Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Harriet felt giddy from the altitude. “Should we pray?” she asked, but before Jeremy could answer, she said, “Well, good for him. He got himself a fine shrine. Maybe he deserves it. God damn, it’s hot in here.” She turned around and walked outside, still laughing in a broken series of almost inaudible chuckles. When she was back in the sun, she pointed her finger the way the sign had indicated and said, “Shrine.”

Jeremy stepped close to her, and they both looked again at the mountains in the west. “I used to read him in college,” Harriet said, “and in high school I had a copy of The Rainbow I hid under my pillow where my mother wouldn’t find it. Jesus, it must be ninety-five degrees.” She looked suddenly at Jeremy, sweat dripping into her eyes. “I used to have a lot of fantasies when I was a teenager,” she said. He was wiping his face with a handkerchief. “Do you see anyone?” she asked.

“Do I see anybody? No. We would’ve heard a car coming up the road. Why?”

“Because I’m hot. I feel like doing something,” Harriet said. “I mean, here we are at the D. H. Lawrence shrine.” She was unbuttoning her blouse. “I just thought of this,” she said, beginning to laugh again. She put her blouse on the ground and quickly unhooked her bra, dropping it on top of the blouse. “There,” she said, sighing. “Now that’s better.” She turned to face the mountains. When Jeremy didn’t say anything, she swung around to look at him. He was staring at her, at the brown circles of her nipples, and his face seemed stricken. She reached over and took his hand. “Oh, Jay, sweetie,” she said, “no one will see us. Honey. What is it? Do you want me to get dressed?”

“That’s not it.” He was staring at her, as if she were not his wife.

“What? What is it?”

“You’re free of it.” He wiped his forehead.

“What?”

“You’re free of it. You’re leaving me alone here.”

“Alone? Alone in what?”

“You know perfectly damn well,” he said. “I’m alone back here.” He tapped his head. “I don’t know how you did it, but you did it. You broke free. You’re gone.” He bent down. “You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes, I do.” She put her bra and blouse back on and turned toward him again. His face was a mixture of agony and rage, but in the huge sunlight these emotions diminished to small vestigial puffs of feeling. “It’s a path,” she said. “And then you’re surprised. You get out. It’ll happen to you. You’ll see. Honestly.”

She could see his legs shaking. His face was a barren but expressive landscape. “Okay,” he said. “Talk all you want. I was just thinking …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“You’ll be all right,” she said, stroking his back.

“I don’t want to be all right!” he said, his voice rising, a horrible smile appearing on his face: it was a devil’s face, Harriet saw, and it was radiant and calm. Sweat poured off his forehead, and his skin had started to flush pink. “It’s my pleasure not to be all right. Do you see that? My pleasure .”

She wiped her hands on her cotton pants. A stain appeared, then vanished. “You want that? You want to be back there by yourself?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “You bet. I feel like an explorer. I feel like a fucking pioneer.” He gave each one of the words a separate emphasis. Meanwhile, he had separated himself from her and was now tilting his head up toward the sky, letting the sun shine on his closed eyelids.

She looked at him. In the midst of the sunlight he was hugging his darkness. She stepped down the zigzag path to the car, leaving him there, but he followed her. Once they were both in the car, the dog inside the ranch house began its frantic barking, but it stopped after a few seconds. She took Jeremy’s hand and scanned the clouds in the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, trying to see the sky, the beckoning clouds, the way he did, but she couldn’t. All she could see was the land stretched out in front of her, and, far in the distance, fifty miles away, a few thunderheads and a narrow curtain of rain, so thin that the light passed straight through it.

CAREFULLY DRUNK, Mr. Bradbury sat on his patio-balcony in the bland morning sunshine, sipping vodka-and-something. He was waiting for his son to visit. This son, Eric, had called and said he would arrive shortly, and that was an hour ago. It was Saturday: vodka day. He peered down from the eleventh floor at the sidewalk trees, where the sparrows were making a racket. Below the sparrows, Mr. Bradbury could see the velvet-brown dot of the doorman’s hat. He thought he could smell crab-apple blossoms and something more subtle, like dust.

In shivering glassy clarity, he observed a rusting blue subcompact move into a space in front of a fireplug. That would be Eric, who had a collection of parking tickets, little marks of risk and daring. Watching him lock his car, his father mashed out his cigarette in a blue pottery ashtray balanced on the balcony railing. He coughed, putting his hand in front of his mouth. Eric had stopped to talk to the doorman, George. George and Eric, two human dots. Eric’s pinpoint face turned, tilted, and stared up at the rows of balconies, finding his father on the eleventh. He did not wave.

Standing up, Mr. Bradbury tested his reflexes. He bent his knees and thought of a line from Byron: “From the dull palace to the dirty hovel, something something something novel.” The problem with poetry was that you were always having to look it up. He couldn’t recall which poem contained the dull palace, nor did he care. He stepped out of the sunlight into the living room and sank into the sofa, trying not to groan. Elena, the Peruvian housekeeper, was preparing lunch, probably one of her crude ethnic casseroles. She didn’t inform him of her plans in advance. He reached over to the coffee table and pressed the MUTE button on the remote control to silence the CNN announcer. His neck hurt. He rubbed it, and to his own fingers the skin felt scaly. At least no swellings or lumps. He let his right arm drop down onto the side table. His thumb landed in the engraved silver scallop-shell ashtray and emerged from it with a gray coating of ash. He bent over and was rubbing the thumb on the carpet just as his son knocked.

The boy had a key; the knock was some kind of ritual announcement of estrangement. He heaved himself up to his feet and, remembering to stand straight, made his way past the bookshelves and the paintings to the foyer.

“Eric,” he said, opening the door and seeing his son in a blast of sentimental pride. “I’m glad you came.” The flaring of his love made him shy, so that he drew back his body even as he extended his hand. Eric shook his hand, gazed down at his father’s face with an examining look, and sniffed twice. Mr. Bradbury could tell that Eric was trying to catch the scent of his breath. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Don’t loiter out there in the hall. Why didn’t you just let yourself in with your key?”

“I lost it,” Eric said. “I lost all my keys.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. A party. Yeah, that’s right. A party.”

Eric stood in the center of the living room, checking out the familial furniture. Then he tossed his jacket on a chair and bent down to unlace his shoes. For some reason his father noticed that his son was wearing thick white cotton socks. Then Eric straightened up, pleased to be on display, his thumbs hooked in the back pockets of his jeans.

“You’re getting sizable. Is it the swimming?”