Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

The yard boy has always been open. He has always let be and disowned. Nevertheless, he has lost the spontaneity of his awakened state. He is sad. He can feel it. The fern can feel it too, which makes it gloomier than ever. Even so, the fern has grown quite fond of the yard boy. It wants to help him any way it can.

The yard boy doesn’t rent a room anymore. He lives in his truck. Then he sells his truck. He and the rabbit’s-foot fern sit on the beach. The fern lives in the shade of the yard boy. The yard boy doesn’t live in the Now at all anymore. He lives in the past. He thinks of his childhood. As a child he had a comic-book-collection high of 374 with perfect covers. His parents had loved him. His parents had another son, whom they loved too. One morning this son had fallen out of a tree onto the driveway and played with nothing but a spoon and saucepan for the next twenty-five years. When the yard boy has lived in the past as much as is reliable, he lives in the future. It is while he is living in the future that his girlfriend walks by on the beach. She is wearing a long wet T-shirt that says, I’M NOT A TOURIST I LIVE HERE. The rabbit’s-foot fern alerts the yard boy and they both stare at her as she walks by.

It is a beautiful day. The water is a smooth green, broken occasionally by porpoises rising. Between the yard boy and his girlfriend is sand a little less white than the clouds. Behind the yard boy are plantings of cabbage palms and succulents and Spanish bayonets. The bayonets are harsh and green with spikes that end in black tips like stilettos.

Act but do not rely upon one’s own abilities, thinks the yard boy. He chews at his nails. The moon can shine in a hundred different bowls, he thinks. What a lot of junk the yard boy thinks. He is as lost in the darkness of his solid thoughts as a yard boy can be. He watches his girlfriend angrily as she sashays by.

The rabbit’s-foot fern brightens at the yard boy’s true annoyance. Its fuzzy long-haired rhizomes clutch its pot tightly. The space around it simmers, it bubbles. Each cell mobilizes its intent of skillful and creative action. It turns its leaves toward the Spanish bayonets. It straightens and sways. Straightens and sways. A moment passes. The message of retribution is received along the heated air. The yard boy watches as the Spanish bayonets uproot themselves and move out.

It had been three weeks since the girl’s German Shepherd had died. He had drowned. The girl couldn’t get over it. She sat on the porch of her boyfriend’s beach house and looked at the water.

It was not the same water. The house was on the Gulf of Mexico. The shepherd had drowned in the bay.

The girl’s boyfriend had bought his house just the week before. It had been purchased furnished with mismatched plates and glasses, several large oak beds and an assortment of bamboo furniture.

The girl had a house of her own on the broad seawalled bay that had big windows overlooking shaggy bougainvillea bushes. There were hardly any studs in the frame and the whole house had shaken when the dog ran through it.

The girl’s boyfriend’s last name was Chester and everyone called him that. He wore sunglasses the color of champagne bottles. Chester had wide shoulders, great hands and one broken marriage, on which he didn’t owe a dime.

“You have fallen into the butter dish,” the girl’s friends told her.

Three days before the shepherd had drowned, Chester had asked the girl to marry him. They had known each other almost a year. “Let’s get married,” he said. They had taken a Quaalude and gone to bed. That had been three weeks and three days ago. They were going to be married in four days. Time is breath, the girl thought.

The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, “Do you love me?” he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight.

The girl had had him since he was two months old. She had bought him from a breeder in Miami, a man who had once been a priest. The girl’s shepherd came from a litter of five with excellent bloodlines. The mother was graceful and friendly, the father more solemn and alert. The breeder who had once been a priest made the girl spend several minutes alone with each puppy and asked her a great many questions about herself. She had never thought about herself much. When she had finally selected her puppy, she sat in the kitchen with the breeder and drank a Pepsi. The puppy stumbled around her feet, nibbling at the laces of her sneakers. The breeder smoked and talked to the girl with a great deal of assurance. The girl had been quite in awe of him.

He said, “We are all asleep and dreaming, you know. If we could ever actually comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out.”

The girl nodded. She was embarrassed. People would sometimes speak to her like this, intimate and alarming, as though she were passionate or thoughtful or well read. The puppy smelled wonderful. She picked him up and held him.

“We deceive ourselves. All we do is dream. Good dreams, bad dreams…”

“The ways that others see us is our life,” the girl said.

“Yes!” the breeder exclaimed.

—

The girl sat moving slowly on the porch glider. She imagined herself standing laughing, younger and much nicer, the shepherd leaping into her arms. Her head buzzed and rustled. The bourbon bobbed around the flamingo’s lowered head on the gaudy glass. The shepherd’s drowned weight in her arms had been a terrible thing, terrible. She and Chester were both dressed rather elaborately because they had just returned from dinner with two friends, a stockbroker and his girlfriend, an art dealer. The girl was very thin and very blond. There were fine blond hairs on her face. The small restaurant where they ate appeared much larger than it was by its use of mirrored walls. The girl watched the four of them eating and drinking in the mirrors. The stockbroker spoke of money, of what he could do for his friends. “I love my work,” he said.

“The art I handle,” his girlfriend said, “is intended as a stimulus for discussion. In no way is it to be taken as an aesthetic product.”

The girl had asked her for the untouched steak tournedos that their waiter had wrapped up in aluminum foil, the foil twisted into the shape of a swan. The girl remembered carrying the meat into the house for the shepherd and seeing the torn window screen. She remembered feeling the stillness in her house as it flowed into her eyes.

—

The girl looked at the Gulf. It was a dazzling day with no surf. The beach was deserted. The serious tanners were in tanning parlors, bronzing evenly beneath sunlamps, saving time.

The girl wished the moment were still to come, that she were there, then, waiting, her empty arms outstretched, saying, “Do you love me?” Dogs hear sounds that we cannot, thought the girl. Dogs hear callings.

Chester had dug a deep square hole beneath the largest of the bougainvillea bushes and the girl had laid her dog down into it.

Their pale clothes became dirty from the drowned dog’s coat. The girl had thrown her dress away. Chester had sent his suit to the dry cleaner.

Chester liked the dog, but it was the girl’s dog. A dog can only belong to one person. When Chester and the girl made love in her house, or when the girl was out for the evening, she kept the shepherd inside, closed up on a small porch with high screened windows. He had taken to leaping out of his pen, a clearing enclosed with Cyclone fencing and equipped with old tires. It was supposed to be his playground, an exercise area that would keep away boredom and loneliness when the girl wasn’t with him. It was a tall fence, but the shepherd had found a way over it. He had escaped, again and again, so the girl had begun locking him up in the small porch room. The girl had never witnessed his escape, from either of these places, but she imagined him leaping, gathering himself and plunging upward. He could leap so high — there was such lightness in him, such faith in the leaping.