“You must tell me everything about yourself,” Poe said. “Do you love him, this Willie?”
Love is the great distractor, and she had been distracted. Liberty cleared her throat to speak but it was as though the turtle that Clem had found in the garden had miraculously entered her throat and lay there, heavy, still, tight as a tomb, in the slick passages behind her unruly tongue, a thing almost acceptable, but terrible too, and cold, cold as what can never be known is cold, and she could not speak around it.
“It must be arduous,” Poe mused. “But if love were easy, what would be the point?”
“She loves a child,” Willie said.
“It’s far too easy to love a child,” Poe said, looking at Liberty critically. “At the very least, is there something terribly wrong with it? Does it have an extra chromosome? Is it epileptic or drug-addicted? A mongoloid perhaps?”
“No. He’s a great child,” Willie said.
“There must be some risk, dear. As they say in the bodybuilding game, if it doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it right. Is it your own child, dear?”
“No,” Willie said. “We don’t have any children of our own. We never will.”
“It’s not a tragedy you know. No sense in mooning and fussing about barrenness. The days are coming perhaps when we might say, Blessed are the barren!”
Willie pulled a rose from the vase. Tiny drops of moisture beaded its furled bud. The tips of the furl were already tinged with brown. He touched Liberty’s arm lightly with it.
“Jesus said that actually. He said more than his prayers, didn’t he.” Poe looked at Clem. “Does he say his prayers? You’ve seen those dogs, haven’t you? Well, perhaps they’re more common in Europe at those little street fairs. They count, they play dead, they say their prayers.”
“He doesn’t know a single trick,” Willie said.
Liberty pushed her fingers through Clem’s fur. She rubbed her foot up and down his spine.
“Let me tell you this little story,” Poe said. “I delivered a baby once. It was in an automobile graveyard in Alabama where I was looking for a bumper for my Studebaker. A cheerful and filthy child escorted me through the yard, reciting the history of his favorite wrecks. There was the VW van with the canvas sunroof through which a motocycle had hurtled, decapitating a passenger when the van failed to negotiate a curve. There was the Buick that had held six in a thunderstorm, all killed when a lightpole fell on them. There was the Olds 88 where the woman lingered for hours while they tried to carve the twisted metal away from her legs. The backseat was full of violets, which she had just purchased from a woman who had Parkinson’s disease and was selling her entire collection. The violets were still packed in the back as neat and unviolated as though they were growing peaceably on the forest floor, not a crumb of earth out of place. There was the Chevy in which the fourteen-year-old foul-shooting champion of the county had lost all feeling below his neck forever. The usual, but the little boy was thrilled by it. He had the widest eyebrows, wide as yours, Liberty. Well we came to this Studebaker, and I was pleased because the bumper was unblemished, but there in the backseat was a girl, crowning. She was a very young girl, pale and thin. Her stomach didn’t seem much larger than a cranshaw melon, but here was this baby coming out. She wasn’t moaning, but she looked terrified when she saw me, and the little boy, who wasn’t more than six or seven, said, ‘Oh Bobbie-Ann, when are you going to grow up!’ He was very angry. He had been such a good guide, you see, escorting this old lady through the junkyard, telling his wonderful stories, and then here was Bobbie-Ann, showing off again. Well, I delivered the baby. She was a very healthy, pretty baby. After she stopped wailing, I lingered for a moment and listened to the wind in the trees. They were whispering something that at the time made an enormous deal of sense. Never have I heard the susurrus of branches so clearly. There were mirrors everywhere on the jumbled cars … all the world seemed bright to me, yet falling, as though it had exploded. Bobbie-Ann didn’t say a word. She clutched the baby and stared at me, and the little boy had vanished. And then … I simply walked away, out of that graveyard of machines. I dreamed of that infant for some years. I traveled with her, into childhood, but I could take her only so far, or she, me, into her imagined life. I became quite adept at the process. I’m told I wasn’t exactly well during that period, but the things I could see! I could see her little shoes and dresses. I could see her pencil cases, I could see the light shining in her room at night and I could see her running in the grass … I kept everything. I was such a hoarder then. I kept the crusts I had cut from her bread, the skin from the hot dogs she favored. I kept the ringlets of her hair, the stuffed toys worn thin from her embrace. I was particularly good at visualizing her hands, at the little drawings she made for me, the houses with smoke pouring from the chimneys, the hearts and suns and so forth. We drove everywhere in my old Studebaker. We loved to drive fast, late at night, with the lights out. It was very beautiful, the speeding and laughing. She was fearless. I even went so far as to take her to the fair one night. We saw the world’s smallest horse, we ate blue sugar, she found a dime on the ground, her weight was guessed. Of course, we didn’t enter the exhibit that housed the two-headed calf. We didn’t see the collection of guillotines or the bedspread made from butterfly wings. Some things I wanted to keep from her. But a sailor gave her a rose, a rose much like one of these. He was a rather dangerous-looking sailor, but his gesture, I was confident, was innocent. We went on the bumper boats and the Ferris wheel. The wheel, which was all aglow with tiny lights, turned, and we were borne upward, and then the wheel stopped. You are familiar with the way the wheel stops? The moment when one can go no higher, the moment before the curving descent begins? I felt the coldness of the bar we clutched and the coldness of the stars above us, and then she left me … She left me there. I never saw her after that night, and I could never create another child in my mind. I had my menses punctually for three decades, a veritable tide table of the possible, once a month for one hundred hours, but then one day they left me as well.”
Liberty felt as though she were dreaming. She saw her hands on Clem’s coat as though dreaming them. But she moved her hands and the hands moved.
“I apologize for being so voluble, but you are my first visitors in many years,” Poe said. “It’s been almost as long since I’ve had a lover. My relationships with my lovers always went on too long. I always had difficulty extricating myself. My last lover drank a bottle of mercurochrome in front of me one evening. I had just said, ‘You don’t excite me anymore, Helen. One can’t be excited by the same individual indefinitely. People tend to be hypocritical about long relationships, and not to face the truth.’ She begged me to be hypocritical, then she swallowed mercurochrome. Nothing happened. We were both disappointed. Gesture had become the very heart of our affair. She had succeeded in poisoning her husband years before we met. It was arsenic. If you dug that man up this moment he’d be perfectly preserved. Like Napoleon. Helen was a theatrical woman, devoted to radical thought processes. For some, you know, the temptation is to play, to dream, to hang on to substitution forever.”
“I could understand Helen,” Willie said. “What became of her?”
“She disappeared, as many living people do,” Poe said.
“I could understand that too,” Willie said. “Living people disappear. It happens every day.”