The Visiting Privilege (55 page)

“You know a lot, Leslie,” Pam said, “but I don't think this would give that woman any peace, coming from you.”

“It would be suicide to speak like that,” one of the mothers said.

“We must behave here as though we didn't exist,” the eldest mother said.

“Didn't exist?” said Barbara. “But we do.”

“What I like about our group is that it isn't a support group,” Francine said. “I couldn't handle a support group. I would consider it suspect in the extreme.”

They all agreed that any kind of support group for the mothers of celebrity killers would be in poor taste.

“Ours is a delicate situation,” the eldest mother said. She requested that someone, it didn't matter who, light the candles.

Leslie said, “My first thought in the morning and my last thought at night is: We are going to be asked to leave.”

“I've still got the Popsicle-stick box he made as a kid,” Francine said. “I keep the kitchen sponge in it.”

“That can't be sanitary,” Emily noted.

“I threw away the handprint. You know how they make plaster-of-paris casts of little kids' hands for Mother's Day in kindergarten and mount them on blocks of wood?”

“That would be worth something on eBay,” Barbara said. “People are such creeps.”

“What have we been discussing tonight, actually,” Leslie asked. “If I had to guess, I'd say we've been talking about God.”

“That's a stretch,” Barbara said.

“I'd say that saying that is making a pretty safe bet,” Francine said. “It's sort of vague. Not to hurt your feelings, Leslie.”

“OK,” Leslie said.

“It's like each time we meet, you think we should have a subject or something. It's not as though we're going down a stairwell, one step at a time, putting what's happened behind us, one step at a time.”

“OK, OK,” Leslie said.

The candles would not light as the cups they were in had filled with the rainwater of days past. “We should be going anyway,” one of the mothers said. Candles always discomfited this one. Vigils, sex, dinner, prayer…they had too many uses.

“I wish I had dropped him as an infant out of his snuggle sack on the rocks,” Barbara said loudly.

Emily had heard her voice this absolutely useless sentiment before. It was always a sure sign that the evening was winding down.

“We've settled nothing,” the eldest mother said. “We cannot make amends for the sins of our children. We gave birth to mayhem and therefore history. Oh, ladies, oh, my friends, we have resolved nothing and the earth is no more beautiful.”

She struggled to her feet and was helped inside. Her old knees creaked like doors. She always liked to end these evenings on an uncompromising note. Of course it was all just whistling in the dark, but sometimes she would conclude by saying that despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years that still lay ahead of them, the earth was no less beautiful.

T
hey were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That's what she'd thought: Why, he's falling to pieces. The place was called Gary's.

“Honey,” he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face, gently at first but then harder. “Oh, honey,” he said in alarm. His tie rested in his Mignon Gary as he was pressed forward. He was overweight and pale but his hair was dark and he wore elegant two-toned shoes. Before this, he had whispered something unintelligible to her. No one watched them. Sweat ran down his face. His drink toppled over and fell on them both.

She was wearing a green dress and the next day she left it behind in the hotel along with the clothes he had been wearing, the tan suit and the tie and the two-toned shoes. The clothes had let them down. The following night they were in a different hotel. It was near the coast and their room had a balcony from which they could see the distant ocean. They knew how to drink. They sought out the slippery places that tempted one to have a drink. Every place was a slippery place.

Denise and Steadman watched the moon rising. Denise played the game she did with herself. She transferred all her own convulsive, compulsive associations to Steadman. She gave them all to him. This was not as difficult as it might once have been because all her thoughts concerned Steadman anyway. Though her mind became smooth and flat and borderless, she wasn't thinking anything so she never felt lost. It was quiet until a deeper silence began to unfold, but she was still all right. Then the silence became like a giant hand mutely offered. When she sensed the giant hand, she got up quickly. That giant hand was always too much for her. She went into the other room and made more drinks. They took suites whenever possible. The gin seemed to need a room of its own. She came back out to the balcony.

“Let's drink this and go get something to eat,” she said.

They found themselves in the dining room of the hotel. It was claustrophobic and the service was poor. They sat on a cracked red leather banquette under a mirror. On a shelf between them and the mirror was a pair of limp rubber gloves. Denise didn't bring them to Steadman's attention. She reasoned that they had been left behind by some maintenance person. They gazed at a table of seven who were telling loud stories about traffic accidents they had witnessed. They seemed to be trying to top one another.

“The French have spectacular wrecks,” a man said.

“I love that Jaws of Life thing,” a woman said. “Have you ever seen that thing?” She had streaked blond hair and a heavily freckled bosom.

“I saw an incredible Mexican bus crash once,” a small man said. But his remark was immediately dismissed by the group.

“A Mexican wreck? There's nothing extraordinary about a Mexican wreck…”

“It's true. The landscape's such a void that there's not the same effect…”

Steadman and Denise listened attentively. Denise didn't have a car-crash story and if she ever did she wouldn't tell it, she decided.

The waitress told them the previous couple at their booth had given her a five-dollar tip but had torn the bill in half, forcing on her the ignominy of taping it back together. She said she despised people, present company excepted, and told them not to order the veal. If they ordered the veal, she told them, she would not serve it, which would be cause for her dismissal but she didn't care.

They decided to have another couple of drinks, and return to their room.

The room was not welcoming. It had seen too many people come and go. It was wearying to be constantly reminded that time passes and everything with it, purposelessly.

Denise watched Steadman place himself on the bed. He lay on his back. The room surrounded them. For a while, Denise lay on the bed too, thinking. Where had it gone, it had gone someplace. The way they were. Then she went into the other room, where the writing table and television set were. Their new traveling bags were there, big soft black ones. She turned off the lights, feeling a little dizzy. She wrung her hands. They should go someplace, she thought. There was tomorrow, something had to be done with it. She reviewed the day's events. Her mind was like a raven, picking over gravel with its oily, luminous feathers. She could almost hear it as it hopped across the small stones but she couldn't quite, thank God. Then she heard someone passing by in the corridor, laughing. A thin breeze entered the room and she thought of the distant water as they had seen it from the balcony, folded like a package between two enormous buildings. She looked at their bags, heaped in a corner. Night was a bad time. Night would simply give her no rest. Steadman was quiet now but he might get up soon and they would have their conversation. It was a mess, they were in an awful mess. He didn't know how much longer he could stand this and so on and so on…Her eyes ached and her throat was dry, she hated this room. It, it just didn't like them. She could hear it saying, Well, there's a pathetic pair, how did they ever find each other? She'd like to set fire to the room. Or beat it up. She could hit, no question. There was someone passing in the hall again, laughing, the fools. The room stared at her lidlessly. Perhaps they could leave tonight. They would go down—Denise and Steadman, Steadman and Denise—past the night clerk trying to read a book
—
10
,
000
Dreams Interpreted.
She remembered what the book looked like: red and falling apart. They had done this before, left in the night when the moon was setting and the sun rising. To get out while the moon was setting, that's exactly what she wanted. She lay down on the floor. The room was not letting them breathe the way they had to; it was scandalous that they'd been given this room instead of another. Listening to Steadman breathe, she tried to breathe. She wished it were June. It was June once and they were somewhere and a mockingbird sang from midnight to daybreak, or so it seemed, imitating other birds, and Steadman had made a list of all the birds he recognized in the mockingbird's song. He learned things and then remembered them, that's just how he was.

Denise crept across the carpet toward Steadman's bed and held on to it. His face was turned toward her, his eyes open, looking at her. That was Steadman, he knew everything but he didn't share. He made her feel like a little animal sometimes, one with little animal emotions and breathing little animal devotions. She would ask him for the list very quietly, very nicely, the little piece of paper with the names of the birds, where was it, he was always putting it someplace and she had already gone through their bags, their beautiful traveling bags, ready for the larger stage.

“Steadman,” she said reasonably.

But how could he hear her? This annoying room was listening to every word she uttered. And what did it know? It couldn't know anything. It couldn't climb from the basement into a life of spiritual sunshine like she was capable of doing, not that she could claim she had. The individual in the hall howled with laughter at this. There were several of them out there now, a whole gang, the ones from the dinner party, probably, the spectacular-wrecks people, just shrieking.

At once Denise realized that the gang was herself and it was morning. Her hands hurt terribly. They were as pink as though they'd been boiled. She'd hurt them somehow. Actually, they were broken. Incredible.

She stared at them in the car on the drive to the hospital. Those hands weren't going to do anything more for Denise for a while.

The doctor in the emergency room wrapped them up, the left first, then the right, indifferently. Even so, some things fascinated him.

“We've got a kid on the third floor,” he said. “He was born with all the bones in his head broken. Now there's a problem. Are you aware that our heads are getting smaller? Our skulls are smaller than those of our brothers in the Paleolithic period. Do you know why? I'll tell you why. Society's the answer. Society has reduced our awareness skills. Personal and direct contact with the natural world requires a continual awareness, but now we just don't have it. We're aware of dick-all.”

Denise looked at her hands covered in the casts. They were like little dead creatures safely concealed in snow-covered burrows. Ugly dishes don't break, she thought. But they had.

“Try to stay alert, miss,” the doctor said, playfully slapping her now utterly exempt hands.

Then they were driving slowly away from the coast through small towns. “I'm tired, Denise,” Steadman was saying. “I'm really tired.”

“Yes, yes,” Denise said. She was thinking of all the nice things she would do for this man she loved.

“I think we should stay somewhere until your hands are better,” he said. “Rent a house. Get some rest.”

“I agree, I agree. No more hotels. We'll get a house for a while.” She was crazy about him, everything was going to be fine.

He turned off the road at a sign that said
CAFE REALITY
and into a parking lot. Actually, it said
CAPE REALTY
. Denise laughed. “And we'll stop drinking,” she said. “We'll just stop.”

“Sure,” Steadman said.

“I don't want to see a lot of places, though,” Denise said. “I don't want to choose.”

She sat in the car. She had ruined that room back there. Embarrassing, she thought. But the room had fought back. It made one think, really.

Steadman returned to the car and put several photographs of a house on her lap. It had a porch in front and a pool in back and was surrounded by a tall, whitewashed wall.

“I'm going to use this month wisely,” Denise assured him.

“Good,” Steadman said.

The important thing was to stop drinking. If she could get twenty-four hours away from last night, she could start stopping. Maybe they could get rid of all the glasses in the house. Glasses were always calling to you. Maybe this house wouldn't have any. Their drinking had brought them here. Denise was determined to learn something, to leave this place refreshed. She yawned nervously. Steadman's forehead was beaded with sweat, the back of his jacket was dark with sweat as he lifted their bags from the trunk.

In one of the rooms, a young woman was sweeping the floor. “I'm the cleaning woman,” she said. “Are you renting this place? I'll be through in a minute.” She wore shorts and red high-top sneakers. “I'll put on a shirt,” she said. “I didn't know anyone was coming. I always sweep without a shirt.” With her was a small dog with black saucery eyes, thick ears and double dewclaws.

“What is that,” Denise asked. It was one of the strangest dogs she had ever seen.

“Everyone asks that,” the girl said. “It's a Lundehund. It's used for hunting puffins in Norway.”

“But what's it doing here?”

“He comes with me while I clean. You'll probably ask next how I ended up with a dog like this. I can't remember the ins and outs of it. I started off wanting a Welsh corgi, the ones you always see in pictures of the queen, greeting her on her return from somewhere or bidding her farewell as she departs. I'm not English, of course. I've never been to England. The Lake District, the Cotswolds, the white cliffs of Dover…you couldn't prove any of them by me. I was born in this town and I've never been anywhere else. But I make sure that everything I have comes from other places, though I try to avoid China. This shirt comes from Nepal, and my perfume's from Paris. I realize it's wrong to subject caged civet cats to daily genital scrapings just to make perfume, but it was a present. My sneakers were put together in Brazil and you're probably about to say that Brazilian laborers make only pennies an hour, but I did purchase them secondhand. See the little stones in these earrings? They come from Arizona. Navajoland.”

She had put on a shirt and was buttoning it as she spoke.

Denise wasn't going to allow the cleaning woman to unnerve her. Her hands throbbed and itched. She had to drink a lot of water, lots and lots of water.

“You shouldn't be here, should you,” she said to the Lundehund. “You should be scrambling up and down rocky crevices, carrying birds' eggs in your teeth.”

It was disgusting and sad, Denise thought, but a great many things were. One's talents should be used.

The woman and the grotesque dog were clearly fresh catastrophes. She was trying to begin and then these catastrophes appeared immediately. Though it wasn't what you thought that was important, but how you acted. Or was it the other way around?

Denise took leave of them and went into a narrow monochromatic room that overlooked the pool. There were empty bookcases over a single bed and numerous indentations in the hardwood floor as though a woman wearing high heels in need of repair had moved back and forth across it, again and again. Her own shoes, too, were run-down. She kicked them off. She sighed, and later it seemed the water in the pool was darker and the shadows were different. Her hair smelled of gin, and her skin. There was someone in the pool, a man, but he left quickly when she got up. It was just the liquor leaving, she thought. She could understand that. The doors in the house were sliding ones she could move with her foot. Her hands bobbed in the casts beside her as she walked. Steadman was where she had last seen him but he was sitting down. The cleaning woman was holding him in her arms and he was weeping loudly.

“I just saw your husband,” Denise said. “He was swimming in the pool. No one should be using the pool now that we're here, should they? We've rented this place, after all. And we don't need a cleaning woman either. This place is clean enough. We'll keep it clean.”

“I don't have a husband,” the cleaning woman said. “You have a husband.” Her shirt was off again, she just couldn't seem to keep that shirt on. She had been combing Steadman's hair back with her fingers. His tears had dried and he looked like a boy, washed and fresh.