Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

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.

T he 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 carve 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.”