Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

They got out of the pool, and Annabel offered to make lemonade, real lemonade with fresh lemons and raw sugar.

“You are aware, are you not,” said Alice, “that American sugar is destroying the Everglades? Big Sugar is a wealthy powerful government-sponsored ecoterrorist that pollutes thousands of acres of one of the most remarkable ecosystems on the planet. Your little bag of sugar dooms hundreds of beautiful wading birds to death by phosphorus and heavy-metal poisoning. We should import our sugar from Cuba, kick the growers off the land around Lake Okeechobee, and — what are these!” A set of glasses on the cabana wet bar were colored in different patterns, stripes, and spots. Inside each was a scene of animals grazing or walking around, exotic animals such as zebras and leopards and giraffes, and on the glass was a circle with lines on it like the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

“I will not drink anything out of these disgusting glasses,” she said. “Where do you get this stuff?”

“It was a house present,” Annabel said. “Another house present.”

“Your father has the worst friends,” Alice said. “Where does he find these people?”

“I don’t know, he just goes out and gets them!” Annabel poured Diet Pepsi into two plain glasses and hoped that not everyone she met out here would be as censorious as Alice.

Carter entered his bedroom with a terrible foreboding that Ginger would be there tonight. He undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. Almost immediately he heard a noise like someone rattling a newspaper. He turned on the lamp. Ginger was sitting in her little chintz-covered boudoir chair with an open newspaper raised to her face. She was close enough for him to read it himself, though he very much did not want to. There was a column on wine with an illustration depicting a nest in a tree. The nest contained a single egg that had broken open to reveal — well, it had hatched a wineglass, it was clear and birds with feet and wings but with the bodies of wine bottles were flying in to provide it with sustenance. That was repulsive, Carter thought. What edition was this?

“Carter,” Ginger said, “do you remember at the club that day in the reading room, Jeannie Winters behind the paper? She said, ‘One of my husbands just died,’ and that was all. She didn’t even put it down, she just went right on to the entertainment section. Wasn’t that a scream? I thought — I would like to be able to do that.” She lowered the paper. “But I never could, Carter, because I was wedded only to you. My life with you prevented me from being stylish like that.”

Carter looked at her. “You seem rather deshabille tonight, my darling.”

“While I loved you and all that, I would very much have liked to have gotten off a line as good as Jeannie Winters’. What do you mean, deshabille? It took a lot out of me coming here, and to this unfamiliar house. Why did you buy such an enormous house? And in the desert, thousands of miles from our home. I know what you’re thinking, Carter.”

“What?” he asked.

“You’re thinking you’ll keep moving around, farther and farther away, and I won’t be able to find you.”

Carter had always been grateful for his ability to conceal his thoughts from Ginger, but this, alarmingly, wasn’t too far off the mark. Still, if you’re not all-knowing when you’re dead, very little makes any sense at all. Very little.

“I want to settle down for Annabel’s sake, darling.”

“What sort of future do you have, Carter? Really, think about it. You have a diminishing future, so why bother? You snore, you know.”

“I do not snore,” Carter said. “I have never snored.”

“I used to think it was merely obnoxious, but it’s undoubtedly sleep apnea, which is a potentially life-threatening disorder. You probably stop breathing hundreds of times each night, Carter.”

“I do not snore,” Carter said. “Darling, it’s silly to argue about this. Tell me what it’s like there, why don’t you? Are odd stones in flannel rolled out to be adored?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always rather had that notion.”

“It’s not like that at all, for godssakes,” Ginger said. “That’s the dumbest attempt at embodying the unspeakable I’ve ever heard.”

“I misunderstand a great deal of what I think,” Carter said.

“Speaking of stones, I wouldn’t have minded one of my own. You could’ve inscribed upon it ‘Here lies the victim of an unhappy marriage.’ Nothing fancy, just to the point.”

Carter felt warm, then cold, then warm again.

“You should be in bed by nine,” Ginger said peevishly. “That’s when the liver repairs itself, between the hours of nine and three. Your body turns to liver restoration during the hours of darkness. I see your liver at this moment, Carter — you may not believe me, but I do. It is yellow, knotty, and hard.”

“Cut it out, Ginger,” Carter said. “If you would. Please.”

“You are a prime candidate for cirrhosis, you know. You don’t have a hair on your chest. If you were a bit more … simian, you’d have a better chance.”

“I didn’t think you cared all that much about my liver, darling.”

“You’ll always be forever in my thoughts, Carter. When will you realize that? When?”

Carter shuddered.

“What are Annabel’s plans for the summer?” Ginger inquired.

“She’s just going to try and get her bearings out here, make some friends.”

“I’ve never liked Annabel’s friends. Do you know what will happen to Annabel? She’ll grow up and then she’ll die.”

Carter was shocked for a moment. Though it wasn’t a particularly radical comment, he felt the need to temper it nonetheless. “But she’ll have had her own life, darling.”

“Oh, you believe that,” Ginger said irritably. “You’ll believe anything.”

“Annabel loves you, darling.”

“Well, I certainly hope so. I hope she’s not being encouraged to think that she idealized me inappropriately.” She twisted a little pearl button on the bodice of her dress, kept twisting until it fell off. “Shit,” she said.

Carter feared he’d find it on the floor in the morning and watched carefully as she placed the button in her pocket. She then spoke at length about the futility of existence and the vanity of all human effort and desire. Her monologues, if anything, seemed to be getting longer. Under ordinary circumstances, if people kept going on like this you’d tell them after a while to put up or shut up, but of course Ginger had put up. She had died.

She extended a narrow hand and pointed to his books, his ties, even his travel alarm from Tiffany’s, one of his favorite things. “All this is unnecessary, Carter.”

He didn’t like the way she was eyeing the little clock. There had been incidents of destruction in the past. “Ginger, please don’t break that.”

“A clock , Carter? I mean, please. You’re clinging to a clock ?”

Carter covered the clock with his hand, where it ticked warmly.

“It crouches there watching the course of your life’s disintegration. Its only function is to witness your decline.”

“I like it,” Carter said. “I like its lines.”

“Time is circular, you fool. That’s the whole point.”

Carter resolutely held the little clock.

“Don’t cling, Carter. I’ve come back to help you in these matters. You must commence the casting off of material things. Where are my things, incidentally? What have you done with my clothes?”

If he uttered the word rummage , she would murder him, despite the fact that it was a good churchy rummage to benefit … who was it?… Haitians, he believed. The clothes that had somehow managed to infiltrate the belongings they’d shipped out here had been donated to … he hadn’t followed up on that transferal. He was silent.