Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Still doing it. Dad, I gotta go. Lorraine’s expecting me later this afternoon. I’ll be in touch.”

“Right.” He started to extend his hand, thought better of it, and stood up. He held out his arms and embraced his son. He was four inches shorter than Eric, and when they drew together, his son’s thick beard brushed against his face. “Be sure to call,” he said. Eric nodded, turned around, and hurried toward the door. “Don’t you dare hold me in contempt,” he said inaudibly, under his breath.

With his hand on the doorknob, Eric shouted backward, “Thanks for the money, Dad. Thanks for everything.”

Then he was gone.

Mr. Bradbury stood in the same position until he heard the elevator doors close. Then he backed into the living room and stood for a moment watching the television screen. He turned off the set. In his study, he bent down at the desk and subtracted two thousand dollars from the balance in his checking account. He glanced at the bookshelves above his desk, reached for a copy of Chekhov’s stories and another volume, Keats’s poems, put them on the desk, then walked down the hallway to the front closet. He put on a sweater and told Elena he was stepping out for a few minutes.

He crossed the street and headed for the park. In the center of this park was a pond, and on the far side of the water was a rowboat concession. He counted the rowboats in the pond: twelve. Feeling the onset of hangover, he strolled past some benches, reaching into his shirt pocket for a breadstick he had stashed there for the ducks. As he walked, he broke up the bread and threw it into the water, but the water was littered with bread and the ducks didn’t notice him.

When he reached the rowboat concession, he paid a twenty-five-dollar deposit and left his driver’s license as security, then let the skinny acned attendant fit him for an orange life jacket. He carried the two oars in either hand and eased himself into the blue rowboat he’d been assigned. He tried breathing the air for the scent but could smell nothing but his own soured breath. Taking the oars off the dock, panting, he fit them into the oarlocks. Then, with his back to the prow of the boat, he rowed, the joints squeaking, out to the middle of the lake.

Once there, he lifted the oars and brought them over the gunwales. He listened. The city traffic was reduced to vague honks and hums; the loudest sounds came from the other boaters and from their radios. Taking a cigarette out of his sweater pocket, he gazed at his building, counting the floors until he could see his bedroom window. There I am, he thought. A rowboat went by to his right, with a young man sitting in front, and his girlfriend pulling at the oars. He watched them until they were several boat lengths away, and then he cursed them quietly. He flicked his cigarette into the water.

As he gazed at the west side of the pond, he noticed that the apple blossoms floating on the water had collected into a kind of clump. The water lapped against the boat. He bent over and with his right index finger began absentmindedly to write his name on the pond’s pale green surface. When he realized what he was doing, he started to laugh.

Eric called in September, November, and twice in December. In a remote and indistinct voice he said he wasn’t having an easy time of it, living by himself. Two weeks before Christmas he announced that he had moved out of the cabin and was living in a rented room in Ely, where he worked as a stock boy at the supermarket. He thought he would give the experiment another month and then call it quits. He said — as if it were incidental — that he had met another woman.

“What about Lorraine?” his father asked.

“That’s over.”

“It’s a good thing you fall out of love as fast as you fall in. Who’s the new one?”

“You’ll meet her.”

“I hope so.”

In February, after a heavy snowstorm, Eric called again to say that he’d be down the following Saturday and would bring Darlene with him. “Darlene?” his father asked. “I knew a Darlene once. She ran a bowling alley.”

“You should talk,” his son said. “Wilford.”

“All right, all right. I see your point. So you’ll be here on Saturday. Looking forward to it. How long’ll you stay?”

“How should I know?” his son said.

George buzzed the apartment to let him know that his son and his son’s new girlfriend had just come in. Mr. Bradbury was waiting at the door when he heard the elevator slide open, and he went on waiting there, under the foyer’s chandelier, while in the hallway Eric and Darlene worked out a plan. The only remark he could catch was his son’s “Don’t let him tell you …” He couldn’t hear the rest of it. What to do, or what to think, or something of the sort.

After they knocked, he waited thirty seconds, timing it by his Rolex. When his son knocked a second time, harder and faster, he said, “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

He opened the door and saw them: a surprised young couple. His son had shaved his beard and cut his hair short; the effect was to make him seem exposed and small-townish. He looked past his father into the apartment with the roving gaze of a narcotics agent. “Hi, Dad,” he said. The woman next to him looked at Eric, then at his father, waiting for them to shake hands or embrace; when they did neither, she said, “Hi, Mr. Bradbury,” and thrust out her hand. “Darlene Spinney.” The hand was rough and chapped. She glanced into the apartment. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Eric’s father said, moving aside so that they could step into the foyer. “Come in and warm up.” Eric slipped off his parka, draped it over a chair, groaned, and immediately walked down the hallway to the bathroom. Mr. Bradbury helped Darlene with her coat, noting from the label that she had purchased it at Sears. The woman’s figure was substantial, north-woods robust: capable of lifting canoes. “I wonder where that son of mine went to?”

“Eric?” She glanced down the hall. “He’s in the bathroom. I’ll tell you something, Mr. Bradbury: you make your son real nervous. He’s as jumpy as a cat. What I think it is, he’s got diarrhea, bringing me here and seeing you. That’s two strikes. One more strike and the boy’ll be out cold.”

He looked at her with some interest. “Come into the living room, Miss Spinney,” he said. “Care for a drink?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a beer?”

“Sure.” He leaned toward her. “I suppose my son has warned you about my drinking.”

“What he said was you sometimes have hard stuff before lunch.”

“That is correct.” He went to the refrigerator, took out a Heineken, and poured it into a glass. “That is what I do. But only on weekends. You can think of it as my hobby. Did he tell you anything else?”

“Oh, I asked, all right. Nothing much but mumbles.”

“What’d you ask?”

“Well, for instance, did you get mean.”

“When I drank.”

“Right.”

“Why’d you want to know?” He came out of the kitchen and handed the glass to her. They both walked toward the front window.

“Do you know mean drinkers, Mr. Bradbury? I don’t guess so. I know a few. In my family, this is. It’s not nice conversation and I won’t go through all the details, about being hit and everything. This,” she said, looking out the window, “is different. I sort of figured you were a man who doesn’t have to hit things.”

“I never learned,” he said, giving the words a resentful torque. “I hired people. Now where did you and Eric meet? I can’t imagine.”

“At the supermarket. He was working in produce, and I was up there at the checkout. I’d never seen him in town before he started working in the back. Well, I mean”—she looked for a place to set down her beer, hesitated, and held on to it—“I thought, oh, what a nice face. Two glances and you don’t have to think about it. So we ate our lunches together. Traded cookies and carrots. He’s nice. He gave me a parking ticket. He said it was an old joke? Anyway, we talked. He wasn’t like the local boys.”