Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

On the beach, at Chester’s, the waves glittered so with light that the girl could not bear to look at them. She finished the bourbon, took the empty glass to the kitchen and put it in the sink.

When the girl and the shepherd had first begun their life together, they had lived around Mile 47 in the Florida Keys. The girl worked in a small marine laboratory there. Her life was purely her own and the dog’s. Life seemed slow and joyous, and remembering those days the girl felt she had been on the brink of something extraordinary. She remembered the shepherd, his exuberance, energy, dignity. She remembered the shepherd and remembered being, herself, good. She lived aware of happiness.

The girl pushed her hands through her hair. The gulf seemed to stick in her throat.

There had been an abundance of holy things then. Once the world had been promising. But then there had been a disappearance of holy things.

A friend of Chester’s had suggested hypnotism. He was quite enthusiastic about it. The girl would have a few sessions with this hypnotist that he knew, and she would forget the dog. Not forget, exactly. Rather, certain connections would not be made. The girl would no longer recall the dog in the context of her grief. The hypnotist had had great success with smokers.

Tonight they were going to have dinner with this man and his wife. The girl couldn’t bear the thought of it. They would talk and talk. They would talk about real estate and hypnotism and coke. Tonight, they would go to a restaurant that had recently become notorious when an elderly woman had died from burns received when the cherries jubilee she was being served set fire to her dress. They would all order flaming desserts. They would go dancing afterward.

Animals are closer to God than we, the girl thought, but they are lost to him. Her arms felt heavy. The sun was huge, moving ponderously toward the horizon. People were gathering on the beach to watch it go down. They were playing their radios. When the sun touched the horizon, it took three minutes before it disappeared. An animal can live for three minutes without air. It had taken the shepherd three minutes to die after however long he had been swimming in the deep water off the smooth seawall. The girl remembered walking into the house with the meat wrapped in the foil in the shape of a swan, and seeing the broken screen. The house was full of mosquitoes. Chester put some soft ice in a glass and poured a nightcap. Chester always looked out of place in the girl’s house. The house wasn’t worth anything, it was the land that was valuable. The girl went outside, calling, past the empty pen, calling, down to the bay, seeing the lights of the better houses along the seawall. A neighbor had called the sheriff’s department and the lights from the deputy’s car shone on the ground on the dark dog.

A buzzer sounded in the beach house. Chester had had the whole house wired. In the week he had owned it, he had put in central air-conditioning, replaced all the windows with one-way glass and installed an elaborate infrared alarm system. The buzzer, however, was just a local signal. It stopped. It had been just the door opening, just Chester coming home. Chester activated the total system when they were out or when they were sleeping. The girl thought of invisible frequencies monitoring undisturbed air. The girl found offensive the notion that she could be spared pain, humiliation or loss by microwaves. She contemplated for a moment the desire Chester had for a complete home security system. There wasn’t anything in the house worth stealing. Chester was protecting space. For a moment, the girl found offensive the touch of Chester’s hand on her hair.

“Why aren’t you dressed,” he asked.

The girl looked at him, and then down at herself, at the thin T-shirt and hibiscus-flowered shorts. I am getting too old to wear this shit, the girl thought. The porch was cooling down fast in the twilight. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

“Why?” the girl said.

Chester sighed. “We’re going out to dinner with the Tynans.”

“I don’t want to go out to dinner with the Tynans,” the girl said.

Chester put his hands in his pockets. “You’ve got to snap out of this,” he said.

“I’m flying,” the girl said. “I have flown.” She thought of the shepherd leaping, the lightness. He had escaped from her. She hadn’t gotten anyplace.

Chester said, “I’ve consoled you the best I can.”

“There is no consolation,” the girl said. “There is no recovery. There is no happy ending.”

“We’re the happy ending,” Chester said. “Give us a break.”

The sky was red, the water a dull silver. “I can’t bear to see the Tynans again,” the girl said. “I can’t bear to go to another restaurant and see the sneeze guard over the salad bar.”

“Don’t scream at me, darling. Doesn’t any of that stuff you take ever calm you down? I’m not the dog that you can scream at.”

“What?” the girl said.

Chester sat down on the glider. He put his hand on her knee. “I think you’re wonderful, but I think a little self-knowledge, a little realism, is in order here. You would stand and scream at that dog, darling.”

The girl looked at his hand, patting her knee. It seemed an impossibly large, ruddy hand.

“I wasn’t screaming,” she said. The dog had a famous trick. The girl would ask, “Do you love me?” and he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. Everyone had been amazed.

“The night it happened, you looked at the screen and you said you’d kill him when he got back.”

The girl stared at the hand stroking and rubbing her knee. She felt numb. “I never said that.”

“It was a justifiable annoyance, darling. You must have repaired that screen half a dozen times. He was becoming a discipline problem. He was beginning to make people feel uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable?” the girl said. She stood up. The hand dropped away.

“We cannot change any of this,” Chester said. “If it were in my power, I would. I would do anything for you.”

“You didn’t stay with me that night, you didn’t lie down beside me!” The girl walked in small troubled circles around the room.

“I stayed for hours, darling. But nobody could sleep on that bed. The sheets were always sandy and covered with dog hairs. That’s why I bought a house, for the beds.” Chester smiled and reached out to her. She turned and walked through the house, opening the door, tripping the buzzer. “Oh, you must stop this!” Chester called.

When she reached her own house, she went into the bedroom and lay down there. There was a yawning silence all around her, like an enormous hole. Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.

The girl lay on her side, then turned onto her back. She thought of the bougainvillea, of the leaves turning into flowers over the shepherd’s grave. She thought of the shepherd by her bed, against the wall, sleeping quietly, his faith in her at peace.

There was a pop, a small explosion in her head that woke her. She lurched up, gasping, from a dream that the shepherd had died. And for an instant, she hovered between two dreams, twice deceived. She saw herself leaping, only to fall back. The moonlight spilled into the clearing.

“I did love you, didn’t I?” the girl said. She saw herself forever leaping, forever falling back. “And didn’t you love me?”

Inside, the auto train was violet. Both little girls were pleased because it was their favorite color. Violet was practically the only thing they agreed on. Danica Anderson and Jane Muirhead were ten years old. They had traveled from Maine to Washington, D.C., by car with Jane’s parents and were now on the train with Jane’s parents, 109 other people and 42 automobiles en route to Florida, where they lived. It was September. Danica had been with Jane since June. Danica’s mother was getting married again and she had needed the summer months to settle down and have everything nice for Dan when she saw her in September. In August, her mother had written Dan and asked what she could do to make things nice for her when she got back. Dan replied that she would like a good wall-hung pencil sharpener and satin sheets. She would like cowboy bread for supper. Dan supposed that she would get none of these things. Her mother hadn’t even asked her what cowboy bread was.