Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“My advice is …” She paused. “Imagine renewing our vows, Carter, you and I. People do it all the time, all sorts of people. And what do they do before they renew their vows? They remember the happy times. The wonderful things. The bright, not the black. I am your wife and spiritual partner. I want you to come to the threshold again. Remember when we were on the threshold of marriage and all you knew was love and hope?”

He silently resisted this interpretation of his complex feelings at that time.

“I want you to see me in that light again,” she said. “You’re not seeing me in the right light. And that’s why I’m unable to ‘take off,’ as you so crassly put it.”

He protested this mutely.

“What’s the matter with you?” she snapped. “You know, I almost went into intensive care that night. I debated whether to go into intensive care on the ride in the ambulance, and then I thought about all the unpleasantness that would entail and decided against it. I never thought you were going to carry on like this, Carter. I should’ve chosen intensive care. You would’ve had your hands full then, all right.”

“You could decide?” Carter said. “It really was up to you?”

“You make me regret everything I do.”

She was truly expert at this, Carter thought.

“That was a big choice I made, and now you’re making me question it.”

No, he couldn’t possibly assure her that she had done the right thing. He was trapped. “I wish you’d give me the chance to miss you,” he said tentatively. “I think you’d be pleased.”

“How would you do that?” she demanded. “I’ll tell you how. You’d remember happy times, or you’d anticipate happy times and wish I were there to share them with you. You’re putting the cart before the horse. No, I think I’ll keep coming back until this thing is resolved.” She was scratching her neck in that nervous way she had. It really was the cocktail hour now, well into it. “Do you have any of those little snacks I like, those spicy snacks?”

He tried to behave as though he did but just couldn’t lay his hands on them. They’d always given him heartburn, he hated them.

“Doesn’t Donald like them?” she said venomously. “What’s he doing tonight, out hand-pollinating something?”

The thought of Donald fluffed Carter up a bit. “Donald—” he began.

“Oh, I don’t want to talk about him,” Ginger said. “I want to talk about me, about us, Carter, about the potential we still have together.”

“There’s no need to be jealous of Donald, darling,” Carter said. “He’s a caring and serious boy, a student of Buddhism. I actually think he could help you, Ginger.”

“Slow fat white dudes studying Buddhism make me sick.”

“Donald isn’t fat,” Carter protested. Ginger had always been overly conscious of weight.

“I can just hear him. ‘It’s only death, Ginger. Everything is fine.’ I wish people like that would shut up. Does he say, ‘Thank you, Illusion,’ every time he manages to overcome some piddling obstacle in his silly life? ‘Thank you, Illusion, thank you …’ ” she minced.

Had she been eavesdropping on Donald? Or were Buddhists — WASP Buddhists, in any case — wandering around in the unthere there just as unfulfilled as Ginger?

“You’ve always hated women, Carter. You showed it in so many little ways. You never used the ellipsoidal or elliptical form in your work, not once. It was so obvious, the efforts you made not to employ the oval form. You don’t even like horse racing. Most men, real men, like horse racing, but not you. The shape of the track was too feminine for you, too frightening.”

“Wagering has never appealed to me, darling. I have never wagered. Gambling is a disease.” Horse racing actually did repell him — those thousands of pounds of caroming flesh, bodies all treated with Lasix to keep the blood circulating inside where it belonged. Didn’t want that blood flying around the track on its own.

“A disease! Like drinking, you mean? Like infertility? You’re such a sap.”

“Infertility?” Carter said. “I didn’t know that was a disease.”

“They’re fighting to make infertility a disease so insurance companies will have to pick up the tab.”

Pick up the tab? Ginger’s language was beginning to fall off. Why was she keeping abreast of current trends, anyway? It didn’t seem necessary.

“The things you people fight for,” she sneered.

She was sounding more and more reactionary, Carter thought. Though one couldn’t expect the dead to be big fans of progress. He wasn’t fighting for anything, certainly not disease, if that’s what she was accusing him of. If anything he was fighting to stay awake, even though he’d scarcely finished his second drink. Staying awake was Donald’s most recent recommendation — arrived at, of course, by way of the Buddha. According to Donald, when some fellow inquired as to how in the dickens men were supposed to conduct themselves with women, the Buddha had first replied, “Don’t see them.” Fine, fine, in Carter’s present predicament, that should’ve been more than sufficient; but then the fellow had persisted, good for him, and said, “But if we do see them, what are we to do?” and the Buddha had answered, “Stay awake.”

Carter widened his eyes, and Ginger became, if anything, bigger.

“You should know something,” she said. “Annabel is not your child. She’s Charge Peabody’s daughter.”

“Oh stop it, Ginger.” Charge Peabody was a stellar twit, a real tosspot. Ambassador to three countries. He’d drunk himself right into the grave.

“Have him exhumed. DNA testing will prove it.”

“I’m not exhuming him, Ginger.”

“Legally his child. She could make a little money off his estate. Dig him up! I should think you’d want to get this straightened out.”

Carter darkened his drink. A nice brunette drink. She would never call it a night now, he knew. For her the night was just beginning. There was morning knowledge and evening knowledge — there always had been — and he was going to get an earful.

Alice roamed the mountain trails in the coolness of early morning. The wilderness was less than an hour’s walk away, which wasn’t right, of course, but that’s the way the world was now, available. She trotted along the trails, her eyes picking up bones. Her eyes were good at bones: lizard jaw, webby coyote skull, the winged eye sockets of the jackrabbit, tiny mice feet encased in owl droppings. She never moved them from their resting spots, she never collected. There was a hummingbird impaled on a barrel cactus, flung there by a momentary wind, a dust devil. Above the pierced and iridescent body, a bright yellow flower bloomed. That’s what Alice liked about the desert, its constant, relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once. She wished she could interest Sherwin in it, but he professed a distaste for nature, however peculiar its forms. She was running this morning to burn off some energy, so that when she saw him in his own apartment — he had actually invited her there, he had actually said cumawn over if you wanna — she’d be a little worn out and not say immature things or much at all.

Alice heard a motorbike’s whine and saw dust rising. Bikes were banned because they stressed the bighorns, though some people argued that there were no bighorns left. They had seen them once but not for a while. Alice had never seen one. The bike was tossing itself down the mountain in brief airborne flights. The bike was yellow and the biker wore black and they looked hinged together, the man and the machine. Waggling and snapping, the thing bore down. She stepped off the path into an outcropping of broken rock and picked up the first large stone she could hold in one hand, for she was not going to let him pass without protest.