Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“You’re saying there’re two bricks out back there that aren’t just bricks,” Toby said.

“I didn’t mingle the ashes. If I was to do it today I would’ve mingled them all, poor Rockford Wiggins and bratty Billy Crawford and the big dog too.”

Toby smacked at her knees. The bugs were really getting to her. “What I don’t understand is how you could imagine that anyone who bought this dump would have kept things as they were.” She smiled to show that she meant no offense.

The woman smiled back. It was the sort of smile the terminally ill might realize they’d been receiving as the days wore on.

“I’m just saying that you took quite a gamble,” Toby said. “This isn’t a graveyard. No one’s under any obligation to care for what’s here.” Or what isn’t, she might as well have added.

“My broker will call you tomorrow,” the woman said.

“I’ll need a few days to make arrangements.”

“In three days, then,” the woman said.

“You can come back in three days, then — no, better make it four,” Toby said.

The woman nodded and turned. The limousine appeared like a liquid poured from the shadows. She addressed Toby once more before she stepped into it. “It’s perfect here!”

Her eyes were certainly dishabituated to reality, Toby thought, if she believed this crummy locale to be perfect. She pushed herself off the swing and went into the house, opening and shutting the warped door with difficulty. She sat down at the kitchen table, an old pink Formica and chrome thing, and turned the pages of a phone book until she found a listing of demolition contractors. She copied down a number of names. She would call them all in the morning. She wanted everything torn up and down. The job would go to the one who could do the work most quickly. A great devotional emptiness swam up in her. She was doing the woman a favor. It had probably just been a prank anyway. There would be no call from a broker. She sneezed sharply from the mildew and held a tissue to her nose. Some people’s behavior was simply inexplicable. They outlasted their lives or something.

The great moon was now obscured by clouds. Toby picked up a flashlight and went outside, stalking across the lost but unforgotten garden to the little bridge. She bent and studied the blocks that supported the foolish thing. No two bricks were different from the rest — all pitted, common, unparticular, of uniform size and texture.

On her knees, she held the light against them. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

—

Robert had brought the great book of Egypt to dinner, and before it could be removed from his grasp had spilled milk on it. He was scolded at length. Lillian had been returned to her room and was being trussed up by Staff in preparation for her personal night. She felt compelled to speak of the cats again.

There was the trap and the pinch of food on the chipped china saucer. Never too much, not that it seemed wasteful, it just wasn’t right. And the saucer — it had to be a chipped one. A perfect saucer would have conferred something else entirely. She had meant no real harm. What if everything one did mattered. Thank God, it could not.

I am trying to think. Sometimes I catch myself saying just those words and just in my head. It seems I got to start everything in my head with something in my head saying I am trying to think. I remember how it begins but can’t remember how it ends. Even though it’s over now. It don’t seem right that it could be over and me back where I’ve always been not even knowing what it was she gave me or what I should do with it.

Because the bridge is still here and the water and the shack. And though I haven’t been to town since she disappeared, I imagine the town’s still there too. Her fancy car is still here sitting on the beach, though it seems to be fading, sort of like a crummy photograph. It’s a black car but the birds have crapped all over it and it’s white now like the sand. Sometimes it hurts my eyes. The chrome catches the sun. But as I say, sometimes I can’t hardly make it out at all. It ain’t really a car anymore. It wouldn’t take nobody anywhere.

What it is I think is that before she came I knew something was going to happen and now that she’s been, I know it ain’t. She didn’t leave a single thing behind except that car. Not a pair of panties or a stick of gum or nothing. Once she brought over a little round tin of chicken-liver patay. Now I know I’ve never eaten chicken-liver patay so it must be around here somewhere, but I can’t find it. My head’s fuller’n a tick on a dog. Full of blood or something. And my prick lies so tame in my blue jeans, I can’t hardly believe it’s even gone through what it’s been through.

She was like smoke the way she went away. She was like that even when she stayed. She’d cover me up, wrapping herself around me tight, tasting sweet and as cool as an ice-cream cone, smelling so good and working at loving me. Then she would just dissolve and I’d fill right up with her like a water glass. I can’t recall it ending, as I say, but I know it’s stopped. Black rain at four in the afternoon like it used to be. Black trees and empty sky. And the gulf running a dirty green foam where it turns into the pass.

But I can think about it beginning. So. That first morning I come back to the shack and there’s a big brown dog sitting there drinking out of the toilet bowl. He’d drained it. And looked at me as though it was me and not him that had no right being there. Drained it and sat and stared at me, its jaws rolling and dripping at me. Now, I like dogs all right but I could see this one was a bum. In the Panhandle, I had two catch dogs that was something to watch. Them dogs just loved to catch. They was no-nonsense dogs. But this can licker was a bum. Somebody’s pet. A poodle or something. The big kind. Before I got around to giving him a good kick, he pushed the screen door open with his paw and left.

I was so mad. And I was thinking and figuring how to get that brown dog, not even thinking then how queer it was that there should be any dog at all, because I hadn’t seen a thing for six months around the bridge or on the beach except wild. And I hadn’t seen another person in that time either and then as soon as I remember this, I see the girl walking along the beach with the dog.

She’s in a bright bikini and long raggedy-wet hair and I remember how long it had been since I’d seen a girl in a bikini or any girl at all because my wife had left me a long while ago, even then having stopped being a girl in any way you could think of and went back to living in Lowell, Massachusetts, the place she come from and left just to plague me. Somewhere, in that town, setting on a lawn outside a factory, is or was a chair fit for a giant’s ass. Forty or fifty times bigger and crazier than a proper chair. And she come from that town. And she sold off my dogs to get back to it on a one-way ticket on a bubble-topped Trailways.

I never knew her that well. She wore more clothes, jesus, you’d think she was an Eskimo. Layers and layers of them. I never knew if I got to her or not and she’d be the last to tell me. She never talked about nothing except New England. Everything was better there, she’d say. Corn, roads, Christmas decorations. The horses ain’t as mean, she’d say. The bread rises better up North. Even the sun, she’d say, is nicer because it sets in a different direction. It don’t fall past the house this way at home, she’d say. I was a young man then and I never cheated. I was a young man and my balls were big as oranges. And I threw it all away. She caught my stuff in her underwear.

When I think about what a honey bear I was and how polite and wonderfully whanged and how it was all wasted on a loveless woman…She had a tongue wide and slick as a fried egg. And never used it once. I guess that’s what I was waiting on but I might just as much have hoped for striking oil in the collards patch. She said she was a respectable woman and claimed to have worked in an office in Boston. But she didn’t have no respect for the man and woman relationship and she didn’t have no brain. She couldn’t bring things together in her head. I’d bring her head together all right if I ever see her again. I’d fold it up for her so she’d be able to carry it in her handbag. Selling the best catch dogs in the state of Florida for a bus ticket.