Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Then the phone would ring and Jack would begin his daily business of reconstructing the previous lives of hair and teeth when they had been possessed by someone. A detective a thousand miles away would send him a box of pitted bones and within days Jack would be saying, “This is a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who didn’t do drugs and who was tall, healthy and trusting. Too trusting, clearly.”

Or a hand would be found in the stomach of a shark hauled up by a party boat off the Gulf Coast of Florida and Jack would be flown off to examine it. He would return deeply tanned and refreshed, with a crisp new haircut, saying, “The shark was most certainly attracted to the rings on this hand. This is a teen’s hand. She was small, perhaps even a legal midget, and well nourished. She was a loner, adventurous, not well educated and probably unemployed. Odds are the rings were stolen. She would certainly have done herself a favor by passing up the temptation of those rings.”

Miriam hated it when Jack was judgmental, and Jack was judgmental a great deal. She herself stole on occasion, mostly sheets. For some reason, it was easy to steal sheets. As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.

Jack had no idea that Miriam stole sheets and more. He liked Miriam. He liked her bones. She had fine bones and he loved tracing them at night beneath her warm, smooth skin, her jawbone, collarbone, pelvic bone. It wasn’t anything that consumed him, but he just liked her was all, usually. And he liked his work. He liked wrapping things up and dealing with those whom the missing had left behind. He was neither doctor nor priest; he was the forensic anthropologist, and he alone could give these people peace. They wanted to know, they had to know. Was that tibia in the swamp Denny’s? Denny, we long to claim you…Were those little bits and pieces they got when they dragged the lake Lucile’s even though she was supposed to be in Manhattan? She had told us she was going to be in Manhattan, there was never any talk about a lake…Bill had gone on a day hike years ago with his little white dog and now at last something had been found in a ravine…Pookie had toddled away from the Airstream on the Fourth of July just as we were setting up the grill, she would be so much older now, a little girl instead of a baby, and it would be so good just to know, if only we could know…

And Jack would give them his gift, the incontrovertible and almost unspeakable news. That’s her, that’s them. No need to worry anymore, it is finished, you are free. No one could help these people who were weary of waiting and sick of hope like Jack could.

Miriam had a fondness for people who vanished, though she had never known any personally. But if she had a loved one who vanished, she would prefer to believe that they had fallen in love with distance, a great distance. She certainly wouldn’t long to be told they were dead.

One day, one of Jack’s students, an ardent hunter, a gangly blue-eyed boy named Carl who wore camouflage pants and a black shirt winter and summer, presented him with four cured deer feet. “I thought you’d like to make a lamp,” Carl said.

Miriam was in the garden. She had taken to stealing distressed plants from nurseries and people’s yards and planting them in an unused corner of the lot, far from Jack’s roses. They remained distressed, however — in shock, she felt.

“It would make a nice lamp,” Carl said. “You can make all kinds of things. With a big buck’s forelegs you can make an outdoor thermometer. Looks good with snowflakes on it.”

“A lamp,” Jack said. He appeared delighted. Jack got along well with his students. He didn’t sleep with the girls and he treated the boys as equals. He put his hands around the tops of the deer feet and splayed them out some.

“You might want to fiddle around with the height,” Carl said. “You can make great stuff with antlers, too. Chandeliers, candelabras. You can use antlers to frame just about anything.”

“We have lamps,” Miriam said. She was holding a wan perennial she had liberated from a supermarket.

“Gosh, this appeals to me, though, Miriam.”

“I bet you’d be good at this sort of thing, sir,” Carl said. “I did one once and it was very relaxing.” He glanced at Miriam, squeezed his eyes almost shut and smiled.

“It will be a novelty item, all right,” Jack said. “I think it will be fun.”

“Maybe you’d like to go hunting sometime with me, sir,” Carl said. “We could go bow hunting for muleys together.”

“You should resist the urge to do this, Jack, really,” Miriam said. The thought of a lamp made of animal legs in her life and turned on caused a violent feeling of panic within her.

But Jack wanted to make a lamp. He needed another hobby, he argued. Hobbies were healthy, and he might even take Carl up on his bow-hunting offer. Why didn’t she get herself a hobby like baking or watching football? he suggested. He finished the lamp in a weekend and set it on an antique jelly cabinet in the sunroom. He’d had a little trouble trimming the legs to the same height. They might not have ended up being exactly the same height. Miriam, expecting to be repulsed by the thing, was enthralled instead. It had a dark blue shade and a gold-colored cord and a sixty-watt bulb. A brighter bulb would be pushing it, Jack said. Miriam could not resist the allure of the little lamp. She often found herself sitting beside it, staring at it, the harsh brown hairs, the dainty pasterns, the polished black hooves, all fastened together with a brass gimp band in a space the size of a dinner plate. It was anarchy, the little lamp, its legs snugly bunched. It was whirl, it was hole, it was the first far drums. She sometimes worried that she would start talking to it. This happened to some people, she knew, they felt they had to talk. She read that Luther Burbank spoke to cactus reassuringly when he wanted to create a spineless variety and that they stabbed him repeatedly; he had to pull thousands of spines from his hands but didn’t care. He continued to speak calmly and patiently; he never got mad, he persisted.

“Miriam,” Jack said, “that is not meant to be a reading light. It’s an accent light. You’re going to ruin your eyes.”

Miriam had once channeled her considerable imagination into sex, which Jack had long appreciated, but now it spilled everywhere and lay lightly on everything like water on a lake. It alarmed him a little. Perhaps, during semester break, they should take a trip together. To witness something strange with each other might be just the ticket. At the same time, he felt unaccountably nervous about traveling with Miriam.

The days were radiant but it was almost fall and a daytime coolness reached out and touched everything. Miriam’s restlessness was gone. It was Jack who was restless.

“I’m going to take up bow hunting, Miriam,” he said. “Carl seems to think I’d be a natural at it.”

Miriam did not object to this as she might once have. Nevertheless, she could not keep herself from waiting anxiously beside the lamp for Jack’s return from his excursions with Carl. She was in a peculiar sort of readiness, and not for anything in particular, either. For weeks Jack went hunting, and for weeks he did not mind that he did not return with a former animal.

“It’s the expectation and the challenge. That’s what counts,” he said. He and Carl would stand in the kitchen sharing a little whiskey. Carl’s skin was clean as a baby’s and he smelled cleanly if somewhat aberrantly of cold cream and celery. “The season’s young, sir,” he said.