Breaking and Entering

by Joy Williams

  She smiled at Liberty, then turned to Willie. “My name is Poe. It’s a name my nursemaid gave me when I was a baby. For years it was thought that I was retarded when the fact was I was merely exceptionally ugly. Your names are …”

  “Willie,” Willie said. “Willie and Liberty.”

  “ ‘Po’, po’ thing,’ she would say to me. ‘Po’ lamb.’ Her name was Lola. She was devoted to me. I had pustular eruptions on my face since birth. You could put nickels in some of the holes on my forehead. I sometimes think Lola, who died sixty years ago, was the only person who ever loved me. I’ve had so many lovers and so little love. Of course, I’m dreadfully afraid of Lola now. It would break her heart, but fear of the dead is common to all the races of mankind. It can’t be helped. How long have you been breaking into houses?”

  “For a long time,” Willie said.

  “One always thinks there are dreadful secrets to be learned, but there aren’t really,” Poe said. She looked at Willie and Liberty happily. “Burglars on my birthday!” she exclaimed.

  “We’re not burglars,” Liberty said.

  “My father once entertained a burglar,” Poe said. “We lived in a quite elaborate house in Connecticut. My father came upon this man skulking about in the foyer in the middle of the night, and he invited him into the kitchen. He made him a cup of coffee and cut him two large pieces of cake. They chatted about this and that. The burglar was of the high-strung, fox-faced, bad-breathed sort. He told my father that he recited the Jesus prayer all the time he was committing a robbery. You know the prayer? ‘Have mercy on me, a sinner, have mercy on me …’ He said that it kept his courage up. After they ate the cake, father suggested that he go next door where his neighbor had a considerable collection of gold coins. The man went next door and was immediately ripped apart by the neighbor’s vicious, barkless dog, a dog my father knew perfectly well was in residence. My father had an engaging but somewhat incoherent personality.”

  Poe bent backward and supported herself on one arm. She flexed the other.

  “You’ve had no difficulties?” she asked. “People are committing themselves more and more these days to self-protection and self-defense. You haven’t come up against any attack dogs or booby traps? No shotguns? No housewives skilled in aikido?”

  “You misunderstand what we’re doing,” Willie said.

  “No, dear, you misunderstand what you’re doing, but you don’t have to seek further. You’re here now, dear.” She bounced erect and smiled. “I have a friend, a lady who’s eighty if she’s a day, who’s made two muggers do the chicken in the last year.”

  “Do the chicken?” Liberty said faintly.

  “The carotid chokeout,” Poe said.

  Silence attended these last remarks.

  “Don’t be so glum!” Poe cried. “This is a lovely moment, a perfect moment, but you’re quite right. One must not trust happiness too much. Dancing with Jesus, for example, simply ruined the rest of my husband’s life.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “He died of nothing in particular, dear,” Poe said. “His life wasn’t very satisfactory. That incident on the South China Sea was just one of those things—the dancing, the harmony, the bliss of illumination, all that was just an instant, followed by years of mental bewilderment and profound misery.” She moved gracefully over to Clem, picked him up in her arms and sat down with him in her lap. “My husband came from a wealthy family like my own, and after the war, he invested his money in lodgings by the sea all over the world. Africa, the Caribbean, England, California … He was a collector. He loved fragments. He was always collecting ceilings and cornices and chimney pieces, grilles and gates and portals. He’d buy a place and make it quite lovely, modernize it, stick in these peculiar mixtures of things, hire good help, put in a pool and such, and in each place he’d erect a large cross on the roof right beside a satellite dish. I’m sure you realize what he had in mind. Daily, he’d expect Jesus to return on a giant, screaming asteroid that would rend the waters, enabling the sea to give up her dead. We would be able to witness the resurrection on television, he was sure of it. He was waiting for Jesus and Billy Oakley. Well, you can imagine how tiring it all became. He tired of waiting, I suppose, and then he died.” She gave Clem a hug and adjusted his choke chain carefully, as though it were a string of pearls. “Memory is dust’s only enemy,” she said.

  “Did you love him?” Liberty asked.

  “No, I didn’t, dear,” Poe said. “It’s not that I was jealous of Jesus or Billy Oakley, but I just never admired the shape of my husband’s mind. He believed that life was an objective process revealing God and naturally he was frustrated and offended every day of his life. He also had a ghastly habit of shooting Reddi-Wip directly into his mouth. He would never place it on a piece or gingerbread or anything, he would just shake it and shoot it directly into his mouth.”

  She gave Clem another hug. “What would this wonderful creature like to eat on my birthday?” she asked. “Tournedos? Duck? Veal?”

  “He’s a vegetarian,” Willie said. “He doesn’t eat anything that used to have eyes.”

  “Why that’s wonderful,” Poe said. “Do you know that the thought of the eye made Charles Darwin turn cold all over? Yes. Cold all over. He said so himself. Eyes weakened Darwin’s theories considerably. One can go only so far with reason, a little further possibly always, but ultimately only so far.”

  She walked with Clem in her arms to the pool. “Life is remarkable, isn’t it? Everything can change in an instant. Imagine me finding you all here on my birthday. Possibilities endlessly arising, that’s life.”

  She walked across the room and down the steps into the swimming pool. She stood up to her waist in the bright water, Clem floating in her arms. It was like some dreadful baptism.

  “I like animals so very much,” Liberty heard her say. “They’re so unanxious. They don’t weep. They don’t hoard up their dead in cemeteries.”

  “I’m sure she’d let us go,” Liberty whispered to Willie. “I’m sure she’d just let us walk right out of here.”

  “She’s going to ask a favor,” Willie said. “At the proper moment. Even, perhaps, a shade before the proper moment.”

  Liberty went out to the patio and said to Clem, “Come here. Come.”

  Clem paddled toward her. He clambered up the steps and stood beside her without shaking the water from his coat. Water pooled against his eyes.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it, the things one acquires,” Poe said. “But you should give him up, dear, really you should. We have to give things up.” She did a half somersault and swam the length of the pool underwater, then vaulted up and out on one massive arm. Her arms exhibited vascular genius. Her veins were like objects that should be personally addressed.

  “I hope you’re still not in any pain,” she said to Willie.

  He was standing next to the stone from which orchids clung. The orchids were white and yellow and scarlet and had black, scattered features that seemed like faces. There were dried flecks of blood on Willie’s arm. The reptilian pattern of the weapon was clearly visible.

  “No,” he said, “it doesn’t hurt now.”

  “The stigmata of the thief,” Poe said happily. “I adore thieves. The world is divided, I think, between thieves and those who wait, wait for fate to step in, like my husband. In one of our homes—it was in Italy, on an island—we built an enormous fireplace with a glass back so that we could see the ocean through the flames, but it meant nothing to him, for he was waiting, you see. He could see nothing through the waiting.”

  “We can’t wait,” Liberty said. “We can’t wait here.”

  “Oh, my dear,” Poe said. “You don’t realize what your Willie has done, do you. He has found the day in which he will solve himself. Please excuse me for a moment. I must get a wrap or I’ll catch a chill.”

  “Let’s go,” Liberty said to Willie after Poe had left.

  “In a moment,” he said. “Just one moment.
”

  She remembered feeling once that anything was possible. The sky was bright and blue and she was walking fast and could go anywhere. But that had been a moment years ago, and since that moment she had felt that her life was like someone else’s garden she had wandered into, something she could care for or not, like one did another’s garden.

  There was a knocking on the wooden door of the courtyard. When Willie did not move and Poe did not appear, Liberty went to the door herself. A man stood holding a long white box of flowers. “I’m the florist,” the man said. He had a beard and a small head, and behind one ear was a pink hibiscus. “I see you’re noticing this flower,” the man said. “What this flower is doing is distracting you from the smallness of my head.” He looked at Clem for a long moment, then slowly extended the long white box to Liberty. “I want to tell you something right up front,” he said. “I was an oil tanker pilot for fourteen years and I didn’t have a single incident until one morning I crashed into a bridge, the same bridge I’d cruised under a hundred times, I crashed into that bridge and I sent twenty-three people to their deaths. I want to tell you that right up front. I don’t want someone to tell you later that the man who delivered the flowers you are about to enjoy was the cause of an incident that caused the death of twenty-three innocent people.” He gave Clem a loose, apologetic smile. He had a wet small mouth within his beard, a mouth such as bearded people often have.

  “They just floated down into the ocean on a Greyhound bus,” he said. “I don’t think any of them could believe it.”

  Poe appeared and signed the bill the man presented with a flourish.

  “Jimmy,” she said. “How are you, Jimmy?”

  “I’m not so good,” Jimmy said. “I’ve got these bad tunes playing in my head today. I’ve got these mean melodies.”

  “Let me give you a little extra today, Jimmy,” Poe said. “Perhaps for some girl, some pretty girl.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Don’t need a girl. What I want is my own vessel back. I want my vessel.”

  He drove away, his truck leaving a puddle of oil behind.

  “You and your dog elicit confessions, don’t you?” Poe said to Liberty. “Who do you yourself confide in?” She was wearing an outrageous snakeskin jacket that seemed to double the size of her massive shoulders. She stroked Clem’s paw with her foot. “He has lovely large feet,” she said. “Like Greta Garbo. How long have you had him?”

  “Not long,” Liberty said, as though it were the truth. “What, dear?” Poe asked.

  “It hasn’t been that long. There was a while before I had him.”

  “I would like you and Willie to perform fellatio in front of me sometime, would you do that?”

  “Certainly never,” Liberty said.

  “Pardon me, that was possibly an uncouth request,” Poe said. “Let me tell you about a friend of mine. She got the most gruesome headaches, simply unbearable headaches. And they finally discovered that the cause of them was a dislocated jaw. The jaw would just pop in and out. So the physician said, Absolutely no oral sex. So my friend engaged in no more oral sex. And the headaches vanished, but of course she was miserable. She died a miserable woman, her head clear as a spring morning.”

  Poe laughed, looking at Liberty. “You find me depressing, don’t you, dear, well I’ll tell you, I have found that one can learn the most from depressing people. Jung and Monet, for example, were both very depressing individuals to be around. I knew them both. I drank champagne with Jung on several occasions. We discussed the first thought of the One and Absolute Being. Monet had a lighter heart. He could look at anything. Anything! I knew him at Giverny. Still, he had his failings. He was very argumentative. He was always arguing with the gardeners. It was understandable. Their concerns were fertilizers, acidity, overburdening the soil and such. He had five gardeners. He was always screaming at them.”

  “What did Jung think the first thought of the Absolute Being was?” Liberty asked.

  “He believed His first thought was the consciousness of utter loneliness,” Poe said.

  4

  The sun was in the exact center of the sky. It was the time of day when things are poised and cast no shadow because they seem so familiar. It was the time of day when the noontide demons are out. On the beach, dragonflies landed on the sea grasses, their transparent wings beating, their square helmeted heads secretive and pitiless. Beyond the beach, the Gulf sparkled and heaved. No one commented upon it.

  The three sat around a massive limestone table in the center of which were the roses in a vase. Poe sent white roses to herself every year on her birthday. They were tightly budded and long-stemmed. Each stem had a plastic rod twisted to it to keep it upright. Liberty remembered roses such as these in a room she had been in once. There was something that a nurse had dissolved in the water on the first day to keep the petals from discoloring and falling. In this way, their passage had been arrested.

  Poe had slipped a cut-off T-shirt over Clem’s head and forelegs. “The Disguise in disguise,” she said. Clem looked discomfited. He lay beside Liberty, his nose beneath his paws.

  It appeared that a considerable amount of time had passed in which Liberty had not been paying attention. Months and years. She guessed that she had been distracted. She stared at the tabletop before her. The fossilized remains of ancient sea creatures stared back. Worms—they were worms. Worms and mollusks and sea fans. She touched their delicate tracings, their white and twisted shadows, with her fingertips.

  “You must tell me everything about yourself,” Poe said. “Do you love him, this Willie?”

  Love is the great distractor, and she had been distracted. Liberty cleared her throat to speak but it was as though the turtle that Clem had found in the garden had miraculously entered her throat and lay there, heavy, still, tight as a tomb, in the slick passages behind her unruly tongue, a thing almost acceptable, but terrible too, and cold, cold as what can never be known is cold, and she could not speak around it.

  “It must be arduous,” Poe mused. “But if love were easy, what would be the point?”

  “She loves a child,” Willie said.

  “It’s far too easy to love a child,” Poe said, looking at Liberty critically. “At the very least, is there something terribly wrong with it? Does it have an extra chromosome? Is it epileptic or drug-addicted? A mongoloid perhaps?”

  “No. He’s a great child,” Willie said.

  “There must be some risk, dear. As they say in the bodybuilding game, if it doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it right. Is it your own child, dear?”

  “No,” Willie said. “We don’t have any children of our own. We never will.”

  “It’s not a tragedy you know. No sense in mooning and fussing about barrenness. The days are coming perhaps when we might say, Blessed are the barren!”

  Willie pulled a rose from the vase. Tiny drops of moisture beaded its furled bud. The tips of the furl were already tinged with brown. He touched Liberty’s arm lightly with it.

  “Jesus said that actually. He said more than his prayers, didn’t he.” Poe looked at Clem. “Does he say his prayers? You’ve seen those dogs, haven’t you? Well, perhaps they’re more common in Europe at those little street fairs. They count, they play dead, they say their prayers.”

  “He doesn’t know a single trick,” Willie said.

  Liberty pushed her fingers through Clem’s fur. She rubbed her foot up and down his spine.

  “Let me tell you this little story,” Poe said. “I delivered a baby once. It was in an automobile graveyard in Alabama where I was looking for a bumper for my Studebaker. A cheerful and filthy child escorted me through the yard, reciting the history of his favorite wrecks. There was the VW van with the canvas sunroof through which a motocycle had hurtled, decapitating a passenger when the van failed to negotiate a curve. There was the Buick that had held six in a thunderstorm, all killed when a lightpole fell on them. There was the Olds 88 where the woman lingered for hours while they tried to c
arve the twisted metal away from her legs. The backseat was full of violets, which she had just purchased from a woman who had Parkinson’s disease and was selling her entire collection. The violets were still packed in the back as neat and unviolated as though they were growing peaceably on the forest floor, not a crumb of earth out of place. There was the Chevy in which the fourteen-year-old foul-shooting champion of the county had lost all feeling below his neck forever. The usual, but the little boy was thrilled by it. He had the widest eyebrows, wide as yours, Liberty. Well we came to this Studebaker, and I was pleased because the bumper was unblemished, but there in the backseat was a girl, crowning. She was a very young girl, pale and thin. Her stomach didn’t seem much larger than a cranshaw melon, but here was this baby coming out. She wasn’t moaning, but she looked terrified when she saw me, and the little boy, who wasn’t more than six or seven, said, ‘Oh Bobbie-Ann, when are you going to grow up!’ He was very angry. He had been such a good guide, you see, escorting this old lady through the junkyard, telling his wonderful stories, and then here was Bobbie-Ann, showing off again. Well, I delivered the baby. She was a very healthy, pretty baby. After she stopped wailing, I lingered for a moment and listened to the wind in the trees. They were whispering something that at the time made an enormous deal of sense. Never have I heard the susurrus of branches so clearly. There were mirrors everywhere on the jumbled cars … all the world seemed bright to me, yet falling, as though it had exploded. Bobbie-Ann didn’t say a word. She clutched the baby and stared at me, and the little boy had vanished. And then … I simply walked away, out of that graveyard of machines. I dreamed of that infant for some years. I traveled with her, into childhood, but I could take her only so far, or she, me, into her imagined life. I became quite adept at the process. I’m told I wasn’t exactly well during that period, but the things I could see! I could see her little shoes and dresses. I could see her pencil cases, I could see the light shining in her room at night and I could see her running in the grass … I kept everything. I was such a hoarder then. I kept the crusts I had cut from her bread, the skin from the hot dogs she favored. I kept the ringlets of her hair, the stuffed toys worn thin from her embrace. I was particularly good at visualizing her hands, at the little drawings she made for me, the houses with smoke pouring from the chimneys, the hearts and suns and so forth. We drove everywhere in my old Studebaker. We loved to drive fast, late at night, with the lights out. It was very beautiful, the speeding and laughing. She was fearless. I even went so far as to take her to the fair one night. We saw the world’s smallest horse, we ate blue sugar, she found a dime on the ground, her weight was guessed. Of course, we didn’t enter the exhibit that housed the two-headed calf. We didn’t see the collection of guillotines or the bedspread made from butterfly wings. Some things I wanted to keep from her. But a sailor gave her a rose, a rose much like one of these. He was a rather dangerous-looking sailor, but his gesture, I was confident, was innocent. We went on the bumper boats and the Ferris wheel. The wheel, which was all aglow with tiny lights, turned, and we were borne upward, and then the wheel stopped. You are familiar with the way the wheel stops? The moment when one can go no higher, the moment before the curving descent begins? I felt the coldness of the bar we clutched and the coldness of the stars above us, and then she left me … She left me there. I never saw her after that night, and I could never create another child in my mind. I had my menses punctually for three decades, a veritable tide table of the possible, once a month for one hundred hours, but then one day they left me as well.”