Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

He walked toward the church and the gulls shuffled away from him and spread their wings but did not fly. The door was unlocked, so he went in, without looking at the sanctuary, and found the bathroom. When he came out he saw the pastor’s office and put his hand on that door too, but it was locked. The church was as cold as the outside, maybe even colder.

He sat down self-consciously in the last pew. There was a child’s mitten on the floor. Less than an hour had passed since he’d driven off the ferry. He sat in the cold. The church felt like the shell of something, something unlucky. The flowers from the Sunday service were still in their vases, browning. The silver vases, however, shone. This was Wednesday.

He could see his own breath before him and his teeth began to chatter. He nudged the child’s mitten away with his foot, under the pew in front. The pews were as heavily varnished as the benches on the ferry. He stood and walked past the pastor’s study into an open room full of rummage, games and glasses, shoes and clothes. On a coatrack there were a number of worn sweaters and jackets. He put his ungloved hand idly in the pocket of one of the jackets and touched cigarette butts and rubber bands. He wondered if any of his father’s things were in this room. He would not have recognized them; he had last been with him two years ago and it hadn’t been anywhere his father lived, just a restaurant in the city. He remembered a plate of bloody meat. Apparently the restaurant was cherished for its firm, fresh, bloody meat. The evening with his father had been all right, though he couldn’t remember all that much about it.

The hand he had placed in the jacket now felt dirty, tingling, even a little numb, as if it had been bitten by poisonous insects. Cigarette butts and rubber bands and death the promised end. He went back to his car, turned on the heater and drove into the interior of the island again. He didn’t see the crushed fox this time and kept going. There were moors with scrub pines, thickets and ponds. There were no houses here in what was common land, a conservancy, crisscrossed by rough trails. He drove aimlessly and slowly through the moors, then stopped on a high knoll. Some distance away he saw a vehicle creeping along with a dog trailing behind it. It was the Newfoundland. This was how the girl exercised him. The bitch, he thought. Oh, the lazy bitch. He sat slumped in his seat, despondent, hating her, following the lumbering dog with his eyes. They didn’t approach him. She must have seen him there, his white car on the moors, but she was selecting trails now that took her farther and farther away. They disappeared from his sight.

The water of the distant sound looked like pavement, an empty boulevard. He must not allow the girl to ruin this island for him, this unknown place where his father would be buried forever. He had to give his father his full attention; it was absolutely essential. He looked at his watch. It was still some time before the burial. He remembered thinking then that the pastor should have invited him to his house during this interval. It would have been nice.

—

The writer who could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees made quite an impression. But her agent double-crossed Cliff and her next contract was with another house. Still, Cliff was credited with having good instincts and given better opportunities. His authors respected the careful work he did while he found he admired them less and less. The best books were those uninhabited by those who wrote them.

“Fierce, tactile prose,” Loup said. “That’s what we want and are so seldom given.

“There’s no fucking energy around anymore,” Loup said. “You notice that? It’s because death’s energy, death’s vital energy, is being ignored. It’s not being utilized. The more and more death, the more it’s wasted. People just let it evaporate. But not us. We know how to husband the source. I’m sure you are aware,” Loup said, “that the soul was invented. A Greek invented it in the sixth century BC. Pindar the Greek.”

—

“They told me I was washing the diapers with too much bleach and that’s why the baby’s been cranky,” Ricky said. “Do you think that could be true?”

He had so wearied of her it was like an ache in his bones.

“I’ve found a good sitter,” she said. “It took me forever to find a really responsible one. Why don’t I come along to the service for your father?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“We never do anything important together. I hardly ever see you. Afterwards we could go out, couldn’t we?”

“We’ll have another drink and go out tonight. We’ll go to that seafood place.”

It was late afternoon and the sun was falling with haste toward the earth.

“Gramma said that when dusk falls it reminds God of the hearts of men. That’s the only time he thinks of us, at dusk.”

“Your grandmother was an amazing woman,” Cliff said.

She looked at him uncertainly.

They would quarrel later. He was relieved it was finally over.

—

He had stopped at the inn before reboarding the ferry. The girl’s car was in the parking lot and in the backseat, like a judge in his robes, sat the dog.

In the dining room the tables were set with white tablecloths but no one was there. People were eating and drinking in the bar. He went into the dining room, ordered a whiskey and soda and some soup and asked for bread. He was almost trembling with hunger. He ate most of the bread with his drink.

The girl materialized from the dimness of the bar and walked across the dining room to his table. She had on jeans and a tweed jacket and was wearing dark red lipstick.

“I’m sorry I was rude to you this morning,” she said. “I feel badly about it. It was interesting what you were saying.”

He picked up the last piece of bread in the basket and began chewing it. “The bread here isn’t very good,” he said.

“It’s better on the weekends,” she said. “Or it sometimes is.” She laughed.

“Would you like a drink?” he said.

“No thank you. I just wanted to apologize. I was so awful. I’m like a different person in the morning.”

She was being terribly pleasant. “Yes,” he said. “You seem like a different person.”

The waitress was coming across the room with the soup.

“I’ll leave you in peace now,” the girl said, and went back to her friends.

He ate the soup. A few minutes later the waitress returned with a fresh drink. “It’s on the house,” she said. He took it and ordered another. A drink someone bought for you didn’t taste any different than a drink you bought yourself. No one else came into the dining room.

As he left, the girl called out good-bye to him.

“Bye-bye,” he said. She meant nothing to him.

It was growing dark and he could barely make out the great patient bulk of the dog in the car next to his own. He thought about being watched from the inside. He would not want to be watched from the inside.

—

Now he and Loup were sitting in a corner of the bar they frequented. They had been regulars here for months. Cliff had finished telling him the story of the island, his father, the girl. He had missed the service at the graveyard. He must have fallen asleep in the car or been thinking of the girl, wishing her ill and the dog too, hoping for something to enter their lives and break her heart. When he had looked at his watch it was well past noon. Even then he had done nothing until it was hours past the moment for which he had come, the committal. He continued to sit in the car with the heater running. But then he had driven back across the island and past the deserted church without even glancing at the grave site to see if the earth was smooth or still disturbed.