Free The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams Page B

long-haired rhizomes clutch its pot tightly. The space around it simmers, it bubbles. Each cell mobilizes its intent of skillful and creative action. It turns its leaves toward the Spanish bayonets. It straightens and sways. Straightens and sways. A moment passes. The message of retribution is received along the heated air. The yard boy watches as the Spanish bayonets uproot themselves and move out.

Shepherd
    I t had been three weeks since the girl’s German Shepherd had died. He had drowned. The girl couldn’t get over it. She sat on the porch of her boyfriend’s beach house and looked at the water.
    It was not the same water. The house was on the Gulf of Mexico. The shepherd had drowned in the bay.
    The girl’s boyfriend had bought his house just the week before. It had been purchased furnished with mismatched plates and glasses, several large oak beds and an assortment of bamboo furniture.
    The girl had a house of her own on the broad seawalled bay that had big windows overlooking shaggy bougainvillea bushes. There were hardly any studs in the frame and the whole house had shaken when the dog ran through it.
    The girl’s boyfriend’s last name was Chester and everyone called him that. He wore sunglasses the color of champagne bottles. Chester had wide shoulders, great hands and one broken marriage, on which he didn’t owe a dime.
    “You have fallen into the butter dish,” the girl’s friends told her.
    Three days before the shepherd had drowned, Chester had asked the girl to marry him. They had known each other almost a year. “Let’s get married,” he said. They had taken a Quaalude and gone to bed. That had been three weeks and three days ago. They were going to be married in four days. Time is breath, the girl thought.
    The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, “Do you love me?” he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight.
    The girl had had him since he was two months old. She had bought him from a breeder in Miami, a man who had once been a priest. The girl’s shepherd came from a litter of five with excellent bloodlines. The mother was graceful and friendly, the father more solemn and alert. The breeder who had once been a priest made the girl spend several minutes alone with each puppy and asked her a great many questions about herself. She had never thought about herself much. When she had finally selected her puppy, she sat in the kitchen with the breeder and drank a Pepsi. The puppy stumbled around her feet, nibbling at the laces of her sneakers. The breeder smoked and talked to the girl with a great deal of assurance. The girl had been quite in awe of him.
    He said, “We are all asleep and dreaming, you know. If we could ever actually comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out.”
    The girl nodded. She was embarrassed. People would sometimes speak to her like this, intimate and alarming, as though she were passionate or thoughtful or well read. The puppy smelled wonderful. She picked him up and held him.
    “We deceive ourselves. All we do is dream. Good dreams, bad dreams…”
    “The ways that others see us is our life,” the girl said.
    “Yes!” the breeder exclaimed.
    —
    The girl sat moving slowly on the porch glider. She imagined herself standing laughing, younger and much nicer, the shepherd leaping into her arms. Her head buzzed and rustled. The bourbon bobbed around the flamingo’s lowered head on the gaudy glass. The shepherd’s drowned weight in her arms had been a terrible thing, terrible. She and Chester were both dressed rather elaborately because they had just returned from dinner with two friends, a stockbroker and his girlfriend, an art dealer. The girl was very thin and very blond. There were fine blond hairs on her face. The small restaurant where they ate