Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “You know,” I say to Emily, as I swing back and forth in my swing, “I’ve been getting postcards. Anonymous postcards.”

  “Dennis,” Emily tells me, “I don’t have time for another story. I have to get home. I have a date tonight, if you can believe it.”

  “No, listen,” I say. “They’ve been arriving in the mail every few days. They’re anonymous, I don’t know who’s sending them. Not to work, but to my home address, the apartment. And they have these picture postcard photographs on the flip side—Miami Beach, the Bahamas, the Empire State Building, the usual. But on the message side, it’s something else.”

  “Dennis, really,” she says, “I have to go.” But she’s still sitting there, in the playground, on her swing. “I have to get ready,” she says, in a flat, neutral tone.

  But I’m going to finish, and I say, “And what it is, these messages—they’re always handwritten, always in blue ink, always in large letters, uppercase, all of them. Short, punchy sentences. Condemnations, against me. Judgments.” I hold up my hand to suggest a headline, even though the words have to fit on postcards. ‘Your work has come to nothing.’ ‘Your life is a disaster.’ ‘Someone is watching you.’ ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ Now who do you suppose would send postcard messages like that?”

  She looks over at me, in the gathering dusk, a genuine expression of surprise, and I understand at the moment that I see her face that it’s not she, it’s not Emily who has been sending me these postcards. All along I had thought it would be her idea of retribution, these insane postcards. But she hasn’t been sending them, and this sends a brief shudder through me. But really, perhaps I had known all along. After all, I would know what her handwriting was like even if she tried to disguise it. We’re almost twins that way.

  “If you’re thinking it was me,” Emily says, “think again. It wasn’t.”

  “And last week, I got one that said, ‘Have you no remorse?’ ”

  “Well,” Emily says, after a pause, “whoever is sending them must know you. That’s a good word, ‘remorse.’ I could have used that word on you. A flea-market word. Maybe I actually did. It would’ve been one of my grandparent words. You never used a word like that. Must be one of your little girlfriends sending these messages. Somebody who’s a little obsessed with you, Dennis.”

  “Some poor devil,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says, “a poor devil, that sounds about right.” She gets up out of the swing and goes over to the climbing structure. “Which one do you suppose it is?”

  “Well,” I say, “I don’t know.” But actually I think I do know. Once this woman and I were at dinner together, a woman who in her day had done a lot of drugs, the ones that give you those dimestore visions, and out of nowhere, she said, “I can see all your thoughts, you know. I can see them, and you don’t even have to say them aloud, because I know what they are.” She was holding her wineglass, this woman, and it had been a good evening until then, but when she said she could see my thoughts, it seemed time to get out of there. She sat up straight. “God and his archangels have taken a real dislike to you,” she said, as I was motioning to the waiter. “They have a gun pointed at your head. I just think I should tell you that.”

  “She really said that?” Emily asks, coming down from the play structure. “That God and his archangels had a gun pointed at your head?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Those were her exact words. But I can’t imagine anyone being obsessed with me. I have such a …” But I can’t think of the phrase.

  “Where did you find these girls, Dennis?” she asks.

  “The place where everybody finds them. In the street, and so on.”

  “You should look in different places.”

  “There are no different places.” It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know what Emily and I are talking about. I’ve completely lost the thread.

  “No,” she says, “there aren’t.” She waits. “Did you see that woman and her little boy? Did you see how … I don’t know, how calm they were with each other? God, I loved seeing that. That calm. It makes you want to be a kid again. Of course, I always want that anyway.”

  I take her hand and we walk back.

  When we get to the house, my ex-wife is about to unlock her car and drive away, but she’s left her purse and wallet in the kitchen. So, together, the two of us go in the front door, and we step into the foyer and the living room. They’re completely dark—it’s night by now—and only the streetlight is spraying a little bit of illumination into the room, barely enough to see by.

  “Close your eyes,” Emily says. “Could you find your way around in this place with your eyes closed? I bet you could.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  So I close my eyes and hold my arms out in the dark, and I walk all around the room where the lamps and tables and chairs were, where Em and I once lived, and I go into the dining room, still with my eyes closed, and I walk into the kitchen, past the counter and the dishwasher and then back out, taking my steps one at a time through these spaces I’ve come to know so intimately. It’s just as well that my eyes are closed as I’m walking through this dark house where Emily and I tried to stage our marriage, because I have this image of Santa jogging—no, sprinting—away from me, and I probably have a grim look.

  It’s right about then that I’m back in the living room and I bump up against Emily, whose arms also have been out, in this game we’re playing. In the story that I don’t tell, we excuse ourselves, but then, very slowly and tenderly, we are inspired by each other at last, and we take each other in our arms, and all the bad times fall away, and we kiss, and we mutter our apologies, our long-standing whispered complicated remorse, and perhaps we sink to the floor, and we make love together in the dark empty living room, on the floor, understanding that maybe it will not be the last time, after all. And as we make love, Emily makes her utterly familiar trembling cry when she comes.

  That’s the story that I don’t tell, because it doesn’t happen, and couldn’t, and would not, because I am unforgivable, and so is she. Two poor devils: what we don’t feel is remorse, the word on that postcard. We bump into each other, two blind staggerers, two solitudes, and then, yes, we apologize. And that’s when Emily goes into the kitchen, her eyes open, but still in the dark house that she knows, as they say, by heart, and she picks up her purse from where she has left it, and she comes out, sailing past me, and she maybe half turns in the dark, and blows me a kiss, but probably she doesn’t.

  She closes the front door behind her, absentmindedly locking it, locking me into the house. And it’s then, and only then, that I speak up. “Good-bye, honey,” I say.

  Ghosts

  OUT ON THE FRONT LAWN, Melinda was weeding her father’s garden with a birdlike metal claw when a car drifted up to the curb. A man with brown hair highlighted with blond streaks got out on the driver’s side. He stood still for a moment, staring at the house as if he owned it and was mulling over possible improvements. In his left hand he held an apple with teeth marks in it, though the apple was still whole. Melinda had never laid eyes on the guy before. Her father’s house was located in an affordable but slightly run-down city neighborhood with its share of characters. They either gawked at you or wouldn’t meet your gaze. Many of them were mutterers who deadwalked their way past other pedestrians in pursuit of their oddball destinations. She returned to her weeding.

  “Hot day,” the man said loudly, as if comments on the weather might interest her. Melinda glanced at him again. With a narrow Eric Claptonish face, and dressed in blue jeans and a plain white shirt, he was on his way to handsomeness without quite arriving there. The apple was probably an accessory for nerves, like a chewed pencil behind the ear.

  The baby monitor on the ground beside her began to squawk.

  “I have to go inside,” Melinda said, half to herself. She dropped her metal claw, rubbed her hands to get some of the topsoil off, and hurried into the house, taking the steps two at a time. Upst
airs, her nine-month-old son, Eric, lay fussing in his crib. With dirt still under her fingernails, she picked him up to kiss him and caught a whiff of wet diaper. At the changing table, she raised her son’s legs with one hand and removed the diaper with the other while she observed the stranger advancing up the front walk toward the entryway. The doorbell rang, startling the baby and making his arms quiver. Melinda called over to her father, whose bedroom was across the hall, to alert him about the stranger. Her father didn’t answer. Sleep often captured him these days and absented him for hours.

  She pinned the clean diaper together, and with slow tenderness brought Eric to her shoulder. She smoothed his hair, the same shade of brown as her own, and at that moment the man who had been standing outside appeared in front of her in the bedroom doorway, smiling dreamily, still holding the bitten apple.

  “I used to live here,” the man said quietly, “when I was little. This was my room when I was small.” After emphasizing the last word with a strange vehemence, he seemed to be surveying the walls and the ceilings and the floors and the windows until at last his gaze fell on Eric. The baby saw him and instead of screaming held out his arm.

  “Jesus. Who are you?” Melinda said. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry,” the man said. “Old habits die hard.” The baby was now tugging downward at Melinda’s blouse buttons, one after the other, which he did whenever he was hungry. “I heard him crying,” the man said. “I thought I might help. Is that your father?” He pointed toward the second bedroom, where Melinda’s father dozed, his head slumped forward, a magazine in his lap.

  “Yes, it is. He is,” Melinda said. “Now please leave. I don’t know you. You’re a trespasser. You have serious boundary issues. You have no right to be here. Please get the fuck out. Now.” The baby was staring at the man. “I’ve said ‘please’ twice, and I won’t say it again.”

  “Quite correct,” the man said, apparently thinking this over. “I really don’t have any right to be here.” He made a noise in his throat like a sheep cough. He had the unbudging calm of a practiced intruder. “Truly I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that I used to live here. I used to be here.” With the hand not holding the apple, he held out his index finger to Eric, and the baby, distracted from the button project, grabbed it. The man loosened the baby’s grip, turned around, and began to walk down the stairs. “If I told you everything about this house,” he said as he was leaving, “and all the things in it, you wouldn’t live here. I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

  She followed him. From the landing she watched him until he had crossed the threshold and was halfway back to his car. Then he stopped, turned around, and said in a loud voice, a half shout, “Are you desperate? You look kind of desperate to me.” He waited in the same stock-still posture she had seen on him earlier. He seemed to be in a state of absolute concentration on something that was not there. People were getting into this style nowadays; really, nothing could outdo the urban zombie affect. It was post-anxiety. It promised a kind of death you could live with. He was waiting eternally for her to answer and wouldn’t move until she replied.

  “Yes. No,” she called through the screen door. “But that’s no business of yours.”

  “My name’s Augenblick,” the man said, just before he got into his car. “Edward Augenblick. Everyone calls me Ted. And I won’t bother you again. I left a business card in the living room, though, if you’re curious about this house.” He turned one last time toward her front screen door, behind which she was now standing. “I’m not dangerous,” he said, holding his apple. “And the other thing is, I know you.”

  The car started—it purred expensively, making a sound like a diesel sedan, but Melinda had never known one brand of car from another, they were all just assemblages of metal to her, and he, this semi-handsome person who said he was Edward Augenblick, whoever that was, and the car, the two of them, the human machine and the actual machine, proceeded down the block in a low chuckling putter, turned right, and disappeared.

  Picking up the baby, she went out to gather up her trowel and the birdlike metallic weeder. She would leave the weeds where they were, for now. Doing another sort of chore might conceivably restore her calm.

  After taking the tools back to the garage, she surveyed her father’s things scattered on the garage’s left-hand side, which now served mostly as a shed. You could get a car in there on the right-hand side if you were very careful. Cast-off fishing poles, broken flashlights, back issues of American Record Guide and Fanfare, operas and chamber music on worn-out vinyl, and more lawn and garden implements that gave off a smell of soil and fertilizer—everything her father didn’t have the heart to throw away had been dumped here into a memory pile in the space where the other car, her mother’s, used to be. Melinda put her gardening implements on a tool shelf next to a can of motor oil for the lawn mower, and she bowed her head. When she did, the baby grabbed at her hair.

  She wasn’t desperate. The almost-handsome stranger had got that particular detail wrong. A man given to generalizations might launch into nonsense about desperation, seeing a single mom with a baby boy, the two of them living in her father’s house, temporarily. Eric pulled hard at her bangs. She was trembling. Her hands shook. The visitation felt like … like what? Like a little big thing—a micro-rape.

  She had grown up in this house; he hadn’t. It was that simple.

  As if taking an inventory to restore herself, she thought of the tasks she had to perform: her property taxes would come due very soon and she would have to pay them on her own house across town, where she would be residing this very minute if her father weren’t in recovery from his stroke. She imagined it: her Arts and Crafts home stood empty (of her and of Eric) on its beautiful wooded lot, with a decorative rose arbor in the backyard, climbing in spite of her, in her absence. She missed the orderly clean lines of her own house and its nursery and its mostly empty spaces and what it required of her.

  “Desperate”—the nerve of the guy.

  Over there, at her own house, she would not be susceptible to the visitations of strangers. Over there, she would be within walking distance of the local college where she taught Spanish literature of the nineteenth century—her specialty being the novels of Pérez Galdós. Over there, she was on leave just now, during her father’s convalescence, while she lived here, the house of her childhood.

  Looking at her father’s ragtag accumulations in the garage, she worried at a pile of books with her foot. The books leaned away from her, and the top three volumes (Gatsby, Edith Wharton, and Lloyd C. Douglas) fell over and scattered. The baby laughed.

  These garage accumulations exemplified a characteristic weakness of the late-middle-aged, the broken estate planning of all the doddering Lear-like fathers. Still holding her son, she sorted her father’s books and restacked them.

  Melinda’s ex-husband had been a great fan of Gatsby. He loved fakery. He had even owned a pair of spats and a top hat that he had purchased at an antique-clothing store. He had been the catalyst for a brief trivial marriage Melinda had committed herself to during graduate school. A month or so ago at a party where, slightly drunk on the Chardonnay—she shouldn’t have been drinking, she knew, she was still nursing the baby—she was telling funny stories about herself, and for a few moments, she hadn’t been able to remember her ex-husband’s name. Anyway, he was just an ex-husband. Now that she had the baby, solitude and its difficulties no longer troubled her. Her child had put an end to selfish longings. And besides—she was gazing at her father’s old National Geographics—she had the languages. She spoke four of them, including Catalan, which no one over here in the States spoke, ever; most Americans didn’t seem to have heard of it. And of course they didn’t know where it was spoken. Or why.

  Her languages were a charm against loneliness; they gave her a kind of imaginary community. The benevolent spirits came to her in dreams and spoke in Catalan.

  During her junior year abro
ad she had lived in Madrid for a few months and then in Barcelona, where she had acquired a Catalan boyfriend who had taught her the language during the times when he prepared meals for her in his small apartment kitchen—standard fare, paella or fried sausage and onions, which in his absentminded ardor he often burned. He gave her little drills in syntax and the names of kitchen appliances. He took her around Barcelona and lectured her about its history, the civil war, the causes for the bullet holes still visible in certain exterior walls.

  He had told her that anyone could learn Spanish, but that she, a stupendously unique and beautiful American girl, must learn Catalan, so she did. What a charming liar he’d been.

  Time passed, she returned to the States, got her degrees, and then eighteen months ago, when she had taken a college group to Barcelona for a week, she had met up again with him, this ex-lover, this Jordi, and they had gone out to a tapas bar where she had spoken Catalan (with her uncertain grammar, she sounded, Jordi said, like a pig farmer’s wife). At least with her long legs, her sensitive face, and her Catalan, she wouldn’t be taken for a typical American, recognizable for innocence and obesity. Then she and Jordi went back to his apartment, a different apartment by now, larger than the one they had spent time in as students, this one near the Gaudí cathedral. Jordi’s wife was away on a business trip to Madrid. Melinda and Jordi made love in the living room so as not to defile his marriage bed. Out of the purity of their nostalgia, they came at the same time. He had used a condom but something happened, and that had been the night when her son was conceived.

  She had never told Jordi about her pregnancy. He possessed a certain hysterical formality and would have been scandalized. As the father, he would never have permitted a Scandia-American name like “Eric” to be affixed to his child. God, he would think, had intervened. Sperm penetrating the condom would be so much like the immaculate conception that Jordi, a Catholic, would have trouble explaining it away. And because he wept easily, he would first weep and then talk, the talk accompanied by his endearing operatic gestures. The sanctity of life! The whatever of parenthood. He had a tendency to make pronouncements, like the pope. Or was this Spanish in nature? A Catalan tendency? A male thing? Or just Jordi? Melinda sometimes got her stereotypes confused.