Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  They walked through the plaza, and Harriet went into a dime store to buy a hat. Jeremy sat outside on a bench in the square, opposite a hotel that advertised a display of the paintings of D. H. Lawrence, banned in England, so it was claimed. He turned away. An old man, an Indian with shoulder-length gray hair, was crossing the plaza in front of him, murmuring an atonal chant. The tourists stepped aside to let the man pass. Jeremy glanced at the tree overhead, in whose shade he was sitting. He could not identify it. He exhaled and examined his watch angrily. He gazed down at the second hand circling the dial face once, then twice. He knew Harriet was approaching when he saw out of the corner of his eye her white cotton pants and her feet in their sandals.

  “Do you like it?” she asked. He looked up. She had bought a yellow cap with a visor and the word “Taos” sewn into it. She was smiling, modeling for him.

  “Very nice,” he said. She sat down next to him and squeezed his arm. “What do people do in this town?” he asked. “Look at vapor trails all day?”

  “They walk around,” she said. “They buy things.” She saw a couple dragging a protesting child into an art gallery. “They bully their kids.” She paused, then went on, “They eat.” She pointed to a restaurant on the east side of the square with a balcony that looked down at the commerce below. “Hungry?” He shrugged. “I sure am,” she said. She took his hand and led him across the square into the archway underneath the restaurant. There she stopped, turned, and put her arms around him, leaning against him. She felt the sweat of his back against her palms. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Then they went up the stairs and had lunch, two margaritas each and enchiladas in hot sauce. Sweating and drowsy, they strolled back to the motel, not speaking.

  They left the curtains of the front window open an inch or so when they made love that afternoon. From the bed they could see occasionally a thin strip of someone walking past. They made love to fill time, with an air of detachment, while the television set stayed on, showing a Lana Turner movie in which everyone’s face was green at the edges and pink at the center. Jeremy and Harriet touched with the pleasure of being close to one familiar object in a setting crowded with strangers. Harriet reached her orgasm with her usual spasms of trembling, and when she cried out he lowered his head to the pillow on her right side, where he wouldn’t see her face.

  Thus began the pattern of the next three days: desultory shopping for knickknacks in the morning, followed by lunch, lovemaking, and naps through the afternoon, during which time it usually rained for an hour or so. During their shopping trips they didn’t buy very much: Jeremy said the art was mythic and lugubrious, and Harriet didn’t like pottery. Jeremy bought a flashlight, in case, he said, the power went out, and Harriet purchased a key chain. All three days they went into the same restaurant at the same time and ordered the same meal, explaining to themselves that they didn’t care to experiment with exotic regional food. On the third afternoon of this they woke up from their naps at about the same time with the totally clear unspoken understanding that they could not spend another day—or perhaps even another hour—in this manner.

  Jeremy announced the problem by asking, “What do we do tomorrow?”

  Harriet kicked her way out of bed and walked over to the television, on top of which she had placed a guide to the Southwest. “Well,” she said, opening it up, “there are sights around here. We haven’t been into the mountains north of here. There’s a Kiowa Indian pueblo just a mile away. There’s a place called Arroyo Seco near here and—”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means Dry Gulch.” She waited. “There’s the Taos Gorge Bridge.” Jeremy shook his head quickly. “The D. H. Lawrence shrine is thirty minutes from here, and so is the Millicent A. Rogers Memorial Museum. There are, it says here, some trout streams. If it were winter, we could go skiing.”

  “It’s summer,” Jeremy said, closing his eyes and pulling the sheet up. “We can’t ski. What about this shrine?”

  She put the book on the bed near Jeremy and read the entry. “It says that Lawrence lived for eighteen months up there, and they’ve preserved his ranch. When he died, they brought his ashes back and there’s a shrine or something. They call it a shrine. I’m only telling you what the book says.”

  “D. H. Lawrence?” Jeremy asked sleepily.

  “You know,” Harriet said. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

  “Yes, I know.” He smiled. “It wasn’t the books I was asking about, it was the quality of the books, and therefore the necessity of making the trip.”

  “All I know is that it’s visitable,” she said, “and it’s off State Highway Three, and it’s something to do.”

  “Okay. I don’t care what damn highway it’s on,” Jeremy said, reaching for the book and throwing it across the room. “Let’s at least get into the car and go somewhere.”

  After breakfast they drove in the rental car out of town toward the Taos ski valley. They reached it after driving up fifteen miles of winding road through the mountains, following a stream of snow runoff, along which they counted a dozen fishermen. When they reached the valley, they admired the Sangre de Cristo Mountains but agreed it was summer and there was nothing to do in such a place. Neither blamed the other for acting upon an unproductive idea. They returned to the car and retraced their steps to the highway, which they followed for another fifteen miles until they reached the turn for the D. H. Lawrence shrine on Kiowa Ranch Road. Jeremy stopped the car on the shoulder. “Well?” he asked.

  “Why do we have to decide about everything?” Harriet said, looking straight ahead. “Why can’t we just do it?”

  He accelerated up the unpaved road, which climbed toward a plateau hidden in the mountains. They passed several farms where cattle were grazing on the thin grasses. The light made the land look varnished; even with sunglasses, Harriet squinted at the shimmering heat waves rising from the gravel.

  Jeremy said, “What’s here?”

  “I told you. Anyhow, the description isn’t much good. We’ll find out. Maybe they’ll have a tour of his inner sanctum or have his Nobel Prize up in a frame. The book says they have his actual typewriter.”

  Jeremy coughed. “He never won the Nobel Prize.” Harriet looked over at him and noticed that his face was losing its internal structure and becoming puffy. Grief had added five years to his appearance. She saw, with disbelief, a new crease on his neck. Turning away, she glanced up at the sky: a hawk, cirrus clouds. The air conditioner was blowing a stream of cool air on her knees. Her gums ached.

  “Only two more miles,” Jeremy said, beginning now to hunch over the wheel slightly.

  “I don’t like this draft,” she said, reaching over to snap off the air conditioner. She cranked down the window and let the breeze tangle her hair. They were still going uphill and had reached, a sign said, an elevation of nine thousand feet. Jeremy hummed Martian jazz as he drove, tapping the steering wheel. The little dirt road went past an open gate, then cut in two, one fork going toward a conference center indicated by a road marker, the other toward the house and shrine. They came to a clearing. In front of them stood a two-story house looking a bit like an English country cottage, surrounded by a white picket fence, with a tire swing in the backyard, beyond which two horses were grazing. They were alone: there were no other cars in sight. Jeremy went up to the door of the house and knocked. A dog began barking angrily from inside, as if the knocks had interrupted its nap. “Look at this,” Harriet said.

  She had walked a few steps and was looking in the direction they had come from; in the clear air they could see down the mountain and across the valley for a distance of fifty miles or so. “It’s beautiful,” she said. Jeremy appeared from behind her, shielding his eyes although the sun was behind him. “What’re you doing that for?” she asked.

  “You have dark glasses. I don’t.”

  “Where’s the shrine?” she asked. “I don’t see it anywhere.”

  “You have to turn around. Look.” He pointed to the pi
cket fence. At its north corner there was a sign that Harriet had missed.

  SHRINE

  “That’s very quaint,” she said. “And what’s this?” She walked toward the fence and picked a child’s mitten off one of the posts. Mickey Mouse’s face was printed on the front of the mitten, and one of his arms reached up over the thumb. She began laughing. “It doesn’t say anything about Mickey Mouse in Fodor’s. Do you think he’s part of the shrine?”

  Jeremy didn’t answer. He had already started out ahead of her on a path indicated by the black pointing finger. Harriet followed him, panting from the altitude and the blistering heat, feeling her back begin to sweat as the light rained down on it. She felt the light on her legs and inside her head, on her eardrums. The path turned to the right and began a series of narrowing zigzags going up the side of a hill at the top of which stood the shrine, a small white boxlike building that, as they approached it, resembled a chapel, a mausoleum, or both. A granite phoenix glowered at the apex of the roof.

  “The door’s open,” Jeremy said, twenty feet ahead of her, “and nobody’s here.” He was wearing heavy jeans, and his blue shirt was soaked with two wings of sweat. Harriet could hear the rhythmic pant of his breathing.

  “Are there snakes out here?” she asked. “I hate snakes.”

  “Not in the shrine,” he said. “I don’t see any.”

  “What do you see?”

  “A visitors’ register.” He had reached the door and had stepped inside. Then he came back out.

  She was still ten feet away. “There must be more. You can’t have a shrine without something in it.”

  “Well, there’s this white thing outside,” he said breathlessly. “Looks like a burial stone.” She was now standing next to him. “Yes. This is where his wife is buried.” They both looked at it. A small picture of Frieda was bolted into the stone.

  “Well,” Jeremy said, “now for the shrine.” They shuffled inside. At the back was a small stained-glass window, a representation of the sun, thick literalized rays burning out from its center. To their left the visitors’ register lay open on a high desk, and above it in a display case three graying documents asserted that the ashes stored here were authentically those of D. H. Lawrence, the author. The chapel’s interior smelled of sage and cement. At the far side of the shrine, six feet away, was a roped-off area, and at the back an approximation of an altar, at whose base was a granite block with the letters DHL carved on it. “This is it?” Jeremy asked. “No wonder no one’s here.”

  Harriet felt giddy from the altitude. “Should we pray?” she asked, but before Jeremy could answer, she said, “Well, good for him. He got himself a fine shrine. Maybe he deserves it. God damn, it’s hot in here.” She turned around and walked outside, still laughing in a broken series of almost inaudible chuckles. When she was back in the sun, she pointed her finger the way the sign had indicated and said, “Shrine.”

  Jeremy stepped close to her, and they both looked again at the mountains in the west. “I used to read him in college,” Harriet said, “and in high school I had a copy of The Rainbow I hid under my pillow where my mother wouldn’t find it. Jesus, it must be ninety-five degrees.” She looked suddenly at Jeremy, sweat dripping into her eyes. “I used to have a lot of fantasies when I was a teenager,” she said. He was wiping his face with a handkerchief. “Do you see anyone?” she asked.

  “Do I see anybody? No. We would’ve heard a car coming up the road. Why?”

  “Because I’m hot. I feel like doing something,” Harriet said. “I mean, here we are at the D. H. Lawrence shrine.” She was unbuttoning her blouse. “I just thought of this,” she said, beginning to laugh again. She put her blouse on the ground and quickly unhooked her bra, dropping it on top of the blouse. “There,” she said, sighing. “Now that’s better.” She turned to face the mountains. When Jeremy didn’t say anything, she swung around to look at him. He was staring at her, at the brown circles of her nipples, and his face seemed stricken. She reached over and took his hand. “Oh, Jay, sweetie,” she said, “no one will see us. Honey. What is it? Do you want me to get dressed?”

  “That’s not it.” He was staring at her, as if she were not his wife.

  “What? What is it?”

  “You’re free of it.” He wiped his forehead.

  “What?”

  “You’re free of it. You’re leaving me alone here.”

  “Alone? Alone in what?”

  “You know perfectly damn well,” he said. “I’m alone back here.” He tapped his head. “I don’t know how you did it, but you did it. You broke free. You’re gone.” He bent down. “You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes, I do.” She put her bra and blouse back on and turned toward him again. His face was a mixture of agony and rage, but in the huge sunlight these emotions diminished to small vestigial puffs of feeling. “It’s a path,” she said. “And then you’re surprised. You get out. It’ll happen to you. You’ll see. Honestly.”

  She could see his legs shaking. His face was a barren but expressive landscape. “Okay,” he said. “Talk all you want. I was just thinking …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “You’ll be all right,” she said, stroking his back.

  “I don’t want to be all right!” he said, his voice rising, a horrible smile appearing on his face: it was a devil’s face, Harriet saw, and it was radiant and calm. Sweat poured off his forehead, and his skin had started to flush pink. “It’s my pleasure not to be all right. Do you see that? My pleasure.”

  She wiped her hands on her cotton pants. A stain appeared, then vanished. “You want that? You want to be back there by yourself?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “You bet. I feel like an explorer. I feel like a fucking pioneer.” He gave each one of the words a separate emphasis. Meanwhile, he had separated himself from her and was now tilting his head up toward the sky, letting the sun shine on his closed eyelids.

  She looked at him. In the midst of the sunlight he was hugging his darkness. She stepped down the zigzag path to the car, leaving him there, but he followed her. Once they were both in the car, the dog inside the ranch house began its frantic barking, but it stopped after a few seconds. She took Jeremy’s hand and scanned the clouds in the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, trying to see the sky, the beckoning clouds, the way he did, but she couldn’t. All she could see was the land stretched out in front of her, and, far in the distance, fifty miles away, a few thunderheads and a narrow curtain of rain, so thin that the light passed straight through it.

  The Eleventh Floor

  CAREFULLY DRUNK, Mr. Bradbury sat on his patio-balcony in the bland morning sunshine, sipping vodka-and-something. He was waiting for his son to visit. This son, Eric, had called and said he would arrive shortly, and that was an hour ago. It was Saturday: vodka day. He peered down from the eleventh floor at the sidewalk trees, where the sparrows were making a racket. Below the sparrows, Mr. Bradbury could see the velvet-brown dot of the doorman’s hat. He thought he could smell crab-apple blossoms and something more subtle, like dust.

  In shivering glassy clarity, he observed a rusting blue subcompact move into a space in front of a fireplug. That would be Eric, who had a collection of parking tickets, little marks of risk and daring. Watching him lock his car, his father mashed out his cigarette in a blue pottery ashtray balanced on the balcony railing. He coughed, putting his hand in front of his mouth. Eric had stopped to talk to the doorman, George. George and Eric, two human dots. Eric’s pinpoint face turned, tilted, and stared up at the rows of balconies, finding his father on the eleventh. He did not wave.

  Standing up, Mr. Bradbury tested his reflexes. He bent his knees and thought of a line from Byron: “From the dull palace to the dirty hovel, something something something novel.” The problem with poetry was that you were always having to look it up. He couldn’t recall which poem contained the dull palace, nor did he care. He stepped out of the sunlight into the living room and sank
into the sofa, trying not to groan. Elena, the Peruvian housekeeper, was preparing lunch, probably one of her crude ethnic casseroles. She didn’t inform him of her plans in advance. He reached over to the coffee table and pressed the MUTE button on the remote control to silence the CNN announcer. His neck hurt. He rubbed it, and to his own fingers the skin felt scaly. At least no swellings or lumps. He let his right arm drop down onto the side table. His thumb landed in the engraved silver scallop-shell ashtray and emerged from it with a gray coating of ash. He bent over and was rubbing the thumb on the carpet just as his son knocked.

  The boy had a key; the knock was some kind of ritual announcement of estrangement. He heaved himself up to his feet and, remembering to stand straight, made his way past the bookshelves and the paintings to the foyer.

  “Eric,” he said, opening the door and seeing his son in a blast of sentimental pride. “I’m glad you came.” The flaring of his love made him shy, so that he drew back his body even as he extended his hand. Eric shook his hand, gazed down at his father’s face with an examining look, and sniffed twice. Mr. Bradbury could tell that Eric was trying to catch the scent of his breath. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Don’t loiter out there in the hall. Why didn’t you just let yourself in with your key?”

  “I lost it,” Eric said. “I lost all my keys.”