She walked across the room and down the steps into the swimming pool. She stood up to her waist in the bright water, Clem floating in her arms. It was like some dreadful baptism.
“I like animals so very much,” Liberty heard her say. “They’re so unanxious. They don’t weep. They don’t hoard up their dead in cemeteries.”
“I’m sure she’d let us go,” Liberty whispered to Willie. “I’m sure she’d just let us walk right out of here.”
“She’s going to ask a favor,” Willie said. “At the proper moment. Even, perhaps, a shade before the proper moment.”
Liberty went out to the patio and said to Clem, “Come here. Come.”
Clem paddled toward her. He clambered up the steps and stood beside her without shaking the water from his coat. Water pooled against his eyes.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it, the things one acquires,” Poe said. “But you should give him up, dear, really you should. We have to give things up.” She did a half somersault and swam the length of the pool underwater, then vaulted up and out on one massive arm. Her arms exhibited vascular genius. Her veins were like objects that should be personally addressed.
“I hope you’re still not in any pain,” she said to Willie.
He was standing next to the stone from which orchids clung. The orchids were white and yellow and scarlet and had black, scattered features that seemed like faces. There were dried flecks of blood on Willie’s arm. The reptilian pattern of the weapon was clearly visible.
“No,” he said, “it doesn’t hurt now.”
“The stigmata of the thief,” Poe said happily. “I adore thieves. The world is divided, I think, between thieves and those who wait, wait for fate to step in, like my husband. In one of our homes — it was in Italy, on an island — we built an enormous fireplace with a glass back so that we could see the ocean through the flames, but it meant nothing to him, for he was waiting, you see. He could see nothing through the waiting.”
“We can’t wait,” Liberty said. “We can’t wait here.”
“Oh, my dear,” Poe said. “You don’t realize what your Willie has done, do you. He has found the day in which he will solve himself. Please excuse me for a moment. I must get a wrap or I’ll catch a chill.”
“Let’s go,” Liberty said to Willie after Poe had left.
“In a moment,” he said. “Just one moment.”
She remembered feeling once that anything was possible. The sky was bright and blue and she was walking fast and could go anywhere. But that had been a moment years ago, and since that moment she had felt that her life was like someone else’s garden she had wandered into, something she could care for or not, like one did another’s garden.
There was a knocking on the wooden door of the courtyard. When Willie did not move and Poe did not appear, Liberty went to the door herself. A man stood holding a long white box of flowers. “I’m the florist,” the man said. He had a beard and a small head, and behind one ear was a pink hibiscus. “I see you’re noticing this flower,” the man said. “What this flower is doing is distracting you from the smallness of my head.” He looked at Clem for a long moment, then slowly extended the long white box to Liberty. “I want to tell you something right up front,” he said. “I was an oil tanker pilot for fourteen years and I didn’t have a single incident until one morning I crashed into a bridge, the same bridge I’d cruised under a hundred times, I crashed into that bridge and I sent twenty-three people to their deaths. I want to tell you that right up front. I don’t want someone to tell you later that the man who delivered the flowers you are about to enjoy was the cause of an incident that caused the death of twenty-three innocent people.” He gave Clem a loose, apologetic smile. He had a wet small mouth within his beard, a mouth such as bearded people often have.
“They just floated down into the ocean on a Greyhound bus,” he said. “I don’t think any of them could believe it.”
Poe appeared and signed the bill the man presented with a flourish.
“Jimmy,” she said. “How are you, Jimmy?”
“I’m not so good,” Jimmy said. “I’ve got these bad tunes playing in my head today. I’ve got these mean melodies.”
“Let me give you a little extra today, Jimmy,” Poe said. “Perhaps for some girl, some pretty girl.”
Jimmy shook his head. “Don’t need a girl. What I want is my own vessel back. I want my vessel.”
He drove away, his truck leaving a puddle of oil behind.
“You and your dog elicit confessions, don’t you?” Poe said to Liberty. “Who do you yourself confide in?” She was wearing an outrageous snakeskin jacket that seemed to double the size of her massive shoulders. She stroked Clem’s paw with her foot. “He has lovely large feet,” she said. “Like Greta Garbo. How long have you had him?”
“Not long,” Liberty said, as though it were the truth. “What, dear?” Poe asked.
“It hasn’t been that long. There was a while before I had him.”
“I would like you and Willie to perform fellatio in front of me sometime, would you do that?”
“Certainly never,” Liberty said.
“Pardon me, that was possibly an uncouth request,” Poe said. “Let me tell you about a friend of mine. She got the most gruesome headaches, simply unbearable headaches. And they finally discovered that the cause of them was a dislocated jaw. The jaw would just pop in and out. So the physician said, Absolutely no oral sex. So my friend engaged in no more oral sex. And the headaches vanished, but of course she was miserable. She died a miserable woman, her head clear as a spring morning.”
Poe laughed, looking at Liberty. “You find me depressing, don’t you, dear, well I’ll tell you, I have found that one can learn the most from depressing people. Jung and Monet, for example, were both very depressing individuals to be around. I knew them both. I drank champagne with Jung on several occasions. We discussed the first thought of the One and Absolute Being. Monet had a lighter heart. He could look at anything. Anything! I knew him at Giverny. Still, he had his failings. He was very argumentative. He was always arguing with the gardeners. It was understandable. Their concerns were fertilizers, acidity, overburdening the soil and such. He had five gardeners. He was always screaming at them.”
“What did Jung think the first thought of the Absolute Being was?” Liberty asked.
“He believed His first thought was the consciousness of utter loneliness,” Poe said.
4
The sun was in the exact center of the sky. It was the time of day when things are poised and cast no shadow because they seem so familiar. It was the time of day when the noontide demons are out. On the beach, dragonflies landed on the sea grasses, their transparent wings beating, their square helmeted heads secretive and pitiless. Beyond the beach, the Gulf sparkled and heaved. No one commented upon it.
The three sat around a massive limestone table in the center of which were the roses in a vase. Poe sent white roses to herself every year on her birthday. They were tightly budded and long-stemmed. Each stem had a plastic rod twisted to it to keep it upright. Liberty remembered roses such as these in a room she had been in once. There was something that a nurse had dissolved in the water on the first day to keep the petals from discoloring and falling. In this way, their passage had been arrested.
Poe had slipped a cut-off T-shirt over Clem’s head and forelegs. “The Disguise in disguise,” she said. Clem looked discomfited. He lay beside Liberty, his nose beneath his paws.
It appeared that a considerable amount of time had passed in which Liberty had not been paying attention. Months and years. She guessed that she had been distracted. She stared at the tabletop before her. The fossilized remains of ancient sea creatures stared back. Worms — they were worms. Worms and mollusks and sea fans. She touched their delicate tracings, their white and twisted shadows, with her fingertips.