Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

He let all three of them have the run of the house, but they didn’t really seem to do anything, other than in his imagination, spin, allot, and snip. What were the names of the other two? He should look it up or ask Donald. Donald was such a student. While he was at it, he’d ask him the name of the Furies too, why not? They could look up the information together. He carved a light little image in his mind of Donald’s earnest blond head bending over a sourcebook … together … learning … their breaths lightly mingling.… Carter shook himself violently and surveyed his surroundings cautiously. No one there. The girls were in the kitchen, burning something; toast, it smelled like. The Furies, also, were three in number, though not so differentiated. The Dirae , the Terrible Ones, but they were well meaning in their way, weren’t they? They just wanted to set things right. They didn’t live on Earth, but they visited it a lot. Like Ginger. He was surprised she hadn’t shown up one night with a whip of scorpions. Then he’d know what he was dealing with! An old myth. Irrelevant. Ginger was … irrelevant.

No, she wasn’t, he thought. He yawned and looked moodily at his large bare feet. He had to get a good night’s sleep soon. Take a bath before retiring, Ginger advised. Don’t dry off, just climb dripping between the sheets. Your body, attempting to protect itself, will expend energy, making you sleepy. What she wanted, of course, was for him to contract pneumonia.

In late morning, it was one hundred fourteen degrees. What was he doing here? The heat made him long for a cool New England murky. His hair felt recently boiled. He had the groggys as well, most familiar-feeling groggys. Shouldn’t drop another touch, really, beginning today. In the kitchen he saw that the girls had cleaned him out of fresh fruits again, except for two pomegranates withering in a wire basket. What was the impulse behind buying these things? In thousands of households pomegranates crouched wizened on counters. Other fruits were all taken, even plums, but pomegranates were always left. There was something shady and unsatisfying and reproachful about them. They weren’t provocative like an orange, compassionate like an apple, weren’t straightforward like a pear. When he got his shoes on, he was going to toss them out in the desert for the little foxes. Then he saw a note: “Daddy, we made you a fruit shake. It’s in the fridge.” Carter was touched. It tasted delicious, too. He finished off the entire blenderful and regarded the pomegranates with more equanimity. Let them be what they were. What was the harm?

The girls were outside, lying under a couple of pool umbrellas. The Moirai — Daughters of Night provided with shears, the Destinies who spun the fatal thread. They didn’t seem to be conversing with one another. Young, their whole lives before them, or pretty much. Gracious, it looked hot out there! Sometimes he thought that if he could just get through this summer, everything would open up.

Carter emptied ice cubes into a bowl, added water, and immersed a fresh dish towel in it. He carried it into the living room and sat on the sofa, tipping back his head and laying the cold cloth across his eyes. Donald had suggested tapas sex.

He had.

“Tapas!” Carter had cried. He thought they were those small, warm, oily appetizers served in Spanish bars. At least that’s what they’d been in the days when he and Ginger were roaming around over there, watching those stupid bullfights, throwing the cushions in indignation, driving fast and gaily through the sharply edged Castilian landscape. He had wanted to go north to Montserrat, where Wagner’s genius had placed the Grail, but they had never made it, he couldn’t recall why. It hadn’t been Ginger’s fault, he was almost certain; they hadn’t quarreled so much in those days, hadn’t disagreed about every last thing, their innocent wishes had been more synchronized. Still, they had never made it to Montserrat, huge rock reared high in the clouds.

Back then, she had called him her stroke oar.

He pushed the cloth through the ice. “What!” he had cried. “Sex tapas?” Evidently — as Donald had quietly explained it — it was a union between two individuals wherein the sex organs are used, only not in a conventional manner. Sexual energy is controlled with intense concentration as it rises to a climax, the orgasm is experienced in the head , and the sexual fluid is reabsorbed back into the system, giving the individual extra energy. Physical desire is conquered in the same instant that it is fulfilled. It sounded quite refined the way Donald described it.

Carter stirred slightly against the cushions. He liked the idea of sex conquering physical desire — inappropriate physical desire, it might be argued — at the same time that it satisfied it. It sounded like a resourceful, streamlined process, not exactly fun but thoughtful and mature.

When Carter had politely inquired if Donald had ever attempted this unconventional sex before, the boy had softly expressed himself in the negative. Not that it mattered, of course, Carter said, but he guessed what he was asking was, if it went badly — well he supposed there was no way it could go badly but if it turned out more conventionally than they might have wished — would Donald be disappointed, would he think less of himself, less of Carter, less of both of them together for it? Because that would be … that would be unfortunate, because Carter was fond of Donald, very fond.

Who was that guy, Carter wondered, sprawled upon the pillows, who spent eternity up to his neck in water, parched with a thirst that could never be assuaged because every time he bent his head to drink, the water fled away leaving the ground all around him parched and dry? He felt a little like that guy. Frustrated.

He was in a mythical state of mind this morning — sinister punishments, great opposing armies clanging around in his head, visions of boyish sport. He groped in the bowl for an ice cube and put it in his mouth. He was willing to give this tapas sex a try, he had told Donald, though maybe they should put it on hold just for the moment. He’d been sober when he said these things just as Donald was leaving for the day, which was only yesterday; it was only when he was alone, which was only last night, that the nice brown drinks kept topping themselves up, producing the debilitation of the moment. He lay there chewing ice, a cool cloth over his eyes, thinking dartingly of Donald — those dazzlingly clean T-shirts he wore, that little pursed gash on his clear face that drew the eye right down into it … Carter groaned. They should try it out, but where ? Not in this house. He could see Ginger capering around as they tried to concentrate. He wondered what it entailed — far more than just hauling out the old hose, he would imagine — but he’d been so excited that he hadn’t pressed for details.

“I don’t want to be a careerist,” Alice said. “A career, no thanks.”

“I certainly don’t want one either,” Annabel said. She was almost out of avocado body butter again, she could scarcely fathom how this had happened. “There’s nothing special about not wanting a career.” Alice thought she was so idiosyncratic. “Having a career has never preoccupied me. I want to — God — live a little, at the very least.”

Corvus lay between them like some creature in hibernation, though not curled. Annabel would protest, and she would protest loudly, if Corvus were lying curled in the classic fetal position of the inarguably depressed. She was spending too much time at Green Palms, that unscrupulous place from which emanated foul tales that just got worse and worse. That poor Mrs. McKenney, who kept a ten-dollar bill under her pillow to tip the girl who would have to wash her up after she died, had been robbed. She checked on that ten-dollar bill a hundred times a day, and someone had managed to swipe it while she was sleeping. It had been an employee, of course, a member of the rotating staff. Everyone kept rotating and rotating, they were there, then they weren’t there, then they were back again and you thought there was some schedule to it just before they were gone for good. The only ones who seemed even semipermanent — practically there since inception, which hadn’t been all that long, though the residents must have felt it comprised their entire lives — were those two nurses, one of whom was a total fright. Corvus shouldn’t involve herself so much in that place. Why didn’t anyone ever tell Corvus anything? Like, you must do this or you mustn’t do that? Corvus was throwing herself against a wall over at Green Palms. And Annabel thought that no matter how brave you were, if you just kept throwing yourself against a wall, what was the use?