Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

They had stayed at the Steadmans’ longer than they should have and now they were going to be late for dinner. Nevertheless, they were driving at a moderate speed through a familiar landscape, passing houses that they had been entertained in many times. There were the Salts and the Hollands and the Greys and the Dodsons. The Dodsons kept their gin in the freezer and owned two large and dappled crotch-sniffing dogs. The Greys imported southerners for their parties. The women all had lovely voices and knew how to make spoon bread and pickled tomatoes and artillery punch. The men had smiles when they’d say to Sarah, “Why, let me get you another. You don’t have a thing in that glass, I swear.” The Hollands gave the kind of dinner party where the shot was still in the duck and the silver should have been in a vault. Little whiskey was served but there was always excellent wine. The Salts were a high-strung couple. Jenny Salt was on some type of medication for tension and often dropped the canapés she attempted to serve. She and her husband, Pete, had a room in which there was nothing but a large dollhouse where witty mâché figures carried on assignations beneath tiny clocks and crystal chandeliers. Once, when Sarah was examining the dollhouse’s library, where two figures were hunched over a chess game that was just about to be won, Pete had always said, on the twenty-second move, he told Sarah that she had pretty eyes. She moved away from him immediately. She closed her eyes. In another room, with the other guests, she talked about the end of summer.

On that night, at the end of summer, the night of the accident, Sarah was still talking as they passed the Salts’ house. She was talking about Venice. She and Tommy had been there once. They drank in the plaza and listened to the orchestras. Sarah quoted D. H. Lawrence on Venice… Abhorrent, green, slippery city… But she and Tommy had liked Venice. They drank standing up at little bars. Sarah had a cold and she drank grappa and the cold had disappeared for the rest of her life.

After the Salts’ house, the road swerved north and became very dark. There were no lights or houses for several miles. There were stone walls, an orchard of sickly peach trees, a cider mill. There was the St. James Episcopal Church, where Tommy took their daughter, Martha, to Sunday school. The Sunday school was oddly fundamental. There were many arguments among the children and their teachers as to the correct interpretation of Bible story favorites. For example, when Lazarus rose from the dead, was he still sick? Martha liked the fervor at St. James. Each week, her dinner graces were becoming more impassioned and fantastic. Martha was seven.

Each Sunday, Tommy takes Martha to her little classes at St. James. Sarah can imagine the child sitting there at a low table with her jar of crayons. Tommy doesn’t go to church himself and Martha’s classes are two hours long. Sarah doesn’t know where Tommy goes. She suspects he is seeing someone. When they come home on Sundays, Tommy is sleek, exhilarated. The three of them sit down to the luncheon Sarah has prepared.

Over the years, Sarah suspects, Tommy has floated to the surface of her. They are swimmers now, far apart on the top of the sea.

Sarah at last fell silent. The road seemed endless as in a dream. They seemed to be slowing down. She could not feel her foot on the accelerator. She could not feel her hands on the wheel. Her mind was an untidy cupboard filled with shining bottles. The road was dark and silvery and straight. In the space ahead of her, there seemed to be something. It beckoned, glittering. Sarah’s mind cleared a little. She saw Martha with her hair cut oddly short. She saw Tommy choosing a succession of houses, examining the plaster, the floorboards, the fireplaces, deciding where windows should be placed or walls knocked down. The sea was white and flat. It did not command her to change her life. It demanded nothing of her. She saw Martha sleeping, her paint-smudged fingers curled. She saw Tommy in the city with a woman, riding in a cab. The woman wore a short fur jacket and Tommy stroked it as he spoke. She saw a figure in the road ahead, its arms raised before its face as though to block out the sight of her. The figure was a boy who wore dark clothing, but his hair was bright, his face was shining. She saw her car leap forward and run him down where he stood.

—

Tommy had taken responsibility for the accident. He had told the police he was driving. The boy apparently had been hitchhiking and had stepped out into the road. At the autopsy, traces of a hallucinogen were found in his system. The boy was fifteen years old and his name was Stevie Bettencourt. No charges were filed.

“My wife,” Tommy told the police, “was not feeling well. My wife,” he said, “was in the passenger seat.”

Sarah stopped drinking immediately after the accident. She felt nauseated much of the time. She slept poorly. The bones in her hands ached. She remembered this was how she’d felt the last time she had stopped drinking. That had been two years before. She remembered why she’d stopped and also why she’d started again. She had stopped because she’d done a cruel thing to her little Martha. It was spring and she and Tommy were giving a dinner party. Sarah had two martinis in the late afternoon when she was preparing dinner and then she had two more martinis with her guests. Martha had come downstairs to say a polite good night to everyone as she had been taught. She had put on her nightie and brushed her teeth. Sarah poured a little more gin in her glass and went upstairs with her to brush out her hair and put her to bed. Martha had long, thick blond hair, of which she was very proud. On that night she wore it in a ponytail secured by an elasticized holder with two small colored balls on the ends. Sarah’s fingers were clumsy and she could not get it off without pulling Martha’s hair and making her cry. She got a pair of scissors and carefully began snipping at the stubborn elastic. The scissors were large, like shears, and they had been difficult to handle. A foot of Martha’s gathered hair had abruptly fallen to the floor. Sarah remembered trying to pat it back into place on the child’s head.

So Sarah had stopped drinking the first time. She did not feel renewed. She felt exhausted and wary. She read and cooked. She realized how little she and Tommy had to talk about. Tommy drank Scotch when he talked to her at night. Sometimes Sarah would silently count as he spoke to see how long the words took. When he was away and he telephoned her, she could hear the ice tinkling in the glass.

Tommy was in the city four days a week. He often changed hotels. He would bring Martha little bars of soap wrapped in the different colored papers of the hotels. Martha’s drawers were full of the soaps scenting her clothes. When Tommy came home on the weekends he would work on the house and they would give parties at which Tommy was charming. Tommy had a talent for holding his liquor and for buying old houses, restoring them and selling them for three times what he had paid for them. Tommy and Sarah had moved six times in eleven years. All their homes had been fine old houses in excellent locations two or three hours from New York. Sarah would stay in the country while Tommy worked in the city.

For three weeks, Sarah did not drink. Then it was her birthday. Tommy gave her a slim gold necklace and fastened it around her neck. He wanted her to come to New York with him, to have dinner, see a play, spend the night with him in the fine suite the company had given him at the hotel. They had gotten a babysitter for Martha, a marvelous capable woman. Sarah drove. Tommy had never cared for driving. His hand rested on her thigh. Occasionally, he would slip his hand beneath her skirt. Sarah was sick with the thought that he touched other women like this.