Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

She moistened the tip of her finger with her tongue and smoothed her eyebrows. At least that’s what it looked like she was doing. “There’s a woman here who saw herself before she died,” she said. “Her exact double.”

“Really?” Carter said. This sounded rather gossipy, and Ginger had never been one for gossip. Carter did not know if this signified a promising development or not. Was she settling in there?

“Yup,” Ginger said. “Her exact double. Rooting through the sale panty bin in an outlet store.”

Carter picked up the bookmark, which was lobbed and weighted at both ends. Maybe he’d get Donald a belt for his birthday next month. A belt was a good idea. A belt for one thing, absolutely.

“Don’t we look all a-bubble,” Ginger snarled. “Thinking of Donald again?”

“Jealousy is a base emotion, Ginger, it’s not good for you.”

“Not good for me! You haven’t once thought about what was good for me, ever since I died. You’re not even grieving, for godssakes. You didn’t even lower the flag back in Connecticut. Not even for one measly month did you lower it.”

“Darling,” Carter said. “People feel sad, they grieve , because when someone they love dies, this person, this loved person, is no longer to be seen. But in our situation, our unusual situation, I do see you. You’re very much seen by me, which makes it impossible to give you the grieving that’s very much your due.” He offered one of his most sincere smiles.

“Don’t you feel badly about the flag?”

“You have to be in politics or something, don’t you? So I thought.”

“You infuriate me.”

“It never occurred to me that you would want the flag lowered, Ginger. What do you think about what I just said, darling?”

Ginger said nothing.

He should recite Lucretius to her, a tantalizing punishment. “Cease thy whinings, know no care.” You are dead, Ginger, dead! Give up! The intentions of the man’s words, exactly. “Nor can one wretched be who hath no being!” Not that she seemed wretched, exactly; she was merely, as in life, making him so. Where was On the Nature of Things , anyway? A little book whose dark blue cover was warped a bit from getting tangled up in a damp beach towel once. He was beginning to misplace everything.

“I’m going into the other room,” Carter said.

“The other room is crowded,” Ginger said. “I believe Annabel’s in there with those girlfriends of hers. Girls who haven’t enjoyed the advantages Annabel has, Carter. I don’t know why you allow her to associate with them.”

“You can come along if you’d like,” Carter said slyly. She had never shown up outside the bedroom. He’d always attributed her appearance to a certain relaxation of his defenses, those moments of unfixed reverie before sleep that, when she got her teeth in them, morphed into detumescence and dismay.

“You’re not going to walk out on me, Carter.”

“Come along, then,” Carter turned, too quickly perhaps, and suddenly had a dreadful headache. He wondered if he could make it to the door. But with the headache came a quickening sense of urgency about his untenable situation.

“Headache?” Ginger suggested. “Didn’t you used to have headaches as a little boy? That gradually increased in frequency and severity until they were pronounced incurable by a number of doctors? And then they went away. Isn’t that right?”

“Ginger, you simply have to stop talking for a moment, darling, please,” Carter said, crouched in awe before this headache, a Visigoth of a headache, a Cat tractor of a headache, a sucking tornadic funnel of one.

“I’m surprised you weren’t asthmatic as well. Like half those teacakes at St. George’s.”

He couldn’t hear her now over the roaring in his head. Then the pain receded, ebbed like a wave sliding back with a slight hiss from the beach it had darkened.

“Couldn’t find your bolt-hole for a minute, could you? Always good to know where your bolt-hole is when things get overwhelming, when there seems to be no escape,” Ginger said complacently.

What was a bolt-hole , for heaven’s sake? She was palling about with Australians, Louisiana fisherfolk, and women who went to discount stores for their underwear. If this had been an ordinary party, she would have made Carter take her home long ago. Did Cole Porter and William Blake have their own area or something? He supposed they might. There might be some multisectional partitioning of the Beyond. Why not?

“When you can’t find your little bolt-hole,” Ginger said, “you can find yourself being ripped apart by unhappy circumstances.”

These were, of course, unhappy circumstances, Carter thought. Strange and unhappy and peculiar circumstances.

He opened the door. There was a long carpeted hallway, then the living room, where the three girls lounged. Petals from white roses had fallen prettily over the piano.

“Would you mind helping me find something, girls? I’m looking for a book, a little book.”

“Are you sleepwalking, Daddy?” Annabel asked.

“Why no, no. I thought I’d just come out for a small nightcap and ask you girls this question.” To ask that they come into the bedroom was probably improper. He should wait until daytime. But Ginger never showed up in the daytime.

He went to the refrigerator and pushed a glass against the ice dispenser’s tongue. Radiant ice in long fingers crashed down. He thought of the icicles on the eaves of the buildings at St. George’s. Never had there been such splendid icicles. The boys had broken them off and fought with them on frigid winter mornings. There had been some pretty amazing injuries, but they’d laughed them off in the full throat of boyish exuberance. He had been thinking about St. George’s a lot lately. He wondered if he should move somewhere where there would be ice again. He missed ice, superior ice. He poured scotch into his glass, and everything became less interesting in many ways.

He returned to the girls. “I can’t reach something in my room. I was hoping you could help me.”

“You’re taller than any of us, though, Daddy,” Annabel noted. “Are you sure you’re not sleepwalking?”

Her comment seemed strange to him; maybe he didn’t need this drink. He swallowed it anyway.

“What were you-all talking about?” he said. “I could hear your voices.”

“We were talking about Mommy, Daddy, and how none of us has a mother. I was saying how Mommy used to clean up after my throw-up — I was always throwing up, remember? — and there was a little bronze bell by my bed and Mommy would always come when I rang it and she always let me put out the candles after dinner with one of those little candle snuffers. One was a silver cone and one was a little beehive and I was trying to remember other things because it was my turn. Alice didn’t want her turn.”

“Well, those are very pleasant things to remember, honey,” Carter said. Ginger had never allowed Annabel to put out the candles and in fact hadn’t spoken to the child for an entire week when somehow the beehive candle snuffer had found its way into the play yard and Annabel had flattened it with her tricycle. As far as the throw-ups, Carter did recall stuffing a number of towels into the washing machine one winter season, but mostly a psychiatrist had dealt with the situation.

“Would you girls come into my room for a moment?” he said. “Just a moment.”

But of course Ginger wasn’t there. What had she done to his mind! She’d taken part of it and was gnawing on it like a sandwich. He saw what the girls saw as they looked around the room, his rumpled bed, the scattered books, the empty glass beneath the lamp, the rings the glass had made. The room was decidedly giving the wrong impression.