Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“Your husband is very pleasant,” Donna said. “He’s funny, isn’t he? And you’re pleasant. It was very nice of you to invite me here. I’d been driving around in Harry’s car and crying to myself, and then I hit you. You were so nice about it.” She looked at Joan uneasily. “Your husband thinks we’re a little alike,” she said. “I never would’ve guessed you were from the South. Do you miss Florida?”

“My father always used to call it Floridon’t,” Joan said. This was how it was supposed to be, she thought. Memory and conversation, clarification and semblance, miscalculation and repentance, skim and rest.

Donna laughed, showing considerable gum. Bliss isn’t going to be able to do much about that, Joan thought. “I’ll get us something to eat,” she said. She walked toward the house, having no intention of getting anyone anything to eat.

Joan went up to the second floor, entered the bedroom and closed the door. She stood by the window and looked down into the adjoining yard. The muscular young man with the mustache had gone into the pen and was playing with the Doberman puppy, who spun in tight, exhilarated circles. The owner put his hands on the dog’s shoulders and pushed him from side to side. Joan stood by the window, watching. Moonlight fell across the ribbon of earth where the man and the dog playfully pulled and turned and rose against each other. Then the man grasped the dog by the collar and led him into the house and the pen was empty.

Some time later, Bliss came into the room. He stood behind her and put his arms around her. His face was damp and his hair smelled of cigarette smoke.

“Do you remember when we drove up here,” Joan said, “when it was finished?”

“Don’t whisper,” Bliss said.

“We left everything behind and drove all through the night and in the morning we stopped at this little picnic grove by a river and there were two old people there and they were washing this big white dog in the river. A big old white dog. They washed him so carefully and then dried him with a towel. He was what they had.”

“Everyone’s about to leave,” Bliss said. “Let’s go down and say good night.”

“I don’t want to be like those old people,” Joan said.

“Never,” Bliss said. “Let’s go down and say good night. Just this one more time.”

Bomber Boyd, age thirteen, told his new acquaintances that summer that his father had been executed by the state of Florida for the murder of a sheriff’s deputy and his drug-sniffing dog.

“It’s a bummer he killed the dog,” a girl said.

“Guns, chair or lethal injection?” a boy asked.

“Chair,” Bomber said. He was sorry he had mentioned the dog in the same breath. The dog had definitely not been necessary.

“Lethal injection is fascist, man,” a small, fierce-looking boy said. “Who does lethal injection?”

“Florida, Florida, Florida,” the girl murmured. “We went to Key West once. We did sunset. We did Sloppy’s. We bought conch-shell lamps with tiny plastic flamingos and palm trees lit up inside by tiny lights.” The girl’s hair was cut in a high Mohawk that rose at least half a foot in the air. She was pale, her skin flawless except for one pimple artfully flourishing above her full upper lip.

“Key West isn’t Florida,” a boy said.

There were six of them standing around, four boys and two girls. Bomber stood there with them, waiting.

—

May was in her garden looking through a stack of a hundred photographs that her son and daughter-in-law had taken years before when they visited Morocco. Bomber had been four at the time and May had taken care of him all that spring. There were pictures of camels, walled towns, tiled staircases and large vats of colored dyes on rooftops. May turned the pictures methodically. There were men washing their heads in a marble ablutions basin. On a dusty road there was the largest pile of carrots May had ever seen. May had been through the photographs many times. She slowly approached the one that never ceased to trouble her, a picture of her child in the city of Fez. He wore khaki pants and a polo shirt and was squatting beside a blanket on which teeth were arranged. It had been explained to May that there were many self-styled dentists in Morocco who pulled teeth and then displayed them on plates they then sold. In the photograph, her son looked healthy, muscular and curious, but there was something unfamiliar about his face. It had begun there, May thought, somehow. She put the photographs down and picked up a collection of postcards from that time, most of them addressed to Bomber. May held one close to her eyes. Men in blue burnooses lounged against their camels, the desert wilderness behind them. On the back was written, The blue men! We wanted so much to see them but we never did.

—

May and Bomber were trying out their life together in a new town. They had only each other, for Bomber’s mother was resting in California, where she would probably be resting for quite some time, and May’s husband, Harold, was dead. In the new town, which was on an island, May had bought a house and planted a pretty little flower garden. She had two big rooms upstairs that she rented out by the week to tourists. One was in yellow and the other in rose. May liked to listen to the voices in the rooms, but as a rule her tourists didn’t say much. Actually, she strained to hear at times. She was not listening for sounds of love, of course. The sounds of love were not what mattered, after all.

Once, as she was standing in the upstairs hallway polishing a small table, her husband’s last words had returned to her. Whether they had been spoken again by someone in the room, either in the rose room or the yellow room, she did not quite know, but there they were. That doctor is so stuck on himself… the same words as Harold’s very last ones.

The tourists would gather seashells and then leave them behind when they left. They left them on the bureaus and on the windowsills and May would pick them up and take them back to the beach. On nights when she couldn’t sleep she would walk downtown to a bar where the young people danced, the Lucky Kittens, and have a glass of beer. The Lucky Kittens was a loud and careless place where there was dancing all night long. May sat alone at a table near the door, an old lady, dignified and out of place.

—

Bomber was down at the dock, watching tourists arrive on the ferry. The tourists were grinning and ready for anything, they thought. Two boys were playing catch with a tennis ball on the pier, the older one wearing a college sweatshirt. The younger one sidled back and forth close to the pier’s edge, catching in both hands the high, lobbed throws the other boy threw. The water was high and dark and flecked with oil, and they were both laughing like lunatics. Bomber believed they were brothers and enjoyed watching them.

A girl moved languidly across the dock toward him. She was the pale girl with the perfect pimple and she touched it delicately as she walked. Her shaved temples had a slight sheen of baby powder on them. Her name was Edith.

“I’ve been thinking,” Edith said, “and I think that what they should do, like, a gesture is enough. Like for murderers they could make them wear black all the time. They could walk around but they’d have to be always in black and they’d have to wear a mask of some sort.”

Sometimes Bomber thought of what had happened to his father as an operation. It was an operation they had performed. “A mask,” he said. “Hey.” He crossed his arms tight across his chest. He thought Edith’s long, pale face beautiful.

She nodded. “A mask,” she said. “Something really amazing.”

“But that wouldn’t be enough, would it,” Bomber asked.