The Visiting Privilege Read Online Free PDF

postcards herself. She really didn’t want to get in touch with anybody but Ben, and Ben lived in the same house with her, as he had in whatever house they’d been in ever since they’d gotten married. She couldn’t very well send a postcard to Ben.
    August was hot and splendid for the most part, but those who stayed for the entire season claimed it was not as nice as July. The gardens were blown. Pedestrians irritably swatted bicyclists who used the sidewalks. There was more weeping in bars, and more jellyfish in the sea.
    On the afternoon of the first Friday in August, Constance was in the attic room observing an elderly couple place their postcards in the mailbox with great deliberation. She watched a woman about her own age drop a card in the box and go off with a mean, satisfied look upon her face. She watched an older woman throw in at least a dozen cards with no emotion whatever.
    Charlotte came upstairs and told her mother, “A person drowning imagines there’s a ladder rising vertically from the water, and he tries to climb that ladder. Did you know that? If he would only imagine that the ladder was horizontal he wouldn’t drown.”
    Charlotte left. Constance sat on a bed and looked around the room. On the bureau mirror were photographs of two little boys, Charlotte’s and Jill’s boyfriends. Their names were Zack and Pete. They were just little boys but there they were. It worried Constance that the children should already have boyfriends. Another photograph, which Constance had not seen before, showed a large dog in front of a potted evergreen. Constance was not acquainted with either him or his name. She got up and began picking up candy wrappers that were scattered around the room and putting them in her empty glass. She was thirty-seven years old. She thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that American lives have no second act.
    Constance went downstairs to the kitchen, where Tracy was drinking some champagne she had brought, and waiting for Steven to appear at five o’clock.
    “I just love it here,” Tracy said. “I love it, love it, love it.”
    Her eyes were shining. She was a good sport but she had rather bad skin. She was a vegetarian; for three days after she left, the children demanded bean curd. She was Steven’s typist in the city, where she and her epileptic lab, Scooter, lived in the same apartment building as Jill’s aunt.
    “You were in my apartment a long, long time ago,” Tracy told Jill, “when you were a little tiny girl, and you pulled Scooter’s tail and he growled at you and you said, ‘Stop that at once,’ and he did.”
    “I can’t remember that,” Jill said.
    “It’s a small world,” Tracy said, pouring herself more champagne. She sighed. “Scooter’s getting along now.”
    Charlotte and Jill were sitting on either side of Tracy at the kitchen table, making lists of the names they wanted to call their children. Charlotte had Victoria, Grover and Christopher; Jill had Beatrice, Travis and Cone.
    “Cone,” Tracy asked. “How can you name a child Cone?”
    Constance looked at the ornately lettered names. The future yawned ahead, filled with individuals, each expecting to be found.
    “Do you swim,” Constance asked Tracy.
    “I do,” Tracy said solemnly. “I just gave the girls a few pointers about panic in the water.”
    “Would you like to go swimming,” Constance asked.
    “It’s almost five,” Tracy said. “Steven will be coming down any moment.”
    “Cone is both a nice shape
and
a nice name,” Jill said.
    “Would you like to go swimming?” Constance asked the girls.
    “No thanks,” they said.
    Ben came in the kitchen door, chewing gum. Since his heart attack, he had given up smoking and chewed a great deal of gum. He was tanned and smiling, but he moved a little oddly, as though he were carrying something awkward. Constance got a little rush every time she saw Ben.
    “Would you like to go swimming with me,” Constance asked.
    “Sure,”