Breaking and Entering (14 page)

Liberty raised herself up on her elbows so she could better see Teddy in the water.

“They thrash around and then sink and then come up and float on their faces,” Sally said. “I mean I imagine that’s what happens. And people give them money.”

“Stay close in, honey,” Liberty called to Teddy.

Sally looked around them at all the children playing on the shore. “I’ve got to have some babies,” Sally said. “I
love
babies. I still want to get my babies from JJ, but who knows, I might have to get them from a man I don’t even know yet.” She made a fist and punched her thigh, annoyed. “JJ hasn’t lost his touch, but I must admit not much has happened lately.
He gets confused. He says that sometimes when he feels my breast he doesn’t know what it is. Sometimes his brain says
honeydew melon
, you know, sometimes it says
gearshift knob
. But he’s better. Maybe he’ll get even better. When he got the stroke he was at the bar making somebody a piña colada. God, I hate piña coladas. I was at home and I remember the exact moment it happened. This big picture fell off the wall. There was something else too, this feeling. I knew something was happening. There was no reason for that picture to fall off the wall. Then the phone rang. Have I told you this before?”

“That’s all right,” Liberty said.

In the sky, a solitary pink cloud hurried by. It seemed just the type of cloud that would appear in answer to an unspoken prayer, dumping rain precipitously, for example, on a single, parched tree in a forest. The cloud hurried over the Gulf.

“It’s always a telephone call these days,” Sally said. She sniffled, having sad memories. She was remembering JJ. she remembered him jumping from a helicopter onto a speeding train. Actually, she had never seen this, he had told her about it. JJ was considerably older than Sally. She had been ten years old when he had done this stunt. She had been in school, learning about participles, about how light went around corners. She remembered JJ falling, his back full of arrows, JJ leaping from bridges, JJ burning up in a German tank. She was eleven or twelve when her husband was doing these things. She had no idea he existed. JJ loved to fall. She remembered him falling. He loved to die. He had different expressions for different deaths. How
did
light go around corners? Sally wondered.

“When I first saw JJ,” Sally said, “I got hot all over. Fate’s got that kind of heat, don’t you think? I was just burning up.” She nibbled on her sandwich, then made a face at it and
buried it in the sand. “Do you know what his initials stand for? They don’t stand for anything. His parents just gave him those two lone letters for a name. I always thought they stood for something, but they’re just two lone letters. I learned that in the hospital. Actually, what I know for sure about JJ you could put in a cup.”

The small pink cloud Liberty had noticed earlier seemed to have reversed direction and was now hovering directly overhead. Liberty had the unsettling feeling that the cloud was about to rain blood on them. This was not unheard of, but it usually happened in places like Calabria or Tennessee. Homer had even written about it, although, of course, Homer had been blind. Liberty remained still, barely breathing, until the terrible feeling passed.

Black Hermann, believing himself invisible, stalked a seagull on the white sand. The gull looked at him with scorn.

Sally adjusted her hat. She wore a long, gauzy dress. She was a neat, round young woman, a measurer, hopeful. The small brown egg beneath its makeshift awning suddenly appeared to her. “What’s that!” she cried.

“Teddy’s taking a sex-education course,” Liberty said. “He has to take care of an egg for a week.”

“That’s an egg! Well of course it’s an egg, isn’t it. What will they think up next.” Her hand veered from touching it and fell lightly on Liberty’s leg. She began patting Liberty’s leg. “I like you a lot, did you know that? You’re reserved. I always liked it when you dropped in at the bar. I got so I looked forward to it. Didn’t we have some nice chats? I love the way your pelvic bones stick up like that. I think women are more genuine than men, don’t you think so?” She moved her hand up to Liberty’s stomach. Liberty removed the hand and placed it against Sally’s own stomach. The hand had taken
on certain properties. Both women looked at it. Clem looked at it.

Sally blushed. “I like you. That isn’t nothing, you know. Are we friends? What are friends? I’m sorry,” she said, “all I can think about lately is sex. JJ was the most sexual man I’d ever known, but I don’t know him any more. How much do you know about Willie? He’s smart, isn’t he. Does it make sex any different?”

Liberty laughed.

“I just love that reserve of yours. I always felt Willie was sexual too, but he has sort of a malignant sexuality, do you know what I mean?”

“I don’t, no,” Liberty said.

“Sure, you know what I mean. Sort of like Pete. You know Pete. Poor Pete.”

“What’s Pete doing these days?” Liberty asked.

Sally’s brother, Pete, had been a Marine in Vietnam. There would be a Club Med in Vietnam one of these days. People would pay for drinks with beads, fuck strangers and dance beneath whispering palms. Pete had been eighteen when he had gone to Vietnam and now he was over forty. His specialty had been defoliating jungles, turning ancient forests into pancakes. He had been happy enough at the time, but now he was terribly unhappy.

“He’s still suffering a little environmental dislocation,” Sally said. “He thinks he’s still
there
or something. ‘Here is here, Pete,’ I keep telling him. JJ used to try to talk to him too, but it didn’t do any good. He’s pretty aggressive even after all these years. He had a job for a while at Skippy’s Cars which he really liked, but he lost it. He was the guy on the television commercial. Did you ever see it? It was wild.”

“The man in the white tuxedo,” Liberty said.

The man in the white tuxedo ran back and forth in front of a row of cars. The hoods of the cars were raised and pennants flew from the antennae.
I want your attention!
the man screamed.
Give me your attention!
He took something out of his pocket and threw it in the window of an unassuming green sedan, and the sedan blew up. Orange flames climbed skyward.
What do I have to do to get your attention
, the man, Pete, screamed.
Do I have to hit you over the head with a shovel!
Sweat poured down his face.
I can make you the best deal in town!

“Pete loved that job,” Sally said. “But now he works in a juice bar. Why don’t you come down there with me sometime and say hello. We could get a glass of juice.”

“Oh, certainly,” Liberty said. Someday, absolutely, she thought, Pete was going to pour Liquid Plumber into the papaya essence and rock the retirement community by terminating two dozen social-security checks simultaneously.

“We’re all so deceived by life, aren’t we,” Sally said. “In many ways, I’ve been thinking, I’ve probably been deceived by my life of love.” She looked at Liberty earnestly. “I was very very happy with JJ, and by being so happy I became blind to my own development. I never had any satellite emotions, like fondness, say. It was a very stable, very inflexible situation. There was just JJ, and upon him I pinned all my hopes for self-fulfillment and satisfaction. I’m not saying he exploited me, but let’s face it, JJ domesticated me and made me a craven woman dependent upon his love. I’m not saying our love wasn’t unique, I’m saying it was sort of suffocating, well, not really suffocating, somewhat suffocating. It was a very deep, very unique love. Do you remember the way he used to talk to me intimately? Well, there’d be no way you
could remember that, of course, I get so mixed up these days, I have to talk for two you know, I have to recall all this stuff for two, but JJ used to talk to me all the time in this sort of rapid whisper, this quick nonsense whisper, as though I were a race horse or something, like this high-strung filly or something. This was very important, this fantasy element of our love. It was very important to JJ and I cooperated fully because our love was so great, but I realize now that I was a very unfulfilled person. JJ was real even though he was acting, but I wasn’t real even though I was just going along. I wasn’t self-actualizing. I was just part of JJ, a man who doesn’t even have a proper name.”

Sally was talking eagerly with a far-off look in her eyes.

“Such language!” Liberty said. “Have you been speaking with your clergyman?” Clergymen often tried too hard, Liberty felt. They had misplaced God in the wilderness and stumbled into the neon wonderland of serial polygamy guidance.

“There’s a voice on the phone, actually,” Sally confessed, “and it gives advice. It’s very sensible. It’s general, but it applies to the particular too. I discovered a lot about my own situation, it was incredible. I discovered I wasn’t autonomous. I’ve got to become autonomous now.” Sally took a deep breath. “What if Willie just left you, he didn’t really die, but he died to you, he couldn’t help it, he just left?”

“He’s left before,” Liberty said. “What I did was wait, I guess.”

“So the waiting made sense because it finally stopped, but what if it didn’t make sense?”

“Waiting never makes sense,” Liberty said.

“We’re all asleep, aren’t we,” Sally said. “Like we’re under a spell and something keeps saying, ‘No need to think about
it, nothing’s going to happen, if anything were to happen it’s not going to happen now, anyway, not this minute …’ Who says that anyway?”

“The Magician in us,” Liberty said. “The Kindly Master.”

“Ugh,” Sally said. She frowned. After a moment, she said, “You’ve still got that dog. I suppose pets give your life a certain continuity. Maybe I should get a pet. I want to lose some weight too. Fifteen pounds would be about right, I think. JJ liked for me to be an armful. ‘My squeeze’ he’d call me. Can you imagine? He called me his squeeze. What a dear man.” Sally began to cry quietly. “He isn’t able to squeeze me any more.”

Liberty reached for Sally’s hand and held it. The sky was once again cloudless and very blue. And the Gulf was blue too, but with a greenish cast. Pale schools of mullet moved through it. There were terns and plovers working the shore now, and later in the day the herons would arrive, and later than the herons, close after sunset, the skimmers would appear, flying swiftly and close to the water, shearing the water with their bills …

“That sky is aloof, isn’t it,” Sally said. “It’s hard to plan on fulfilling yourself under a sky like that.” She patted her eyes dry with the back of Liberty’s hand and stood up. “I’ve got to get back to the Gator. I wish you’d come on by. We’re having a welcome home party for JJ tomorrow night. I wish you weren’t such a stranger. You know what they say about ’gators? They say they’ve got seven emotions and they make a sound for each one of them, but it’s all the same sound.” A peculiar expression slid across Sally’s face. “Just like JJ,” she said. “Oh, god,” she said, “I didn’t say that. Don’t tell me I said that.”

“Sally,” Liberty said.

Sally closed her eyes and shook her head, giggling. “I just didn’t say that,” she said. “But you know what, you know that big Cajun? Charlie, right? He’s got such a crush on you. He talks about you all the time.”

“A crush?”

“A big crush.”

“A gin crush,” Liberty said.

“Don’t be that stranger now, you come on by,” Sally said. She kissed Liberty briskly on the cheek. “Good-bye baby beach!” she said to the beach.

Teddy ran up from the water, holding a shell in his hand. “I found a murex!” he said. “It doesn’t live around here. Somebody must have bought it in a store and then come here and dropped it. It lives in the Mediterranean. And look what I’ve got too, I got these from the trash. Will they count?”

She looked at the ice-cream wrappers. Five wrinkled bears.

“They’ll count.” She smoothed them out on her knee. “What do you think the word
crush
means, honey?”

“Conquer and destroy.”

“Conquer and destroy,” Liberty said. “Maybe you should drop that war course.”

Outside Teddy’s house, Duane was gazing under the hood of a matte black ’69 Shelby Cobra Mach 1. There was reverence in his eyes as he contemplated the gleaming air cleaner with its crinkle finish and polished aluminum hi-lite fins. Teddy touched a brilliantly twinkling radiator cap with his fingers. His father nudged him back a bit.

“You’re sandy, son,” he said. “Take a shower and then you can look.” He took a clean rag from his pocket and flicked it across the grille.

“You shining up the engine again, Daddy?”

“Boy, son, you sure are sandy,” Duane said. He glanced quickly at Teddy. He wished his boy were sturdy—even, perhaps, a little wild and nasty, with a face of his own.

“We’ve been to the beach.”

“Nah,” he said. “Nah you haven’t. Impossible.” Duane’s eyes were focused a little above Teddy and beyond. He cuffed the child’s shoulder playfully.

“Yes we have, we have!” Teddy said excitedly. “See, Liberty’s sandy too. And Clem! We’re all sandy!”

“Nah, you haven’t been to the beach,” Duane said, feinting a jab at Teddy’s chest.