Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“I have my questions all prepared for tomorrow,” Argon said. “I’m going to ask him about the eyes. Where do you get the eyes, I’m going to ask.”

“A child got there ahead of you on that one, I’m afraid,” Irene said. “Some little Goldilocks in a baseball hat.”

“Oh, no!” Argon exclaimed. “What did he say?”

“He said he got the eyes from a supply house.”

“I’m sure he would have expressed it differently to me,” Argon said.

Alec, gnawing on his other thumb, looked helplessly at her.

“I just hate that,” somebody said. “Someone else gets to ask your question, and you never get to the bottom of it.”

“Excuse me,” Miriam said quietly to Irene, “but why are you all here?”

“We’re here with those we love because something big is going to happen here, we think,” Irene said. “We want to be here for it. Then we’ll have been here.”

“You never know,” Vern said. “Next year at this time, we might all have ridden over the skyline.”

“But we’re not ready to ride over the skyline yet,” Irene said, patting his hand.

The lights in the Toad flickered, went out, then came back on again more weakly.

“It’s closing time,” several people said at once.

They all filed out into the night. Many were staying in campers and tents pitched around the museum, while others were staying in the hotel.

“I wouldn’t want to pass my days in Detroit either,” a voice said.

“I was using terror as an analgesic,” Priscilla was explaining to no one, as far as Miriam could see. “And now I’m not.”

Back in the room, Miriam sat with the lamp for some time. The legs were dusty so she wiped them down with a damp towel. She was thinking of getting different shades for it. Shade of the week. Even if she slurred her words when she thought, the lamp was able to follow her. There were tenses that human speech had yet to discover, and the lamp was able to incorporate these in its understanding as well. Miriam was excited about going to the museum in the morning. She planned on being there the moment the doors opened. The lamp had no interest in seeing the taxidermist. It was beyond that. They read a short, sad story about a brown dog whose faith in his master proved to be terribly misplaced, and spent a rather fitful night.

The next morning Miriam joined Jack and Carl in their room for breakfast.

“We’ve just finished brushing our teeth,” Carl said. Jack’s glasses were off and he regarded Miriam skittishly out of his good eye. She poured the coffee while Carl buttered the toast and Jack peeled the backing off Band-Aids and stuck them on things. He preferred children’s adhesive bandages with spaceships and cartoon characters on them to the flesh-colored ones. He plastered some on Miriam’s hands.

“He likes you!” Carl exclaimed.

They drank their coffee in silence. A fan whined in the room.

“Truck should be ready today,” Carl said.

“Have you ever been in love before?” Miriam asked him.

“No,” Carl said.

“Well, you’re handling it very well, I think.”

“No problem,” Carl said.

Miriam held her cup. She pretended there was one more sip in it when there wasn’t. “Why don’t we all go to the museum?” she said. “That’s what people do when they’re here.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Carl said. “And I would say that a museum like that, and the people who run it — well, it’s deeply into denial on every level. That’s what I’d say. And Jack here, all his life he was the great verifier — weren’t you, Jack? And still are, by golly.” Jack cleared his throat and Carl gazed at him happily. “We don’t want to go into a place like that,” Carl said.

Miriam felt ashamed and determined. “I’ll go over there for just an hour or two,” she said.

There were many people in line ahead of her, although she didn’t see any of her acquaintances from the night before. The museum was massive, with wide cement columns and curving walls of tinted glass. She could dimly make out static, shaggy arrangements within. The first room she entered was a replica of a famous basketball player’s den in California. There were fifteen hundred wolf muzzles on the wall. A small bronze tablet said that Wilt Chamberlain had bought a whole year’s worth of wolves from an Alaskan bounty hunter. It said he wanted the room to have an unequivocally masculine look. Miriam heard one man say hoarsely to another, “He got that, by god.” The next few rooms were reproductions of big-game hunters’ studies and full of heads and horns and antlers. In the restaurant, a group of giraffes were arranged behind the tables as though in the act of chewing grass, the large lashed eyes in their angular Victorian faces content. In the petting area, children toddled among the animals, pulling their tails and shaking their paws. Miriam stepped quickly past flocks and herds and prides of creatures to stand in a glaring space before a polar bear and two cubs.

“Say hi to the polar bear,” a man said to his child.

“Hi!” the child said.

“She’s protecting her newborn cubs, that’s why she’s snarling like that,” the man said.

“It’s dead,” Miriam remarked. “The whole little family.”

“Hi, polar bear,” the child crooned. “Hi, hi, hi.”

“What’s the matter with you?” the father demanded of Miriam. “People like you make me sick.”

Miriam threw out her hand and slapped his jaw. He dropped the child’s hand and she slapped him again even harder, then hurried from the room.

She wandered among the crowds. The museum was lit dimly and flute music played. The effect was that of a funeral parlor or a dignified cocktail lounge. All the animals were arranged in a state of extreme and hopeless awareness. Wings raised, jaws open, hindquarters bunched. All recaptured from death to appear at the brink of departure.

“They’re glorious, aren’t they?” a woman exclaimed.

“Tasteful,” someone said.

“None of these animals died a natural death, though,” a pale young man said. “That’s what troubles me a little.”

“These are trophy animals,” his companion said. “It would be unnatural for them to die a natural death. It would be disgusting. It would be like Marilyn Monroe or something. James Dean, for example.”

“It troubled me just a little. I’m all right now.”

“That’s not how things work, honey,” his companion said.

Miriam threaded through a line of people waiting to see the taxidermist. He was seated in a glass room. Beside him was a small locked room filled with skins and false bodies. There were all kinds of shapes, white and smooth.

The taxidermist sat behind a desk on which there were various tools — scissors and forceps, calipers and stuffing rods. A tiny, brilliantly colored bird lay on a blotter. Behind him was a large nonhuman shape on which progress appeared to have slowed. It looked as though it had been in this stage of the process for a long time. The taxidermist was listening to a question that was being asked.

“I’m a poet,” a man with a shovel-shaped face said, “and I recently accompanied two ornithologists into the jungles of Peru to discover heretofore unknown birds. I found the process of finding, collecting, identifying, examining and skinning hundreds of specimens for use in taxonomic studies tedious. I became disappointed. In other words, I found the labor of turning rare birds into specimens mundane. Isn’t your work a bit mundane as well?”

“You’re mundane,” the taxidermist said. His voice was loud and seemed to possess a lot of chilled space around it. It was like an astronaut’s voice.

He fixed his eyes on Miriam, then waved and gestured for her to come around to the side of the glass room. He pulled down a long black shade on which were the words The Taxidermist Will Be Right Back .