Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

He squeezed up his eyes. He could not see it.

“I like clouds,” he said.

“Clouds aren’t as pretty as they used to be,” Audrey said. “That’s a known fact.”

Tommy looked back at the book. It was a big book, with nothing but pictures of icebergs or so it seemed. How could she have stolen it? She turned the pages back and forth, not turning them in any order that he could see.

“Later explorers came and discovered the sea cow,” she read. “The sea cows munched seaweed in the shallows of the Bering Strait. They were colossal and dim-witted, their skin was like the bark of ancient oaks. Discovered in 1741, they were extinct by 1768.”

“I don’t know what extinct is,” Tommy said.

“Seventeen sixty-eight was the eighteenth century. Then there was the nineteenth century and the twentieth century and we are now in the twenty-first century. This is the century of destruction. The earth’s been around for four point six billion years and it may take only fifty more years to kill it.”

He thought for a while. “I’ll be fifty-nine,” he said. “You’ll be sixty-five.”

“We don’t want to be around when the earth gets killed,” Audrey said.

She went into the kitchen and helped herself to two Popsicles from the freezer. They ate them quickly, their lips and tongues turned red.

“Do you want me to give you a kiss?” Audrey said.

He opened his mouth.

“Look,” she said. “You don’t drool when you kiss. How’d you learn such a thing?”

“I didn’t,” he said.

“Never mind,” she said. “We don’t ever have to kiss. We’re the last generation.”

Walter made his boys supper every night when he came home from work. He set the table, poured the milk.

“Well, men,” he would say, “here we are.” He would begin to cry. “I’m sorry, men,” he’d say.

The sun would be setting in a mottled sky over the wet woods and the light would linger in a smeared radiance for a while.

Tommy would scarcely be able to sleep at night, waiting for the morning to come and go so it would be the afternoon and he would be with Audrey, rocking in the metal chairs.

“The last generation has got certain responsibilities,” Audrey said, “though you might think we wouldn’t. We should know nothing and want nothing and be nothing, but at the same time we should want everything and know everything and be everything.”

Upstairs, in his room, Walter, Jr., was lifting weights. They could hear him hoarsely breathing, gasping.

Audrey’s strange, smooth face looked blank. It looked empty.

“Did you love my brother,” Tommy asked. “Do you still love him?”

“Certainly not,” Audrey said. “We were just passing friends.”

“My father says we are all passing guests of God.”

“He says that kind of thing because the Mom left so quick.” She snapped her fingers.

Tommy was holding tight to the curved metal arms of the chair. He put his hands up to his face and sniffed them. He had had dreams of putting his hands in Audrey’s hair, hiding them there, up to his wrists. Her hair was the color of gingerbread.

“Love isn’t what you think anyway,” Audrey said.

“I don’t,” Tommy said.

“Love is ruthless. I’m reading a book for English class, Wuthering Heights. Everything’s in that book, but mostly it’s about the ruthlessness of love.”

“Tell me the whole book,” Tommy said.

“Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. I’ll tell you a story about her.”

He picked at a scab on his knee.

“Emily Brontë had a bulldog named Keeper that she loved. His only bad habit was sleeping on the beds. The housekeeper complained about this and Emily said that if she ever found him sleeping on the clean white beds again, she would beat him. So Emily found him one evening sleeping on a clean white bed and she dragged him off and pushed him in a corner and beat him with her fists. She punished him until his eyes were swelled up and he was bloody and half blind, and after she punished him, then she nursed him back to health.”

Tommy rocked on his chair, watching Audrey. He stopped picking. The scab didn’t want to come off.

“She had a harsh life,” Audrey said, “but she was fair.”

“Did she tell him later that she was sorry,” Tommy asked.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Did Keeper forgive her?”

“Dogs can’t think that way.”

“I’ve never had a dog,” Tommy said.

“I had a dog when I was little. She was a golden retriever. She looked exactly like all golden retrievers. Her size was the same, the color of her fur, and her large, sad eyes. Her behavior was the same. She was devoted, expectant and yet resigned. Do you see what I mean? But I liked her a lot. She was special to me. When she died, I wanted them to bury her under my window, but you know what they said to me? They said, The best place to bury a dog is in your heart.”

She looked at him until he finally said, “That’s right.”

“That’s a crock,” she said. “A crock of you know what. Don’t agree to so much stuff. You’ve got to watch out.”

“All right,” he said, and shook his head.

Sometimes, Audrey visited him at school. He told her when his recess was and she would walk over to the playground and talk with him through the playground’s chain-link fence. Once she brought a girlfriend with her. Her name was Flan and she wore large clothes, a long, wide skirt and a big sweater with little animals running in rows. There were only parts of the little animals where the body of the sweater met the sleeves and collar.

“He’s like a little doll, like, isn’t he,” Flan said.

“Now don’t go and scare him,” Audrey said.

Flan had a cold. She held little wadded tissues to her mouth and eyes. The tissues were blue and pink and green and she would dab at her face with them and push them back in her pockets but one spilled out and fluttered in the weeds beside the school-yard fence. It didn’t blow away and stayed there, fluttering.

“I ain’t scaring him. Where’d you get all them moles around your neck?” she said to Tommy.

“What do you mean, where’d he get them?” Audrey said. “He didn’t get them from anywhere.”

“Don’t you worry about them moles?” the girl persisted.

“Naw,” Tommy said.

“You’re a brave little guy, aren’t you,” Flan said. “There’s other stuff, I know. I’m not saying it’s all moles.” She tugged at the front of the frightful sweater. “Audrey gave me this sweater. She stole it. You know how she steals things and after a while she puts them back? But I like this so it’s not going to get put back.”

Tommy gazed unhappily at the sweater and then at Audrey.

“Sometimes putting stuff back is the best part,” Audrey said. “Sometimes it isn’t.”

“Audrey can steal anything,” Flan said.

“Can she steal a house,” Tommy asked.

“He’s so cute, ” Flan shrieked.

“I gotta go in,” Tommy said. Behind him, in the school yard, the children were playing a peculiar game, running, crouching, calling. There didn’t seem to be any rules. He trotted toward them and heard Flan say, “He’s a cute little guy, isn’t he.”

Tommy never saw Flan again and he was glad of that. He asked Audrey if Flan was in the last generation.

“Yes,” Audrey said. “She sure is.”

“Is my brother in the last generation too?”

“Technically he is, of course,” Audrey said. “But he’s not really. He has too much stuff.”

“I have stuff,” Tommy said. He had his little cars. “You’ve given me stuff.”

“But you don’t have possessions because what I gave you I stole. Anyway, you’ll stop caring about that soon. You’ll forget all about it, but Walter, Jr., really likes possessions and he likes to think about what he’s going to do. He has his truck and his barbells and those shirts with the pearl buttons.”