Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

She shouldn’t have been jumping as high as her own shoulders, perhaps, Francine thought.

“We still talked about snakes and made pineapple upside-down cake and swam and rode bicycles and I was still in love with her and then she took her other week again, which I begrudged her as usual, and when she came back she died.”

“I’ll be darned!” Francine exclaimed. She really was trying to follow this unformed history. It would cost her nothing to be polite. They owed him money and he had done a good job. Not a remarkable job, but a good one. Also, he was a human being who had suffered a loss, even if this had been by her estimation almost thirty years ago. The shock had clearly addled him. It must have come exactly at the wrong time. A moment either side of it and he would’ve been perfectly all right. She hoped they hadn’t had an open casket.

“My parents permitted me to put a piece of broken glass in the coffin because Darla and I collected pieces of broken glass. It was one of the many collections we maintained. My parents didn’t want there to be any confusion in my mind. They wanted me to realize that this time Darla was gone for good. Still, I had difficulty with the concept. It was a little beyond me.”

“An open casket can sometimes backfire,” Francine said.

“What?”

Darla sounded like a good-hearted girl, energetic, inventive, a nice kid, called too soon from life’s parade or banquet, whatever it was. She couldn’t imagine anyone being further from the idea of Darla than herself.

“I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found you,” Dennis said.

“You haven’t found me!” Francine said, alarmed.

“I’m not saying you are Darla. Jeesh, I’m not crazy. I’m just wondering if you wouldn’t like to go out some night and talk like we used to.”

“I was never Darla.”

“Jeesh,” Dennis said. “I’m not saying you were Darla and now you’re not, I’m not crazy. But I was thinking we’d go out in the desert and build a little fire. Darla loved those fires so! I could bring the wood we’d need to get it started in the motorcycle’s saddlebags. In less than fifty miles we could be in the desert. Fat Boy could get us there in an hour.”

“We are in the desert.”

“You know they don’t know what this is now where we are.”

He was missing a tooth, far back, only noticeable in the way that hardly noticeable things are.

“You’ve seen my Harley. Haven’t you just wanted to climb on Fat Boy and go ? That bike gets so many compliments. If I ever wanted to sell, the ad would read Consistent compliments, but I’ll never sell. Or maybe you’d want to go somewhere else. I’ll take you anywhere you want. I got another pair of jeans, newer jeans. What? My hearing’s not so good. After Darla died I stuck knives in my ears. You know how they say you shouldn’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear? It was in honor of Darla because I loved her voice so much and never wanted to hear another’s. I probably hear better than I should but I miss some of the mumble. You were mumbling there, not making yourself clear.”

“The only place I’m going now, Dennis, is inside my home. I don’t feel well.”

“You don’t look as good as you do sometimes. You got a headache? Darla used to have the cruelest headaches. I’d soak cloths in cool vinegar and put them on her head.”

She probably had tumors the size of goose eggs in that head, Francine thought. Any operation was bound to be futile.

“OK, you go on inside,” Dennis said. “Close the blinds. Put on this music I’m going to give you. Put this in your tape player. Take whatever’s in there and throw it away. You’ll never care for it again.” He unbuttoned the pocket of his denim shirt and removed a plastic baggie containing a tape. “It’s Darla playing the piano. It was in the lodge at the dude ranch right where Galore is, as I’ve told you. We didn’t have a piano in St. Louis. This is pure Darla. She was so talented! When you hear this you’ll recognize everything for the first time.”

“Music can’t do that.”

“It can’t?” He pressed the tape into her hand. “Since when?”

—

There was still no coffee. She wasn’t going to waste her time looking for coffee when there wasn’t any. A moth was floating in the sheltie’s water bowl. This was one of those recurrent things. She went into the bedroom and lay down on the unmade bed. She wanted to sleep. She could no longer fall asleep! Insomnia, of course, was far worse than just being awake. She thought longingly of those two stages — the hypnogogic and the hypnopompic, although she could never declare with confidence which was which once she’d been informed of their existence — on either side of sleep, the going into and the coming out when the conscious and the subconscious were shifting dominance, when for an instant the minds were in perfect balance, neither holding dominion. But she couldn’t sleep, she lacked her escorts, the hypnopompic and the hypnogogic, who of late had been acting more like unfriendly guards.

The sun was slipping into the afternoon, exposing the dirtiness of the windows, which she never cleaned in the hope of dissuading doves from crashing into the glass. The doves flew undissuaded. The many blurred impressions of their bodies depressed her but she was convinced that sparkling windows would be even more inviting to them as they attempted to thread through the houses in their evening plunge from the foothills to the valley below.

She had removed the tape from the dusty little bag and played it. It was a formal exercise — familiar, pleasant, ordinary. It didn’t cast a spell or create a mood. It was not the kind of music that tore hungrily at her. It did not appeal to her at all. Much of the tape was empty of all but hum and hiss. The playing had simply stopped and had not resumed again. There was no applause, no exclamations of approval, no sense of an audience being present, least of all an impressionable child. Darla had certainly taken that kid for a ride. Had she confounded everyone she met in her brief life or only him? Probably him alone. Francine didn’t think Dennis even knew this Darla very well, not really. He had a collection of queer memories — a girl leaping in place to what avail — of no more value than bits of broken glass. He had nothing. Darla inhabited his world more than he did, for she infused it, doing what the dead would like to do but in most cases couldn’t, which in Francine’s opinion was a very good thing. As far as she was concerned, though, Darla, her quenched double, was a disappointment.

She played the tape again and it sounded even less interesting than before and briefer as well. She didn’t know what was missing, it had just become, was becoming, more compressed. She began to play it once more, then thought better of it. She ejected it from the machine and put it back in the baggie. Locating a pencil, she tore an envelope in half — another unpaid bill! — and wrote:

Dear Dennis. We appreciate the work you’ve done. Good luck in raising security cactus! Good-bye and all best.

Her sentiments were not at all sincere but such were the means by which one expressed participation in the world.

Dennis was scrubbing the swimming pool tiles with a pumice stone.

“Here’s your tape back,” Francine said.

“It’s something, isn’t it,” Dennis said.

“I found it a little repetitive.”

“Yes, yes, those final chords can never be forgotten quickly enough.” He seemed pleased.

“Dennis, I’m curious about a number of things.”

“Darla was curious.”

“You are from St. Louis and Darla is buried there?”

He nodded. “My family once owned half of St. Louis but they don’t anymore.”