The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

“Isn’t that something!” Caroline exclaimed.

  “I was the first to find him,” Dwight said. “I’m no expert but that man was gone.”

  “What did this dead man look like,” Lucy asked Dwight.

  He thought for a moment, then said, “He looked like someone in the movies. He had a large head.”

  “In any case,” Lucy said a little impatiently.

  “In any case,” Dwight said, “this car just jumped at me, you know how some things do. I knew I just had to have this car, it was just so pretty. This car is almost cherry,” Dwight said, gesturing out at it, “and now it’s ours.”

  “That car is not almost cherry,” Lucy said. “A man died in it. I would say that this car was about as un-cherry as you can get.” She went on vehemently like this for a while.

  Caroline gazed at her, her lips parted, her teeth making no judgment. Then she said, “I’ve got to get back to my lonely home.” She did not live far away. Almost everybody they knew, and a lot of people they didn’t, lived close by. “Now you two have fun in that car, it’s a sweet little car.” She kissed Dwight and he patted her back in an avuncular fashion as he walked her to the door. The air outside had a faint, thin smell of fruit and rubber. A siren screamed through it.

  When Dwight returned, Lucy said, “I don’t want a car a man died in for my birthday.”

  “It’s not your birthday coming up, is it?”

  Lucy admitted it was not, although Dwight often planned for her birthday months in advance. She blushed.

  “It’s funny how some people live longer than others, isn’t it,” she finally said.

  —

  When Dwight had first seen Lucy, he was twenty-five years old and she was a four-month-old baby.

  “I’m gonna marry you,” Dwight said to the baby. People heard him. He was tall and had black hair, and was wearing a leather jacket that a girlfriend had sewed a silk liner into. It was a New Year’s Eve party at this girlfriend’s house and the girl was standing beside him. “Oh, right,” she said. She didn’t see anything particularly intriguing about this baby. They could make better babies than this, she thought. Lucy lay in a white wicker basket on a sofa. Her hair was sparse and her expression solemn. “You’re gonna be my wife,” Dwight said. He was very good with babies and good with children too. When Lucy was five, her favorite things were pop-up books in which one found what was missing by pushing or pulling or turning a tab, and for her birthday Dwight bought her fifteen of these, surely as many as had ever been produced. When she was ten he bought her a playhouse and filled it with balloons. Dwight was good with adolescents as well. When she was fourteen, he rented her a horse for a year. As for women, he had a special touch with them, as all his girlfriends would attest. Dwight wasn’t faithful to Lucy as she was growing up, but he was attentive and devoted. Dwight kept up the pace nicely. And all the time Lucy was stoically growing up, learning how to dress herself and read, letting her hair grow, then cutting it all off, joining clubs and playing records, doing her algebra, going on dates, Dwight was out in the world. He always sent her little stones from the places he visited and she ordered them by size or color and put them in and out of boxes and jars until there came to be so many she grew confused as to where each had come from. At about the time Lucy didn’t care if she saw another little stone in her life, they got married. They bought a house and settled in. The house was a large, comfortable one, large enough, was the inference, to accommodate growth of various sorts. Things were all right. Dwight was like a big strange book where Lucy just needed to turn the pages and there everything was already.

  —

  They went out and looked at the Thunderbird in the waning light.

  “It’s a beauty, isn’t it,” Dwight said. “Wide whites, complete engine dress.” He opened the hood, exposing the gleaming motor. Dwight was happy, his inky eyes shone. When he slammed the hood shut there was a soft rattling as of pebbles being thrown.

  “What’s that,” Lucy asked.

  “What’s what, my sweet?”

  “That,” Lucy said, “on the ground.” She picked up a piece of rust, as big as her small hand and very light. Dwight peered at it. As she was trying to hand it to him, it dropped and crumbled.

  “It looked so solid, I didn’t check underneath,” Dwight said. “I’ll have some body men come over tomorrow and look at it. I’m sure it’s no problem, just superficial stuff.”

  She ran her fingers behind the rocker panel of the door and came up with a handful of flakes.

  “I don’t know why you’d want to make it worse,” Dwight said.

  The next morning, two men were scooting around on their backs beneath the T-Bird, poking here and there with screwdrivers and squinting at the undercarriage. Lucy, who enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, was still in the kitchen, finishing it. As she ate her cereal, she studied the milk carton, a panel of which made a request for organs. Lucy was aware of a new determination in the world to keep things going. She rinsed her bowl and went outside just as the two men had slipped from beneath the car and were standing up, staring at Dwight. Gouts and clots of rust littered the drive.

  “This for your daughter here?” one of them said.

  “No,” Dwight said irritably.

  “I wouldn’t give this to my daughter.”

  “It’s not for anyone like that!” Dwight said.

  “Bottom’s just about to go,” the other one said. “Riding along, these plates give, floor falls out, your butt’s on the road. You need new pans at least. Pans are no problem.” He chewed on his thumbnail. “It’s rusted out too where the leaf springs meet the frame. Needs some work, no doubt about that. Somebody’s done a lot of work but it needs a lot more work for sure. Donny, get me the Hemmings out of the truck.”

  The other man ambled off and returned with a thick brown catalog.

  “Maybe you should trade up,” the first man said. “Get a car with a solid frame.”

  Dwight shook his head. “You can’t repair it?”

  “Why sure we can repair it!” Donny said. “You can get everything for these cars, all the parts, you got yourself a classic here!” He thumbed through the catalog until he came to a page that offered the services of something called The T-Bird Sanctuary. The Sanctuary seemed to be a wrecking yard. A grainy photograph showed a jumble of cannibalized cars scattered among trees. It was the kind of picture that looked as though it had been taken furtively with a concealed camera.

  “I’d trade up,” the other man said. “Lookit over here, this page here, Fifty-seven T-Bird supercharged, torch red, total body-off restoration, nothing left undone, ready to show…”

  “Be still, my heart,” Donny said.

  “You know if you are going to stick with this car you got,” the other man said, “and I’m not advising you to, you should paint it the original color. This black ain’t original.” He opened the door and pointed at a smudge near the hinges. “See here, powder blue.”

  Lucy returned to the house. She stood inside, thinking, looking out at the street. When she had been a little girl walking to school, she had once found an envelope on the street with her name on it, but there hadn’t been anything in the envelope.

  “We’re getting another opinion,” Dwight said when he came in. “We’re taking it over to Boris, the best in the business.”

  They drove to the edge of town, to where another town began, to a big brown building there. Lucy enjoyed the car. It handled very well, she thought. They hurtled along, even though bigger cars passed them.

  Boris was small, bald and stern. The German shepherd that stood beside him seemed remarkably large. His paws were delicately rounded but each was the size of a football. There was room, easily, for another German shepherd inside him, Lucy thought. Boris drove the Thunderbird onto a lift and elevated it. He walked slowly beneath it, his hands on his hips. Not a hair grew from his head. He lowered the car down and said, “Hopeless.” When neither Lucy nor Dwight spoke, he shouted, “Worthless. Useless.” The Ger
man shepherd sighed as though he had heard this prognosis many times.

  “What about where the leaf springs meet the frame?” Lucy said. The phrase enchanted her.

  Boris moved his hands around and then clutched and twisted them together in a pleading fashion.

  “How can I make you nice people understand that it is hopeless? What can I say so that you will hear me, so that you will believe me? Do you like ripping up one-hundred-dollar bills? Is this what you want to do with the rest of your life? What kind of masochists are you? It would be wicked of me to give you hope. This car is unrestorable. It is full of rust and rot. Rust is a living thing, it breathes, it eats and it is swallowing up your car. These quarters and rockers have already been replaced, once, twice, who knows how many times. You will replace them again. It is nothing to replace quarters and rockers! How can I save you from your innocence and foolishness and delusions. You take out a bad part, say, you solder in new metal, you line-weld it tight, you replace the whole rear end, say, and what have you accomplished, you have accomplished only a small part of what is necessary, you have accomplished hardly anything! I can see you feel dread and nausea at what I’m saying but it is nothing compared to the dread and nausea you will feel if you continue in this unfortunate project. Stop wasting your thoughts! Rot like this cannot be stayed. This brings us to the question, What is man? with its three subdivisions, What can he know? What ought he do? What may he hope? Questions which concern us all, even you, little lady.”

  “What!” Dwight said.

  “My suggestion is to drive this car,” Boris said in a calmer tone, “enjoy it, but for the spring and summer only, then dump it, part it out. Otherwise, you’ll be putting in new welds, more and more new welds, but always the collapse will be just ahead of you. Years will pass and then will come the day when there is nothing to weld the weld to, there is no frame, nothing. Once rot, then nothing.” He bowed, then retired to his office.

  Driving home, Dwight said, “You never used to hear about rust and rot all the time. It’s new, this rust and rot business. You don’t know what’s around you anymore.”

  Lucy knew Dwight was depressed and tried to look concerned, though in truth she didn’t care much about the T-Bird. She was distracted by a tune that was going through her head. It was a song she remembered hearing when she was a little baby, about a tiny ant being at his doorway. She finally told Dwight about it and hummed the tune.

  “Do you remember that little song,” she asked.

  “Almost,” Dwight said.

  “What was that about anyway,” Lucy asked. “The tiny ant didn’t do anything, he was just waiting at his doorway.”

  “It was just nonsense stuff you’d sing to a little baby,” Dwight said. He looked at her vaguely and said, “My sweet…”

  —

  Lucy called up her friend Daisy and told her about the black Thunderbird. She did not mention rot. Daisy was ten years older than Lucy and was one of the last of Dwight’s girlfriends. Daisy had recently had one of her legs amputated. There had been a climbing accident and then she had just let things go on for too long. She was a tall, boyish-looking woman who before the amputation had always worn jeans. Now she slung herself about in skirts, for she found it disturbed people less when she wore a skirt, but when she went to the beach she wore a bathing suit, and she didn’t care if she disturbed people or not because she loved the beach, the water, so still and so heavy, hiding so much.

  “I didn’t read in the paper about a dead man just sitting in his car like that,” Daisy said. “Don’t they usually report such things? It’s unusual, isn’t it?”

  Lucy had fostered Daisy’s friendship because she knew Daisy was still in love with Dwight. If someone, God, for example, had asked Daisy if she’d rather have her leg back or Dwight, she would have said, “Dwight.” Lucy felt excited about this and at the same time mystified and pitying. Knowing it always cheered Lucy up when she felt out of sorts.

  “Did I tell you about the man in the supermarket with only one leg,” Daisy asked. “I had never seen him before. He was with his wife and baby and instead of being in the mother’s arms the baby was in a stroller so the three of them took up a great deal of room in the aisle, and when I turned down the aisle I became entangled with this little family. I felt that I had known this man all my life, of course. People were smiling at us. Even the wife was smiling. It was dreadful.”

  “You should find someone,” Lucy said without much interest.

  Daisy’s leg was in ashes in a drawer in a church garden, waiting for the rest of her.

  “Oh no, no,” Daisy said modestly. “So!” she said. “You’re going to have another car!”

  —

  It was almost suppertime and there was the smell of meat on the air. Two small, brown birds hopped across the patchy grass and Lucy watched them with interest for birds seldom frequented their neighborhood. Whenever there were more than three birds in a given place, it was considered an infestation and a variety of measures were taken, which reduced their numbers to an acceptable level. Lucy remembered that when she was little, the birds that flew overhead sometimes cast shadows on the ground. There were flocks of them at times and she remembered hearing the creaking of their wings, but she supposed that was just the sort of thing a child might remember, having seen or heard it only once.

  She set the dining room table for three as this was the night each spring when Rosette would come for dinner, bringing shad and shad roe, Dwight’s favorite meal. Rosette had been the most elegant of Dwight’s girlfriends, and the one with the smallest waist. She was now married to a man named Bob. When Rosette had been Dwight’s girlfriend, she had been called Muffin. For the last five springs, ever since Lucy and Dwight had been married, she would have the shad flown down from the North and she would bring it to their house and cook it. Yet even though shad was his favorite fish and he only got it once a year, Dwight would be coming home a little late this night because he was getting another opinion on the T-Bird. Lucy no longer accompanied him on these discouraging expeditions.

  Rosette appeared in a scant, white cocktail dress and red high-heeled shoes. She had brought her own china, silver, candles and wine. She reset the table, dimmed the lights and made Lucy and herself large martinis. They sat, waiting for Dwight, speaking aimlessly about things. Rosette and Bob were providing a foster home for two delinquents, whose names were Jerry and Jackie.

  “What awful children,” Rosette said. “They’re so homely too. They were cuter when they were younger, now their noses are really long and their jaws are odd-looking too. I gave them bunny baskets this year and Jackie wrote me a note saying that what she really needed was a prescription for birth-control pills.”

  When Dwight arrived, Rosette was saying, “Guilt’s not a bad thing to have. There are worse things to have than guilt.” She looked admiringly at Dwight and said, “You’re a handsome eyeful.” She made him a martini, which he drank quickly, then she made them all another one. Drinking hers, Lucy stood and watched the T-Bird in the driveway. It was a dainty car, and the paint was so black it looked wet. Rosette prepared the fish with great solemnity, bending over Lucy’s somewhat dirty broiler. They all ate in a measured way. Lucy tried to eat the roe one small egg at a time but found that this was impossible.

  “I saw Jerry this afternoon walking down the street carrying a weed whacker,” Dwight said. “Does he do yard work now? Yard work’s a good occupation for a boy.”

  “Delinquents aren’t always culprits,” Rosette said. “That’s what many people don’t understand, but no, Jerry is not doing yard work, he probably stole that thing off someone’s lawn. Bob tries to talk to him but Jerry doesn’t heed a word he says. Bob’s not very convincing.”

  “How is Bob?” Lucy asked.

  “Husband Bob is a call I never should have answered,” Rosette said.

  Lucy crossed her arms over her stomach and squeezed herself with delight because Rosette said the same thing each year when she was asked
about Bob.

  “Life with Husband Bob is a long twilight of drinking and listless anecdote,” Rosette said.

  Lucy giggled, because Rosette always said this, too.

  —

  The next day, Dwight told Lucy of his intentions to bring the T-Bird into the house. “She won’t last long on the street,” he said. “She’s a honey but she’s tired. Elements are hard on a car and it’s the elements that have done this sweet little car in. We’ll put her in the living room, which is underfurnished anyway, and it will be like living with a work of art right in our living room. We’ll keep her shined up and sit inside her and talk. It’s very peaceful inside that little car, you know.”

  The T-Bird looked alert and coquettish as they spoke around it.

  “That car was meant to know the open road,” Lucy said. “I think we should drive it till it drops.” Dwight looked at her sorrowfully and she widened her eyes, not believing she had said such a thing. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think a car should be in a house, but maybe we could bring it in for a little while and then if we don’t like it we could take it out again.”

  He put his arms around her and embraced her and she could hear his heart pounding away in his chest with gratitude and excitement.

  Lucy called Daisy on the telephone. The banging and sawing had already begun. “Men go odd differently than women,” Daisy said. “That’s always been the case. For example, I read that men are exploring how to turn the earth around toxic waste dumps into glass by the insertion of high-temperature electric probes. A woman would never think of something like that.”

  Dwight worked feverishly for days. He removed the picture window, took down the wall, shored up the floor, built a ramp, drained the car of all its fluids so it wouldn’t leak on the rug, pushed it into the house, replaced the studs, put back the window, erected fresh Sheetrock and repainted the entire room. In the room, the car looked like a big doll’s car. But it didn’t look bad inside the house at all and Lucy didn’t mind it being there, although she didn’t like it when Dwight raised the hood. She didn’t care for the hood being raised one bit and always lowered it when she saw it was up. 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.