Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

The day of the party was a Saturday, and Bliss had shopped with Joan for the liquor and food. As they were turning in to their driveway, their car was struck in the rear by a woman in an old Triumph. Joan and Bliss got out and looked at the rear of their car, which was undamaged, and then at the Triumph, which also appeared undamaged.

The woman was weeping. “I’m sorry,” she wailed. “Oh, I’m so sorry. This is my husband’s car.”

“No harm done,” Bliss said.

The woman tore at her hair. She was very pretty.

Joan was unaffected by trivial unpleasantries. She drove to the house, while Bliss remained standing by the Triumph. Joan unloaded the car and then went outside with a large bag of Hershey’s Kisses. She hid the Kisses all around the lawn, in the interstices of the stone walls and on the lower branches of trees for the children at the party to find.

“Well, Donna certainly has a tale to tell,” Bliss said, coming up to her. He unwrapped the foil from a Kiss and tossed the chocolate into his mouth.

“Donna, the TR person,” Joan said.

“I invited her to the party. Is that all right?”

“Sure,” Joan said. Bliss often invited strangers to their parties. Sometimes they were very nice people.

“Her husband had a stroke and is divorcing her. He insists on it.” Bliss rolled the foil into a tiny ball, looked at it, then dropped it in his pocket.

“We won’t get divorced,” Joan said.

“Never,” Bliss said. He went into the house to set out the glasses and plates. Joan walked around outside, hiding the rest of the candy. In the yard next door, a Doberman puppy with bandages on his ears and tail was playing with a rubber ice-cream sundae. His aluminum run extended the length of the yard. He had a druggy name, the name of some amphetamine. Joan had heard his owner calling him. The owner was a muscular man with a mustache who drove an elaborate four-wheel-drive vehicle. The puppy’s fashionable name made him seem transitory, even doomed.

At 5:00 p.m., Joan and Bliss went upstairs to their bedroom. The room was simple and pleasant with plain wide-board floors and white furniture, a little cell of felicity. There was a single framed poster of wildflowers on the white walls. It seemed to Joan the kind of room in which someone was supposed to be getting better. Joan lay on the bed and watched Bliss change his clothes for the party. She smiled for an instant, then shut her eyes. The passion they felt for each other had turned to unease some time ago.

“Maybe you’d love me if I were a priest,” Bliss said.

Joan’s eyes were shut. She saw the green lawn below them extending in time to her parents’ house, herself as the child her own children would never remind her of. She saw the barn where her father kept the chemicals and sprays for the groves. Inside, tacked on one wall, was a large foldout from an insecticide manufacturer’s brochure depicting all the ills that citrus was heir to. Beneath each picture of an insect was a picture of the horrible damage it could do. As a child, she had thrilled to it — flyspecked, yellowing, curling around the rusted nails that secured it. That such cruel and destructive forces could exist and be named amazed her, and that the means to control them could be at hand seemed preposterous. She saw it often, as now, clearly; the meticulous detail, the particularity of each proffered blight.

“It’s a question of language,” Bliss said. “ ‘The periapical granuloma is one of the most common of all sequelae of pulpitis’—it’s not the kind of language that sends a person forth into the world feeling loved, forgiven and renewed.”

“It’s not very comforting,” Joan agreed, opening her eyes.

“Really,” Bliss said, “I’m sick of teeth. You wouldn’t believe what goes on in people’s mouths. I want to abandon dentistry and go into the ministry. I have already chosen my style,” Bliss said, addressing her face in the mirror. “Yesterday, when Peter Carlyle was in — he’s the acute suppurative osteomyelitis — I said, ‘This day only is ours.’ ”

“Did he agree?”

“He certainly did,” Bliss said. “That is, he nodded slightly and groaned. Would you like a drink?”

“Sure,” Joan said. “It’s a party.”

Bliss went downstairs and reappeared a few moments later with a glass of bourbon and ice. Joan ran a bath and sat in the tub, listening to the cars coming up the driveway, the slamming of doors and people’s greetings. She did not touch the bourbon. She thought about Daniel, his voice, his prematurely gray hair. He had big feet. The shoes he wore in church seemed enormous. Joan went to church several times a week and sat, rose or knelt in accordance with the service. She sat in the back, in a pew where someone had once outlined a flower in the brocade of the kneeling bench with green crayon. In each pew, by the hymnal rack, was a smaller rack holding printed information cards and a small sharpened pencil. One could introduce oneself, ask questions, request a hymn, seek counseling. Joan did none of these things. She sat quietly in church, her head tilted upward, listening, feeling vain, unfixed, distracted. With Daniel she felt she was close to something, some comprehension of what there was left for her to want. Bliss was right, she thought, to be jealous of Daniel, although she and the priest were little more than acquaintances. And Daniel, of course, doesn’t know anything about her — he doesn’t know the past, about the babies, he doesn’t know her breasts, her lips. He doesn’t know the terrible way she thinks, like Bliss knows.

Joan got out of the tub. Wide veins were darkly visible on her hands and feet. She painted her nails chalk-colored, put on a flowered dress and went down to the party on the lawn. There were several dozen adults there and half a dozen children sitting meditatively in a circle. Joan approached them slowly, wondering what was in the heart of the circle. A baby bird? A Ouija board? But from a distance she saw it was a bowl of pretzels. The sky was pale and the ragged crown of the trees, dark. She gazed at the children without really seeing them. If someone had demanded that she describe them, she could not. She and Bliss gave a great many parties and were reciprocally invited to many. There was nothing to it, really.

A man named Tim Barnes came up to her and kissed her cheek. Tim liked to sail. He enjoyed narrow rivers and winding estuaries. He had fashioned a story around the time his mast went through the branches of a tree, and often he would tell it. When he told it, he would say, “I proceeded, looking like Birnam Wood.”

Once, during another party, Tim had said to Joan, “I dream about you, and when I wake up I’m angry. What do you think?”

People were talking and laughing. Joan had a tendency to look at their mouths. Their teeth seemed good. Bliss had made the acquaintance of many of these people professionally. She imagined Bliss solving their mouths, making them attractive, happy, her friends.

Next door, the Doberman trotted back and forth the length of his run, watching them. He had an abrupt, rocking gait. His paws, striking the soft dirt, made no sound.

People were talking about whether or not they wanted to survive a nuclear war.

“I certainly wouldn’t,” Tim Barnes’s wife said.

“I don’t believe we’re talking about nuclear war just like our parents did in the fifties,” a woman named Petey said.

Joan saw a clutch of candy at the base of a slender crab apple tree. She should have hidden something less bright. She had to remember to tell the children that they were supposed to look for the candy. She thought of her father spraying water on his citrus before a freeze. The next morning, the globes of fruit would be white and shining and rotting in the clear sunny air. Florida was not a serious state.