Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Carter?” she resumed. “Do you know what I’d like for Christmas?”

That was a hard one.

“Don’t look at me all agley like that, Carter.”

“I was considering giving Annabel some pearl earrings,” he said.

“Annabel …” Ginger said. “Oh, Annabel . I hope you’re not planning on giving her my pearl earrings.”

“She’d treasure them, darling,” he said without much hope.

“Don’t even think about it.” Ginger seemed to be examining her hair again.

“Christmas is quite a ways off,” Carter said. “It’s summer here. It was one hundred ten degrees here today.”

“ ‘Here?’ ” she scoffed. “I’m quite aware of where you are, Carter, and it doesn’t impress me one bit. In any case, Christmas will be upon you before you know it, and what I want for Christmas is you.”

“Me?”

“You’re so tedious tonight, Carter. So self-absorbed. What do you think I’d want — a rosebush?” She laughed unpleasantly. “People who think they can get away with planting a goddamn memorial rosebush are beneath our contempt.”

“You shouldn’t want anything now, darling, least of all me.”

“You’re a shadow of what you used to be, Carter, it’s true. We both have to admit it.”

“Darling, I’m simply going to have to say good night now.” He was in a panic of exhaustion.

“Darling,” she said. “Darling, darling, darling, darling. You’re wearing the goddamn word out. I wish I’d had a bodyguard. He could’ve gone to restaurants with us and had sense enough to recommend shell steaks and yogurt with peaches to soak up all the booze we drank. If the place didn’t have shell steaks and yogurt with peaches, he would’ve escorted us elsewhere. He would’ve been forthright, with a big sunny grin. He’d wear blue suits unabashedly. He’d be strong. He’d instinctively know what I needed. He’d be protective and adept—”

Ginger was working herself up to quite a pitch. Then there was a queasy retinal flash and she was gone.

Carter wandered out to the kitchen. He recalled a friend of his who claimed his wife had left him after the doctor had changed her anti-depression medicine. That’s all it took. Why hadn’t Ginger’s doctor been more enterprising? He wondered if he should tell Donald about Ginger. The only thing the young man knew was that she was dead, which normally would have been enough. Should he confide in Donald? He could see the boy’s handsome, thrillingly unresponsive face. Donald might say, “Consider, Mr. Vineyard …” Donald frequently prefaced the laying out of parameters in this manner. Consider . What a remarkable, elegant word, Carter thought, the way Donald said it. He poured himself a drink.

Sherwin was eating lunch at one of his favorite neighborhood establishments. The building had been conceived as a bank, but the bank had failed. Now it was a restaurant whose intentions were difficult to determine. He and Alice were sitting in an enclosed patio that once had offered the convenience of a drive-up window. A striped awning hugged the area, altering the hue of flesh and food alike. Each table had a card propped among the condiments (the ketchup looked quite green) stating YOU’RE NOT GOING COLOR-BLIND! OUR NEW AWNING CAUSES THIS EFFECT! PEACE!” Sherwin was eating pasta primavera. Oil glistened on his chin. Alice, opposite him, hadn’t said anything for some minutes.

“You ever notice that I got a glass eye?” Sherwin asked.

“No,” Alice said.

“Pretty interesting, huh?”

“No,” Alice said. “You don’t have a glass eye. Both of them move.”

“That’s because it’s on a coral fragment. There’s a real piece of coral back there that the muscles are attached to, so it can swing around a little bit. A little piece of coral from America’s only living reef tract off Marathon, Florida.”

“You can’t take coral in the Florida Keys,” Alice said. “It’s a crime. A felony.”

“A felony!” Sherwin said.

“A misdemeanor, then. It should be a felony.”

“My God, she’d deprive me of an eye.”

“If you don’t have an eye and you put in something that looks like an eye, it doesn’t seem like the you I know. The you I know would want a big hole behind dark glasses, or you’d want an eye that looked like a tattooed egg.”

Sherwin grinned at her. “Surely you didn’t say a tattooed egg.”

“One of those eggs, you know, it starts with an F .”

“Fabergé.”

“Right. Fabergé.”

Sherwin stopped grinning. He looked down at his plate and pushed it away, then picked up a cigarette he’d left burning in the ashtray.

“Coral is alive, you know,” Alice said fretfully. “The coral reef is like an underwater forest, and a variety of marine life depends on—”

“I’m ordering some buffalo wings and sweet potato fries. The sweet potato fries are good here, you want some?”

“Why do they call them buffalo wings?”

“The term is supposed to connote whimsical fantasy, Alice.”

“That is so offensive. In less than a hundred years, Americans reduced the quintessential animal of the continent by ninety-nine-point-nine percent. Only twenty-three remained when—”

“Alice, have some fries.”

“Do you know that more than forty percent of our food has been genetically altered?” she said wearily, then gazed at the iced tea before her. Everything was big in this place, enormous. There must have been a quart of it in a disgusting pink plastic glass.

When had she fallen out of love with him? Sherwin wondered. For about two weeks, he could’ve asked her to do anything and she would’ve. That was love, wasn’t it? He’d thought he had all the time in the world to decide what to do with her. She’d amused him, repelled him. Women had always repelled him, they were whiskered slits, irresponsible, barbaric, they’d eat you alive. In dreams, he’d embrace a woman and turn into a pillar of blood.

“So when did you stop being crazy about me?”

Alice blushed. “I’m crazy about you. Why did you say you have a glass eye when you don’t?”

“I was just making conversation,” Sherwin said. “But since you’re not crazy about me anymore, why don’t you tell me what you wanted from me in the first place?”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Alice said. “I just wanted to be with you, like now.” She looked around at their surroundings, at the two loud women sitting nearby. They had poured sugar on their food so they wouldn’t eat anymore.

“So I went out to get the blower fixed,” one was saying. “It’s under warranty and they’ve moved — there’s an arrow on the door that says ‘Moved two miles down the road’—so I drive two miles down the road and there’s this hacienda-style house, though modest, with a tile roof and a center courtyard, and I go in to pick up the goddamn blower which has been nothing but trouble and I say, ‘What is this, a house?’ and they say, ‘This is Tarzan Zambini’s house!’ and I say, ‘Who the hell is Tarzan Zambini?’ and it turns out he was a lion tamer with the circus and he retired out here with his lions and they lived on one side of the house and Tarzan lived on the other and there was a swimming pool between them and the lions would swim in the pool, they loved it, but Tarzan had to move out and give up his lions when the highway went through. There he was out in the middle of nowhere with his lions, and comes progress’s inexorable wheel to slice his spread in half, and now there are these stupid lawn mowers where the lions used to play.”

“Where’d Tarzan move to?”

“I think he just passed on. Where’s a person going to move to if he’s used to having lions? Most garden apartments that are affordable and safe, who’d accept an odd old fellow like Tarzan? Probably wouldn’t even let him have a clothesline.”