Joy Williams: State of Grace

“You go for a swim and when you come back our refreshments will be here. The towels here are extraordinary. Did you notice them? Like rugs. Do you remember the poor towels we had at home? Your mother was always mending them. And the sheets as well. Tiny stitches. Starbursts of thread. Roses and faces of colored thread. You made up a story for each one and you would tell them to me. But these towels look brand new. And so white. No stories there.”

I go out of the room and down the stairs into the lobby. The clerk is standing beside his desk, bouncing on the balls of his feet. The bird is sleeping, folded up on its purple talons. I walk onto the beach, past the young men. Two are standing close together. One is standing farther away, measuring distances with a cloth ruler. I hear a voice, speaking in perfect, musical English.

“John, I saw a muscle of yours on that last shot that I swear I have never seen before.”

I walk into the water and continue until the sandbar. I walk over the sandbar and instantly into water up to my neck. My clothes expire. I turn and face the hotel but do not try to find Daddy on the balcony. I stand there for a while. The nice porpoises have vanished. I wallow back to shore. The young men never glance at me. I take a turn around the desk.

“We prefer that swimmers use the service elevator at the rear,” the clerk says. I go to the rear. The elevator obediently exposes itself.

“Hey,” the clerk says. He has a borrowed, uneasy face as though he chose it off the television. “This bird can shit seven feet flat across the room.”

I return to Daddy. Our snack is laid out nicely. Daddy is fixing the drinks.

“That’s fine,” he says, “that’s fine. I want you to have a good time.” He calls for someone to pick up my clothes for cleaning and pressing. He rubs me dry and wraps me in one of the sumptuous towels.

“You certainly have developed a way about you, Daddy,” I say.

“I want everything to be pleasant for you, darling. I can control it all if you allow me to.” He hands me a drink, expertly prepared, gorgeous with crushed ice.

“Drinketh damage,” he says, smiling. His jaw twitches. His jaw is clenched. He wears a handsome, expensive jersey. His face and thin arms are hard and white like marble. “It’s pleasant here but not for us. You can see that, darling. The sun is bright with malice.”

We sit on the balcony. The sun sprawls scarlet across the Gulf. The sea birds are going home. The plovers, the pelicans, sanderlings, terns and ibis stream across the sky. He slips his hand inside the towel. It falls from my shoulders. A breeze swims across me and stops.

“This is not my favorite time of day,” I say. “Speaking only for myself, I prefer dawn. Birds drop their eggs at dawn. It is generally more a time of hope and promise.”

“All the promises have been kept,” Daddy says.

I am swinging in the dreadful hammock of a dream. Whatever woke me has stopped but it will come back again if I am still. It is the sound of birds, beyond the board and metal, in the woods. And my foot aches terribly. In the dark, I reach beneath the blanket and touch it. It is hot and spavined, the toes spread out in a cramp. For some reason, the baby needs something that is in that foot. The baby makes strange demands. It is stronger than I am. I am being housed by it . I am being fashioned in the nights that will bring it to term. And it is I who feel the exhaustion of journey. Not it. What would it know? It is myself who lives in darkness, slowly becoming aware, and it is the child who moves resplendent in the sunlight, beyond restitution in the sunlight.

The child is my dream of life. I harbor its progress and am victim to its whims. Gestating is like being witness to a crime. And I am furtive, I must admit. We all look furtive. My suggestion is to confess to everything. Once, on the street here, shortly after I arrived, the FBI spotted me in a laundromat. I thought the manager was giving me the eye because his machine was acting oddly. Clanging and banging and taxiing around its filthy slot. I tried to ignore his mean and greedy eye. He thought the reward was his. I maintained my poise by reading an agricultural bulletin that was available for patrons. The article I was engrossed in concerned the rat

Eat — hide — gnaw — scatter filth — start fires — gnaw — eat — breed — hide! THAT’S THE LIFE OF A RAT!

And then these fellows slipped around me, crisp as pudding. Smith their names were, and Smith. When Smith showed me his card, he exposed the weighted exercise belt around his middle. Smith, on the other hand, was not a vain man. He conducted the questioning. “Howdjew find Jessup the last time you was there,” he said. “They sure changed that town some.”

“Jessup?” I say.

“You let your hair grow out,” he said. “I gotta say it ain’t becoming. But a girl like you. I can’t imagine you traveling alone. Where’d your boy friend be? The boy what done the carving? I’m sure a little thing like yourself wouldn’t have done that carving.”

“Sheeit,” Smith said, “I bet a little girl like you can’t be aware even of the enormity of her crime.”

Unfortunately, something or other had run in SOAK. My clothes were the color of gasoline.

“Whyn’t we just check up on your little niceties here,” Smith said. “Blood’s harder’n tar to get off your clothes.”

Smith tugs a bit at his crotch. “We might add that your boy’s caught now. It was him that told us where you was. He’s up there in Tampa spilling the beans and he don’t give a pig’s piss for you at this point.”

“Wrong girl,” I say. And of course I was. They wandered away. The manager said that he wasn’t responsible for clothes left in the machine and if I didn’t get them away he wouldn’t be responsible. Of course I knew what Smith had been referring to. A dreadful story. Chopped up someone’s lover and sent him to Coconut Grove in a casserole dish.

But that was when I first arrived. I am sought after, accosted, but never found. Is that not how you find it?

In any case, now I am here rubbing my foot, twisting my toes and wearing a spotted nightie. I can see nothing in the room, but outside the birds are singing and so it must be morning. Or perhaps it is the afternoon of the day before for I can’t place falling asleep. I can make out shadows in the room. There’s a small window over an easy chair but it is stuffed across with webs, hives, cocoons and silky sacks. There is also a large X taped on the window with adhesive as though the window were condemned. Almost no light enters, but there is enough, for the moment, for me to see Grady in the easy chair, sitting with both feet on the floor, his knees apart. I like seeing him there and perhaps the knowledge of Grady being there is what woke me. The first time we met, I woke up and he was there. Most people that later one discovers are significant to one’s living are met through glimpse and carelessness, through stumbling brush and grope. They expose themselves gradually in serial form. Not so with Grady, my groom. He rose beyond reproach in the stink of the old movie house, his voice in my ear an overcurrent to the thud and pound of repair within the walls (for they were renovating the old movie house, redesigning it for a more sophisticated and lucid audience) and his hand on my shoulder was strong …

I want to have him love me. The fact that he does already troubles both of us. I prop the pillow behind my back and begin a conversation. The room is close. I’ve spilled some scent and it’s in the carpet. I open my lips and the words enter my furred mouth.

I begin to tell him a story. Many times I have talked but I have never finished what I wanted to say. To be frank, I have never begun what I wanted to say. I have discussed something else. But now it is as though my whole life has fashioned itself for this moment which is, of course, true. It is as though my whole life is dependent upon the reply to this moment, upon the recognition of it, its application and success. When I complete not telling this story, my life will begin.