The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “I wouldn’t have thought we’d have to worry about you,” Martha says unhappily.

  —

  When I returned from Martha’s house the first time, I passed a farmer traveling on the beach road in his rusty car. Strapped to the roof was a sandhill crane, one wing raised, pumped full of air and sailing in the moonlight. They kill these birds for their meat. The meat, they say, tastes just like chicken. I have found that almost everything tastes like chicken.

  —

  There is a garage not far from town where Jace used to buy gas. I stopped there once. There was a large wire meshed cage outside, by the pumps. A sign on it said BABY FLORIDA RATTLERS. Inside were dozens of blue and pink baby rattles on a dirt floor. It gave me a headache. The deception. The largeness of the cage.

  —

  At night I take the child and walk over the beach to the water’s edge, where it is cool. The child is at peace here, beside the water, and it is here, most likely, where Jace will find us when he comes back. When Jace comes back it will be at night. He always comes in on the heat, at night.

  “Darling,” I can hear him say, “even as a little boy, I was all there ever was for you.”

  I can see it quite clearly. I will be on the shoreline, nursing, and Jace will come back in on the heat, all careless and easy, and “Darling,” he’ll shout into the wind, into the white roil of water behind us. “Darling, darling,” Jace will shout, “where you been, little girl?”

  The Farm

  It was a dark night in August. Sarah and Tommy were going to their third party that night, the party where they would actually sit down to dinner. They were driving down Mixtuxet Avenue, a long black street of trees that led out of the village, away from the shore and the coastal homes into the country. Tommy had been drinking only soda that night. Every other weekend, Tommy wouldn’t drink. He did it, he said, because he could.

  Sarah was telling a long story as she drove. She kept asking Tommy if she had told it to him before, but he was noncommittal. When Tommy didn’t drink, Sarah talked and talked. She was telling him a terrible story that she had read in the newspaper about an alligator at a jungle-farm attraction in Florida. The alligator had eaten a child who’d crawled into its pen. The alligator’s name was Cookie. Its owner shot it immediately. The owner was sad about everything—the child, the parents’ grief, Cookie. He was quoted in the paper as saying that shooting Cookie was not an act of revenge.

  When Tommy didn’t drink, Sarah felt cold. She was shivering in the car. There were goose pimples on her tanned, thin arms. Tommy sat beside her smoking, saying nothing.

  There had been words between them earlier. The parties here had an undercurrent of sexuality. Sarah could almost hear it, flowing around them all, carrying them all along. In the car, on the night of the accident, Sarah was at that point in the evening when she felt guilty. She wanted to make things better, make things nice. She had gone through her elated stage, her jealous stage, her stubbornly resigned stage and now she felt guilty. Had they talked about divorce that night, or had that been before, on other evenings? There was a flavor she remembered in their talks about divorce, a scent. It was hot, as Italy had been hot when they were there. Dust, bread, sun, a burning at the back of the throat from too much drinking.

  But no, they hadn’t been talking about divorce that night. The parties had been crowded. Sarah had hardly seen Tommy. Then, on her way to the bathroom, she had seen him sitting with a girl on a bed in one of the back rooms. He was telling the girl about condors, about hunting for condors in small, light planes.

  “Oh, but you didn’t hurt them, did you,” the girl asked. She was someone’s daughter, a little overweight but with beautiful skin and large green eyes.

  “Oh no,” Tommy assured her, “we weren’t hunting to hurt.”

  Condors. Sarah looked at them sitting on the bed. When they noticed her, the girl blushed. Tommy smiled. Sarah imagined what she looked like, standing in the doorway.

  That had been at the Steadmans’. The first party was at the Perrys’. The Perrys never served food. Sarah had two or three drinks there. The bar was set up beneath the grape arbor and everyone stood outside. It had still been light at the Perrys’ but at the Steadmans’ it was dark and people drank inside. Everyone spoke about the end of summer as though it were a bewildering and unnatural event.

  They had stayed at the Steadmans’ longer than they should have and now they were going to be late for dinner. Nevertheless, they were driving at a moderate speed through a familiar landscape, passing houses that they had been entertained in many times. There were the Salts and the Hollands and the Greys and the Dodsons. The Dodsons kept their gin in the freezer and owned two large and dappled crotch-sniffing dogs. The Greys imported southerners for their parties. The women all had lovely voices and knew how to make spoon bread and pickled tomatoes and artillery punch. The men had smiles when they’d say to Sarah, “Why, let me get you another. You don’t have a thing in that glass, I swear.” The Hollands gave the kind of dinner party where the shot was still in the duck and the silver should have been in a vault. Little whiskey was served but there was always excellent wine. The Salts were a high-strung couple. Jenny Salt was on some type of medication for tension and often dropped the canapés she attempted to serve. She and her husband, Pete, had a room in which there was nothing but a large dollhouse where witty mâché figures carried on assignations beneath tiny clocks and crystal chandeliers. Once, when Sarah was examining the dollhouse’s library, where two figures were hunched over a chess game that was just about to be won, Pete had always said, on the twenty-second move, he told Sarah that she had pretty eyes. She moved away from him immediately. She closed her eyes. In another room, with the other guests, she talked about the end of summer.

  On that night, at the end of summer, the night of the accident, Sarah was still talking as they passed the Salts’ house. She was talking about Venice. She and Tommy had been there once. They drank in the plaza and listened to the orchestras. Sarah quoted D. H. Lawrence on Venice…Abhorrent, green, slippery city…But she and Tommy had liked Venice. They drank standing up at little bars. Sarah had a cold and she drank grappa and the cold had disappeared for the rest of her life.

  After the Salts’ house, the road swerved north and became very dark. There were no lights or houses for several miles. There were stone walls, an orchard of sickly peach trees, a cider mill. There was the St. James Episcopal Church, where Tommy took their daughter, Martha, to Sunday school. The Sunday school was oddly fundamental. There were many arguments among the children and their teachers as to the correct interpretation of Bible story favorites. For example, when Lazarus rose from the dead, was he still sick? Martha liked the fervor at St. James. Each week, her dinner graces were becoming more impassioned and fantastic. Martha was seven.

  Each Sunday, Tommy takes Martha to her little classes at St. James. Sarah can imagine the child sitting there at a low table with her jar of crayons. Tommy doesn’t go to church himself and Martha’s classes are two hours long. Sarah doesn’t know where Tommy goes. She suspects he is seeing someone. When they come home on Sundays, Tommy is sleek, exhilarated. The three of them sit down to the luncheon Sarah has prepared.

  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.

  Sarah at last fell silent. The road seemed endless as in a dream. They seemed to be slowing down. She could not feel her foot on the accelerator. She could not feel her hands on the wheel. Her mind was an untidy cupboard filled with shining bottles. The road was dark and silvery and straight. In the space ahead of her, there seemed to be something. It beckoned, glittering. Sarah’s mind cleared a little. She saw Martha with her hair cut oddly short. She saw Tommy choosing a succession of houses, examining the plaster, the floorboards, the fireplaces, deciding where windows should be placed or walls knocked down. The sea was white and flat. It did not command her to change her life. It demanded nothing of
her. She saw Martha sleeping, her paint-smudged fingers curled. She saw Tommy in the city with a woman, riding in a cab. The woman wore a short fur jacket and Tommy stroked it as he spoke. She saw a figure in the road ahead, its arms raised before its face as though to block out the sight of her. The figure was a boy who wore dark clothing, but his hair was bright, his face was shining. She saw her car leap forward and run him down where he stood.

  —

  Tommy had taken responsibility for the accident. He had told the police he was driving. The boy apparently had been hitchhiking and had stepped out into the road. At the autopsy, traces of a hallucinogen were found in his system. The boy was fifteen years old and his name was Stevie Bettencourt. No charges were filed.

  “My wife,” Tommy told the police, “was not feeling well. My wife,” he said, “was in the passenger seat.”

  Sarah stopped drinking immediately after the accident. She felt nauseated much of the time. She slept poorly. The bones in her hands ached. She remembered this was how she’d felt the last time she had stopped drinking. That had been two years before. She remembered why she’d stopped and also why she’d started again. She had stopped because she’d done a cruel thing to her little Martha. It was spring and she and Tommy were giving a dinner party. Sarah had two martinis in the late afternoon when she was preparing dinner and then she had two more martinis with her guests. Martha had come downstairs to say a polite good night to everyone as she had been taught. She had put on her nightie and brushed her teeth. Sarah poured a little more gin in her glass and went upstairs with her to brush out her hair and put her to bed. Martha had long, thick blond hair, of which she was very proud. On that night she wore it in a ponytail secured by an elasticized holder with two small colored balls on the ends. Sarah’s fingers were clumsy and she could not get it off without pulling Martha’s hair and making her cry. She got a pair of scissors and carefully began snipping at the stubborn elastic. The scissors were large, like shears, and they had been difficult to handle. A foot of Martha’s gathered hair had abruptly fallen to the floor. Sarah remembered trying to pat it back into place on the child’s head.

  So Sarah had stopped drinking the first time. She did not feel renewed. She felt exhausted and wary. She read and cooked. She realized how little she and Tommy had to talk about. Tommy drank Scotch when he talked to her at night. Sometimes Sarah would silently count as he spoke to see how long the words took. When he was away and he telephoned her, she could hear the ice tinkling in the glass.

  Tommy was in the city four days a week. He often changed hotels. He would bring Martha little bars of soap wrapped in the different colored papers of the hotels. Martha’s drawers were full of the soaps scenting her clothes. When Tommy came home on the weekends he would work on the house and they would give parties at which Tommy was charming. Tommy had a talent for holding his liquor and for buying old houses, restoring them and selling them for three times what he had paid for them. Tommy and Sarah had moved six times in eleven years. All their homes had been fine old houses in excellent locations two or three hours from New York. Sarah would stay in the country while Tommy worked in the city.

  For three weeks, Sarah did not drink. Then it was her birthday. Tommy gave her a slim gold necklace and fastened it around her neck. He wanted her to come to New York with him, to have dinner, see a play, spend the night with him in the fine suite the company had given him at the hotel. They had gotten a babysitter for Martha, a marvelous capable woman. Sarah drove. Tommy had never cared for driving. His hand rested on her thigh. Occasionally, he would slip his hand beneath her skirt. Sarah was sick with the thought that he touched other women like this.

  By the time they were in Manhattan, they were arguing. They had been married for eleven years. Both had had brief marriages before. They could argue about anything. In midtown, Tommy stormed out of the car as Sarah braked for a light. He took his suitcase and disappeared.

  Sarah drove carefully for many blocks. When she had the opportunity, she would pull to the curb and ask someone how to get to Connecticut. No one seemed to know. Sarah thought she was probably phrasing the question poorly but she didn’t know how else to present it. After half an hour, she somehow found the hotel where Tommy was staying. The doorman parked the car and she went into the lobby. She looked into the hotel bar and saw Tommy in the dimness, sitting at a small table. He jumped up and kissed her passionately. He rubbed his hands up and down her sides. “Darling, darling,” he said, “I want you to have a happy birthday.”

  Tommy ordered drinks for both of them. Sarah sipped hers slowly at first but then she drank it and he ordered others. The bar was subdued. There was a piano player who sang about the lord of the dance. The words seemed like those of a hymn. The hymn made her sad but she laughed. Tommy spoke to her urgently and gaily about little things. They laughed together like they had when they were first married. They had always drunk a lot together then and fallen asleep, comfortably and lovingly entwined.

  They went to their room to change for the theater. The maid had turned back the beds. There was a fresh rose in a bud vase on the writing desk. They had another drink in the room and got undressed. Sarah awoke the next morning curled up on the floor with the bedspread tangled around her. Her mouth was sore. There was a bruise on her leg. Sarah crept into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She sat in the tub while the water beat against her. Pinned to the outside of the shower curtain was a note from Tommy, who had gone to work. Darling, the note said, we had a good time on your birthday. I can’t say I’m sorry we never got out. I’ll call you for lunch. Love.

  Sarah turned the note inward until the water made the writing illegible. When the phone rang just before noon, she didn’t answer it.

  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.

  When Sarah had been a drinker, she felt she had a fundamental and inventive grasp of situations, but now that she no longer drank, she found herself in the midst of a great and impenetrable silence that she could in no way interpret.

  It was a small village. Many of the people who lived there didn’t even own cars. The demands of life were easily met and it was pretty there besides. It was divided between those who had always lived there and owned fishing boats and restaurants and the city people who had more recently discovered the area as a summer place and winter weekend investment. On the weekends, the New Yorkers would come up with their houseguests and their pâté and cheeses and build fires and go cross-country skiing. Tommy came home to Sarah on weekends. They did things together. They agreed on where to go. During the week she was on her own.

  Once, alone, she saw a helicopter carrying a tree in a sling across the sound. The wealthy could afford to leave nothing behind.

  Once, with the rest of the town, she saw five boats burning in their storage shrouds. Each summer resort has its winter pyromaniac.

  Sarah did not read anymore. Her eyes hurt when she read and her hands ached all the time. During the week, she marketed and walked and cared for Martha.

  It was three months after Stevie Bettencourt was killed when his mother visited Sarah. She came to the door and knocked on it and Sarah let her in.

  Genevieve Bettencourt was Sarah’s age, although she looked rather younger. She had been divorced almost from the day that Stevie was born. She had another son named Bruce, who lived with his father in Nova Scotia. She had an old powder-blue Buick parked on the street in front of Sarah’s house. The Buick had one white door.

  The two women sat in Sarah’s handsome, sunny living room. It was very calm, very peculiar, almost thrilling. Genevieve looked all around the room. Off the living room were the bedrooms. The door to Sarah and Tommy’s was closed but Martha’s door was open. She had a little hanging gar
den against the window. She had a hamster in a cage. She had an enormous bookcase filled with dolls and books.

  Genevieve said to Sarah, “That room wasn’t there before. This used to be a lobster pound. I know a great deal about this town. People like you have nothing to do with what I know about this town. Do you remember the way things were, ever?”

  “No,” Sarah said.

  Genevieve sighed. “Does your daughter look like you or your husband?”

  “No one’s ever told me she looked like me,” Sarah said quietly.

  “I did not want my life to know you,” Genevieve said. She removed a hair from the front of her white blouse and dropped it to the floor. She looked out the window at the sun. The floor was of a very light and varnished pine. Sarah could see the hair lying there.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sarah said. “I’m so very, very sorry.” She stretched her neck and put her head back.

  “Stevie was a mixed-up boy,” Genevieve said. “They threw him off the basketball team. He took pills. He had bad friends. He didn’t study and he got a D in geometry and they wouldn’t let him play basketball.”

  She got up and wandered around the room. She wore green rubber boots, dirty jeans and a beautiful, hand-knit sweater. “I once bought all my fish here,” she said. “The O’Malleys owned it. There were practically no windows. Just narrow high ones over the tanks. Now it’s all windows, isn’t it? Don’t you feel exposed?”

  “No, I…” Sarah began. “There are drapes,” she said.

  “Off to the side, where you have your garden, there are whale bones if you dig deep enough. I can tell you a lot about this town.”