by Joy Williams
He ordered another beer, which tasted just the slightest shade warmer than the first, then retreated with determined nonchalance into the establishment’s other room. In here it was darker, and by error he seated himself directly beside the only other occupied table. Two men had been talking, and one of them pushed the curtain back from a filthy window so that more light fell upon the scene, a gaping desert light much disoriented at finding itself inside.
The men had been telling stories, and they waved Ray right in on the hearing of one, as though he’d been with them all the while, had departed only for a moment, and had now come back.
“So he spends Christmas Day in a motel room with my sixteen-year-old daughter.”
“Jesus. Christmas Day.”
“Disappeared right after the stockings. She came home that night, but it took me and my buddy until New Year’s Eve to find him.”
“You was always good friends, I recall.”
“Good friends. No problem up to then between me and Modesto. My little girl can be a troublemaker sometimes, I’d be the first to admit it. So Modesto has this girlfriend he’s crazy about, and she’s got a little kid. It’s Modesto’s little kid. He’s crazy about the both of them, but she’s out of town for Christmas visiting her mother. She’s in Bisbee. Her mother runs one of those cute-as-hell motels over there.”
The man smiled at Ray, who couldn’t help but wonder why they had befriended him.
“So I say to Modesto, when we found him, ‘You’ve got a choice here, my friend.’ We had him in his own truck. We was sitting on either side of him in his own truck. ‘You got a choice,’ I say. ‘You can either watch your girlfriend and your little kid go down—and I mean watch, I mean go down—or you can eat these varmint pellets.’ ”
“Nahhhh!”
“Yes.”
“Strychnine!”
“We had him outside his girlfriend’s apartment. I mean, right outside. You could see the fucking mobile over the kid’s crib. And I say, ‘Take this, eat this, or else they die.’ ”
Ray gulped his beer. “Scared the shit out of him, huh?” he interjected.
“So the punk took it. He thought it was a movie or something. He thought he was exhibiting an ethical dimension.”
“He might’ve thought it was an initiation or something,” Ray said. Initiations were always a dark-before-dawn arrangement. Things usually got better afterward.
“So he swallows the damn stuff, and my buddy and I vacate the truck. Modesto sits there for a minute and then starts shooting all around the cab on his own accord in these convulsions. Banged himself all the hell up. Must’ve gone on for ten minutes.”
“It wasn’t really strychnine was it?” Ray said.
“Cops come eventually, and you know what they conclude? They conclude Modesto OD’d. They say he suicided.”
“Cops are dumb around here, huh?” Ray said.
“That word ‘initiation’ is some word,” the storyteller’s companion said. “Don’t hear a word like that every day.”
“Man’s trying to put himself in Modesto’s shoes.”
“Gotta be an asshole to want to be in them.”
“Considering that Modesto convulsed himself right out of them, I’d have to agree with you. Those ten minutes were, well, they were beyond my wildest dreams of satisfaction,” the man said contentedly.
Ray thought he’d better be on his way. He didn’t even feel the need to finish his beer. At the same time, he thought he should buy a round for all concerned, though possibly that wasn’t a great idea either.
“Like maybe you’re imagining that Modesto’s imagining he’s being initiated into the No Fear club or something? Those assholes that have them banners across their windshields, those shade screens that say ‘No Fear,’ they belong to a club, right?”
“That is not my truck,” Ray said.
“We saw you get out of it.”
“It’s not mine.”
“Salaried pussies, they lease those vehicles.”
“I stole it,” Ray said.
“Ooh-hoo.”
“I sure did.” Ray wanted to appear a hardened criminal, but hip and friendly too. He pondered his exit line.
“You happen to know the Jesus prayer, wee-wee face?” the storyteller inquired.
Ray said nothing. His mouth seemed more insensate than usual.
“You just keep mumbling the ol’ Jesus prayer, and it will wreak a little miracle on you.”
“Wreak?” Ray dared. “I don’t … what is it?”
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
“I don’t know that.”
“You just keep mumbling it”—the storyteller rolled his eyes and waggled his tongue in a rude portrayal of an idiot—“and mumbling and mumbling and you’ll come to know that whatever happens to you is just something that happens. And what’s even better is, you’ll come to know that whatever you do to someone else is just something that happens too.”
The other man stared at Ray’s truck, absorbed in the flagrant breach of etiquette it represented.
“Adios, gentlemen,” Ray said.
They gaped at him. “Adios?” they cried in unison.
“Don’t die around here,” the storyteller suggested warmly. “It will be utterly misconstrued.”
Ray was already up and moving steadily through the bar, past the big-screen TV, now focused on Recondita Armonia in the dry pits. There wasn’t a mark on her.
10
Even with a considerable number of partying people, the house was in no way crowded. Carter supposed it was a bit large for his and Annabel’s needs, but they’d always lived in large houses. Anything under twelve thousand square feet Ginger had considered a hut. In their marriage’s prime, they had needed various rooms into which to retreat after quarrels had reached their towering crest. As a matter of fact, whenever they had bought a house (and they had moved frequently during Ginger’s spate on earth) one of their requirements had been rooms that served no other purpose. But though Carter had paid top dollar for this place, it lacked what could be considered a post-altercation crawl space. This pleased him, for any place that intimated a way of life other than the one he had shared with Ginger was a pearl beyond price.
He had toyed with various themes for this evening’s party but finally decided just to let the champagne flow and see what happened. He did suggest dressy. Carter loved dressy. He himself was never more relaxed than in a dinner jacket. There was something about a dinner jacket that was so relaxing, it just took you a million miles away.
Annabel was wearing her alpaca swing coat and her beaded chiffon skirt, two of her most fabulous things. Alice was wearing houndstooth slacks from Goodwill and a clean T-shirt with no railing message on it. Though Annabel had forced a little makeup on her, she’d rubbed most of it off. “You looked so sultry,” Annabel complained. “Well, maybe not sultry, but that cherry chocolate lipstick looked good on you. Effects can be achieved, Alice, you just have to experiment.” Corvus wore an unexceptional white sundress, but what she wore hardly elicited notice; it was the intrigue of her face, the sleekness of her dark hair. All three of them were motherless. Annabel thought they should have more in common than they did.
There was the civilized, slapping sound of martinis being made.
Carter found himself enjoying the company of several young men. “Now, for Wagner,” he was saying, “opera was a political creed and spiritual gospel; its aims were revolution and salvation. He wanted to transfigure the lives of those who heard his work.” The fine young men were attentive to these sentiments.
About a hundred guests were present. Carter had found them here and there. Ginger had never liked his friends, so he’d gotten into the habit of making new ones readily. Back east, Ginger had actually been instrumental in getting one of his nicest friends deported to the horribly infelicitous country of his birth, a place where everyone spoke a different dialect and murderous fights broke out over the slightest m
isunderstanding. His friend had previously managed to inadvertently insult a number of his countrymen, and Carter feared that the homecoming had not been a pleasant one.
“You know,” one of the young men was saying to Carter, “Wolf House is only a few days’ drive from here, in Sonoma. If you’re a London fan, you have to see it. It was his dream house, in the works for years, and it burnt to the ground the night before he was to move in.”
“I do want to see Wolf House,” Carter said. He had an empathy for structural decay on a grand and brooding scale, generally a bad tendency in an architect. Hadn’t the disaster in this case been the architect’s fault—a great writer’s dream thwarted on the telluric level by a faulty venting design? It made him glad he had never truly practiced his profession.
Donald discreetly turned Carter’s attention to the rising moon, which had rolled past the mountain’s corner like an immense cruise ship.
Corvus was quiet as always quiet, though taking everything in, Annabel suspected. She would hate to be the kind of person who had to take everything in all the time. Corvus made her feel like a merry little insect or something, though she wasn’t at all snobbish or supercilious. She had perfect skin, almost translucent, and sometimes Annabel would just gape at it. There were dog hairs on that white sundress, though, she noticed pityingly.
Alice was sitting on a couch watching a man in a tuxedo play the piano. A woman in a silk jumpsuit sat beside him on the bench, and Alice looked at them sulkily. The woman began to sing. She didn’t have a bad voice, she was confident and playful. Alice bit her nails, dragging them out of her mouth on occasion for inspection. The woman was singing witty lyrics in a light, assured voice, and the man in the tuxedo grinned at her, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, his hands flying over the keys.
“Alice, what are you thinking about?” she heard Annabel ask. “You’re all scrunched up! Do you want some hummus?” She extended some on a cracker.
“I can’t eat,” Alice said.
Annabel looked at her respectfully.
“I … he … they just won’t let him out early. We keep hoping they’ll let him out early.” The reason she didn’t date, Alice had explained, was that she already had a boyfriend, who unfortunately was away in prison.
“It’s too bad you have to think about parole all the time,” Annabel said.
Alice wished she’d never invented this absentee boyfriend.
“But I don’t think prison’s anything to be ashamed about,” Annabel said. “It’s something lots of people have to just get behind them.”
What was he in jail for anyway? Alice wondered. Nothing good.
“I’m sure he doesn’t even belong in prison,” Annabel said. “I knew a boy back home, he was piloting his dad’s motorboat at night and he hit a buoy and killed two of his friends and they sent him to prison. He was there a whole year, and he didn’t belong there at all.”
Alice looked at her.
“Well, he was a nice boy, I mean. Basically. And they’d all been drinking—even the dead ones. What’s yours look like, you’ve never told me. I don’t picture him as being particularly cute … more compelling-looking.”
“It’s difficult to describe someone you love,” Alice said.
“So he’s really going to be in there forever, or what? That’s a big responsibility for you. They want them to feel remorse, is the thing. He should profess remorse.”
“Annabel,” Alice said, “I don’t want to discuss it.”
“I understand,” Annabel said.
Now the singer was embracing the man in the tuxedo, giving him a big kiss on the side of the head. Then she slid gracefully off the piano bench and joined the party. The man sat with his back to the girls, not doing anything for a moment. Then he lit another cigarette.
Alice heard a woman say, “Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it.”
“What kind of poems do you write?” someone asked.
This soiree was sort of out of it, Alice thought.
The man in the tuxedo turned toward her. “What would you like to hear, darling?” he asked.
I’d like to hear you moaning in ecstasy in bed, Alice thought, startling herself. Men did that, didn’t they? She gave him a smile and felt her lip snag on her tooth the way Fury’s did sometimes after he yawned and her poppa would have to reach down and unhook it.
“Without the guidance of request, I always play ‘I Get a Kick Out of You.’ ” After he finished, he came over and sat between them.
“The woman who was singing with you,” Alice croaked. “Is she your lover?”
Annabel giggled. She had never seen Alice behave like this.
“There are certain women,” the man in the tuxedo said, “who love men like myself. They’re fascinated with us, we’re a challenge to them. Do you suppose he’d fuck me? they wonder. Do you think he could do it?”
“Really?” Alice said.
“That is the case,” the man said.
“Some people are so shallow,” Alice said.
“Some people are tremendously shallow,” Annabel said. “I knew a boy back home who, if someone he didn’t like told him something he thought was dumb, he’d laugh in a noblesse oblige fashion and then he’d look at someone he liked and shrug and say ‘Noblesse oblige.’ ”
“Have you ever had a man, darling?” the man asked Annabel.
“A few experiments,” she said. “They were actually just boys. Sort of. Back home.” The piano player was sort of disgusting. Leave it to Alice to be enchanted.
“Do you always wear a tuxedo?” Alice asked.
“Always,” he said. “Never without it. In church you can’t see it for the robe.”
“Church?” Alice exclaimed, troubled.
“God is the net. We are the creatures within the net.”
“Oh, that’s kind of pretty, I think,” Annabel said. But then she didn’t think it sounded pretty at all.
“You need to see the net for it to work,” he said. “It’s not enough to be in it. We have to be conscious of it over and over again.”
“We make our own net,” Alice said. She couldn’t believe he was a churchgoer. She’d have to work her way around that.
“But we don’t make it out of that marvelous light stuff,” he said. “We make those ugly, hard, crude, clangoring links.”
“You really go to church?” Alice asked.
“I play the hymns. They pay me for it, though I would do it for nothing. I find church very sexy. I love Protestants.”
“Then you don’t believe it?”
“Believe what, darling?”
“It just arouses you?”
Annabel gave an alarmed, piercing laugh.
“ ‘I fled him down the nights and down the days/I fled him down the arches of the years/I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind/and in the midst of tears I hid from him,’ dah dah dah dah. ‘From those strong feet that followed, followed after …,’ ” the man in the tuxedo chanted, his eyes half shut. “The minister loves the old mystics. I think he’s going to have a nervous breakdown any Sunday now. Expectation runs high.” He seemed to notice Corvus for the first time, and he smiled at her and bowed a little.
“Well,” Alice said, “God’s not my owner.”
“You must like cats,” he said.
“Cats?” Alice said.
“The chosen allies of womankind.”
“Would anyone like a beverage?” Annabel said.
“Cats are accustomed to making their own decisions and implementing them out of their owner’s sight.”
“I don’t care for cats at all,” Alice said.
“Coffee perhaps?” Annabel persisted.
“No coffee for me, darling,” the piano player said. “I drink coffee at night, and I have bad dreams—headless, one-eyed men with their mouths in their armpits wanting you-know-what from me and
such.”
Annabel never told her dreams since the time she had asked her mother if she wanted to hear about one that in Annabel’s opinion was particularly artful and mysterious. “I dreamed …,” Annabel had begun. “I dreamed I was in Hell,” her mother interrupted, pretending those were the words Annabel was about to speak. It was nine in the morning and her mother was having a screwdriver and a cookie.
“Would you like some ice water?” Alice asked.
“Ice water would be fabulous,” he said, “but hold the ice.”
She went off happily for the water. Obtaining the simple element in a glass required intensive negotiations with the bartender.
“Plastic relies on an unrenewable resource,” Alice complained. “It’s not truly recyclable, and the petroleum involved requires extensive use of toxics in manufacture. Plus it’s the largest trash contaminant of the oceans. As a caterer, you should be aware of this and set a better example.”
“Who invited you, might I ask?” the bartender said.
She eventually returned with something acceptable.
“This is a perfect glass of water,” the man in the tuxedo said.
They watched him drink it, the muscles in his neck moving.
“What were we talking about?” Annabel said. “Oh, church …”
He put down the empty glass. “I take most of my meals on a church plate,” he said. “That is, a plate with the representation of my church’s building upon it. It’s my only plate.” He looked at them piously. “I have very little.”
“I’d love to see it,” Alice said.
“Words don’t express our thoughts very well, do they, darling?” he said.
“I’ve always thought that was true!” Alice agreed. “Who came up with the idea they could? Some sort of control freak.”
