Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  When he caught up with her, she was unlocking the door of a blue Chevrolet rusting near the hubcaps. He gazed down at the rust with professional interest—it had the characteristic blister pattern of rust caused by salt. She slipped inside the car and reached across to unlock the passenger side, and when he got in—he hadn’t been invited to get in, but he thought it was all right—he sat down on several small plastic tape cassette cases. He picked them out from underneath him and tried to read their labels. She was taking off her shoes. Debussy, Bach, 10,000 Maniacs, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

  “Where are we going?” he asked. He glanced down at her bare foot on the accelerator. She put the car into reverse. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Stop this car.” She put on the brake and turned off the ignition. “I just want to look at you,” he said.

  “Okay, look.” She turned on the interior light and kept her face turned so that he was looking at her in profile. Something about her suggested a lovely disorder, a ragged brightness toward the back of her face.

  “Are we going to do things?” he asked, touching her on the arm.

  “Of course,” she said. “Strangers should always do things.”

  She said that she would drop him off at his hotel, that he must change clothes. This was important. She would then pick him up. On the way over, he saw almost no one downtown. For some reason, it was quite empty of shoppers, strollers, or pedestrians of any kind. “I’m going to tell you some things you should know,” she said. He settled back. He was used to this kind of talk on dates: everyone, everywhere, liked to reveal intimate details. It was an international convention.

  They were slowing for a red light. “God is love,” she said, downshifting, her bare left foot on the clutch. “At least I think so. It’s my hope. In the world we have left, only love matters. Do you understand? I’m one of the Last Ones. Maybe you’ve heard of us.”

  “No, I have not. What do you do?”

  “We do what everyone else does. We work and we go home and have dinner and go to bed. There is only one thing we do that is special.”

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “We don’t make plans,” she said. “No big plans at all.”

  “That is not so unusual,” he said, trying to normalize what she was saying. “Many people don’t like to make—”

  “It’s not liking,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with liking or not liking. It’s a faith. Look at those buildings.” She pointed toward several abandoned multistoried buildings with broken or vacant windows. “What face is moving behind all that? Something is. I live and work here. I’m not blind. Anyone can see what’s taking place here. You’re not blind, either. Our church is over on the east side, off Van Dyke Avenue. It’s not a good part of town, but we want to be near where the face is doing its work.”

  “Your church?”

  “The Church of the Millennium,” she said. “Where they preach the Gospel of Last Things.” They were now on the freeway, heading up toward the General Motors Building and his hotel. “Do you understand me?”

  “Of course,” he said. He had heard of American cult religions but thought they were all in California. He didn’t mind her talk of religion. It was like talk of the sunset or childhood; it kept things going. “Of course I have been listening.”

  “Because I won’t sleep with you unless you listen to me,” she said. “It’s the one thing I care about, that people listen. It’s so damn rare, listening I mean, that you might as well care about it. I don’t sleep with strangers too often. Almost never.” She turned to look at him. “Anders,” she said, “what do you pray to?”

  He laughed. “I don’t.”

  “Okay, then, what do you plan for?”

  “A few things,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “My dinner every night. My job. My friends.”

  “You don’t let accidents happen? You should. Things reveal themselves in accidents.”

  “Are there many people like you?” he asked.

  “What do you think?” He looked again at her face, taken over by the darkness in the car but dimly lit by the dashboard lights and the oncoming flare of traffic. “Do you think there are many people like me?”

  “Not very many,” he said. “But maybe more than there used to be.”

  “Any of us in Sweden?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s not a religion over there. People don’t … They didn’t tell us in Sweden about American girls who listen to Debussy and 10,000 Maniacs in their automobiles and who believe in gods and accidents.”

  “They don’t say ‘girls’ here,” she told him. “They say ‘women.’ ”

  She dropped him off at the hotel and said that she would pick him up in forty-five minutes. In his room, as he chose a clean shirt and a sport coat and a pair of trousers, he found himself laughing happily. He felt giddy. It was all happening so fast; he could hardly believe his luck. I am a very lucky man, he thought.

  He looked out his hotel window at the streetlights. They had an amber glow, the color of gemstones. This city, this American city, was unlike any he had ever seen. A downtown area emptied of people; a river with huge ships going by silently; a park with girls who believe in the millennium. No, not girls: women. He had learned his lesson.

  He wanted to open the hotel window to smell the air, but the casement frames were welded shut.

  After walking down the stairs to the lobby, he stood out in front of the hotel doorway. He felt a warm breeze against his face. He told the doorman, Luis, that he had met a woman on Belle Isle who was going to pick him up in a few minutes. She was going to take him dancing. The doorman nodded, rubbing his chin with his hand. Anders said that she was friendly and wanted to show him, a foreigner, things. The doorman nodded. “Yes, I agree,” Luis said. “Dancing. Make sure that this is what you do.”

  “What?”

  “Dancing,” Luis said, “yes. Go dancing. You know this woman?”

  “I just met her.”

  “Ah,” Luis said, and stepped back to observe Anders, as if to remember his face. “Dangerous fun.” When her car appeared in front of the hotel, she was wearing a light summer dress, and when she smiled, she looked like the melancholy baby he had heard about in an American song. As they pulled away from the hotel, he looked back at Luis, who was watching them closely, and then Anders realized that Luis was reading the numbers on Lauren’s license plate. To break the mood, he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. She smelled of cigarettes and something else—soap or cut flowers.

  She took him uptown to a club where a trio played soft rock and some jazz. Some of this music was slow enough to dance to, in the slow way he wanted to dance. Her hand in his felt bony and muscular; physically, she was direct and immediate. He wondered, now, looking at her face, whether she might be an American Indian, and again he was frustrated because he couldn’t tell one race in this country from another. He knew it was improper to ask. When he sat at the table, holding hands with her and sipping from his drink, he began to feel as if he had known her for a long time and was related to her in some obscure way.

  Suddenly he asked her, “Why are you so interested in me?”

  “Interested?” She laughed, and her long black hair, no longer pinned up, shook in quick thick waves. “Well, all right. I have an interest. I like it that you’re so foreign that you take cabs to the park. I like the way you look. You’re kind of cute. And the other thing is, your soul is so raw and new, Anders, it’s like an oyster.”

  “What?” He looked at her near him at the table. Their drinks were half finished. “My soul?”

  “Yeah, your soul. I can almost see it.”

  “Where is it?”

  She leaned forward, friendly and sexual and now slightly elegant. “You want me to show you?”

  “Yes,” Anders said. “Sure.”

  “It’s in two places,” she said. “One part is up here.” She released his hand and put her thumb on his forehead. “And the other part i
s down here.” She touched him in the middle of his stomach. “Right there. And they’re connected.”

  “What are they like?” he asked, playing along.

  “Yours? Raw and shiny, just like I said.”

  “And what about your soul?” he asked.

  She looked at him. “My soul is radioactive,” she said. “It’s like plutonium. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  He thought that this was another American idiom he hadn’t heard before, and he decided not to spoil things by asking her about it. In Sweden, people didn’t talk much about the soul, at least not in conjunction with oysters or plutonium. It was probably some local metaphor he had never heard in Sweden.

  In the dark he couldn’t make out much about her building, except that it was several floors high and at least fifty years old. Her living-room window looked out distantly at the river—once upstairs, he could see the lights of another passing freighter—and through the left side of the window he could see an electrical billboard. The name of the product was made out of hundreds of small incandescent bulbs, which went on and off from left to right. One of the letters was missing.

  It’s today’s CHEVR LET!

  All around her living-room walls were brightly framed watercolors, almost celebratory and Matisse-like, but in vague shapes. She went down the hallway, tapped on one of the doors, and said, “I’m home.” Then she returned to the living room and kicked off her shoes. “My grandmother,” she said. “She has her own room.”

  “Are these your pictures?” he asked. “Did you draw them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t tell what they are. What are they?”

  “They’re abstract. You use wet paper to get that effect. They’re abstract because God has gotten abstract. God used to have a form but now He’s dissolving into pure light. That’s what you see in those pictures. They’re pictures of the trails that God leaves behind.”

  “Like the vapor trails”—he smiled—“behind jets.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Like that.”

  He went over to her in the dark and drew her to him and kissed her. Her breath was layered with smoke, apparently from cigarettes. Immediately he felt an unusual physical sensation inside his skin, like something heating up in a frypan.

  She drew back. He heard another siren go by on the street outside. He wondered whether they should talk some more in the living room—share a few more verbal intimacies—to be really civilized about this and decided, no, it was not necessary, not when strangers make love, as they do, sometimes, in strange cities, away from home. They went into her bedroom and undressed each other. Her body, by the light of a dim bedside lamp, was as beautiful and as exotic as he had hoped it would be, darker than his own skin in the dark room, native somehow to this continent. She had the flared shoulders and hips of a dancer. She bent down and snapped off the bedside light, and as he approached her, she was lit from behind by the billboard. Her skin felt vaguely electrical to him.

  They stood in the middle of her bedroom, arms around each other, swaying, and he knew, in his arousal, that something odd was about to occur: he had no words for it in either his own language or English.

  They moved over and under each other, changing positions to stay in the breeze created by the window fan. They were both lively and attentive, and at first he thought it would be just the usual fun, this time with an almost anonymous American woman. He looked at her in the bed and saw her dark leg alongside his own, and he saw that same scar line running up her arm to her shoulder, where it disappeared.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  “That?” She looked at it. “That was an accident that was done to me.”

  Half an hour later, resting with her, his hands on her back, he felt a wave of happiness; he felt it was a wave of color traveling through his body, surging from his forehead down to his stomach. It took him over again, and then a third time, with such force that he almost sat up.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It is like … I felt a color moving through my body.”

  “Oh that?” She smiled at him in the dark. “It’s your soul, Anders. That’s all. That’s all it is. Never felt it before, huh?”

  “I must be very drunk,” he said.

  She put her hand up into his hair. “Call it anything you want to. Didn’t you feel it before? Our souls were curled together.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “You are a crazy woman.”

  “Oh yeah?” she whispered. “Is that what you think? Watch. Watch what happens now. You think this is all physical. Guess what. You’re the crazy one. Watch. Watch.”

  She went to work on him, and at first it was pleasurable, but as she moved over him it became a succession of waves that had specific colorations, even when he turned her and thought he was taking charge. Soon he felt some substance, some glossy blue possession entangled in the air above him.

  “I bet you’re going to say that you’re imagining all this,” she said, her hand skidding across him.

  “Who are you?” he said. “Who in the world are you?”

  “I warned you,” she whispered, her mouth directly over his ear. “I warned you. You people with your things, your rusty things, you suffer so bad when you come into where we live. Did they tell you we were all soulless here? Did they say that?”

  He put his hands on her. “This is not love, but it—”

  “Of course not,” she said. “It’s something else. Do you know the word? Do you know the word for something that opens your soul at once? Like that?” She snapped her fingers on the pillow. Her tongue was touching his ear. “Do you?” The words were almost inaudible.

  “No.”

  “Addiction.” She waited. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  In the middle of the night he rose up and went to the window. He felt like a stump, amputated from the physical body of the woman. At the window he looked down, to the right of the billboard, and saw another apartment building with heavy decorations with human forms near the roof’s edge, and on the third floor he saw a man at the window, as naked as he himself was but almost completely in shadow, gazing out at the street. There were so far away from each other that being unclothed didn’t matter. It was vague and small and impersonal.

  “Do you always stand at the window without clothes on?” she asked, from the bed.

  “Not in Sweden,” he said. He turned around. “This is odd,” he said. “At night no one walks out on the streets. But there, over on that block, there’s a man like me, at the window, and he is looking out, too. Do people stand everywhere at the windows here?”

  “Come to bed.”

  “When I was in the army, the Swedish army,” he said, still looking out, “they taught us to think that we could decide to do anything. They talked about the will. Your word ‘willpower.’ All Sweden believes this—choice, will, willpower. Maybe not so much now. I wonder if they talk about it here.”

  “You’re funny,” she said. She had moved up from behind him and embraced him.

  In the morning he watched her as she dressed. His eyes hurt from sleeplessness. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m already late.” She was putting on a light blue skirt. As she did, she smiled. “You’re a lovely lover,” she said. “I like your body very much.”

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “We? There is no ‘we,’ Anders. There’s you and then there’s me. We’re not a couple. I’m going to work. You’re going back to your country soon. What are you planning to do?”

  “May I stay here?”

  “For an hour,” she said, “and then you should go back to your hotel. I don’t think you should stay. You don’t live here.”

  “May I take you to dinner tonight?” he asked, trying not to watch her as he watched her. “What can we do tonight?”

  “There’s that ‘we’ again. Well, maybe. You can teach me a few words of Swedish. Why don’t you hang around at your ho
tel and maybe I’ll come by around six and get you, but don’t call me if I don’t come by, because if I don’t, I don’t.”

  “I can’t call you,” he said. “I don’t know your last name.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “Well, listen. I’ll probably come at six.” She looked at him lying in the bed. “I don’t believe this,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You think you’re in love, don’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “Not exactly.” He waited. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I get the point,” she said. “Well, you’d better get used to it. Welcome to our town. We’re not always good at love but we are good at that.” She bent to kiss him and then was gone. Happiness and agony simultaneously reached down and pressed against his chest. They, too, were like colors, but when you mixed the two together, you got something greenish-pink, excruciating.

  He stood up, put on his trousers, and began looking into her dresser drawers. He expected to find trinkets and whatnot, but all she had were folded clothes, and, in the corner of the top drawer, a small turquoise heart for a charm bracelet. He put it into his pocket.

  In the bathroom, he examined the labels on her medicines and facial creams before washing his face. He wanted evidence but didn’t know for what. He looked, to himself, like a slightly different version of what he had once been. In the mirror his face had a puffy look and a passive expression, as if he had been assaulted during the night.

  After he had dressed and entered the living room, he saw Lauren’s grandmother sitting at a small dining-room table. She was eating a piece of toast and looking out of the window toward the river. The apartment, in daylight, had an aggressively scrubbed and mopped look. On the kitchen counter a small black-and-white television was blaring, but the old woman wasn’t watching it. Her black hair was streaked with gray, and she wore a ragged pink bathrobe decorated with pictures of orchids. She was very frail. Her skin was as dark as her granddaughter’s. Looking at her, Anders was once again unable to guess what race she was. She might be Arabic, or a Native American, or Hispanic, or black. Because he couldn’t tell, he didn’t care.