Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“Getting out on the, ah … water, certainly seems to agree with you,” Carter said.

“You should come along next time. Always room for one more on the Revelance .”

Carter winced. He simply could not stand the name. “I don’t think I’d be welcome.”

“Oh, you would, Carter, you would!” She bent toward him. “Why stay here? This is no place for you. Do you know that the desert is the loneliest land ever to come from God’s hand?”

“No, I … why, that’s very prettily put.”

“He said that himself. Didn’t know why he even bothered making the damn thing.”

“Actually,” Carter said, “on further reflection I’d have to disagree. I don’t think it’s any lonelier than anyplace else.”

“You disagree?” Ginger said.

“That is only one of the sometimes many benefits of being alive, as opposed to being dead. When you’re dead, as you are, Ginger, you don’t have the option of expressing a conflicting point of view.”

“You are actually disagreeing with—”

“Plus, when dead, I suppose you’re more conscious of which side your bread is buttered on.”

“I fail to appreciate the point you’re making here, Carter.”

She had recovered the use of phrasing, at least. They’d always been known for their educated quarrels. If overheard, people would say, “Well, at least it’s an educated quarrel.”

With a start, he realized it was daytime. Ginger was here at the pinnacle of healthful day, when the arrows of death flew unseen. This new development perturbed him. She had reached some new level of accomplishment or confidence. Daylight was streaming into the room as though to some promised jubilee.

Donald had suggested that Carter simply tell Ginger to go away , which just showed how little the wonderful boy knew about women, particularly a woman like Ginger. But Donald insisted that his mother had good luck with this back in Nantucket when there were silverfish in the drawers. “Go away,” she’d said firmly to the silverfish, not yelling, and they had. Another suggestion of Donald’s, which he’d carried out surreptitiously, was to scatter salt in the corners of the bedroom, but that had not been effective either. He’d had an idea himself but had forgotten it. What had it been? An apathy had overtaken him in the last few days, a numbness, a peculiar weariness. A hair had sprouted from his ear, vigorously long and ugly. His headaches were adopting a schedule of sorts. His feet itched.

There was a knock on the door.

“I’m not leaving,” Ginger said.

“Daddy?” Annabel called.

“What do you mean, you’re not leaving?”

“I won’t leave, and there’s nothing you can do to make me, nothing at all. Your crucials are at hand,” she added, alarmingly.

“Daddy!” Annabel cried. “A terrible thing has happened.”

He flung open the door.

Annabel was holding a crumpled paper napkin in her hand. “She blew her nose in it!” she wailed.

Carter looked at it, dumbfounded. It did look used, not disgustingly so but definitely damp; a paper napkin, after all, fulfilling, perhaps, its destiny.

“I’m sorry,” Alice called from somewhere.

“We were in my room,” Annabel cried, “and I have this little thing for Mommy there that I’ve made.”

“A thing for Mommy,” Carter said. “What kind of thing for Mommy?”

“It wasn’t like a retablo because I didn’t have anything to be thankful for, but it was this little arrangement that helped me think about Mommy. It had this little napkin that was in her purse that night and a lipstick and then that little photo of us together — I cut you out of it, Daddy, because this is for Mommy — and that silver hairbrush that had been on her bureau, it even had some of her hair in it—”

“Not my hair,” Ginger mouthed, shaking her head.

“It was just something I could dwell on, and—”

“You shouldn’t be dwelling on this, honey,” Carter said.

“—they were these meaningful things I’d collected, and Alice knew that. She knew that! And we were in my room and she sneezed and then she grabbed the little napkin right off my arrangement.”

“Honey, why don’t you sit down while we talk.” Carter gestured to the edge of the bed opposite to where Ginger had settled herself.

“I don’t want to, Daddy. Daddy, what am I going to do?”

“I never carried paper napkins around in my purse,” Ginger said. “What kind of person does she think I was?”

“I don’t like it here, Daddy. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“Sit down, honey.”

She looked directly at the place where Ginger was, he could swear she did.

“I don’t want to sit down. What good would sitting down do?”

“Honey, what would you say if I told you Ginger visits me sometimes, that she comes right into this room. What would you say?”

“Poor Daddy,” Annabel said.

Well, that’s sensible, Carter thought.

“How do you make it happen, Daddy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you pretend?”

“God, no.” Carter pointed. “She’s right over there.”

Annabel looked disconsolately through the empty space.

“She’s developing your chin, Carter,” Ginger said, “which is too bad. You could slice a roast with a chin like that.”

“You have to be serious sometimes, Daddy.”

He had never seen Ginger more incarnate. She was pulsating with an almost animal energy. No longer content with just existence after death, she had to be active as well. That day of sailing — but of course there couldn’t have been a day of sailing. Even so, he could picture the good ship Revelance borne on the back of a great fish, though surely in Ginger’s case the fish part was coincidence.

“Ginger,” he said, “your daughter wants to think about you, to make contact, and you’re being most inconsiderate, Ginger, by failing to respond. You were never as demonstrative toward Annabel as you could have been, and now’s the time.”

“Daddy,” Annabel cried, wringing the napkin, “don’t! You’re scaring me.”

“She’s not very plucky, is she?” Ginger noted. “Not much spunk. Charge wasn’t long on spunk either, as I learned to my disappointment.”

“She has my chin,” Carter said loudly. “You said so yourself.”

“Daddy, Daddy,” Annabel said.

“Honey, what would you like to say? Maybe this should be our approach.”

“Mommy,” Annabel said, “if you’re there, I don’t think you should be.”

“That’s very good,” Carter said, brightening. “Very good, honey.”

“Your opinions are laughable,” Ginger said, then laughed. Annabel was gravitating toward her. “Noli me tangere,” Ginger warned.

“Oh, please,” Carter said. “Isn’t that overly dramatic?” Still, it probably wouldn’t be helpful to actually touch … he tugged Annabel back.

“Must you involve everyone you know in our relationship?” Ginger complained. “This is between a man and a woman, you and me, two great antipodes of the universe. Why drag family into it? I’m asking for very little, only you.” She made a dramlike space between two fingers, which triggered in Carter the desperate desire for a strong drink.

She was becoming so bold she was practically thrumming . She’d show up at his parties next. Surrounding himself with others would soon no longer help. She’d be leaping into his arms, and then no one need bother calling a physician, any coroner would do. And to think that chance had brought them together so many years before, sheer chance. Surely he hadn’t been destined for this as a child, small for his age but then suddenly growing, thriving, at St. George’s. The open window with its eight-over-eight lights. The huge sills dusted with crumbs for the sparrows. The coldness of his sheets. The clock tower overlooking his world of happy preparation. To persevere and grow! Their inquiries had been ontological in nature. Oh, happy happy years of preparation. But then the preparation stopped.