Joy Williams: The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

The girl is sleeping alone in her apartment. The man has gone on a business trip. He assures her he will come back. He’ll always come back, he says. When the girl is alone she measures her drink out carefully. Carefully, she drinks twelve ounces of bourbon in two and a half hours. When she is not with the man, she resumes her habit of listening to the radio. Frequently, she hears only the replies of Action Line. “Yes,” the Answer Man says, “in answer to your question, the difference between rising every morning at six or at eight in the course of forty years amounts to twenty-nine thousand two hundred and twenty hours or three years, two hundred twenty-one days and sixteen hours, which are equal to eight hours a day for ten years. So that rising at six will be the equivalent of adding ten years to your life.” The girl feels, by the Answer Man’s tone, that he is a little repulsed by this. She washes her whiskey glass out in the sink. Balloons are drifting around the kitchen. They float out of the kitchen and drift onto the balcony. They float down the hall and bump against the closed door of the child’s room. Some of the balloons don’t float but slump in the corners of the kitchen like mounds of jelly. These are filled with water. The girl buys many balloons and is always blowing them up for the child. They play a great deal with the balloons, breaking them over the stove or smashing the water-filled ones against the walls of the bathroom. The girl turns off the radio and falls asleep.

The girl touches her lover’s face. She runs her fingers across the bones. “Of course I love you,” he says. “I want us to have a life together.” She is so restless. She moves her hand across his mouth. There is something she doesn’t understand, something she doesn’t know how to do. She makes them a drink. She asks for a piece of gum. He hands her a small crumpled stick, still in the wrapper. She is sure that it is not the real thing. The Answer Man has said that Lewis Carroll once invented a substitute for gum. She fears that is what this is. She doesn’t want this! She swallows it without chewing. “Please,” she says. “Please what?” the man replies, a bit impatiently.

Her former husband calls her up. It is autumn and the heat is unusually oppressive. He wants to see the child. He wants to take her away for a week to his lakeside house in the middle of the state. The girl agrees to this. He arrives at the apartment and picks up the child and nuzzles her. He is a little heavier than before. He makes a little more money. He has a different watch, wallet and key ring. “What are you doing these days?” the child’s father asks. “I am in love,” she says.

The man does not visit the girl for a week. She doesn’t leave the apartment. She loses four pounds. She and the child make Jell-O and they eat it for days. The girl remembers that after the baby was born, the only food the hospital gave her was Jell-O. She thinks of all the water boiling in hospitals everywhere for new mothers’ Jell-O. The girl sits on the floor and plays endlessly with the child. The child is bored. She dresses and undresses herself. She goes through everything in her small bureau drawer and tries everything on. The girl thinks about the man constantly but without much exactitude. She does not even have a photograph of him! She looks through old magazines. He must resemble someone! Sometimes, late at night, when she thinks he might come to her, she feels that the Answer Man arrives instead. He is like a moving light, never still. He has the high temperature and metabolism of a bird. On Action Line, someone is saying, “And I live by the airport, what is this that hits my house, that showers my roof on takeoff? We can hear it. What is this, I demand to know! My lawn is healthy, my television reception is fine but something is going on without my consent and I am not well, my wife’s had a stroke and someone stole my stamp collection and took the orchids off my trees.” The girl sips her bourbon and shakes her head. The greediness and wickedness of people, she thinks, their rudeness and lust. “Well,” the Answer Man says, “each piece of earth is bad for something. Something is going to suffer eventually on it and the land itself is no longer safe. It’s weakening. If you dig deep enough to dip your seed, beneath the crust you’ll find an emptiness like the sky. No, nothing’s compatible to living in the long run. Next caller, please.” The girl goes to the telephone and dials hurriedly. It is very late. She whispers, not wanting to wake the child. There is static and humming. “I can’t make you out,” the Answer Man shouts. The girl says more firmly, “I want to know my hour.” “Your hour came, dear,” he says. “It went when you were sleeping. It came and saw you dreaming and it went back to where it was.”

The girl’s lover comes to the apartment. She throws herself into his arms. He looks wonderful. She would do anything for him! The child grabs the pocket of his jacket and swings on it with her full weight. “My friend,” the child says to him. “Why yes,” the man says with surprise. They drive the child to the nursery and then go out for a wonderful lunch. The girl begins to cry and spills the roll basket on the floor.

“What is it,” he asks. “What’s wrong?” He wearies of her, really. Her moods and palpitations. The girl’s face is pale. Death is not so far, she thinks. It is easily arrived at. Love is further than death. She kisses him. She cannot stop. She clings to him, trying to kiss him. “Be calm,” he says.

The girl no longer sees the man. She doesn’t know anything about him. She is a gaunt, passive girl, living alone with her child. “I love you,” she says to the child. “Mommy loves me,” the child murmurs, “and Daddy loves me and Grandma loves me and Granddaddy loves me and my friend loves me.” The girl corrects her. “Mommy loves you,” she says. The child is growing. In not too long the child will be grown. When is this happening! She wakes the child in the middle of the night. She gives her a glass of juice and together they listen to the radio. A woman is speaking on the radio. She says, “I hope you will not think me vulgar.” “Not at all,” the Answer Man replies. “He is never at a loss,” the girl whispers to the child. The woman says, “My husband can only become excited if he feels that some part of his body is missing.” “Yes,” the Answer Man says. The girl shakes the sleepy child. “Listen to this,” she says. “I want you to know about these things.” The unknown woman’s voice continues, dimly. “A finger or an eye or a leg. I have to pretend it’s not there.”

“Yes,” the Answer Man says.

Constance and Ben and their daughters by previous marriages, Charlotte and Jill, were sharing a summerhouse for a month with their friend Steven. There were five weekends that August, and for each one of them Steven invited a different woman up — Tracy, India, Yvette, Aster and Bronwyn. The women made a great deal of fuss over Charlotte and Jill, who were both ten. They made the girls nachos and root-beer floats, and bought them latch-hook sets and took them out to the moors to identify flowers. They took them to the cemeteries, from which the children would return with rubbings which Constance found depressing—

This beautiful bud to us was given

To unfold here but bloom in heaven

or worse!

Here lies Aimira Rawson

Daughter Wife Mother

She has done what she could

The children affixed the rubbings to the side of the refrigerator with magnets in the shape of broccoli.

The women would arrange the children’s hair in various elaborate styles that Constance hated. They knew no taboos; they discussed everything with the children — love, death, Japanese whaling methods. Each woman had habits and theories and stories to tell, and each brought a house present and stayed seventy-two hours. They all spent so much time with the children because they could not spend it with Steven, who appeared after 5:00 p.m. only. Steven was writing a book that summer; he was, in his words, “writing an aesthetically complex response to hermetic currents in modern life.” This took time.