Joy Williams: The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

“You know,” Fred said, “Vermont really has somewhat of a problem. A lot of things that people think are ancient writings on stones are actually just marks left by plows, or the roots of trees. Some of these marks get translated anyway, even though they’re not genuine.”

India lowered her eyes and giggled.

Later, India and Miriam and Fred took Charlotte and Jill to the cliff that was considered the highest point on the island, and they all jumped off. This was one of the girls’ favorite amusements. They loved jumping off the cliff and springing in long leaps down the rosy sand to the beach below, but they hated the climb back up.

The next day it rained. In the afternoon, the girls went with the houseguests to a movie, and Constance went up to their room. The rain had blown in the open window and an acrostic puzzle was sopping on the sill. Constance shut the window and mopped up. She sat on one of the beds and thought of two pet rabbits Charlotte and Jill had had the summer they were eight. Ben would throw his voice into the rabbits and have them speak of the verities in a pompous and irascible tone. Constance had always thought it hilarious. Then the rabbits had died, and the children hadn’t wanted another pair. Constance stared out the window. The rain pounded the dark street silver. There was no one out there.

That night, the house was quiet. Constance lay behind Ben on their bed and nuzzled his hair. “Talk to me,” Constance said.

“William Gass said that lovers are alike as lightbulbs,” Ben said.

“That’s just alliteration,” Constance said. “Talk to me some more.” But Ben didn’t say much more.

—

Yvette arrived. She had fine features and large eyes, but she looked anxious, and her hair was always damp “from visions and insomnia” she told Constance. She entertained Charlotte and Jill by telling them the entire plot line from General Hospital . She read the palms of their grubby hands.

“Constitutionally, I am more or less doomed to suffer,” Yvette said, pointing to deep lines running down from the ball of her own thumb. But she assured the girls that they would be happy, that they would each have three husbands and be happy with them all. The girls made another list. Jill had William, Daniel and Jean-Paul. Charlotte had Eric, Franklin and Duke.

Constance regarded the lists. She did not want to think of her little girls as wives in love.

“Do you think Yvette is beautiful,” Constance asked Ben.

“I don’t understand what she’s talking about,” Ben said.

“You don’t have to understand what she’s talking about to think she’s beautiful,” Constance said.

“I don’t think she’s beautiful,” Ben said.

“She told me that Steven said that the meanings of her words were telepathic and cumulative.”

“Let’s go downtown and get some gum,” Ben said.

The two of them walked down to Main Street. Hundreds of people thronged the small town. “Jerry!” a woman screamed from the doorway of a shop. “I need money!” There was slanted parking on the one-way street, the spaces filled with cars that were either extremely rusted or highly waxed and occupied by young men and women playing loud radios.

“What a lot of people,” Constance said.

“There’s a sphere of radio transmissions about thirty light-years thick expanding outward at the speed of light, informing every star it touches that the world is full of people,” Ben said.

Constance stared at him. “I’ll be glad when the summer’s over,” she said.

“I can’t remember very many Augusts,” Ben said. “I’m really going to remember my Augusts from now on.”

Constance started to cry.

“I can’t talk to you,” Ben said. They were walking back home. A group of girls wearing monogrammed knapsacks pedaled past on bicycles.

“That’s not talking,” Constance said. “That’s shorthand, just a miserable shorthand.”

In the kitchen, Yvette was making the girls popcorn as she waited for Steven. She chattered away. The girls gazed at her raptly. Yvette said, “I love talking to strangers. As you grow older, you’ll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.”

Late that night, Constance woke to hear music from Steven’s tape deck in the next room. The night was very hot. Beyond the thin curtains was a fat bluish moon.

“That’s the saddest piece of music I’ve ever heard,” Constance said. “What is that music?”

Ben said, “It’s pretty sad all right.”

The children came into the room and shook Constance’s shoulder. “Mummy,” Jill said, “we can’t sleep. Yvette told us that last year she tried to kill herself with a pair of scissors.”

“Oh!” cried Constance, disgusted. She took the girls back to their room. They all sat on a bed and looked out the window at the moon.

“Yvette said that if the astronaut Gus Grissom hadn’t died on the ground in the Apollo fire, he would probably have died on the moon of a heart attack,” Charlotte told Constance. “Yvette said that Gus Grissom’s arteries were clogged with fatty deposits, and that he carried within himself all the prerequisites for tragedy. Yvette said that if Gus Grissom had had a heart attack on the moon, nobody in the whole world would be able to look up into the sky with the same awe and wonder as before.”

Jill said, “Yvette said all things happen because they must happen.”

“I’d like to sock Yvette in the teeth,” Constance said.

—

Constance had not seen Steven for days. She had only heard the sound of his typewriter, and sometimes there was a glass in the sink that might have been his. Constance had an image in her mind of the Coke bottle caught in the venetian-blind cord tapping out incoherent messages at the end of On the Beach. She finally went up to his room and knocked on the door.

“Yo!” Steven yelled.

Constance was embarrassed about disturbing him, and slipped away without saying anything. She went upstairs to the girls’ room and looked out the window. A man stood by the mailbox, scrutinizing the pickup hours posted on the front and shaking his head.

—

Aster came with her child, Nora. Nora was precocious. She was eight, wore a bra, had red hair down to her kneecaps and knew the genuine and incomprehensible lyrics to most of the New Wave tunes. She sang in a rasping, wasted voice and shook her little body back and forth like a mop. Aster looked at Nora as she danced. It was an irritated look, such as a wife might give a husband. Constance thought of Paul. She had been so bored with Paul, but now she wondered what it had been, exactly, that was so boring. It was difficult to remember boring things. Paul had hated mayonnaise. The first thing he had told Constance’s mother when they met was that he had owned twenty cars in his life, which was true.

“Do you ever think about Susan,” Constance asked Ben.

“She’s on television now,” Ben said. “It’s a Pepsi-Cola commercial but Susan is waving a piece of fried chicken.”

“I’ve never seen that commercial,” Constance said sincerely, wishing she had never asked about Susan.

Aster was an older woman. She seemed more impatient than the others for Steven to knock off and get on with it.

“He’s making a miraculous synthesis up there, is he?” she said wryly. “Passion, time? Inside, outside?”

“Are you in love with Steven,” Constance asked.

Aster shrugged.

Constance thought about this. Perhaps love was neither the goal nor the answer. Constance loved Ben and what good did that do him? He had just almost died from her absorption in him. Perhaps understanding was more important than Love, and perhaps the highest form of understanding was the understanding of oneself, one’s motives and desires and capabilities. Constance thought about this but the idea didn’t appeal to her much. She dismissed it.