Breaking and Entering

by Joy Williams

  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.

  Willie lay on the bed and Liberty felt that she should move toward him, smile or burst into tears, put her tongue in his mouth, cover him with her wounded body, perform the blind rituals of women. She turned toward him, but her eye caught instead a white sculpted head on a bureau. It had zippers for eyes, two rectangular drawers for a mouth. It was a jewel box, she supposed.

  “What’s this, do you think?” Willie said. He had opened the drawer of a table and was holding what appeared to be a flashlight. It was black and cylindrical, with a checkered pattern on the handle. It had a lens, but looked oddly malignant, as though it had been manufactured not for the purposes of light at all.

  “It almost looks like a weapon,” Liberty said, “but it’s so small.” She touched a button on it and wafers of light struck and fluttered across the red walls.

  “Anything can be a weapon,” Willie said. “In the house I was in on that very pretty inlet, there was a water pistol filled with ammonia in every room. Fear. There’s so much fear.”

  Liberty put the object on the table. She sat down beside Willie and put her head in his lap. He stroked her hair. She parted her lips and pressed them against the khaki cloth of his groin.

  He desired what she was still not. The weight and warmth she touched had nothing to do with desire for her. Charlie had told her that he once got an erection from contemplating an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. He told her that the moment, which had not been fleeting, had appalled him.

  “What?” Liberty said.

  “You were right,” Willie said. “There is someone in this house.”

  Liberty sat up quickly and turned. A tall, muscular woman stood looking at them. She wore a bikini with a wide leather belt around her narrow waist. Weights hung from the buckle of the belt. Her features were fine, even aristocratic, but her face was deeply pock-marked, and the pulse in her neck quivered and jumped. She was old. The long muscles in her thighs bunched as she moved around the bed toward the table and picked up the cylinder lying there.

  “You don’t know how this works?” she said. She seemed amused. She held it downward in the palm of her hand. “You cock your hand like this, as though you were playing with a child and making shadow images of a duck on the wall.” She tilted her head, inches from Willie.

  Liberty thought of Teddy with a quick dismay, as though she had misplaced him, as though he were in her charge in this house but that she had forgotten where. Little Dot was already gone. She had allowed her to be gone, like a part of herself, twice gone.

  “Then just flick your hand toward your target …”—The lower end of the cylinder flew out and hammered Willie on the arm. He grunted and turned pale—“… catch it as it reaches its fullest extension and snap it back to striking position again.” She snapped the thing several times in the air. “Little cobra-like flicks, see.”

  There were a dozen small bleeding lacerations on Willie’s arm.

  A telephone rang somewhere in the house. “Well, answer it,” the woman said to Liberty.

  Liberty walked from the room in the direction of the ringing. She couldn’t see the phone. She felt faint and believed she was going to fall before she reached the ringing. On the beach she saw Clem, amusing himself by rolling rocks about with his nose.

  The phone was covered with a wicker basket stacked with books. The World Was My Garden was stamped on the spine of one of the books.

  She pulled the phone from beneath the basket.

  “Yes,” she said.

  It was the police. The police were selling chances on a bass boat. The bass boat would benefit bad boys who the police were trying to rehabilitate by sending them to camp. Liberty had heard about th
e camp. The bad boys cleared brush, made trails and learned how to put their thoughts down on paper. They took apart four-cylinder engines and put them back together again. The bad boys liked doing all these things but what they really enjoyed doing was catching armadillos and cutting off their front feet for luck. The police didn’t tell her that but Liberty knew it as a fact.

  “I don’t believe I’ll take a chance today,” Liberty said, speaking in such a way, she hoped, as to leave the future open.

  3

  Willie came into the room, followed by the old woman. She was tanned and balding. She was oiled up, her hair was short, gray, and grew in tufts. She squatted down and looked upward at them as though to view them better, gazing at them as though they were forlorn, barely sentient creatures in a hutch. Thick, crisscrossing bands of muscle moved in her legs. Her face was gaunt and cruelly scarred, and her breasts were as high and round as a girl’s.

  Liberty covered the phone once again with the basket. She performed this simple task soundlessly. It calmed her somewhat.

  “Who was it?” the woman asked.

  “Actually, it was the police,” Liberty said.

  “I hope you told them everything was under control.”

  “They were just selling chances,” Liberty said. “On a boat.”

  “A boat!” she exclaimed. “How interesting! A boat to sail away in.”

  Clem had appeared at the glass door. The woman looked at him with delight and let him in.

  “This,” she said, pointing her bare, slender foot at him, “is a disguise, correct?” She smiled at Clem.

  “The disguise of a repressed idea,” Willie said. He was still pale. He held his arm behind his back as though it embarrassed him.

  “I understand,” the woman said. “He probably knows too much to have an actual personality. I like him very much.” She unbuckled the weighted belt from around her waist and laid it on the floor. “What were you planning on taking?” she asked Willie.

  “Nothing.”

  She looked at Liberty. “Why don’t you sit down, dear.”

  Liberty sat down.

  “Is this your husband?”

  Liberty nodded.

  “I’ve marked him now, dear, you know. He’ll never forget me.”

  “These marks,” Willie said, looking at his arm, “will last a week at the most.”

  She turned her back on them and flexed her muscles.

  “You’re really ripped,” Willie said. “Your definition is spectacular.”

  “Why, thank you,” the woman said. “That’s true. I’m peaking today. I like to peak each year on my birthday. It takes about four months. I stick with a basic split system routine. Monday, chest and back; Tuesday, shoulders and biceps; Wednesdays, legs and triceps. I train each body part twice a week. At first I was consuming thirty-five hundred calories a day but I gradually decreased that to four hundred. I also lightened the weights on some of my lifts. For example, I’ve been doing only two hundred pounds in the squat recently.”

  “Today is your birthday?” Liberty asked. She felt disturbingly like the woman’s birthday gift, delivered.

  “Yes it is. I am seventy-five years of age today.” She hit a pose, one leg flexed, hands clasped, smiling. Then she bent over and picked Clem up in her arms. She held him for a moment, then put him down again.

  “He really is extraordinary,” she said. “I can lift twice my body weight, but no more. Of course, he’s not twice my body weight. He weighs around one forty, I would imagine.” She picked Clem up again and walked around the room with him. She thrust her arms out straight and held him close against the wall for a moment. It was an unnerving sight.

  “He’s very close to being the shade of the walls, isn’t he, and the shade of the walls is exactly the color of the inside of Rothko’s forearm. That’s the color he always wanted as the backdrop for his paintings, you know. Pale ivory with a slight, yellowish cast, the color of Cellutex.” She pursed her lips. “It was the crook of the arm where he slashed himself, severing the brachial artery on February twenty-fourth, 1970.”

  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 b
ar 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.”