Breaking and Entering

by Joy Williams

  “Poor Chip hasn’t been able to cope very well with Mrs. Maxwell’s maiming,” Turnupseed had told Willie. “For twenty-five years she was his little singing bird, you know what I’m saying, and then she had that operation and she became his cheerful mutilated wife. She doesn’t have a morbid bone in her body, but Chip proved to be more delicate. I found him once on the beach at midnight, the drunkest man I’ve ever seen, crying and trying to stab himself with a spoon.”

  “Turnupseed’s heart is going to break when he finds out what we are,” Liberty said.

  “Friends are what we are,” Willie said.

  Liberty went downstairs and sat alone in the living room, which was arranged for conversation. Clem lay in the kitchen, the same color as the refrigerator, his legs straight up in the air. In the living room was a fireplace containing a screen that, if plugged in, would project a fire burning. Liberty did not want the illusion of a fire burning. Liberty loved Willie. She believed in love and knew that every day was judgment day. It didn’t seem to be enough anymore. If someone loved you, Willie said, you became other than what you knew yourself to be. He did not want to become that other one. Willie was becoming a little occult in his attitudes. His thoughts included Liberty less and less, his coordinates were elsewhere, his possibilities without her becoming more actualized. This was marriage.

  “Why don’t you and Willie have a baby?” Liberty’s mother demanded frequently when she phoned them at home. “What are you waiting for! If you had a baby I’d come and take care of it for you. I saw a cute little quilt for its crib the other day in town. I do wish you’d have a baby, Liberty, I’d like to have someone to eat ice cream with. Your father can’t eat ice cream, as you know. He swells up. They have some very exotic flavors these days like Hula Pie. I don’t think it would be wise to start the baby right off on Hula Pie, though. I think something simpler would be in order, like French Vanilla. How soon would it be, do you think, before the baby could have a little cup of French Vanilla ice cream?”

  Liberty looked out the windows at the sunset colors rushing, funneling, toward the horizon. It was a good sunset. When it was over, she curled up on the couch and turned on the television. On the screen there was a picture of a plate with a large steak and a plump baked potato on it. The potato got up and a little slit appeared in it, which was apparently its mouth, and it apparently began talking. Liberty turned up the sound. It was a commercial for potatoes, and the potato was complaining that everyone says steak and potatoes instead of the other way around. It nestled down against the steak again after making its point. The piece of meat didn’t say anything.

  Willie and Liberty went to a party given by the Edgecups of the Crab Key Association. Turnupseed had reminded them to go. He was surprised that the Maxwells hadn’t told them about it. The house was pink, and shuttered in the Bermuda fashion. Everything was pink. The phones were pink, the statuary and chaise longues. The balloons bobbing in the swimming pool were pink. The punch was pink.

  The hostess greeted them with ardor. She was standing beside a gentleman wearing bathing trunks which were imprinted with flying beach umbrellas.

  “You two are just cute as buttons,” she said. “Are you related?”

  “We’re brother and sister,” Willie said.

  “That’s adorable,” she said. “I had a brother once but he was …” she fluttered her fingers “… one of those. Very into the Greek tradition. He stole away all my boyfriends.” She looked down at Clem, who stood beside them chewing on an ice cube. “What,” she asked, “is that supposed to represent?”

  “It’s a dog,” the gentleman suggested. “A pet would be my guess.”

  “It certainly has peculiar eyes,” the hostess said. “My, I wouldn’t want to look at them every day. They sure remind me of something, though.” A memory knocked, then tramped muddily through her otherwise fastidious memory rooms. “Goodness,” she said excitedly. “I haven’t been this broody in years!… Have you tried the pears stuffed with Gorgonzola? I want everyone to promise me they’ll try them.” She wandered off.

  “What’s your line of work, son?” the gentleman asked Willie. He was drinking a martini from a jar. He would unscrew the cap of the jar, take a sip and screw the lid back on again. After each sip, his jaws would go slack, giving him a meaty look.

  Willie shrugged.

  The man nodded. “I don’t believe in work either,” he said, and laughed. “It’s my money that believes in it.” His laugh had bubbles and clots in it. He probed delicately at one of the beach umbrellas tipped at the crotch of his bathing trunks.

  “I’ve saved a few people recently,” Willie said. “If you call that work. It’s what’s been coming up recently.”

  “What are you, one of those Witnesses? Sneak up to a place with those little booklets, trying to make a man change his ways? A stranger comes up to my door, I greet him bare-ass, dick out, pistol ready.” He narrowed his eyes.

  “I’m not doing what you think,” Willie said. “This wasn’t your redemption stuff. This was minor. Material stuff. Isolated events. Drowning. Shock.”

  It was true. Willie had been saving people, though he knew it didn’t have the feel of a calling.

  The first person Willie had saved was a young man struck by lightning on the beach. It was late in the afternoon of a stormy day, and they were watching the surfers enjoy the high, troubled Gulf. The sky was the color of plums and the water pale, and the surfers were dark on their bright boards. The boy had been hurled out of the water and thrown twenty feet through the air onto the beach by the force of the charge. His chest had been badly burned. The burns were delicate and intricate like the web of a spider. Willie had administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The young man’s name was Carl. He was small and blond and looked ferocious even when he was unconscious. A few days later his parents had come over to the house with a box of chocolate-covered cherries. The parents were old and grateful. They had had Carl very late in life. They said he was a wild boy whom they had never understood. They thought he had a death wish. They were old and Carl was young. They couldn’t understand his hurry.

  While they were at the house, Carl’s father, Big Carl, who was an automobile mechanic, gave their truck a tune-up. Carl’s mother found a tick the size of an acorn under Clem’s chin and disposed of it without fuss in the toilet. She confided to Liberty that Carl had once called her a bugger and made her cry. She never cried about anything, she said, except her little Carl.

  Willie had saved two people next, an elderly couple in a Mercedes who had taken a wrong turn and driven briskly down a boat ramp into eight feet of water. Willie had been there to pull open the door. His hand had first rested on a man’s bearded face, and for an instant, Willie said, he thought he was going to get bitten. The old woman wore a low-cut evening gown which showed off her Pacemaker to good advantage. The three of them stood dripping on the ramp, staring at the fuchsia pom-pom on the Mercedes antenna, all that was visible on the surface of the bay. They had been going to the opera.

  “You’ve always been a fool, Herbert,” the old woman said to her husband.

  “A wrong turn in a strange city is not impossible, my dear,” Herbert said.

  To Willie, he said, “Once I was a young man like you. I was an innocent, a rain-washed star, then I married this bag.”

  “Herbert’s lived in this town for years,” the man with the beach umbrellas flying over his bathing trunks said when Willie recounted the incident. “They love accidents, those two. Gets their blood going. Puts the sap in old Herb’s stick.”

  The old couple had given Willie a thousand dollars, all in twenties, delivered by messenger.

  “It’s good work, but it doesn’t sound steady,” the man said, clapping Willie on the shoulder. “Ruthie!” he hollered, gesturing wildly to a woman on the other side of the pool. “Come over here and meet this grand guy!” Ruthie made her way toward them, plunging her fingers in the soil of each potted plant along her route.

  �
��She never waters anything,” Ruthie complained.

  “Meet these two here,” the man said. “Ask them if they’ve got a Mississippi credit card.”

  “Oh, I know that one,” Ruthie exclaimed cheerfully. “That’s four feet of garden hose to siphon gas, am I right?” She looked at Willie slyly, then turned to Liberty and showed her teeth.

  Ruthie wore a great deal of jewelry. She glittered, resembling a chandelier. Willie declared admiration.

  “I always wear my jewelry,” Ruthie said. “All the time, everywhere. Life is short.”

  “Do you know why people are interested in jewels?” Willie asked. He touched a large red stone at the woman’s wrist. “It’s the way the visionaries experience things. Their world is a dazzling one of light. Everyone wants to see things that way. Materially, jewels and gems are the closest thing to a preternatural experience.”

  “Come over here a sec,” Ruthie said and led him away from the party.

  “What kind of drugs you got?” she asked, smiling. “I’m your lady. I’ll buy anything. I want to bong myself to the gills.” She clutched a little purse.

  “I don’t have any drugs.”

  “What’s all this lapis lazuli stuff?”

  “I was just giving you some background.”

  “You’re the youngest person here by at least twenty years. You don’t deal?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No? I can’t believe it. You think I don’t know? That I’m too old or ordinary to know?” She was still smiling. “They gave my husband heroin when he was dying. He kept telling me how profoundly uninteresting life was.”

  “Good,” Willie said. “That’s good.”

  “You’re a creepy kid,” Ruthie said.

  Liberty watched, from a distance, Willie speaking. He looked back at her, scanning the space between them like a machine. How long would it be before they were caught, Liberty wondered. Caught, they would be separated. Separated, the contradictions between them would disappear, would vanish. No one would catch them then.

  They had not fallen in love as though it were a trap, not at all. Love was not a thing that merely happened. Love was created, an act of the will, something made strong in the world, surviving the world’s strangeness and unaccountability. But Willie was inching out, his eye on something, the angling of some light coming from beneath some closed door.

  All one day at CASA VIRGINIA, Willie took pictures of Liberty. He had found a camera in the house and a few rolls of film. Willie took shots of Liberty eating from a can of peaches. He took shots of her in her mildewy bikini. He took shots of her with a sea oat between her teeth. He took her hip bone, her nipples, her widow’s peak. Liberty saw that her life was being recorded in some way. Nevertheless, she was aware that her moments lacked incident.

  Willie put the rolls of film in an antique brass bowl on the floor in the middle of the living room. Liberty took them outside at noon and broke the film from the cartridges. She would give the film to Little Dot, a child she knew. Little Dot found uses for useless things. She might attach the coils to her headband and pretend she was a princess from the planet Utynor. The sheets of film would be her face. Things had purposes for which they were not intended certainly. That’s what enabled a person to keep getting up in the morning.

  At last Willie decided to move along. They saw Turnupseed staggering along the beach with an enormous Glad bag filled with empty beer cans.

  “There’s enough aluminum on the beaches of Florida to build an airplane,” Turnupseed said.

  Turnupseed looked tired. He was tired of the responsibility. “Looking back on it,” he said, “if I had to do it all over again, I just don’t know if I could.”

  Willie said, “We can’t disown the light into which we’re born.”

  In the uncaring light, Turnupseed gave a smile rather like a baby’s.

  “You’ve got a lot of my first wife in you, son. What a sweetie she was. Number One was the one I really boogied with, if you know what I mean. She said that being sad separates a person from God.”

  “She said that?” Willie wondered.

  “I believe she used those very words,” Turnupseed said.

  “We’ve got to be off now,” Willie said. “We’re leaving.”

  “Leaving this radiant place?” Turnupseed said. “Well, I don’t blame you. Last night, you know, in town, I just could swear I saw my last wife in the laundromat. She didn’t speak to me.”

  “Well, the dead can’t disappear,” Willie said. “After all, where would they go?”

  “I like your manner son, I’m going to miss you,” Turnupseed said. “Take care of that wife of yours. She seems to be living in a world where this don’t follow that, if you know what I mean.”

  Later, when the Crab Key Association discovered that Turnupseed had been on such excellent terms with the besmirchers, an aneurysm would smack into the old guard’s heart with the grace of a speeding bus touching a toad. Liberty could still see him waving good-bye.

  2

  Willie and Liberty and a locksmith stood outside the Umbertons’ house on Featherbed Lane. Willie and Liberty were not acquainted with the Umbertons, who had been away now for several weeks. Newspaper delivery had been canceled, the houseplants placed outside in filtered shade, the phone disconnected, and several lamps of low wattage had been lit, burning dimly at night and invisibly by day. The Umbertons were away, in another state, in a more vigorous clime, in a recommended restaurant where they were choosing with considerable excitement items from the dessert cart. They were absorbed and concerned by the choices offered—the napoleons, the lemon tarts, the chocolate-dipped strawberries—much as they would be weeks later, after their return home, in cylinder rim vertical deadbolt locks, hardened shackles and electric eyes.

  Willie had noted that the house had no alarm system, so he had called a locksmith from a phone booth.

  “Locked yourself out, huh?” the locksmith said.

  “You know what happened to us?” Willie said. “Our keys were stolen. Keys to everything, stolen.”

  “That’s awful,” the locksmith said. His name was Drawdy. “The stealing these days is just awful. People will steal anything. My sister come home one night and somebody had dug up every dwarf pygmy palm in her yard. She’d just had some landscaping done, and there were these four dwarf pygmy palms, except when she came home that night, there was just four holes there. Those holes were so neat she didn’t notice at first that the palms were gone. Never seen neater holes in my life. It was like little men from outer space came down and just plucked up those dwarf pygmy palms.” He looked at the lock on the front door of the Umbertons’ house. “You know what I’d give you for this,” he said to Willie. “I wouldn’t give you fifteen cents for this.” He went back to his truck and got his tool box. “I’ll tell you,” Drawdy said, returning. “You’ve got to think like a burglar these days to protect yourself. You’ve got to look at everything just like a burglar would.” He set to work on the door. Clem walked around the corner of the house and sniffed the locksmith’s leg. “God in heaven,” Drawdy said. He grew rigid, then slowly smiled. His smile was fixed and gray, lying on his mouth like a cobweb he had stumbled into.

  “That’s just Baby Dog,” Willie said. “He’s one of us.”

  Drawdy turned his smile on the door’s lock and picked away at it.

  “Before I got into locks and such, I sold light bulbs,” Drawdy said. “I worked for a store in Mobile that sold nothing but white light bulbs. Now I bet you think that a white light bulb is nothing but a white light bulb, that white is white, but that is not the case. In Mobile I personally dealt with and sold Soft White, Warm White, Deluxe Warm White, Cool White, Deluxe Cool White, Daylight, Design White, Regal White, Natural White, Chroma White 50, Chroma White 75, Optima White, Vita-Lite, Natur-Escent, Verilux and …” he pushed open the Umbertons’ door with a flourish “… White.”

  “Thanks,” Willie said.

  “I would say that animal was close to
a Chroma White 50,” Drawdy said, staring at Clem.

  “How much do we owe you?” asked Willie.

  “Twenty-five dollars,” Drawdy said.

  “Could you bill us?” Willie asked. “I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure,” Drawdy said, squinting at Clem. The Umbertons’ name was given and their address. Drawdy wrote it down.

  “I bet y’all don’t know how light bulbs are made,” Drawdy said.

  “We don’t,” Willie agreed.

  “Light bulbs are made by feeding glass in a continuous stream to the bulb-making machine,” Drawdy said somberly. “Don’t y’all want some keys made?”

  “We’ll be in touch,” Willie said.

  “Right,” Drawdy said. He watched Clem. “If I had that animal I’d teach him something maybe.”

  “Like what?” Willie asked.

  Drawdy looked puzzled. He rubbed his jaw and looked. “Like how to play an instrument,” he said. He picked up his toolbox, walked back to his truck and drove away.

  The Umbertons had many possessions. The house was heavily furnished. They had glass torchères, leather couches, massive sideboards, thick carpets. And then the house was cluttered with small objects. The objects were of a different quality, as though the Umbertons had bought them for somebody else and then took them back after a quarrel. The kind of objects intended for a recipient who died before the occasion of giving.

  On the leather-topped desk in the living room was a framed photograph of the Umbertons on their wedding day. They were standing on marble steps, he one step above her. He had a crew cut, her dress a long train. Their round faces were set resolutely toward one another. On the desk too was a picture of a large orange cat in front of a Christmas tree. It was obvious that a superior choice had been made that year in the selection of the tree, for in an album photos of many previous Christmas trees were mounted. The kitchen cupboards were filled with an assortment of nourishing and sensible canned goods. Large clothes hung in the closets in predominant colors of blue and beige. There was a cabinet off the bath that was filled with nothing but toilet paper.