“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.”
She smiled at Liberty, then turned to Willie. “My name is Poe. It’s a name my nursemaid gave me when I was a baby. For years it was thought that I was retarded when the fact was I was merely exceptionally ugly. Your names are …”
“Willie,” Willie said. “Willie and Liberty.”
“ ‘Po’, po’ thing,’ she would say to me. ‘Po’ lamb.’ Her name was Lola. She was devoted to me. I had pustular eruptions on my face since birth. You could put nickels in some of the holes on my forehead. I sometimes think Lola, who died sixty years ago, was the only person who ever loved me. I’ve had so many lovers and so little love. Of course, I’m dreadfully afraid of Lola now. It would break her heart, but fear of the dead is common to all the races of mankind. It can’t be helped. How long have you been breaking into houses?”
“For a long time,” Willie said.
“One always thinks there are dreadful secrets to be learned, but there aren’t really,” Poe said. She looked at Willie and Liberty happily. “Burglars on my birthday!” she exclaimed.
“We’re not burglars,” Liberty said.
“My father once entertained a burglar,” Poe said. “We lived in a quite elaborate house in Connecticut. My father came upon this man skulking about in the foyer in the middle of the night, and he invited him into the kitchen. He made him a cup of coffee and cut him two large pieces of cake. They chatted about this and that. The burglar was of the high-strung, fox-faced, bad-breathed sort. He told my father that he recited the Jesus prayer all the time he was committing a robbery. You know the prayer? ‘Have mercy on me, a sinner, have mercy on me …’ He said that it kept his courage up. After they ate the cake, father suggested that he go next door where his neighbor had a considerable collection of gold coins. The man went next door and was immediately ripped apart by the neighbor’s vicious, barkless dog, a dog my father knew perfectly well was in residence. My father had an engaging but somewhat incoherent personality.”
Poe bent backward and supported herself on one arm. She flexed the other.
“You’ve had no difficulties?” she asked. “People are committing themselves more and more these days to self-protection and self-defense. You haven’t come up against any attack dogs or booby traps? No shotguns? No housewives skilled in aikido?”
“You misunderstand what we’re doing,” Willie said.
“No, dear, you misunderstand what you’re doing, but you don’t have to seek further. You’re here now, dear.” She bounced erect and smiled. “I have a friend, a lady who’s eighty if she’s a day, who’s made two muggers do the chicken in the last year.”
“Do the chicken?” Liberty said faintly.
“The carotid chokeout,” Poe said.
Silence attended these last remarks.
“Don’t be so glum!” Poe cried. “This is a lovely moment, a perfect moment, but you’re quite right. One must not trust happiness too much. Dancing with Jesus, for example, simply ruined the rest of my husband’s life.”
“What did he die of?”
“He died of nothing in particular, dear,” Poe said. “His life wasn’t very satisfactory. That incident on the South China Sea was just one of those things — the dancing, the harmony, the bliss of illumination, all that was just an instant, followed by years of mental bewilderment and profound misery.” She moved gracefully over to Clem, picked him up in her arms and sat down with him in her lap. “My husband came from a wealthy family like my own, and after the war, he invested his money in lodgings by the sea all over the world. Africa, the Caribbean, England, California … He was a collector. He loved fragments. He was always collecting ceilings and cornices and chimney pieces, grilles and gates and portals. He’d buy a place and make it quite lovely, modernize it, stick in these peculiar mixtures of things, hire good help, put in a pool and such, and in each place he’d erect a large cross on the roof right beside a satellite dish. I’m sure you realize what he had in mind. Daily, he’d expect Jesus to return on a giant, screaming asteroid that would rend the waters, enabling the sea to give up her dead. We would be able to witness the resurrection on television, he was sure of it. He was waiting for Jesus and Billy Oakley. Well, you can imagine how tiring it all became. He tired of waiting, I suppose, and then he died.” She gave Clem a hug and adjusted his choke chain carefully, as though it were a string of pearls. “Memory is dust’s only enemy,” she said.
“Did you love him?” Liberty asked.
“No, I didn’t, dear,” Poe said. “It’s not that I was jealous of Jesus or Billy Oakley, but I just never admired the shape of my husband’s mind. He believed that life was an objective process revealing God and naturally he was frustrated and offended every day of his life. He also had a ghastly habit of shooting Reddi-Wip directly into his mouth. He would never place it on a piece or gingerbread or anything, he would just shake it and shoot it directly into his mouth.”
She gave Clem another hug. “What would this wonderful creature like to eat on my birthday?” she asked. “Tournedos? Duck? Veal?”
“He’s a vegetarian,” Willie said. “He doesn’t eat anything that used to have eyes.”
“Why that’s wonderful,” Poe said. “Do you know that the thought of the eye made Charles Darwin turn cold all over? Yes. Cold all over. He said so himself. Eyes weakened Darwin’s theories considerably. One can go only so far with reason, a little further possibly always, but ultimately only so far.”
She walked with Clem in her arms to the pool. “Life is remarkable, isn’t it? Everything can change in an instant. Imagine me finding you all here on my birthday. Possibilities endlessly arising, that’s life.”