The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “Bless her heart,” Betty said.

  “Does she?” Pauline asked. “But there’s no way of judging that, is there? I mean, how can you even presume—”

  “I wish you’d continue,” Betty said to Starky.

  “Yes,” Bruce said. “Mustn’t get stalled on that one.”

  “My fourth daughter is a singer, an exquisite mezzo-soprano. Her voice was a great gift, she hasn’t had a single lesson. Even when it became clear that she was extraordinary we decided against formal training, which would only have perverted her voice’s singularity and freshness. Sing, I urged her always. Sing! For your voice will desert you one day without warning.”

  “Mommy,” Guinivere said—startling me, for I had forgotten her completely.

  “Do sing for us, Guinivere,” Betty said. “We so love it when you sing.”

  “Yes, go ahead,” her mother said.

  The girl’s round mouth grew rounder still and after a moment in which, I suppose, she composed herself, she sang in the most thrilling voice:

  If there had anywhere appeared in space

  Another place of refuge, where to flee,

  Our hearts had taken refuge in that place,

  And not with Thee.

  ………………

  And only when we found in earth and air,

  In heaven or hell, that such might nowhere be—

  That we could not flee from Thee anywhere,

  We fled to Thee.

  “How sweet,” Pauline allowed.

  “Is that Trench?” Bruce asked. “I’m not as keen as I used to be in identifying those old English hymnists.”

  Guinivere rose and said something urgently to Betty.

  “Go behind the bushes, dear,” Betty said. “It’s quite all right.”

  “Behind the bushes!” Pauline appeared scandalized. “She’s a grown woman!”

  “Our house rather frightens Guinivere,” Betty said.

  “Perhaps there are ghosts,” Pauline said. She giggled and whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell me the Vineyard wouldn’t be better than this.”

  “I don’t know about ghosts,” Betty said, “but in any old house you can be sure things happened, cruel and desperate things.”

  When Guinivere had disappeared behind the large lavender globes of the hydrangeas, her mother said quietly, “Her voice is in decline.”

  “I find that difficult to believe,” I said, though of course I am no expert. “Her voice is splendid.”

  Starky said calmly, “She is like a great tree in winter whose roots are cut, only mimicking what the other trees can promise—the life to come.”

  Guinivere returned and took her place. She could not be persuaded to sing again. We were all sitting on old metal chairs, rusted from years of the island’s heavy, almost unremitting fog, but not so badly that they marked one’s clothes. I believe Bruce and Betty stored them in the cellar during the winter.

  “My fifth daughter,” Starky resumed to my dismay, “is the one I personally taught about time. I did her no service for she is my most melancholy child. She is unable to give value to things and never surrenders herself to comforting distractions. Alternatives are meaningless to her. She is a hounded girl, desolate, a captive, seeking in silence some language that might serve her. Faith would allow her some relief but she resists the slavishness of spirit that faith would entail. No, for her faith is out of the question.”

  Bruce gestured for me to make fresh drinks for all. I wanted further drink badly, indeed I had almost taken Pauline’s glass and drained it as my own. I made the drinks quickly, without the niceties of sugar or lime and with the last of the ice.

  “My sixth daughter is dead,” Starky said. “She ran the brief race prescribed to her and now her race is done.”

  “She has a lovely stone,” Betty said.

  “She wanted a stone,” Starky said. “I had to assure her over and over that there would be a stone.”

  “Well, it’s lovely,” Betty said.

  “She found the peace which the world cannot give,” Starky said, quite unnecessarily, I thought.

  Pauline stared at her, then turned to me and said, “What could she possibly mean? How could she know what the poor thing found?”

  I wanted to calm her though I knew she was more angry than anxious. Only hours before this mad evening had begun we were sitting quite contentedly alone on the moors, or what on this island they refer to as moors. We had wasted the morning, we’d agreed then, but not the afternoon. We could not see the sea, though we were aware of it because of course it was all around us. Love’s bright mother from the ocean sprung, the Greeks believed.

  “I can’t bear this another moment,” Pauline said, rising to her feet. “Why do you expect to be so indulged? Why did you have so many? Where is the father? Who is the father? The children are freakish, at least as you present them. Why do you put them on such cruel display? Why are their efforts so feeble and familiar? Why are you not more concerned? This is not how friends spend a sociable evening. Why didn’t you tell a real story, not even once? How could you believe we would even be interested? No, I can’t endure this any longer.”

  And with this she hurried out, unerringly I must say, through the dark garden, across the uneven flagstone. It took me several minutes to deliver my apologies and good-byes, but even so I left in such haste that it was not until I was well down the street that I realized I was still wearing Bruce’s old sweater. I would mail it to him in the morning before we boarded the ferry. I wondered if Betty and Bruce would store the old chairs when the days grew bitter and if, assuming they did, the effort would be made to bring them out again in the spring.

  It must have been quite late for the streets were deserted. I hoped that a walk, at my own pace in the light chill fog, would clear my head. Starky had seemed amused by Pauline’s outburst and Betty and Bruce unperturbed, while Guinivere had not raised her head, either then or at my own departure. Indeed, she appeared to be practically in a stupor. Her mother might have been correct. The effort she was making could not be sustained much longer.

  I walked slowly down the cobblestoned main street, turning left at the museum where earlier in the day Pauline and I had spent less than an hour for it was a dispiriting place, cheerfully staffed by volunteer docents but displaying the most grotesque weapons and tools of eighteenth-century whaling—knives and spades and chisels, harpoons and lances and fluke chains. Antique drawings and prints accompanied by descriptive commentary filled the walls. One sentence concerning the end of the flensing process, which took place alongside the ships, remains with me: Finally the body was cast off and allowed to float away. Most disturbingly put, I felt, the word allowed being particularly horrible.

  Pauline had been quite right about the whales. Had they not cried out in the days of their destruction with exquisite and anguished song? Yet their pursuers wanted only to extinguish them. Indeed, man had reveled in the fine red mist that rose and then fell, as though from heaven, from the great collapsing hearts to herald the harried and bewildered creatures’ deaths.

  The inn where we had taken lodging was now in sight. I thought once again of the debt I owe Pauline and wondered if, in time, she would leave this life before me. It is proof of her success with me that I could entertain such a thought. One of us will be first, in any case, and until then we have each other.

  The Other Week

  “The fire department charged us three hundred and seventy-five dollars to relocate that snake,” Francine said.

  “Must have missed that one,” Freddie said. “Fire department was here? Big red truck and everything?”

  “There was a rattlesnake on the patio and I called the fire department and they had a long…it was some sort of hooked pole, and they got the snake in a box and released it somewhere and it shouldn’t have cost anything because that’s one of the services they provide to their subscribers, which is why everyone knows to call the fire department when a snake shows up on the patio. But we’re
not one of their subscribers, Freddie. I was informed of this after the fact. We have not paid their bill and their service is not included in our property taxes, which we likewise have not paid.”

  “Must’ve been taking a tub.”

  “The charge is excessive, don’t you think? They were here for five minutes.”

  “Why didn’t you just smack the thing with a hoe?”

  “It’s very civilized of the fire department to effect live removal. Why aren’t we one of their subscribers, Freddie? If the house started to burn down, they’d respond but it would cost us twenty-five thousand dollars an hour. That’s what they told me when I called to complain.”

  “The house isn’t going to burn down.”

  “Freddie, why aren’t you paying our bills?”

  “No money,” he said.

  It was October in the desert and quite still, so still that Francine could hear their aged sheltie drinking from the bidet in the pool house. He was forbidden to do this. Francine narrowed her eyes and smiled at her husband. “What happened to our money?”

  “It goes, Francine. Money goes. I haven’t worked in almost three years. Surely you’ve noticed.”

  “I have, yes.”

  “No money coming in, and you were sick for a year. That took its toll.”

  “They never figured out what that was all about,” Francine admitted.

  “No insurance. Seventeen doctors. You slept eighteen hours a day. All you ate was blueberries and wheatgrass.”

  “Well, that couldn’t have cost much.”

  “Like a goddamn mud hen.”

  “Freddie!”

  “Seventeen doctors. No insurance. Car costs alone shunting you around to doctors cost more than four thousand that year, not including regular maintenance, filters, shocks and the like. Should’ve rotated the tires but I was trying to keep costs down.”

  “There was something wrong with my blood or something,” Francine protested.

  “Bought you an armload of coral bracelets. Supposed to be good for melancholia. Never wore them. Never gave ’em a chance.”

  “They pinched,” Francine said.

  “Even stole aspirin for you. Stole aspirin every chance I got.”

  “That was very resourceful.”

  “Oh, be sarcastic, see where that gets you. There’s no point in discussing it further. We’re broke.”

  The sheltie limped out into the sun, sated. He barked hoarsely, then stopped. He was becoming more and more uncertain as to his duties.

  Francine went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She searched the refrigerator until she found a lemon, a small shriveled one from which she had some difficulty coaxing a bit of zestful juice. The refrigerator was full of meat. Freddie did the shopping and had overfamiliarized himself with the meat department.

  “Broke,” Francine said. He couldn’t be serious. They had a house, two cars. They had a gardener. She returned to the living room and sat down opposite her husband. He was wearing a white formal shirt with the linkless cuffs rolled up, black shorts and large black sunglasses. His gaze was directed toward an empty hummingbird feeder.

  “It’s bats that drain that thing at night,” Freddie said. “You don’t have hummingbirds at all, Francine. You’ve got lesser long-nosed bats. They arrive in groups of six. One feeds while the others circle in an orderly fashion awaiting their turn. I enjoyed watching them of an evening. Can’t even afford sugar water for the poor bastards anymore.”

  “What do you propose to do about our finances, Freddie?”

  “Ride it out. Let the days roll on. You had your year of sleeping eighteen hours a day.”

  “But that was a long time ago!” Once she had been the type of person who didn’t take much between drinks, as they say, but the marathon sleeping—it actually had been closer to twenty hours a day, Freddie always was a poor judge of time—had knocked the commitment to the sauce right out of her.

  “Seventeen doctors. No insurance. Never found out what it was.”

  “I pictured myself then very much like a particular doll I had as a little girl,” Francine mused. “She was a doll with a soft cloth body and a hard plastic head. She had blue eyes and painted curls, not real curls. The best part was that she had eyelids with black lashes of probably horsehair, and when you laid the doll on its back those hard little eyelids would roll down and Dolly would be asleep. Have I ever told you that’s how I pictured myself?”

  “Many, many times,” Freddie said.

  Dusk arrived. A dead-bolt gold. Francine maintained an offended silence as vermilion clouds streamed westward and vanished, never again to be seen by human eyes. Freddie made drinks for them both. Then he made dinner, which they took separately. A bit less meat humming in the refrigerator now. Francine retired to the bedroom and turned on the television. The sheltie staggered in and circled his little rug for long minutes before collapsing on it with a burp. He smelled a little, the poor dear.

  —

  Freddie in seersucker pajamas lay down beside her in the bed. He settled himself, then placed his hand in the vicinity of her thigh. A light blanket and a sheet separated his hand from the thigh itself. He raised his hand and slipped it beneath the blanket. But there was still the sheet. He worked his hand under the fabric until he finally got to her skin, which he patted.

  They were watching a film that was vicious and self-satisfied, tedious and predictable, when in a scene that did not serve particularly to further the plot a dead actor was introduced to digitally interact with a living one.

  The dead actor was acting away. “Look at that!” Francine said.

  The scene didn’t last long, it was just some cleverness. The dead actor seemed awkward but professional. Still, this wasn’t the scene he had contracted for. Watching, Francine knew a lot more than he did about his situation, but under the circumstances he was connecting pretty well with others.

  “What are you getting so upset about?” Freddie said.

  “Space and time,” she said. “Those used to be the requirements. Space and time or you couldn’t get into the nightclub. Our senses establish the conditions for the world we see. Kant said our senses were like the nightclub doorman who only let people in who were sensibly dressed, and the criterion for being properly dressed or respectably dressed, whatever, was that things had to be covered up in space and time.”

  “Who said this?”

  “Kant.”

  Freddie removed his hand from her thigh. “Something’s been lost in your translation of that one, Francine. Why does one want to get into the nightclub anyway? Or that nightclub rather than another one?”

  “We’re the nightclub!” she said. “We’re each our own nightclub! And the nightclub might want other patrons. Other patrons might be absolutely necessary for the nightclub to succeed!”

  “I think it’s a little late for us to be discussing Kant with such earnestness,” Freddie said.

  “You mean a little late at night or a little late in life?”

  He nodded, meaning both.

  She snatched the blanket off the bed and walked through the darkened house to the patio. It was long past the hour when people in the neighborhood used the outside. It was a big concern among Francine’s acquaintances, who were always vowing to utilize the outside more, but after a certain hour they stopped worrying about it. To many of Francine’s acquaintances, the outside was the only flagellator their consciences would ever know.

  She wrapped herself in the blanket and lay on the chaise longue. She was very uncomfortable, but when she lay on it in the daytime she never was. Finally she managed to wander into sleep, a condition for which she was losing her knack. When she woke it was glaring day and the gardener’s face was hanging over hers. His name was Dennis, and he’d been in their employ for years. She had never been stared at so thoroughly. She frowned and he drew back and stood behind her. He placed his fingers lightly on her forehead and ran them down her neck, then dragged them up again and rubbed her temples. The day was al
l around her. The refulgent day, she thought. His hand floated to just above her collarbone and she felt an excruciating pain as his thumb dug into the tendon there and scoured it. She screamed and struggled upright.

  “That shouldn’t hurt,” he said mildly. “It’s because you’re so tense.”

  She hurried into the house and quickly dressed. There was no coffee. She required coffee, and there was none. The house was silent. Both Freddie and the sheltie were gone. He sometimes took the dog for a walk, which Francine had thought was kind before she learned that their destination was usually a small park on a dry riverbed frequented by emaciated and tactically brilliant coyotes. There had been several instances when a coyote had materialized and carried off some pet absorbed in peeing, frolicking or quarreling with its own kind and thus inattentive to personal safety. Francine had accused Freddie of being irresponsible, but he insisted that these attacks were rare. More important was the possibility of attack, which gave distinction to an otherwise vapid suburban experience and provided a coherence and camaraderie among a group of people who socially, politically and economically had little in common. They were a fine bunch of people, Freddie assured her, and they shared a considerable pool of knowledge regarding various canine personality problems—fear-biting, abandonment issues and hallucinations among them—as well as such physical disorders as mange, anal impaction and incontinence, to name only a few.

  Francine searched hopelessly for coffee. Outside, Dennis had scooped up a large snake between the tines of a rake and was dropping it over the wall that separated their lot from the Benchleys’. It looked quite like the snake the fire department had recently removed. Dennis was being helpful but she would have to dismiss him. He would simply have to retreat to his life’s ambition, which he had once told her was to run a security-cactus ranch. There he would cultivate hybrids specific to sites, creating fast-growing, murderously flowering walls with giant devil’s-claw spines that could scoop an intruder’s throat out in a heartbeat.