The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  Yuck, thought Emily.

  “It turns out,” said Pam, “to make a long story short, that the decrepit old man was Jupiter, whose reign as supreme ruler of the universe was long past. The goat was his old nurse, Amalthea, who had once suckled him, and the bird was the fearsome eagle who once carried in its claws the god’s devastating thunderbolts. When Jupiter heard from the sailors that any temples that remained were in ruins and then realized that all he remembered had disappeared, he began to sob and the eagle screamed and the old goat bleated, all in the most terrible anguish. The sailors were so frightened that they fled back to their boat. Among the crew was a learned Russian professor of philosophy, and he was the one who told them the old guy was Jupiter and—”

  “There just happened to be a learned Russian professor of philosophy on this fishing boat?” Emily said.

  “That’s a melancholy story,” Leslie said. “I’m not sure why.”

  “Birds are sad,” Francine said. “Remember when Penny was here and she tried to establish a sanctuary for unwanted parrots and the town shut her down? They said there was no permitting process for such a thing. Penny said those birds cried when they were taken off her property. They knew. They knew their last chance had come and gone.”

  The mothers were silent.

  Then Barbara said, “Well, I don’t know why you told that story about the old god, but the nice thing about it was that he wasn’t alone at the end.”

  “What about the one we got now,” Emily asked.

  “The one what?”

  “The god we got now. Do you think somebody in the future will be telling a story about finding him exiled to some desolate island and crying when he learns that everything he had fashioned and understood has vanished and that he is subject to the same miserable destiny as any created thing?”

  “Probably,” someone finally said.

  “I feel uneasy even thinking about the river god,” Leslie said. “But it’s gone now, I’ve heard, blown up. They’re not even calling it an act of vandalism.”

  “If we lived in Palestine,” Pam said, “and my boy had done there what he’d done here, the Israeli people would have blown up my home.” She imagined herself being allowed to take from it whatever she could carry, though, but maybe not.

  One of the mothers said that was called collective punishment.

  “They might as well have blown up my home,” Barbara said. “I’ve never had one. I butterfly around and always have.”

  She was living in a motel out on the highway that was next to a burned-out gas station and a knife outlet. The management of the motel was doing its part for the environment by changing the sheets and towels only after repeated requests, a notion picked up from the pieties of the better chains. Barbara was getting by with a debit card she’d found behind the bed. It was in the original paper sleeve with the PIN written on it. Some poor devil with shaky handwriting was out in the world not realizing his account was being discreetly drained.

  The eldest mother made every effort to flex her arthritic hands and modestly succeeded. She couldn’t lift a finger to save herself even if that was all it took, which it never was. She felt the darkness closing in without exactly seeing it. This was not unusual. Life was like a mirror that didn’t know what it was reflecting. For the mirror, reflections didn’t even exist. Whenever she saw a mirror where she didn’t expect it, she thought: Poor old woman, how sad she looks.

  “I had just said to the waitress that what I’d like was a nice cup of coffee,” one of the mothers was remembering, “when the police came in. I had to go with them and tell them what I knew. Of course I knew nothing. He had never presented his dark plan to me. I sometimes feel he committed that crime in another state of existence.”

  “We don’t live in the same time as our children, if that’s what you mean,” Pam ventured graciously.

  “But here we are,” Leslie said. “It doesn’t seem right, does it, and what are we supposed to do now? What shall we do?”

  Bathed in tender moonlight, everything looked lethal, the weeds in their beds, the bottled water, the ladder on its side, the painted nails of the mothers’ feet in sandals.

  “Have any of you performed community service,” Emily asked, and then blushed at their silence. Clearly what had been done by the offspring of those in the garden was beyond the salve of community service.

  “When I first got here,” one of the mothers said, “I would take electric bills out of people’s mailboxes and pay them.”

  “Did anyone ever make themselves available for comment,” Barbara asked. “I instinctively knew not to make myself available. And they respect that. Even the persistent ones give up after a while.”

  “I retained a spokesperson but it was a big mistake,” Pam said. “Did anyone come up with an extenuating circumstance in the sentencing phase?”

  The mothers shook their heads.

  “Well,” Francine said, “Allen called 911 when his girlfriend cut off her fingers and toes, though admittedly anyone would have sought emergency assistance. But it certainly might have affected him, seeing his girlfriend of only a few months cut off her fingers and toes.”

  “What did she think they were?” Emily wondered. “That she’d want to get rid of them.”

  “Did you say minutes,” Barbara asked. “That’s like—”

  “Months,” Francine told her. “A girlfriend of a few months.”

  “I thought you said he was a sociopath.”

  “He was a sociopath, a harmless sociopath at the time. He didn’t care for society or crowds. He didn’t like traffic, bars, sitting on planes. Then he found a girlfriend. I had great hopes for her but it turned out she was nuttier than he was.”

  “In her fashion,” Emily said.

  “One human family,” the eldest mother said. “That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve got to remember. This is Thyself. It should always be spoken of any creature to keep us in mind of the similarity of their inmost being with ours.”

  “This is Thyself,” Pam repeated. She made fists of her hands and struck her breasts softly.

  Emily thought of the several minutes she had spent yesterday looking out her window at the neighbor’s cat taking a dump. It didn’t cover up its deposit after it finished, just shook itself and walked away. It was a large white cat with a shining red sore on its head. The neighbor said she was allowing the matter of the sore to run its course. The cat still had a good appetite.

  “I live beside a woman who lost a boy in the war, and she lords it over me something awful,” Leslie said. “She’s a police dispatcher, and when I smile at her in greeting she hisses at me, actually hisses. She planted a cherry tree, I guess for the boy, and it got the gall. It’s a few years old now and it’s got this enormous gall. I know it must be breaking her heart. I want to tell her that some galls can be beneficial. They return nitrogen to the soil, which is good. Or in other ways they can be beneficial to man.”

  “You know a lot, Leslie,” Pam said, “but I don’t think this would give that woman any peace, coming from you.”

  “It would be suicide to speak like that,” one of the mothers said.

  “We must behave here as though we didn’t exist,” the eldest mother said.

  “Didn’t exist?” said Barbara. “But we do.”

  “What I like about our group is that it isn’t a support group,” Francine said. “I couldn’t handle a support group. I would consider it suspect in the extreme.”

  They all agreed that any kind of support group for the mothers of celebrity killers would be in poor taste.

  “Ours is a delicate situation,” the eldest mother said. She requested that someone, it didn’t matter who, light the candles.

  Leslie said, “My first thought in the morning and my last thought at night is: We are going to be asked to leave.”

  “I’ve still got the Popsicle-stick box he made as a kid,” Francine said. “I keep the kitchen sponge in it.”

  “That can’t be sa
nitary,” Emily noted.

  “I threw away the handprint. You know how they make plaster-of-paris casts of little kids’ hands for Mother’s Day in kindergarten and mount them on blocks of wood?”

  “That would be worth something on eBay,” Barbara said. “People are such creeps.”

  “What have we been discussing tonight, actually,” Leslie asked. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’ve been talking about God.”

  “That’s a stretch,” Barbara said.

  “I’d say that saying that is making a pretty safe bet,” Francine said. “It’s sort of vague. Not to hurt your feelings, Leslie.”

  “OK,” Leslie said.

  “It’s like each time we meet, you think we should have a subject or something. It’s not as though we’re going down a stairwell, one step at a time, putting what’s happened behind us, one step at a time.”

  “OK, OK,” Leslie said.

  The candles would not light as the cups they were in had filled with the rainwater of days past. “We should be going anyway,” one of the mothers said. Candles always discomfited this one. Vigils, sex, dinner, prayer…they had too many uses.

  “I wish I had dropped him as an infant out of his snuggle sack on the rocks,” Barbara said loudly.

  Emily had heard her voice this absolutely useless sentiment before. It was always a sure sign that the evening was winding down.

  “We’ve settled nothing,” the eldest mother said. “We cannot make amends for the sins of our children. We gave birth to mayhem and therefore history. Oh, ladies, oh, my friends, we have resolved nothing and the earth is no more beautiful.”

  She struggled to her feet and was helped inside. Her old knees creaked like doors. She always liked to end these evenings on an uncompromising note. Of course it was all just whistling in the dark, but sometimes she would conclude by saying that despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years that still lay ahead of them, the earth was no less beautiful.

  Craving

  They were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That’s what she’d thought: Why, he’s falling to pieces. The place was called Gary’s.

  “Honey,” he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face, gently at first but then harder. “Oh, honey,” he said in alarm. His tie rested in his Mignon Gary as he was pressed forward. He was overweight and pale but his hair was dark and he wore elegant two-toned shoes. Before this, he had whispered something unintelligible to her. No one watched them. Sweat ran down his face. His drink toppled over and fell on them both.

  She was wearing a green dress and the next day she left it behind in the hotel along with the clothes he had been wearing, the tan suit and the tie and the two-toned shoes. The clothes had let them down. The following night they were in a different hotel. It was near the coast and their room had a balcony from which they could see the distant ocean. They knew how to drink. They sought out the slippery places that tempted one to have a drink. Every place was a slippery place.

  Denise and Steadman watched the moon rising. Denise played the game she did with herself. She transferred all her own convulsive, compulsive associations to Steadman. She gave them all to him. This was not as difficult as it might once have been because all her thoughts concerned Steadman anyway. Though her mind became smooth and flat and borderless, she wasn’t thinking anything so she never felt lost. It was quiet until a deeper silence began to unfold, but she was still all right. Then the silence became like a giant hand mutely offered. When she sensed the giant hand, she got up quickly. That giant hand was always too much for her. She went into the other room and made more drinks. They took suites whenever possible. The gin seemed to need a room of its own. She came back out to the balcony.

  “Let’s drink this and go get something to eat,” she said.

  They found themselves in the dining room of the hotel. It was claustrophobic and the service was poor. They sat on a cracked red leather banquette under a mirror. On a shelf between them and the mirror was a pair of limp rubber gloves. Denise didn’t bring them to Steadman’s attention. She reasoned that they had been left behind by some maintenance person. They gazed at a table of seven who were telling loud stories about traffic accidents they had witnessed. They seemed to be trying to top one another.

  “The French have spectacular wrecks,” a man said.

  “I love that Jaws of Life thing,” a woman said. “Have you ever seen that thing?” She had streaked blond hair and a heavily freckled bosom.

  “I saw an incredible Mexican bus crash once,” a small man said. But his remark was immediately dismissed by the group.

  “A Mexican wreck? There’s nothing extraordinary about a Mexican wreck…”

  “It’s true. The landscape’s such a void that there’s not the same effect…”

  Steadman and Denise listened attentively. Denise didn’t have a car-crash story and if she ever did she wouldn’t tell it, she decided.

  The waitress told them the previous couple at their booth had given her a five-dollar tip but had torn the bill in half, forcing on her the ignominy of taping it back together. She said she despised people, present company excepted, and told them not to order the veal. If they ordered the veal, she told them, she would not serve it, which would be cause for her dismissal but she didn’t care.

  They decided to have another couple of drinks, and return to their room.

  The room was not welcoming. It had seen too many people come and go. It was wearying to be constantly reminded that time passes and everything with it, purposelessly.

  Denise watched Steadman place himself on the bed. He lay on his back. The room surrounded them. For a while, Denise lay on the bed too, thinking. Where had it gone, it had gone someplace. The way they were. Then she went into the other room, where the writing table and television set were. Their new traveling bags were there, big soft black ones. She turned off the lights, feeling a little dizzy. She wrung her hands. They should go someplace, she thought. There was tomorrow, something had to be done with it. She reviewed the day’s events. Her mind was like a raven, picking over gravel with its oily, luminous feathers. She could almost hear it as it hopped across the small stones but she couldn’t quite, thank God. Then she heard someone passing by in the corridor, laughing. A thin breeze entered the room and she thought of the distant water as they had seen it from the balcony, folded like a package between two enormous buildings. She looked at their bags, heaped in a corner. Night was a bad time. Night would simply give her no rest. Steadman was quiet now but he might get up soon and they would have their conversation. It was a mess, they were in an awful mess. He didn’t know how much longer he could stand this and so on and so on…Her eyes ached and her throat was dry, she hated this room. It, it just didn’t like them. She could hear it saying, Well, there’s a pathetic pair, how did they ever find each other? She’d like to set fire to the room. Or beat it up. She could hit, no question. There was someone passing in the hall again, laughing, the fools. The room stared at her lidlessly. Perhaps they could leave tonight. They would go down—Denise and Steadman, Steadman and Denise—past the night clerk trying to read a book—10,000 Dreams Interpreted. She remembered what the book looked like: red and falling apart. They had done this before, left in the night when the moon was setting and the sun rising. To get out while the moon was setting, that’s exactly what she wanted. She lay down on the floor. The room was not letting them breathe the way they had to; it was scandalous that they’d been given this room instead of another. Listening to Steadman breathe, she tried to breathe. She wished it were June. It was June once and they were somewhere and a mockingbird sang from midnight to daybreak, or so it seemed, imitating other birds, and Steadman had made a list of all the birds he recognized in the mockingbird’s song. He learned things and then remembered them, that’s just how he was.

  Denise crept across the carpet toward Steadman’s bed and held on to it. His face wa
s turned toward her, his eyes open, looking at her. That was Steadman, he knew everything but he didn’t share. He made her feel like a little animal sometimes, one with little animal emotions and breathing little animal devotions. She would ask him for the list very quietly, very nicely, the little piece of paper with the names of the birds, where was it, he was always putting it someplace and she had already gone through their bags, their beautiful traveling bags, ready for the larger stage.

  “Steadman,” she said reasonably.

  But how could he hear her? This annoying room was listening to every word she uttered. And what did it know? It couldn’t know anything. It couldn’t climb from the basement into a life of spiritual sunshine like she was capable of doing, not that she could claim she had. The individual in the hall howled with laughter at this. There were several of them out there now, a whole gang, the ones from the dinner party, probably, the spectacular-wrecks people, just shrieking.

  At once Denise realized that the gang was herself and it was morning. Her hands hurt terribly. They were as pink as though they’d been boiled. She’d hurt them somehow. Actually, they were broken. Incredible.

  She stared at them in the car on the drive to the hospital. Those hands weren’t going to do anything more for Denise for a while.

  The doctor in the emergency room wrapped them up, the left first, then the right, indifferently. Even so, some things fascinated him.

  “We’ve got a kid on the third floor,” he said. “He was born with all the bones in his head broken. Now there’s a problem. Are you aware that our heads are getting smaller? Our skulls are smaller than those of our brothers in the Paleolithic period. Do you know why? I’ll tell you why. Society’s the answer. Society has reduced our awareness skills. Personal and direct contact with the natural world requires a continual awareness, but now we just don’t have it. We’re aware of dick-all.”