Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“You know,” one of the young men was saying to Carter, “Wolf House is only a few days’ drive from here, in Sonoma. If you’re a London fan, you have to see it. It was his dream house, in the works for years, and it burnt to the ground the night before he was to move in.”

“I do want to see Wolf House,” Carter said. He had an empathy for structural decay on a grand and brooding scale, generally a bad tendency in an architect. Hadn’t the disaster in this case been the architect’s fault — a great writer’s dream thwarted on the telluric level by a faulty venting design? It made him glad he had never truly practiced his profession.

Donald discreetly turned Carter’s attention to the rising moon, which had rolled past the mountain’s corner like an immense cruise ship.

Corvus was quiet as always quiet, though taking everything in, Annabel suspected. She would hate to be the kind of person who had to take everything in all the time. Corvus made her feel like a merry little insect or something, though she wasn’t at all snobbish or supercilious. She had perfect skin, almost translucent, and sometimes Annabel would just gape at it. There were dog hairs on that white sundress, though, she noticed pityingly.

Alice was sitting on a couch watching a man in a tuxedo play the piano. A woman in a silk jumpsuit sat beside him on the bench, and Alice looked at them sulkily. The woman began to sing. She didn’t have a bad voice, she was confident and playful. Alice bit her nails, dragging them out of her mouth on occasion for inspection. The woman was singing witty lyrics in a light, assured voice, and the man in the tuxedo grinned at her, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, his hands flying over the keys.

“Alice, what are you thinking about?” she heard Annabel ask. “You’re all scrunched up! Do you want some hummus?” She extended some on a cracker.

“I can’t eat,” Alice said.

Annabel looked at her respectfully.

“I … he … they just won’t let him out early. We keep hoping they’ll let him out early.” The reason she didn’t date, Alice had explained, was that she already had a boyfriend, who unfortunately was away in prison.

“It’s too bad you have to think about parole all the time,” Annabel said.

Alice wished she’d never invented this absentee boyfriend.

“But I don’t think prison’s anything to be ashamed about,” Annabel said. “It’s something lots of people have to just get behind them.”

What was he in jail for anyway? Alice wondered. Nothing good.

“I’m sure he doesn’t even belong in prison,” Annabel said. “I knew a boy back home, he was piloting his dad’s motorboat at night and he hit a buoy and killed two of his friends and they sent him to prison. He was there a whole year, and he didn’t belong there at all.”

Alice looked at her.

“Well, he was a nice boy, I mean. Basically. And they’d all been drinking — even the dead ones. What’s yours look like, you’ve never told me. I don’t picture him as being particularly cute … more compelling-looking.”

“It’s difficult to describe someone you love,” Alice said.

“So he’s really going to be in there forever, or what? That’s a big responsibility for you. They want them to feel remorse, is the thing. He should profess remorse.”

“Annabel,” Alice said, “I don’t want to discuss it.”

“I understand ,” Annabel said.

Now the singer was embracing the man in the tuxedo, giving him a big kiss on the side of the head. Then she slid gracefully off the piano bench and joined the party. The man sat with his back to the girls, not doing anything for a moment. Then he lit another cigarette.

Alice heard a woman say, “Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it.”

“What kind of poems do you write?” someone asked.

This soiree was sort of out of it, Alice thought.

The man in the tuxedo turned toward her. “What would you like to hear, darling?” he asked.

I’d like to hear you moaning in ecstasy in bed, Alice thought, startling herself. Men did that, didn’t they? She gave him a smile and felt her lip snag on her tooth the way Fury’s did sometimes after he yawned and her poppa would have to reach down and unhook it.

“Without the guidance of request, I always play ‘I Get a Kick Out of You.’ ” After he finished, he came over and sat between them.

“The woman who was singing with you,” Alice croaked. “Is she your lover?”

Annabel giggled. She had never seen Alice behave like this.

“There are certain women,” the man in the tuxedo said, “who love men like myself. They’re fascinated with us, we’re a challenge to them. Do you suppose he’d fuck me? they wonder. Do you think he could do it?”

“Really?” Alice said.

“That is the case,” the man said.

“Some people are so shallow,” Alice said.

“Some people are tremendously shallow,” Annabel said. “I knew a boy back home who, if someone he didn’t like told him something he thought was dumb, he’d laugh in a noblesse oblige fashion and then he’d look at someone he liked and shrug and say ‘Noblesse oblige.’ ”

“Have you ever had a man, darling?” the man asked Annabel.

“A few experiments,” she said. “They were actually just boys. Sort of. Back home.” The piano player was sort of disgusting. Leave it to Alice to be enchanted.

“Do you always wear a tuxedo?” Alice asked.

“Always,” he said. “Never without it. In church you can’t see it for the robe.”

“Church?” Alice exclaimed, troubled.

“God is the net. We are the creatures within the net.”

“Oh, that’s kind of pretty, I think,” Annabel said. But then she didn’t think it sounded pretty at all.

“You need to see the net for it to work,” he said. “It’s not enough to be in it. We have to be conscious of it over and over again.”

“We make our own net,” Alice said. She couldn’t believe he was a churchgoer. She’d have to work her way around that.

“But we don’t make it out of that marvelous light stuff,” he said. “We make those ugly, hard, crude, clangoring links.”

“You really go to church?” Alice asked.

“I play the hymns. They pay me for it, though I would do it for nothing. I find church very sexy. I love Protestants.”

“Then you don’t believe it?”

“Believe what, darling?”

“It just arouses you?”

Annabel gave an alarmed, piercing laugh.

“ ‘I fled him down the nights and down the days/I fled him down the arches of the years/I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind/and in the midst of tears I hid from him,’ dah dah dah dah. ‘From those strong feet that followed, followed after …,’ ” the man in the tuxedo chanted, his eyes half shut. “The minister loves the old mystics. I think he’s going to have a nervous breakdown any Sunday now. Expectation runs high.” He seemed to notice Corvus for the first time, and he smiled at her and bowed a little.

“Well,” Alice said, “God’s not my owner.”

“You must like cats,” he said.

“Cats?” Alice said.

“The chosen allies of womankind.”

“Would anyone like a beverage?” Annabel said.

“Cats are accustomed to making their own decisions and implementing them out of their owner’s sight.”

“I don’t care for cats at all,” Alice said.

“Coffee perhaps?” Annabel persisted.

“No coffee for me, darling,” the piano player said. “I drink coffee at night, and I have bad dreams — headless, one-eyed men with their mouths in their armpits wanting you-know-what from me and such.”