Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

It seemed that people were better off when they could concentrate on something, hold something in their mind for a long time and really believe it. Pammy had once seen a radical skater putting on a show at the opening of a shopping mall. He leapt over cars and pumped up the sides of buildings. He did flips and spins. A disc jockey who was set up for the day in the parking lot interviewed him. “I’m really impressed with your performance,” the disc jockey said, “and I’m impressed that you never fall. Why don’t you fall?” The skater was a thin boy in baggy cutoff jeans. “I don’t fall,” the boy said, looking hard at the microphone, “because I’ve got a deep respect for the concrete surface and because when I make a miscalculation, instead of falling I turn it into a new trick.”

Pammy thinks it is wonderful that the boy was able to tell himself something that would keep him from thinking he might fall.

The door to the room opened. Pammy had heard the turning of the knob. At first she lies without opening her eyes, willing the sound of the door shutting, but she hears nothing, only the ticking of the bed’s timer. She swings her head quickly to the side and looks at the door. A man is standing there, staring at her. She presses her right hand into a fist and lays it between her legs. She puts her left arm across her breasts.

“What?” she says to the figure, frightened. In an instant she is almost panting with fear. She feels the repetition of something painful and known, but she has not known this, not ever. The figure says nothing and pulls the door shut. With a flurry of rapid ticking, the timer stops. The harsh lights of the bed go out.

Pammy pushes the lid back and hurriedly gets up. She dresses hastily and smooths her hair with her fingers. She looks at herself in the mirror, her lips parted. Her teeth are white behind her pale lips. She stares at herself. She can be looked at and not discovered. She can speak and not be known. She opens the door and enters the hall. There is no one there. The hall is so narrow that by spreading her arms she can touch the walls with her fingertips. In the reception area by Aurora’s desk, there are three people, a stoop-shouldered young woman and two men. The woman was signing up for a month of unlimited tanning, which meant that after the basic monthly fee she only had to pay a dollar a visit. She takes her checkbook out of a soiled handbag, which is made out of some silvery material, and writes a check. The men look comfortable lounging in the chairs, their legs stretched out. They know each other, Pammy guesses, but do not know the woman. One of them has dark spiky hair like a wet animal’s. The other wears a tight red T-shirt. Neither is the man she had seen in the doorway.

“What time do you want to come back tomorrow, honey,” Aurora asks Pammy. “You certainly are coming along nicely. Isn’t she coming along nicely?”

“I’d like to come back the same time tomorrow,” Pammy says. She raises her hand to her mouth and coughs slightly.

“Not the same time, honey. Can’t give you the same time. How about an hour later?”

“All right,” Pammy says. The stoop-shouldered woman sits down in a chair. There are no more chairs in the room. Pammy opens the door and steps outside. It has rained and the pavement is dark and shining. She walks slowly down the street and smells the rain lingering in the trees. By a store called Imagine, there’s a clump of bamboo with some beer cans glittering in its ragged, grassy center. Imagine sells neon palm trees and silk clouds and stars. It sells greeting cards and chocolate in shapes children aren’t allowed to see and it sells children’s stickers and shoelaces. Pammy looks in the window at a satin pillow in the shape of a heart with a heavy zipper running down the center of it. Pammy turns and walks back to the building that houses the tanning beds. Her mother pulls up in their car. “Pammy!” she calls. She is leaning toward the window on the passenger side, which she has rolled down. She unlocks the car’s door. Pammy gets in and the door locks again.

The car speeds down the street and Pammy sits in it, a little stunned. Her father will teach her how to drive, and she will drive around. Her mother will continue to take classes at the university. Whenever she meets someone new, she will mention the Goya. “I have a small Goya,” she will say, and laugh. Pammy will grow older, she is older already. But the world will remain as young as she was once, infinite in its possibilities, and uncaring. She never wants to see that figure looking at her again, staring so coldly, but she knows she will, for already its features are becoming more indistinct, more general. It could be anything. And it will be somewhere else now, something else. She coughs, but it is not the cough of a sick person because Pammy is a healthy girl. It is the kind of cough a person might make if they were at a party and there was no one there but strangers.

Bliss and Joan were giving a farewell party for the Episcopal priest and his family, who had been called by God to the state of Michigan. They had invited some mutual friends and couples with children the same age as the priest’s children. Bliss did not go to church and had never met the priest, but he approved of any party given for whatever reason and felt that Joan had something of a fascination with the man, whose name was Daniel. Joan had always imagined that Daniel might tell her something, although he never had, and now he was leaving.

This was in New England, where they had lived for three years. Joan was a fourth-generation Floridian who missed the garish sunsets and the sound of armadillos crashing through the palmetto scrub. She remembered wearing live lizards hanging from her earlobes when she was a child. She remembered Gator, a pony her father had bought for her. Joan’s father owned a grapefruit grove. Her grandfather had run a fishing camp, and her great-grandfather had been a guide who shot flamingos and spoonbills and ibis and gathered eggs for naturalists.

Bliss had been born in Florida too. Now he’s a dentist. People think that dentists are acquisitive and don’t care, but Bliss cares.

Bliss and Joan have no children. Twice, Joan gave birth to a baby but both times the baby died before he was six months old. There was a sweet smell on the baby’s diaper, a smell rather like that of maple sugar, and in a few hours the baby was dead. Bliss has a single deviant gene that matches a single deviant gene of Joan’s. When a doctor told him at the hospital that the deaths were not as mysterious as they first appeared to be, Bliss struck him before he could say anything more, once with his left hand and again with his right. The doctor fell to the floor but got up quickly and walked away down the white corridor, leaving Bliss alone, his arms aching.

After the death of their second child, they had moved to New En-gland. In Florida, Joan’s depression had been compounded by unpleasant dreams of her great-grandfather. He appeared in her dreams exactly as he did in her father’s photo album — a skinny man in a wide hat, rough clothes and rubber boots, standing with his shotgun. In a recurrent dream, he was a waiter in a pleasant, rosily lit dining room serving her soup in which birds in all stages of incubation floated. In another frequent dream, he was not visible, yet Joan sensed his presence beneath the vision of hundreds of flamingos flying through a dark sky, flying, as they do, in a serpentine manner, as though they were crawling through the air.

In New England, Joan discovered that if she slept while it was light she didn’t dream, so she slept in the afternoons and stayed up all night, putting together immense puzzles of Long Island Sound. She lived in terror, actually, but it was rootless, because the worst had already happened. She referred to the days behind her as “those so-called days.”