Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“It is my dog,” Jane says, “and I’m going to get rid of him for you.”

David starts to cry.

“Why don’t you have another drink?” Jackson says to Jane. “You’re so vivacious when you drink.”

David is sobbing. His hands flap in the air. Jackson picks him up. “Stop it,” he says. David wraps his legs around his father’s chest and pees all over him. Their clothing turns dark as though, together, they’d been shot. “Goddamn it,” Jackson shouts. He throws his arms out. He stops holding the child but his son clings to him, then drops to the floor.

Jane grabs Jackson’s shoulder. She whispers in his ear, something so crude, in a tone so unfamiliar, that it can only belong to all the time before them. Jackson does not react to it. He says nothing. He unbuttons his shirt. He takes it off and throws it in the sink. Jane has thrown the dog food there. The shirt floats down to it from his open fist.

Jane kneels and kisses her soiled son. David does not look at her. It is as though, however, he is dreaming of looking at her.

Elizabeth always wanted to read fables to her little girl but the child only wanted to hear the story about the little bird who thought a steam shovel was its mother. They would often argue about this. Elizabeth was sick of the story. She particularly disliked the part where the baby bird said, “You are not my mother, you are a snort, I want to get out of here!” At night, at the child’s bedtime, Sam would often hear them complaining bitterly to each other. He would preheat the broiler for dinner and freshen his drink and go out and sit on the picnic table. In a little while, the screen door would slam and Elizabeth would come out, shaking her head. The child had frustrated her again. The child would not go to sleep. She was upstairs, wandering around, making “cotton candy” in her bone-china bunny mug. “Cotton candy” was Kleenex sogged in water. Sometimes Elizabeth would tell Sam the story that she had prepared for the child. The people in Elizabeth’s fables were always looking for truth or happiness and they were always being given mirrors or lumps of coal. Elizabeth’s stories were inhabited by wolves and cart horses and solipsists.

“Please relax,” Sam would say.

“Sam,” the child called, “have some of my cotton candy. It’s delicious.”

Elizabeth’s child reminded Sam of Hester’s little Pearl even though he knew that her father, far from being the “Prince of the Air,” was a tax accountant. Elizabeth spoke about him occasionally. He had not shared the previous year’s refund with her even though they had filed jointly and half of the year’s income had been hers. The tax accountant told Elizabeth that she didn’t know how to do anything right. Elizabeth, in turn, told her accountant that he was always ejaculating prematurely.

“Sam,” the child called, “why do you have your hand over your heart?”

“That’s my Scotch,” Sam said.

—

Elizabeth was a nervous young woman. She was nervous because she was not married to Sam. This desire to be married again embarrassed her, but she couldn’t help it. Sam was married to someone else. Sam was always married to someone.

Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness. They met at the wedding dinner of the daughter of a mutual friend. Delicious food was served and many peculiar toasts were given. Sam liked Elizabeth’s aura and she liked his too. They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink. At one point, he thought he saw a red rabbit in the floral centerpiece. It’s true, it was Easter week, but he worried about this. They danced again. Sam danced Elizabeth out of the party and into the parking lot. Sam’s car was nondescript and tidy except for a bag of melting groceries.

Elizabeth loved his kisses. On the other hand, when Sam saw Elizabeth’s brightly flowered scanty panties, he thought he’d faint with happiness. He was a sentimentalist.

“I love you,” Elizabeth thought she heard him say.

Sam swore that he heard Elizabeth say, “Life is an eccentric privilege.”

This worried him but not in time.

—

They began going out together. Elizabeth promised to always take the babysitter home. At first, Elizabeth and Sam attempted to do vile and imaginative things to each other. This culminated one afternoon when Sam spooned a mound of tiramisu between Elizabeth’s legs. At first, of course, Elizabeth was nervous. Then she stopped being nervous and began watching Sam’s sweating, good-looking shoulders with real apprehension. Simultaneously, they both gave up. This seemed a good sign. The battle is always between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, is it not? Imagination is not what it’s cracked up to be. Sam decided to forget the petty, bourgeois rite of eating food out of another’s orifices for a while. He decided to just love Elizabeth instead.

—

“Did you know that Charles Dickens wanted to marry little Red Riding Hood?”

“What!” Sam exclaimed, appalled.

“Well, as a child he wanted to marry her,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh,” Sam said, relieved.

—

Elizabeth had a house and her little girl. Sam had a house and a car and a Noank sloop. The houses were thirteen hundred miles apart. They spent the winter in Elizabeth’s house in the South and they drove up to Sam’s house for the summer. The trip took two and a half days. They had done it twice now. It seemed about the same each time. They bought peaches and cigarettes and fireworks. The child would often sit on the floor in the front seat and talk into the air-conditioning vent.

“Emergency,” she’d say. “Come in, please.”

—

On the most recent trip, Sam had called his lawyer from a Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike. The lawyer told him that Sam’s divorce had become final that morning. This had been Sam’s third marriage. He and Annie had seemed very compatible. They tended to each other realistically, with affection and common sense. Then Annie decided to go back to school. She became interested in animal behaviorism. Books accumulated. She was never at home. She was always on field trips, in thickets or on beaches, or visiting some ornithologist in Barnstable.

“Annie, Annie,” Sam had pleaded. “Let’s have some people over for drinks. Let’s prune the apple tree. Let’s bake the orange cake you always made for my birthday.”

“I have never made an orange cake in my life,” Annie said.

“Annie,” Sam said, “don’t they have courses in seventeenth-century romantic verse or something?”

“You drink too much,” Annie said. “You get quarrelsome every night at nine. Your behavior patterns are severely limited.”

Sam clutched his head with his hands.

“Plus you are reducing my ability to respond to meaningful occurrences, Sam.”

Sam poured himself another Scotch. He lit a cigarette. He applied a mustache with a piece of picnic charcoal.

“I am Captain Blood,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”

“When Errol Flynn died, he had the body of a man of ninety,” Annie said. “His brain was unrealistic from alcohol.”

She had already packed the toast rack and the pewter and rolled up the Oriental rug.

“I am just taking this one Wanda Landowska recording,” she said. “That’s all I’m taking in the way of records.”

Sam, with his charcoal mustache, sat very straight at his end of the table.

“The variations in our life have ceased to be significant,” Annie said.

—

Sam’s house was on a hill overlooking a cove. The cove was turning into a saltwater marsh. Sam liked marshes but he thought he had bought property on a deepwater cove where he could take his boat in and out. He wished that he were not involved in witnessing his cove turning into a marsh. When he had first bought the place, he was so excited about everything that he had a big dinner party at which he served soupe de poisson using only the fish he had caught himself from the cove. He could not, it seems, keep himself from doing this each year. Each year, the soupe de poisson did not seem as nice as it had the year before. About a year before Annie left him, she suggested that they should probably stop having that particular dinner party.