Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Aster and Nora were highly skilled at a little parlor game in which vowels, numbers and first letters of names would be used by one person, in a dizzying polygamous travelogue, to clue the other as to whispered identities.

“I went,” Aster would say, “to Switzerland with Tim for four days and then I went to Nome with Ernest.”

“Mick Jagger!” Nora would yell.

Jill, glaring at Nora, whispered in Aster’s ear.

“I went,” Aster said, “to India with Ralph for a day before I met Ned.”

“The Ayatollah Khomeini!” Nora screamed.

Charlotte and Jill looked at her, offended.

That evening, everyone went out except Constance, who stayed home with Nora.

“You know,” Nora told her, “you shouldn’t drink quinine. They won’t let airline pilots drink quinine in their gin. It affects their judgment.”

That afternoon, downtown with Aster, Nora had bought a lot of small candles. Now she placed them all around the house in little saucers and lit them. She and Constance turned off all the lights and walked from room to room enjoying the candles.

“Aren’t they pretty!” Nora said. She had large white feet and wore a man’s shirt as a nightie. “I think they’re so pretty. I don’t like electrical lighting. Electrical lighting just lights the whole place up at once. Everything looks so dead, do you know what I mean?”

Constance peered at Nora without answering. Nora said, “It’s as though nothing can happen when it’s all lit up like that. It’s as though everything is. ”

Constance looked at the wavering pools of light cast by the little candles. She had never known a mystic before.

“I enjoy things best that I don’t have to think about,” Nora said. “I mean, I get awfully sick of using my brain, don’t you? When you think of the world or of God, you don’t think of this gigantic brain, do you?”

“Certainly not,” Constance replied.

“Of course you don’t,” Nora said nicely.

The candles had different aromas. Finally, more or less in order, one after another, they went out. On Sunday, after Nora left with her mother, Constance missed her.

—

Constance was having difficulty sleeping. She would go to bed far earlier than anyone else, sometimes right after supper, and lie there and not sleep. Once she slept for a little while and had a dream in which the cart she was wheeling through the aisles of the A & P was a crash cart, a complete mobile cardiopulmonary resuscitation unit, of the kind she had seen in the corridors of the intensive-care wing at the hospital. In the dream, she bit her nails as she pushed the cart down the endless aisles, agonizing over her selections. She reached for a box of Triscuits and placed it in the cart between a box of automatic rotating cuffs and a defibrillator. Constance woke up, her own heart pounding. She listened to Ben’s quiet breathing for a moment; then she rolled out of bed, dressed and walked downtown. It was just before dawn and the streets were cool and quiet and empty, but someone, during the night, had pulled all the flowers out of the window boxes in front of the shops. Clumps of earth and broken petals made a ragged trail before her. The wreckage rounded a corner. Constance wished Ben were with her. They could just walk along, they wouldn’t have to say anything.

—

The weekend that Bronwyn arrived was extremely foggy. Bronwyn was from the South. She was unsmiling and honest, a Baptist who had just left her husband for good. She had been in love with Steven since she was thirteen years old.

“My parents are Baptists,” Constance told her.

Fog slid through the screens. A voice from the street said, “I can’t believe she served bluefish again!”

Bronwyn had little calling cards that showed Jesus knocking on the door of your heart. Jesus wore white robes and he had a neatly trimmed beard. He was rapping thoughtfully at the heavy wooden doors of a snug little vine-covered bungalow.

“I remember that picture!” Constance said. “When I was little, that picture just seemed to be everywhere.”

“Have one,” Bronwyn said.

The heart did not appear mean, it simply seemed closed. Constance wondered how long the artist had intended Jesus to have been standing there.

Bronwyn took Charlotte and Jill out to collect money to save marine mammals. They stood on the street and collected over thirty dollars in a Brim coffee can.

“Our salvation lies in learning to communicate with alien intelligences,” Bronwyn said.

Constance wrote a check.

“Whales and dolphins are highly articulate,” Bronwyn told Constance. “They know fidelity, play and sorrow.”

Constance wrote another check, made herself a gin and tonic and went upstairs. That night, from Steven’s room, she heard murmurs and moans in repetitive sequence.

The following day, Bronwyn asked, “Have you enjoyed sharing a house with Steven?”

“I haven’t seen much of him,” Constance said, “actually, at all.”

“Summer can be a difficult time,” Bronwyn said.

—

On the last day of August, Ben rented a bright red Jeep with neither top nor sides. Ben and Constance and Charlotte and Jill bounced around in it all morning, and at noon they drove on the beach to the very tip of the island, where the lighthouse was. Approaching the lighthouse, Constance was filled with an odd excitement. She wanted to climb to the top. The steel door had been chained shut, but about four feet up from the base was a large hole knocked through the cement, and inside, beer cans, a considerable amount of broken glass and a lacy black wrought-iron staircase winding upward could be seen. Charlotte and Jill did not go in because they hadn’t brought their shoes, but Constance climbed through the hole and went up the staircase. There was a wonderful expectancy to the tight climb upward through the whitewashed gyre. She was a little breathless when she reached the top. Powering the light, in a maze of cables and connectors, were eighteen black, heavy-duty truck batteries. For a moment, Constance’s disappointment concealed her surprise. She saw the Atlantic fanning out without a speck on it, and her little family on the beach below, sitting on a striped blanket. Constance inched out onto the catwalk encircling the light. “I love you!” she shouted. Ben looked up and waved. She went back inside and began her descent. She did not know, exactly, what it was she had expected, but it had certainly not been eighteen black, heavy-duty truck batteries.

—

In bed that night, Constance dreamed of people laughing. She opened her eyes. “Ben,” she whispered.

“Hi.” He was wide awake.

“I dreamed of laughing,” Constance said. “I want to laugh.”

“We’ll laugh tomorrow,” Ben said. He turned her away from him and held her. She felt his mouth smiling against her ear.

There is Jane and there is Jackson and there is David. There is the dog.

David is burying a bird. He has a box that once held tea and he is digging a hole beneath the kitchen window. He mutters and cries a little. He is spending Sunday morning doing this. He is five.

Jackson comes outside and says, “That hole is far too big.”

Jackson is going to be an architect. He goes to school all day and he works as a bartender at night. He sees Jane and David on weekends. He is too tired in the morning to have breakfast with them. Jane leaves before nine. She sells ornaments in a Christmas shop, and Jackson is gone by the time she returns in the afternoon. David is in kindergarten all day. Jackson tends bar until long after midnight. Sometimes he steals a bottle of blended whiskey and brings it home with him. He wears saddle shoes and a wedding ring. His clothes are poor but he has well-shaped hands and nails. Jane is usually asleep when Jackson gets in bed beside her. He goes at her without turning on the light.