Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Bunny,” he said to me, sitting down with an audible expunging of air. He still used my childhood name. No one else did. He didn’t give me a hug because we don’t do that. “I see you’ve gotten started. You’re having a martini?”

I nodded. “Morning tune-up,” I said.

“Brave choice.” Brantford grinned, simultaneously waving down the server. “Waitress,” he said, pointing at my drink, “I’ll have one of those. Very dry, please, no olive.” The server nodded before giving Brantford a thin professional smile and gliding over to the bar.

We had a kind of solidarity, Brantford and I. I had two decades on him, but we were oddly similar, more like brothers than cousins. I had always seen in him some better qualities than those I actually possessed. For example, he was one of those people who always make you happier the moment you see them.

Before his drink arrived, we caught ourselves up. Brantford’s mother, Aunt Margaret, had by that time been married to several different husbands, including a three-star army general, and she currently resided in a small apartment cluttered with knickknacks near the corner of Ninety-second and Broadway.

Having spent herself in a wild youth and at all times given to manias, Brantford’s mother had started taking a new medication called Elysium-Max, which seemed to be keeping her on a steady course where life was concerned. Brantford instructed me to please phone her while I was in town, and I said I would. As for Brantford’s two half sisters, they were doing fine.

With this information out of the way, I asked Brantford how he was.

“I don’t know. It’s strange. Sometimes at night I have the feeling that I’ve murdered somebody.” He stopped and glanced down at the tableware. “Someone’s dead. Only I don’t know who or what, or when I did it. I must’ve killed somebody . I’m sure of it. Thank you,” he said with his first real smile of the day, as the server placed a martini in front of him.

“Well, that’s just crazy,” I said. “You haven’t killed anyone.”

“Doesn’t matter if I have or haven’t,” he said, “if it feels that way. Maybe I should take a vacation.”

“Brantford,” I said, “you can’t take a vacation. You don’t work.” I waited for a moment. “Do you?”

“Well,” he said, “I’d like to. Besides, I work, in my way,” he claimed, taking a sip of the martini. “And don’t forget that I can be anything I want to be.” This sentence was enunciated carefully and with precise despair, as if it had served as one of those lifelong mottoes that he no longer believed in.

What year was this? 1994? When someone begins to carry on as my cousin did, I’m never sure what to say. Tact is required. As a teenager, Brantford had told me that he aspired to be a concert pianist, and I was the one who had to remind him that he wasn’t a musician and didn’t play the piano. But he had seen a fiery angel somewhere in the sky and thought it might descend on him. I hate those angels. I haven’t always behaved well when people open their hearts to me.

“Well, what about the animals?” I asked. Brantford was always caring for damaged animals and had done so from the time he was a boy. He found them in streets and alleys and nursed them back to health and then let them go. But they tended to fall in with him and to get crushes on him. Wherever he lived you would find recovering cats, mutts, and sparrows barking and chirping and mewling in response to him.

“No, not that,” he said. “I would never make a living off those critters,” he said. “That’s a sideline. I love them too much.”

“Veterinary school?” I asked.

“No, I couldn’t. Absolutely not. I don’t want to practice that kind of medicine with them,” he said, as if he were speaking of family members. “If I made money off those little guys, I’d lose the gift. Besides, I don’t have the discipline to get through another school. Willpower is not my strong suit. The world is made out of willpower,” he said, as if perplexed. He put his head back into his hands. “Willpower! Anyhow, would you please explain to me why it feels as if I’ve committed a murder?”

When I had first come to New York in the 1970s as an aspiring actor, I rode the subways everywhere, particularly the number 6, which in those days was still the Lexington IRT line. Sitting on that train one afternoon, squeezed between my fellow passengers as I helped one of them, a schoolboy, with a nosebleed, I felt pleased with myself. I had assimilated. Having come to New York from the Midwest, I was anticipating my big break and meanwhile waited tables at a little bistro near Astor Place. Mine was a familiar story, one of those drabby little tales of ideals and artistic high-mindedness that wouldn’t bear repeating if it weren’t for the woman with whom I was then involved.

She had a quietly insubstantial quality. When you looked away from her, you couldn’t be sure that she’d still be there when you looked back again. She knew how to vanish quickly from scenes she didn’t like. Her ability to dematerialize was purposeful and was complicated by her appearance: day and night, she wore dark glasses. She had sensitivity to light, a photophobia, which she had acquired as a result of a corneal infection. In those days, her casual friends thought that the dark glasses constituted a praiseworthy affectation. “She looks very cool,” they would say.

Even her name — Giulietta, spelled in the Italian manner — seemed like an affectation. But Giulietta it was, the name with which, as a Catholic, she had been baptized. We’d met at the bistro where I carried menus and trays laden with food back and forth. Dining alone, cornered under a light fixture, she was reading a book by Bruno Bettelheim, and I deliberately served her a risotto entrée that she hadn’t ordered. I wanted to provoke her to conversation, even if it was hostile. I couldn’t see her eyes behind those dark glasses, but I wanted to. Self-possession in any form attracts me, especially at night, in cities. Anyway, my studied incompetence as a waiter amused her. Eventually she gave me her phone number.

She worked in Brooklyn at a special school for mildly autistic and emotionally impaired little kids. The first time we slept together we had to move the teddy bears and the copies of the New Yorker off her bed. Sophistication and a certain childlike guilelessness lived side by side in her behavior. On Sunday morning she watched cartoons and Meet the Press , and in the afternoon she listened to the Bartók quartets while smoking marijuana, which she claimed was good for her eyesight. In her bathtub was a rubber duck, and in the living room a copy of Anna Karenina , which she had read three times.

We were inventive and energetic in our lovemaking, Giulietta and I, but her eyes stayed hidden no matter how dark it was. From her, I knew nothing of the look of recognition a woman can give to a man. All the same, I was beginning to love her. She comforted me and sustained me by attaching me to ordinary things: reading the Sunday paper in bed, making bad jokes — the rewards of plain everyday life.

One night I took her uptown for a party near Columbia, at the apartment of another actor, Freddy Avery, who also happened to be a poet. Like many actors, Freddy enjoyed performing and was good at mimicry, and his parties tended to be raucous. You could easily commit an error in tone at those parties. You’d expose yourself as a hayseed if you were too sincere about anything. There was an Iron Law of Irony at Freddy’s parties, so I was worried that if Giulietta and I arrived too early, we’d be mocked. No one was ever prompt at Freddy’s parties (they always began at their midpoint, if I could put it that way), so we ducked into a bar to waste a bit of time before going up.