Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

Down the beach, she saw Willie, his trousers billowing out with the wind. He had his arms raised. She realized she hadn’t been thinking about Willie, only about reaching him. When she touched him, he kissed her. We are lovers , Liberty thought. We love . His kiss pushed against her like the wind and the sun. Then he pulled away and looked at her, saying nothing, but she saw herself as though she were fifteen years old again and listening to him, nodding her head, agreeing. She saw herself from somewhere, watching this girl in love, this sun-burnt girl, her ear close to this boy’s moving lips. One should listen. And yet … No, one should listen. It is one’s duty, one’s gift to listen.

Watching left her feeling sad and weary. She couldn’t remember. She didn’t want to. She remembered too much.

A low and rambling yellow house was behind a hump of dune over which a walkway of weathered boards was laid. They passed through a gated courtyard to the south where everything bloomed in profusion. The hibiscus were the size of dinner plates. Heavy brass wind chimes hung beneath the eaves, too heavy to stir in the wind that rustled the fronds of the Cuban Belly palms. Liberty touched one of the elaborate wind bells and it sounded dully. Behind the house, concealed from the road, was a curving, pebbled driveway. Each pebble seemed to have its place.

“Where’s the truck?” Liberty asked.

“I left the truck somewhere,” Willie said. “We don’t need the truck.”

Willie smelled of hot weeds and soap. There was a silky look to him, as though he’d been born in a cocoon. He looked incorruptible.

“You’re all scratched up,” Willie said, running his fingers across her arm. “You look thin. Have you been eating?”

“Sure,” Liberty said. “Sure I’ve been eating. You look thin too.”

“I need you. I need you to be with me.”

“I need you too,” Liberty said.

She was enchanted by him, she couldn’t look away. This was the long vacation in a rented world. This was their life.

“I went into a lunchroom yesterday,” Willie said, “but before I could order, the woman sitting beside me at the counter started to choke. She was eating a piece of cherry pie. She had her children with her. They weren’t eating anything, they were watching her eat. She was a fat woman, perhaps the fattest woman I’ve ever seen.”

Liberty raised her fingers to her throat. “You saved her from choking.” Willie saved people. There was nothing wrong with that. He covered, for a moment, their shadow with his own. And left them to the baffling light of days that should not have been.

“It wasn’t difficult,” Willie said. “She didn’t choke. Then she wanted to talk. She told me she was crazy about space. She had only completed the tenth grade, but she had some knowledge about galaxies and moons. She was raising her children to be astronauts. One kid wanted to be an aquanaut, which, she told me, had brought her to the brink of despair more than once. The kids sat there and didn’t say a word. She kept the kids around primarily to remain ambulatory. She didn’t believe in the soul, she told me, but she believed in immortality in an oscillating universe. She believed in bounce and re-expansion and the separation of mind from matter. Her mind, she told me, was not the mind of an obese woman. She assured me she knew how it would all end. She said if more people loved a vacuum, the world would be a happier place.”

Clem came into the garden with a turtle in his mouth. He placed it carefully in a bird bath and sat down to watch it. The turtle was shut tight as a tomb.

“Were there any other incidents?” Liberty asked.

He shook his head.

“You aren’t looking for these people, are you? You don’t try to find them?”

“Aren’t they coming to me?”

“They’ll start depending on you, Willie.”

“That would be a mistake, wouldn’t it.” He was still stroking the scratches on her arm. “Don’t you want to come inside?”

They went into a large, interior patio. Everywhere there was the faint, comforting sound of water. The water fell along a sluice cut in the marble floor and emptied into a long pool tiled in dark blue. One wall of the patio was a rocky grotto in which orchids bloomed. The water in the sluice sparkled like snakes, like barbed wire, like sunlight.

Liberty stepped up into the living room, onto thick, whitish carpeting. The walls were the same color as the carpet — a peculiar shade, like the glabrous skin of some animal.

“You always choose such decorous homes, Willie,” Liberty said.

“This isn’t decorous. This might be it, actually.”

“Might be what? It’s just another rich person’s house.”

“We could belong here. We could stay here.”

She saw the end of it, returning.

“There’s someone here already.” Liberty said. “What are you doing?” She was sure there was someone in the house.

“No, there’s no one. I was here all day yesterday and at night. There’s no one.”

The house had a cool, medicinal smell. There was a dark painting on the wall, which Liberty did not approach. She went instead into the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator. There were a dozen bottles of Taittinger, several sealed jars of bee pollen and a box of granola. She found a bowl in the cupboard and poured some granola into it. She uncorked a bottle of champagne and let it foam into the granola. In the wastebasket was a single, desiccated orchid.

“This is not real trash,” Liberty said. “The real trash is kept somewhere else.”

She put the bowl on the floor for Clem, then made another for herself. Clem lapped the champagne, then sneezed.

Willie laughed and picked up the bottle. He tipped back his head and let the champagne run down his throat. Liberty saw his strong throat working, swallowing. Champagne spilled and bubbled upon his chest.

“Champagne and granola,” Willie said. “Liberty’s porridge. You’re just like Goldilocks.”

“Goldilocks, the first housebreaker.”

“The blonde and appealing outsider. The bears come back. She jumps from a window and runs away. There’s something wrong with that story. That story doesn’t end.”

“Someone’s here,” Liberty said. “Why don’t you think someone’s here? How did you get in?”

“An aluminum jimmy. Don’t you want to see the other rooms?”

For a time, as a child, Liberty had desired a career as a chambermaid. She saw herself going from room to room, rooms silent and dim, terrible in their confusions, the causes of their disarray beyond her knowledge, their secrets both blatant and incomprehensible. And the child had cleaned them and brought order and even light. Room after room. Again and again. In an eternal, successful repetition. But she who was not a child had no order to confer, no pretense of design.

Besides, here there was order, even emptiness.

He had his hands on her hips, steering her. They went into a bedroom filled with gymnastic equipment, some free weights and a machine using stacked weights and a cam. Bolted close to the ceiling was a bar with inversion boots. Liberty felt that the person whose house this was lived a life of both hazard and comfort and never felt sorrow about anything.

In the bathroom by the sink there were hairbrushes, a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. There were no hairs in the hairbrushes. Liberty glanced into the mirror. She was the outsider, the onlooker, the eavesdropper. Even the image reflected before her was something she felt she could not occupy. Behind her, she could see the edge of a bedroom wall, which was painted a dull red like cranberries, and an open closet door. There were three coats on hangers in the closet. They looked terrible, like apparitions. But they were just three coats.