Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

He walks to the baby’s crib and she is fine, she’s sleeping. Jones moves a chair up beside the crib. The baby wakes when the morning comes. She begins to cry. Jones’s daughter does not come into the room. She has been gone from them now for hours.

Jones can no longer think about his daughter with any confidence. His head sweats. The sweat runs down his cheeks. In things extreme, and scattering bright… a line from Donne, those are the words that murmur in his mind. There are no other words in his mind.

—

A letter from Jones’s daughter arrives several days later. His daughter writes, I am not well but I will get better if I can only have some time. She does not mention the baby.

Everyone agrees that Jones and his wife should care for the baby. She is weaned easily. She is a healthy, good baby.

Jones’s son-in-law is very apologetic. He folds his hands behind his back and bends slightly when he looks at the baby. He hums softly, abstractly, a visiting relative.

—

Months pass. The baby is five months old now. She is wearing bright blue overalls and a red turtleneck shirt. She is sitting on the floor and wants to take off one of her shoes. She struggles with the shoe. She cannot think of requesting or demanding assistance in this. She tugs and tugs.

Jones and the baby sit with Jones’s wife in the hospital. It seems there is something wrong with her blood. She is not in a ward. She is just here for tests and she is in a stylish wing where she is allowed to wear her own clothes and even make a cup of tea on the hot plate. She bends now and unties the baby’s shoe and holds it in her hand. The baby isn’t wearing socks. Jones had just done a washing and none of the socks was dry.

Jones wiggles the baby’s largest toe. “That’s Crandlehurst,” he says. He invents silly names for the baby’s toes.

The baby looks severely at the toe and then stops looking at it without moving her eyes. Jones cannot think of names for all the baby’s toes. No fond and foolish names flower in his brain. No room! His brain, instead, hums hotly with weeds, the weedy metaphors of doctors. The white cells may be compared to the defending foot soldiers who engage the attacking enemy in mortal hand-to-hand combat and either destroy them or are themselves destroyed.

Jones presses his finger as unobtrusively as possible against his temple. He looks at the carpeting. It is redder than the baby’s jersey, red as a valentine.

—

Jones tells his wife how nice she looks. She is wearing a dress that he likes, one about which he has happy memories. It is very warm in the hospital. She has entered this hospital and is in another season. Outside it is winter. But the memory is one of summer, his wife in this dress with tanned pretty arms. Jones can share this with her. He shares his heart with her, all that there is. As Rilke said…where was it where Rilke said Like a piece of bread that has to suffice for two ? His heart, Jones’s love. He looks at the dress. It is a trim blue and white check, slightly faded.

It is summer. They are in a little cottage, on holiday. There is a straw rug on the floor, in a petal pattern through which the sand falls. When the rug is lifted, the design remains, perfectly, in the sand. There is a row of raisins on the porch sill for the catbirds.

Jones remembers. In the mornings, the grass seems polished with a jeweler’s cloth. And Jones’s wife is in this dress, rubbing the face of their daughter with the hem of this dress. Yet it cannot be this dress, surely, everything was too long ago…

But now the visiting hours are over. A buzzer goes off in each of the rooms. Jones and the baby return home. Jones undresses her and then dresses her again for bed. He stays in her room long after she has fallen asleep. Then he goes downstairs and builds a fire in the fireplace and searches through the bookshelves for his collection of Rilke’s work. The poems have been translated but the essays have not. He takes out his German grammar and begins to search for the phrase that came to him so magically earlier in the evening. Jones enjoys the feel of the grammar. He enjoys the words of another language. He needs another language, other words. He is so weary of the words he has. He enjoys the search. Is not everything the search? An hour later he comes across the passage. It is not as Jones had thought, not as he expected. Rilke is speaking not of women but of Dinge. He is speaking not of lovers and life, but of dolls and death. Each word rises to Jones’s lips. Was it not with a thing that you first shared your little heart, like a piece of bread that had to suffice for two? Was it not with a thing that you experienced, through it, through its existence, through its anyhow appearance, through its final smashing or enigmatic departure, all that is human, right into the depths of death?

—

Jones’s wife had brought the baby a toy from the hospital gift shop. It is a soft, stuffed blue elephant, eight inches high. Inside it is a music box that plays “The Carousel Waltz.” While the waltz plays, the elephant’s trunk rotates slowly. It is a pretty toy. Jones’s wife is happy she has finally found something here that she can give the baby. For the last several days she has walked down the corridor to the gift shop. Every day, like a bird, in the warmest, strongest hour of the day, she has ventured out. When at last she saw something she wanted to buy, she felt relieved, unambiguous. She is in control, a woman buying a toy for her grandchild. There have been so many tests. She has been here for days; they will not release her. They do not know what is wrong, but it is not the worst! The first tests have been negative. It is bad but it is not the worst. What can the worst have been? She no longer needs to fear it.

She returns this day with the toy, panting a little, the veins on either side of her eyes throbbing. She sits on her bed quietly. The veins seem to hover outside her head. They are out and they want to get in. They are coiled there, almost visible, knotted, stiff, a mess, tangled like a cheap garden hose. These veins, this problem, is something she could take care of, something she is certainly capable of correcting, of making tidy and functional again, if only she had the strength. She feels calmer now. The noises in her face have stopped. She looks at the toy elephant. The girl who runs the gift shop has put it in a bag. A brown paper bag, crumpled as though it has been used over and over again.

Jones’s wife wraps the toy in tissue paper and waits for the evening visiting hours. Jones and the baby arrive. The baby smiles at her new plaything. She is not surprised. She is too little. She raises her face to the overhead light and closes her eyes.

Mother comes back one evening and she starts up at supper about feng shui, how our house isn’t organized for a happy life, how the front door should never line up with the back door like ours does — never. One of her colleagues in Parks and Recreation told her that.

“They’re all dipshits down there,” I said.

And the boy said, talking with his mouth full like he always does, “That’s why you’re not supposed to have a crucifix in the bedroom. Is a cross the same as a crucifix?” he says.

I could see the meat with the ketchup on it in his mouth. “No,” I said. “A crucifix is a cross with the body on it.”

“A cross is OK, then,” he said. “And a crucifix is OK as long as the eyes aren’t open. You don’t want that in the bedroom.”

Usually nobody said anything at supper but sometimes it would go all haywire like this. I went into the backyard for a cigarette. I’ve got a velvet mesquite back there and two saguaros. All of this was here when I bought the place in 1972. The saguaros don’t have arms on them yet. A saguaro has to be seventy-five years old before it puts out an arm.