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 the 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.