The Quick & the Dead (22 page)

Ray didn’t even have the opportunity to see his old friend Pythagoras in the flowing white robes, holding an animal to his mouth to catch his dying breath, for Pythagoras believed that only animals perpetuate spirit. Ray didn’t have the comforting chance to see that. His self merely scattered. Into the lacuna.

T
he television was on again. A startled bull with a ring through its immense nostrils stood in a river. Piranha swirled about. The bull turned gray like a block of chalk, then transparent, and then it was a skeleton, floating away.

Ginger, Ginger, Carter thought, then unplugged the television, turned the screen to the wall, and draped his bathrobe over it.

“Did you buy that stock I’ve been telling you about?” she asked.

“I have not,” Carter said. He decided he was going to be matter-of-fact tonight. No more, no less. Ginger had been urging him to buy a particular stock, insisting upon it, though she’d never shown much interest in the market in the past.

“This is how people get ahead, Carter, through insider information. I’m giving you a tip.”

“Cyberstocks are very tricky, darling. The market’s still sorting itself out.”

“Aren’t you interested in how I know?” she said.

“I wish we’d done this together before,” Carter said. “It would’ve been fun, but under the circumstances I—” Could Ginger have put on a few pounds? Impossible, Carter thought. But there was no doubt about it, she had become a little hippy.

“What are you looking at?” she snapped.

“Thinking,” he said, “just thinking.”

“It’s going to be instant gratification with this stock, I assure you.”

“People who want instant gratification get clobbered by the market. This sounds very similar to the biotechnology craze just a few—”

“Don’t try to educate me, Carter. I can’t believe you still have a long-term horizon.”

Long-term horizon? She certainly had been talking to someone. “Why not?” he asked cautiously.

“Have you rearranged this room?” Ginger demanded. “You have, haven’t you? You’ve done something with the mirror.”

He looked guiltily at the mirror, which Donald had moved only a few days before. “You never should have a mirror that reflects your image in bed, Mr. Vineyard,” Donald had told him. “A mirror that reflects your body while sleeping causes unnatural dream states and a weakening of physical vitality.”

Carter got a kick out of Donald calling him Mr. Vineyard. It was getting to be a little joke between them.

“The entire room looks different,” Ginger said, annoyed. “Is it that dolt Donald’s doing? You’ll be hanging crystals in the windows next! You’ll be putting baskets filled with feathers in the corner.” Her wide hips moved her fluidly from one side of the room to the other while she ranted about Donald. She was looking astonishingly well nourished, Carter thought with dismay. She wasn’t fading away at all.

“You’ve moved the lights around as well! It’s much dimmer in here.”

Donald had told Carter that due to overbright bulbs, the bedroom was an extraordinarily unstable environment.

“Have you ever heard of
bagua
, darling?” Carter ventured.
“Feng shui?”

“I cannot believe this!”

Empty vessels make the most noise, Carter thought. Maybe this is what that meant.

“It’s just an idea,” he said, trying to be conciliatory.

“I know what it is, for godssakes, and it’s an
Oriental
idea. Carter, you’re becoming a flake. You were always dull and predictable and rational and money-oriented, and to hear you now—well, it’s pathetic.”

“My journey has changed,” Carter said, “as has yours.” He felt a little giddy talking to Ginger like this. Butting heads, as it were.

“Do you intend to marry Donald?” she said.

“Why would Donald want to get married?” He hastened to add, “What a preposterous notion.”

“Has he suggested a hot-air balloon ride yet?”

“No,” Carter said. Skimming over the desert peaks and valleys in a
colorfully patterned balloon with Donald … the idea had come up. Casting off at dawn. Elevating with the rising sun. Champagne, a few silly sandwiches. Maybe on his birthday.

Ginger pulled her hair around in front of her face in a vaguely familiar gesture and peered at the ends. “I’m letting my hair grow,” she said. “Don’t you love it?”

Carter put his head in his hands.

“Passion was never your forte,” Ginger went on. “Your member was adequate, but your lovemaking lacked élan. Admit it, Carter. You preferred making money.”

“Darling, it’s so late,” Carter said from behind his hands. “Isn’t it late?”

“Why don’t you look at your little clock?” she suggested.

Carter looked around the room, which Donald had quite transformed. Where was the clock? Ginger was taking exceptional satisfaction in its absence. His minor losses and setbacks clearly won her complete approval. Ginger was mean, she was so mean. She was aggressive, destructive, and bored, a pyramid of seemingly indestructible neuroses. No way was he going to buy that stock. He would stand firm on this one, appeal to her snobbishness. Did she want to use the opportunity she’d been given, in what was a stunning reversal of nature’s laws—to indulge in common necromancy? If only she’d make some friends there. Surely the dead had their fascinations. But Ginger hadn’t been at all interested in or moved by the dead even when she was alive.

“Carter?” she resumed. “Do you know what I’d like for Christmas?”

That was a hard one.

“Don’t look at me all agley like that, Carter.”

“I was considering giving Annabel some pearl earrings,” he said.

“Annabel …” Ginger said. “Oh,
Annabel
. I hope you’re not planning on giving her
my
pearl earrings.”

“She’d treasure them, darling,” he said without much hope.

“Don’t even think about it.” Ginger seemed to be examining her hair again.

“Christmas is quite a ways off,” Carter said. “It’s summer here. It was one hundred ten degrees here today.”

“ ‘Here?’ ”
she scoffed. “I’m quite aware of where you are, Carter, and
it doesn’t impress me one bit. In any case, Christmas will be upon you before you know it, and what I want for Christmas is you.”

“Me?”

“You’re so tedious tonight, Carter. So self-absorbed. What do you think I’d want—a rosebush?” She laughed unpleasantly. “People who think they can get away with planting a goddamn memorial rosebush are beneath our contempt.”

“You shouldn’t want anything now, darling, least of all me.”

“You’re a shadow of what you used to be, Carter, it’s true. We both have to admit it.”

“Darling, I’m simply going to have to say good night now.” He was in a panic of exhaustion.

“Darling,” she said. “Darling, darling, darling, darling. You’re wearing the goddamn word out. I wish I’d had a bodyguard. He could’ve gone to restaurants with us and had sense enough to recommend shell steaks and yogurt with peaches to soak up all the booze we drank. If the place didn’t have shell steaks and yogurt with peaches, he would’ve escorted us elsewhere. He would’ve been forthright, with a big sunny grin. He’d wear blue suits unabashedly. He’d be strong. He’d instinctively know what I needed. He’d be protective and adept—”

Ginger was working herself up to quite a pitch. Then there was a queasy retinal flash and she was gone.

Carter wandered out to the kitchen. He recalled a friend of his who claimed his wife had left him after the doctor had changed her anti-depression medicine. That’s all it took. Why hadn’t Ginger’s doctor been more enterprising? He wondered if he should tell Donald about Ginger. The only thing the young man knew was that she was dead, which normally would have been enough. Should he confide in Donald? He could see the boy’s handsome, thrillingly unresponsive face. Donald might say, “Consider, Mr. Vineyard …” Donald frequently prefaced the laying out of parameters in this manner.
Consider
. What a remarkable, elegant word, Carter thought, the way Donald said it. He poured himself a drink.

S
herwin was eating lunch at one of his favorite neighborhood establishments. The building had been conceived as a bank, but the bank had failed. Now it was a restaurant whose intentions were difficult to determine. He and Alice were sitting in an enclosed patio that once had offered the convenience of a drive-up window. A striped awning hugged the area, altering the hue of flesh and food alike. Each table had a card propped among the condiments (the ketchup looked quite green) stating
YOU’RE NOT GOING COLOR-BLIND! OUR NEW AWNING CAUSES THIS EFFECT! PEACE!
” Sherwin was eating pasta primavera. Oil glistened on his chin. Alice, opposite him, hadn’t said anything for some minutes.

“You ever notice that I got a glass eye?” Sherwin asked.

“No,” Alice said.

“Pretty interesting, huh?”

“No,” Alice said. “You don’t have a glass eye. Both of them move.”

“That’s because it’s on a coral fragment. There’s a real piece of coral back there that the muscles are attached to, so it can swing around a little bit. A little piece of coral from America’s only living reef tract off Marathon, Florida.”

“You can’t take coral in the Florida Keys,” Alice said. “It’s a crime. A felony.”

“A felony!” Sherwin said.

“A misdemeanor, then. It should be a felony.”

“My God, she’d deprive me of an eye.”

“If you don’t have an eye and you put in something that looks like an eye, it doesn’t seem like the you I know. The you I know would want a
big hole behind dark glasses, or you’d want an eye that looked like a tattooed egg.”

Sherwin grinned at her. “Surely you didn’t say a tattooed egg.”

“One of those eggs, you know, it starts with an
F
.”

“Fabergé.”

“Right. Fabergé.”

Sherwin stopped grinning. He looked down at his plate and pushed it away, then picked up a cigarette he’d left burning in the ashtray.

“Coral is alive, you know,” Alice said fretfully. “The coral reef is like an underwater forest, and a variety of marine life depends on—”

“I’m ordering some buffalo wings and sweet potato fries. The sweet potato fries are good here, you want some?”

“Why do they call them buffalo wings?”

“The term is supposed to connote whimsical fantasy, Alice.”

“That is
so
offensive. In less than a hundred years, Americans reduced the quintessential animal of the continent by ninety-nine-point-nine percent. Only twenty-three remained when—”

“Alice, have some fries.”

“Do you know that more than forty percent of our food has been genetically altered?” she said wearily, then gazed at the iced tea before her. Everything was big in this place, enormous. There must have been a quart of it in a disgusting pink plastic glass.

When had she fallen out of love with him? Sherwin wondered. For about two weeks, he could’ve asked her to do anything and she would’ve. That was love, wasn’t it? He’d thought he had all the time in the world to decide what to do with her. She’d amused him, repelled him. Women had always repelled him, they were whiskered slits, irresponsible, barbaric, they’d eat you alive. In dreams, he’d embrace a woman and turn into a pillar of blood.

“So when did you stop being crazy about me?”

Alice blushed. “I’m crazy about you. Why did you say you have a glass eye when you don’t?”

“I was just making conversation,” Sherwin said. “But since you’re not crazy about me anymore, why don’t you tell me what you wanted from me in the first place?”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Alice said. “I just wanted to be with you, like now.” She looked around at their surroundings, at the two loud women sitting nearby. They had poured sugar on their food so they wouldn’t eat anymore.

“So I went out to get the blower fixed,” one was saying. “It’s under warranty and they’ve moved—there’s an arrow on the door that says ‘Moved two miles down the road’—so I drive two miles down the road and there’s this hacienda-style house, though modest, with a tile roof and a center courtyard, and I go in to pick up the goddamn blower which has been nothing but trouble and I say, ‘What is this, a house?’ and they say, ‘This is Tarzan Zambini’s house!’ and I say, ‘Who the hell is Tarzan Zambini?’ and it turns out he was a lion tamer with the circus and he retired out here with his lions and they lived on one side of the house and Tarzan lived on the other and there was a swimming pool between them and the lions would swim in the pool, they loved it, but Tarzan had to move out and give up his lions when the highway went through. There he was out in the middle of nowhere with his lions, and comes progress’s inexorable wheel to slice his spread in half, and now there are these stupid lawn mowers where the lions used to play.”

“Where’d Tarzan move to?”

“I think he just passed on. Where’s a person going to move to if he’s used to having lions? Most garden apartments that are affordable and safe, who’d accept an odd old fellow like Tarzan? Probably wouldn’t even let him have a clothesline.”

“I hate to differ with you, Vivian,” her friend said, “but they’d allow him a clothesline if it weren’t visible from the street.”

Alice was ambivalent about the fate of Tarzan Zambini. Was it deserved or not?

The wings had arrived with the sweet potato fries. Sherwin was wearing his tuxedo. His fingers were greasy. Watching him had given Alice much pleasure in the past, but now she felt nothing. Would she forever be an empty onlooker at the feast of life? She shook her iced tea, and it spilled a little. She ate some bread.

“That’s a famous painting,” Sherwin said.

A wall was devoted to the glaring thing. “Famous?”

“It’s a reproduction of a famous painting.
The Icebergs
.”

“I like it,” Alice acknowledged, “but I don’t think it belongs here. It doesn’t seem suitable decor. It’s like the owner’s too cheap for air-conditioning. Not that I approve of air-conditioning.”

“You know why you like it? Because there aren’t any people in it. There’s a funny story about the painting. See the tiny little mast in the corner?”