The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “You might want to fiddle around with the height,” Carl said. “You can make great stuff with antlers, too. Chandeliers, candelabras. You can use antlers to frame just about anything.”

  “We have lamps,” Miriam said. She was holding a wan perennial she had liberated from a supermarket.

  “Gosh, this appeals to me, though, Miriam.”

  “I bet you’d be good at this sort of thing, sir,” Carl said. “I did one once and it was very relaxing.” He glanced at Miriam, squeezed his eyes almost shut and smiled.

  “It will be a novelty item, all right,” Jack said. “I think it will be fun.”

  “Maybe you’d like to go hunting sometime with me, sir,” Carl said. “We could go bow hunting for muleys together.”

  “You should resist the urge to do this, Jack, really,” Miriam said. The thought of a lamp made of animal legs in her life and turned on caused a violent feeling of panic within her.

  But Jack wanted to make a lamp. He needed another hobby, he argued. Hobbies were healthy, and he might even take Carl up on his bow-hunting offer. Why didn’t she get herself a hobby like baking or watching football? he suggested. He finished the lamp in a weekend and set it on an antique jelly cabinet in the sunroom. He’d had a little trouble trimming the legs to the same height. They might not have ended up being exactly the same height. Miriam, expecting to be repulsed by the thing, was enthralled instead. It had a dark blue shade and a gold-colored cord and a sixty-watt bulb. A brighter bulb would be pushing it, Jack said. Miriam could not resist the allure of the little lamp. She often found herself sitting beside it, staring at it, the harsh brown hairs, the dainty pasterns, the polished black hooves, all fastened together with a brass gimp band in a space the size of a dinner plate. It was anarchy, the little lamp, its legs snugly bunched. It was whirl, it was hole, it was the first far drums. She sometimes worried that she would start talking to it. This happened to some people, she knew, they felt they had to talk. She read that Luther Burbank spoke to cactus reassuringly when he wanted to create a spineless variety and that they stabbed him repeatedly; he had to pull thousands of spines from his hands but didn’t care. He continued to speak calmly and patiently; he never got mad, he persisted.

  “Miriam,” Jack said, “that is not meant to be a reading light. It’s an accent light. You’re going to ruin your eyes.”

  Miriam had once channeled her considerable imagination into sex, which Jack had long appreciated, but now it spilled everywhere and lay lightly on everything like water on a lake. It alarmed him a little. Perhaps, during semester break, they should take a trip together. To witness something strange with each other might be just the ticket. At the same time, he felt unaccountably nervous about traveling with Miriam.

  The days were radiant but it was almost fall and a daytime coolness reached out and touched everything. Miriam’s restlessness was gone. It was Jack who was restless.

  “I’m going to take up bow hunting, Miriam,” he said. “Carl seems to think I’d be a natural at it.”

  Miriam did not object to this as she might once have. Nevertheless, she could not keep herself from waiting anxiously beside the lamp for Jack’s return from his excursions with Carl. She was in a peculiar sort of readiness, and not for anything in particular, either. For weeks Jack went hunting, and for weeks he did not mind that he did not return with a former animal.

  “It’s the expectation and the challenge. That’s what counts,” he said. He and Carl would stand in the kitchen sharing a little whiskey. Carl’s skin was clean as a baby’s and he smelled cleanly if somewhat aberrantly of cold cream and celery. “The season’s young, sir,” he said.

  But eventually Jack’s lack of success began to vex him. Miriam and the lamp continued to wait solemnly for his empty-handed return. He grew irritable. Sometimes he would forget to wash off his camouflage paint, and he slept poorly. Then, late one afternoon when Jack was out in the woods, he fell asleep in his stand and toppled out of a tree, critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passed through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe. A large portion of his brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent’s coat. A month later, he could walk with difficulty and move one arm. He had some vision out of his remaining eye and he could hear but not speak. He emerged from rehab with a face as expressionless as a frosted cake. He was something that had suffered a premature burial, something accounted for but not present. Miriam was certain that he was aware of the morbid irony in this.

  The lamp was a great comfort to Miriam in the weeks following the accident. Carl was of less comfort. Whenever she saw him in the hospital’s halls, he was wailing and grinding his teeth. But the crooked, dainty deer-foot lamp was calm. They spent most nights together reading quietly. The lamp had eclectic reading tastes. It would cast its light on anything, actually. It liked the stories of Poe. The night before Jack was to return home, they read a little book in which animals offered their prayers to God—the mouse, the bear, the turtle and so on—and this is perhaps where the lamp and Miriam had their first disagreement. Miriam liked the little verses. But the lamp felt that though the author clearly meant well, the prayers were cloying and confused thought with existence. The lamp had witnessed a smattering of Kierkegaard and felt strongly that thought should never be confused with existence. Being in such a condition of peculiar and altered existence itself, the lamp felt some things unequivocally. Miriam often wanted to think about that other life, when the parts knew the whole, when the legs ran and rested and moved through woods washed by flowers, but the lamp did not want to reflect upon those times.

  Jack came back and Carl moved in with them. He had sold everything he owned except his big Chevy truck and wanted only to nurse Jack for the rest of his life. Jack’s good eye often teared, and he indicated both discomfort and agreement with a whistling hiss. Even so, he didn’t seem all that glad to see Miriam. As for herself, she felt that she had driven to a grave and gotten out of the car with the engine left running. Carl slept for a time in Jack’s study, but one night when Miriam couldn’t sleep and was sitting in the living room with the lamp, she saw him go into their room and shut the door. And that became the arrangement. Carl stayed with Jack day and night.

  One of the first things Carl wanted to do was to take a trip. He believed that the doleful visits from the other students tired Jack and that the familiar house and grounds didn’t stimulate him properly. While Miriam didn’t think highly of Carl’s ideas, this one didn’t seem too bad. She was ready to leave. After all, Jack had already left in his fashion and it seemed pointless to stay in his house. They all three would sit together in the big roomy cab on the wide cherry-red custom seat of Carl’s truck and tour the Southwest. The only thing she didn’t like was that the lamp would have to travel in the back with the luggage.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to it,” Carl said. “Look at dogs. Dogs ride around in the backs of trucks all the time. They love it.”

  “Thousands of dogs die each year from being pitched out of the backs of pickups,” Miriam said.

  Jack remained in the room with them while they debated the statistical probability of this. He was gaunt and his head was scarred, and he tended to resemble, if left to his own devices, a large white appliance. But Carl was always buying him things and making small alterations to his appearance. This day he was wearing pressed khakis, a crisp madras shirt, big black glasses and a black Stetson hat. Carl was young and guilty and crazy in love. He patted Jack’s wrists as he talked, not wanting to upset him.

  Finally, continuing to assert that he had never heard of a dog falling out of a pickup truck, Carl agreed to buy a camper shell and enclose the back. He packed two small bags for himself and Jack while Miriam got a cardboard carton and arranged her clothes around the lamp. Her plan was to unplug whatever lamp was in whatever motel room they stayed in and plug this one in. Clearly, that would be the high point of its day.

  They took to the road that night and didn�
�t stop driving until daylight disclosed that the landscape had changed considerably. There was a great deal of broken glass and huge cactus everywhere. Organ-pipe, saguaro, barrel cactus and prickly pear. Strange and stern shapes, far stiller than trees, less friendly and willing to serve. They seemed to be waiting for further transition, another awesome shift of the earth’s plates, an enormous occurrence. The sun bathed each spine, it sharpened the smashed bottles and threw itself through the large delicate ears of car-crushed jackrabbits. They saw few people and no animals except dead ones. The land was vast and still and there seemed to be considerable resentment toward the nonhuman creatures who struggled to inhabit it. Dead coyotes and hawks were nailed to fence posts and the road was hammered with the remains of lizards and snakes. Miriam was glad that the lamp was covered and did not have to suffer these sights.

  The first night they stopped at a motel, with a Chinese restaurant and lounge adjoining. Miriam ordered moo goo gai pan for dinner, something she had not had since she was a child, and an orange soda. Carl fed Jack some select tidbits from an appetizer platter with a pair of chopsticks. After they ate Miriam wandered into the lounge, but there was only a cat vigorously cleaning itself and staring at her with its legs splayed over its head. She picked up a couple of worn paperback books from the exchange table in the office and went back to her room. Through the walls she could hear Carl singing to Jack as he ran the bathwater. He would shampoo Jack’s hair, scrub his nails and talk about the future…Miriam turned on the lamp and examined one of the books. It concerned desert plants but many of the pages were missing and someone had spilled wine on the pictures. She did learn, however, that cactus are descended from roses. They were late arrivals, adapters, part of a new climate. She felt like that, felt very much a late arrival, it was her personality. She had adapted readily to being in love, and then adapted to not being in love anymore. And the new climate was, well, this situation. She put the book about cactus down.

  The other book was about hunting zebras in Africa. I shot him right up his big fat fanny, the author wrote. She had read this before she knew what she was doing and felt terrible about it, but the lamp held steady until she finally turned it off and got into bed.

  The next day they drove. They stopped at hot springs and ghost towns. They stopped on an Indian reservation and Carl bought Jack colored sand in a bottle. They stopped at a Dairy Queen and Miriam drove while Carl spooned blueberry Blizzard into Jack’s mouth. They admired the desert, the peculiar growths, the odd pale colors. They passed through a canyon of large, solitary boulders. There was a sign threatening fine and imprisonment for defacing the rocks but the boulders were covered with paint, spelling out people’s names, mostly. The shapes of the rocks resembled nothing though the words made them look like toilet doors in a truck stop. On the other side of the canyon was a small town with two museums, a brick hotel, a gas station and a large bar called the Horny Toad. Miriam had the feeling that the truck’s engine had stopped running.

  “Truck’s stopped,” Carl said.

  They coasted to the side of the road and Carl fiddled with the ignition.

  “Alternator’s shot, I bet,” he said. He took Jack’s sunglasses off, wiped them with a handkerchief and carefully hooked them back over Jack’s ears. Underneath her elbow, the metal of the door was heating up.

  “You check into the hotel,” Carl directed her. “Jack and I will walk down to the garage. He likes garages.”

  Carl helped Miriam get their luggage from the back and carried it into the hotel’s lobby. She arranged for two unadjoining rooms. They were the last rooms left, even though the hotel and town appeared deserted. The museums were closed and everyone was at the bar, the manager told her. One of the museums displayed only a petrified wedding cake, a petrified cat, some rocks and old clothes. It was typical and not worth going into, he confided. But people came from far and wide to see the other museum and speak to the taxidermist on duty. He was surprised that they had come here without having the museum as their destination. The taxidermist was a genius. He couldn’t make an animal look dead if he wanted to.

  “He can even do reptiles and combine them in artistic and instructive groups,” the manager said.

  “This museum is full of dead animals?” Miriam said.

  “Sure,” the manager said. “It’s a wildlife museum.”

  Miriam’s room was in the back of the hotel over the kitchen and smelled like the inside of a lunch box, but it wasn’t unpleasant. She rearranged the furniture, plugged in the lamp and gazed out the single window at the bar, a long, dark structure that seemed, the longer she stared at it, to be almost heaving with the muffled sound of voices. This was the Horny Toad. She decided to go there.

  Miriam had always felt that she was the kind of person who somehow quenched in the least exacting stranger any desire for conversation with her. This, however, was not the case at the Toad. People turned to her immediately and began to speak. They had bright, restless faces, seemed starved for affection and were in full conversational mode. A number of children were present. Everyone was wildly stimulated.

  A young woman with lank, thinning hair touched Miriam with a small dry hand. “I’m Priscilla Dickman and I’m an ex-agoraphobic,” she said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Yes,” Miriam said, startled. People were waving, smiling.

  “I used to be so afraid of losing control,” Priscilla said. “I was afraid of going insane, embarrassing myself. I was afraid of getting sick or doing something frightening or dying. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  She went off to the bar, saying she would return with gimlets. Miriam was immediately joined by an elderly couple wearing jeans, satin shirts and large, identical concha belts. Their names were Vern and Irene. They had spent all day at the museum and were happy and tired.

  “My favorite is the javelina family,” Irene said. “Those babies were adorable.”

  “Ugly animals,” Vern said. “Bizarre. But they’ve always been Irene’s favorite.”

  “Not last year,” Irene said. “Last year it was the bears, I think. Vern says that Life is just one thing but it takes different forms to amuse itself.”

  “That’s what I say, but I don’t believe it,” Vern said, winking broadly at Miriam.

  “Vern likes the ground squirrels.”

  Vern agreed. “Isn’t much of a display, but I like what I hear about them. That state-of-torpor thing. When the going gets rough, boom, right into a state of torpor. They don’t need anything. A single breath every three minutes.”

  Irene didn’t seem as fascinated as her husband by the state of torpor. “Have you gone yet, dear,” she asked Miriam. “Have you asked the taxidermist your question?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Miriam said. She accepted a glass from Priscilla, who had returned with a tray of drinks. “I’m Priscilla Dickman,” she said to the old couple, “and I’m an ex-agoraphobic.”

  “He doesn’t answer everybody,” Vern said.

  “He answers the children sometimes, but they don’t know what they’re saying,” Irene said fretfully. “I think children should be allowed only in the petting zoo.”

  A gaunt, grave boy named Alec arrived and identified himself as a tree hugger. He was with a girl named Argon.

  “When I got old enough to know sort of what I wanted?” Argon said, “I decided I wanted either a tree hugger or a car guy. I’d narrowed it down to that. At my first demonstration, I lay in the road with some other people in a park where they were going to bulldoze two-hundred-year-old trees for a picnic area. We had attracted quite a crowd of onlooking picnickers. When the cops came and carried me off, a little girl said, ‘Why are they taking the pretty one away, Mommy?’ and I was hooked. I just loved demonstrating after that, always hoping to overhear those words again. But I never did.”

  “We all get older, dear,” Irene said.

  “Car guys are kind of interesting,” Argon said. “They can be really hypnotic, but only when they’re talkin
g about cars, actually.”

  Sometime later, Alec was still in the midst of a long story about Indian environmentalists in the Himalayas. The tree-hugging movement started long ago, he’d been telling them, when the maharaja of Jodhpur wanted to cut down trees for yet another palace and a woman named Amrita Devi resisted his axmen by hugging a tree and uttering the now well-known statement “A chopped head is cheaper than a felled tree” before she was dismembered. Then her three daughters took her place and they, too, were dismembered. Then 359 additional villagers were dismembered before the maharaja called it off.

  “And it really worked,” Alec said, gnawing on his thumbnail. “That whole area is full of militant conservationists now. They have a fair there every year.” He gnawed furiously at his nail. “And on the supposed spot where the first lady died, no grass grows. Not a single blade. They’ve got it cordoned off.” He struggled for a moment with a piece of separated nail between his teeth, at last freed it, examined it for a moment, then flicked it to the floor.

  “You know, Alec,” Argon said, “I’ve never liked that story. It just misses the mark as far as I’m concerned.” She turned to Miriam. “Tree huggers tend sometimes not to have both feet on the ground. I want to be a spiritual and ecological warrior but I want both feet on the ground too.”

  Miriam looked at the white curving nail on the dirty floor. Jack wouldn’t have had much to go on with that. Even Jack. Who were these people? They were all so desperate. You couldn’t attribute their behavior to alcohol alone.

  Other people gathered around the table, all talking about their experiences in the museum, all expressing awe at the exhibits, the mountain lions, the wading birds, the herds of elk and the exotics, particularly the exotics. They had come from far away to see this. Many of them returned, year after year.

  “It’s impossible to leave the place unmoved,” a woman said.

  “My favorite is the wood ibis on a stump in a lonely swamp,” Priscilla said cautiously. “It couldn’t be more properly delineated.”