Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

She pushed open the door and turned on the lamp beside the bed. There were three sockets in the lamp but only one bulb. There had been more bulbs in the lamp last night. She also thought there had been more furniture in the room, another chair. Reading would have been difficult, if she had wanted to read, but she was tired of reading, tired of books. After they had told her the first time and even after they had told her the other times in different ways, she had wanted to read, she didn’t want to just stand around gaping at everything, but she couldn’t pick the habit up again, it wasn’t the same.

The screen in the window was a mottled bluish green, a coppery, oceanic color. She thought of herself as a child with the spoonful of dust, but it was just a memory of her telling it now.

In the middle of the night she woke, soaked with sweat. Someone was right outside, she thought. Then this feeling vanished. She gathered up her things and put everything in the car. She did this all hurriedly, and then drove quickly to Jean’s house. She parked out front and turned the lights off. After a few moments, Gwendal appeared. She was wearing an ugly dress and carrying a suitcase. There were creases down one side of her face as though she’d been sleeping hard before she woke. “Where to first?” Gwendal said.

What they did first was to drive to the monastery and steal a dog. Gloria suspected that a fatal illness made her more or less invisible, and this seemed to be the case. She drove directly to the kennel, went in and walked out with a dog. She put him in the backseat and they drove off.

“We’ll avoid the highway,” Gloria said. “We’ll stick to the back roads.”

“Fine with me,” Gwendal said.

Neither of them spoke for miles, then Gwendal said, “Would you say he’s handsome and he knows it?”

“He’s a dog,” Gloria said. Gwendal was really mixed up. She was worse than her mother, Gloria thought.

They pulled into a diner and had breakfast. Then they went to a store and bought notebooks, pencils, dog food and gin. They bought sunglasses. It was full day now. They kept driving until dusk. They were quite a distance from Jean’s house. Gloria felt sorry for Jean. She liked to have everyone around her, even funny little Gwendal, and now she didn’t.

Gwendal had been sleeping. Suddenly she woke up. “Do you want to hear my dream?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Gloria said.

“Someone, it wasn’t you, told me not to touch this funny-looking animal, it wasn’t him,” Gwendal said, gesturing toward the dog. “Every time I’d pat it, it would bite off a piece of my arm or a piece of my chest. I just had to keep going ‘It’s cute’ and keep petting it.”

“Oh,” Gloria said. She had no idea what to say.

“Tell me one of your dreams,” Gwendal said, yawning.

“I haven’t been dreaming lately,” Gloria said.

“That’s not good,” Gwendal said. “That shows a lack of imagination. Readiness, it shows a lack of readiness, maybe. Well, I can put the dreams in later. Don’t worry about it.” She chose a pencil and opened the notebook. “OK,” she said. “Married?”

“No.”

“Any children?”

“No.”

“Allergies?”

Gloria looked at her.

“Do you want to start at the beginning or work backward from the Big Surprise,” Gwendal asked.

They were on the outskirts of a town, stopped at a traffic light. Gloria looked straight ahead. Beginnings. She couldn’t remember any beginnings.

“Hey,” someone said. “Hey!”

She looked to her left at a dented car full of young men. One of them threw a can of beer at her. It bounced off the door and they sped off, howling.

“Everyone knows if someone yells ‘Hey’ you don’t look at them,” Gwendal said.

“Let’s stop for the night,” Gloria said.

“How are you feeling,” Gwendal asked…not all that solicitously, Gloria thought.

They pulled into the first motel they saw. Gloria fed the dog and had a drink while Gwendal bounced on the bed. He seemed a most equable dog. He drank from the toilet bowl and gnawed peaceably on the bed rail. Gloria and Gwendal ate pancakes in an empty restaurant and strolled around a swimming pool that had a filthy rubber cover rolled across it. Back in the room, Gloria lay down on one bed while Gwendal sat on the other.

“Do you want me to paint your nails or do your hair,” Gwendal asked.

“No,” Gloria said. She was recalling a bad thought she’d had once, a very bad thought. It had caused no damage, however, as far as she knew.

“I wouldn’t know how to do your hair, actually,” Gwendal said.

With a little training, Gloria thought, this kid could be a mortician.

That night Gloria dreamed. She dreamed she was going to the funeral of some woman who had been indifferent to her. There was no need for her to be there. She was standing with a group of people. She felt like a criminal, undetected, but she felt chosen, too, to be there when she shouldn’t be. Then she was lying across the opening of a cement pipe. When she woke, she was filled with relief, knowing she would forget the dream immediately. It was morning again. Gwendal was outside by the unpleasant pool, writing in her notebook.

“This was happiness then,” she said, scribbling away.

“Where’s the dog,” Gloria asked. “Isn’t he with you?”

“I don’t know,” Gwendal said. “I let him out and he took off for parts unknown.”

“What do you mean!” Gloria said. She ran back to the room, went to the car, ran across the cement parking lot and around the motel. Gloria didn’t have any name to call the dog with. It had just disappeared without having ever been hers. She got Gwendal in the car and they drove down the roads around the motel. She squinted, frightened, at black heaps along the shoulder and in the littered grass, but it was tires, rags, tires. Cars sped by them. Along the median strip, dead trees were planted at fifty-foot intervals. The dog wasn’t anywhere that she could find. Gloria glared at Gwendal.

“It was an accident,” Gwendal said.

“You have your own ideas about how this should be, don’t you?”

“He was kind of a distraction,” Gwendal said.

Gloria’s head hurt. Back in the desert, just before she had made this trip, she had had her little winter. Her heart had pounded like a fist on a door. But it was false, all false, for she had survived it.

Gwendal had the hateful notebook on her lap. It had a splatter black cover with the word Composition on it. “Now we can get started,” she said. “Today’s the day. Favorite color,” she asked. “Favorite show tune?” A childish blue barrette was stuck haphazardly in her hair, exposing part of a large, pale ear.

Gloria wasn’t going to talk to her.

After a while, Gwendal said, “They were unaware that the fugitive was in their midst.” She wrote it down. Gwendal scribbled in the book all day long and asked Gloria to buy her another one. She sometimes referred to Gloria’s imminent condition as the Great Adventure.

Gloria was distracted. Hours went by and she was driving, though she could barely recall what they passed. “I’m going to pull in early tonight,” she said.

The motel they stopped at late that afternoon was much like the one before. It was called the Motel Lark. Gloria lay on one bed and Gwendal sat on the other. Gloria missed having a dog. A dog wouldn’t let the stranger in, she thought sentimentally. Whereas Gwendal would in a minute.

“We should be able to talk,” Gwendal said.

“Why should we be able to talk?” Gloria said. “There’s no reason we should be able to talk.”

“You’re not open is your problem. You don’t want to share. It’s hard to imagine what’s real all by yourself, you know.”