Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

“I kind of hoped I might see her here.”

“How old are you?” Annabel asked.

He’d forgotten for a moment what he’d told Alice. He usually told women that he was twenty-eight. He couldn’t get away with that with men. “Twenty-eight,” he said.

“How old really ?”

“You’re hurting my feelings,” Sherwin said. In the other room, someone was playing the piano. He might as well not even be here tonight. It was a strange night, the kind of night where thoughts of the immeasurable greatness of the sea that none can cross kept intruding. He liked to keep such thoughts in their place. He didn’t mind entertaining them amusingly while alone but found them formidably undesirable when they accosted him in public. In public, he preferred harboring thoughts of self-destruction, but not of the way-of-death variety.

One of the buttons of his shirt was cracked in half — therefore not qualifying as a button, right? — and Annabel could see his skin, which was watery white. He had to be forty years old, maybe even more. She shuddered. “Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me how old you are. You’re only as old as you feel.” What did that actually mean? Annabel wondered. She wished she hadn’t said it.

“You don’t want to know anything about me,” Sherwin pouted.

“Oh, I don’t,” Annabel said with great feeling.

“Well, we’re both great fans of Alice.”

“We are ?” Annabel said.

Sherwin laughed.

“Alice can be so mean,” Annabel said. “Maybe you don’t know her mean side. Once I said to her, ‘You’re such a septic, Alice,’ and she was all over me because I said ‘septic.’ She’s so vain about language. It was just a little mispronunciation, and she was all over me.”

Sherwin laughed again.

“I don’t think Alice will ever have fans.” Annabel said. If Alice were here, she’d be having a fit about salmon being served. The whole thing about salmon was sort of pathetic. That need to return. And when they did succeed in returning to the place where they had been born or spawned or whatever, didn’t they just rot?… like immediately …

“If you’re not a fan by nature — I don’t mean just a fan of Alice’s, but a fan by nature — then you must be aware of the presence of God.”

“Oh, I can’t — I just can’t talk like this.” Annabel said.

“An awareness of the presence of God enables a person to resist the false values of mass communications, which create fans, enthusiasts, fantasists.”

“I think mass communication is wonderful,” Annabel said. “I think it’s done an awful lot of good.” She had turned quite pale.

“Hey, relax,” Sherwin said. “I’m just kidding around.”

The ponytail had returned to the kitchen, his platter of salmon puffs denuded.

“Jonathan!” she screamed.

“Will you tell Alice I’m sorry I missed her?” Sherwin said.

“Sorry you missed her,” Annabel said. “Certainly.” Is this what they did together, he and Alice? It was sick.

She picked up a little ceramic butter dish, took the top off, and then put it back on. The lid was in the shape of a little hen, and a chick was nestled in the hen’s wing. She had bought it for her mother for Christmas one year and of course her mother had hated it, wanting nothing with the merest whiff of domesticity as a gift. Annabel took the top off again; it fit back only one way. How absorbing this little dish was … she wished Sherwin would leave. She glanced up and saw with relief that he actually was walking away, twitching and rolling his shoulders in the dark tuxedo. He was so odious and incoherent . Someone else was playing the piano anyway. Was he even necessary?

Sherwin passed through the kitchen and slowed but did not stop his passage into the great room, where the guests were still striving toward the party’s high note, which it might not achieve. Madder music was required. He didn’t look at the piano. By the door there was a table in the shape of an elephant. Indian, Sherwin thought. Right? They’re the ones with the smaller ears, the longer face. On top of it was a glass of white wine with an hors d’oeuvre in it, looking for all the world like a turd in a toilet.

Outside, he moved away from the light of the party, down the length of the house. Below, cupped in the valley, the lights of the city trembled, and high up, in further darkness, a greenish wad of light burned solitary and bright — a mine reopened, working out its semiprecious stones. He stood and smoked. Sometimes we exist, he thought, and sometimes we pretend to exist, which takes considerably more effort. He walked to the end of the house. Metal animals were spiked into the decoratively inclined earth as one-dimensional entertainment. A troupe of quail. A life-sized javelina.

He hadn’t realized how big a house it was. One wing angled off westward. The house, subtly, seemed to go on and on. Sherwin grinned and shook his head. It was like the classic dream where you dream there’s one more room to your house — silly me, it’s been there all the while, and what? I’d forgotten? A whole other room! Of course it wasn’t his own house, it was his sometime employer’s house, the man who signed the checks. He touched the handle on a glass door, and it slid back on its tracks with a dry whisper. He patted the wall for a light switch.

It was a bedroom, ornate as the rest of the house but tousled and cold. Cold as a meat locker. There were silk sheets on the bed of a dark rose color. Long mirrors, the kind you attached to the backs of doors, leaned against the walls. Drinking glasses and books scattered about, a few table lamps, the ones with shades as tall as a child. An overhead fan rotated slowly, making the room colder still. Now, this was a room you could go out in, a room that made no bones about it. This would be a room to introduce to Alice.

“ ‘There shall be no sea, they say/On Nature’s great coronation day/when the Bridegroom comes to the Bride’ dum dum dum dum.” But what that meant, of course, was nullity, not the old in-and-out. Maybe he should make a few preparations and come back here to deal himself his blow. Clean his apartment, tell his few remaining acquaintances their failings, get a colonic irrigation.… He picked up the nearest reading material, The Worst Journey in the World , by one Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It had Carter’s bookplate in it. Carter might be a bit of a goose, Sherwin thought.

The Worst Journey in the World was polar in nature, as the worst-journey genre tended to be, and concerned the doomed Antarctic explorer Scott, a figure for whom Sherwin had little empathy. Scott had made it clear in his diaries that although he and his little group (a fateful asymmetrical seven rather than the originally planned-for six) had the means to take their own lives in an emergency, they decided when the last fatal blizzard descended to die naturally. Sort of the let-the-body-deal-with-it-rather-than-the-mind attitude. But their decision to consciously freeze to death was sort of an ultrasuicide. They got foxed.

Sherwin put the book down. He was surprised there wasn’t some porn or some other sign of innocent human diversion. The room eluded him, its destiny seeming a little vague. He couldn’t even hear the party from here.

He switched on the VCR on top of the television set, and Africa bloomed. The veldt. People with remarkable cheekbones. A Land Rover tearing along.

“This is the part that’s always supposed to bring a tear to your eye,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s when they’ve left the lioness for a week and it’s the rainy season and she isn’t able to get anything to eat and she’s half starved. But that’s not the real Elsa there. That’s her stand-in.”