Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“Who said this?”

“Kant.”

Freddie removed his hand from her thigh. “Something’s been lost in your translation of that one, Francine. Why does one want to get into the nightclub anyway? Or that nightclub rather than another one?”

“We’re the nightclub!” she said. “We’re each our own nightclub! And the nightclub might want other patrons. Other patrons might be absolutely necessary for the nightclub to succeed!”

“I think it’s a little late for us to be discussing Kant with such earnestness,” Freddie said.

“You mean a little late at night or a little late in life?”

He nodded, meaning both.

She snatched the blanket off the bed and walked through the darkened house to the patio. It was long past the hour when people in the neighborhood used the outside. It was a big concern among Francine’s acquaintances, who were always vowing to utilize the outside more, but after a certain hour they stopped worrying about it. To many of Francine’s acquaintances, the outside was the only flagellator their consciences would ever know.

She wrapped herself in the blanket and lay on the chaise longue. She was very uncomfortable, but when she lay on it in the daytime she never was. Finally she managed to wander into sleep, a condition for which she was losing her knack. When she woke it was glaring day and the gardener’s face was hanging over hers. His name was Dennis, and he’d been in their employ for years. She had never been stared at so thoroughly. She frowned and he drew back and stood behind her. He placed his fingers lightly on her forehead and ran them down her neck, then dragged them up again and rubbed her temples. The day was all around her. The refulgent day, she thought. His hand floated to just above her collarbone and she felt an excruciating pain as his thumb dug into the tendon there and scoured it. She screamed and struggled upright.

“That shouldn’t hurt,” he said mildly. “It’s because you’re so tense.”

She hurried into the house and quickly dressed. There was no coffee. She required coffee, and there was none. The house was silent. Both Freddie and the sheltie were gone. He sometimes took the dog for a walk, which Francine had thought was kind before she learned that their destination was usually a small park on a dry riverbed frequented by emaciated and tactically brilliant coyotes. There had been several instances when a coyote had materialized and carried off some pet absorbed in peeing, frolicking or quarreling with its own kind and thus inattentive to personal safety. Francine had accused Freddie of being irresponsible, but he insisted that these attacks were rare. More important was the possibility of attack, which gave distinction to an otherwise vapid suburban experience and provided a coherence and camaraderie among a group of people who socially, politically and economically had little in common. They were a fine bunch of people, Freddie assured her, and they shared a considerable pool of knowledge regarding various canine personality problems — fear-biting, abandonment issues and hallucinations among them — as well as such physical disorders as mange, anal impaction and incontinence, to name only a few.

Francine searched hopelessly for coffee. Outside, Dennis had scooped up a large snake between the tines of a rake and was dropping it over the wall that separated their lot from the Benchleys’. It looked quite like the snake the fire department had recently removed. Dennis was being helpful but she would have to dismiss him. He would simply have to retreat to his life’s ambition, which he had once told her was to run a security-cactus ranch. There he would cultivate hybrids specific to sites, creating fast-growing, murderously flowering walls with giant devil’s-claw spines that could scoop an intruder’s throat out in a heartbeat.

She went outside. “Dennis,” she began.

He turned toward her, not a young man. He had deep lines in his narrow face, running from his eyes to the corners of his mouth. They were not unattractive. If a woman dared to have lines like that she would naturally be considered freakish.

“Rattlesnakes don’t have anyplace to go anymore,” Dennis said.

The snake, deposited in a flower bed maintained by the Benchleys at a cost of great aggravation, set off in the direction of a large rock Francine knew to be fraudulent. It weighed little more than an egg carton and concealed a spare house key for the maid.

“Dennis, I’m afraid we must terminate your services. We haven’t the money to pay you.”

Dennis shrugged. “Nobody’s paid me for coming on a year.”

“Freddie hasn’t been paying you?”

“Told me six months ago you didn’t have any money. I come here because you remind me of Darla. When I first saw you I said to myself, Why, she’s the spit and image of Darla, taking the years into account.”

“Spitting image,” Francine said. “What on earth does that mean?”

“I’ll talk any way you want me to. You want me to talk less formal? I’m just so happy we’re talking at last, like the more than friends we were meant to be.”

“This is of no interest to me, but who is Darla?”

“Darla was my nanny when I was eight years old. She was ten years older than me.”

Francine was shocked. A nanny! Though she did not want to believe herself a snob.

“Darla liked snakes.”

“I don’t like —”

“She had lots of stories about snakes. She told me, for instance, that the Mayans practiced frontal deplanation in newborn children so their heads would look like a rattlesnake’s head. They bound up the newborn’s soft little skull with weights. They believed snakes were sacred and that people with rattlesnake skulls would be more intelligent and creative. This had a positive, motivating psychological force on them. They became freer, more aware, bright and unusual. And I remember saying to Darla when she told me this that I wished someone had the imagination and foresight to do that to me when I was first born because I wouldn’t mind having a deeply ridged, crenellated head. And Darla said it was too bad but that knowing my parents, which of course she did very well, it would never have happened were they given the opportunity for a thousand years, they still wouldn’t have done it. They were very conservative. Not like Darla. Darla could leap up as high as her own shoulders from a standing position. Darla rocked! We lived in St. Louis, and once a year Darla and I would come out here to the desert, each spring for three years, and spend a week at a dude ranch and shoot bottles and ride mules and sleep in bunk beds. The corral is where Galore is now.”

“Is that a new town?”

“Barbeques Galore is there.”

“Oh,” Francine said. She found this quite funny but decided to say in her most gracious manner, “Change can be quite overwhelming at times.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Dennis said. “And then we’d come back to St. Louis and Darla would go off on another week of vacation but without me, and as you might imagine I resented that other week very much because I loved Darla. And then Darla had to have an operation.”

“Wait,” Francine said. “An operation?”

Dennis nodded. “She had to go under the anesthesia. And when a person goes under the anesthesia they’re never the same when they come back up. You’ve got another person you’re dealing with then. It makes just the smallest difference, but it’s permanent. The change only happens once. That is, you might have to go under the anesthesia again for one reason or another and there’d be no change. Change don’t build on that first change.”

“Why did she have to have an operation?” Francine wondered.

“I was never told why,” Dennis said, “so that’s not important.”