The Visiting Privilege (56 page)

While Denise was musing on this, the Lundehund rose softly up against her side and began chewing on the casts.

“Get down,” the cleaning woman scolded him. “That's a naughty boy.”

“You should allow dogs their pleasures,” Denise said. “They don't live long.” She had intended this remark to make the woman sad, but apparently everyone realized the truth of it. It had no effect because it was something that was already known.

“You're in terrible shape,” the cleaning woman said. “Both of you. Let me come a few hours each day. I'll make the meals and keep things tidy. Drink, drank, drunk, no more. That was there but now you're here. This is the subjunctive here. Look,” she said, “it's going to be all right.”

It's like when a person dies and someone says it's going to be all right, Denise thought. So stupid! This woman wanted to be Steadman's mistress, she could tell. She'd been pressing her lips against his temple and laying her long breasts against his chest. But she could only be the mistress of some delusion, Denise thought triumphantly. The woman gathered up her things, the Lundehund's nails clicked across the floor, the door closed and they were gone.

Denise looked at Steadman. She was crazy about him. Though it wasn't easy, this house. It was small and hot in the dark. They hadn't had a drink in hours. She looked at Steadman's watch: sixteen hours, exactly. Maybe they shouldn't try to get better here. That was the problem with houses. They belonged to other people, even if those people were far away, but a hotel room didn't belong to anybody. Maybe they should just get back in the car. This was the law, the
doctrine,
of maybe. She believed in this, and in her love for Steadman, and these were her beliefs.

She smiled at him.

“Denise,” he said. “Please.”

She was standing in the dark and he was still sitting. She wanted a drink badly. She closed her eyes and swallowed. You are what you drink, she thought, but here they were nothing, they were nowhere. Maybe she should say farewell to love, she thought. It gives you more balance. She should have considered this long ago. She stared at Steadman in the dark.

At last he said, “Groceries.”

She had been thinking about the state they were in. They executed people in this state for certain things, but before they could do it the person had to realize what the results, the significance, of execution would be. That was the law. So of course you pretended you didn't realize. As long as you could do that they had to leave you alone.

“So,” Steadman said. “What do you want?”

She felt a little Februaryish, as she always did in that forlorn, short, spiky month.

“Let's not get groceries now,” she said. Groceries meant more than food. They implied duration. She didn't want that here. “There's nothing to drink here. It's fantastic, isn't it? Let's lie down. Would you hold me? I can't hold you.”

She raised her hands, moving them up and down in their white casts. She remembered a bar they'd been in. Was it Gary's? There were framed hunting and fishing pictures on the walls. A woman was holding two snow geese by their necks. She held them high, in gloved hands, close to her head, as though they were earrings.

“Where are you going,” Denise asked.

“I'm not going anywhere,” Steadman said. He ran his hands across his face.

“You're not going to get a drink, are you?”

“No,” Steadman said. “I am not.”

Denise wandered back into the bedroom again. The man had returned to the pool and was swimming with powerful strokes. She heard herself speaking to him, asking him to leave. “Be reasonable,” she said. “We're here now. You can't be here now that we are.” She said this and that, choosing her words carefully, shouting from inside the house. The man pulled himself out and stood, dripping. Then he crouched and she was afraid of this, she had worried that something like this would happen, that he would begin to dismantle the pool somehow, that he would begin by pulling at the big submerged light at the deep end, rotating it, twisting it out. Water was spilling and buckling everywhere and the light was trailing its cord behind it, like a huge white eye on its long stalk.

Denise couldn't stay here a moment longer. She was trembling, she had to get out. They would get in the car, she and Steadman, they would drive away and never come back. They loved driving in the dark and drinking, mixing cocktails in paper cups, driving around. They had done it a lot. They would mix up some drinks and go out and tease cars. That's what they called it, Steadman and Denise. They'd tailgate them, pounce on them out of nowhere. Crazy stuff.

“Steadman!” she called. He knew what she wanted, he knew what they would do, that this had been a mistake. He opened the door to their car, and she smelled the lovely gin. It was in a glass from before, wedged between the seats.

They drove down the street, picking up speed. They passed a house with a wrought-iron sign hanging from a post. The design was of a wrought-iron palm tree and the wrought-iron waves of a sea. Below it, where the custom lettering was supposed to be, it said
YOUR NAME
. Delightful! Denise thought. They had ordered it just the way it had been advertised.

“God, that was funny,” she said. People could be so funny.

“It really was,” Steadman said.

They were driving fast now. They were so much alike, they were just alike, Denise thought. “Roll my window down, please,” she said.

Steadman reached across her and did.

“Oh, thank you,” she said. Warm, humid, lovely air passed across her face. “Go faster.”

He did. She giggled.

“Slow down,” she said, “speed up. That road there.”

Steadman did, he did.

They had left the town behind. “Turn the lights off, maybe,” she said.

They rocketed down the road in the dark. Before them was nothing, but behind them a car was gaining.

She turned and saw the two wild lights moving closer. They're going to tease us, she thought. “Faster,” she said.

But the car, weaving, was almost upon them and then, with a roar, was beside them. It was all outside them now.

“There it is, Steadman,” Denise said. It all just hung there for an instant before the car swerved around them and turned in inches beyond their front bumper. Then, whatever was driving it slammed on the brakes.

Many of the stories included here were previously published in the following works:

“The Excursion,” “The Farm,” “The Lover,” “Preparation for a Collie,” “Shepherd,” “Shorelines,” “Summer,” “Taking Care,” “Train,” “The Wedding,” “Winter Chemistry,” and “The Yard Boy” from
Taking Care
by Joy Williams, copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Joy Williams (Random House, New York). Reprinted by permission.

“The Blue Men,” “Bromeliads,” “Escapes,” “Health,” “The Last Generation,” “The Little Winter,” “Lu-Lu,” “Rot,” and “The Skater” from
Escapes
by Joy Williams, copyright © 1990 by Joy Williams (originally The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, subsequently Vintage Books, New York).

“ACK,” “Anodyne,” “Charity,” “Congress,” “Fortune,” “Hammer,” “Honored Guest,” “Marabou,” “The Other Week,” “Substance,” and “The Visiting Privilege” from
Honored Guest: Stories
by Joy Williams, copyright © 2004 by Joy Williams (Alfred A. Knopf, New York). All rights reserved. Adapted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Several of the stories initially collected here were previously published in the following journals:

Granta:
“Brass” (Autumn 2011) and “Dangerous” (Winter 2014)

Idaho Review:
“The Girls” (2004) and “Revenant” (2014)

Little Star:
“The Mission” (January 2014)

No Tokens:
“The Mother Cell” (February 2014)

Ploughshares:
“Craving” (August 1991)

Prairie Schooner:
“Another Season” (Summer 1966)

Tin House:
“The Country” (Spring 2014)

Vice:
“The Bridgetender” (Summer 2015)

Joy Williams is the author of four novels—the most recent,
The Quick and the Dead,
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001—and three earlier collections of stories, as well as
Ill Nature,
a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008.