Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  Anyway, her news about the baby would in all likelihood have destroyed his marriage, an arrangement that Melinda supposed was undoubtedly steady, in a relaxed Euro sort of way, despite Jordi’s one-off infidelity that particular night, with her.

  Maybe he was habitually unfaithful. What was a married man doing with a condom in the drawer of the bedside table? Hidden but in plain view? Did husbands use condoms when making love to their wives? It seemed defeatist.

  It was what it was. Still, she had loved Jordi once. She would say to her Catalan friends, “Have you seen his eyes, and those eyelashes?”—the most beautiful brown eyes she had ever seen on a man. He had other qualities difficult to summarize. All the same, men, at least the ones she had known, including Jordi, were a long-term nuisance, a drain on human resources. Whenever intimacy threatened, they often seemed unexpectedly obtuse. If you were going to couple with straight men—and what choice did you have?—you often had to deal with their strange semi-comic fogs afterward. Jordi snored and after lovemaking clipped his toenails. As Hemingway, another man, once wrote: the bill always came.

  Anyway, she was not desperate. Melinda roused herself from her reverie. Augenblick! The stranger had got that part wrong, about the desperation.

  She went back upstairs. She put Eric into his crib. The baby occupied himself by listening to a white-throated sparrow singing outside the window. Across the hall, her father sat staring at his dresser. It had been positioned beneath family pictures—Melinda, her brother, her mother, and her father—hung in a photo cluster where he could see them as he made his heroic post-stroke efforts to dress and to greet the morning. Behind the pictures was the ancient wallpaper with green horizontal stripes. He turned toward her, and the right side of his face smiled at her.

  “Do you hear it?” he asked.

  She waited. Hear what? The sparrow? He wouldn’t be asking about that. “No,” she said; the room was quite silent. Lately her father had been suffering from music hallucinations, what he called “ear worms,” and she wasn’t sure whether to grant him his hallucinations or not. Did the pink elephant problem grow larger whenever, being affable, you agreed that there was indeed a pink elephant right outside the door, or shambling about in the street? “What is it? What do you hear?”

  “Somebody far away, practicing,” he told her. “A violinist. She’s doing trills and double-stops. She’s practicing someone-or-other’s concerto in D. You really don’t hear it?” Her father had not been a professional musician, but he had always had perfect pitch. If he heard music in D major, then that was the key signature, hallucination or not.

  In the silent room, Melinda gazed down at her father, at his thinning gray hair, the food stains scattered on his shirt, the sleepy, half-withdrawn look in his eyes, the magazine now on the floor, the untied shoelaces, the trouser zipper imperfectly closed, the mismatched socks, the shirt with the buttons in the wrong buttonholes, the precancerous blotches on his face, the half-eaten muffin spread with margarine nearby on the side table, and she was so overcome with a lifelong affection for this calm, decent man that she felt faint for a moment. Her soul left her body and then came back in an instant. “Oh, wait,” she said suddenly. “Yup. I do hear it. It’s very soft. From across the street. You know, it’s who, that scary brilliant teenager, that Asian girl, what’s her name, Maria Chang. And I know who wrote that music, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure,” Melinda said. “It’s Glazunov. Alexander Glazunov. It’s the Glazunov concerto for violin in D major.” She was making it all up as she went along.

  “Yes,” her father said. “Glazunov. The teacher of Shostakovich. That must be right.” He smiled again at her. “But that concerto is in A, baby doll.” Turning his head to face her at a strange angle, he asked, “Who was that person who j-j-j-j-just came to the door? Did he come upstairs? Did he watch me? Did he come for me? Was it death? I was half asleep.”

  “An intruder,” she said. “Somebody who said his name was Augenblick.”

  “Well, that’s almost like death. What’d he want?”

  “He said he used to live here. As a baby or something.”

  “Impossible. I know who I bought this house from thirty-five years ago, and it wasn’t anybody by that name. Besides, that’s not his real name. It’s German. It means …”

  “Blink of an eye,” Melinda said. “An instant.”

  “Right. But he’s lying to you. I never heard of any German person named Augenblick. It’s a fiction, that name. There’s no such name in German. It’s total bullshit.” He waved his hand dismissively. Since his stroke, her father had started to employ gutterisms in his day-to-day speech. His new degraded vocabulary was disconcerting. His mind had suffered depreciation. She didn’t like obscenity from him; it didn’t match his character, or what remained of it.

  Her father’s potted plant in the corner needed watering—its leaves were shriveling. Lately she had become a caretaker: Eric, and her father, and the lawn and garden out in front, and her father’s house, and the plants in it—and if she weren’t careful, that caretaking condition might become permanent, she would move into permanent stewardship, they would be her accumulations, and they would pile up and surround her. The present would dry up and disappear, except for the baby, and there would be nothing else around her except the past.

  Downstairs on a side table was a business card.

  Edward Augenblick

  INVESTMENT COUNSELOR

  “Fortune Favors the Few”

  e-mail: eyeblink@droopingleaf.com

  Anger spat up from somewhere near her stomach. “Fortune favors the few”! Damn him. And this zealotry from an intruder. At once, the languages roused themselves, spewing out their local-color bile. First, the Catalan. ¡Malparit. Fot el camp de casa meva ara mateix! And then the Spanish. ¡Me cago en tu madre, hijo de puta! What a relief it was to have other languages available for your obscenities. They pitched in.

  A day later, she and her friend Germaine were walking in Minnehaha Creek, their pants rolled up, shoes in hand, Eric babypacked on Melinda. They were searching the creek for vegetative wonders as they bird-watched and conversed. Melinda liked Germaine’s witty impatience and had befriended her for it. They had bumped into each other in a bookstore a year ago, and Germaine had grumbled at her amiably. Melinda was bowled over by her wit and asked her out for coffee, an invitation that Germaine accepted. Germaine, a teacher and poet, was now back from New York, where she had toured the restaurants.

  “There’s a blue jay,” Melinda said, pointing. She splashed her feet in the water, being careful not to slip on the rocks.

  “Did I tell you how all the staff at one place spoke with accents? Did I mention that?” Germaine asked. “ ‘Ladies and gentle, let me know eef I can help you in any how.’ They sounded worse during the wine-tasting session. ‘Yooou like theeese vine? Have a zip.’ ” She walked up to Eric and kissed him on the ear. The baby giggled. “ ‘Hold theeese vine to the liiiight to determinate the lascivity.’ ”

  “You should be more tolerant of foreigners,” Melinda murmured, turning to face her.

  “Why should I? I’m not like you. I put salt in my coffee.” She looked at her friend. “You take that beautiful baby of yours around on your back just to flaunt him in front of nature.”

  “No, I don’t. Your leg is cut,” Melinda said, pointing. “Where’d you get that mess of scabs?”

  “Roses. I was staring at the clematis vine. Its growth habits were unpleasing. I held the ideal in my head so firmly that I obliterated awareness of the rest of the garden, especially the very large, known-to-be-violent rosebush between the clematis and me. I must have lunged at the vine. The rosebush grabbed at my leg, which continued to move. Seconds later I realized that the whole front of my leg had been savagely torn.”

  “Savagely torn? That’s awful.”

  “ ‘Laceration’ is what the form said, when I finally got out of the ER. I looked the word up, from lacerate, distress dee
ply, torn, mangled. Then I had a drug reaction to the prophylactic antibiotic. It sent me back to the ER. I couldn’t walk.”

  “What’s that?” Melinda nodded toward something growing in the creek.

  “Watercress?” Germaine said. Her black hair fell downward as she bent to see it, and for a moment Melinda thought of Persephone on her way back from the underworld. Germaine had the wildly intelligent eyes of a genius. “No, it’s just an unknown, anonymous weed. By the way, how close are we to the Mississippi? I have an appointment. Well, I think of it as an appointment. You might not.”

  Melinda stood up straight, feeling the baby’s weight shift. He was making sucking sounds. “I had a visitor yesterday. Well, not a visitor. A man, an intruder. He looked like Eric Clapton. He walked right into the house. He said he used to live there. But he didn’t. He couldn’t have. His name was Augenblick.”

  “You call the cops?”

  “No.”

  “I would have,” Germaine told her. “I’d have the law scurrying right over, with the cuffs and the beaters out.”

  “He said Eric’s nursery had once been his own room. He said he knew things about the house, bad things. He said, this stranger, that I was desperate. Can you imagine?”

  “He got the wrong address,” Germaine said. “He meant me.”

  “Damn him anyway,” said Melinda. She pointed to an opening of the creek where the Mississippi River was visible. “There it is. There’s the river. We made it.”

  “Yeah.” Germaine slapped at a mosquito on her forearm, leaving a little smear of blood just above her wristwatch. “Is this about your mother?” she asked. Her tone was studiously neutral. “This is about your mother, isn’t it? Maybe this guy lived in the neighborhood when you were growing up. Maybe your mother was known to him.”

  Melinda stopped and looked at her friend. Seedpods from a cottonwood overhead drifted down onto her hair and into the water. “Oh, well,” she said, as if something had been settled. Melinda’s mother had been in and out of institutions. Melinda refused to come to terms with it, now or ever; a mad parent could not be rescued or reasoned with. Things were getting dark all of a sudden. “I’m, um, feeling a bit light-headed.” She felt her knees weakening, and she made her way to the side of the creek, where she sat down abruptly on the wet sands.

  “Are you fainting?” she heard Germaine say, in front of, or behind, a crow cawing. “Here. Let me take your hand.…” The force of her friend’s voice drifted into her consciousness, as did her voice, someone turning the volume knob back and forth, as she held her own nausea at bay, her head down between her knees. Creek water was suddenly splashed on her face, thrown by her friend, to rouse her.

  At certain times, usually in the afternoons, her father would ride the buses, but Melinda had no idea where he went, and he himself could not always remember. He said that he visited the markets, but one time he came back and said that he had knocked at the Gates of Heaven. He would not elaborate. Where were these gates? He had forgotten. Perhaps downtown? Many people were going in, all at once. He felt he wasn’t ready, and took the bus home.

  This traveling around was a habit he had picked up from his wife, whose wandering had started right after the death of their first child, Melinda’s older sister, Sarah, who had died of a blood infection at the age of two. Her mother gave birth to Melinda and then went into a very long, slow, discreetly managed and genteel decline. One day, when Melinda was eleven, her mother, unable to keep up appearances anymore, drove away and disappeared altogether. She was spotted in Madison before she evaporated.

  Back in her father’s house, Melinda went straight from the phone to her computer. She typed in Augenblick’s e-mail address and then wrote a note.

  hi. i don’t know who you are, but you’re not who you say you are, and my father has never heard of you or your family. i shouldn’t be writing to you and i wouldn’t be except i didn’t like it that you said you knew me. from where? we’ve never met. you don’t know me. i hardly know myself. kidding, i mean, i’ve met you and i still haven’t met you. you’re a ghost, for all i know.

  She deleted the last three sentences—too baroque—both for their meaning and her responsibility for writing them. The joking tone might be mistaken for friendliness. She ducked her head, hearing Eric staying quiet (she didn’t want to breast-feed him again tonight, her nipples were sore—but it was odd, she also had suffered a sudden brokenhearted need for sex, for friendly nakedness), and then she continued writing.

  as far as i know, the previous owners of this house were named anderson. that’s who my mom and dad bought it from. “augenblick” isn’t even a name. it’s just a german noun.

  so, my question is: who are you? where are you from? what were you doing in my house?

  —melinda everson, ph.d.

  She deleted the reference to the doctoral degree, then put it back, then deleted it again, then put it back in, before touching the SEND button.

  Half an hour later, a new letter appeared in the electronic in-box, from eyeblink@droopingleaf.com.

  THINK OF ME AS THE RAGE OVER THE LOST PENNY. BUT LIKE I TOLD YOU IM ACTUALLY VERY HARMLESS. W/R/T YOUR QUESTIONS, I CAN DROP BY AGAIN. INFORMATION IS ALL I WANT TO GIVE YOU. eye two LIVED THERE.

  HA HA.—TED

  The school year would be starting soon, and she needed to prepare her classes. She needed to study Peréz Galdós’s Miau again, for the umpteenth time, for its story of a man lost in a mazelike bureaucracy—her lecture notes were getting mazelike themselves, Kafkaesque. And worse: bland. She would get to that. But for now she was waiting. She knew without knowing how she knew that when Augenblick came back, he would show himself at night, when both her father and her son were asleep; that he would come at the end of a week of hot, dry late-summer weather orchestrated by crickets, that he would show up as a polite intruder again, halfway handsome, early-middle-aged semi-degraded-Clapton, well dressed, like a piano tuner, and that he would say, as soon as he was out of the driver’s-side door of his unidentifiable car, perhaps handmade, and had advanced so that he stood there on the other side of the screen door, “You look very nice tonight. I got your letter. Thanks for inviting me over.”

  These events occurred because she was living in her father’s house.

  “And I got yours,” she said, from behind the screen. The screen provided scanning lines; his face was high-definition. “You’re the rage over the lost penny. But I didn’t invite you over. You’re not invited. It wasn’t an invitation.” She hesitated. “Shit. Well, come in anyway.”

  This time, once inside, he approached her and shook her hand, and in removing his hand, rubbed hers, as if this were the custom somewhere upon greeting someone whom you didn’t know but with whom you wanted a relationship. It was a failed tentative caress but so bizarre that she let it happen.

  “My father is upstairs,” she said. “And my son, too. Maybe you could explain who you are?”

  “This is the living room,” he told her, as if he hadn’t heard her question, “and over there we once had a baby grand piano in that corner, by the stairs.” He pointed. “A Mason and Hamlin. I was never any good at playing it, but my sister was. She’s the real musician in the family.”

  “What does she play?” she asked, testing him. “What’s her specialty?”

  “Scriabin études,” he said. “Chopin and Schumann, too, and Schubert, the B-minor.”

  “She didn’t play the violin, did she?”

  “No. The piano. She still does. She’s a pediatric endocrinologist now. Doctors like music, you know. It’s a professional thing.” He waited. “Ours was the only piano on the block.” He glanced toward the dining room. “In the dining room we used to have another chandelier, it was cut glass—”

  “Mr. Augenblick, uh, maybe you could tell me why you’re here? And why you’re lying to me?” She scooped a bit of perspiration off her forehead and gazed into his game face. “Why all these stories about this locality? Scriabin, Schubert: every house ha
s a story. The truth is, I’m not actually interested in who did what, where, here.” She saw him glance down at her body, then at the baby toys scattered across the living-room floor. Her breasts were swollen, and she had always been pretty. She was a bit disheveled now, though still a beauty. “I’m a mother. New life is going on here these days. My son is here, my father, too, upstairs, recuperating from a stroke. I don’t have time for a personal history. For all I know, you’re an intruder. A dangerous maniac.”

  “No,” he said, “I’ve noticed that. No one has time for a history.” Augenblick stood in the living room for a moment, apparently pondering what to say next. At last he looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought, and asked, “May I have a glass of iced tea?”

  “No.” She folded her arms. “If you were a guest, I would provide the iced tea. But, as I said, I didn’t invite you here. I don’t mean to be rude, but—”

  “Actually,” he said, “you are rude. You wrote back to me, and that was, well, an invitation. Wasn’t it? At least that’s how I took it, it’s how any man would have taken it.” He pasted onto his face a momentarily wounded look. “So all right. So there’s to be no iced tea, no water, no hospitality of any kind. No stories, either, about the house. All right. You want to know why I’m here? You really want to know why I’m here? My life hasn’t been going so well. I was doing a bit of that living-in-the-past thing. I was driving around, in this neighborhood, my former neighborhood, and I saw a really attractive woman working in her garden, weeding, and I thought: Well, maybe she isn’t married or attached, maybe I have a chance, maybe I can strike up a conversation with that woman working there in that garden. I wasn’t out on the prowl, exactly, but I did see you. And then I discovered that you had a baby. A beautiful boy. You know, I’m actually a nice guy, though you’d never know it. I’m a landscape architect. I have a college degree. All I wanted was to meet you.”