Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “Well, I’m not going with you,” I said. She nodded. I looked at her, and I wondered if she might be crazed with the bad judgment my parents had told me all teenagers had. Bad judgment of this kind was starting to interest me; it was a powerful antidote for boredom, which seemed worse.

  “You don’t want to come?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll walk home.” I gazed up the hill, and in the distance I could see the lights of our house, a twenty-minute walk across the bay.

  “Okay,” Stephanie said. “I didn’t think you’d want to come along.” We waited. “Russell, do you think your brother is interested in me?”

  “I guess so,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she meant by “interested.” Anybody interested him, up to a point. “He says he likes you.”

  “That’s funny, because I feel like something in the Lost and Found,” she said, scratching her boot into the ice. “You know, one of those gloves that don’t match anything.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “One glove. One left-hand glove, with the thumb missing.”

  I could hear Ben’s car starting, and then I saw it heading down Gallagher’s boat landing. I was glad he was driving out toward us, because I didn’t want to talk to her this way anymore.

  Stephanie was now watching my brother’s car. His headlights were on. It was odd to see a car with headlights on out on the ice, where there was no road. I saw my brother accelerate and fishtail the car, then slam on the brakes and do a 360-degree spin. He floored it, revving the back wheels, which made a high, whining sound on the ice, like a buzz saw working through wood. He was having a thrill and soon would give Stephanie another thrill by driving her home across ice that might break at any time. Thrills did it, whatever it was. Thrills led to other thrills.

  “Would you look at that,” I said.

  She turned. After a moment she made a little sound in her throat. I remember that sound. When I see her now, she still makes it—a sign of impatience or worry. After all, she didn’t go through the ice in my brother’s car on the way home. She and my brother didn’t drown, together or separately. Stephanie had two marriages and several children. Recently, she and her second husband adopted a Korean baby. She has the complex dignity of many small-town people who do not resort to alcohol until well after night has fallen. She continues to live in Five Oaks, Michigan, and she works behind the counter at the post office, where I buy stamps from her and gossip, holding up the line, trying to make her smile. She still has an overbite and she still laughs easily, despite the moody expression that comes over her when she relaxes. She has moved back to the same house she grew up in. Even now the exterior paint on that house blisters in cobweb patterns. I keep track of her. She and my brother certainly didn’t get married; in fact, they broke up a few weeks after seeing the Chevrolet under ice.

  “What are we doing out here?” Stephanie asked. I shook my head. “In the middle of winter, out here on this stupid lake? I’ll tell you, Russell, I sure don’t know. But I do know that your brother doesn’t notice me enough, and I can’t love him unless he notices me. You know your brother. You know what he pays attention to. What do I have to do to get him to notice me?”

  I was twelve years old. I said, “Take off your shoes.”

  She stood there, thinking about what I had said, and then, quietly, she bent down and took off her boots, and, putting her hand on my shoulder to balance herself, she took off her brown loafers and her white socks. She stood there in front of me with her bare feet on the ice. I saw in the grayish January light that her toenails were painted. Bare feet with painted toenails on the ice—this was a desperate and beautiful sight, and I shivered and felt my fingers curling inside my gloves.

  “How does it feel?” I asked.

  “You’ll know,” she said. “You’ll know in a few years.”

  My brother drove up close to us. He rolled down his window and opened the passenger-side door. He didn’t say anything. I watched Stephanie get into the car, carrying her shoes and socks and boots, and then I waved good-bye to them before turning to walk back to our house. I heard the car heading north across the ice. My brother would be looking at Stephanie’s bare feet on the floor of his car. He would probably not be saying anything just now.

  When I reached our front lawn, I stood out in the dark and looked in through the kitchen window. My mother and stepfather were sitting at the kitchen counter; I couldn’t be sure if they were speaking to each other, but then I saw my mother raise her arm in one of her can-you-believe-this gestures. I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted to feel cold, so cold that the cold itself became permanently interesting. I took off my overcoat and my gloves. Tilting my head back, I felt some snow fall onto my face. I thought of the word “exposure” and of how once or twice a year deer hunters in the Upper Peninsula died of it, and I bent down and stuck my hand into the snow and frozen grass and held it there. The cold rose from my hand to my elbow, and when I had counted to forty and couldn’t stand another second of it, I picked up my coat and gloves and walked into the bright heat of the front hallway.

  The Disappeared

  WHAT HE FIRST NOTICED about Detroit and therefore America was the smell. Almost as soon as he walked off the plane, he caught it: an acrid odor of wood ash. The smell seemed to go through his nostrils and take up residence in his head. In Sweden, his own country, he associated this smell with autumn, and the first family fires of winter, the smoke chuffing out of chimneys and settling familiarly over the neighborhood. But here it was midsummer, and he couldn’t see anything burning.

  On the way in from the airport, with the windows of the cab open and hot stony summer air blowing over his face, he asked the driver about it.

  “You’re smelling Detroit,” the driver said.

  Anders, who spoke very precise school English, thought that perhaps he hadn’t made himself understood. “No,” he said. “I am sorry. I mean the burning smell. What is it?”

  The cabdriver glanced in the rearview mirror. He was wearing a knitted beret, and his dreadlocks flapped in the breeze. “Where you from?”

  “Sweden.”

  The driver nodded to himself. “Explains why,” he said. The cab took a sharp right turn on the freeway and entered the Detroit city limits. The driver gestured with his left hand toward an electronic signboard, a small windowless factory at its base, and a clustered group of cramped clapboard houses nearby. When he gestured, the cab wobbled on the freeway. “Fires here most all the time,” he said. “Day in and day out. You get so you don’t notice. Or maybe you get so you do notice and you like it.”

  “I don’t see any fires,” Anders said.

  “That’s right.”

  Feeling that he was missing the point somehow, Anders decided to change the subject. “I see a saxophone and a baseball bat next to you,” he said, in his best English. “Do you like to play baseball?”

  “Not in this cab, I don’t,” the driver said quietly. “It’s no game then, you understand?”

  The young man sat back, feeling that he had been defeated by the American idiom in his first native encounter with it. An engineer, he was in Detroit to discuss his work in metal alloys that resist oxidation. The company that had invited him had suggested that he might agree to become a consultant on an exclusive contract, for what seemed to him an enormous, American-sized fee. But the money meant little to him. It was America he was curious about, attracted by, especially its colorful disorderliness.

  Disorder, of which there was very little in Sweden, seemed sexy to him: the disorder of a disheveled woman who has rushed down two flights of stairs to offer a last long kiss. Anders was single, and before he left the country he hoped to sleep with an American woman in an American bed. It was his ambition. He wondered if the experience would have any distinction. He had an idea that he might be able to go home and tell one or two friends about it.

  At the hotel, he was met by a representative of the automobile company, a gray-haired man with thick glasses who, to Anders’s surprise, spoke
rather good Swedish. Later that afternoon, and for the next two days, he was taken down silent carpeted hallways and shown into plush windowless rooms with recessed lighting. He showed them his slides and metal samples, cited chemical formulas, and made cost projections; he looked at the faces looking back at him. They were interested, friendly, but oddly blank, like faces he had seen in the military. He saw corridor after corridor. The building seemed more expressive than the people in it. The lighting was both bright and diffuse, and a low-frequency hum of power and secrecy seemed to flow out from the ventilators. Everyone complimented him on his English. A tall woman in a tailored suit, flashing him a secretive smile, asked him if he intended to stay in this country for long. Anders smiled, said that his plans on that particular point were open, and managed to work the name of his hotel into his conversation.

  At the end of the third day, the division head once again shook Anders’s hand in the foyer of the hotel lobby and said they’d be getting in touch with him very soon. Finally free, Anders stepped outside the hotel and sniffed the air. All the rooms he had been in since he had arrived had had no windows, or windows so blocked by drapes or blinds that he couldn’t see out.

  He felt restless and excited, with three days free for sightseeing in a wide-open American city, not quite in the Wild West but close enough to it to suit him. He returned to his room and changed into a pair of jeans, a light cotton shirt, and a pair of running shoes. In the mirror, he thought he looked relaxed and handsome. His vanity amused him, but he felt lucky to look the way he did. Back out on the sidewalk, he asked the doorman which direction he would recommend for a walk.

  The doorman, who had curly gray hair and sagging pouches under his eyes, removed his cap and rubbed his forehead. He did not look back at Anders. “You want my recommendation? Don’t walk anywhere. I would not recommend a walk. Sit in the bar and watch the soaps.” The doorman stared at a fire hydrant as he spoke.

  “What about running?”

  The doorman suddenly glanced at Anders, sizing him up. “It’s a chance. You might be okay. But to be safe, stay inside. There’s movies on the cable, you want them.”

  “Is there a park here?”

  “Sure, there’s parks. There’s always parks. There’s Belle Isle. You could go there. People do. I don’t recommend it. Still and all you might enjoy it if you run fast enough. What’re you planning to do?”

  Anders shrugged. “Relax. See your city.”

  “You’re seeing it,” the doorman said. “Ain’t nobody relaxed, seeing this place. Buy some postcards, you want sights. This place ain’t built for tourists and amateurs.”

  Anders thought that perhaps he had misunderstood again and took a cab out to Belle Isle; as soon as he had entered the park, he saw a large municipal fountain and asked the cabbie to drop him off in front of it. On its rim, children were shouting and dangling their legs in the water. The ornamentation of the stone lions was both solemn and whimsical and reminded him of the forced humor of Danish public sculpture. Behind the fountain he saw families grouped in evening picnics on the grass, and many citizens, of various apparent ethnic types, running, bicycling, and walking. Anders liked the way Americans walked, a sort of busyness in their step, as if, having no particular goal, they still had an unconscious urgency to get somewhere, to seem purposeful.

  He began to jog, and found himself passing a yacht club of some sort, and then a small zoo, and more landscaped areas where solitaries and couples sat on the grass listening to the evening baseball game on their radios. Other couples were stretched out by themselves, self-absorbed. The light had a bluish-gold quality. It looked like almost any city park to him, placid and decorative, a bit hushed.

  He found his way to an old building with a concession stand inside. After admiring the building’s fake Corinthian architecture, he bought a hot dog and a cola. Thinking himself disguised as a native—America was full of foreigners anyway—he walked to the west windows of the dining area to check on the unattached women. He wanted to praise, to an American, this evening, and this park.

  There were several couples on this side of the room, and what seemed to be several unattached men and women standing near the open window and listening to their various earphones. One of these women, with her hair partially pinned up, was sipping a lemonade. She had just the right faraway look. Anders thought he recognized this look. It meant that she was in a kind of suspension, between engagements.

  He put himself in her line of sight and said, in his heaviest accent, “A nice evening!”

  “What?” She removed the earphones and looked at him. “What did you say?”

  “I said the evening was beautiful.” He tried to sound as foreign as he could, the way Germans in Sweden did. “I am a visitor here,” he added quickly, “and not familiar with any of this.” He motioned his arm to indicate the park.

  “Not familiar?” she asked. “Not familiar with what?”

  “Well, with this park. With the sky here. The people.”

  “Parks are the same everywhere,” the woman said, leaning her hip against the wall. She looked at him with a vague interest. “The sky is the same. Only the people are different.”

  “Yes? How?”

  “Where are you from?”

  He explained, and she looked out the window toward the Canadian side of the Detroit River, at the city of Windsor. “That’s Canada, you know,” she said, pointing a finger at the river. “They make Canadian whiskey right over there.” She pointed at some high buildings and what seemed to be a grain elevator. “I’ve never drunk the whiskey. They say it tastes of acid rain. I’ve never been to Canada. I mean, I’ve seen it, but I’ve never been there. If I can see it from here, why should I go there?”

  “To be in Canada,” Anders suggested. “Another country.”

  “But I’m here,” she said suddenly, turning to him and looking at him directly. Her eyes were so dark they were almost colorless. “Why should I be anywhere else? Why are you here?”

  “I came to Detroit for business,” he said. “Now I’m sightseeing.”

  “Sightseeing?” She laughed out loud, and Anders saw her arch her back. Her breasts seemed to flare in front of him. Her body had distinct athletic lines. “No one sightsees here. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “Yes. The doorman at the hotel. He told me not to come.”

  “But you did. How did you get here?”

  “I came by taxi.”

  “You’re joking,” she said. Then she reached out and put her hand momentarily on his shoulder. “You took a taxi to this park? How do you expect to get back to your hotel?”

  “I suppose”—he shrugged—“I will get another taxi.”

  “Oh no you won’t,” she said, and Anders felt himself pleased that things were working out so well. He noticed again her pinned-up hair and its intense black. Her skin was deeply tanned or naturally dark, and he thought that she herself might be black or Hispanic, he didn’t know which, being unpracticed in making such distinctions. Outside he saw fireflies. No one had ever mentioned fireflies in Detroit. Night was coming on. He gazed up at the sky. Same stars, same moon.

  “You’re here alone?” she asked. “In America? And in this city?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Why not?”

  “People shouldn’t be left alone in this country,” she said, leaning toward him with a kind of vehemence. “They shouldn’t have left you here. It can get kind of weird, what happens to people. Didn’t they tell you?”

  He smiled and said that they hadn’t told him anything to that effect.

  “Well, they should have.” She dropped her cup into a trash can, and he thought he saw the beginning of a scar, a white line, traveling up the underside of her arm toward her shoulder.

  “Who do you mean?” he asked. “You said ‘they.’ Who is ‘they’?”

  “Any they at all,” she said. “Your guardians.” She sighed. “All right. Come on. Follow me.” She went outside and broke into a run. For a moment he thought t
hat she was running away from him, then realized that he was expected to run with her; it was what people did now, instead of holding hands, to get acquainted. He sprinted up next to her, and as she ran, she asked him, “Who are you?”

  Being careful not to tire—she wouldn’t like it if his endurance was poor—he told her his name, his professional interests, and he patched together a narrative about his mother, father, two sisters, and his aunt Ingrid. Running past a slower couple, he told her that his aunt was eccentric and broke china by throwing it on the floor on Fridays, which she called “the devil’s day.”

  “Years ago, they would have branded her a witch,” Anders said. “But she isn’t a witch. She’s just moody.”

  He watched her reactions and noticed that she didn’t seem at all interested in his family, or any sort of background. “Do you run a lot?” she asked. “You look as if you’re in pretty good shape.”

  He admitted that, yes, he ran, but that people in Sweden didn’t do this as much as they did in America.

  “You look a little like that tennis star, that Swede,” she said. “By the way, I’m Lauren.” Still running, she held out her hand, and, still running, he shook it. “Which god do you believe in?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Which god?” she asked. “Which god do you think is in control?”

  “I had not thought about it.”

  “You’d better,” she said. “Because one of them is.” She stopped suddenly and put her hands on her hips and walked in a small circle. She put her hand to her neck and took her pulse, timing it on her wristwatch. Then she placed her fingers on Anders’s neck and took his pulse. “One hundred fourteen,” she said. “Pretty good.” Again she walked away from him and again he found himself following her. In the growing darkness he noticed other men, standing in the parking lot, watching her, this American with pinned-up hair, dressed in a running outfit. He thought she was pretty, but maybe Americans had other standards so that here, in fact, she wasn’t pretty, and it was some kind of optical illusion.