Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“No,” he said.

“Well, neither do I, but I used to,” she said, proceeding down the hallway toward an open doorway. Krumholtz followed her and noticed a Bonazzi painting next to a Hockney — no, it wasn’t a Hockney, though it looked like one, with a nude male swimmer underwater — and a Dentinger, a Fabian, and a huge Dierking that went all the way up to the ceiling, the dirty-brown and grayish paint mixed in with what looked like rusted metal fragments expressive of terrible agony on an epic scale. When he turned the corner, he found himself in what appeared to be a master bathroom placed in the middle of the hallway with a large whirlpool bath built into the floor. Leaning back in the bathtub, with his eyes fixed on Krumholtz, was the winner, James Mallard.

“Ah, so at last you’re here,” Mallard said. “We thought you must have been a little lost, being late. As you were. What happened to you?”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Krumholtz said, putting his notebook away.

“Oh, that’s all right.” Mallard stood up and stepped out of the whirlpool bath. He was quite magnificent, still in possession of a sculpted athlete’s body, classically muscled and proportioned. Somewhere else in this house, Krumholtz knew, would be a fully equipped gym and possibly a full-time personal trainer. “We wondered what had gone wrong with you,” Mallard muttered flatly, as if Krumholtz’s absence actually had been a matter of the greatest indifference. Without a trace of shyness, and still wet, Mallard stepped toward Krumholtz and shook his hand, hard. He had a strong wet grip and large, thick fingers. Having finished with the handshake, Mallard stepped backward toward a grooved section of wall, where he pressed a recessed button. Hot air came blowing out on him from louvers in the wall, drying his body as he pivoted, his arms held slightly up. Krumholtz glanced over at Mallard’s wife, who was gazing appreciatively at her husband. Like the gods, these people had no timidity or shame. “Darling,” Mallard said to his wife, “would you hand me a towel?”

She reached over for a red bath towel, with a JM monogram, and handed it to her husband, though not before giving him a peck on the cheek. Mallard dried the backs of his legs and his hair, still in full view of Krumholtz, whose hand was now sopping wet. After drying himself, Mallard tossed the bath towel onto the floor.

“Well,” he said. “How shall we conduct this interview? This little interview?”

“Perhaps in your den?” Krumholtz asked. “I have a digital recorder—”

“Wouldn’t you rather be doing something?” Mallard asked. “Something physical? Do you hunt? It’s deer season, and we could go hunting. Actually, no. Unfortunately for us, the light is going, and it’s too late in the day. We could go out tomorrow, if you wish.”

“Well, no, I don’t hunt,” Krumholtz said. Here I am, he thought, talking to this naked man, while his wife looks on.

“We could chop some wood,” Mallard said. “There’s time. We could do that.”

“But you’ve just washed. And I have to take notes.”

“You mean there’s a rule?” Mallard laughed. “Didn’t know there was a rule.” He walked into the bedroom on the other side of the bathroom and put on the worn clothes he had apparently just taken off. “There’s never a rule. That’s the first thing you have to learn. Come on.”

Outside, in the backyard, Mallard, or someone, had set up a small platform of slatted wood and, a few feet away, a sawhorse. Off to the side were axes, hatchets, a steel wedge, and a chain saw neatly arranged inside a wooden holding-frame with pegs at the top from which to hang other tools. A large pile of unsplit logs had been dumped nearby, and now Mallard picked up a log and stood it up on the platform. He took out an ax before stepping away from the log. With one powerful blow, he raised the ax and brought it down on the log, splitting it cleanly in two.

“Is this your hobby?” Krumholtz asked. “Splitting wood?”

“It’s not a hobby, no. Hobbies are for others. It’s an activity, a physical exertion, that we like to engage in,” Mallard said. Again he placed a log vertically on the platform, and again the ax came down in one clean arc. The two parts of the log dropped away on either side. “A few minutes, and then you can take over.”

Krumholtz took a long look at Mallard’s face, which now, in the diminishing light, seemed to have a rock-jawed solidity, with eyes set far apart and a heavy five-o’clock shadow over a thick neck. Wherever Mallard turned, he gave off an air of command: the velvet glove over the iron fist had grown very thin with him. He split logs with efficiency, Krumholtz thought, but also as if he were in a permanent rage.

“So, you have questions? Ask questions,” Mallard said, his breath coming out in snorts. “Ask me questions.”

“Why did you move out here? It’s a bit remote.”

“We didn’t want to see any neighbors. So we bought up the entire valley. You can look in any direction, and you won’t see anybody. It gives you a … freedom, you know?”

“Yes, well. Something else I meant to ask right away. This can be on or off the record, but your wife mentioned something about ‘the other woman,’ and I think she said her name is Lorraine. When I came to the gate—”

“Lorraine?” The ax came down. “Are you doing a gossip sheet? I thought this was for Success magazine. Well. This isn’t for publication. Lorraine’s my girlfriend. My mistress , if you will.”

“She’s here?”

“Of course she’s here. You didn’t meet her? Sometimes—” He set up another log, then took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “Sometimes Lorraine stays down at her end of the house. Or she’s out in back.” He waved his arm at the air.

“Your wife doesn’t mind? Your having a live-in girlfriend?”

“Off the record? Or on it? Well, write what you please. We don’t care. No, she doesn’t mind. She knows that a man like me needs more than one woman. That’s how it happens to be. Always has been. From the start. We simply choose not to lie about it and not to indulge in the usual middling hypocrisies. I could tell you about men who have a different mistress every month . If you can afford it, you can do it. Everyone knows and nobody cares. So. Have you met Lorraine?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you go back into the house and go back toward the other wing and introduce yourself to her and get her version of things, then come back and split some logs? Obviously, you need to get the girlfriend thing out of the way. Then we’ll have a drink.” Mallard pointed at the door.

Walking down the hallways in a kind of trance, with the artwork appearing to register his presence — here was another video installation, switched on possibly for his benefit, this one by an artist, Frederic Winkelman, whose work he recognized, the flat screen showing a woman staring straight out at the viewer, this same woman wearing a slightly antique stained silk chiffon bridal gown à la Miss Havisham but posed sitting in a folding chair on a busy urban sidewalk (it looked like midtown Manhattan somewhere near Forty-second Street) while all around her the blurry pedestrians parted and then reclustered — walking away from this visual disturbance, and making his way past more artistic plunder perfectly mounted and framed, Krumholtz thought first of his wife, Cathy, working at her desk at the agency, and then of the remote castle in Beauty and the Beast , not the Disney version (his daughters’ favorite movie, both of them addicted to princess figures), but the Cocteau film with the hallway chandeliers consisting of bare human arms holding candlesticks, and all the other inanimate objects down to the cups and saucers having taken on resentful life as servants, everything under a spell that could be broken only by love, by a kiss. Cathy would be headed home about now, picking up the girls at after-school care, driving them homeward while she tried to quiet them and think of what to serve for dinner, and he wondered if she would have a thought for him out on this assignment, and at that particular moment he turned another corner near an open door and saw a woman, the one who must certainly be the girlfriend, Lorraine, lying back on a fainting couch. She was reading a glossy magazine and glanced up when Krumholtz entered.