Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Jenny’s face is tense and intimate. She knows everything, but how aimless and arbitrary her knowledge is! For she has only desire; she has always had only the desire for this, her sleek, quiescent lover. He is so cold and so satisfying for there is no discovery in him. She goes to the bed and curls up beside him. He is dark and she is light. There are no shadings in Jenny’s world. He is a tall, dark tree rooted in the stubborn night, and she is a flame seeking him — unstable, transparent. They are in Oaxaca. If they opened the shutters they would see the stone town. The town is made of a soft, pale green stone that makes it look as though it has been rained upon for centuries. Shadows in the shapes of men fall from the buildings. Everything is cool, almost rotten. In the markets, the fruit beads with water; the fragile feathered skulls of the birds are moist to the touch.

The man sleeks her hair back behind her ears. She is not so pretty now. Her face is uneven, her eyes are closed.

“You’re asleep,” he says. “You’re making love to me in your sleep.” She is nothing, nowhere. There is something exquisite in this, in the way, now, that he holds her throat. The pressure is so familiar. She yearns for this.

But he turns from her. He leaves.

Jenny pretends sleep. She plays that she is sleeping. She is fascinated with her sleep, where everything takes place as though it were not so. Nothing is concealed. On stationery from the Hotel Principal there is written:

Nobody to blame. Call 228

She sits at a small desk, drinking beer and reading. She is reading about the Aztecs. She notes the goddess Tlazolteotl, the goddess of filth and fecundity, of human moods, sexual love and confession. Jenny sits very straight in the chair. Her neck is long, full, graceful. But she feels out of breath. The high, clear air here makes her pant. The man pants too while he climbs the steep, stone steps of the town. He smokes too much. At night, when they return from drinking, he coughs flecks of blood onto the bathroom mirror. The blood is on the tiles, in the basin. Jenny closes her own mouth tightly as she hears him gag. Breath is outside her, expelled, not doing her any good. She stands beside the man as he coughs. There is not much blood but it seems to be everywhere, late at night, after they have been drinking, everywhere except on the man’s clothes. He is impeccable about his clothes. He always wears a gray lightweight suit and a white shirt. He has two suits and they are both gray, and he has several shirts and they are all white. He is always the same. Even in his nakedness, his force, he is smooth, furled, closed. He is simple to her. There is no other path offered. He offers her the death of his sterility. His sexuality is the source of life, and his curse is death. He offers her nothing except his dying.

She wets her hands and wipes off the mirror. She cannot really imagine him dead. She is just a child embracing the crisis of a woman. The death she sees is that of herself in his emptiness. And he fills her with it. He floods her with emptiness. She grasps his thick, longish hair. She feels as if she is floating through his hair, falling miraculously away from danger into death. Safe at last.

“Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,” her mother calls.

“I want a baby,” Jenny says. “Can I have a baby?”

“Of course,” her mother says, “when you get to be a big girl and fall in love.”

Jenny will write on the stationery of the Hotel Principal:

The claims of love and self-preservation are opposed.

The man looks over her shoulder. He is restless, impatient to get going. They are going to the baths outside of town, in the mountains. A waterfall thuds into a long stone basin that has been artificially heated. It is a private club, crowded with Americans and wealthy Mexicans. When Jenny and the man arrive at the baths, they first go to a tiny stone cubicle, where the man strips. He hangs his clothes carefully from the wooden pegs fixed in the stone. Jenny looks outside, where a red horse grazes from a long, woven tether. There is water trickling over the face of the hillside. There is very little grass. The water sparkles around the horse’s hooves. The man turns Jenny from the window and begins to undress her. She is like a little child with artless limbs. He rolls her pants down slowly. He slips her sweater off. He does everything slowly. Her clothes fall to the floor, which is wet with something that smells sweet. With one hand, the man holds her arms firmly behind her back. He doesn’t do anything to her. She cannot smell him or even feel his breath. She can see his face, which is a little stern but not frightening. It holds no disappointment for her. She tries to move closer to him, but his grip on her arms prevents her. She begins to tremble. Her body feels his stroking, his touch, even though he does nothing. Her body starts to beat, to move in the style of their lovemaking. She becomes confused, the absence of him in her is so strong.

Later, the man goes out to the pool. Jenny hates the baths, but they come here several times a week on the man’s insistence. She dresses and goes out to the side of the pool and watches the man swim back and forth. There are many people here, naked or nearly so, tossing miniature footballs back and forth. She sees the man grasp the ankles of a woman and begin to tow her playfully through the water. The woman wears silver earrings. Her hair is silver, her pubic hair is silver. Her mouth is a thickly frosted white. The water foams on her skin in tiny translucent bubbles. The woman laughs and moves her legs up in a scissors grip around the man’s waist. Jenny sees him kiss her.

Another man, a Mexican, comes up to Jenny. He is bare-chested and wears white trousers and tall, yellow boots. He absently plucks at his left nipple while he looks at her.

“Ford Galaxie,” he says at last. He takes a ring of car keys from his pocket and jerks his head toward the mountains.

“No,” Jenny says.

“Galaxie,” the Mexican says. “Galaxie. Rojo. ”

Jenny sees the car, its red shell cold in the black mountains, drawn through the landscape of rock and mutilated maguey. Drawn through, with her inside, quietly transported.

“No,” she says. She hates the baths. The tile in the bottom of the pool is arranged in the shape of a bird, a heron with thin legs and a huge, flat head. Her lover stands still in the water now, looking at her, amused.

“Jenny,” her mother laughs. “You’re such a dreamer. Would you like to go out for supper? You and Daddy and I can go to the restaurant that you like.”

For it is just the summer. That is all it is, and Jenny is only five. In the house they are renting on Martha’s Vineyard, there is a dinghy stored in the rafters of the living room. The landlord is supposed to come for it and take it down, but he does not. Jenny positions herself beneath the dinghy and scatters her shell collection over her legs and chest. She pretends that she has been cast out of it and floated to the bottom of the sea.

“Jenny-cake, get up now,” her mother says. The child rises heavily from the floor. The same sorrow undergone for nothing is concluded. Again and again, nothing.

“Oh, Jenny-cake,” her mother says sadly, for Jenny is so quiet, so pale. They have come to the island for the sunshine, for play, to offer Jenny her childhood. Her childhood eludes them all. What guide does Jenny follow?

“Let’s play hairdresser,” her mother says. “I’ll be the hairdresser and you be the little girl.”

Jenny lets her comb and arrange her hair.

“You’re so pretty,” her mother says.

But she is so melancholy, so careless with herself. She is bruised everywhere. Her mother parts her hair carefully. She brings out a dish of soapy water and brushes and trims Jenny’s nails. She is put in order. She is a tidy little girl in a clean dress going out to supper on a summer night.