Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

By the time they were in Manhattan, they were arguing. They had been married for eleven years. Both had had brief marriages before. They could argue about anything. In midtown, Tommy stormed out of the car as Sarah braked for a light. He took his suitcase and disappeared.

Sarah drove carefully for many blocks. When she had the opportunity, she would pull to the curb and ask someone how to get to Connecticut. No one seemed to know. Sarah thought she was probably phrasing the question poorly but she didn’t know how else to present it. After half an hour, she somehow found the hotel where Tommy was staying. The doorman parked the car and she went into the lobby. She looked into the hotel bar and saw Tommy in the dimness, sitting at a small table. He jumped up and kissed her passionately. He rubbed his hands up and down her sides. “Darling, darling,” he said, “I want you to have a happy birthday.”

Tommy ordered drinks for both of them. Sarah sipped hers slowly at first but then she drank it and he ordered others. The bar was subdued. There was a piano player who sang about the lord of the dance. The words seemed like those of a hymn. The hymn made her sad but she laughed. Tommy spoke to her urgently and gaily about little things. They laughed together like they had when they were first married. They had always drunk a lot together then and fallen asleep, comfortably and lovingly entwined.

They went to their room to change for the theater. The maid had turned back the beds. There was a fresh rose in a bud vase on the writing desk. They had another drink in the room and got undressed. Sarah awoke the next morning curled up on the floor with the bedspread tangled around her. Her mouth was sore. There was a bruise on her leg. Sarah crept into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She sat in the tub while the water beat against her. Pinned to the outside of the shower curtain was a note from Tommy, who had gone to work. Darling, the note said, we had a good time on your birthday. I can’t say I’m sorry we never got out. I’ll call you for lunch. Love.

Sarah turned the note inward until the water made the writing illegible. When the phone rang just before noon, she didn’t answer it.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance. And how one witnesses things when drunk is different as well. It is like putting a face mask against the surface of the sea and looking into things, into their baffled and guileless hearts.

When Sarah had been a drinker, she felt she had a fundamental and inventive grasp of situations, but now that she no longer drank, she found herself in the midst of a great and impenetrable silence that she could in no way interpret.

It was a small village. Many of the people who lived there didn’t even own cars. The demands of life were easily met and it was pretty there besides. It was divided between those who had always lived there and owned fishing boats and restaurants and the city people who had more recently discovered the area as a summer place and winter weekend investment. On the weekends, the New Yorkers would come up with their houseguests and their pâté and cheeses and build fires and go cross-country skiing. Tommy came home to Sarah on weekends. They did things together. They agreed on where to go. During the week she was on her own.

Once, alone, she saw a helicopter carrying a tree in a sling across the sound. The wealthy could afford to leave nothing behind.

Once, with the rest of the town, she saw five boats burning in their storage shrouds. Each summer resort has its winter pyromaniac.

Sarah did not read anymore. Her eyes hurt when she read and her hands ached all the time. During the week, she marketed and walked and cared for Martha.

It was three months after Stevie Bettencourt was killed when his mother visited Sarah. She came to the door and knocked on it and Sarah let her in.

Genevieve Bettencourt was Sarah’s age, although she looked rather younger. She had been divorced almost from the day that Stevie was born. She had another son named Bruce, who lived with his father in Nova Scotia. She had an old powder-blue Buick parked on the street in front of Sarah’s house. The Buick had one white door.

The two women sat in Sarah’s handsome, sunny living room. It was very calm, very peculiar, almost thrilling. Genevieve looked all around the room. Off the living room were the bedrooms. The door to Sarah and Tommy’s was closed but Martha’s door was open. She had a little hanging garden against the window. She had a hamster in a cage. She had an enormous bookcase filled with dolls and books.

Genevieve said to Sarah, “That room wasn’t there before. This used to be a lobster pound. I know a great deal about this town. People like you have nothing to do with what I know about this town. Do you remember the way things were, ever?”

“No,” Sarah said.

Genevieve sighed. “Does your daughter look like you or your husband?”

“No one’s ever told me she looked like me,” Sarah said quietly.

“I did not want my life to know you,” Genevieve said. She removed a hair from the front of her white blouse and dropped it to the floor. She looked out the window at the sun. The floor was of a very light and varnished pine. Sarah could see the hair lying there.

“I’m so sorry,” Sarah said. “I’m so very, very sorry.” She stretched her neck and put her head back.

“Stevie was a mixed-up boy,” Genevieve said. “They threw him off the basketball team. He took pills. He had bad friends. He didn’t study and he got a D in geometry and they wouldn’t let him play basketball.”

She got up and wandered around the room. She wore green rubber boots, dirty jeans and a beautiful, hand-knit sweater. “I once bought all my fish here,” she said. “The O’Malleys owned it. There were practically no windows. Just narrow high ones over the tanks. Now it’s all windows, isn’t it? Don’t you feel exposed?”

“No, I…” Sarah began. “There are drapes,” she said.

“Off to the side, where you have your garden, there are whale bones if you dig deep enough. I can tell you a lot about this town.”

“My husband wants to move,” Sarah said.

“I can understand that, but you’re the real drinker, after all, aren’t you, not him.”

“I don’t drink anymore,” Sarah said. She looked at the woman dizzily.

Genevieve was not pretty but she had a clear, strong face. She sat down on the opposite side of the room. “I guess I would like something,” she said. “A glass of water.” Sarah went to the kitchen and poured a glass of Vichy for them both. Her hands shook.

“We are not strangers to one another,” Genevieve said. “We could be friends.”

“My first husband always wanted to be friends with my second husband,” Sarah said after a moment. “I could never understand it.” This had somehow seemed analogous when she was saying it but now it did not. “It is not appropriate for us to be friends,” she said.

Genevieve continued to sit and talk. Sarah found herself concentrating desperately on her articulate, one-sided conversation. She suspected that the words Genevieve was using were codes for other words, terrible words. Genevieve spoke thoughtlessly, dispassionately, with erratic flourishes of language. Sarah couldn’t believe that they were chatting about food, men, the red clouds massed above the sea.

“I have a friend who is a designer,” Genevieve said. “She hopes to make a great deal of money someday. Her work has completely altered her perceptions. Every time she looks at a view, she thinks of sheets. ‘Take out those mountains,’ she will say, ‘lighten that cloud a bit and it would make a great sheet.’ When she looks at the sky, she thinks of lingerie. Now when I look at the sky, I think of earlier, happier times when I’d looked at the sky. I’ve never been in love, have you?”