The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “What time do you want to come back tomorrow, honey,” Aurora asks Pammy. “You certainly are coming along nicely. Isn’t she coming along nicely?”

  “I’d like to come back the same time tomorrow,” Pammy says. She raises her hand to her mouth and coughs slightly.

  “Not the same time, honey. Can’t give you the same time. How about an hour later?”

  “All right,” Pammy says. The stoop-shouldered woman sits down in a chair. There are no more chairs in the room. Pammy opens the door and steps outside. It has rained and the pavement is dark and shining. She walks slowly down the street and smells the rain lingering in the trees. By a store called Imagine, there’s a clump of bamboo with some beer cans glittering in its ragged, grassy center. Imagine sells neon palm trees and silk clouds and stars. It sells greeting cards and chocolate in shapes children aren’t allowed to see and it sells children’s stickers and shoelaces. Pammy looks in the window at a satin pillow in the shape of a heart with a heavy zipper running down the center of it. Pammy turns and walks back to the building that houses the tanning beds. Her mother pulls up in their car. “Pammy!” she calls. She is leaning toward the window on the passenger side, which she has rolled down. She unlocks the car’s door. Pammy gets in and the door locks again.

  The car speeds down the street and Pammy sits in it, a little stunned. Her father will teach her how to drive, and she will drive around. Her mother will continue to take classes at the university. Whenever she meets someone new, she will mention the Goya. “I have a small Goya,” she will say, and laugh. Pammy will grow older, she is older already. But the world will remain as young as she was once, infinite in its possibilities, and uncaring. She never wants to see that figure looking at her again, staring so coldly, but she knows she will, for already its features are becoming more indistinct, more general. It could be anything. And it will be somewhere else now, something else. She coughs, but it is not the cough of a sick person because Pammy is a healthy girl. It is the kind of cough a person might make if they were at a party and there was no one there but strangers.

  White

  Bliss and Joan were giving a farewell party for the Episcopal priest and his family, who had been called by God to the state of Michigan. They had invited some mutual friends and couples with children the same age as the priest’s children. Bliss did not go to church and had never met the priest, but he approved of any party given for whatever reason and felt that Joan had something of a fascination with the man, whose name was Daniel. Joan had always imagined that Daniel might tell her something, although he never had, and now he was leaving.

  This was in New England, where they had lived for three years. Joan was a fourth-generation Floridian who missed the garish sunsets and the sound of armadillos crashing through the palmetto scrub. She remembered wearing live lizards hanging from her earlobes when she was a child. She remembered Gator, a pony her father had bought for her. Joan’s father owned a grapefruit grove. Her grandfather had run a fishing camp, and her great-grandfather had been a guide who shot flamingos and spoonbills and ibis and gathered eggs for naturalists.

  Bliss had been born in Florida too. Now he’s a dentist. People think that dentists are acquisitive and don’t care, but Bliss cares.

  Bliss and Joan have no children. Twice, Joan gave birth to a baby but both times the baby died before he was six months old. There was a sweet smell on the baby’s diaper, a smell rather like that of maple sugar, and in a few hours the baby was dead. Bliss has a single deviant gene that matches a single deviant gene of Joan’s. When a doctor told him at the hospital that the deaths were not as mysterious as they first appeared to be, Bliss struck him before he could say anything more, once with his left hand and again with his right. The doctor fell to the floor but got up quickly and walked away down the white corridor, leaving Bliss alone, his arms aching.

  After the death of their second child, they had moved to New En-gland. In Florida, Joan’s depression had been compounded by unpleasant dreams of her great-grandfather. He appeared in her dreams exactly as he did in her father’s photo album—a skinny man in a wide hat, rough clothes and rubber boots, standing with his shotgun. In a recurrent dream, he was a waiter in a pleasant, rosily lit dining room serving her soup in which birds in all stages of incubation floated. In another frequent dream, he was not visible, yet Joan sensed his presence beneath the vision of hundreds of flamingos flying through a dark sky, flying, as they do, in a serpentine manner, as though they were crawling through the air.

  In New England, Joan discovered that if she slept while it was light she didn’t dream, so she slept in the afternoons and stayed up all night, putting together immense puzzles of Long Island Sound. She lived in terror, actually, but it was rootless, because the worst had already happened. She referred to the days behind her as “those so-called days.”

  The day of the party was a Saturday, and Bliss had shopped with Joan for the liquor and food. As they were turning in to their driveway, their car was struck in the rear by a woman in an old Triumph. Joan and Bliss got out and looked at the rear of their car, which was undamaged, and then at the Triumph, which also appeared undamaged.

  The woman was weeping. “I’m sorry,” she wailed. “Oh, I’m so sorry. This is my husband’s car.”

  “No harm done,” Bliss said.

  The woman tore at her hair. She was very pretty.

  Joan was unaffected by trivial unpleasantries. She drove to the house, while Bliss remained standing by the Triumph. Joan unloaded the car and then went outside with a large bag of Hershey’s Kisses. She hid the Kisses all around the lawn, in the interstices of the stone walls and on the lower branches of trees for the children at the party to find.

  “Well, Donna certainly has a tale to tell,” Bliss said, coming up to her. He unwrapped the foil from a Kiss and tossed the chocolate into his mouth.

  “Donna, the TR person,” Joan said.

  “I invited her to the party. Is that all right?”

  “Sure,” Joan said. Bliss often invited strangers to their parties. Sometimes they were very nice people.

  “Her husband had a stroke and is divorcing her. He insists on it.” Bliss rolled the foil into a tiny ball, looked at it, then dropped it in his pocket.

  “We won’t get divorced,” Joan said.

  “Never,” Bliss said. He went into the house to set out the glasses and plates. Joan walked around outside, hiding the rest of the candy. In the yard next door, a Doberman puppy with bandages on his ears and tail was playing with a rubber ice-cream sundae. His aluminum run extended the length of the yard. He had a druggy name, the name of some amphetamine. Joan had heard his owner calling him. The owner was a muscular man with a mustache who drove an elaborate four-wheel-drive vehicle. The puppy’s fashionable name made him seem transitory, even doomed.

  At 5:00 p.m., Joan and Bliss went upstairs to their bedroom. The room was simple and pleasant with plain wide-board floors and white furniture, a little cell of felicity. There was a single framed poster of wildflowers on the white walls. It seemed to Joan the kind of room in which someone was supposed to be getting better. Joan lay on the bed and watched Bliss change his clothes for the party. She smiled for an instant, then shut her eyes. The passion they felt for each other had turned to unease some time ago.

  “Maybe you’d love me if I were a priest,” Bliss said.

  Joan’s eyes were shut. She saw the green lawn below them extending in time to her parents’ house, herself as the child her own children would never remind her of. She saw the barn where her father kept the chemicals and sprays for the groves. Inside, tacked on one wall, was a large foldout from an insecticide manufacturer’s brochure depicting all the ills that citrus was heir to. Beneath each picture of an insect was a picture of the horrible damage it could do. As a child, she had thrilled to it—flyspecked, yellowing, curling around the rusted nails that secured it. That such cruel and destructive forces could exist and be named amazed her, and that the means to control
them could be at hand seemed preposterous. She saw it often, as now, clearly; the meticulous detail, the particularity of each proffered blight.

  “It’s a question of language,” Bliss said. “ ‘The periapical granuloma is one of the most common of all sequelae of pulpitis’—it’s not the kind of language that sends a person forth into the world feeling loved, forgiven and renewed.”

  “It’s not very comforting,” Joan agreed, opening her eyes.

  “Really,” Bliss said, “I’m sick of teeth. You wouldn’t believe what goes on in people’s mouths. I want to abandon dentistry and go into the ministry. I have already chosen my style,” Bliss said, addressing her face in the mirror. “Yesterday, when Peter Carlyle was in—he’s the acute suppurative osteomyelitis—I said, ‘This day only is ours.’ ”

  “Did he agree?”

  “He certainly did,” Bliss said. “That is, he nodded slightly and groaned. Would you like a drink?”

  “Sure,” Joan said. “It’s a party.”

  Bliss went downstairs and reappeared a few moments later with a glass of bourbon and ice. Joan ran a bath and sat in the tub, listening to the cars coming up the driveway, the slamming of doors and people’s greetings. She did not touch the bourbon. She thought about Daniel, his voice, his prematurely gray hair. He had big feet. The shoes he wore in church seemed enormous. Joan went to church several times a week and sat, rose or knelt in accordance with the service. She sat in the back, in a pew where someone had once outlined a flower in the brocade of the kneeling bench with green crayon. In each pew, by the hymnal rack, was a smaller rack holding printed information cards and a small sharpened pencil. One could introduce oneself, ask questions, request a hymn, seek counseling. Joan did none of these things. She sat quietly in church, her head tilted upward, listening, feeling vain, unfixed, distracted. With Daniel she felt she was close to something, some comprehension of what there was left for her to want. Bliss was right, she thought, to be jealous of Daniel, although she and the priest were little more than acquaintances. And Daniel, of course, doesn’t know anything about her—he doesn’t know the past, about the babies, he doesn’t know her breasts, her lips. He doesn’t know the terrible way she thinks, like Bliss knows.

  Joan got out of the tub. Wide veins were darkly visible on her hands and feet. She painted her nails chalk-colored, put on a flowered dress and went down to the party on the lawn. There were several dozen adults there and half a dozen children sitting meditatively in a circle. Joan approached them slowly, wondering what was in the heart of the circle. A baby bird? A Ouija board? But from a distance she saw it was a bowl of pretzels. The sky was pale and the ragged crown of the trees, dark. She gazed at the children without really seeing them. If someone had demanded that she describe them, she could not. She and Bliss gave a great many parties and were reciprocally invited to many. There was nothing to it, really.

  A man named Tim Barnes came up to her and kissed her cheek. Tim liked to sail. He enjoyed narrow rivers and winding estuaries. He had fashioned a story around the time his mast went through the branches of a tree, and often he would tell it. When he told it, he would say, “I proceeded, looking like Birnam Wood.”

  Once, during another party, Tim had said to Joan, “I dream about you, and when I wake up I’m angry. What do you think?”

  People were talking and laughing. Joan had a tendency to look at their mouths. Their teeth seemed good. Bliss had made the acquaintance of many of these people professionally. She imagined Bliss solving their mouths, making them attractive, happy, her friends.

  Next door, the Doberman trotted back and forth the length of his run, watching them. He had an abrupt, rocking gait. His paws, striking the soft dirt, made no sound.

  People were talking about whether or not they wanted to survive a nuclear war.

  “I certainly wouldn’t,” Tim Barnes’s wife said.

  “I don’t believe we’re talking about nuclear war just like our parents did in the fifties,” a woman named Petey said.

  Joan saw a clutch of candy at the base of a slender crab apple tree. She should have hidden something less bright. She had to remember to tell the children that they were supposed to look for the candy. She thought of her father spraying water on his citrus before a freeze. The next morning, the globes of fruit would be white and shining and rotting in the clear sunny air. Florida was not a serious state.

  “The first thing our government is going to do after the Big B is to implement their post-attack taxation plan,” Tim Barnes said.

  “I mean,” his wife said, “who wants to survive only to pay forty or fifty percent?”

  “You have to protect the banking system,” Tim said. “You have to reestablish the productive base.”

  “I have to greet the guest of honor,” Joan said. The group, for the most part, chuckled. Joan walked toward Daniel, who was standing at the bottom of the lawn. He had a drink in one hand and a pretzel rod in the other and was gazing into a bed of delphiniums. Several yards away, Donna, the TR person, was talking to Bliss.

  “People need dentists,” Joan heard her assure him, “they really do.”

  “Joan!” Daniel exclaimed as she drew near. “What a beautiful garden.” He wore a green shirt and a poplin suit. His large feet were encased in sneakers. “Cast completely in blue and white. Very discriminating, very elegant. It must have been difficult.”

  Joan looked at her garden, which gave her no pleasure. She had designed it and cared for it. She knew some things. It didn’t matter.

  “White is a distinctively modern color,” Daniel said, finishing his drink. “It takes the curse off things.”

  “Its neutrality is its charm,” Joan said.

  The priest sighed. “I want to clarify what I just said, Joan. You can’t imagine how tired I am. Claire was so tired, she couldn’t make it. The hustle-bustle of moving is exhausting. She’s going to write you a note. You will definitely receive a note from her. I meant, and this is not in regard to your garden, which is stunning, that white is often used to make otherwise unacceptable things acceptable. In general.”

  “Some people feel that flowers are in bad taste,” Joan said.

  “Isn’t that astounding,” Daniel said. “Someone told me that once in regard to the altar and I found it astounding.” He rolled his glass between his hands and nodded toward the puppy, who was resting on his haunches now, regarding the group in the dimming light.

  “Your cats must be afraid of that Doberman,” he said.

  “I don’t have cats.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you had two cats. Perhaps it’s Joan Pillsbury who has the cats.”

  One of Daniel’s sons came up to them and said, “Dad, there’s nothing to do here.” Daniel looked at him. Joan told the boy about the hidden candy and in a moment the small group of children had scattered across the yard with shrill cries. An instant later, they had found it all and returned to the small piece of earth that they had appropriated for themselves. They displayed the amount, then ate it.

  “That was fun,” the priest said. “They all certainly enjoyed that.”

  “Dentists talk a lot, don’t they,” Donna said to Bliss. “I mean, I’ve always wondered, why are dentists so garrulous?”

  “Look,” Bliss said, “my wife has turned on the moon.” The two couples had drifted together and now looked upward at a full, close, mauve moon.

  “My wife fell from that tree once, you know,” Bliss said, addressing Daniel, pointing toward a large maple.

  “You didn’t,” the priest said to Joan. He shook his head.

  “Uh-huh,” Bliss said. “Several years ago.”

  “How did it happen?” Daniel said, weaving his eyes among the branches, down the trunk to the ground beneath it as though he expected to see her splayed form there, outlined in lime by some secular authority. “Was one of your cats up there with his eye on the sparrow?” He chuckled.

  “I would’ve broken my neck,” Donna said. She laughed but her eyes we
re wet. Her mouth trembled a little.

  “Nothing happened,” Joan said. “Here I am.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Joan,” Daniel said. “You took a little rest but now you’re back among us.”

  Donna looked at Joan, then at the priest.

  “I believe you married us,” Donna said to Daniel. “St. Stephen’s, right? Harry and Donna Sutton?”

  “Hello,” Daniel said warmly.

  “We weren’t members. You just fit us in.”

  There was a pause while they all sipped their drinks.

  “Do you know that at any given moment there are approximately five hundred and eighty-four million unfilled carious lesions in the teeth of the U.S. population?” Bliss said.

  Donna laughed, then turned and walked unsteadily to one of the long stone benches on the lawn. She lay on the bench and crossed her ankles.

  “You’d like Donna,” Bliss said to Joan. “You know where she’s from? Panama City.”

  “How are she and Harry doing,” Daniel asked.

  “Time has wrought its meanness on their attachment,” Bliss said. “You know what I told her? I told her, to God both the day and the night are alike, so are the first and last of our days.”

  “My, that’s very good,” Daniel said, “but a bit cold.”

  “I told her sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.”

  “One of the great lines, certainly.”

  “Are you of the school that thinks of man as a vapor, a fantastic vapor, or a shadow, even the dream of a shadow?” Bliss asked.

  “Stop,” Joan said. She stifled a yawn because she wanted to appear rude.

  “A bubble,” Daniel said. “We subscribe to the bubble theory.”

  “Excuse me, Father,” Bliss said. “I’m sure this happens to you all the time, people asking you questions on an emergency basis at cocktail parties.”

  Daniel stretched his neck and smiled at Joan.

  Bliss took several swallows of his drink. “An interesting thing happened today,” he said. “Joan’s father sent us a letter. It began briskly enough, ‘Dear Joan and Bliss.’ But then there was nothing, not a thing. Just a page, blank as the day is long. Well, we puzzled over that one, you can imagine.”