what?” the man replies, a bit impatiently.

  Her former husband calls her up. It is autumn and the heat is unusually oppressive. He wants to see the child. He wants to take her away for a week to his lakeside house in the middle of the state. The girl agrees to this. He arrives at the apartment and picks up the child and nuzzles her. He is a little heavier than before. He makes a little more money. He has a different watch, wallet and key ring. “What are you doing these days?” the child’s father asks. “I am in love,” she says.

  The man does not visit the girl for a week. She doesn’t leave the apartment. She loses four pounds. She and the child make Jell-O and they eat it for days. The girl remembers that after the baby was born, the only food the hospital gave her was Jell-O. She thinks of all the water boiling in hospitals everywhere for new mothers’ Jell-O. The girl sits on the floor and plays endlessly with the child. The child is bored. She dresses and undresses herself. She goes through everything in her small bureau drawer and tries everything on. The girl thinks about the man constantly but without much exactitude. She does not even have a photograph of him! She looks through old magazines. He must resemble someone! Sometimes, late at night, when she thinks he might come to her, she feels that the Answer Man arrives instead. He is like a moving light, never still. He has the high temperature and metabolism of a bird. On Action Line, someone is saying, “And I live by the airport, what is this that hits my house, that showers my roof on takeoff? We can hear it. What is this, I demand to know! My lawn is healthy, my television reception is fine but something is going on without my consent and I am not well, my wife’s had a stroke and someone stole my stamp collection and took the orchids off my trees.” The girl sips her bourbon and shakes her head. The greediness and wickedness of people, she thinks, their rudeness and lust. “Well,” the Answer Man says, “each piece of earth is bad for something. Something is going to suffer eventually on it and the land itself is no longer safe. It’s weakening. If you dig deep enough to dip your seed, beneath the crust you’ll find an emptiness like the sky. No, nothing’s compatible to living in the long run. Next caller, please.” The girl goes to the telephone and dials hurriedly. It is very late. She whispers, not wanting to wake the child. There is static and humming. “I can’t make you out,” the Answer Man shouts. The girl says more firmly, “I want to know my hour.” “Your hour came, dear,” he says. “It went when you were sleeping. It came and saw you dreaming and it went back to where it was.”

  The girl’s lover comes to the apartment. She throws herself into his arms. He looks wonderful. She would do anything for him! The child grabs the pocket of his jacket and swings on it with her full weight. “My friend,” the child says to him. “Why yes,” the man says with surprise. They drive the child to the nursery and then go out for a wonderful lunch. The girl begins to cry and spills the roll basket on the floor.

  “What is it,” he asks. “What’s wrong?” He wearies of her, really. Her moods and palpitations. The girl’s face is pale. Death is not so far, she thinks. It is easily arrived at. Love is further than death. She kisses him. She cannot stop. She clings to him, trying to kiss him. “Be calm,” he says.

  The girl no longer sees the man. She doesn’t know anything about him. She is a gaunt, passive girl, living alone with her child. “I love you,” she says to the child. “Mommy loves me,” the child murmurs, “and Daddy loves me and Grandma loves me and Granddaddy loves me and my friend loves me.” The girl corrects her. “Mommy loves you,” she says. The child is growing. In not too long the child will be grown. When is this happening! She wakes the child in the middle of the night. She gives her a glass of juice and together they listen to the radio. A woman is speaking on the radio. She says, “I hope you will not think me vulgar.” “Not at all,” the Answer Man replies. “He is never at a loss,” the girl whispers to the child. The woman says, “My husband can only become excited if he feels that some part of his body is missing.” “Yes,” the Answer Man says. The girl shakes the sleepy child. “Listen to this,” she says. “I want you to know about these things.” The unknown woman’s voice continues, dimly. “A finger or an eye or a leg. I have to pretend it’s not there.”

  “Yes,” the Answer Man says.

  Summer

  Constance and Ben and their daughters by previous marriages, Charlotte and Jill, were sharing a summerhouse for a month with their friend Steven. There were five weekends that August, and for each one of them Steven invited a different woman up—Tracy, India, Yvette, Aster and Bronwyn. The women made a great deal of fuss over Charlotte and Jill, who were both ten. They made the girls nachos and root-beer floats, and bought them latch-hook sets and took them out to the moors to identify flowers. They took them to the cemeteries, from which the children would return with rubbings which Constance found depressing—

  This beautiful bud to us was given

  To unfold here but bloom in heaven

  or worse!

  Here lies Aimira Rawson

  Daughter Wife Mother

  She has done what she could

  The children affixed the rubbings to the side of the refrigerator with magnets in the shape of broccoli.

  The women would arrange the children’s hair in various elaborate styles that Constance hated. They knew no taboos; they discussed everything with the children—love, death, Japanese whaling methods. Each woman had habits and theories and stories to tell, and each brought a house present and stayed seventy-two hours. They all spent so much time with the children because they could not spend it with Steven, who appeared after 5:00 p.m. only. Steven was writing a book that summer; he was, in his words, “writing an aesthetically complex response to hermetic currents in modern life.” This took time.

  Ben was recovering from a heart attack he had suffered in the spring. He and Constance had been in a restaurant, and he had had a heart attack. She remembered the look of absolute attentiveness that had crossed his face. At the time, she had thought he was looking at a beautiful woman behind her and on the other side of the room. The memory, which she recalled frequently, mortified her.

  Things appeared different now to Constance: objects seemed to have more presence, people seemed more vivid, the sky seemed brighter. Her nightmares’ messages were far less veiled. Constance was embarrassed at having these feelings, for it had been Ben’s heart attack, after all, not hers. He had always accused her of taking things too personally.

  Constance and Ben had been married for five years. Charlotte was Constance’s child from her marriage with Paul, and Jill was Ben’s from his marriage with Susan. The children weren’t crazy about each other, but they got along. It was all right, really, with them. Here in the summerhouse they slept in the attic; in Constance’s opinion, the nicest room in the house. It had two iron beds, white beaverboard walls and a small window, from which one could see three streets converging. Sometimes Constance would take a gin and tonic up to the attic and lie on one of the beds and watch people place their postcards in the mailbox at the intersection. Constance didn’t send postcards herself. She really didn’t want to get in touch with anybody but Ben, and Ben lived in the same house with her, as he had in whatever house they’d been in ever since they’d gotten married. She couldn’t very well send a postcard to Ben.

  August was hot and splendid for the most part, but those who stayed for the entire season claimed it was not as nice as July. The gardens wer
e blown. Pedestrians irritably swatted bicyclists who used the sidewalks. There was more weeping in bars, and more jellyfish in the sea.

  On the afternoon of the first Friday in August, Constance was in the attic room observing an elderly couple place their postcards in the mailbox with great deliberation. She watched a woman about her own age drop a card in the box and go off with a mean, satisfied look upon her face. She watched an older woman throw in at least a dozen cards with no emotion whatever.

  Charlotte came upstairs and told her mother, “A person drowning imagines there’s a ladder rising vertically from the water, and he tries to climb that ladder. Did you know that? If he would only imagine that the ladder was horizontal he wouldn’t drown.”

  Charlotte left. Constance sat on a bed and looked around the room. On the bureau mirror were photographs of two little boys, Charlotte’s and Jill’s boyfriends. Their names were Zack and Pete. They were just little boys but there they were. It worried Constance that the children should already have boyfriends. Another photograph, which Constance had not seen before, showed a large dog in front of a potted evergreen. Constance was not acquainted with either him or his name. She got up and began picking up candy wrappers that were scattered around the room and putting them in her empty glass. She was thirty-seven years old. She thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that American lives have no second act.

  Constance went downstairs to the kitchen, where Tracy was drinking some champagne she had brought, and waiting for Steven to appear at five o’clock.

  “I just love it here,” Tracy said. “I love it, love it, love it.”

  Her eyes were shining. She was a good sport but she had rather bad skin. She was a vegetarian; for three days after she left, the children demanded bean curd. She was Steven’s typist in the city, where she and her epileptic lab, Scooter, lived in the same apartment building as Jill’s aunt.

  “You were in my apartment a long, long time ago,” Tracy told Jill, “when you were a little tiny girl, and you pulled Scooter’s tail and he growled at you and you said, ‘Stop that at once,’ and he did.”

  “I can’t remember that,” Jill said.

  “It’s a small world,” Tracy said, pouring herself more champagne. She sighed. “Scooter’s getting along now.”

  Charlotte and Jill were sitting on either side of Tracy at the kitchen table, making lists of the names they wanted to call their children. Charlotte had Victoria, Grover and Christopher; Jill had Beatrice, Travis and Cone.

  “Cone,” Tracy asked. “How can you name a child Cone?”

  Constance looked at the ornately lettered names. The future yawned ahead, filled with individuals, each expecting to be found.

  “Do you swim,” Constance asked Tracy.

  “I do,” Tracy said solemnly. “I just gave the girls a few pointers about panic in the water.”

  “Would you like to go swimming,” Constance asked.

  “It’s almost five,” Tracy said. “Steven will be coming down any moment.”

  “Cone is both a nice shape and a nice name,” Jill said.

  “Would you like to go swimming?” Constance asked the girls.

  “No thanks,” they said.

  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.

  “Would you like to go swimming with me,” Constance asked.

  “Sure,” Ben said.

  They drove out to the beach and went swimming. On the bluff above the beach was the white silo of a loran station, which sent out signals that enabled navigators to determine their position by time displacement. Constance and Ben swam without touching or talking. Then they went home.

  —

  India came the next weekend. Tracy’s champagne bottle held a browning mum. India was secretive and feminine. She brought two guests of her own, Fred and Miriam. They all lived on a farm in South Woodstock, Vermont, not far from the huge quartz testicle stones there. “There are megalithic erections all over our farm,” India told Constance.

  A terrible thing had happened to Fred—his wife had just died. A mole on her waist had turned blue and in six weeks she was dead.

  Fred told Constance, “The last words she said to me were ‘Life goes on long enough. Not too long, but long enough.’ ” Fred’s eyes would glass up but he did not cry. He had brought a tape of Blind Willie Johnson singing “Dark Was the Night,” which he frequently played.

  On Saturday they had a large lunch of several dozen ears of fresh corn and a gallon of white wine. Miriam said to Constance, “It wasn’t Rose that died, it was Lu-Ellen. Doesn’t Fred just wish it was Rose! Lu-Ellen was just a girl in the office he was crazy for.”

  Miriam whispered this so Fred would not hear. She had corn kernels in her teeth, but apart from that she was the very picture of an exasperated woman. Was she in love with Fred? Constance wondered. Or Steven? Actually, it was Edward she spoke to constantly on the phone. Miriam would say things to India like “Edward said he got in touch with Jimmy and everything’s all right now.”

  After lunch, there was a long moment of silence while they all listened to the sound of Steven’s typewriter. Steven did not eat lunch; he was bringing together the cosmic and the personal, the poetic and the expository. During working hours, he was fueled by grapefruit juice only.

  India had brought four quarts of Vermont raspberries to Constance and Ben. The berries had been bruised a little during their passage across the sound. She had brought Steven a leather-bound book with thick creamy blank pages upon which to record his thoughts.

  “Nothing gets past Steven, not a single thing,” India said.

  “I’ve never known a cooler intelligence,” Miriam said.

  “You know,” Fred said, “Vermont really has somewhat of a problem. A lot of things that people think are ancient writings on stones are actually just marks left by plows, or the roots of trees. Some of these marks get translated anyway, even though they’re not genuine.”

  India lowered her eyes and giggled.

  Later, India and Miriam and Fred took Charlotte and Jill to the cliff that was considered the highest point on the island, and they all jumped off. This was one of the girls’ favorite amusements. They loved jumping off the cliff and springing in long leaps down the rosy sand to the beach below, but they hated the climb back up.

  The next day it rained. In the afternoon, the girls went with the houseguests to a movie, and Constance went up to their room. The rain had blown in the open window and an acrostic puzzle was sopping on the sill. Constance shut the window and mopped up. She sat on one of the beds and thought of two pet rabbits Charlotte and Jill had had the summer they were eight. Ben would throw his voice into the rabbits and have them speak of the verities in a pompous and irascible tone. Constance had always thought it hilarious. Then the rabbits had died, and the children hadn’t wanted another pair. Constance stared out the window. The rain pounded the dark street silver. There was no one out there.

  That night, the house was quiet. Constance lay behind Ben on their bed and nuzzled his hair. “Talk to me,” Constance said.

  “William Gass said that lovers are alike as lightbulbs,” Ben said.

  “That’s just alliteration,” Constance said. “Talk to me some more.” But Ben didn’t say much more.

  —

  Yvette arrived. She had fine features and large eyes, but she looked anxious, and her hair was always damp “from visions and insomnia” she told Constance. She entertained Charlotte and Jill by telling them the entire plot line from General Hospital. She read the palms of their grubby hands.

  “Constitutionally, I am more or less doomed to suffer,” Yvette said, pointing to deep lines running down from the ball of her own thumb. But she assured the girls that they would be happy, that they would each have three husbands and be happy with them
all. The girls made another list. Jill had William, Daniel and Jean-Paul. Charlotte had Eric, Franklin and Duke.

  Constance regarded the lists. She did not want to think of her little girls as wives in love.

  “Do you think Yvette is beautiful,” Constance asked Ben.

  “I don’t understand what she’s talking about,” Ben said.

  “You don’t have to understand what she’s talking about to think she’s beautiful,” Constance said.

  “I don’t think she’s beautiful,” Ben said.

  “She told me that Steven said that the meanings of her words were telepathic and cumulative.”

  “Let’s go downtown and get some gum,” Ben said.

  The two of them walked down to Main Street. Hundreds of people thronged the small town. “Jerry!” a woman screamed from the doorway of a shop. “I need money!” There was slanted parking on the one-way street, the spaces filled with cars that were either extremely rusted or highly waxed and occupied by young men and women playing loud radios.