Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“I saw and heard everything back there,” he said to Miriam. “There are monitors and microphones all over this place. I like a woman with spirit. I find that beliefs about reality affect people’s actions to an enormous degree, don’t you? Have you read Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls?”

Miriam shook her head. It sounded like something the lamp would like. She would try to acquire it.

“Really? I’m surprised. Well-known broad. She was burned at the stake, but an enormous crowd was converted to her favor after witnessing her attitude toward death.”

“What was her attitude?” Miriam said.

“I don’t know exactly. Thirteenth century. The records are muzzy. I guess she went out without a lot of racket about it. Women have been trying to figure out how to be strong for a long while. It’s harder for a woman to find out than it is for a man. Not crying about stuff doesn’t seem to be enough.”

Miriam said nothing. Back in the room, the lamp was hovering over Moby-Dick . It would be deeply involved in it by now, slamming down Melville like water. The shapeless maw of the undifferentiating sea! God as indifferent, insentient Being, composed of an infinitude of deaths! Nature. Gliding…bewitching…majestic…capable of universal catastrophe! The lamp was eating it up.

“I’ve been here for ten years,” the taxidermist said. “I built this place up from nothing. The guy before me had nothing but a few ratty displays. Medallions were his specialty. Things have to look dead on a medallion, that’s the whole point. But when I finished with something it looked alive. You could almost hear it breathe. But of course it wasn’t breathing. Ha! It was best when I was working on it, that’s when it really existed, but when I stopped…uhhh,” he said. “I’ve done as much as I can. I’ve reached my oubliette. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“I do,” Miriam said.

“Oh,” he said, “I’m crazy about the word oubliette . That word says it all.”

“It’s true,” she said.

“You’re perfect,” he said. “I want to retire, and I want you to take my place.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Miriam said.

“No stuffing would be required. I’ve done all that, we’re beyond that. You’d just be answering questions.”

“I don’t know anything about questions,” Miriam said.

“The only thing you have to know is that you can answer them any way you want. The questions are pretty much the same, so you’ll go nuts if you don’t change the answers.”

“I’ll think about it,” Miriam said. But actually she was thinking about the lamp. The odd thing was she had never been in love with an animal. She had just skipped that cross-species eroticism and gone right beyond it to altered parts. There was something wrong with that, she thought. It was so hopeless. Well, love was hopeless…

“I have certain responsibilities,” Miriam said. “I have a lamp.”

“That’s a wonderful touch!” the taxidermist said. “And when things are slow you’ll have all the animals too. There are over a thousand of them here, you know, and some of them are pretty darn rare. I think you’ll be making up lots of stories about them.”

It seemed a pretty good arrangement for the lamp. Miriam made up her mind. “All right,” she said.

“You’ll have a following in no time,” the taxidermist said. “I’ll finish up with these people and you can start in the morning.”

There was still a long line of people waiting to get into the museum. Miriam passed them on her way out.

“I’ve been back five times,” a bald woman was saying to her friend. “I think you’ll find it’s almost a quasi-religious experience.”

“Oh, I think everything should be like that,” her friend said.

Carl’s big truck was no longer at the garage. Miriam gazed around but the truck did not reappear and probably, as far as she was concerned, never would. For most people, and apparently Carl and Jack were two of them, a breakdown meant that it was just a matter of time before they were back on the road again. She walked over to the hotel and up the stairs to their room. The door was open and the beds were stripped. The big pillows without their pretty covers looked like flayed things. A thin maid in a pink uniform was changing the channel on a television set. Something was being described by the announcer as a plume of effluent surrounded by seagulls…

The maid noticed her and said, “San Diego, a sewer pipe broke. A single pipe for one point four million people. A million four, what do they expect.”

Miriam continued down the corridor and opened the door quietly to her own room. She looked at the lamp. The lamp looked back at her as though it had no idea who she was. Miriam knew that look. She’d always felt it was full of promise. Nothing could happen anywhere was the truth of it. And the lamp was burning with this. Burning!

The funeral of Anne’s son, Harry, had not gone smoothly. Other burials were taking place at the same hour, including that of a popular singer several hundred yards away whose mourner fans carried on loudly under a lurid striped tent. Still more fans pressed against the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates, screaming and eating potato chips. Anne had been distracted. She gazed at the other service in disbelief, thinking of the singer’s songs that she had heard now and then on the radio.

Her own group, Harry’s friends, was subdued. They were pale, young, and all wore sunglasses. Most of them were classmates from the prep school he had graduated from two years before, and all were addicts, or former addicts of some sort. Anne couldn’t tell the difference between those who were recovering and those who were still hard at it. She was sure there was a difference, of course, and it only appeared there wasn’t. They all had a manner. There were about twenty of them, boys and girls, strikingly alike in black. Later she took them all out to a restaurant. “Death…by none art thou understood,” one boy kept saying. “Henry Vaughan.”

They were all bright enough, Anne supposed. After a while he stopped saying it. They had calamari, duck, champagne, everything. They were on the second floor of the restaurant and had the place to themselves. They stayed for hours. By the time they left, one girl was saying earnestly, “You know a word I like is interplanetary .”

Then she brought them back to the house, although she locked Harry’s rooms. Young people were sentimentalists, consumers. She didn’t want them carrying off Harry’s things, his ties and tapes, anything at all. They sat in the kitchen. They were beginning to act a little peculiar, Anne thought. They didn’t talk about Harry much, though one of them remembered a time when Harry was driving and he stopped at all the green lights and proceeded on the red. They all acted as though they’d been there. This seemed a fine thing to remember about Harry. Then someone, a floppy-haired boy who looked frightened, remembered something else, but it turned out this was associated with a boy named Pete who wasn’t even present.

At about one o’clock in the morning, Anne said that when she and Harry were in Africa, during the very first evening at the hotel in Victoria Falls, he claimed he’d seen a pangolin, a peculiar anteater-like animal. He described it, and that’s clearly what it was, but a very rare thing, an impossible thing for him to have seen, really, and no one in the group they would be traveling with believed him. He had been wandering around the hotel grounds by himself, so there were no other witnesses. The group went on to discuss the falls. Everyone could verify the impression the falls made. So many hundreds of millions of gallons of water went over each minute or something, and there was a drop of more than 350 feet. Even so, everyone was quite aware it wasn’t like that, no one was satisfied with that. The sound of the falls was like silence, total amplified silence, the sight of it exclusionary. And all that could be done was to look at it, this astonishing thing, Victoria Falls, then eventually stop looking and go on to something else.