The Visiting Privilege (34 page)

“I couldn't do that,” Louise said simply.

“I insist on paying you something.”

“No, it's impossible. I won't give the dog up,” Louise said. He could be a vivisector for all she knew.

“It would mean a great deal to me,” he said, his mouth trembling. “My brother's dog.”

Louise shook her head.

“I can't believe this,” he muttered.

“Believe what?” Louise said, looking at Elliot's brother, if that's who he was, although there was no reason to doubt him, not really.

He spoke again, patiently, as if she had utterly misunderstood his situation and the seriousness of his request. His guilt was almost holy, he was on a holy quest. He had determined that this was what must be done, the only thing that remained possible now to do.

“We were so close,” he said. “He was my little brother. I taught him how to ski, how to drive. We went to the same college. I'd always protected him, he looked up to me, then there was this stupid, senseless quarrel. Now he's gone forever and I'm all ruined inside, it's destroyed me.” He rubbed his chest as if something within him really was harrowed. “If I could care now for something he had cared for, then I would have something of my brother, of my brother's love.”

“I don't mean to sound rude,” Louise said, “but we've all been dealing with this for some time now and you suddenly appear, having been ill and out of the country both at the same time. Both at the same time,” she repeated. “It's just so unnecessary now, your appearance. It's possible to come around too late.”

“That's not true,” he said. He was sallow beneath his tan. “Your friends, Elliot's friends, said they were sure you'd appreciate the opportunity, that they were sure you wouldn't mind, that in fact you'd be relieved and delighted.”

“That just shows how little we comprehend one another,” Louise said. “Even when we try,” she added. “Have you ever had a dog before?” Louise was just curious. She didn't mean to lead him on, but as soon as she said this, she feared she'd given him hope.

“Oh yes,” he said eagerly. “As boys we always had dogs.”

“They'd die and you'd get another?”

“That's a queer way of putting it.”

“Look,” Louise said, “your brother had this dog for about three minutes.” She felt she was exonerating Elliot.

“Three minutes,” he said, bewildered.

“I said about three minutes. You should get a dog and pretend it was your brother's and care for it tenderly and that will be that.” Louise was not going to get up and go inside the house and lock the door against him. She would wait him out. “There's nothing more to discuss,” she said.

He turned from her sadly. There were several youths peering into his van. “Get away from there!” he cried, and hurried toward them.

It was Walter's turn to give a party. He had a fire in the fireplace although it wasn't at all cold. Still, it was very pleasant, everyone said so.

“I ordered half a cord of wood but it wasn't split, it was just logs,” Walter said, “and one of the logs had a chain partly embedded in it, like a dog chain. The tree had started to grow right over the chain.”

“Wow,” Daisy said. “I don't think so.”

“Sometimes,” Wilbur said, “certain concepts, it's better not to air them.”

The twins held each other's hands and looked into the fire.

“Who would have thought that Elliot would have such a dreary brother,” Angus said. “I wouldn't have given him the dog either.”

“Still, I'm amazed you didn't, Louise,” Jack said.

“I guess he got all the things we actually remembered Elliot having,” Andrew said. “I remember a rather nice ship's clock, for instance. That wristwatch I was given, who'd ever seen that before?”

“Elliot wasn't in his right mind,” Betsy said. “We keep forgetting that. He wasn't thinking clearly. If you're thinking clearly, you don't take your own life.”

Again, Louise marveled at her friend's way of phrasing things. To take your own life was to take control of it, to take possession of it, to give it a shape by occupying it. But Elliot's life still had no shape, even though it had been completed.

“I want to confess something,” Andrew said. “I tossed that watch.” He had crammed it into an overflowing Goodwill bin in the parking lot of a shopping mall. He described the experience of pushing the watch into an open-throated, softly bulging sack as an extremely unpleasant one. Everyone knew the Goodwill bin and its mute congregation of displaced things, some too large to have been slipped inside, all those things waiting to be revisited in this life, waiting to be used again.

That evening everyone drank too much and later dreamed vivid dreams. The twins dreamed they were in the middle of a highway, trying to cross, trying to cross. Angus dreamed he was in a coffee shop where a kindly but inefficient waitress who looked like his mother was directing him to a table that wasn't there. Lucretia dreamed she was carving
Kindertotenlieder
as sung by Kathleen Ferrier out of a block of wood with a chain saw. That's quite good, someone was saying. It's only a copy, Lucretia demurred. Walter dreamed he was kneeling at the communion rail in the silk pajamas. The cup was coming toward him but had become a thermometer to be placed beneath the tongues of the devout, and by the time it reached him it was a dipstick from a car's engine that a mechanic was wiping with a filthy cloth.

Louise had had the dog for five months now. When she realized how much time had passed, she thought: Seven more months to go. In seven months we'll know more.

Someone was putting a house up behind Louise's house. The yard had been bladed and most of the trees taken down. The banal framework of a house stood there. When Louise gave a party, everyone was shocked at the change.

“I thought that yard went with this house,” Jack said.

“Well, I guess not,” Louise said.

“All those little birdhouses are gone,” Lucretia said. “People put them inside now, you know, as a decorative accent. They paint them in these already fading, flaking colors and put them around.”

“They're safer inside,” Angus said.

“That thing is going to be huge, Louise,” Betsy said. “It's going to loom over you.”

They talked for a while about what she could plant to block it out.

“Nothing will grow in time,” Betsy said.

“In time for what?” Walter said.

“Everything takes so long to grow. My god, Louise,” Betsy said, “you'd better just move.”

“Louise,” the twins said, “if you die are you going to leave us anything?” They were sitting on the sofa eating pretzels. Outside, the wind was blowing hard but there were no trees anymore to indicate this with their tossing branches. A door blew open, though, banging.

Louise was going to move. She didn't want that house going up behind her. Within a week, she had found another place. Walter and Lucretia helped her move. He had a truck and they transferred all the furniture in one trip. They transferred Broom too, with his dog bed and his dish for water and his dish for food. Then Louise packed her car with what remained, right up to the roof. Even so, she had thrown away a lot of things. She was simplifying and purifying her life, keeping only her nicest, most singular things. Louise swept the old house clean, glad to be leaving. She looked with satisfaction at the empty rooms, the stark windows and their newly ugly vistas. She slammed the door and headed for her car but it wasn't where she'd left it. She stared at the place where the car had been. But it had vanished, been stolen, and everything was gone. The sun was bright, still shining on the place where it had been.

It was Betsy's turn to have a party. They told theft stories—they all had them—and tried to cheer Louise up. She had already bought another car with the insurance money. It wasn't as appealing but she liked it in a different way. She liked it because she didn't like it that much, wasn't as girlishly pleased with it as she had been with the other one.

“You can get all new clothes,” Lucretia said. “You can go on a spree. That favorite dress of yours had a spot on it anyway, kind of on the back.”

“It did not,” Louise said. “I got that spot out. I loved that dress.”

“I bet you can't even remember everything you packed in the car,” Jack said.

“My pearls,” Louise said sadly.

“Christmas is coming,” Angus said. But he always said that, as if he were going to buy everyone wonderful gifts, only ones of their most perfect desiring. But all he bought was champagne and cookies that they would drink and eat.

“My grandmother's silver tea service.”

“Louise, you know you never used that and never would even once in your life,” Lucretia said. “It didn't have a place.”

“But it's gone,” Louise said. It was gone, of course, but there was something else, something worse. She had made all these choices. She had discarded this and retained that and it hadn't mattered.

“Things are ephemeral,” Daisy said.

“And an illusion,” Wilbur said.

“Well, which is it?” Jack demanded, annoyed.

Everyone was a little embarrassed. Seldom did anyone respond to the twins.

“I'll tell you one thing,” Jack said. “I sold that crazy bowl of Elliot's to an antique store.”

None of them could think about Elliot without being thwarted by the mystery of the things he'd given them. His behavior had been inexplicable. It was all inexplicable.

“Oh, I can't think about it anymore!” Louise cried. They were all drinking margaritas out of silly glasses.

“How is Broom,” Andrew asked delicately.

“Oh, I've rather gotten used to Broom,” Louise said.

Lucretia looked at her unhappily. Louise had lost her sparkle, Lucretia thought.

Louise settled quickly into her new house. It was bigger than the other one, and more ordinary. Broom didn't know which room to disappear into. He had tried them all and couldn't decide. He would try the most unlikely places. Sometimes she would come across him on the fifth step of a narrow back staircase. What an odd place to be! Wherever he was he looked uncomfortable. Still, she was sure Elliot would not have wanted her to surrender the animal so easily. Of course she would never know Elliot's thoughts. She herself could only think—and she was sure she was like many others in this regard, it was her connection with others, really—that life would have been far different under other circumstances, and yet here it wasn't, after all.

T
hey had been told about it by a police officer eating a tamale at a cafe near the Arizona–New Mexico border.

“I just went out there in all that white sand and got me a dune and went up on it and looked and looked and just let it sink in, and I never saw anything like it, never felt anything like it. I think I could stay out there in that white sand for a real long time and I don't know exactly why.”

“It doesn't sound like something you'd want to do too often,” Richard said. The policeman frowned. Then he ignored them.

Back in the car, Janice wanted to go there immediately. They were having a look at the Southwest on their way to Santa Fe. They were both wearing khaki suits, and Richard had a hand-painted tie he had paid a great deal of money for around his neck.

They drove to the White Sands National Monument, paid the admission and went in. The park ranger said, “We invite you to get out of your car and explore a bit, climb a dune for a better view of the endless sea of sand all around you.”

They drove slowly along a loop road. Everything was white and orderly. It was as if the dunes had a sense of mission.

“Do you want to get out?” Richard said. “I'll wait in the car.”

Janice felt that she was still capable of awe and transfiguration and was uncomfortable when, together with Richard, she felt not much of anything. She was distracted by the knowledge that they were on a loop road. She studied the dunes without hope. As they were leaving, they saw something small and translucent, like a lizard, stagger beneath their wheels, and they both remarked on that.

“I don't know what that policeman was talking about,” Richard said.

“He was trying to express something spiritual.”

“Don't you get tired of that out here? Everything's sacred and mysterious and for the initiated only. Even the cops are after illumination. It wears me out, to be quite honest.”

She wished she had gotten out of the car. She hadn't even gotten out of the car. She was wearing high heels. “Let's go back,” she said. “Let's try it again.”

“Janice,” Richard said.

After some miles he said, “I forgot to take a leak back there.”

“Really!” she exclaimed.

“I'm going to pull into this rest stop.”

“To take a leak! How good!” she said. She fixed an enthralled expression upon him.

Outside, the heat was breathtaking and the desert had a slightly lavender cast. People were standing under a ramada, speaking loudly about family members who smoked like chimneys and lived into their nineties. Farther away, someone was calling to a small dog. “Peaches,” the woman called, “you come here now.” The dog seemed sincere in its unfamiliarity with the name Peaches. This was clearly a name the dog felt did not indicate its true nature, and it was not going to respond to it.

The road led past the toilets and ramadas through a portion of landscape where every form of plant life was explained with signs, then back out onto the highway. Janice walked along it toward a group of vending machines. She loved vending-machine coffee. She felt it had an unusual taste and wasn't for everyone. While waiting for the cardboard cup to sling itself down and fill with the uncanny liquid, she noticed a chalky purple van parked nearby. Two beautiful children stood beside it with their arms folded, looking around as though they had a certain amount of authority. They were rather dirty and blond and striking. A man and woman were rummaging around inside the open van. Both the man and the boy were barefoot and shirtless. The woman, who had long, careless hair, said something to the girl, who climbed inside just as the man triumphantly produced what appeared to be an empty pizza box. Janice could hardly take her eyes off them. She finished the coffee, which was now cold and tasted even more peculiar, and returned to Richard and their rental car, which had a small scratch on the hood that she had taken great pains to point out to the agency so they would not be held responsible for it. The grille had collected a number of butterflies. Without speaking, she got in and shut the door. She'd like to tell Richard how much she refrained from saying to him, but actually she refrained from saying very little.

As they passed the van, the man raised the scrap of box on which was now printed in crayon
PLEASE
:
NEED GAS MONEY
.

The colon in this plea touched Janice deeply. “Richard,” she said, “we must give that family some money.”

The man held the sign close to his chest, just above an appendectomy scar, as the children looked stonily into space.

“Richard!” she said.

“Oh, please, Janice,” he said. “Honestly.”

“Go back,” she said.

They had reached the highway, and Richard accelerated. “Why do you always want to go back. We're not going back. Why don't you do things the first time?”

She gasped at the unfairness of this remark. She considered rearing back and hammering at the windshield with her high-heeled shoes. “I want to give that poor family some gas money,” she said.

“Someone will give them money.”

“But I want it to be us!”

Richard drove faster.

“Look,” she said reasonably, “what if you were in the hospital and you needed a new liver and the doctor finally came in and he said, ‘I have good news, the hospital has found a liver for you.' Wouldn't you be grateful?”

“I would,” Richard said thoughtfully.

“Someone would have given you a second chance.”

“It would be a dead person,” Richard said, still thoughtful. “It would have to have been.”

“I wish I were driving,” she said.

“Well, you're not.”

Janice moaned. “I hate you,” she said. “I do.”

“Let's just get to Santa Fe,” Richard said. “It's a civilized town. It will have a civilizing effect on us.”

“That tie makes you look stupid,” she said.

“I know,” he said. He wrenched the knot free, rolled down the window and threw the tie out.

“What are you doing!” Janice cried. The tie was of genuine cellulose acetate and had been painted in the forties. It depicted a Plains Indian brave standing before a pueblo. That the scene was incorrect, that it had been conceived in utter ignorance, made it more expensive and, they were told, more valuable in the long run. But now there was no long run. The tie was toast. She shifted in her seat and stared breathlessly into the distance ahead. She thought of the little family with grave compassion.

“I'm afraid I have to stop again. For gas,” he said.

He was pitiless, she thought. A moral aborigine. She hugged herself.

They rolled off an exit into a town that stretched a single block deep for miles along the highway and pulled into a gas station mocked up to look like a trading post, with a corral beside it filled with old, big-finned cars. Richard got out and pumped gas. Then he cleaned the windshield, grinning at her through the glass.

She did not know him, she thought. She was really no more acquainted with who he was than she was familiar with the cold dark-matter theory, say.

He tapped on the glass. “Want to come inside?” he said. “Shot glasses, velvet paintings, lacquered scorpions?”

He was a snob, she thought.

He sighed and walked away, patting the breast pocket of his jacket for his wallet. Janice moved across the seat quickly, grasped the wheel and drove off in a great rattle and shriek of sand. She was back at the rest stop in fifteen minutes. The children had climbed the van's ladder and were lying on the roof. The woman was nowhere visible. The man was still rigidly holding the sign. Janice pulled up beside him.

“How you doing?” he said. He had bright, pale eyes.

“I want to give you twenty dollars,” Janice said. She opened her purse and was disturbed to find she had only two fifty-dollar bills.

“Rose!” the man yelled, lowering the sign. He had a long, smooth torso, except for the appendectomy scar.

The woman emerged from the van and regarded Janice coolly.

“Yes?” she said.

“I saw your sign,” Janice said, confused.

The children rose languidly from the roof and looked down at her.

“We have to travel seventy miles to our home and get these children in school tomorrow,” Rose said formally. “What we do, what our policy is, is we drive to the nearest gas station and at that point you give us the amount you've decided on. That way you'll be assured that we're using it for gas and gas only.”

Janice was grateful for the rules they had worked out.

“People will give you money at a rest stop whereas they wouldn't at a gas station,” the man said. “It's just human nature. They're more at peace with themselves in rest stops.”

Introductions were made. The man's name was Leo. The children were Zorro and ZoeBella. Janice identified herself too.

“Skinny Puppy's my gang name,” Zorro said, “but use it at your peril.”

“Gang name my ass,” Leo said. “He doesn't know anything about gangs. He signed a lowrider last week. Practically got us killed.”

“I didn't know I was signing,” Zorro said. “I just had my hand out the window.”

“Bastard about run us off the highway,” Leo said.

Janice realized that she was gazing at them openly, a little stupidly. She suggested that they drive to the gas station so they could all be on their way.

“Can I go with you,” Rose asked. “I would like to feel like a human being, if only for a few miles.”

“Lemme too!” Zorro cried. He opened the back door of Janice's car, tumbled over the front seat and snuggled against her. “Mnnnn, you smell fine,” he said.

“I don't know where he picks that shit up from,” Rose muttered. “Certainly not from his father. Get out of that vehicle now!” she screamed.

The child flipped backward over the seat and out the door and jumped into the van. ZoeBella, who had not uttered a word, climbed in beside him.

Janice invited Rose to ride with her to the gas station, which Leo seemed to be familiar with. She felt blessed with social responsibility. She was doing well. It would be over soon, and she would be able to look back on this in the future. Richard had only one mental key and it didn't open all locks, she had always felt this about Richard. And she had lots of mental keys, she thought gratefully, and that's why she was moving so freely through a world that welcomed her.

Leo started the van with difficulty. Blue smoke poured from the tailpipe.

“That doesn't look good,” Janice noted.

“Rings, seals, valves, you name it,” Rose said.

The van gained the highway and wobbled off ahead of them. Smoke appeared to be rising from the wheels as well. The sky was cloudless and sharply blue, and the smoke floundered upward into it.

“Some people like the sky out here,” Rose volunteered, “but I prefer the sky over New York City. Now that's sky. The big buildings push it back so it's far, far overhead. It looks wilder that way.”

Janice agreed, thinking that this was a highly original remark. She felt splendid about herself. She looked at Rose warmly.

“That Zorro smudged your seat,” Rose said, regarding a dusty footprint on the car's upholstery.

Janice waved this concern away. “Such beautiful children,” she said. “And such unusual names.”

“God knows I didn't want to call him Zorro, but his father insisted. Those two aren't from the same stock. ZoeBella's dad, Warren, was blind. I hope that you, like many others, aren't under the misperception that blind people are good people. It just isn't so. Blind people don't feel that they have to interact with others at all. They contribute nothing to a conversation. He had a wonderful dog, though, Mountain. Mountain came to Lamaze class with us. Lamaze encourages you to focus on something other than birth and I focused on Mountain week after week, but when it was finally time to have ZoeBella they wouldn't let Mountain into the delivery room. A violation of infection-control procedures, they said. Well, I freaked, and I think the whole thing messed ZoeBella up too. Here I went the whole pregnancy with no cigarettes or liquor and then they won't let the goddamn dog into the delivery room. It was a very, very difficult birth and Warren, the bastard, was no help at all. But we sued the hospital for not letting us have Mountain in there, and they settled out of court. Warren was long gone by then, but that money did us for four years, Leo and Zorro too. What an inspiration that was. I wish I could come up with another one that good. Have you ever fucked a blind man?”

“Why, no,” Janice said. “No, I haven't.”

“Do it before you die, girl,” Rose said. “There's nothing like it.”

Janice nodded.

“But don't stick around afterwards. Get your cookies out of there,” Rose advised.

Janice nodded again. She was beginning to worry somewhat about Richard's mood when she retrieved him. The van weaved smoldering before them. Janice felt a little queasy watching it. By the time they reached the exit, Janice found that she was gripping the steering wheel tightly. The van turned not in to the gas station where Janice had left Richard but into one across the street, where it clattered to a stop.

“Makes you want a cocktail just looking at that heap, doesn't it?” Rose said.

“I'd like to give you fifty dollars, if you don't mind,” Janice said. “I think you probably need some oil too. Wouldn't you like some oil? To make it home safely?”

“Oh, you could drop a bundle into that thing,” Rose said. “It's a suckhole.” She accepted the bill slowly from Janice's fingers. “Thank you,” she said slowly. She seemed absorbed in some involuted ritual. She didn't respect the money, it was clear, but she respected the person who gave her the money. Was that it? Janice wondered. Why was she giving her so much money anyway? Her own behavior was becoming increasingly suspect.