by Joy Williams
She looked at her mother and J.C. together, a discomforting sight, and trying to coax up another happy thought, selected the train one. Trains passed through town four times a day, and Emily would ofttimes bicycle down to see them. There wasn’t a station, just a Dairy Queen and a small park practically paved with long red Dairy Queen spoons. Three of the trains would stop and people would get on and off, but the fourth train just tore on past, whistles wailing, and Emily particularly admired this one.
30
Dick and Dinah Webb sat behind their ten-foot cement-block privacy wall having tea. Two fainting goats, an ostrich, a kangaroo, and an assortment of pigs, ducks, and turkeys dabbled and milled around them. At the moment Dinah did not realize she was in Florida. She was in Africa, still puzzling over something a guide had explained to her years ago.
“When elephants can get beneath the bark and into the wood of the baobob tree, it’s just like chocolate cake to them. That’s what he said. Now, chocolate cake—what could that mean?”
The goats were playing on a little hill that Dick had built for them. Otherwise they showed no sign of being aware of the Webbs’ existence.
“He was an idiot,” Dick said. “Too smug by half.”
“What’s the other tree the elephants liked?”
“The speck-boom,” Dick said with satisfaction. As far as he was concerned, this was the best part of the day. Their conversations varied but were always ones they’d had before. Once great tourists, they now were pretty much confined to their property because of Dinah’s arthritis.
“The branches and stems had the puffy appearance of the arms of a doll,” Dinah said.
“Beyond weird,” Dick agreed.
“I’d like to have one of those trees. Do you think we could get a seedling or something?”
“A cutting?” Dick said.
“Could we, old sweetness?”
“I’m sure.”
“But where would we get the elephants?” Dinah laughed girlishly. Her gruesomely contorted hands rose a little, then fell back into her lap. Suddenly she wasn’t in Africa anymore—the terrifying sunrises, the thick beaks of the birds, the gazelles floating through the air. She had loved the sliver of green in the fierce bone white of the thorn tree. But now she was unwell and in Florida. But where was that? Florida could be anyplace, which had always been one of Florida’s problems.
A bell was ringing, which signified a visitor at the gate.
“I hope that’s not you-know-who,” Dinah said. Louise, a friend, frequently dropped by. She had Parkinson’s disease but had money too, and she’d paid thirty thousand dollars to have a fetal-tissue implant. A slender tube had been inserted into Louise’s skull and fetal cells dripped onto her brain. She was a big fan of the operation, and it was all she ever wanted to talk about.
“Or it may be Won-Yee,” Dick said. “Is this Won-Yee’s day?”
Twice a week, a Chinese acupuncturist put needles in Dinah’s ankles. This is where the garbage gets taken out, he always said. These are the garbage trucks collecting the garbage. Though she liked the needles, the metaphor was getting on her nerves and giving her shingles. She would give anything for it not to be Won-Yee.
Most likely it was just another passerby complaining about the wall. “Eyesore, eyesore, eyesore” or “If someone comes home one night a little muddled and runs into this he will surely kill himself and you could be sued. It don’t matter if you got the permit from the county. You could be sued and sued good” or “When you going to stucco the damn thing?” Usually they just stuffed anonymous messages into the mailbox, but sometimes they rang the bell before disappearing. Many were the objects the outside world tried to lob over the wall as well, but because of its height, most fell backward—to Dick’s satisfaction—onto the public way. Still, one of the ducks had been struck on the head with a bottle, and once the kangaroo had almost choked to death when it tried to swallow a small spray can of Slo-Cum.
Dick Webb loved his wall, which had been up almost a year. The footers went down four feet, and maybe for its birthday he would put a lot of jagged colored glass on top. Before the wall, their grassy yard had run neatly trimmed to the curb, and there had been concrete animals instead of live ones. He had constructed them himself, having always worked in the medium, as it was, being a concrete finisher by trade. He loved casting the statuary, stippling, swirling, and molding the lifesize animals to Dinah’s specifications. But people would bust them up or cart them off while they were sleeping, so he’d built the wall. The idea had come to him in totality one morning while he sat with his glass of grapefruit juice and his cafard, his life a shade, Dinah weeping at the kitchen sink where she was soaking her poor hands in salt, hands that she believed would surely be the death of her. He saw the wall, the whole concept, and set out to build it at once. The real animals had been Dinah’s idea, he couldn’t take credit for that. God knows where she got them. People were always excessing animals.
The bell kept jangling shrilly at the gate. Dick hiked up his trousers and headed toward it.
“Don’t let it be Won-Yee, dear,” Dinah said.
A deputy sheriff was standing there gazing up at the wall. He took off his hat. “Is this the family home of Ray Webb?”
“No,” Dick said. What had their boy done now! He must have some syndrome besides his ill health. He was always doing something.
“You are not Mr. Webb pater?” the deputy said and frowned. He was just trying it out, that word. In his experience, any word that put more distance between himself and the individual he was dealing with was backup assistance.
“I am not,” Dick Webb said.
The deputy put his hat back on again. “Do you have any idea where the Webbs live? I have some unfortunate news for the Webb family.”
Dick lowered his voice for added sincerity. “I don’t,” he said. He wouldn’t dream of troubling Dinah with this. For one thing, it would take so long to explain who Ray was—he had never been an easy concept to grasp—and when she did make the connection—her son, her only child, her troubled boy!—she would get upset. He could see her eyes tearing up, her poor hands paddling the air. Unfortunate news. That could very well mean you-know-what, Dick thought. Before long the deputy would return with verification that he was indeed Webb pater. He and Dinah would have to leave before that happened, get someone in to take care of the animals, go someplace that couldn’t be simulated in the backyard—Antarctica, maybe. They’d take a cruise …
“We’re renting,” Dick said as an afterthought. “Just moved in yesterday.”
The deputy looked doubtful. “Why would you want to live behind this thing?”
“Was it Bobby, dear?” Dinah asked when Dick returned. The kangaroo was sitting, as was its wont, with its head in her lap.
“Bobby?” Who was Bobby? Dick felt a little tired. “No, it was Won-Yee.”
“Oh my, I just don’t feel like having the garbage taken out today.”
“It’s all right, I sent him away.”
“Oh, thank you, dear. You’re my precious terror, my old precious terror, that’s what you are.” She gazed at him fondly.
Got to move on now, Dick thought. Get those tickets. Death is not failure, son! If indeed Death was what the deputy had been implying. Death is but a night between two days. Death is the Radiant Coat. Or perhaps Ray himself had offered the Radiant Coat to someone. You never knew about that boy. Had he once thrown an ax at his mother? No, of course not. It must have slipped from his hands at the kindling stump. Had he cursed him, his own father? No, never.
“Dear?” Dinah said, concerned.
“How about some aurora borealis?” Dick offered. “We’ll take a cruise and see the ice shelves calving their icebergs. Dawn at night. Penguins.” He might have gone too far with the penguins. They might be in just the opposite place.
“Why, dear,” Dinah said, “that would be lovely.”
Book
Three
ADMISSION.
Yo
u are Here.
Enjoy.
They seem expectant still, though they have already walked within the Riddle, not this day but long before. They walked within the instant that is Death’s Riddle, and many moments later were reconstituted here, placed in the hollow liturgical court of this black garden. They roam no wilderness. There is no wilderness. It preceded them into the hands of man.
This is Eden turned hex backwards, where they have been resurrected into an air-conditioned hum. Belief in resurrection was the butt of pagan jest. The difficulties, the logistics of it … better to see dust as both more and less than dust and be finished with it. But here, in this place, the work was done hygienically and to scale, though the problem of the soul remains and is all the greater because their life had been their soul and was extinguished with them. Here the heavens are false, as is the very rock. The water is glittering real but slakes no thirst. From an egg (a debated touch)—a large hinged egg not centrally located—come the sounds of the morning when desired and the sounds of the evening when appropriate: the murmurs and cries, the preparation. Over everything, a dimness that does not quite touch them, but hovers instead like those angels who are unable to tell whether they move among the living or the dead.
31
Carter had started thinking of the girls as the Three Fates. He didn’t know why this image should have lingered in his mind, except that he was a classical sort of fellow. Contrary to the popular visualization, he had never seen those ladies as decrepit, tottering old crones but as irrational, merciless, impatient maidens. How did they all get along? They seemed so different. One spun, one measured, one cut. The only name of the three he could remember was Atropos, the Inflexible, which was definitely Alice. He thought of his dear Annabel as the spinner—good-hearted, a little unaware of what she was doing—and quiet Corvus as the measuring one. Alice was amusing; she’d be quite the zealot if she survived her adolescence. Corvus was tragic but allowed no gesture of condolence. She was utterly uncommunicative with him, though she did smile pleasantly if cornered. She lived in the protectorate of suffering.
He let all three of them have the run of the house, but they didn’t really seem to do anything, other than in his imagination, spin, allot, and snip. What were the names of the other two? He should look it up or ask Donald. Donald was such a student. While he was at it, he’d ask him the name of the Furies too, why not? They could look up the information together. He carved a light little image in his mind of Donald’s earnest blond head bending over a sourcebook … together … learning … their breaths lightly mingling.… Carter shook himself violently and surveyed his surroundings cautiously. No one there. The girls were in the kitchen, burning something; toast, it smelled like. The Furies, also, were three in number, though not so differentiated. The Dirae, the Terrible Ones, but they were well meaning in their way, weren’t they? They just wanted to set things right. They didn’t live on Earth, but they visited it a lot. Like Ginger. He was surprised she hadn’t shown up one night with a whip of scorpions. Then he’d know what he was dealing with! An old myth. Irrelevant. Ginger was … irrelevant.
No, she wasn’t, he thought. He yawned and looked moodily at his large bare feet. He had to get a good night’s sleep soon. Take a bath before retiring, Ginger advised. Don’t dry off, just climb dripping between the sheets. Your body, attempting to protect itself, will expend energy, making you sleepy. What she wanted, of course, was for him to contract pneumonia.
In late morning, it was one hundred fourteen degrees. What was he doing here? The heat made him long for a cool New England murky. His hair felt recently boiled. He had the groggys as well, most familiar-feeling groggys. Shouldn’t drop another touch, really, beginning today. In the kitchen he saw that the girls had cleaned him out of fresh fruits again, except for two pomegranates withering in a wire basket. What was the impulse behind buying these things? In thousands of households pomegranates crouched wizened on counters. Other fruits were all taken, even plums, but pomegranates were always left. There was something shady and unsatisfying and reproachful about them. They weren’t provocative like an orange, compassionate like an apple, weren’t straightforward like a pear. When he got his shoes on, he was going to toss them out in the desert for the little foxes. Then he saw a note: “Daddy, we made you a fruit shake. It’s in the fridge.” Carter was touched. It tasted delicious, too. He finished off the entire blenderful and regarded the pomegranates with more equanimity. Let them be what they were. What was the harm?
The girls were outside, lying under a couple of pool umbrellas. The Moirai—Daughters of Night provided with shears, the Destinies who spun the fatal thread. They didn’t seem to be conversing with one another. Young, their whole lives before them, or pretty much. Gracious, it looked hot out there! Sometimes he thought that if he could just get through this summer, everything would open up.
Carter emptied ice cubes into a bowl, added water, and immersed a fresh dish towel in it. He carried it into the living room and sat on the sofa, tipping back his head and laying the cold cloth across his eyes. Donald had suggested tapas sex.
He had.
“Tapas!” Carter had cried. He thought they were those small, warm, oily appetizers served in Spanish bars. At least that’s what they’d been in the days when he and Ginger were roaming around over there, watching those stupid bullfights, throwing the cushions in indignation, driving fast and gaily through the sharply edged Castilian landscape. He had wanted to go north to Montserrat, where Wagner’s genius had placed the Grail, but they had never made it, he couldn’t recall why. It hadn’t been Ginger’s fault, he was almost certain; they hadn’t quarreled so much in those days, hadn’t disagreed about every last thing, their innocent wishes had been more synchronized. Still, they had never made it to Montserrat, huge rock reared high in the clouds.
Back then, she had called him her stroke oar.
He pushed the cloth through the ice. “What!” he had cried. “Sex tapas?” Evidently—as Donald had quietly explained it—it was a union between two individuals wherein the sex organs are used, only not in a conventional manner. Sexual energy is controlled with intense concentration as it rises to a climax, the orgasm is experienced in the head, and the sexual fluid is reabsorbed back into the system, giving the individual extra energy. Physical desire is conquered in the same instant that it is fulfilled. It sounded quite refined the way Donald described it.
Carter stirred slightly against the cushions. He liked the idea of sex conquering physical desire—inappropriate physical desire, it might be argued—at the same time that it satisfied it. It sounded like a resourceful, streamlined process, not exactly fun but thoughtful and mature.
When Carter had politely inquired if Donald had ever attempted this unconventional sex before, the boy had softly expressed himself in the negative. Not that it mattered, of course, Carter said, but he guessed what he was asking was, if it went badly—well he supposed there was no way it could go badly but if it turned out more conventionally than they might have wished—would Donald be disappointed, would he think less of himself, less of Carter, less of both of them together for it? Because that would be … that would be unfortunate, because Carter was fond of Donald, very fond.
Who was that guy, Carter wondered, sprawled upon the pillows, who spent eternity up to his neck in water, parched with a thirst that could never be assuaged because every time he bent his head to drink, the water fled away leaving the ground all around him parched and dry? He felt a little like that guy. Frustrated.
He was in a mythical state of mind this morning—sinister punishments, great opposing armies clanging around in his head, visions of boyish sport. He groped in the bowl for an ice cube and put it in his mouth. He was willing to give this tapas sex a try, he had told Donald, though maybe they should put it on hold just for the moment. He’d been sober when he said these things just as Donald was leaving for the day, which was only yesterday; it was only when he was alone, which was only last night, that the nice b
rown drinks kept topping themselves up, producing the debilitation of the moment. He lay there chewing ice, a cool cloth over his eyes, thinking dartingly of Donald—those dazzlingly clean T-shirts he wore, that little pursed gash on his clear face that drew the eye right down into it … Carter groaned. They should try it out, but where? Not in this house. He could see Ginger capering around as they tried to concentrate. He wondered what it entailed—far more than just hauling out the old hose, he would imagine—but he’d been so excited that he hadn’t pressed for details.
“I don’t want to be a careerist,” Alice said. “A career, no thanks.”
“I certainly don’t want one either,” Annabel said. She was almost out of avocado body butter again, she could scarcely fathom how this had happened. “There’s nothing special about not wanting a career.” Alice thought she was so idiosyncratic. “Having a career has never preoccupied me. I want to—God—live a little, at the very least.”
Corvus lay between them like some creature in hibernation, though not curled. Annabel would protest, and she would protest loudly, if Corvus were lying curled in the classic fetal position of the inarguably depressed. She was spending too much time at Green Palms, that unscrupulous place from which emanated foul tales that just got worse and worse. That poor Mrs. McKenney, who kept a ten-dollar bill under her pillow to tip the girl who would have to wash her up after she died, had been robbed. She checked on that ten-dollar bill a hundred times a day, and someone had managed to swipe it while she was sleeping. It had been an employee, of course, a member of the rotating staff. Everyone kept rotating and rotating, they were there, then they weren’t there, then they were back again and you thought there was some schedule to it just before they were gone for good. The only ones who seemed even semipermanent—practically there since inception, which hadn’t been all that long, though the residents must have felt it comprised their entire lives—were those two nurses, one of whom was a total fright. Corvus shouldn’t involve herself so much in that place. Why didn’t anyone ever tell Corvus anything? Like, you must do this or you mustn’t do that? Corvus was throwing herself against a wall over at Green Palms. And Annabel thought that no matter how brave you were, if you just kept throwing yourself against a wall, what was the use?
