The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  It was not the same water. The house was on the Gulf of Mexico. The shepherd had drowned in the bay.

  The girl’s boyfriend had bought his house just the week before. It had been purchased furnished with mismatched plates and glasses, several large oak beds and an assortment of bamboo furniture.

  The girl had a house of her own on the broad seawalled bay that had big windows overlooking shaggy bougainvillea bushes. There were hardly any studs in the frame and the whole house had shaken when the dog ran through it.

  The girl’s boyfriend’s last name was Chester and everyone called him that. He wore sunglasses the color of champagne bottles. Chester had wide shoulders, great hands and one broken marriage, on which he didn’t owe a dime.

  “You have fallen into the butter dish,” the girl’s friends told her.

  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 had had him since he was two months old. She had bought him from a breeder in Miami, a man who had once been a priest. The girl’s shepherd came from a litter of five with excellent bloodlines. The mother was graceful and friendly, the father more solemn and alert. The breeder who had once been a priest made the girl spend several minutes alone with each puppy and asked her a great many questions about herself. She had never thought about herself much. When she had finally selected her puppy, she sat in the kitchen with the breeder and drank a Pepsi. The puppy stumbled around her feet, nibbling at the laces of her sneakers. The breeder smoked and talked to the girl with a great deal of assurance. The girl had been quite in awe of him.

  He said, “We are all asleep and dreaming, you know. If we could ever actually comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out.”

  The girl nodded. She was embarrassed. People would sometimes speak to her like this, intimate and alarming, as though she were passionate or thoughtful or well read. The puppy smelled wonderful. She picked him up and held him.

  “We deceive ourselves. All we do is dream. Good dreams, bad dreams…”

  “The ways that others see us is our life,” the girl said.

  “Yes!” the breeder exclaimed.

  —

  The girl sat moving slowly on the porch glider. She imagined herself standing laughing, younger and much nicer, the shepherd leaping into her arms. Her head buzzed and rustled. The bourbon bobbed around the flamingo’s lowered head on the gaudy glass. The shepherd’s drowned weight in her arms had been a terrible thing, terrible. She and Chester were both dressed rather elaborately because they had just returned from dinner with two friends, a stockbroker and his girlfriend, an art dealer. The girl was very thin and very blond. There were fine blond hairs on her face. The small restaurant where they ate appeared much larger than it was by its use of mirrored walls. The girl watched the four of them eating and drinking in the mirrors. The stockbroker spoke of money, of what he could do for his friends. “I love my work,” he said.

  “The art I handle,” his girlfriend said, “is intended as a stimulus for discussion. In no way is it to be taken as an aesthetic product.”

  The girl had asked her for the untouched steak tournedos that their waiter had wrapped up in aluminum foil, the foil twisted into the shape of a swan. The girl remembered carrying the meat into the house for the shepherd and seeing the torn window screen. She remembered feeling the stillness in her house as it flowed into her eyes.

  —

  The girl looked at the Gulf. It was a dazzling day with no surf. The beach was deserted. The serious tanners were in tanning parlors, bronzing evenly beneath sunlamps, saving time.

  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.

  Chester had dug a deep square hole beneath the largest of the bougainvillea bushes and the girl had laid her dog down into it.

  Their pale clothes became dirty from the drowned dog’s coat. The girl had thrown her dress away. Chester had sent his suit to the dry cleaner.

  Chester liked the dog, but it was the girl’s dog. A dog can only belong to one person. When Chester and the girl made love in her house, or when the girl was out for the evening, she kept the shepherd inside, closed up on a small porch with high screened windows. He had taken to leaping out of his pen, a clearing enclosed with Cyclone fencing and equipped with old tires. It was supposed to be his playground, an exercise area that would keep away boredom and loneliness when the girl wasn’t with him. It was a tall fence, but the shepherd had found a way over it. He had escaped, again and again, so the girl had begun locking him up in the small porch room. The girl had never witnessed his escape, from either of these places, but she imagined him leaping, gathering himself and plunging upward. He could leap so high—there was such lightness in him, such faith in the leaping.

  On the beach, at Chester’s, the waves glittered so with light that the girl could not bear to look at them. She finished the bourbon, took the empty glass to the kitchen and put it in the sink.

  When the girl and the shepherd had first begun their life together, they had lived around Mile 47 in the Florida Keys. The girl worked in a small marine laboratory there. Her life was purely her own and the dog’s. Life seemed slow and joyous, and remembering those days the girl felt she had been on the brink of something extraordinary. She remembered the shepherd, his exuberance, energy, dignity. She remembered the shepherd and remembered being, herself, good. She lived aware of happiness.

  The girl pushed her hands through her hair. The gulf seemed to stick in her throat.

  There had been an abundance of holy things then. Once the world had been promising. But then there had been a disappearance of holy things.

  A friend of Chester’s had suggested hypnotism. He was quite enthusiastic about it. The girl would have a few sessions with this hypnotist that he knew, and she would forget the dog. Not forget, exactly. Rather, certain connections would not be made. The girl would no longer recall the dog in the context of her grief. The hypnotist had had great success with smokers.

  Tonight they were going to have dinner with this man and his wife. The girl couldn’t bear the thought of it. They would talk and talk. They would talk about real estate and hypnotism and coke. Tonight, they would go to a restaurant that had recently become notorious when an elderly woman had died from burns received when the cherries jubilee she was being served set fire to her dress. They would all order flaming desserts. They would go dancing afterward.

  Animals are closer to God than we, the girl thought, but they are lost to him. Her arms felt heavy. The sun was huge, moving ponderously toward the horizon. People were gathering on the beach to watch it go down. They were playing their radios. When the sun touched the horizon, it took three minutes before it disappeared. An animal can live for three minutes without air. It had taken the shepherd three minutes to die after however long he had been swimming in the deep water off the smooth seawall. The girl remembered walking into the house with the meat wrapped in the foil in the shape of a swan, and seeing the broken screen. The house was full of mosquitoes. Chester put some soft ice in a glass and poured a nightcap. Chester always looked out of place in the girl’s house. The house wasn’t worth anything, it was the land that was valuable. The girl went outside, calling, past the empty pen, calling, down to the bay, seeing the lights of the better houses along the seawall. A neighbor had called the sheriff’s depar
tment and the lights from the deputy’s car shone on the ground on the dark dog.

  A buzzer sounded in the beach house. Chester had had the whole house wired. In the week he had owned it, he had put in central air-conditioning, replaced all the windows with one-way glass and installed an elaborate infrared alarm system. The buzzer, however, was just a local signal. It stopped. It had been just the door opening, just Chester coming home. Chester activated the total system when they were out or when they were sleeping. The girl thought of invisible frequencies monitoring undisturbed air. The girl found offensive the notion that she could be spared pain, humiliation or loss by microwaves. She contemplated for a moment the desire Chester had for a complete home security system. There wasn’t anything in the house worth stealing. Chester was protecting space. For a moment, the girl found offensive the touch of Chester’s hand on her hair.

  “Why aren’t you dressed,” he asked.

  The girl looked at him, and then down at herself, at the thin T-shirt and hibiscus-flowered shorts. I am getting too old to wear this shit, the girl thought. The porch was cooling down fast in the twilight. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

  “Why?” the girl said.

  Chester sighed. “We’re going out to dinner with the Tynans.”

  “I don’t want to go out to dinner with the Tynans,” the girl said.

  Chester put his hands in his pockets. “You’ve got to snap out of this,” he said.

  “I’m flying,” the girl said. “I have flown.” She thought of the shepherd leaping, the lightness. He had escaped from her. She hadn’t gotten anyplace.

  Chester said, “I’ve consoled you the best I can.”

  “There is no consolation,” the girl said. “There is no recovery. There is no happy ending.”

  “We’re the happy ending,” Chester said. “Give us a break.”

  The sky was red, the water a dull silver. “I can’t bear to see the Tynans again,” the girl said. “I can’t bear to go to another restaurant and see the sneeze guard over the salad bar.”

  “Don’t scream at me, darling. Doesn’t any of that stuff you take ever calm you down? I’m not the dog that you can scream at.”

  “What?” the girl said.

  Chester sat down on the glider. He put his hand on her knee. “I think you’re wonderful, but I think a little self-knowledge, a little realism, is in order here. You would stand and scream at that dog, darling.”

  The girl looked at his hand, patting her knee. It seemed an impossibly large, ruddy hand.

  “I wasn’t screaming,” she said. The dog had a famous trick. The girl would ask, “Do you love me?” and he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. Everyone had been amazed.

  “The night it happened, you looked at the screen and you said you’d kill him when he got back.”

  The girl stared at the hand stroking and rubbing her knee. She felt numb. “I never said that.”

  “It was a justifiable annoyance, darling. You must have repaired that screen half a dozen times. He was becoming a discipline problem. He was beginning to make people feel uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable?” the girl said. She stood up. The hand dropped away.

  “We cannot change any of this,” Chester said. “If it were in my power, I would. I would do anything for you.”

  “You didn’t stay with me that night, you didn’t lie down beside me!” The girl walked in small troubled circles around the room.

  “I stayed for hours, darling. But nobody could sleep on that bed. The sheets were always sandy and covered with dog hairs. That’s why I bought a house, for the beds.” Chester smiled and reached out to her. She turned and walked through the house, opening the door, tripping the buzzer. “Oh, you must stop this!” Chester called.

  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.

  The girl lay on her side, then turned onto her back. She thought of the bougainvillea, of the leaves turning into flowers over the shepherd’s grave. She thought of the shepherd by her bed, against the wall, sleeping quietly, his faith in her at peace.

  There was a pop, a small explosion in her head that woke her. She lurched up, gasping, from a dream that the shepherd had died. And for an instant, she hovered between two dreams, twice deceived. She saw herself leaping, only to fall back. The moonlight spilled into the clearing.

  “I did love you, didn’t I?” the girl said. She saw herself forever leaping, forever falling back. “And didn’t you love me?”

  Train

  Inside, the auto train was violet. Both little girls were pleased because it was their favorite color. Violet was practically the only thing they agreed on. Danica Anderson and Jane Muirhead were ten years old. They had traveled from Maine to Washington, D.C., by car with Jane’s parents and were now on the train with Jane’s parents, 109 other people and 42 automobiles en route to Florida, where they lived. It was September. Danica had been with Jane since June. Danica’s mother was getting married again and she had needed the summer months to settle down and have everything nice for Dan when she saw her in September. In August, her mother had written Dan and asked what she could do to make things nice for her when she got back. Dan replied that she would like a good wall-hung pencil sharpener and satin sheets. She would like cowboy bread for supper. Dan supposed that she would get none of these things. Her mother hadn’t even asked her what cowboy bread was.

  The girls explored the entire train, north to south. They saw everyone but the engineer. Then they sat down in their violet seats. Jane made faces at a cute little toddler holding a cloth rabbit until he started to cry. Dan took out her writing materials and began writing to Jim Anderson. She was writing him a postcard.

  Jim, she wrote, I miss you and I will see you any minute. When I see you we will go swimming right away.

  “That is real messy writing,” Jane said. “It’s all scrunched together. If you were writing to anyone other than a dog, they wouldn’t be able to read it at all.”

  Dan printed her name on the bottom of the card and embellished it all with X’s and O’s.

  “Your writing to Jim Anderson is dumb in about twelve different ways. He’s a golden retriever, for god’s sake.”

  Dan looked at her friend mildly. She was used to Jane yelling at her and expressing disgust and impatience. Jane had once lived in Manhattan. She had developed certain attitudes. Jane was a treasure from the city of New York currently on loan to the state of Florida, where her father, for the last two years, had been engaged in running down a perfectly good investment in a marina and dinner theater. Jane liked to wear scarves tied around her head. She claimed to enjoy grapes and brown sugar and sour cream for dessert more than ice cream and cookies. She liked artichokes. She adored artichokes. She adored the part in the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker Suite where the Dewdrops and the candied Petals of Roses dance to the “Waltz of the Flowers.” Jane had seen the Nutcracker four times, for god’s sake.

  Dan and Jane and Jane’s mother and father had all lived with Jane’s grandmother in her big house in Maine all summer. The girls hadn’t seen that much of the Muirheads. The Muirheads were always “cruising.” They were always “gunk-holing,” as they called it. Whatever that was, Jane said, for god’s sake. Jane’s grandmother’s house was on the ocean and she knew how to make pizza—’za, she called it—and candy and sail a canoe. She sang hymns. She sewed sequins on their jeans and made them say grace before dinner. After they said grace, Jane’s grandmother would ask forgiveness for things done and left undone. She would, upon request, lie down and chat with them at night before they went to sleep. Jane was crazy about her grandmother and was quite a nice person in her presence. One night, at the end of summer, Jane had had a dream in which men dressed in black suits and white bathing caps had broken
into her grandmother’s house and taken all her possessions and put them in the road. In Jane’s dream, rain fell on all her grandmother’s things. Jane woke up weeping. Dan had wept too. Jane and Dan were friends.

  The train had not yet left the station even though it was two hours past the posted departure time. An announcement had just been made that said that a two-hour delay was built into the train’s schedule.

  “They make up the time at night,” Jane said. She plucked the postcard from Dan’s hand. “This is a good one,” she said. “I think you’re sending it to Jim Anderson just so you can save it yourself.” She read aloud, “This is a photograph of the Phantom Dream Car crashing through a wall of burning television sets before a cheering crowd at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.”

  At the beginning of summer, Dan’s mother had given her one hundred dollars, four packages of new underwear and three dozen stamped postcards. Most of the cards were plain but there were a few with odd pictures on them. 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.

  “I only have three left now,” Dan said, “but when I get home I’m going to start my own collection.”

  “I’ve been through that phase,” Jane said. “It’s just a phase. I don’t think you’re much of a correspondent. You wrote, ‘I got sunburn. Love, Dan’…‘I bought a green Frisbee. Love, Dan’…‘Mrs. Muirhead has swimmer’s ear. Love, Dan’…‘Mr. Muirhead went water-skiing and cracked his rib. Love, Dan’…When you write to people you should have something to say.”

  Dan didn’t reply. She had been Jane’s companion for a long time, and was wearying of what Jane’s mother called her effervescence.

  Jane slapped Dan on the back and hollered, “Danica Anderson! What is a clod like yourself doing on this fabulous journey!”