The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  This hurt Gloria’s feelings. “I’m dying,” she said. “I have a brain tumor. I can do what I want.”

  “If you’re dying you can do anything you want?” Gwendal said. “I didn’t know that. That’s a new one. So there are compensations.”

  Gloria couldn’t believe she’d told Gwendal she was dying. “You’re fat,” she said glumly.

  Gwendal ignored this. She wasn’t all that fat. Somewhat fat, perhaps, but not grotesquely so.

  “Oh, to hell with it,” Gloria said. “You want me to stop drinking, I’ll stop drinking.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” Gwendal said.

  Gloria’s mouth trembled. I’m drunk, she thought.

  “Some simple pleasures are just a bit too simple, you know,” Gwendal said.

  Gloria had felt she’d been handling her upcoming death pretty well, but now she wasn’t sure. In fact she felt awful. What was she doing spending what might be one of her last days sitting on a scratchy blanket in a weedy yard while an unpleasant child insulted her? 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.

  Gwendal said, “Listen, I have an idea. We could do it the other way around. Instead of you being my biographer, I’ll be yours. Gloria by Gwendal.” She wrote it in the air with her finger. She did not have a particularly flourishing hand, Gloria noted. “Your life as told to Gwendal Crawley. I’ll write it all down. At least that’s something. We can always spice it up.”

  “I haven’t had a very interesting life,” Gloria said modestly. But it was true, she thought. When her parents had named her, they must have been happy. They must have thought something was going to happen now.

  “I’m sure you must be having some interesting reflections, though,” Gwendal said. “And if you’re really dying, I bet you’ll feel like doing everything once.” She was wringing her hands in delight.

  Jean walked toward them from the house.

  “C’mon,” Gwendal hissed. “Let me go with you. You didn’t come all this way just to stay here, did you?”

  “Gloria and I are going to visit Bill,” Jean said. “Let’s all go,” she said to Gwendal.

  “I don’t want to,” Gwendal said.

  “If I don’t see you again, good-bye,” Gloria said to Gwendal.

  The kid stared at her.

  —

  Jean was driving, turning here and there, passing the houses of those she had once loved.

  “That’s Chuckie’s house,” Jean said. “The one with the hair.” They drove slowly by, looking at Chuckie’s house. “Charming on the outside but sleazy inside, just like Chuckie. He broke my heart, literally broke my heart. Well, his foot is going to slide in due time, as they say, and I want to be around for that. That’s why I’ve decided to stay.” She said a moment later, “It’s not really.”

  They passed Fred’s house. Everybody had a house.

  “Fred has a pond,” Jean said. “We can go for a swim there later. I always use Fred’s pond. He used to own a whole quarry, can you imagine? This was before our time with him, Gwendal’s and mine, but kids were always getting in there and drowning. He put up big signs and barbed wire and everything but they still got in. It got to be too much trouble, so he sold it.”

  “Too much trouble!” Gloria said.

  Death seemed preposterous. Totally unacceptable. Those silly kids, Gloria thought. She was elated and knew that she would soon feel tired and uneasy, but maybe it wouldn’t happen this time. The day was bright, clean after the rain. Leaves lay on the streets, green and fresh.

  “Those were Fred’s words, too much trouble. Can’t I pick them? I can really pick them.” Jean shook her head.

  They drove to Bill’s house. Next to it was a pasture with horses in it. “Those aren’t Bill’s horses, but they’re pretty, aren’t they,” Jean said. “You’re going to love Bill. He’s gotten a little strange but he always was a little strange. We are who we are, aren’t we. He carves ducks.”

  Bill was obviously not expecting them. He was a big man with long hair wearing boxer shorts and smoking a cigar. He looked at Jean warily.

  “This used to be the love of my life,” Jean said. To Bill, she said, “This is Gloria, my dearest friend.”

  Gloria felt she should demur, but smiled instead. Her condition didn’t make her any more honest, she had found.

  “Beautiful messengers, bad news,” Bill said.

  “We just thought we’d stop by,” Jean said.

  “Let me put on my pants,” he said.

  The two women sat in the living room, surrounded by wooden ducks. The ducks, exquisite and oppressive, nested on every surface. Bufflehead, canvasback, scaup, blue-winged teal. Gloria picked one up. It looked heavy but was light. Shoveler, mallard, merganser. The names kept coming to her.

  “I forgot the lunch so we’ll just stay a minute,” Jean whispered. “I was mad about this man. Don’t you ever wonder where it all goes?”

  Bill returned, wearing trousers and a checked shirt. He had put his cigar somewhere.

  “I love these ducks,” Jean said. “You’re getting so good.”

  “You want a duck,” Bill said.

  “Oh, yes!” Jean said.

  “I wasn’t offering you one. I just figured that you did.” He winked at Gloria.

  “Oh, you,” Jean said.

  “Take one, take one.” Bill sighed.

  Jean picked up the nearest duck and put it in her lap.

  “That’s a harlequin,” Bill said.

  “It’s bizarre, I love it.” Jean gripped the duck tightly.

  “You want a duck?” Bill said to Gloria.

  “No,” Gloria said.

  “Oh, take one!” Jean said excitedly.

  “Decoys have always been particularly abhorrent to me,” Gloria said, “since they are objects designed to lure a living thing to its destruction with the false promise of safety, companionship and rest.”

  They both looked at her, startled.

  “Wow, Gloria,” Jean said.

  “These aren’t decoys,” Bill said mildly. “People don’t use them for decoys anymore, they use them for decoration. There are hardly any ducks left to hunt. Ducks are on their way out. They’re in a free fall.”

  “Diminishing habitat,” Jean said.

  “There you go,” Bill said.

  Black duck, pintail, widgeon. The names kept moving toward Gloria, then past.

  “I’m more interested in creating dramas now,” Bill said. “I’m getting away from the static stuff. I want to make dramatic moments. They have to be a little less than life-sized, but otherwise it’s all there…the whole situation.” He stood up. “Just a second,” he said.

  Once he was out of the room, Jean turned to her. “Gloria?” she said.

  Bill returned carrying a large object covered by a sheet. He set it down on the floor and took off the sheet.

  “I like it so far,” Jean said after a moment.

  “Interpret away,” Bill said.

  “Well,” Jean said, “I don’t think you should make it too busy.”

  “I said interpret, not criticize,” Bill said.

  “I just think the temptation would be to make something like that too busy. The temptation would be to put stuff in all those little spaces.”

  Bill appeared unmoved by this possible judgment, but he replaced the sheet.

  —

  In the car, Jean said, “Wasn’t that awful. He should stick to ducks.”

  According to Bill, the situation the object represented seemed to be the acceptance of inexorable fate, this acceptance containing within it, however, a heroic gesture of defiance.

  This was the situation, ideally always the situation, and it had been transformed, more or less abstractly, by Bill, into wood.

  “He liked you.”

  “Jean,
why would he like me?”

  “He was flirting with you, I think. Wouldn’t it be something if you two got together and we were all here in this one place?”

  “Oh, my god,” Gloria said, putting her hands over her face. Jean glanced at her absentmindedly. “I should be getting back,” Gloria said. “I’m a little tired.”

  “But you just got here, and we have to take a swim at Fred’s. The pond is wonderful, you’ll love the pond. Actually, listen, do you want to go over to my parents’ for lunch? My mother can make us something nice.”

  “Your parents live around here too,” Gloria asked.

  Jean looked frightened for a moment. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? They’re so sweet. You’d love my parents. Oh, I wish you’d talk,” she exclaimed. “You’re my friend. I wish you’d open up some.”

  They drove past Chuckie’s house again. “Whose car is that now?” Jean wondered.

  “I remember trying to feed my mother a spoonful of dust once,” Gloria said.

  “Why?” Jean said. “Tell!”

  “I was little, maybe four. She told me that I had grown in her stomach because she’d eaten some dust.”

  “No!” Jean said. “The things they tell you when they know you don’t know.”

  “I wanted there to be another baby, someone else, a brother or a sister. So I had my little teaspoon. Eat this, I said. It’s not a bit dirty. Don’t be afraid.”

  “How out of control!” Jean cried.

  “She looked at it and said she’d been talking about a different kind of dust, the sort of dust there was on flowers.”

  “She was just getting in deeper and deeper, wasn’t she?” Jean said. She waited for Gloria to say more but the story seemed to be over.

  —

  It was dark when she got back to the cabins. There were no lights on anywhere. She remembered being happy off and on that day, and then looking at things and finding it all unkind. It had gotten harder for her to talk, and harder to listen too, but she was alone now and felt a little better. Still, she didn’t feel right. She knew she would never be steady. It would never seem all of a piece for her. It would come and go until it stopped.

  She pushed open the door and turned on the lamp beside the bed. There were three sockets in the lamp but only one bulb. There had been more bulbs in the lamp last night. She also thought there had been more furniture in the room, another chair. Reading would have been difficult, if she had wanted to read, but she was tired of reading, tired of books. After they had told her the first time and even after they had told her the other times in different ways, she had wanted to read, she didn’t want to just stand around gaping at everything, but she couldn’t pick the habit up again, it wasn’t the same.

  The screen in the window was a mottled bluish green, a coppery, oceanic color. She thought of herself as a child with the spoonful of dust, but it was just a memory of her telling it now.

  In the middle of the night she woke, soaked with sweat. Someone was right outside, she thought. Then this feeling vanished. She gathered up her things and put everything in the car. She did this all hurriedly, and then drove quickly to Jean’s house. She parked out front and turned the lights off. After a few moments, Gwendal appeared. She was wearing an ugly dress and carrying a suitcase. There were creases down one side of her face as though she’d been sleeping hard before she woke. “Where to first?” Gwendal said.

  What they did first was to drive to the monastery and steal a dog. Gloria suspected that a fatal illness made her more or less invisible, and this seemed to be the case. She drove directly to the kennel, went in and walked out with a dog. She put him in the backseat and they drove off.

  “We’ll avoid the highway,” Gloria said. “We’ll stick to the back roads.”

  “Fine with me,” Gwendal said.

  Neither of them spoke for miles, then Gwendal said, “Would you say he’s handsome and he knows it?”

  “He’s a dog,” Gloria said. Gwendal was really mixed up. She was worse than her mother, Gloria thought.

  They pulled into a diner and had breakfast. Then they went to a store and bought notebooks, pencils, dog food and gin. They bought sunglasses. It was full day now. They kept driving until dusk. They were quite a distance from Jean’s house. Gloria felt sorry for Jean. She liked to have everyone around her, even funny little Gwendal, and now she didn’t.

  Gwendal had been sleeping. Suddenly she woke up. “Do you want to hear my dream?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” Gloria said.

  “Someone, it wasn’t you, told me not to touch this funny-looking animal, it wasn’t him,” Gwendal said, gesturing toward the dog. “Every time I’d pat it, it would bite off a piece of my arm or a piece of my chest. I just had to keep going ‘It’s cute’ and keep petting it.”

  “Oh,” Gloria said. She had no idea what to say.

  “Tell me one of your dreams,” Gwendal said, yawning.

  “I haven’t been dreaming lately,” Gloria said.

  “That’s not good,” Gwendal said. “That shows a lack of imagination. Readiness, it shows a lack of readiness, maybe. Well, I can put the dreams in later. Don’t worry about it.” She chose a pencil and opened the notebook. “OK,” she said. “Married?”

  “No.”

  “Any children?”

  “No.”

  “Allergies?”

  Gloria looked at her.

  “Do you want to start at the beginning or work backward from the Big Surprise,” Gwendal asked.

  They were on the outskirts of a town, stopped at a traffic light. Gloria looked straight ahead. Beginnings. She couldn’t remember any beginnings.

  “Hey,” someone said. “Hey!”

  She looked to her left at a dented car full of young men. One of them threw a can of beer at her. It bounced off the door and they sped off, howling.

  “Everyone knows if someone yells ‘Hey’ you don’t look at them,” Gwendal said.

  “Let’s stop for the night,” Gloria said.

  “How are you feeling,” Gwendal asked…not all that solicitously, Gloria thought.

  They pulled into the first motel they saw. Gloria fed the dog and had a drink while Gwendal bounced on the bed. He seemed a most equable dog. He drank from the toilet bowl and gnawed peaceably on the bed rail. Gloria and Gwendal ate pancakes in an empty restaurant and strolled around a swimming pool that had a filthy rubber cover rolled across it. Back in the room, Gloria lay down on one bed while Gwendal sat on the other.

  “Do you want me to paint your nails or do your hair,” Gwendal asked.

  “No,” Gloria said. She was recalling a bad thought she’d had once, a very bad thought. It had caused no damage, however, as far as she knew.

  “I wouldn’t know how to do your hair, actually,” Gwendal said.

  With a little training, Gloria thought, this kid could be a mortician.

  That night Gloria dreamed. She dreamed she was going to the funeral of some woman who had been indifferent to her. There was no need for her to be there. She was standing with a group of people. She felt like a criminal, undetected, but she felt chosen, too, to be there when she shouldn’t be. Then she was lying across the opening of a cement pipe. When she woke, she was filled with relief, knowing she would forget the dream immediately. It was morning again. Gwendal was outside by the unpleasant pool, writing in her notebook.

  “This was happiness then,” she said, scribbling away.

  “Where’s the dog,” Gloria asked. “Isn’t he with you?”

  “I don’t know,” Gwendal said. “I let him out and he took off for parts unknown.”

  “What do you mean!” Gloria said. She ran back to the room, went to the car, ran across the cement parking lot and around the motel. Gloria didn’t have any name to call the dog with. It had just disappeared without having ever been hers. She got Gwendal in the car and they drove down the roads around the motel. She squinted, frightened, at black heaps along the shoulder and in the littered grass, but it was tires,
rags, tires. Cars sped by them. Along the median strip, dead trees were planted at fifty-foot intervals. The dog wasn’t anywhere that she could find. Gloria glared at Gwendal.

  “It was an accident,” Gwendal said.

  “You have your own ideas about how this should be, don’t you?”

  “He was kind of a distraction,” Gwendal said.

  Gloria’s head hurt. Back in the desert, just before she had made this trip, she had had her little winter. Her heart had pounded like a fist on a door. But it was false, all false, for she had survived it.

  Gwendal had the hateful notebook on her lap. It had a splatter black cover with the word Composition on it. “Now we can get started,” she said. “Today’s the day. Favorite color,” she asked. “Favorite show tune?” A childish blue barrette was stuck haphazardly in her hair, exposing part of a large, pale ear.

  Gloria wasn’t going to talk to her.

  After a while, Gwendal said, “They were unaware that the fugitive was in their midst.” She wrote it down. Gwendal scribbled in the book all day long and asked Gloria to buy her another one. She sometimes referred to Gloria’s imminent condition as the Great Adventure.

  Gloria was distracted. Hours went by and she was driving, though she could barely recall what they passed. “I’m going to pull in early tonight,” she said.

  The motel they stopped at late that afternoon was much like the one before. It was called the Motel Lark. Gloria lay on one bed and Gwendal sat on the other. Gloria missed having a dog. A dog wouldn’t let the stranger in, she thought sentimentally. Whereas Gwendal would in a minute.

  “We should be able to talk,” Gwendal said.

  “Why should we be able to talk?” Gloria said. “There’s no reason we should be able to talk.”

  “You’re not open is your problem. You don’t want to share. It’s hard to imagine what’s real all by yourself, you know.”

  “It is not!” Gloria said hotly. They were bickering like an old married couple.

  “This isn’t working out,” Gloria said. “This is crazy. We should call your mother.”

  “I’ll give you a few more days, but it’s true,” Gwendal said. “I thought this would be a more mystical experience. I thought you’d tell me something. You don’t even know about makeup. I bet you don’t even know how to check the oil in that car. I’ve never seen you check the oil.”