by Joy Williams
6
Down the beach came a rider on a gray and golden horse. The rider passed.
“You poor children,” Poe sighed. “You’ve given up lust, love, even life in order to remain together.”
“She’s forgiven me,” Willie said. “She didn’t mention that.”
“Forgiveness,” Poe said. She shrugged, dismissing it, then pushed herself away from the table and stood up. Her arms swung wide from her powerfully sloping shoulders. “Love,” she said. “It hounds us every day of our lives, baying at us with its hound voice. It follows us and runs before us and beside us, it doesn’t leave us in peace for a minute, but at the hour of our greatest need, our death, it lies curled meek as rags in some dark corner.” She sighed. “Well, that’s a sad, sad story and now that you’ve told it, there’s nothing left for you but to stay here, with me. It happened a long time ago, but that was when you entered your life, dear. And that entrance allowed you to go so far and no farther. You won’t go any farther.”
Willie’s eyes were blank. He seemed to accept this.
Liberty reached down and pushed Clem’s legs out of the T-shirt. She worked it over his head and dropped it on the rug. It had a chemical smell, a burnt smell, like hurt earth, hurt air. She pressed her wet eyes against his coat.
“He’s such a comfort, isn’t he,” Poe said. “Are you familiar with the works of Melville? There was a man who knew a great deal about whiteness, its quality of absence, ‘its dumb blankness, full of meaning’ ….”
Liberty stroked Clem’s coat and glanced at Willie. His eyes were half-shut now. The eyes are drawers, she thought, smoothly sliding drawers that open and close, filled with things that are put in, taken out.
“I could teach you a great deal,” Poe said to her. “You are always endowing nothing with attributes. You know so little of life. You’ve known only a man who has betrayed you and an unborn baby. You have him still, of course,” she said, nodding at Clem, “but that’s not something you can know. That’s his whole purpose, after all.”
“We’re leaving,” Liberty said.
“You think your life is more than just the story of it?” Poe asked.
It was nonsense the woman was speaking. She was just an old, rich, crazy woman.
“I’m tired,” Willie said. “We have to stay a while.”
Liberty saw him and he did not look tired. He looked as though something had been released in him. He was forgetting her, had forgotten her. She looked at her hands. It had something to do with hands she was sure. She had simply taken his hand and they had left. She had known how to do it. But she could not remember. The other couple had been in chairs and they had been in chairs. They were eating dinner or had just eaten dinner and moved to other chairs. The man had a round, protruding stomach that made him look off balance when he moved. He had stopped smoking or had been on medication that was the wrong medication. The man was a developer—effusive, a manipulator, cruel. The woman cooked. It had been a dinner invitation. The woman wore tight jeans and a bright red shirt and had a lined, childish face. Where had Willie found these people? Where had they been then? It was not a place she could quite remember. They were not near water, but there had been water against one wall. An aquarium filled with fish, the water a sapphire blue. It had been in a town on their endless travels, in the South. Outside the door was pasture with nothing grazing in it. How had this couple known Willie? People liked Willie, they were drawn to him. He had a calmness, he seemed quite selfless. He had the charisma of one to whom one thing was equal to any other. The evening had ended badly, in confusion. It wasn’t quite clear how it had ended.
Poe was gazing at her. “It must have been terrible for you,” she said, “to come back, to make that long journey back and find him …” She hesitated.
Willie stirred in his chair. “Wanting,” he said.
“Wanting.” Poe nodded. “Yes, wanting something still. Wanting something very close to me. Always.” Poe cocked her ragged face primly. She seemed to have shaken out her body, which was now as smooth as a bullet.
“Don’t picture me,” Willie said.
“I picture you perfectly, more than you had ever hoped. You’re a boy in love with lustral death. You can empty yourself again and again in me. It will never be enough. You’re inside now. For years you’ve tried to cling to the outside, but it wouldn’t have you, would it? I’ve brought you inside now.”
“I found you,” Willie said. “It was me who found you.”
“That’s just your pride saying that, dear. I know, I know, I’m not beyond pride myself. Today my body looks quite glorious, but by tomorrow, well, by tomorrow it will have lost its edge, and then the process must begin again.”
There had seemed something staged about the evening with the other couple, as though they had done it before. But how could they have done it before? They had settled down after dinner as though waiting for something to play itself out. The man with his hard, horrible little stomach. He had rested his hand on it as he spoke. Willie had seemed apathetic. It was as though he had lost interest and they were trying to interest him, particularly the woman.
Liberty stood up. “Let’s leave,” she said. “We’re leaving.” Her legs felt numb. She was exhausted. Yet the talk of the lost baby had released something—the broken waters of memory. The waters breaking should have meant a deliverance, but there had been no deliverance. And now it seemed as though there would just be the waters, breaking.
“Stay, dear,” Poe said, “stay with your Willie. See how beautiful he is. He has the look of those hermits portrayed in the frescoes of the monasteries of Athos. He is old, your Willie, he was born old, and has always been more ingenuous than you thought. He has their face, the ones who have always believed in the last temptations, the last miracles. Centuries ago he could have been a static. He could have been an anchorite in those rock abbeys of Turkey, in Cappadocia, living in that fantastic landscape of stone, carving from rock his table and bed. You made him struggle to live in the world and he never wanted the world. It held no astonishments for him. You had come back and you were always bringing him back. He didn’t want love, he wanted mortifications. And all you could give him was love.”
Liberty stared at her.
“Your Willie’s heart’s a tomb, but it was big enough for the both of you. That’s all he could ever do, you see, was to make it big enough for both of you.”
“She’s going to ask the favor of us now,” Willie said.
Liberty thought of children at a birthday party, some secret token wrapped on the table before them. She had no idea what the favor was, but Willie seemed to know. It was too much to know.
“Why, yes,” Poe said. “I would like to give you this house. This house is yours.”
It was an abhorrent idea, preposterous. Liberty was conscious of them all breathing in the room. She was finding it hard to breathe.
“You would like us to kill you,” Willie said, “for you want to die now.”
“Willie!” Liberty cried.
Poe smiled. She arched her back lazily. “Each year, I peak on my birthday. Then the day passes. Such a tiresome process. I wish to have my body killed because my body is killing me. Self-defense,” she said merrily.
The planes of Willie’s face had taken on the last hard light of the room and his face looked crystalline, intractable. His face lacked expression. It indicated nothing. Looking at his beloved face was like looking into a pit. Then he stood and walked away from her, back through the house to where Poe had found them.
The big room filled with silence and for a moment Liberty simply stood there.
“I’ve lived my life, you see,” Poe said. “He can deal with that. You mustn’t blame him. Few of us know how to love.”
Liberty went to the glass doors and pushed them open. She and Clem stepped outside. The air was buoyant and dark. The splintered walk boards angled up the dune.
Liberty began to pick her way up the boards.
“ ‘You
are saved, you are saved,’ ” Poe called after her. “ ‘What has cast such a shadow upon you!’ ”
Liberty walked away, turning toward the Pass, which lay flat and vaguely brighter ahead, walking with her head down, watching her feet moving along. She was not stopping, she was moving along, but soon she would go back, she thought, because it was not finished, how could it be finished? She thought of Little Dot, her small sneakers, one of which said LEFT, the other, RIGHT. She thought of Teddy, who could make traveling noises. He made the sound of truck wheels slapping through rain. He made the sound of parachutes snapping thickly open.
The beach was still. She walked, trying to focus only on the beach now. There was a dark shape in the distance, like a palm log, appearing darker, more vegetative than she knew it was. Beside it was a smaller thing in motion, slowly moving, weaving around it, a cat, its head gravely misshapen from long ago battles, its head both shrunken and swollen at once, as though it had been chewed upon for years in some larger thing’s mouth, at the mouth’s own convenience. It limped around the dead heron, which it had not yet touched. Liberty threw a shell at it and it hobbled over the dunes back toward the trees.
Hours ago, the heron had flown with its last strength away from her and now it lay on its side, one wing spread artlessly, its beak open. Liberty stroked its still feathers. She moved her fingers across its back, felt the welts and twistings of the tangled line.
It’s all right, Liberty said to it. See how easy it is now, she said. She knew she should not be talking to dead things. It was not something she should allow herself to do, and yet it had seemed natural to her for a long time. No one would admit how natural it was to speak with the dead.
She raised the heron’s head and looked into its eyes, which were strangely divided, even in death, one eye, it seemed, belonging to a creature still flying hard, hoping for the best, the other knowing there was another world but it was in the one just taken away. She lay down and spread the heron’s wing, moving it so it fell across her stomach. Cold seeped into her back. The bird’s dead soft wing covered her. I was a suicide, she said to it, and this is my dog. We move like ghosts, my dog and I. We are seen, addressed, even desired, but we are as ghosts. She talked to that which lightly covered her, and looked at the night through which a full moon steadily rose.
One of life’s hopeful mysteries was supposed to be that everything that happens keeps on being a beginning, but what kind of hopeful mystery was that?
Ghosts can speak most readily with the dead, she assured it. They know no boundaries. They wander but are not free. They long for lives that never were and live outside them, close as they can, outside them. It’s easy there in many ways.
The feathers of the bird’s wing stirred in the breeze, then settled. She said to it, I must tell you I have always been frightened of birds.
Something was pounding, beating at the edges of her mind. She was with Willie, trying to tell Willie something. It was about the bread, the bread she did not want to leave behind because she feared the birds would find it. The birds would come and eat it and then they would not be able to fly over the dark waters they must cross. They would avoid the waters and then the waters would become more frightening than the birds.…
She was with Willie. She had always been with Willie. This was not so long ago.
“Come in, come in,” Howard said. “Chrissie has built this meal from the ground up. Believe me, this is going to be one of the meals of your life.”
The house had been built in the fifties. It was all angles and hidden ducts in turquoise and gray. The lights resembled torpedoes. A Southwestern look had been imposed upon it. Cactus. Kachina dolls. Bent willow. Roadrunner appliques on the throw pillows. And the aquarium.
“Chrissie’s pride and joy over there,” Howard said.
“None of them are rare or anything, but they’re good fish,” Chrissie said earnestly.
“You’re not browsers, I hope,” Howard said. “No place for browsers here tonight. This is supper! The Big S.”
Drinks were mixed. The bar was behind a rotating bookcase that Howard exposed with a flourish. We all have to go sometime, a cartoon above the bottles said. Try the first door on your right.
“The fifties were a gleefully secretive time,” Howard said. “It wasn’t all just raba-raba-ding-dong.”
“I’m sorry I had to ask you to leave your dog in the truck,” Chrissie said in a small voice. “It’s just that my little doggie isn’t feeling well.”
“He’s fine out there,” Liberty said. “It’s all right.”
“He seems like a very nice dog,” Chrissie said. “Big.”
“So,” Howard said, “you’re traveling. No obligations, no commitments. Footloose and fancy-free.”
Chrissie had put out little bowls of nuts, of olives. She was spreading cheese on crackers. “This is the nicest cheese,” she said to Liberty. She smiled shyly. Her teeth were not good. They were all drinking. Music was being piped in from somewhere. There was the sound too of something like a toilet running.
“Living up to your names,” Howard went on. “Try living up to our names—Howard and Chrissie—it’s difficult.”
Willie was looking at a display of Indian baskets on a shelf. “You’ve got some nice things here,” he said. “Man in the maze, lightning bolts, spider webs.”
“It’s still a relatively easy thing to cheat an Indian,” Howard said.
“Apache, Pima, Hopi.” Willie shook his head. “These are old. The makers of these are long dead.” He picked up a conical basket that was woven in a design of diminishing concentric rings. At the bottom was a single dot. “These are valuable.”
“He’s casing the joint, honey,” Howard said.
Chrissie looked a little alarmed. She prepared more crackers with cheese.
“I’m just holding them for a friend actually,” Howard said. “I don’t know shit from Indians. They all mean something, but it’s simple beyond belief. See that one hanging? The one with all the crisscrosses? Indian thought she was copying the Milky Way.”
“A lot of the designs are based on the patterns wind makes on sand,” Willie said. “Designs made by no visible agency.”
Howard looked into his glass. “Let me freshen our drinks,” he said.
“It was wonderful of you to stop when our car broke down,” Chrissie said. “It was just genius what you did.”
“It was a jump start,” Willie said.
“But no one was stopping and when you stopped, I thought—‘I am going to be raped!’ ” Chrissie widened her eyes. Howard looked at her.
“Giving you a great meal is the least we can do,” he said. “I can give you a job too.”
“Howard’s in development,” Chrissie said.
“No thanks,” Willie said.
“We like meeting new people,” Chrissie said. She looked at Willie and smiled. She uncrossed her legs. “Howard’s paved over a good deal of Arizona,” she said absently.
“That was then,” he said. “This is Louisiana.”
“Howard enjoys a challenge. Wetlands are a challenge to Howard.”
“A swamp don’t generally stand much of a chance around me,” Howard said. “Concrete is honest. It’s a lot more honest than a swamp.”
Chrissie leaned forward, her knees almost touching Liberty’s own. “Is this your first marriage?” she asked. “Howard’s been married twice.” She seemed to find this amusing. She squeezed Liberty’s arm.
A spotted puppy staggered in from the kitchen. Liberty scooped it up and put it in her lap. The puppy was listless. Its heart pounded wetly beneath loose skin.
“I don’t think she should have been spayed so soon,” Howard said. “I don’t think she’s going to make it. What did the vet say?”
“I just took her over to the school,” Chrissie said. “A friend of mine did it. No charge.”
“No charge,” Howard said. He rolled his eyes.
Chrissie picked the puppy up. It gave a small yip, then fe
ll silent. “I just have a few tiny things to do in the kitchen before we eat,” she said.
Liberty walked over to the baskets. She picked up a flat-backed breast-shaped basket. It was a rich earthen color, tightly coiled with a zigzag pattern. A Hopi woman, if she was a virgin, would not finish off a basket. The grasses would flow out from the last stitch of the coil. The flowing gate. A married woman who could have children would cut the strands a little closer. Open gate. The barren woman would tie off the grasses, stitch it tightly shut. Closed gate.
“She’s casing the joint, honey,” Howard called out cheerfully.
Liberty returned to her chair and looked at the aquarium, at the fish moving languidly back and forth.
Willie and Howard were talking about the Southwest. Howard was speaking animatedly about the saguaro. “They’re like condos,” he said. “All kinds of shit live in them.” Howard was clearly fond of the saguaro.
Willie seemed to be enjoying himself. It was as though he had entered a satisfactory game, one still wide open to choice and interpretation. Liberty constructed a yawn, wondering vaguely why she had chosen to do so. She finished her drink, noting that her ice cube harbored a hair. They ate dinner. Howard uncorked several bottles of wine.
“I’m a woman among women and a man among men,” Chrissie said to Liberty, “but sometimes I like to be a woman among men.”
“Chrissie’s a great little homebody,” Howard said. “You gotta take back a loaf of Chrissie’s bread. She makes all her own bread, our Chrissie does.”
In the candlelight, Chrissie smiled with abandon. Liberty drank bemusedly. After they ate, they returned to the living room, clutching their glasses.
“Toot time,” Howard said. “Want some toot?”
“No,” Willie said.
“You’re right,” Howard said. “Toot’s passé.”
Willie stretched his legs out. He rubbed the back of his neck with his fingers.
“You want a massage?” Howard asked. “Chrissie gives great massage. Guys don’t even get erections when she does them. It’s real pure stuff.”
