Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“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.