Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “Seattle.” The Caroline-person nodded, in a, well, professional way, one of those therapeutic nods. Her hair had a spiky thickness, like straw or hay. Maybe Caroline would mention the traffic in Seattle. The ferries? Puget Sound? “What’s that?” She pointed at the haplessly soiled book.

  “Oh, this?” Kit shrugged. “Ovid.”

  More nodding. Blondish hair spiked here and there, arrows pointing at the ceiling and the light fixtures and the arrival-and-departure screens. The Caroline-person carried—no, actually pulled on wheels—a tan suitcase, and she wore a business suit, account executive attire, a little gold pin in the shape of the Greek lambda on her lapel. Not a very pretty pin, but maybe a clue: lambda, lambda, now what would that … possibly mean? Suitcase: This woman didn’t live here in Chicago. Or else she did.

  “You were always reading, Kit. All that Greek and Latin!” She stepped back and surveyed. “You look simply fabulous! With the cap? Such a cute retro look, it’s so street-smart, like … who’s that actress?”

  “Yeah, well, I have to … It’s nice to see you, Caroline, but I’m headed back to the Loop, it’s late, and I have to—”

  “Is your car here?” A hand wave: Caroline-person wedding ring: tasteful diamond, of course, that’s the way it goes in the Midwest, wedding rings everyfuckingwhere.

  “Uh, no, we took, I mean, he and I took the taxi out.” Somehow it seemed important to repeat that. “We took a taxi.”

  “Great! I’ll give you a ride back. I’ll take you to your place. I’ll drop you right at the doorstep. Would you like some company? Come on!”

  She felt her elbow being touched.

  Down the long corridors of O’Hare Airport shaped like the ever-ballooning hallways of eternity, the Caroline-person pulled her suitcase, its tiny wheels humming behind her high-heeled businesslike stride; and easily keeping up in her jogging shoes, in which she jogged when the mood struck her, Kit tried to remember where on this planet, and in this life, she’d met this person. Graduate school? College? She wasn’t a parent of one of her students, that was certain. You were always reading. Must’ve been college. “It’s been so long,” the woman was saying. “Must be … what?” They edged out of the way of a beeping handicap cart.

  Kit shook her head as if equally exasperated by their mutual ignorance.

  “Well, I don’t know either,” Caroline-person said. “So, who’d you see off?”

  “What?”

  “To Seattle.”

  “Oh,” Kit said.

  “Something the matter?”

  “It was Billy,” Kit said. “It was Billy I put on the plane.”

  “Kit,” she said, “I haven’t seen you in years. Who’s this Billy?” She gave her a sly girlish smile. “Must be somebody special.”

  Kit nodded. “Yeah. Must be.”

  “Oh,” Caroline said, “you can tell me.”

  “Actually, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I’d just rather not.”

  A smile took over Caroline’s face like the moon taking over the sun during an eclipse. “But you can. You can tell me.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t remember you, Caroline. I don’t remember the first thing about you. I know a person’s not supposed to admit that, but it’s been a bad couple of days, and I just don’t know who you are. Probably we went to college together or something, classics majors and all that, but I can’t remember.” People rushed past them and around them. “I don’t remember you at all.”

  “You’re kidding,” the woman said.

  “No,” Kit said, “I’m not. I can’t remember seeing you before.”

  The woman who said her name was Caroline put her hand on her forehead and stared at Kit with a what-have-we-here? shocked look. Kit knew she was supposed to feel humiliated and embarrassed, but instead she felt shiny and new and fine for the first time all day. She didn’t like to be tactless, but that seemed to be the direction, at least right now, this weekend, where her freedom lay. She’d been so good for so long, she thought, so loving and sweet and agreeable, and look where it had gotten her. “You’re telling me,” the woman said, “that you don’t remember our—”

  “Stop,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Wait. You don’t even want to be reminded? You’re … But why? Now I’m offended,” the woman told her. “Let’s start over. Let’s begin again. Kit, I feel very hurt.”

  “I know,” Kit said. “It’s been a really strange afternoon.”

  “I just don’t think …,” the woman said, but then she was unable to finish the sentence. “Our ride into the city …”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Kit said. “I couldn’t take up your offer. I’ll ride the bus back. They have good buses here,” she added.

  “No,” she said. “Go with me.”

  “I can’t, Caroline. I don’t remember you. We’re strangers.”

  “Well, uh, good-bye then,” the woman muttered. “You certainly have changed.”

  “I certainly have. But I’m almost never like this. It’s Billy who did this to me.” She gazed in Caroline’s direction. “And my vocabulary,” she said, not quite knowing what she meant. But she liked it, so she repeated it. “My vocabulary did this to me.”

  “It’s that bad?” the woman said.

  Standing in O’Hare Airport, where she had gone for no good reason except that she could not stand to be alone in her apartment, she felt, for about ten seconds, tiny and scaled-down, like a model person in a model airport as viewed from above, and she reached out and balanced herself on the driver’s-side door handle and then shook her head and closed her eyes. If she accepted compassion from this woman, there would be nothing left of her in the morning. Sympathy would give her chills and fever, and she would start shaking, and the shaking would move her out of the hurricane’s eye into the hurricane itself, and it would batter her, and then wear her away to the zero. Nothing in life had ever hurt her more than sympathy.

  “I have to go now,” Kit said, turning away. She walked fast, and then ran, in the opposite direction.

  Of course I remember you. We were both in a calculus class. We had hamburgers after the class sometimes in the college greasy spoon, and we talked about boys and the future and your dog at home, Brutus, in New Buffalo, Minnesota, where your mother bred cairn terriers. In the backyard there was fencing for a kennel, and that’s where Brutus stayed. He sometimes climbed to the top of his little pile of stones to survey what there was to survey of the fields around your house. He barked at hawks and skunks. Thunderstorms scared him, and he was so lazy, he hated to take walks. When he was inside, he’d hide under the bed, where he thought no one could see him, with his telltale leash visible, trailing out on the bedroom floor. You told that story back then. You were pretty in those days. You still are. You wear a pin in the shape of the Greek letter lambda and a diamond wedding ring. In those days, I recited poetry. I can remember you. I just can’t do it in front of you. I can’t remember you when you’re there.

  She gazed out the window of the bus. She didn’t feel all right but she could feel all right approaching her, somewhere off there in the distance.

  She had felt it lifting when she had said his name was Billy. It wasn’t Billy. It was Ben. Billy hadn’t left her; Ben had. There never had been a Billy, but maybe now there was. She was saying good-bye to him; he wasn’t saying good-bye to her. She turned on the overhead light as the bus sped through Des Plaines, and she tried to read some Ovid, but she immediately dozed off.

  Roaring through the traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, the bus lurched and rocked, and Kit’s head on the headrest turned from side to side, an irregular rhythm, but a rhythm all the same: enjambments, caesuras, strophes.

  My darling girl, (he said, thinner

  than she’d ever thought he’d be,

  mostly bald, a few sprout curls,

  and sad-but-cheerful, certainly,

  Ro
man and wryly unfeminist, unhumanist,

  unliving), child of gall and wormwood (he pointed his

  thin malnourished finger at her,

  soil inside the nail),

  what on earth

  brought you to that unlikely place?

  An airport! Didn’t I tell you,

  clearly,

  to shun such spots? A city park on a warm

  Sunday afternoon wouldn’t be as bad. People fall

  into one another’s arms out there all the time.

  Hundreds of them! (He seemed exasperated.)

  Thank you (he said)

  for reading me, but for the sake

  of your own well-being, don’t go there

  again without a ticket. It seems

  you have found me out. (He

  shrugged.) Advice? I don’t have any

  worth passing on. It’s easier

  to give advice when you’re alive

  than when you’re not,

  and besides, I swore it off. Oh I liked

  what you did with Caroline, the lambda-girl

  who wears that pin because her husband

  gave it to her on her birthday,

  March twenty-first—now that

  I’m dead, I know everything

  but it does me not a particle of good—

  but naturally she thinks it has no

  special meaning, and that’s the way

  she conducts her life. Him, too. He

  bought it at a jewelry store next to a shoe

  shop in the mall at 2 p.m.

  March 13, a Thursday—but I digress—

  and the salesgirl,

  cute thing, hair done in a short cut

  style, flirted with him

  showing him no mercy,

  touching his coat sleeve,

  thin wool, because she was on commission. Her

  name was

  Eleanor, she had green eyes.

  The pin cost him $175, plus tax.

  She took him, I mean, took him for a ride,

  as you would say,

  then went out for coffee. By herself, that is,

  thinking of her true

  and best beloved, Claire, an obstetrician

  with lovely hands. I always did admire

  Sapphic love. But I’m

  still digressing. (He smirked.)

  The distant failed humor of the dead.

  Our timing’s bad,

  the jokes are dusty,

  and we can’t concentrate

  on just

  one thing. I’m as interested

  in Eleanor as I am

  in you. Lambda. Who cares? Lambda: I suppose

  I mean, I know,

  he thought the eleventh letter, that uncompleted triangle,

  looked like his wife’s legs. Look:

  I can’t help it,

  I’m—what is the word?—salacious, that’s

  the way I always was,

  the bard of breasts and puberty, I was

  exiled for it, I turned to powder

  six feet under all the topsoil

  in Romania. Sweetheart, what on earth

  are you doing on

  this bus? Wake up, kiddo, that guy

  Ben is gone, good riddance

  is my verdict from two thousand

  years ago, to you.

  Listen: I have a present for you.

  He took her hand.

  His hand didn’t feel like much,

  it felt like water when you’re reaching

  down for a stone or shell

  under the water, something you don’t

  have, but want, and your fingers

  strain toward it.

  Here, he said, this is the one stunt

  I can do: look up, sweetie, check out

  this:

  (he raised his arm in ceremony)

  See? he said proudly. It’s raining.

  I made it rain. I can do that.

  The rain is falling, only

  it’s not water, it’s

  this other thing. It’s the other thing

  that’s raining, soaking you. Good-bye.

  When she awoke, at the sound of the air brakes, the bus driver announced that they had arrived at their first stop, the Palmer House. It wasn’t quite her stop, but Kit decided to get out. The driver stood at the curb as the passengers stepped down, and the streetlight gave his cap an odd bluish glow. His teeth were so discolored they looked like pencil erasers. He asked her if she had any luggage, and Kit said no, she hadn’t brought any luggage with her.

  The El clattered overhead. She was in front of a restaurant with thick glass windows. On the other side of the glass, a man with a soiled unpressed tie was talking and eating prime rib. On the sidewalk, just down the block, under an orange neon light, an old woman was shouting curses at the moon and Mayor Daley. She wore a paper hat and her glasses had only one lens in them, on the left side, and her curses were so interesting, so incoherently articulate, uttered in that voice, which was like sandpaper worried across a brick, that Kit forgot that she was supposed to be unhappy, she was listening so hard, and watching the way the orange was reflected in that one lens.

  Poor Devil

  MY EX-WIFE AND I are sitting on the floor of what was once our living room. The room stands empty now except for us. This place is the site of our marital decline and we are performing a ritual cleansing on it. I’ve been washing the hardwood with a soapy disinfectant solution, using a soft brush and an old mop, working toward the front window, which has a view of the street. My hands smell of soap and bleach. We’re trying to freshen the place up for the new owners. The terms of sale do not require this kind of scouring, but somehow we have brought ourselves here to perform it.

  We’re both bruised from the work: Emily fell off a kitchen stool this morning while washing the upstairs windows, and I banged my head against a drainpipe when I was cleaning under the bathroom sink. When I heard her drop to the floor, I yelled upstairs to ask if she was okay, and she yelled back down to say that she was, but I didn’t run up there to check.

  When my wife and I were in the process of splitting up, the house itself participated. Lamps dismounted from their tables at the slightest touch, pictures plummeted from the wall and their frames shattered whenever anyone walked past them. Destruction abounded. You couldn’t touch anything in here without breaking it. The air in the living room acquired a poisonous residue from the things we had said to each other. I sometimes thought I could discern a malignant green mist, invisible to everyone else, floating just above the coffee table. We excreted malice, the two of us. The house was haunted with pain. You felt it the minute you walked in the door.

  Therefore this cleaning. We both like the young couple who have bought the house—smiling, just-out-of-school types with one toddler and another child on the way. We want to give them a decent chance. During our eight years together, Emily and I never had any kids ourselves—luckily, or: unluckily, who can say.

  Anyway, now that we’ve been cleaning it, our former dwelling seems to have calmed down. The air in the living room has achieved a settled stale quietude. It’s as if we’d never lived here. The unhappiness has seeped out of it.

  Emily is sitting on the floor over in the other corner now, a stain in the shape of a Y on her T-shirt. She’s taking a breather. I can smell her sweat, a vinegary sweetness, and quite pleasant. She’s drinking a beer, though it’s only two in the afternoon. She’s barefoot, little traces of polish on her toenails. Her pretty brown hair, always one of her best features, hangs fixed back by a rubber band in the sort of ponytail women sometimes make when they’re housecleaning. Her face is pink from her exertions, and on her forehead is a bruise from where she fell.

  She’s saying that it’s strange, but the very sight of me causes her sadness, a complicated sadness, she informs me, inflecting the adjective, though she’s smiling when she says it, a half smile, some grudges mixed in there with this late-term affabilit
y. She takes a swig of the beer. I can see that she’s trying to make our troubles into a manageable comedy. I was Laurel; she was Hardy. I was Abbott; she was Costello. We failed together at the job we had been given, our marriage. But I don’t think this comedic version of us will work out, even in retrospect. She tells me that one of my mistakes was that I thought I knew her, but, in fact, no, I never really knew her, and she can prove it. This is old ground, but I let her talk. She’s not speaking to me so much as she’s meditating aloud in the direction of the wall a few feet above my head. It’s as if I’ve become a problem in linear algebra.

  My general ignorance of her character causes her sorrow, she now admits. She wonders whether I was deluded about women in general and her in particular. To illustrate what I don’t know about her, she begins to tell me a story.

  But before she can really get started, I interrupt her. “ ‘Sorrow,’ ” I say. “Now there’s a noun from our grandparents’ generation. Nobody our age uses words like that anymore except you. Or ‘weary.’ You’re the only person I know who ever used that word. I’m weary, you’d say, when you didn’t look weary at all, just irritable. And ‘forbearance.’ I don’t even fucking know what forbearance is. ‘Show some forbearance’—that was a line you used. Where did you find those words, anyway?”

  “Are you done?” she asks me. We’re like a couple of tired fighters in the fifteenth round.

  “What’s wrong with saying ‘I’m bummed’?” I ask her. “Everyone else says that. ‘I’m bummed.’ ‘I’m down.’ ‘I’m depressed.’ ‘I’m blue.’ But you—you have a gift for the … archaic.” I am trying to amuse her and irritate her at the same time, so I wink.

  “I wasn’t depressed back then,” she says. “I was sad. There’s a difference.” I scuttle over to where she is sitting and take a swig from the beer can she’s been clutching. Only there’s no beer left. I take a swig of air. Okay: we may be divorced, but we’re still married.

  Before I met her, but after she had dropped out of college, Emily had moved to the Bay Area, quite a few summers after the Summers of Love, which she had missed, both the summers and the love. She had rented a cheap basement apartment in the Noe Valley, one of those ground-floor places with a view of the sidewalk and of passing shoes, and during the day she was working in a department store, the Emporium, in the luggage department.