Taking Care (27 page)

Liberty grimaced. Willie asked Charlie, “Who does Teddy think you are, a visiting uncle?”

“We’ve never met. I’ve only laid eyes on him in a photo cube. Janiella wants to keep him out of the house and she’s got him busy every minute. He has soccer practice, swim team, safe boating instruction. He’s hardly ever at home. After school, he takes special courses in computer language, calligraphy, backgammon. Poor little squirt comes staggering home, his brain on
fire.
I think of myself as a fantastic impetus to his learning.”

“Liberty’s not happy with this situation at all,” Willie said.

“Liberty’s all right,” Charlie grinned, showing his pale gums. “Liberty’s a great girl.” The waitress arrived and warily placed a pint carton of milk by Charlie’s right hand. The carton of milk had a straw sticking out of it. “Oh look at that!” Charlie exclaimed. “I love this place. You gotta get a pie, Liberty. Bring it home to Clem. He’d scarf it down and get some words.
Be zealous and repent.
Dog’d go wild!”

Liberty reached across to Willie’s plate and spooned up another small piece of mush.

“That’s extremely irritating,” Willie said. “You never order anything and then you eat what I order.”

Liberty blushed.

“Liberty!” Charlie cried, “eat off my plate, I beseech you! Let’s mix a little yin and yang!” He speared a piece of coffee cake with his fork and fed it to her.

“it’s just one of those things,” Willie said, “that has been going on for years.” He looked unhappily at his plate.

“Really, man, you’re losing energy with these negative emotions. You’re just going dim on us, man,” Charlie said.

“All right,” Willie said to Liberty, “let’s talk about you for awhile. Tell me something you’ve never told me before.”

“She’s going to say Oavid,’” Charlie said. He brushed his fingers lightly across the veins in Liberty’s wrist.

“David?” Liberty asked. “Who is David?”

“David is the boy you never slept with,” Willie said. “David is your lost opportunity.”

“I think we’re talking too loud,” Charlie yelled. “These are polite, God-fearing people. Their babies come by UPS. Big brown Turtle-Waxed trucks turn into their little lanes. They have to sign for them, the babies. The babies grow up to be just like these old geezers here. Nevertheless, it’s better to get babies by UPS. The sound of two bodies yattering together to produce a baby is a terrible thing really.”

“With David you would be another kind of woman,” Willie said. “At this very moment, you could be with David, cuddling David. After you cuddled, you could arise, dress identically in your scarlet union suits, chino pants, ragg socks, Bass boots, British seaman pullovers and down cruiser vests and go out and remodel old churches for use as private residences in fashionable New England coastal towns.”

“But David,” sighed Charlie, “is missing and presumed at rest.”

“Change the present,” Willie said. “Through the present, change the future and through the future, the past. Today is
the result of some past. If we change today, we change the past.”

Charlie shook his head. “Too much to put on a pie plate, man. Besides, it doesn’t sound Christian.”

“If you were another kind of woman,” Willie said, “you could be married to Clay, the lawyer, dealing in torts. You’d have two little ones, Rocky and Sandy. They’d have red hair and be hyperactive. They’d be the terror of the car pool. Clay would have his nuts tied.”

“Oh please, man,” Charlie exclaimed.

“You and Clay would fly to your vacations in your very own private plane. You’d know French. You’d gain a small reputation as a photographer of wildflowers, really bringing out the stamens and pistils in a studious but quite improper way. Women would flock to the better department stores in order to buy the address books in which your photos appeared. With menopause would come a change in faith, however. You’d get bored with your recipes and your BMW. You’d stop taking dirty pictures. You’d divorce Clay.”

“I knew it, I knew it!” shouted Charlie. “There he’d be with his useless nuts!”

“You’d become a believer in past lives. You’d become fascinated with other forms of intelligent life. You’d see that Christ had returned as a humpback whale. You’d become involved in the study of whale language.”

“Oh, I love whales too, man,” Charlie said, spilling coffee down the front of his pink button-down shirt. “They are poets in tune with every aspect of their world. They sing these songs, man.”

“You’d curse the house in Nantucket that Rocky and Sandy had spent so many happy summers in.”

“Ahhh, Nantucket, built on blood. Let’s abandon this subject,” Charlie said. He looked sadly at his shirt. “I’ve got to throw up, man, the happy vomiter has got to leave you now.” He sighed and remained seated. “God is unrelenting and bitchier than a woman, I swear. What do you say, Liberty?”

“Liberty’s song is a little garbled,” Willie said.

“Aren’t ours all,” Charlie said graciously. “Ubble-gubble.” He smiled at Liberty, who tried to meet his thoughtful, thickened gaze. She wished that she could watch him without being seen. The considerable fact that she was attracted to him made her feel morbid,
things i would like,
she thought,
things i would never do.
She had to get started on that list.

“Except for Clem’s song,” Charlie was saying. The dog was visible from their table, lying beneath the palm tree, his paws crossed, yawning. A sheriff’s deputy sat nearby in his cruiser, looking at him as though he’d like to write out a ticket. “Clem’s song is serene. How’d you get such a great dog, Liberty?”

“He came in on the night air and settled on her head as she slept,” Willie said.

“Gubble-ubble,” Charlie said.

“He was in the envelope with the marriage license,” Willie said. “We sprinkled a little water on him and he puffed up and was made soul.”

“Leave this creep and come away with me,” Charlie said.

Willie said, “We got him from the Humane Society. He ate a child. The police impounded him but what could they do, after all, this isn’t the Middle Ages, we don’t hang animals for crimes. And he was an innocent, a victim himself, belonging to a schizophrenic, anorectic unwed mother who kept leaving her infant son alone with him, unfed, in her fleabag apartment.”

Charlie said, “I mean it. I love married women. I treat them right. Your blood will race, I’m telling you. I’m also a cook. I make great meat loaf, no, forget meat loaf, I’ll make gumbo. I’m third in line for two acres of land in St. Landry Parish. Only two people have to die and it’s all mine. It’s got a chinaberry tree on it. We’ll go to cockfights and pole the bayous and drink beer and eat gumbo.”

“Actually,” Willie said, “she found him sitting in the road. He’d been hit by a car. His eye was in a ditch of water hyacinths, being examined by two ducks. Blood all over the place. What a mess.”

“Everything’s so relative with you, man. I don’t know how
you make it through the day,” Charlie said. He gazed at Liberty, absorbed.

“A linear life is a tedious life,” Willie said. “Man wasn’t born to suffer leading his life from moment to moment.”

“I love quiet married women,” Charlie said. “Their lack of fidelity thrills me. But I am coming to the conclusion that Janiella talks too much. Even
in situ,
she’s gabbing away. And she’s into very experimental stuff. There are not as many ways of making love as people seem to believe. Janiella may not be for me, actually.”

“I’m splitting,” Willie announced.

“I think you’re making a fetish out of the real world,” Charlie said, looking at Willie glumly. He rubbed his face hard with his hands. He wanted a drink, Liberty knew. He had that look in his dark eyes. “And seriously, man, about these people you’ve been saving, I don’t know, I mean about those
old
people particularly. I would allow them to go under if I were you. They might buy another Mercedes and take a wrong turn this time right into school recess. See them! Barreling through shrieking groups of shepherd’s-pie-stained Bubble-Yum T-shirts, hand-tooled pointy-toed cowboy boots and small rucksacks stickered with hearts, flattening little hands holding baby bunnies, little sunburned arms …” He shook his head. “And that bugger you saved …”

“Bugger?” Willie looked rattled.

“You saved a bugger,” Charlie said morosely.

“He saved someone who had called his mother a ‘bugger’ is what I said,” Liberty said. “That’s what the mother told me.”

“You’re so literal,” Willie said to Liberty. “What the young man said to me was that getting struck by lightning didn’t feel like getting laid.”

“Well, now
that’s
expected,” Charlie said. “It’s well known that people say mechanical things under certain circumstances.”

“Liberty prefers not to read between the lines,” Willie said. “The clearly visible is exhausting enough, she feels.”

“Liberty’s a great girl,” Charlie said. “A girl of romantic sensibility, a girl who cares.”

“Liberty is a highly depressed individual,” Willie said.

“Whatever,” Charlie said cheerfully. “Building, building.”

Willie stood up and leaned slightly toward Liberty, his hands on the table. His hands were tanned and strong and clean. His wedding band was slender. Liberty remembered the wedding clearly. It had taken place in a lush green tropical forest in the time of the dinosaurs. “I’ve got to shake myself a little loose,” he said, “do you want the truck?”

“No,” Liberty said.

“Just a few days,” Willie said. “Later,” he said to Charlie. He left.

“A butterfly vanishes from the world of caterpillars,” Charlie said.

Liberty saw Clem get up and look after the truck as it drove away. He trotted over to the restaurant and peered in, resting his muzzle on a window box of geraniums. Liberty waved to him.

“He can’t see that,” Charlie said. “Animals live in a two-dimensional world. For example, like with roads? To a dog, each road is a separate phenomenon which has nothing in common with another road.”

“That sounds about right,” Liberty said. She watched Clem nibble on a pink geranium. His bad eye was like a smooth stone.

“There are lots of roads,” Charlie said. He picked up her hand and kissed her palm. “I love you,” he said.

Liberty smiled. “Janiella’s your married woman.”

He shook his head and blew softly on her palm. “There’s only you,” he said.

“You’re a bottle man,” Liberty said.

“Liberty!” a child’s voice called. It was Teddy, standing by the bakery counter. He hurried over, shoelaces flapping, holding a waxed bag. “Mommy sent me here for rolls because Daddy’s home and they’re fighting.” He sat on Liberty’s lap while she tied the laces.

Charlie closed his eyes.

“Who is that?” Teddy demanded.

“My man,” Charlie said, “we were just discussing running away together.”

“I want to go too,” Teddy said. “You won’t make me memorize poetry, will you?”

“What kind of monsters do you think we are?” Charlie said.

“My mother makes me do a lot of memorizing. I’m going to go to boarding school next year. ‘Marriage needs room,’ she says.” Teddy pointed to a shelf on the far wall of items for sale—palm canes, dolls, cream pitchers in the shape of cows. “I bought my mother one of those for her birthday,” Teddy said, pointing at a cow.

Charlie’s long face looked sad. “That touches me,” he said. “I have been touched. I have been reached now for sure and I suddenly see things clearly. This is us,” he said, touching their arms. “We should do something about us.”

“Did this ever happen before?” Teddy asked, his arms lightly encircling Liberty’s neck. “It all seems a little familiar.”

“A very common feeling in childhood,” Charlie said. “Stuff that should have happened but didn’t has to keep trying to happen until it does.”

Liberty shook her head and smiled.

“Look at this pretty lady smile,” Charlie said to Teddy. “I love this lady. I’ve loved her for a long time. It’s been a secret just between us but now you know too.”

“I want to run away with you and Liberty and Clem,” Teddy said.

“A beautiful woman, a smart dog, a little kid and yours truly,” Charlie said. “We can do it! We will become myths in the minds of others. They will say about us,” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “that we all went out for breakfast and never returned.”

“Good,” Teddy said.

“So where shall we go?” Charlie said. He kissed Liberty’s face. The line of people waiting to be seated, old women in bonnets, holding one another’s hands, looked at them in alarm.

“There’s no place to go,” Liberty said.

“There are many places to go,” Charlie said. “Hundreds.”

“Let’s make a list, I love lists!” Teddy said.

“We’re the nuclear unit scrambling out, the improbable family whose salvation is at hand,” Charlie said. “We’ll go to Idaho, British Columbia, New Zealand, the Costa del Sol. We’ll go to Nepal. No, forget Nepal, all those tinkly little bells would drive us crazy. What do you say, we’ll go to Paraguay. That’s where Jesse James went.”

“That’s where the Germans went,” Liberty said. “Jesse James just died.”

“You’re right,” Charlie said. “It wasn’t Paraguay. It was Patagonia where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid went.” He was fidgeting now. His dark eyes glittered.

“They were outlaws,” Teddy said.

“They were outlaws,” Charlie said. “Successful outlaws.”

“Why are you crying?” Teddy asked Liberty. “Are you crying?”

“We’ve got to move along, it’s later than we think,” Charlie said. “How about some lunch?”