Joy Williams: The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

Ben was recovering from a heart attack he had suffered in the spring. He and Constance had been in a restaurant, and he had had a heart attack. She remembered the look of absolute attentiveness that had crossed his face. At the time, she had thought he was looking at a beautiful woman behind her and on the other side of the room. The memory, which she recalled frequently, mortified her.

Things appeared different now to Constance: objects seemed to have more presence, people seemed more vivid, the sky seemed brighter. Her nightmares’ messages were far less veiled. Constance was embarrassed at having these feelings, for it had been Ben’s heart attack, after all, not hers. He had always accused her of taking things too personally.

Constance and Ben had been married for five years. Charlotte was Constance’s child from her marriage with Paul, and Jill was Ben’s from his marriage with Susan. The children weren’t crazy about each other, but they got along. It was all right, really, with them. Here in the summerhouse they slept in the attic; in Constance’s opinion, the nicest room in the house. It had two iron beds, white beaverboard walls and a small window, from which one could see three streets converging. Sometimes Constance would take a gin and tonic up to the attic and lie on one of the beds and watch people place their postcards in the mailbox at the intersection. Constance didn’t send postcards herself. She really didn’t want to get in touch with anybody but Ben, and Ben lived in the same house with her, as he had in whatever house they’d been in ever since they’d gotten married. She couldn’t very well send a postcard to Ben.

August was hot and splendid for the most part, but those who stayed for the entire season claimed it was not as nice as July. The gardens were blown. Pedestrians irritably swatted bicyclists who used the sidewalks. There was more weeping in bars, and more jellyfish in the sea.

On the afternoon of the first Friday in August, Constance was in the attic room observing an elderly couple place their postcards in the mailbox with great deliberation. She watched a woman about her own age drop a card in the box and go off with a mean, satisfied look upon her face. She watched an older woman throw in at least a dozen cards with no emotion whatever.

Charlotte came upstairs and told her mother, “A person drowning imagines there’s a ladder rising vertically from the water, and he tries to climb that ladder. Did you know that? If he would only imagine that the ladder was horizontal he wouldn’t drown.”

Charlotte left. Constance sat on a bed and looked around the room. On the bureau mirror were photographs of two little boys, Charlotte’s and Jill’s boyfriends. Their names were Zack and Pete. They were just little boys but there they were. It worried Constance that the children should already have boyfriends. Another photograph, which Constance had not seen before, showed a large dog in front of a potted evergreen. Constance was not acquainted with either him or his name. She got up and began picking up candy wrappers that were scattered around the room and putting them in her empty glass. She was thirty-seven years old. She thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that American lives have no second act.

Constance went downstairs to the kitchen, where Tracy was drinking some champagne she had brought, and waiting for Steven to appear at five o’clock.

“I just love it here,” Tracy said. “I love it, love it, love it.”

Her eyes were shining. She was a good sport but she had rather bad skin. She was a vegetarian; for three days after she left, the children demanded bean curd. She was Steven’s typist in the city, where she and her epileptic lab, Scooter, lived in the same apartment building as Jill’s aunt.

“You were in my apartment a long, long time ago,” Tracy told Jill, “when you were a little tiny girl, and you pulled Scooter’s tail and he growled at you and you said, ‘Stop that at once,’ and he did.”

“I can’t remember that,” Jill said.

“It’s a small world,” Tracy said, pouring herself more champagne. She sighed. “Scooter’s getting along now.”

Charlotte and Jill were sitting on either side of Tracy at the kitchen table, making lists of the names they wanted to call their children. Charlotte had Victoria, Grover and Christopher; Jill had Beatrice, Travis and Cone.

“Cone,” Tracy asked. “How can you name a child Cone?”

Constance looked at the ornately lettered names. The future yawned ahead, filled with individuals, each expecting to be found.

“Do you swim,” Constance asked Tracy.

“I do,” Tracy said solemnly. “I just gave the girls a few pointers about panic in the water.”

“Would you like to go swimming,” Constance asked.

“It’s almost five,” Tracy said. “Steven will be coming down any moment.”

“Cone is both a nice shape and a nice name,” Jill said.

“Would you like to go swimming?” Constance asked the girls.

“No thanks,” they said.

Ben came in the kitchen door, chewing gum. Since his heart attack, he had given up smoking and chewed a great deal of gum. He was tanned and smiling, but he moved a little oddly, as though he were carrying something awkward. Constance got a little rush every time she saw Ben.

“Would you like to go swimming with me,” Constance asked.

“Sure,” Ben said.

They drove out to the beach and went swimming. On the bluff above the beach was the white silo of a loran station, which sent out signals that enabled navigators to determine their position by time displacement. Constance and Ben swam without touching or talking. Then they went home.

—

India came the next weekend. Tracy’s champagne bottle held a browning mum. India was secretive and feminine. She brought two guests of her own, Fred and Miriam. They all lived on a farm in South Woodstock, Vermont, not far from the huge quartz testicle stones there. “There are megalithic erections all over our farm,” India told Constance.

A terrible thing had happened to Fred — his wife had just died. A mole on her waist had turned blue and in six weeks she was dead.

Fred told Constance, “The last words she said to me were ‘Life goes on long enough. Not too long, but long enough.’ ” Fred’s eyes would glass up but he did not cry. He had brought a tape of Blind Willie Johnson singing “Dark Was the Night,” which he frequently played.

On Saturday they had a large lunch of several dozen ears of fresh corn and a gallon of white wine. Miriam said to Constance, “It wasn’t Rose that died, it was Lu-Ellen. Doesn’t Fred just wish it was Rose! Lu-Ellen was just a girl in the office he was crazy for.”

Miriam whispered this so Fred would not hear. She had corn kernels in her teeth, but apart from that she was the very picture of an exasperated woman. Was she in love with Fred? Constance wondered. Or Steven? Actually, it was Edward she spoke to constantly on the phone. Miriam would say things to India like “Edward said he got in touch with Jimmy and everything’s all right now.”

After lunch, there was a long moment of silence while they all listened to the sound of Steven’s typewriter. Steven did not eat lunch; he was bringing together the cosmic and the personal, the poetic and the expository. During working hours, he was fueled by grapefruit juice only.

India had brought four quarts of Vermont raspberries to Constance and Ben. The berries had been bruised a little during their passage across the sound. She had brought Steven a leather-bound book with thick creamy blank pages upon which to record his thoughts.

“Nothing gets past Steven, not a single thing,” India said.

“I’ve never known a cooler intelligence,” Miriam said.