Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

—

One of the assistants died and most of the office attended the funeral. He was younger than Cliff, just out of Bard. He’d drowned, horsing around in some lake on a long holiday weekend, and now he was dead. Then, less than a week later, a beloved agent died from the complications diabetes often brings. That was a memorial service, and the first time Cliff heard Loup speak in such a venue. Although Cliff had not known the agent, he found Loup’s words moving, even thrilling in a peculiar way. He was by far the best speaker there. Life seemed sweet and carefree and cruel, futile, almost comprehensible. He could have described to no one what Loup had said.

“Jesus,” Loup muttered to him afterward, “let’s go get a drink.” It was three o’clock in the afternoon and they went to the Carlyle. As they were handing over their coats to be checked, Cliff saw Loup glance at the Phi Beta Kappa key he wore as a lapel pin on his coat. A diligent student, he had graduated from a midwestern college of no great reputation. He wore the pin with some secretiveness but casually, as though it didn’t matter. And it did not matter, because he hadn’t gone to the right school.

Loup bestowed on him the slightest of smiles. Cliff was too nervous to even get drunk. Later, when he returned to the writer’s studio, he removed the pin and threw it in a drawer.

—

Loup was going through boxes of manuscripts, a dozen of them that had been on his desk for a month. He was now disposing of them rapidly. He would pick an even-numbered page and give it his full attention. One page could tell him everything. Sometimes the decision was made on a single line. It was all true, what writers suspected.

He called Cliff into his office and read aloud, “I looked out the window. I could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees.” He said to Cliff, “What the hell does that mean?”

“I like it,” Cliff ventured. “It’s not bad.”

“So give her a chance. If we don’t change her life, somebody else will.”

—

Loup and Cliff swept into memorial services together, two fine-looking men in dark coats. There were so many occasions, at least once a month, in cathedrals and supper clubs, in arboretums, in chapels, under bridges, in theaters. A dignified lament seemed almost perpetual, resting lightly over the vigor and flash of the city. There was nothing suspicious or extraordinary about the numbers, nothing particularly unnerving about the manner in which the usual course of nature was accomplished upon those taken. Surprises were not infrequent, although there were no suicides. The enemy agent appeared in its own time, arrived on its own schedule. A translator died in a domino car wreck in a dust storm on a New Mexico interstate. A poet was murdered by his wife. The founder of an old, stubbornly prestigious quarterly collapsed, having just excused himself from dinner.

And after the funeral it felt good to be drinking and talking, unfazed, strengthened, made alert by his attendance at these courteous rituals where Loup often spoke in his oblique, heretical, much-admired fashion, addressing those gathered in a courtyard holding flutes of champagne or standing barefoot in the verge of some gently receding tide or assembled in some vast prewar apartment — not every war bestows upon the time just preceding it such desirable architecture — or moteless, light-filled loft, where the faces seemed as idealized as masks, some but not many half barbaric with grief. They thought Loup was telling them they were still winning, for their hearts, though they might be cold or troubled or uncertain or even without honor, had not yet died within them. They were winning. The day belonged to them still, though tomorrow was promised to no one.

On the weekends, Ricky tried to match him drink for drink. He increasingly arrived hours later than he had promised. The neat little house felt stifling to him. The boy’s face was flushed but he was sleeping, drugged with the heat, wearing only a dazzlingly white cloth diaper.

“Why don’t you open some windows?” he demanded.

“I kept the house shut up to be cool,” Ricky said. “Gramma did and it was always cool.”

“It’s like being in an oven,” Cliff complained.

“I guess I wasn’t thinking. I was just waiting for you.”

He moved quickly through the house, noisily pushing up windows. They had to be held in place with sticks, cracked croquet mallets, the rungs of old chairs. That was how the old woman had done things. A fragrant breeze slipped in immediately from the meadow but did not mollify him.

In the morning, they sat out on a redwood deck the grandmother was having built the month she died. Cliff had tried to finish the work himself and done it badly but Ricky didn’t seem to notice. She liked having breakfast on the ugly deck, which she’d made even uglier with pots of geraniums everywhere. Farther away, near the marsh, red-winged blackbirds swayed on the tips of tall grasses.

Ricky was reading the newspaper avidly, as she always did. Her morning homage to the newspaper. Finally she put it down.

“What?” she said. “You’re restless.”

“I have a lot of work to do.”

“You could have brought it with you. I don’t mind.”

“I better go back early. Maybe after lunch.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. She began pinching dead stems off the geraniums.

“Those things have a helluva smell,” he said.

“I like roses better but I’m not good with roses.” After a moment she said, “Don’t be unhappy with me, Cliff, with us.”

“I’m not unhappy,” he said. “Don’t start that stuff.”

—

On the ferry, the girl had been stroking the dog’s head as she read. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him again. He must have been staring at her without realizing it.

“Rilke’s my favorite,” he said. “He wrote about dogs a great deal. He wrote about going into them, you know? He’d have been fascinated with your big fellow.”

“My big fellow,” she said slowly.

“It’s apparently why Rilke left his wife, why he left home. Because he wasn’t allowed to ‘go into the dog.’ Or if he did he would have to attempt to explain it, which spoiled everything. He loved easing himself into the dog, into the dog’s very center, into the place from which the dog existed as a dog, the very place, he said, where God would have rested when the dog was complete, to watch him.” He spoke quickly. Usually he didn’t talk much. He felt a little breathless.

“I’d like to make something clear to you,” she said. “Do you think that would be possible? I mean really clear.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I think you understand me,” she said.

After she had sped around him on the road, he drove for a time, disoriented, across the island. Then he returned to the church and the graveyard. There were a few large marble stones, pink as uncooked bacon, then some low granite pillow stones, as he’d heard them called. It was not an old cemetery. There was probably an older one somewhere on the island. He couldn’t see that any earth had been freshly excavated. He hoped that they remembered, that they knew what they were doing. He got out of the car and walked toward the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the burying ground. With relief he saw some shoveled earth, some waiting earth. He returned to the car and poured a cup of coffee from the thermos he’d brought. It seemed he had known more about everything before his father’s death, which had just been six days before, and now he would know less and less. He looked at the church and the graveyard and the parking lot where gulls stood hunched. On the beak of each one was a perfect red dot like a drop of blood. He couldn’t understand any of it. The church had no spire. It had an architectural suggestion of a spire.