The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  Judy always told her friend the most awful things she could think of, true or false, and made promises that she would not keep and insulted and disappointed and teased her as much as possible. Julep allowed this and was always deeply affected and bewildered by this, which flattered Judy enormously. This pleasure compensated for the fact that Julep had white hair that Judy would have given anything in the world to have. It annoyed her that her friend had such strange and devastating hair and didn’t know how to cut or curl it properly.

  After school, they would often go to Julep’s house. They usually went there rather than to Judy’s because Julep’s room was bigger. Judy’s room was just a closet with a bright lightbulb and a studio bed and the smell of underwear.

  —

  “Look now,” Judy said, peeling off a strip of Scotch tape from her bangs, “we’ve got to broaden our conversational base. Why don’t we talk about men or movies? Or even mixed drinks?”

  Julep said, “We don’t know anything about those things.” She looked at the worn black Bible on her bedside table. She had read there that the sun would someday become black as a sackcloth of hair and the moon would turn red as blood. This was because of the evil in people, and Julep worried that this would happen to the sun before she had a chance to get back to where it was again.

  “You don’t know anything is all.” Judy plucked at her sweater and smiled the bittersweet smile she found so crushing on the lips of the girl models of the fashion magazines. Her new breasts rose and fell eerily beneath her sweater.

  “I know that someday you’re gonna poke someone’s eye out with those things,” Julep said, pointing at her friend’s chest. “If I were you, I’d be worried sick.”

  Judy yawned. Julep stared out the window. The sun was still up but nowhere in sight. The air was blue and the snow falling through it was blue, and the trees were as black as though they had been burned.

  “I’m leaving,” Judy said abruptly, then swept out of Julep’s bedroom and downstairs to the kitchen.

  Julep rubbed at the frost forming inside the windowpane with a thin yellowish nail that was bleeding beneath the quick. She felt her head sweating. If she pressed her hands to it, it would pop like a too-heavy tick on a dog. If hell were hot then heaven must be freezing cold. She backed away from the window and thudded down the stairs.

  Judy had drawn on her boots and coat. She waved coyly at Julep.

  “Well, aren’t we going over there tonight to watch him?” Julep asked nervously, swinging her eyes heavily toward her friend. Looking often cost Julep a great deal of effort, as though her eyes were boxes of bricks she had to push around in front of her.

  “No,” Judy said, for she wanted to punish Julep for her dullness. Her books were lying on the kitchen table beside a small dish that said LET ME HOLD YOUR TEA BAG. Judy rolled her eyes and then shook her head at Julep. Julep’s father owned a little grocery and variety store down the street, and in the window of it was a hand-lettered sign.

  WHY MAKE THE RICH RICHER

  PATRONIZE THE POOR

  THANK YOU

  “How can you stand to live in such a dump,” she asked. “With such dummies?” Julep didn’t know. Judy left and walked through the heavy snow to dumb Julep’s father’s dumb store, where she bought a package of gum and lifted a mascara and eyeliner set.

  Julep ate supper. Chowder, bread, two glasses of milk and three pieces of cake. She felt that she was feeding something inside her that belonged in a pen in the zoo. A plow traveled up the street, its orange light chopping through the blackness. She went to bed early, for she had tests and a basketball game the next day. She thought of the tropical ocean, of enormous white flowers on yellow stalks motionless in the sun. Things would carry distantly over the water there. Things would start out from ugly places and never reach Julep at all.

  —

  Judy Cushman and Julep Lee had become friends the summer before when they were on the beach. It was a bitter, shining Maine day and they were alone except for two people drowning just beyond the breaker line. The two girls sat on the beach eating potato chips, unable to decide if the people were drowning or if they were just having a good time. Even after they disappeared, the girls could not believe they had really done it. They went home and the next day read about it in the newspapers. From that day on, they spent all their time together, even though they never mentioned the incident again.

  —

  Debevoise was thirty-four and took no part in adventure. He didn’t care for women and he couldn’t care for men. He lived in a corner second-story room of a rambling boardinghouse. The room had two windows, one of which overlooked the field and the other, the sea. There were no curtains on the windows and he never pulled the shades. He ate breakfast with the elderly owners, lunch every noon at the high school and drove to a hotel in the next town for dinner every night. He was stern and deeply tanned and exceptionally good-looking. As for the teaching, he barely recognized his students as human beings, considering them all mentally bludgeoned by the unremitting landscape. He couldn’t imagine chemistry doing any better or worse by them than anything else.

  And the girls felt hopeless, stubborn and distraught, for they had come a long way on just a whisper more than nothing.

  —

  They could approach the house either by walking up the beach and climbing the metal rungs welded into the rock, which was dangerous and gave them no cover, or by walking through the little town and across the field. Their post was a small depression beside an enormous pine, the branches of which swept the ground. Farther away was the rim of rocks they had assembled as another hiding place. Every night they could see everything from either one of these locations.

  Every night the chemistry teacher was projected brightly behind the square window glass and watching him was like seeing something in a museum. The girls would often close their eyes and even doze off for a time, and the snow would fall on them and freeze in their hair. Sometimes he would take off all his clothes and walk around the room, punching at the wall but never hitting it. Seeing him naked was never as exciting as the girls kept on imagining it would be since no one had ever told them what to feel about this.

  Even so, Julep would come back to the house smiling, as though someone had made a very exciting promise to her. No one was there to notice this, for her mother was always locked in her room, powdered and rouged and in a lacy bed jacket like an invalid, watching TV and eating ice cream from the store, and her father had been sleeping for hours, twitching and suicidal, dreaming of meat going bad in faulty freezers.

  On the nights when the girls saw the chemistry teacher without his clothes, Judy pretended to swoon with delight but actually felt hostile toward this vision, which was both improbable and irresistible. His body was brown all over and did not seem real. The boys she knew were so comprehensible. Of Debevoise, she understood nothing. She could pretend he was a movie star, beside her, naked, about to press his tongue against her teeth. Mr. Debevoise was going to put a bruise on her neck! He was going to take her hand and place it on his belt!! But she could not really believe these things.

  —

  The morning after Judy had refused to go spying, Julep woke with a headache and a terrible thirst. She thought for a moment that she had taken up the watch all by herself and something awful had happened to her. As soon as she stepped outside, someone was going to tell her about it.

  The sky had pieces of black running through it like something that had died during the night. Walking to school, Julep suddenly started to cry. Her throat ached and her head felt heavy. She pulled savagely at her colorless hair, arranging it so it fell more directly into and around her eyes. She stood in front of the school, her arms dangling, looking at her feet. She looked and looked, shocked. There she began. There were her boots, tall scuffed riding boots, her only winter footwear, which let in the damp, staining her feet each day the color of her socks. Then came her chapped knees, yellow and gray from spills on the gymnasium floor. Then
her frayed and ugly coat. Her insides, too, were not what she would wish, for she knew that she was convulsively arranged—a steaming mess of foods and soft scarlet parts, Bible quotes, chemistry equations and queer bumpings and pains as though there was something down in her frantic to get out.

  Debevoise, she knew, was pure and warm with not a speck of debris about him.

  Julep walked inside and moved down the busy halls like a wraith, meek and bony and awkward, her towhead glowing like a lamp. The class before chemistry was endless. The cold seeped past the windowsills and over the plastic rosebud on the teacher’s desk.

  The classroom fell away and she was alone with Debevoise in a rubber raft on a clear green ocean. Small sweet fish nibbled on one another without rancor and parts of them fell off with no blood attached. Julep’s knees touched his and they both had cameras and were taking pictures of each other. The sun was burning a hole in the top of her head…

  —

  No one ever played in the snow or used it for anything. It came too often and it stayed too long. In the cafeteria, the windows were even with the ground and crisscrossed with a steel mesh to protect the glass from objects flying through the air and across the ground. The snow was higher than the windows. Judy sat alone at a long wooden table. Old food and bobby pins were lodged in its cracks. The cafeteria was a terrible place that everyone recklessly frequented. When Judy saw her friend’s narrow nervous frame move jerkily across the room she decided on the spot that she would forgive her and they would resume watching Debevoise that very night. Afterward, they would go to Julep’s room and drink gin and Coca-Cola. They would have highballs and she would make Julep talk about men whether she wanted to or not. Julep could provide the Coca-Colas since she was making money on drinking them.

  Julep sat down and looked at Judy shyly. The chemistry teacher walked past them and sat at the faculty table on the other side of the room. He wore a lemon-colored suit, a dark blue shirt, a deep yellow tie and the fixed smirk that was his usual workaday expression.

  They watched him respectfully. Julep closed her eyes. With her eyes shut, Julep looked sick and unconscious, beyond the range of instruction.

  “What would you have him do if you had your choice?” Judy whispered. Julep said nothing. Judy tapped her fingers on the table and whispered more loudly, “The way you’re sitting there and the way you’re looking, you look for all the world as though you’d just gotten raped.”

  Julep’s eyes fell open, blurred and out of focus for several seconds as though they’d been somewhere other than her head for the last few years. “You could ruin the heavenly city itself,” she finally said.

  —

  Judy called her heavenly city for the rest of the afternoon. In the chemistry laboratory, she muttered so much that her titration experiments were ruined. Julep poured the chemicals in the trough of running water that flowed down the center of the slate worktable, and pressed her hands to her roaring head. She could feel Debevoise standing silently beside her, smell the cologne and the new shirt. His bright clothing rested on the rim of her eye like a giddy tropical bird.

  After classes, in the gymnasium, Julep sat on a bench behind the scorer in her shining uniform and the high white sneakers she’d won in a statewide free-throw contest the year before. She could not remember why she had become obsessed with playing basketball. She taped up her wrists.

  Judy was a fan in the bleachers, surrounded by boys. The boys were all running combs through their hair and all wore jeans and hunting boots. “Heavenly City!” Judy shouted. “Heavenly City!”

  Julep watched the girls from the other team. They caught the basketball delicately, as though it were covered with some dreadful slime.

  On the court she played extravagantly, her hard white head cresting above the others crowded beneath the board, her bony elbows shocking the girls in the ribs. Her nostrils filled with dust and the tapping heat of the radiators. Julep’s team was far ahead. The cords of the net creaked as the ball floated through. Basketball was serious business and Julep felt no levity. Life was what you figured out for yourself.

  “Heavenly City, Heavenly City!” Judy persisted from the stands. “Look to your right!” All the boys around her looked soberly down on the court and chewed great wads of gum. “Look to your right,” Judy shrieked.

  Julep moved her eyes gingerly along the sidelines. The opposing forwards had the ball and were moving it cautiously around on the other half of the court. She stood panting and slightly bent, looking through the stands until her weary eyes rested on Debevoise. He was smiling kindly and looking at her. His dark handsome face was smooth and empty of habitual boredom and disgust, and his lips, in the instant that she saw him, seemed to be moving toward an expression that she had not known he possessed. It was then that the ball hit her squarely in the head and she fell to her knees. She heard a noise from the bleachers, something corrosive and impersonal, a rush and a hissing bubble as though her head had opened up and a wave was coming through it. A titter and blurred silence. As someone helped her up and off the court, she could see the chemistry teacher, smiling into his hands as though his jaws were about to crack.

  Julep walked home slowly in a freezing dusk, her coat in her arms. Her brain was pumping madly, although her heart was still.

  Judy came over at eight o’clock, a bottle of gin zipped up in the lining of her coat. She had found it lodged behind the record player in her house. The bottle was very dusty and about two inches of its contents were gone. Judy didn’t know if it was still good or not.

  Julep was in the bathroom, pressing a hot washcloth against her left eye. Almost all the white had disappeared into a soak of red. Judy did not speak to her about the embarrassment of the basketball game. She thought Julep was crazy to get so excited about playing a boys’ game and she was also suspicious that too much of that sort of thing would change her friend’s hormones. Magazines told her terrible things and she believed in most of them.

  Judy went to the kitchen for glasses and something to mix with the gin. From behind a closed door, she heard a television going and a woman’s voice above it. “No,” the voice said. “No, that bum is up to no good.” There was a shot, then a bump and rising music. “I told you,” the voice said. Judy gathered up a handful of stale cookies and went up to Julep. The cookies were in the shape of stars and burned at the edges.

  “Holiday relics,” Julep said, mopping at her eye.

  They each drank a glass of gin and then walked through the town, which was all one color with hardly anything moving in it, and the night was very cold and clear. Beyond the field, the sea was flat as a highway in the moonlight.

  “I feel just amazing,” Judy said in a high, wet voice.

  Julep said nothing. She felt only hot and ponderous, as she had when she woke up that morning. She arranged her head scarf over her injured eye. Every once in a while, the eye seemed to roll backward and study her instead of bearing outward toward the night.

  They settled beneath the giant tree and Judy fumblingly took the binoculars from her coat. She dropped them in the snow and giggled as she dug them out. She thought that Julep was just trying to be smart and had no doubt poured her gin into the rug or something when she wasn’t watching. She pushed against her rudely and raised the binoculars.

  “God,” she said loudly. “He’s nude again.”

  Julep sat hunched, her arms around her knees. Her clothes were soaked with sweat and rivulets of perspiration ran from the corners of her mouth.

  “You’re yelling,” Julep said. “Someone will hear you.” She tried to think of her own nakedness and what it might mean to somebody, even herself, but she had never paid any attention to her own body. Her eye shuddered and then became a piece of raw meat lying tamely in her head.

  Debevoise was clamping a sunlamp above his bed. He turned it on and then lay on his back with his hands beneath his head. The bulb hung over him blankly for a moment and then lit shrilly. Almost at the same instant, the door of the hou
se opened and a flashlight beam bored over the field. Judy gave a small shriek and pushed herself backward against the tree trunk.

  “Who’s there!” a man demanded. “I know you’re there.” Behind the voice were a pink hallway and an old woman standing in a shawl, her hand in a fist moving across her mouth. There seemed deadening light everywhere. The sea and snow and sunlamp and now the old man walking toward them. The girls knelt beneath the tree like jacked deer.

  “Don’t go over there, Ernest,” the old woman said.

  The man stopped and moved the light in a wide arc. “It ain’t the first time you been here. You come out or there’s going to be trouble.”

  “Ernest,” the old woman said fretfully, turning the porch light off and on as though she were guiding in a ship. Judy and Julep bolted, stumbling across the field, spinning off tree limbs, their hands over their faces. “Hey!” they heard behind them. “Hey! You get outta here.”

  —

  Julep was sick for three weeks and never moved from the bed. She could hear children on their horses, cantering in the streets. She could hear the plows. She drank soup and sniffed herself beneath the damp bedclothes. She felt that she was an exceedingly fragile organism lying beneath complex layers of mulch. Her face was shrunken and without structure, as though something were burning it up and coring it out from within. The snow fell eternally out of a withered sky, and inside, Julep, beyond the range of dream or reasoning, continued to burn.

  She couldn’t decide if it had been coming for a long time and she had just gotten in the way of it or if it had always been there with her and she had only now recognized it.

  Ever since the afternoon of the basketball game, she could not remember how she had once regarded Debevoise. He was the pain and the heat of her head, and no longer something she could think about.