The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “Faith illuminates that letter for us,” Daniel said. “Love is the great translator. On the other hand, how’s Dad’s eyesight? Does he buy good-quality pens or does he buy them ten for two dollars?”

  “The man refuses to be a guest.” Bliss laughed. “Actually, I don’t know why I made that up about the letter.”

  “I’m a little giddy tonight myself,” Daniel said. “I suppose it’s the thrill of saddling up and moving on.”

  Bliss put his hand on Joan’s back and lightly touched her hair. For an instant Joan hated him, and in another instant felt sick, drowning. She saw the party set up beneath the trees, illuminated by candles stuck in paper bags of sand. People were eating ribs and salad from large china plates. Donna remained lying on her back on the bench, her arms dangling, her hands, loosely curved, touching the grass. Joan pulled away from Bliss and walked over to her. The girl’s eyes were open and she wore shiny pants, pegged and zippered at the ankles. Her blouse looped out over her belt.

  “Can I get you something to eat?” Joan asked. She was solicitous and incurious. But people were supposed to be making connections like these all the time, she thought, all through their lives.

  Donna sat up abruptly. “I shouldn’t be behaving like this, should I? I’m making a fool of myself, aren’t I?” Joan sat beside her on the bench. “My husband’s sick and doesn’t want me anymore,” she said. “When he was well he was always saying he didn’t want me to have a baby yet. He said he wanted to wait a while before we had a baby. Men always act as though the same baby is waiting out there in the dark each month, did you ever notice that?”

  At the edge of the party, Amanda Sherrill, her long peach-colored hair shining and swinging, demonstrated a hip-slimming exercise to a small exuberant group. She grasped the seat of a lawn chair and extended her left leg upward in a slow arc.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Jack Buttrick screamed.

  “Your husband is very pleasant,” Donna said. “He’s funny, isn’t he? And you’re pleasant. It was very nice of you to invite me here. I’d been driving around in Harry’s car and crying to myself, and then I hit you. You were so nice about it.” She looked at Joan uneasily. “Your husband thinks we’re a little alike,” she said. “I never would’ve guessed you were from the South. Do you miss Florida?”

  “My father always used to call it Floridon’t,” Joan said. This was how it was supposed to be, she thought. Memory and conversation, clarification and semblance, miscalculation and repentance, skim and rest.

  Donna laughed, showing considerable gum. Bliss isn’t going to be able to do much about that, Joan thought. “I’ll get us something to eat,” she said. She walked toward the house, having no intention of getting anyone anything to eat.

  Joan went up to the second floor, entered the bedroom and closed the door. She stood by the window and looked down into the adjoining yard. The muscular young man with the mustache had gone into the pen and was playing with the Doberman puppy, who spun in tight, exhilarated circles. The owner put his hands on the dog’s shoulders and pushed him from side to side. Joan stood by the window, watching. Moonlight fell across the ribbon of earth where the man and the dog playfully pulled and turned and rose against each other. Then the man grasped the dog by the collar and led him into the house and the pen was empty.

  Some time later, Bliss came into the room. He stood behind her and put his arms around her. His face was damp and his hair smelled of cigarette smoke.

  “Do you remember when we drove up here,” Joan said, “when it was finished?”

  “Don’t whisper,” Bliss said.

  “We left everything behind and drove all through the night and in the morning we stopped at this little picnic grove by a river and there were two old people there and they were washing this big white dog in the river. A big old white dog. They washed him so carefully and then dried him with a towel. He was what they had.”

  “Everyone’s about to leave,” Bliss said. “Let’s go down and say good night.”

  “I don’t want to be like those old people,” Joan said.

  “Never,” Bliss said. “Let’s go down and say good night. Just this one more time.”

  The Blue Men

  Bomber Boyd, age thirteen, told his new acquaintances that summer that his father had been executed by the state of Florida for the murder of a sheriff’s deputy and his drug-sniffing dog.

  “It’s a bummer he killed the dog,” a girl said.

  “Guns, chair or lethal injection?” a boy asked.

  “Chair,” Bomber said. He was sorry he had mentioned the dog in the same breath. The dog had definitely not been necessary.

  “Lethal injection is fascist, man,” a small, fierce-looking boy said. “Who does lethal injection?”

  “Florida, Florida, Florida,” the girl murmured. “We went to Key West once. We did sunset. We did Sloppy’s. We bought conch-shell lamps with tiny plastic flamingos and palm trees lit up inside by tiny lights.” The girl’s hair was cut in a high Mohawk that rose at least half a foot in the air. She was pale, her skin flawless except for one pimple artfully flourishing above her full upper lip.

  “Key West isn’t Florida,” a boy said.

  There were six of them standing around, four boys and two girls. Bomber stood there with them, waiting.

  —

  May was in her garden looking through a stack of a hundred photographs that her son and daughter-in-law had taken years before when they visited Morocco. Bomber had been four at the time and May had taken care of him all that spring. There were pictures of camels, walled towns, tiled staircases and large vats of colored dyes on rooftops. May turned the pictures methodically. There were men washing their heads in a marble ablutions basin. On a dusty road there was the largest pile of carrots May had ever seen. May had been through the photographs many times. She slowly approached the one that never ceased to trouble her, a picture of her child in the city of Fez. He wore khaki pants and a polo shirt and was squatting beside a blanket on which teeth were arranged. It had been explained to May that there were many self-styled dentists in Morocco who pulled teeth and then displayed them on plates they then sold. In the photograph, her son looked healthy, muscular and curious, but there was something unfamiliar about his face. It had begun there, May thought, somehow. She put the photographs down and picked up a collection of postcards from that time, most of them addressed to Bomber. May held one close to her eyes. Men in blue burnooses lounged against their camels, the desert wilderness behind them. On the back was written, The blue men! We wanted so much to see them but we never did.

  —

  May and Bomber were trying out their life together in a new town. They had only each other, for Bomber’s mother was resting in California, where she would probably be resting for quite some time, and May’s husband, Harold, was dead. In the new town, which was on an island, May had bought a house and planted a pretty little flower garden. She had two big rooms upstairs that she rented out by the week to tourists. One was in yellow and the other in rose. May liked to listen to the voices in the rooms, but as a rule her tourists didn’t say much. Actually, she strained to hear at times. She was not listening for sounds of love, of course. The sounds of love were not what mattered, after all.

  Once, as she was standing in the upstairs hallway polishing a small table, her husband’s last words had returned to her. Whether they had been spoken again by someone in the room, either in the rose room or the yellow room, she did not quite know, but there they were. That doctor is so stuck on himself…the same words as Harold’s very last ones.

  The tourists would gather seashells and then leave them behind when they left. They left them on the bureaus and on the windowsills and May would pick them up and take them back to the beach. On nights when she couldn’t sleep she would walk downtown to a bar where the young people danced, the Lucky Kittens, and have a glass of beer. The Lucky Kittens was a loud and careless place where there was dancing all night long. May sat alone at a table n
ear the door, an old lady, dignified and out of place.

  —

  Bomber was down at the dock, watching tourists arrive on the ferry. The tourists were grinning and ready for anything, they thought. Two boys were playing catch with a tennis ball on the pier, the older one wearing a college sweatshirt. The younger one sidled back and forth close to the pier’s edge, catching in both hands the high, lobbed throws the other boy threw. The water was high and dark and flecked with oil, and they were both laughing like lunatics. Bomber believed they were brothers and enjoyed watching them.

  A girl moved languidly across the dock toward him. She was the pale girl with the perfect pimple and she touched it delicately as she walked. Her shaved temples had a slight sheen of baby powder on them. Her name was Edith.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Edith said, “and I think that what they should do, like, a gesture is enough. Like for murderers they could make them wear black all the time. They could walk around but they’d have to be always in black and they’d have to wear a mask of some sort.”

  Sometimes Bomber thought of what had happened to his father as an operation. It was an operation they had performed. “A mask,” he said. “Hey.” He crossed his arms tight across his chest. He thought Edith’s long, pale face beautiful.

  She nodded. “A mask,” she said. “Something really amazing.”

  “But that wouldn’t be enough, would it,” Bomber asked.

  “They wouldn’t be able to take it off,” Edith said. “There’d be no way.” There was a pale vein on her temple, curving like a piece of string. “We didn’t believe what you told us, you know,” she said. “There was this kid, his name was Alex, and he had a boat. And he said he took this girl water-skiing who he didn’t like, and they were water-skiing in this little cove where swans were and he steered her right in the middle of the swans and she just creamed them, but he wasn’t telling the truth. He’s such a loser.”

  “Which one’s Alex,” Bomber asked.

  “Oh, he’s around,” Edith said.

  They were silent as the passengers from the ferry eddied around them. They watched the two boys playing catch, the younger one darting from side to side, never looking backward to calculate the space, his eyes only on the softly slowly falling ball released from his brother’s hand.

  “That’s nice, isn’t it?” Edith said. “That little kid is so trusting it’s kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.”

  Bomber wanted to touch the vein, the pimple, the shock of dark, waxed hair, but he stood motionless, slouched in his clothes. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Like, you know, if he fell in,” Edith said.

  —

  One Sunday, May went to church. It was a denomination that, as she gratefully knew, would bury anyone. She sat in a pew behind three young women and studied their pretty blond hair, their necks and their collars and their zippers. One of the girls scratched her neck. A few minutes later, she scratched it again. May bent forward and saw a small tick crawling on the girl. She carefully picked it off with her fingers. She did it with such stealth that the girl didn’t even know that May had touched her. May pinched the tick vigorously between her fingernails for some time and then dropped it to the floor, where it vanished from her sight.

  After the service, there was a coffee hour. May joined a group around a table that was dotted with plates of muffins, bright cookies and glazed cakes. When the conversation lagged, she said, “I’ve just returned from Morocco.”

  “How exotic!” a woman exclaimed. “Did you see the Casbah?” The group turned toward May and looked at her attentively.

  “There are many casbahs,” May said. “I had tea under a tent on the edge of the Sahara. The children in Morocco all want aspirin. ‘Boom-boom la tête,’ they say, ‘boom-boom la tête.’ Their little hands are dry as paper. It’s the lack of humidity, I suppose.”

  “You didn’t go there by yourself, did you,” a woman asked. She panted as she spoke.

  “I went alone, yes,” May said.

  The group hummed appreciatively. May was holding a tiny blueberry muffin in her hand. She couldn’t remember picking it up. It sat cupped in the palm of her hand, the paper around it looking like the muffin itself. May had been fooled by such muffins in public places in the past. She returned it to the table.

  “I saw the blue men,” May said.

  The group looked at her, smiling. They were taller than she and their heads were tilted toward her.

  “Most tourists don’t see them,” May said. “They roam the deserts. Their camels are pale beige, almost white, and the men riding them are blue. They wear deep blue floating robes and blue turbans. Their skin is even stained blue where the dye has rubbed off.”

  “Are they wanderers,” someone asked. “What’s their purpose?”

  May was startled. She felt as though the person were regarding her with suspicion.

  “They’re part of the mystery,” she said. “To see them is to see part of the mystery.”

  “It must have been a sight,” someone offered.

  “Oh yes,” May said, “it was.”

  After some moments, the group dispersed and May left the church and walked home through the town. She liked the town, which was cut off from other places. People came here only if they wanted to. You couldn’t find this place by accident. The town seemed to be a place to visit and most people didn’t stay on. There were some, of course, who had stayed on. May liked the clear light of the town and the trees rounded by the wind. She liked the trucks and the Jeeps with the dogs riding in them. When the trucks were parked, the dogs would stare solemnly down at the pavement as though something there was astounding.

  May felt elated, almost feverish. She had taken up lying rather late in life, but with enthusiasm. Bomber didn’t seem to notice, even though he had, in May’s opinion, a hurtful obsession with the truth. When May got back to her house, she changed from her good dress into her gardening dress. She looked at herself in the mirror. I’m in charge of this person, she thought. “You’d better watch out,” she said to the person in the mirror.

  —

  Bomber’s friends don’t drink or smoke or eat meat. They are bony and wild. In the winter, a psychiatrist comes into their classrooms and says, You think that suicide is an escape and not a permanent departure, but the truth is that it is a permanent departure. They know that! Their eyes water with boredom. Their mothers used to lie to them when they were little about dead things, but they know better now. It’s stupid to wait for the dead to do anything new. But one of their classmates had killed himself, so the psychiatrist would come back every winter.

  “They planted a tree,” Edith said, “you know, in this kid’s memory at school, and what this kid had done was to hang himself from a tree.” She rolled her eyes. “I mean, this school. You’re not going to believe this school.”

  Edith and Bomber sat on opposite sides of May’s parlor, which was filling with twilight. Edith wore a pair of men’s boxer shorts, lace-up boots and a lurid Hawaiian shirt. “This is a nice house,” Edith said. “It smells nice. I see your granny coming out of the Kittens sometimes. She’s cute.”

  “A thing I used to remember about my dad,” Bomber said, “was that he gave me a tepee once when I was little and he pitched it in the middle of the living room. I slept in it every night for weeks, right in the middle of the living room. It was great. But it actually wasn’t my dad who had done that at all, it was my gramma.”

  “Your granny is so cute,” Edith said. “I know I’d like her. Do you know Bobby?”

  “Which one’s Bobby,” Bomber asked.

  “He’s the skinny one with the tooth that overlaps a little. He’s the sort of person I used to like. What he does is he fishes. There’s not a fish he can’t catch.”

  “I can’t do that,” Bomber said.

  “Oh, you don’t have to do anything like that now,” Edith said.

  —

  The last things May had brough
t her son were a dark suit and a white shirt. They told her she could if she wished, and she had. She had brought him many things in the two years before he died—candy and cigarettes, books on all subjects—and lastly she had brought these things. She had bought the shirt new and then washed it at home several times so it was soft and then she had driven over to that place. It was a cool, misty morning and the air smelled of chemicals from the mills miles away. Dew glittered on the wires and on the grasses and the fronds of palms. She sat opposite him in the tall, narrow, familiar room, its high windows webby with steel, and he had opened the box with the shirt in it. Together they had looked at it. Together, mutely, they had bent their heads over it and stared. Their eyes had fallen into it as though it were a hole. They watched the shirt and it seemed to shift and shrink as though to accommodate itself to some ghastly and impossible interstice of time and purpose.

  “What a shirt,” her child said.

  “Give it back,” May whispered. She was terribly frightened. She had obliged some lunatic sense of decorum, and dread—the dread that lay beyond the fear of death—seized her.

  “This is the one, I’m going out in this one,” her child said. He was thin, his hair was gray.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” May said. “Please give it back, I can’t think about any of this.”

  “I was born to wear this shirt,” her child said.

  —

  In the Lucky Kittens, over the bar, was a large painting of kittens crawling out of a sack. The sack was huge, out of proportion to the sea and the sky behind it. When May looked at it for a time, the sack appeared to tremble. One night, as she was walking home, someone brushed against her, almost knocking her down, and ran off with her purse. Her purse had fifteen dollars in it and in it too were the postcards and pictures of Morocco. May continued to walk home, her left arm still feeling the weight of the purse. It seemed heavier now that it wasn’t there. She pushed herself forward, looking, out of habit, into the handsome homes along the street. The rooms were artfully lit as though on specific display for the passerby. No one was ever seen in them. At home, she looked at herself in the mirror for bruises. There were none, although her face was deeply flushed.