Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

She set Clem down and stroked the tip of his ear. “Well,” she said, “we all have our February twenty-fourth. Even this one.” She turned her eyes toward the luminous painting on the wall. “I’ve always thought it was criminal the way Rothko painted pictures. Each time he made a picture, he committed a crime against the belief in the unquenchability of the human spirit.” She stared at the painting and sucked in her stomach. Liberty stared at the painting. Willie stared. Liberty felt that they were all on the verge of gulping for air in its presence.

“You’ve come here to make me happy,” the woman said, turning to them, smiling.

“Excuse me?” Liberty said.

“You’ve come here to make me happy,” she said. “Just this morning I was out on the patio drinking my water and protein powder and I realized that I felt better than I had in weeks. It was my birthday in my seventy-fifty year and my energy was in the morning. I felt so good I exclaimed aloud, The Purst Furfect Day!”

Willie laughed.

“Yes,” she said. “You might not have come a moment too soon. I may be on the verge of a vessel occlusion.”

“Your abs are razor-sharp,” Willie said. “Fantastic.”

“Thank you,” she said. She made a circle with her arms over her head and extended her right leg. Her calf did not tremble. Her pitted face showed no strain.

“How long have you been building up your body?” Willie asked.

“Only since the age of sixty-five,” she said in a formal tone. “I must confess I have grown to enjoy my body very much. I despised it as a young woman, but I’m interested now in putting it in the proper condition to be received. It’s the way I conceive of the journey. Rather, the way I conceive of the journey is in the way the journey ends.”

Willie looked at her as though hypnotized. His color had returned, but he was sweating.

The woman crouched, then bounced on the balls of her feet. Her sleek and bulging body was quite monstrous. “I love doing hack and sissy squats,” she said. “I could do them all day.”

Willie cleared his throat.

“I know, I know,” she said, “you believe that physical beauty isn’t everything, even that true beauty isn’t physical at all. Jesus, for example, was supposed to be quite ugly — small, ill-favored and insignificant, perhaps even a leper, at least up until the fifth century. Infirmus, inglorious , even indecorus , some said. My husband insisted that he saw him in World War II and that he was far from being handsome.”

“Where is your husband today?” Willie asked.

“Dust,” she said.

Willie raised an imaginary glass. “To dust,” he said.

“How rude of me,” the woman said. “Let me get us something to toast with.” She went to the kitchen and returned with a fresh bottle of champagne and three glasses. She popped the cork expertly into her closed hand and filled the glasses. “To all the gloomy dead,” she said. They all three drank.

“My husband was in the Navy when he saw Jesus,” she said. “It was in March of 1944. His ship had been torpedoed and he and fourteen other men had been adrift off Luzon in the South China Sea on a hatch cover eight feet long and no more than two feet wide for three days. He saw terrible things, men drinking their own urine, men drinking their own blood, men going crazy and dying all around him, men talking to the waves, thinking the waves were soldiers in ponchos going toward the cookhouse. His best friend was on that hatch cover with them, his very best friend, a red-headed freckled boy by the name of Billy Oakley. Billy Oakley couldn’t hang on after the second day. He was almost blind from burning oil and he kept saying to my husband, ‘I’m going below for a cup of coffee.’ He could see this large chrome coffee urn in the water. My husband couldn’t stop him. He tried to hold him back, but Billy Oakley untied himself from the hatch cover, slipped over the side and sank like a rock in the South China Sea. Other men were seeing ships or women or islands with neon bar lights blinking. Shortly after Billy sank, my husband saw Jesus. He maintained that he was fat, had green eyes and bitten nails and that he was dancing. He danced with my husband. My husband said that he had never known such happiness.”

“To happiness,” Willie said, drinking.

“I must have that dog,” the woman said. “May I have him?”

“No,” Liberty said.

The woman took a bowl of carnival glass from a table, poured champagne in it and set it before Clem. Looking more closely, Liberty saw that it was not carnival glass but Tiffany. Clem lapped it up.

“You don’t really need this fabulous creature, I’m sure,” the woman said. “Are you sure I can’t have him?”

Willie didn’t say anything. Liberty shook her head.

The woman sighed. “He can have that bowl if he wants it,” she said.

“We should be leaving now,” Liberty said.

The woman came closer and looked into Liberty’s face. She had a deep, loamy smell, like shade. “Your eyes are very dark and deep. I suppose people are always trying to get messages across to you,” she said to Liberty.

“Liberty’s brown, earthbound eyes are famous,” Willie said. “Children, alcoholics, the mad and the isolated, all of them think those eyes are the dust to which they must return. Every day, Liberty must fight the tendency to return to the inorganic.”

“I knew a girl like that long ago,” the woman said. “She was very close to the homeostasis state. She had amazing control. I adored her, but she felt nothing for me, nothing at all. I was a student at the time, bicycling through Europe. I met her in Rome on the Ostian Way, at that place where the three fountains are, that place where St. Paul lost his head. I’m sure you’re familiar with that story. When Paul was decapitated, his head bounced three times and wherever it bounced, a fountain sprang up. Well, I met her there. She was a splendid girl.”

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.”