Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

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.”