Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“I hate to differ with you, Vivian,” her friend said, “but they’d allow him a clothesline if it weren’t visible from the street.”

Alice was ambivalent about the fate of Tarzan Zambini. Was it deserved or not?

The wings had arrived with the sweet potato fries. Sherwin was wearing his tuxedo. His fingers were greasy. Watching him had given Alice much pleasure in the past, but now she felt nothing. Would she forever be an empty onlooker at the feast of life? She shook her iced tea, and it spilled a little. She ate some bread.

“That’s a famous painting,” Sherwin said.

A wall was devoted to the glaring thing. “Famous?”

“It’s a reproduction of a famous painting. The Icebergs .”

“I like it,” Alice acknowledged, “but I don’t think it belongs here. It doesn’t seem suitable decor. It’s like the owner’s too cheap for air-conditioning. Not that I approve of air-conditioning.”

“You know why you like it? Because there aren’t any people in it. There’s a funny story about the painting. See the tiny little mast in the corner?”

“There’s food on it, I think.” The work had not escaped spillage.

“That’s the crow’s nest from a wrecked ship. The artist’s name was Church, a famous landscape painter a century ago, but when he exhibited The Icebergs , no one exclaimed over it. The reaction was so reserved that Church lugged the painting back to his studio and painted in that tiny little smashed-up crow’s nest to give it a little human dimension, see what I’m saying? Like, man was here, even though he was destroyed, he got to see this cold, immense, monumental thing and was ennobled by his very inconsequentiality before it.”

“Did they like it any better after he put the wreck in it?” It was the smallest of corrections, Alice noted.

“The public? No, flotsam and jetsam didn’t do it for them. Flotsam and jetsam just reminded them of their own paltry selves, that they were tramps and drifters and vagrants in this life, nothing more. The public hated the painting. Church was crushed. Frederic Edwin Church. Of the luminist school.” He regarded Alice thoughtfully. She was sexless but troubling. He wanted to go away and then send for her, that’s what he wanted. He wanted to leave and have her follow. We are in exile here. We are strangers and pilgrims in this place. Two on a party, a solitude of two. He wanted to twist her to him.

“Note the cruciform shape,” Sherwin said. “It’s a very persistent symbol. The symbol of symbols. The cross represents a way out; it moves, renews, implies further voyaging. But Church used it cynically. The painting disappeared. It got lost for one hundred and sixteen years. Then it was found. In some stairwell at a school for bad boys.”

“Why not bad girls?” Alice said. She was listening to a story that wasn’t true, maybe, a story that could still be altered. Annabel had told her not to encourage him by believing him.

Sherwin laughed. “Bad girls! They would’ve torn it apart with their long, painted nails. They would’ve wanted to see it burn. It was a kind providence that kept it out of the bad girls’ school.”

“Well, what did the bad boys do to it?”

“They didn’t harm it, except for one bad boy who signed it.”

“That’s nice!” Alice exclaimed. “What happened to him?”

“Forget him, he’s dead by now. Don’t you want to belong to me?”

Alice took a swallow of her iced tea. It tasted like the smell in Fury’s ears. Some of these herbal teas went too far.

The waiter came up. “Impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake,” he said. “You want anything else? A nice mud pie?”

“Maybe my wife does,” Sherwin said.

The waiter looked at her, amused. Alice reddened and shook her head.

“Naw, that’s it then.” Sherwin took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and gave it to the man, who wore white clinging plastic gloves.

“Have a nice remainder of the rest of your life,” the waiter said. “Gotta cough.” He turned away.

Sherwin shook his head. “The last act begins inauspiciously.”

“I don’t get this place,” Alice said.

“That’s because you’re a child of the dominant culture.”

“I’m nobody’s child,” Alice said.

“We won’t come here anymore.”

“Good.”

“Sometimes I prefer the haunts of criminals, but sometimes I like to avoid them too.”

Alice glanced at the two women. They were sprinkling more sugar on their food just to make sure. Tarzan Zambini had been dismissed.

“No criminals patronize this place,” Alice said.

“Just you and me.”

“I wish,” Alice said fervently.

Outside, a man in harlequin rags was screaming at the empty street, declaiming against a world that cared a great deal less than he imagined.

“Yeah,” Sherwin said, “you and me.”

Alice nibbled more bread.

“What are you going to do about that tooth?”

“I’m getting an oral implant,” she said guiltily.

“You’ll be tracked down through your teeth. You won’t be able to call your life your own.”

“I don’t have a Social Security number,” Alice said.

“I thought you were going to unhinge things. You don’t need perfect teeth for that.”

“I never even had a cavity before,” Alice said.

“Soon you’ll be getting bone-density scans. Time goes by like this.” He snapped his long fingers. “But still, I want to confess something to you. I never intended to live this long. You want to cuddle with me in a bathtub?”

It didn’t sound wholesome. “Sure,” Alice said. “But you don’t have a bathtub.” She remembered that there was no tub where he lived; instead, a shower stall of that somewhat flexible consistency.

“You know anyone with a tub?” Sherwin lit another cigarette, and his hand shook a little. He’d tried it before. There were names for people like him. Attempters. Parasuicides. He preferred Attempter. If you were successful, you were called a Completer, although they avoided the word successful . He’d known guys … Larry, a Completer if ever there was one. He’d gone out in the most beautiful leather coat. None of them had known he even owned such a thing. It was unborn calf, or some buttery, ineffable creature. Larry had employed pills and Absolut, and what a presentation their Larry had made: fresh haircut, pedicure, a dash of glitter on his eyelids, Purcell playing over and over on his distinguished audio system . Cave, Cave, Dominus videt … Larry had actually thought God was watching!

“How about your friend Corvus? She got a tub we could borrow? She’s always seemed mystical and pessimistic to me. It’s an intriguing combination.”

“You and Corvus should never ever meet,” Alice said.

“What do you mean? We’ve met.”

“You can’t talk to her this way, the way we’re talking, this I-love-you stuff, this words-are-just-noise stuff, this bathtub stuff.”

“You know to what I allude,” Sherwin said. “This is wonderful for me.”

“You’re kind of like a disease,” Alice said sincerely, “an immunizing disease, which I like. But Corvus, no, no, no.”

“An immunizing disease,” Sherwin said.

“Corvus is … I don’t want you to talk about Corvus.” She stood up. “I want to go.”

The horrible waiter reappeared, seemingly transfixed by the sight of them together. Sherwin looked at The Icebergs on the way out. There was something on it, Alice had been right, not food itself but the stains of food. The crow’s nest really was a nice touch — a little desperate, of course, but Sherwin had always found the shape of a cross to be pleasing. The cross was the symbolic image of death, a death distinguished from mere biological anonymity, a death surrounded by an aura of hope and uncertainty.