Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead

“Give me Annabel’s number and I’ll call her,” Alice said, for the man seemed to have misplaced the reason he’d approached her in the first place.

Carter’s face twitched. “Yes. Terrific.” He extracted a pen and paper from his jacket in the elegant way some men have of producing these humble instruments.

“Do you have another girlfriend you could bring along?”

“I wouldn’t right away,” Alice said cautiously. Maybe a rapprochement with life could be made possible for Corvus by employing this Annabel person, or maybe not.

“I’m just wondering if I should find someone else as well. I was determined to do something about this today, get Annabel started.” He gave a happy sigh. “I like it out here. People seem accessible.”

He was a little nuts, Alice thought. She kind of liked him.

Outside, the Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets person was crouched sobbing, in handcuffs, while a policeman watched her warily. “A work of reference ain’t worth this, lady,” he said.

Alice called Annabel and was immediately invited over to her house. It was in the foothills with a big pool and the city below and nothing behind but the hard, folded mountains still trying to conceal what they knew. The first impression Alice had of Annabel was that she was exceptionally tan. Annabel said her mother used to be able to tan like that, she loved tanning practically more than anything, but when she was forty-two, her skin stopped providing that service. It just wouldn’t tan up for her anymore. She said that a friend of her mother’s had told her that it was age and hormones and nothing could be done about it, and her mother had wept.

“Some people didn’t know how to be friends,” Alice said.

On the piano in the living room was a picture of Annabel’s mother in a silver frame. She wasn’t laughing in this picture.

Annabel made a spinach and fig and jicama salad for lunch, then she and Alice sat by the pool eating the salad and drinking seltzer water and chatting, tranquiling out on the trivial as some people do when they first meet and sometimes forever after. The area around the pool was intensely groomed desert vegetation. There was one of everything, but nothing was too tall except for three saguaros that clearly had just been purchased and were propped up with planks. Annabel confided that she thought saguaros were cute, the cutest things in the desert so far.

“This is a nice house,” Alice mumbled.

“I like the airily articulated spaces,” Annabel said.

Alice looked at her.

“That’s one of Daddy’s lines.”

“But that Indian’s a little tacky, isn’t it?” The Indian sat in a bent willow chair, moodily gazing at the pool and the valley plain below. Alice had almost greeted him deferentially when she arrived. He was plastic, life-sized, dressed in a shirt and jeans and moccasins. His limbs were jointed, and his hair was braided. “I mean, when you think of the way we exterminated the Indian, the way we took his land and extinguished his spirit.”

“Daddy says it’s inferior taxidermy,” Annabel said, nibbling on a fig. “It’s just a dumb house present.”

Alice followed the Indian’s glum gaze. She told Annabel that deer often came down from the mountains and drowned in people’s swimming pools and asked if that had happened here yet, and Annabel said, of course not, of course it hadn’t happened. Alice said there were lots of robberies in the foothills and had they been broken into yet and Annabel said no, a million alarms would go off, the house was programmed to attack and behead the intruder practically. Alice told her about the Little Caesar Murderer, where the guy would get into the house, murder its inhabitants, then take a shower and send out for a pizza. Annabel seemed preoccupied.

“I should tell you,” Annabel said. “I take these exercises, and sometimes they really work and I don’t care about anything and I accept everything, but usually I’m very conscious of my body and I want to look pretty and have pretty things and be happy and open to new experiences and I want people to be interesting and fun and that’s just the way I am.” She twisted strands of her hair with her fingers and looked at the ends.

“What kind of exercises?” Alice asked. Near them, hummingbirds with the swollen bodies of mice hovered.

“Oh, you know, everything’s in your mind . You just sit quietly and try to believe that. They’re these exercises you do after someone you love has died. Someone figured them out, I bet he’s a millionaire.”

Alice must next have asked Annabel about her mother, the pale woman in the silver frame, for Annabel went on, formally and incoherently: It had not been long ago. She’d been struck by a car. Instantaneous, her flight to Heaven. There was something about a fish restaurant.

Alice, whose unevolved sense of compassion for her own kind had been more than once remarked upon, said, “A fish restaurant, here? Where do you find a fish restaurant around here?”

“She’d had four martinis and was mad at Daddy. She ran out of the restaurant onto the highway. It wasn’t here, it was back home.”

“I would absolutely refuse to go into any fish restaurant,” Alice said. “Entire species of fish are being vacuumed out of the seas by the greed of commercial fishermen. People used to think fishermen were so cool, like truck drivers, but they’re indiscriminate, avaricious bastards grossly subsidized by the government to empty the oceans.”

Annabel gathered up her hair from the back of her neck, held it a moment, framing her pretty face, and let it drop.

“Do you know fish can talk?” Alice said. “They squeeze their swim bladders or gnash their teeth or rub some of their bones together. They produce sounds ranging from buzzes and clicks to yelps and sobs.”

“I don’t know what this has to do with my mother,” Annabel said. “It just happened to be a fish restaurant.”

“I’ve got this thing about fish,” Alice admitted.

They were quiet for a moment, then Annabel asked, “Would you like to play cribbage? I could get out the cribbage board.”

Alice had drifted off. She saw the noble swordfish rotting in the ghost net’s raptorial web. Cribbage, what was cribbage? This Annabel was in deep denial. That swordfish was not swimming away. “No,” she said, “let’s just sit here.”

“I love leisure time,” Annabel said. “It’s my favorite kind of time.”

“Leisure follows the consumption pattern,” Alice said, “and is managed by an industry that sells boredom-compensating commodities.”

Annabel wished she had an emery board at that moment.

“Do you ever feel you’re on parole?” Alice asked. “Not just locally but cosmically? And that’s why you’re not doing what you really want to do even when you think you’re doing it?”

“Parole!” Annabel said. “Certainly not. I haven’t done anything. Let’s go for a swim. A swim is just a swim, isn’t it? It’s nothing you have to feel guilty about.”

They swam. Annabel complimented Alice on her vigorous butterfly, even though she personally found the stroke unappealing. They bobbed and floated. Annabel talked about perfume. There was a perfume for practically every hour of the day. You had to be subtle but precise. At noon you would think you could go all out, but you couldn’t; noon was tricky. She talked about travel. Annabel believed, and she believed this strongly, that when you went to another country you should always take little jars of bubbles for the children and little bars of soap for the adults and hand them out; it made for good relations, made those foreign people glad you were there. She talked about her sentiments and fears. She missed the flowers back east and the mizzle that accompanied the fog in from the sea. She sometimes worried about losing a limb — an arm — it would be awful. She didn’t know where that worry had come from. She didn’t even know anyone who had lost a limb. She talked about boys. She had slept with two boys; she was glad it hadn’t been just one.