Free The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams Page A

handsome vault. You know how I really pictured it? I pictured you going first, of course. And then when my turn came and I was lowered into our tomb, your skeleton arms would open to receive me.”
    She got that right out of Héloïse and Abélard, Carter thought, history’s most tedious couple. He hoped Ginger wasn’t going to start writing to him. “Darling, please,” he said, “give it a rest.” Dead for months and still complaining about his driving, the way he had to clear his throat sometimes, his tipping practices (twenty percent), which she considered excessive. He studied her. She looked the same, and she was glaring at him.
    “You never liked my breasts. You never paid any attention to them.”
    “I disagree with you there, darling. I’m sorry to say I disagree with you categorically over that one. I love—I loved—your breasts, your silver breasts. Your pearlescent breasts.”
    “No, no, no,” Ginger moaned. “You were a false alarm, and I answered it.”
    Carter’s stomach hurt. Those lambchops were down there thinking, What’s happened to us now? Where … why, this is incomprehensible.… He closed his eyes, hoping Ginger might vanish, though this had not been effective in the past. She stayed and stayed, sometimes for hours, her masterly and intricate condemnation of him going on and on. Gingerwas clearly, merely, a thought of his and could be replaced with another. Why couldn’t he do that? Maybe he needed a little instruction along these lines, a little training. He opened his eyes. Ginger was still there.
    “I don’t understand,” he said, “why you didn’t show up when Annabel wanted you.”
    “Never, never will I. She’d flip out if I did.”
    “What is it you want, Ginger?” Carter asked. His stomach shrieked, then fell silent.
    “I want you to acknowledge your responsibilities. You’re a married man, and marriage is a sacrament. It is indissoluble. I’m mortified by this Donald business. Mortified. You’ve turned into an old queen, Carter. You look so silly when you’re infatuated. Your eyes practically cross.”
    Suddenly, the bedroom door began shaking in its frame. The ties, hanging there on a hook, slumped to the floor. The door flew open, and Annabel stood yelling in full nightmare.
    “Pieces—in all the corners. Small, but too big—little pieces—”
    Ginger evaporated as Carter hurried toward his daughter. He wore enormous blue boxer shorts.
    “Left-handed people die sooner,” Annabel hollered, flailing out at him and hitting him in the mouth.
    “Not true,” he managed to say. “It isn’t, no, none of it.”
    “Oh Daddy, I’m sorry.” Annabel said. She went back to bed. Carter went to the kitchen and made another drink. He pushed ice under his lip, sliding it along his gum. Nobody he knew was left-handed. He put
Tristan and Isolde
on and sat in the dark. He loved
Tristan
. All meaning lay in the things its characters didn’t do or say; everything vibrated within the stillness of the characters, poised for actions that they postponed indefinitely. Opera was wonderful, Carter thought happily. An art devoted to love and death and the cryptic alliance between them. An art devoted to the definition and interchangeability of the sexes, to madness and drink and blasphemy! The characters of opera obey neither moral nor social law, which was pretty much what he’d been telling Donald. He sat in the dark listening to everything happening darkly and invisibly. When it was over, he still sat there. He supposed he should have outgrown Wagner by now. He wanted to throw a party, fill the house with people. Use that piano. He’d been sold on the house becauseof the existent piano in the otherwise empty rooms. He’d never had a piano before. It had yet to be utilized for anything except to display Ginger’s photograph and, more recently, Donald’s weekly flower arrangement. Donald. He was such a talented young man. Carter was definitely going to throw a party,