The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “This is good,” June said.

  “It’s the same kind we always drink,” James said. “It’s from Cuba.”

  They stood or sat drinking beer while the boy slowly ate the sandwich and watched them.

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” Howard said. He threw his empty bottle down and pushed the sandals from his feet. “I have.” He made fists of his hands, rolled his eyes upward and quickly walked the length of the fire pit.

  “I don’t believe it,” Caroline said.

  He turned and walked the fire again. “Cool moss,” he screamed. “You think cool moss.” He sank to the ground laughing, unharmed.

  “You’re loco,” James said.

  “Feel my feet, feel them,” Howard said. “I ask you, are they hot?”

  Caroline boldly touched the soles of his feet and pronounced them not warm at all. They were clammy, in fact.

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with belief,” Howard said. “But if you have doubts, you burn. It’s an evolutionary stimulant. I am now evolutionarily advanced.”

  “That is a fire that should so be put out right now,” Abby said.

  “I want to walk,” Parker said. “I’m gonna walk.” He stood and made small fists.

  Abby yanked him toward her and slapped his bottom. “You are going to bed!” Abby said.

  The fire winked radiantly at them all. Howard was laughing. He was deeply, coldly happy, and the revulsion June felt for him shocked her. She looked at Caroline uneasily.

  “I do not believe this,” Caroline said.

  The Guatemalan boy had been collecting the empty bottles strewn about. He held them against his chest, against the bright red sweater. Then he put them down and, smiling furtively at Howard, stepped onto the fire. He screamed at once. Howard pulled him back, the boy screaming thinly. “You’re all right, man, you’re all right,” he said, pouring beer over the boy’s feet. “You were distracted and doubtful, man, and when you’re D and D, you burn. No tenga miedo. No es nada.” He held the boy’s feet and crooned No es nada to him mournfully, but he looked pleased.

  Whimpering, the boy reached blindly for his bottles and clutched them once more to his chest.

  “Get him out of here,” Caroline said. “Give him the rest of the food. Give him the whole damn basket.” She ran to the gates and opened them. “Váyase! Váyase!” she yelled at him.

  As the boy stumbled out, he almost collided with the fortune birds being escorted home on their motorbike. The man of the remarkable vein steadied him with a snarl and then, regarding them all grimly, pushed the motorbike across the courtyard.

  June ran up to him, digging coins from her pocket. “My fortune,” she said, “por favor.”

  “In the morning,” he said distinctly.

  June looked closely at the tiny prophets clinging wearily to the bars of their cage, at their tiny breasts and dull feathers. Only a few rolled papers tied with rough string were on the bottom of the cage.

  “More in the morning,” he said. “Better for you.”

  “No,” June said. “I need it now. Morning no good. No está bien,” she said cautiously. “That one, Planeta, I want her to do it.”

  “Importa poco.”

  “What?” June said.

  “It makes little difference.”

  “Planeta,” she insisted. She pointed to the little one with the dark, opaque eyes that looked as though they’d been ringed in crayon.

  “That is Justicio,” he said. “Justicio,” he sang softly, “Justicio…”

  The bird dropped to the soiled floor of the cage and seized a tiny scroll as if it were a seed of much importance, one that could nourish it throughout the night. June pressed her fingers to the crookedly woven bars, almost expecting to receive a slight shock. The bird knocked the paper against her fingers. Once. Twice. She took it and the bird fluttered upward to its perch, where it crouched like a clump of earth.

  “Oh, June,” Abby called. “What does it say?”

  She turned toward her friends and walked slowly toward them, unrolling the paper. The writing was florid and crowded. There were many unfamiliar words. Caroline knew the language best, then Howard. What a mistake this had been! She would need time to study it and there was no time. Everyone was looking at her.

  “Oh, it’s just silly,” she said, and threw it in the fire, where it burned sluggishly. No one attempted to retrieve it.

  “God, isn’t it late, where are my parents?” Abby said, yawning. “I want to go to bed.”

  June sat with them all a little while longer before going to her room. She lay on her bed discouraged, uncomfortably, listlessly awake. She heard a wailing from far away, but when she listened closely she could not hear it. She listened avidly now. Nothing. She could not recall the cadence of the drums. She had lied to James about that. But she could picture the anda being borne down the streets. That she would remember. It was fascinating to have seen the designs so meticulously created and then the anda passing, being borne on, swaying, and in its wake the designs smeared, crushed, a scattered wonder. And that part, the after, had been fascinating too.

  But she didn’t really believe it was fascinating. It wasn’t good to deceive yourself. She thought about Howard, hating him and his cold grin. He was fleshy, did he not know that? Fleshier than most. He was not attractive. That was a lie, what Howard had done. It could hardly be anything else. She thought of the mannequins praying in their cell. A lie, too, but one that was funny. Things had to be funny.

  —

  In the morning, Caroline’s dog was gone again. The rope had been knotted any number of times; it was always breaking. And when it broke, the dog would escape from the courtyard and, barking with joy, run through the streets. Caroline said that when it disappeared for good, it would be time to go. She had heard somewhere that angels tell you when it’s time to leave a place by leaving just before you. June thought she had heard that too. Something like that.

  Bromeliads

  Jones’s grandchild is eight days old. Jones and his wife have not been sent a picture of the baby and although they have spoken with their daughter several times on the telephone they do not have a very good idea of what the child looks like. It seems very difficult to describe a new baby. Jones has seen quite a few new babies in his years of serving a congregation and he has held them and gazed into their eyes. These experiences, however, cannot help him picture this child, his only grandchild, this harmonious and sweet thought that he carries green and graceful in his mind.

  Jones and his wife had no idea that their daughter was going to have a baby. They had seen her six months ago and she had mentioned nothing about a baby. Several days after the birth, her husband had called them with the news.

  Jones lies awake in the night, troubled by this. His wife twists restlessly beside him. She has been having great difficulty sleeping lately. Sleep is full of impossible chores, unending labors. She is so tired but her body cannot find any rest. She feels cold. She gets up and goes into the bathroom and runs hot water over her hands. She pats her cheeks with the hot water. While she is in the bathroom, Jones goes down to the kitchen and boils water for two cups of tea. He makes up a tray of tea and lemon peel and peanut butter cookies. He and his wife sit in bed and sip the tea. She does not feel so cold now. She feels better. They talk about the baby. Their daughter has told them that she has a nice mouth and pale brown hair.

  “Pale brown,” Jones says enthusiastically.

  His wife wants very much to travel down and see the baby even though the trip is more than a thousand miles. She wants to leave as soon as possible, the next day. She is insistent about this.

  —

  Jones walks with his daughter in the woods behind her small house. She is pointing out the various species of bromeliads that flourish there. The study of bromeliads is his daughter’s most recent enthusiasm. She is a thin, hasty, troubling girl with exact and joyless passions. She lopes silently ahead of Jones through the dappled lemon-
smelling woods. The trees twist upward. Only the tops of them are green. She is wearing a faded brief bikini, and there are bruises on her legs and splashes of paint on the bikini. There is a cast to the flesh, a slender delicate mossy line on her flat stomach, extending down from the navel. It is a wistful, insubstantial line.

  The baby is napping back in the little cypress cottage that Jones’s daughter and her husband are renting. Jones’s wife is napping too. Earlier that morning Jones had gone to the supermarket and bought food for his wife that was rich in iron. Perhaps she is tired because of an iron deficiency. Jones had gone through the aisles, pushing a cart. There was an arrangement in front of the handle that could be pushed back into a seat, two spaces through which a child could put his legs. Many children were in the store, transported in these carts. Some of them smiled at Jones with their small prim teeth. Jones had bought eggs, green vegetables, liver, molasses and nuts. When he returned, his wife had wanted nothing. She sat in her slip on a cot in the baby’s room.

  Jones fanned his face with a road map. “I’d like to treat us all to a strawberry soda later,” he said.

  “Oh, that would be very refreshing,” his wife replied. “That would be very nice, but right now I think I’d just like to watch the baby while she sleeps.” She had moved her lips in a gesture for Jones.

  Jones had kissed her forehead and gone outside. His daughter is walking there, padding through the rich mulch of oak leaves with her bare feet.

  “Neoregelia spectabilis,” his daughter says. “Aechmea fulgens.” There are hundreds of bromeliads, some growing in the crotches of trees, others clinging epiphytically to one another, massed across the ground. His daughter identifies them all. “Hohenbergia stellata,” she says. They are thick glossy plants with extraordinary flowers. Their rosettes of leaves are filled with water.

  “Perhaps Mother should drink some of this,” she says, waggling her finger in the cups of a heavily clustered bromeliad. The water is brown and acrid. Jones stares at his daughter. She shrugs. “They call it tea,” she says. Her face is remote and bony. “I don’t know,” she says, and begins gnawing on her nails.

  The sunlight falls down through the branches of the cedars and the live oaks as though through measured slats in a greenhouse.

  “Bromeliads are fascinating,” she says. “They live on nothing. Just the air and the wind. The rain brings dust and bird excrement to feed them. Leaves from trees fall into their cups and break down into nutrients. They must be one of God’s favorites. One doesn’t have to do anything for them. They require no care whatsoever.”

  Jones was saddened by her words.

  Jones’s daughter is preparing dinner. She darts from kitchen to porch, nursing the baby as she lays out the silverware. The cottage is dark and hot. Everyone is very hot. The dog drinks continually from a large bowl set on the floor. Jones fills it when it is empty and the dog continues to drink. Jones stands in the kitchen, by the refrigerator, filling a glass with ice cubes. His daughter is at the stove, stirring the white sauce with a whisk. The baby has fallen asleep, her cheek riding on her mother’s tanned breast, her mouth a lacy bubble of milk. Jones would like to hug them both, his daughter and her child. He does. The baby wakens with a squeak.

  “Daddy,” Jones’s daughter says. She hunches her shoulders. Her lower lip is split and burned by the sun. She has brushed her brown hair straight back from her forehead and a rim of skin just below the hairline is burned raw too. Jones stands beside her.

  “It’s too hot in the kitchen, Daddy, please,” she says.

  Jones walks to the porch with the glass of ice and gives it to his wife. She has a craving for ice. She chews it most of the day. “What is it that my body wants?” she asks, her teeth grinding the ice.

  Jones’s son-in-law arrives with a bottle of gin and makes everyone a gin and tonic with fresh limes from a tree that is visible from the house. The tree is in fruit and blossom at the same time.

  “Isn’t that peculiar?” Jones remarks.

  “It’s wonderful!” his wife says. “I understand that. It’s beautiful!”

  For a moment, Jones fears that she will cry.

  —

  Jones’s daughter has prepared a very nice meal. The sun has vanished, leaving the sky cerise. Jones’s wife wears a gay yellow silk blouse. It is the shade of the tropical south, of the summer sundown, a color that brings no light. They all prepare to sit down. Jones’s son-in-law looks concernedly at his hands.

  “Excuse me,” he says, “I must wash my hands.” He is blond, affable. He recognizes everyone in some way. There is in him a polite and not too inaccurate recognition of everything. He is a somnolent, affectionate young man.

  Jones and his wife and daughter sit down at the table.

  “Every time he has to take a leak, he gives me that crap about his hands,” Jones’s daughter says. “Every time. It drives me crazy.”

  Her hands knock angrily against the plates. Her husband returns. She won’t look at his face. Her eyes are fixed somewhere on his chest. She thrusts her face forward as though she is going to fall against his chest.

  Jones’s wife says, “I hope you take photographs of the baby. There can never be enough pictures. When one looks back, there are hardly any pictures at all.”

  —

  The night before Jones and his wife are to return home, he wakes abruptly from a sound sleep. He hastily puts on his bathrobe and moves through the strange room. He senses that he has fallen into this room, into, even, his life. He feels very much the weight of this moment, which seems without resolution. He is in the present, perfectly reconciled to the future but cut off from the past. It is the present that Jones has fallen into.

  He walks to the baby’s crib and she is fine, she’s sleeping. Jones moves a chair up beside the crib. The baby wakes when the morning comes. She begins to cry. Jones’s daughter does not come into the room. She has been gone from them now for hours.

  Jones can no longer think about his daughter with any confidence. His head sweats. The sweat runs down his cheeks. In things extreme, and scattering bright…a line from Donne, those are the words that murmur in his mind. There are no other words in his mind.

  —

  A letter from Jones’s daughter arrives several days later. His daughter writes, I am not well but I will get better if I can only have some time. She does not mention the baby.

  Everyone agrees that Jones and his wife should care for the baby. She is weaned easily. She is a healthy, good baby.

  Jones’s son-in-law is very apologetic. He folds his hands behind his back and bends slightly when he looks at the baby. He hums softly, abstractly, a visiting relative.

  —

  Months pass. The baby is five months old now. She is wearing bright blue overalls and a red turtleneck shirt. She is sitting on the floor and wants to take off one of her shoes. She struggles with the shoe. She cannot think of requesting or demanding assistance in this. She tugs and tugs.

  Jones and the baby sit with Jones’s wife in the hospital. It seems there is something wrong with her blood. She is not in a ward. She is just here for tests and she is in a stylish wing where she is allowed to wear her own clothes and even make a cup of tea on the hot plate. She bends now and unties the baby’s shoe and holds it in her hand. The baby isn’t wearing socks. Jones had just done a washing and none of the socks was dry.

  Jones wiggles the baby’s largest toe. “That’s Crandlehurst,” he says. He invents silly names for the baby’s toes.

  The baby looks severely at the toe and then stops looking at it without moving her eyes. Jones cannot think of names for all the baby’s toes. No fond and foolish names flower in his brain. No room! His brain, instead, hums hotly with weeds, the weedy metaphors of doctors. The white cells may be compared to the defending foot soldiers who engage the attacking enemy in mortal hand-to-hand combat and either destroy them or are themselves destroyed.

  Jones presses his finger as unobtrusively as possible against his tem
ple. He looks at the carpeting. It is redder than the baby’s jersey, red as a valentine.

  —

  Jones tells his wife how nice she looks. She is wearing a dress that he likes, one about which he has happy memories. It is very warm in the hospital. She has entered this hospital and is in another season. Outside it is winter. But the memory is one of summer, his wife in this dress with tanned pretty arms. Jones can share this with her. He shares his heart with her, all that there is. As Rilke said…where was it where Rilke said Like a piece of bread that has to suffice for two? His heart, Jones’s love. He looks at the dress. It is a trim blue and white check, slightly faded.

  It is summer. They are in a little cottage, on holiday. There is a straw rug on the floor, in a petal pattern through which the sand falls. When the rug is lifted, the design remains, perfectly, in the sand. There is a row of raisins on the porch sill for the catbirds.

  Jones remembers. In the mornings, the grass seems polished with a jeweler’s cloth. And Jones’s wife is in this dress, rubbing the face of their daughter with the hem of this dress. Yet it cannot be this dress, surely, everything was too long ago…

  But now the visiting hours are over. A buzzer goes off in each of the rooms. Jones and the baby return home. Jones undresses her and then dresses her again for bed. He stays in her room long after she has fallen asleep. Then he goes downstairs and builds a fire in the fireplace and searches through the bookshelves for his collection of Rilke’s work. The poems have been translated but the essays have not. He takes out his German grammar and begins to search for the phrase that came to him so magically earlier in the evening. Jones enjoys the feel of the grammar. He enjoys the words of another language. He needs another language, other words. He is so weary of the words he has. He enjoys the search. Is not everything the search? An hour later he comes across the passage. It is not as Jones had thought, not as he expected. Rilke is speaking not of women but of Dinge. He is speaking not of lovers and life, but of dolls and death. Each word rises to Jones’s lips. Was it not with a thing that you first shared your little heart, like a piece of bread that had to suffice for two? Was it not with a thing that you experienced, through it, through its existence, through its anyhow appearance, through its final smashing or enigmatic departure, all that is human, right into the depths of death?