Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“This is Andy,” Gloria said.

“Andy,” Jean agreed. “He had an excellent vocabulary and was very precise. How I got involved with him I’ll never know. But he was my husband and I was devastated. I lived at the hospital, week after week. He liked me to read to him. I was there that afternoon and I had adjusted the shade and plumped the pillows and I was reading to him. And there he was, quietly slipping away right then, I guess, looking back on it. I was reading and I got to this part about someone being the master of a highly circumscribed universe and he opened his eyes and said, Circumscribed. What, darling? I said. And he said, Circumscribed, not circumcised…you said circumcised. And I said, I’m sure I didn’t, darling, and he gave me this long look and then he gave a big sigh and died. Isn’t that awful?”

Gloria giggled, then shook her head.

Jean’s eyes darted around the room, which was in high disorder. Peeling wallpaper, cracked linoleum. Cardboard boxes everywhere. Shards of glass had been swept into one corner and a broken croquet mallet propped one window open. “So what do you think of this place?” Jean said.

“It’s some place,” Gloria said.

“Everyone says I shouldn’t have. It needs some work, I know, but I found this wonderful man, or he found me. He came up to the door and looked at all this and I said, Can you help me? Do you do work like this? And he nodded and said, I puttah. Isn’t that wonderful! I puttah…”

Gloria looked at the sagging floor and the windows loose in their frames. The mantel was blackened by smoke and grooved with cigarette burns. It was clear that the previous occupants had led lives of grinding boredom here and with little composure. He’d better start puttahing soon, Gloria thought. “Don’t marry him,” she said, and laughed.

“Oh, I know you think I marry everybody,” Jean said, “but I don’t. There have only been four. The last one, and I mean the last, was the worst. What a rodent Chuckie was. No, he’s more like a big predator, a crow or a weasel or something. Cruel, lazy, deceitful.” Jean shuddered. “The best thing about him was his hair.” Jean was frequently undone by hair. “He has great hair. He wears it in a sort of fifties full flattop.”

Gloria felt hollow and happy. Nothing mattered much. “You actually bought this place?” she said.

“Oh, it’s crazy,” Jean said, “but Gwendal and I needed a home. I’ve heard that faux is the new trend. I’m going to do it all faux when I get organized. Do you want to see the upstairs? Gwendal’s room is upstairs. Hers is the neatest.”

They went up the stairs to a room where a fat girl sat on a bed writing in a book.

“I’m doing my autobiography,” Gwendal said, “but I think I’m going to change my approach.” She turned to Gloria. “Would you like to be my biographer?”

Jean said, “Say hello to Gloria. You remember Gloria.”

Gloria gave the girl a hug. Gwendal smelled good and had small pale eyes. The room wasn’t clean at all, but there was very little in it. Gloria supposed it was the neatest. Conversation lagged.

“Let’s go out and sit on the lawn,” Jean suggested.

“I don’t want to,” Gwendal said.

The two women went downstairs. Gloria needed to use the bathroom but Jean said she had to go outside as the plumbing wasn’t all it should be at the moment. There was a steep brushy bank behind the house and Gloria crouched there. The day was clear and warm now. At the bottom of the bank, a flat stream moved laboriously around vine-covered trees. The mud glistened in the sun. Blackberries grew in the brush. This place had a lot of candor, Gloria thought.

Jean had laid a blanket on the grass and was sitting there, eating a wedge of cheesecake from a plastic plate. Gloria decided on a drink over cake.

“We’ll go to Bill’s house for lunch,” Jean said. “Then we’ll go to Fred’s house for a swim.” Fred was an old husband too. Gwendal’s father was the only one who wasn’t around. He lived in Las Vegas. Andy wasn’t around either, of course.

Gwendal came out of the house into the sloppy yard. She stopped in the middle of a rhubarb patch, exclaiming silently and waving her arms.

Jean sighed. “It’s hard being a single mother.”

“You haven’t been single for long,” Gloria said.

Jean laughed loudly at this. “Poor Gwendal,” she said. “I love her dearly.”

“A lovely child,” Gloria murmured.

“I just wish she wouldn’t make up so much stuff sometimes.”

“She’s young,” Gloria said, finishing her drink. Really, she hardly knew what she was saying. “What is she doing?” she asked Jean.

Gwendal leapt quietly around in the rhubarb.

“Whatever it is, it needs to be translated,” Jean said. “Gwendal needs a good translator.”

“She’s pretending something or other,” Gloria offered, thinking she would very much like another drink.

“I’m going to put on a fresh dress for visiting Bill,” Jean said. “Do you want to change?”

Gloria shook her head. She was watching Gwendal. When Jean went into the house, the girl trotted over to the blanket. “Why don’t you kidnap me,” she said.

“Why don’t you kidnap me ?” Gloria said, laughing. What an odd kid, she thought. “I don’t want to kidnap you,” she said.

“I’d like to see your house,” Gwendal said.

“I don’t have a house. I live in an apartment.”

“Apartments aren’t interesting,” Gwendal said. “Dump it. We could get a van. The kind with the ladder that goes up the back. We could get a wheel cover that says MESS WITH THE BEST, LOSE LIKE THE REST.”

There was something truly terrifying about girls on the verge of puberty, Gloria thought. She laughed.

“You drink too much,” Gwendal said. “You’re always drinking something.”

This hurt Gloria’s feelings. “I’m dying,” she said. “I have a brain tumor. I can do what I want.”

“If you’re dying you can do anything you want?” Gwendal said. “I didn’t know that. That’s a new one. So there are compensations.”

Gloria couldn’t believe she’d told Gwendal she was dying. “You’re fat,” she said glumly.

Gwendal ignored this. She wasn’t all that fat. Somewhat fat, perhaps, but not grotesquely so.

“Oh, to hell with it,” Gloria said. “You want me to stop drinking, I’ll stop drinking.”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” Gwendal said.

Gloria’s mouth trembled. I’m drunk, she thought.

“Some simple pleasures are just a bit too simple, you know,” Gwendal said.

Gloria had felt she’d been handling her upcoming death pretty well, but now she wasn’t sure. In fact she felt awful. What was she doing spending what might be one of her last days sitting on a scratchy blanket in a weedy yard while an unpleasant child insulted her? Her problem was that she had never figured out exactly where she wanted to go to die. Some people knew and planned accordingly. The desert, say, or Nantucket. Or a good hotel somewhere. But she hadn’t figured it out. En route was the closest she’d come.

Gwendal said, “Listen, I have an idea. We could do it the other way around. Instead of you being my biographer, I’ll be yours. Gloria by Gwendal. ” She wrote it in the air with her finger. She did not have a particularly flourishing hand, Gloria noted. “Your life as told to Gwendal Crawley. I’ll write it all down. At least that’s something. We can always spice it up.”

“I haven’t had a very interesting life,” Gloria said modestly. But it was true, she thought. When her parents had named her, they must have been happy. They must have thought something was going to happen now.