The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

Author:Joy Williams [Williams, Joy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Modern, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307763822
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

26

Sherwin 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.

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