by Joy Williams
It was almost lunchtime when she met Walker. She had been trying to decide whether she should go up to the top floor of the department store to a rotating restaurant and have an iced tea and a salad. That was what women did, wasn’t it? While she was trying to decide this she palmed some bracelets off a counter and slipped them on her wrist.
Walker said to her, “You’re going to get caught. I’ve caught you.”
Pearl stood very still. Her backbone was hot, burning through her dress. She felt as though someone had set a match to it. Pearl stood very still but she felt that her head was rotating wildly. Once, on the soundless television, she saw a baseball player beaned by a ball. His fractured head began swinging crazily, in all sorts of impossible positions. He’d looked as though he cared so much, he was doing it all so hard. His head was making up for the years of stillness ahead.
Pearl brought her hand up slowly to her head. It was still. The fear she felt had nothing to do with the situation of being arrested for common shoplifting. That would simply be an embarrassment. She would feel like a fool. She would be fingerprinted; she would be put in a cell and given a sandwich and then Gene would be notified and he would come and get her and he would be terribly embarrassed too. He would pay something to get her out. They would get in the car together and drive home. He would pat her hand. He would not mention the incident again.
This had nothing to do with the anxiousness Pearl felt at the sound of Walker’s voice. This applied only to the rules of a benign and banal world she had just fallen from. The other, the fear, the loss of herself beside him, was nameless and complete.
She turned to the man standing beside her. He had dark hair and eyes. Smooth, marvelous skin. His hands rested on her shoulder. He was a large man. Even his hair seemed weighty. She knew he was not going to arrest her. His authority had nothing to do with the law. His hands on her were a hunter’s hands, dressing her down. She felt stretched, spread, terribly exposed.
“Come on now,” he said. “Come with me.”
She felt as though he were emptying her, right there on the spot, absorbing little parts of her, nullifying them, closing the little exits in her mind. Jesus walked out. The doors kept shutting in her mind. She did not want to interfere. Windows shut. Her heart was in twilight. She was nothing, in a field, children running across her heart. She was nothing, nowhere, with this man. A strange thought crept across her mind. Once there were four animals who supported the world in the sky. Then one of them was killed. This could never be redeemed. This could never be atoned for. Pearl felt so lonely and sad. The animal died. Things could never be all right. Pearl had never felt such loneliness or been filled with such longing.
She put the handbag that wasn’t her own down on the floor. And then she followed this man who was Walker. They passed through the store and into the street. They were in his car, traveling out of the city. As they drove, he questioned her politely, about her past, her associations and arrangements. She answered, she knew. She heard her voice, replying, wrapping up her life for him. It had a beginning and an end. He listened attentively. The two of them, she recounting, he listening, disposed of it. It was their first act together.
He pulled into a motel on the highway, one of a large, popular chain. She knew of course that he would do this and she felt that this was somehow to her advantage, this presumption, this knowledge. This is how it all begins. It was the hereditary flow of women to have such helpless understanding. The wound that opened again and again. The wound that was never fatal. She felt better. That was all there was to it, even with this man. She was not lost, nor had she been found. She was not doing anything particularly abnormal. She was in an efficiently run motel. There would be children in the swimming pool with styrofoam bubbles on their backs. There would be a loop of paper on the toilet seat to show that it had been cleaned. There would be a grip cemented on the shower wall. There would be no danger here.
Pearl walked into the lobby with Walker as he registered.
“What do you drink?” he asked, writing on the form, “Thomas. Mr. and Mrs. Walker Thomas.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She didn’t know about drinking. She hadn’t had a drink since the red-headed boy in the bathhouse.
Walker’s hand on her neck was soft. His touch was gentle, pitiless, and again she felt the dread of nothingness, the extinguishment of light. She did not want to be responsible for maintaining the light in herself. She sagged against him slightly and then straightened.
He guided her out of the lobby and into the adjacent bar. The only people there were a woman bartender and an overweight couple drinking Cokes.
“Kids are wonderful,” the man was saying. “Our four-year-old, the things he says! The other night he wouldn’t go to sleep, you know. He was making a little fuss and saying he was afraid of the dark and all and mother here says to him, ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark. God’s in the room with you,’ and he says, ‘I know God’s here but I want somebody with skin on.’”
The woman started to laugh. She was plump and blond and smelled like a rising cake.
“Isn’t that a kid though,” the bartender said.
Pearl put her hand out and held on to the bar. She thought that this was the most horrible story she had ever heard in her life.
Walker bought a fifth of bourbon and they walked out of the bar and down a concrete walkway to the last room in the complex. On the grass rimming the walkway were many arrangements of pets’ feces.
Walker unlocked the door. The room was cold and dark. She started to undress immediately. Walker sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette. She knew it would be like this, that he would sit and smoke and watch her. The bottoms of her feet were dirty. It came from wearing sandals all the time. She rubbed her bare feet awkwardly on the carpet.
“I’m getting fat,” she said. Actually she was thin. But she knew she would say that.
Walker said nothing. His eyes were hooded, secret. There seemed to be no white to them in the dimness of the room. He put two pillows behind his head and stretched out full length on the bed. She lay down beside him. The way he lay beside her so heavily, so powerfully at rest, excited her. Her own body was unable to accept this force, this stillness in him. She caressed him. The cloth of his suit was expensive. She was sweating, burning with her chastity beside him. She could not look at his face. She began undressing him, stealthily, a sexual robber. A gangster already caught and sentenced. He stopped her.
“Wait,” he said, “it’s all right. Tell me something, anything. Start anywhere.”
Pearl returned to herself again though not as successfully as before. She shook her head dully. She sat up. She was twenty years old, her nipples were like the hard tight buds of a new tree. She had been married but now it seems she is not married. She does not have her pocketbook. She does not have any identification.
“I had a dog once,” she said. “My father shot it. My mother and father told me that the dog had attacked a little girl, another little girl, and ripped her arm, and that my father had to shoot it.”
Pearl looked at Walker. Such a nice dog he had been. A black shepherd with brandy-colored paws. She had never seen him bite any little girl.
“I never learned how to row a boat. I never learned how to push my sunglasses up on the crown of my head like the other girls.”
Walker said nothing.
“I never learned how to masturbate,” Pearl said. “There was not much that I learned actually but I’ve never understood why I do not know how to masturbate.”
“You were all alone. You could not imagine the lover.”
“My stomach bloated. I grew rigid. I took myself carefully, moment by moment . . .”
“And then nothing?”
“Soon I became embarrassed.”
“You could not imagine the lover. But I’m your lover now.”
“Yes,” she said. It had been very dark in the room, that first room with Walker. Outside it was night. The air conditioner obliterated any of
the noise that might have been out there. He had not touched her since they had entered the room. He was still facing her. She was still. But it was as though her life had finally been put into motion by this man.
“Why were you in the department store?” Pearl asked. “Why am I with you now? I didn’t have to follow you. I shouldn’t have to be with you.”
She wondered if she was going to be murdered and have her name in all the papers like her father, who had murdered himself.
“You’re like a pretty piece of glass on the beach, a piece of driftwood. Something waiting to be found, something waiting for someone like me to discover its personality. You’ve been washed up by the tide. I’ve collected you.” His voice was smooth, striped with sun in the darkness like the moving flanks of an animal. “You can think of it like that, if you wish,” he said.
“I won’t think about it,” she said. She was very tired. She fell asleep. When she awoke she was on her stomach. She felt as though she were being breathed on by something. It was not her own breath. She was the breath, rolling in meaty jaws. She flung her arm behind her and grasped the thick hair of his head, which was dry and fragrant. She writhed in the darkness with him, unprotesting. She started to moan. It was like singing. She could not stop. He rose and turned her beneath him. She was so light, just a feather, just a bone. He fell into her again. Her breasts entered his mouth. He was a tree, she a snake, coiling about him. She was many snakes coiling in the sunshine by the tree’s roots, upon the ground, everywhere.
He let her slide to the floor. She raised her haunches to him, she pressed her cheek to the carpet. Dust in her nostrils, the color of the carpet, a rose shade. A pattern that swirled inward, into the buds of flowers. He fixed his mouth against her neck and came into her with a low growl. She was not with him, but she felt a keen and startling pleasure. And she went with that, kept going with that, until she was far away.
Hours later, Pearl had been almost surprised to wake into an ordinary morning. She peered through the blinds and could see travelers packing their cars. An irritated mother was hitting a child on the shoulders with the child’s own Barbie and Ken lunch box. Engines were starting. A bathtub was draining in the room beside her. It reminded her that she should take a bath.
She bathed quickly and dressed, then unlocked the door to the outside. Walker lay on the bed, on his back, watching her with his dark eyes.
“I have to get a few things,” she said.
“Put it on the bill,” he said. “Or take money if you’d rather. My wallet’s in my jacket there.”
She took a few dollars from his wallet.
“Don’t disappear now,” he said.
“Oh no,” she said. The thought hadn’t occurred to her.
He smiled. “We’re going to my home,” he said simply. As simply as that. “We have to drive about twenty miles to the ferry, and then it’s forty minutes by steamer to Saddleback Island. Then we take a boat over to our island. It’s seven miles, a little over half an hour if Joe has the Chris-Craft there. We’ll leave as soon as you get back.”
“I didn’t know there were any islands beyond Saddleback,” Pearl said.
Walker swung his legs over the side of the bed. “A few little ones. Ours is the largest. Twenty thousand acres. We’ve owned it for one hundred years.”
“Oh,” Pearl said. “I just didn’t know there were other islands there.” She felt stupid. She averted her eyes from his as she stood up.
“There’s no reason for anyone to know about them,” he said, then laughed. “The state knows we’re there, though. They just raised our taxes last year from six to forty thousand.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’ll just get a few things.” She gestured toward the door.
He was dressed and waiting for her when she returned to the room. They drove mostly in silence. It was early autumn and the day was cool. Pearl had known about Saddleback for years. It was an elegant resort island. They called the fine old homes “cottages” there. They called the simpler but comfortable houses “shacks.” As a teenager, Pearl felt that if she could only have a safari-cloth skirt and a cranberry-colored sweater and walk those streets of summer with their expensive crowds, her life would turn out all right.
Not once on their drive to the steamer had she thought of Gene or of those dead nights. She had been taken away as though by drowning. They would never find her living face again. No announcement would arrive.
Once she said to Walker, “Will we be together now? From now on?”
He shrugged.
“If we don’t have the time, we’ll have eternity,” she said, half laughing, not really knowing what she meant.
“You know about that eternity,” he said. “There’s a rock that’s a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.”
“I’m not a child,” Pearl said.
He smiled. They passed a sign advertising a palmist. A gigantic hand. MADAME CLAVELL. The hand was covered with starbursts of light. The little lights were .22 holes. Flattened in the center of the palm were the remnants of something feathered.
Pearl opened her mouth and then shut it again.
“So much even for the little bird,” Walker said.
Pearl laughed. She felt that she owed this man a good deal. He had awakened her, not to life, but to some sweet void in which she felt she could dwell forever. But she was so tired. Her body, slumped against the blond leather of the car seats, was a weight too heavy to be borne. Her exhaustion was strange to her. She closed her eyes and fell into dreams.
She was having a baby in a large, freshly cut field. There was blood on the grass but it may not have been her own. It was cold but dry. It might have been color, not blood at all, an ivy winding through the grass. Her thighs were spread. Her arms were spread. She was going to have a baby. She knew that those around her were going to cut open her stomach and fold back the flaps of skin and unfold the baby from her like a bridal gown. She knew that they would abandon her there, her terrible dark wound a nest for the flying creatures of the night.
The baby slid out of her. It was beautiful, black and silver, heaving for breath, glossy with her blood and water. She could not see him clearly enough. She strained to see him. They assured her that he was beautiful. She tossed her head fretfully from side to side. She wanted to feed him. She wanted to see him so that she could begin to love. She was afraid she didn’t know anything about love. That love was like physics, something that somebody had tried to teach her about once, something she had not caught onto. The figures that had been on the rim of the meadow now surrounded her. They assured her that he was perfect. And the fact that he had been born at dusk was propitious, they said. For that was the luckiest hour.
Their voices were low, peaceful. She couldn’t understand why she knew what they were saying. It was not words they were saying. It was a dream, she knew. If she could relax in her dream, she would wake up. But it made her fret. She was in a car traveling. This is how people dreamed. She was awake now but she kept her eyes clenched tight.
In her dream it had become too dark for Pearl to see her baby.
She opened her eyes. “I can’t,” she said.
“We’re almost at the boat,” he said. “Then we’ll be home.”
“I’m married,” she said awkwardly.
“That was nothing. Six days. No one’s married for six days.” He passed his hand over her hair. “Little Mouse.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Little mouse,” he repeated. “Little lost soul.”
She looked at him, her eyes widening. What is the redeeming question? she thought. I have failed to ask the redeeming question and now it is too late.
“You’re with me,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
They had taken the steamer over to Saddleback. They stood on the deck with the other travelers. Everyone was tanned and there were many bicycles and dogs.
A woman sa
id to her friend, “They bought a rocking horse that had documents with it, proof that it had belonged to Rommel. It cost them a fortune and they gave it to Jennifer, can you imagine . . .”
Beside Pearl was a man in a clerical collar, wearing a seersucker suit and sneakers and taking pictures with a Nikon. He had a dog leashed to the railing and occasionally, turning away from the view, which was pretty much blue and empty, he would take pictures of the dog.
Pearl would grab plastic cups that were rolling around the deck and put them in the trash. A man wearing dyed blue Jockey shorts and Mexican sandals said, “I’ve taught him how to fuck and play tennis and still he won’t marry me.”
The boat rolled across the simple sea and made Pearl a little queasy.
When it docked, everyone waited on the narrow stairs. The man in the Jockey shorts said to the man of the collar, “I have a sister, Father, who is a real meatball. She goes into the nunnery and the first thing you know she’s pregnant and she tells me, she says, ‘Jesus thought of me.’ That’s how she said it happened, I swear. What do you think of that, Father?”
Everyone trooped to the hold and squeezed into their cars, which were parked very close together. There was a convertible parked next to Walker’s Mercedes. It had a cat carrier in it. A rounded gray paw extended limply. A woman was screaming at her husband about it. She would look unhappily into the box and then scream at her husband. Her husband looked embarrassed.
Walker drove swiftly across the island toward Morgansport. They passed through several pretty villages, old whaling ports with healthy vistas, with streets lined with elm trees that had escaped disease. Pearl wanted to linger there. She wanted Walker to show her the sights, but he was uninterested in Saddleback Island. His island, their island, lay beyond.
Walker garaged the car on the lane that led to their private pier. There was a long barn on one side of the lane for the family’s cars. The walls of the barn were papered with posters. One of the posters advertised a circus. It showed the face of a clown. One half of the clown’s face was made up very sadly, the other half leered in delight.
