Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Lucy was watching the street when an old Ford Thunderbird turned in to their driveway. She had never seen the car before and her husband, Dwight, was driving it. One of Dwight’s old girlfriends leapt from the passenger seat and ran toward the house. Her name was Caroline, she had curly hair and big white teeth, more than seemed normal, and Lucy liked her the least of all of Dwight’s old girlfriends.

“I was the horn,” Caroline said. “That car doesn’t have one so I was it. I’d yell out the window, ‘Watch out!’ ”

“Were you the brakes too or just the horn,” Lucy asked.

“It has brakes,” Caroline said, showing her startling teeth. She went into the living room and said, “Hello, rug.” She always spoke to the rug lying there. The rug was from Mexico with birds of different colors flying across it. All of the birds had long, white eyes. Dwight and Caroline had brought the rug back from the Yucatán when they had gone snorkeling there years before. Some of the coves were so popular that the fish could scarcely be seen for all the suntan oil floating in the water. At Garrafón in Isla Mujeres, Dwight told Lucy, he had raised his head and seen a hundred people bobbing facedown over the rocks of the reef and a clean white tampon bobbing there among them. Caroline had said at the time, “It’s disgusting, but it’s obviously some joke.”

Caroline muttered little things to the rug, showing off, Lucy thought, although she wasn’t speaking Spanish to it, she didn’t know Spanish. Lucy looked out the window at Dwight sitting in the Thunderbird. It was old with new paint, black, with a white top and portholes and skirts. He looked a little big for it. He got out abruptly and ran to the house as though through rain, but there was no rain. It was a still day in spring, just before Easter, with an odious weight to the air. Recently, when they had been coming inside, synthetic stuff from Easter baskets had been traveling in with them, the fake nesting matter, the pastel and crinkly stuff of Easter baskets. Lucy couldn’t imagine where they kept picking it up from, but no festive detritus came in this time.

Dwight gave her a hard, wandering kiss on the mouth. Lately, it was as though he were trying out kisses, trying to adjust them.

“You’ll tell me all about this, I guess,” Lucy said.

“Lucy,” Dwight said solemnly.

Caroline joined them and said, “I’ve got to be off. I don’t know the time, but I bet I can guess it to within a minute. I can do that,” she assured Lucy. Caroline closed her eyes. Her teeth seemed still to be looking out at them, however. “Five-ten,” she said after a while. Lucy looked at the clock on the wall, which showed ten minutes past five. She shrugged.

“That car is some cute,” Caroline said, giving Dwight a little squeeze. “Isn’t it some cute?” she said to Lucy. “Your Dwight’s been tracking this car for days.”

“I bought it from the next of kin,” Dwight said.

Lucy looked at him impassively. She was not a girl who was quick to alarm.

“I was down at the Aquarium last week looking at the fish,” Dwight began.

“Oh, that Aquarium,” Lucy said.

The Aquarium was where a baby seal had been put to sleep because he was born too ugly to be viewed by children. He had not been considered viewable so off he went. The Aquarium offended Lucy. “I like fish,” Dwight had told Lucy when she asked why he spent so much of his free time at the Aquarium. “Men like fish.”

“And when I came out into the parking lot, next to our car was this little Thunderbird and there was a dead man sitting behind the wheel.”

“Isn’t that something!” Caroline exclaimed.

“I was the first to find him,” Dwight said. “I’m no expert but that man was gone.”

“What did this dead man look like,” Lucy asked Dwight.

He thought for a moment, then said, “He looked like someone in the movies. He had a large head.”

“In any case,” Lucy said a little impatiently.

“In any case,” Dwight said, “this car just jumped at me, you know how some things do. I knew I just had to have this car, it was just so pretty. This car is almost cherry,” Dwight said, gesturing out at it, “and now it’s ours.”

“That car is not almost cherry,” Lucy said. “A man died in it. I would say that this car was about as un-cherry as you can get.” She went on vehemently like this for a while.

Caroline gazed at her, her lips parted, her teeth making no judgment. Then she said, “I’ve got to get back to my lonely home.” She did not live far away. Almost everybody they knew, and a lot of people they didn’t, lived close by. “Now you two have fun in that car, it’s a sweet little car.” She kissed Dwight and he patted her back in an avuncular fashion as he walked her to the door. The air outside had a faint, thin smell of fruit and rubber. A siren screamed through it.

When Dwight returned, Lucy said, “I don’t want a car a man died in for my birthday.”

“It’s not your birthday coming up, is it?”

Lucy admitted it was not, although Dwight often planned for her birthday months in advance. She blushed.

“It’s funny how some people live longer than others, isn’t it,” she finally said.

—

When Dwight had first seen Lucy, he was twenty-five years old and she was a four-month-old baby.

“I’m gonna marry you,” Dwight said to the baby. People heard him. He was tall and had black hair, and was wearing a leather jacket that a girlfriend had sewed a silk liner into. It was a New Year’s Eve party at this girlfriend’s house and the girl was standing beside him. “Oh, right,” she said. She didn’t see anything particularly intriguing about this baby. They could make better babies than this, she thought. Lucy lay in a white wicker basket on a sofa. Her hair was sparse and her expression solemn. “You’re gonna be my wife,” Dwight said. He was very good with babies and good with children too. When Lucy was five, her favorite things were pop-up books in which one found what was missing by pushing or pulling or turning a tab, and for her birthday Dwight bought her fifteen of these, surely as many as had ever been produced. When she was ten he bought her a playhouse and filled it with balloons. Dwight was good with adolescents as well. When she was fourteen, he rented her a horse for a year. As for women, he had a special touch with them, as all his girlfriends would attest. Dwight wasn’t faithful to Lucy as she was growing up, but he was attentive and devoted. Dwight kept up the pace nicely. And all the time Lucy was stoically growing up, learning how to dress herself and read, letting her hair grow, then cutting it all off, joining clubs and playing records, doing her algebra, going on dates, Dwight was out in the world. He always sent her little stones from the places he visited and she ordered them by size or color and put them in and out of boxes and jars until there came to be so many she grew confused as to where each had come from. At about the time Lucy didn’t care if she saw another little stone in her life, they got married. They bought a house and settled in. The house was a large, comfortable one, large enough, was the inference, to accommodate growth of various sorts. Things were all right. Dwight was like a big strange book where Lucy just needed to turn the pages and there everything was already.

—

They went out and looked at the Thunderbird in the waning light.

“It’s a beauty, isn’t it,” Dwight said. “Wide whites, complete engine dress.” He opened the hood, exposing the gleaming motor. Dwight was happy, his inky eyes shone. When he slammed the hood shut there was a soft rattling as of pebbles being thrown.

“What’s that,” Lucy asked.