Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“No?”

“No. He can sit by himself. When he works, he listens to the boss, Mr. Glusac, giving him orders, and he has this so-what look on his face. He’s sweet. Like he’s always making plans. He’s a dreamer. Can’t fix a car.”

“I don’t think he ever learned.”

“That’s the truth. Doesn’t know what gaskets are, says he never learned to use a socket wrench. That car of his was hard-starting and dieseling, and I told him to tune it, you know, with a timing light, and he tells me he’s never removed a spark plug in his life. ‘We didn’t do that,’ he says. Jesus, it’s a long way down.” She was gazing at the frozen pond in the park.

“Eleven floors,” Mr. Bradbury said. “You can’t hear the harlot’s cry from street to street up here, more’s the pity. I look down on it all from a great height. I have an eleventh-floor view of things.”

She said, “I can see a man walking a dog. Eric says you write commercials.” She sat down on the sofa and glanced at the muted newscaster on the television set. He noticed that her fingernails were painted bright red, and that the back of one hand was scarred. “Is it hard, writing commercials?”

“Not if your whole life prepares you to do it. And of course there are the anodynes. If it weren’t for them, my heart wouldn’t be in it.”

“Anodynes.”

“I’m sorry. Painkillers. Things that come in bottles and tubes.”

“I only had a year of community college before I had to go to work,” Darlene said, and just as Mr. Bradbury understood what her remark was supposed to explain, she said, “I’m always afraid I’m boring people. Eric says I don’t bore him. Do you know your TV set is on?”

“Yes.”

“Why’s it on if you aren’t listening to it?”

“I like to have someone in the room with me, in case I get a call from the fraud police. Ah, hey, here’s the kid.”

Eric had reappeared silently. His father turned to look at him; he might have been standing in the hallway, out of sight, listening to them both for the last five minutes. Eric sat down next to Darlene on the sofa, putting his arm around her shoulders. She snuggled close to him, and Mr. Bradbury resisted the impulse to close his eyes. He sat down in his Barcelona chair. “So,” he began, with effort, “here you are. Give me a report. How was nature?”

“Nature was fine.” With his free hand Eric brutally rubbed his nose. The nose was running, and he wiped his hand on the sofa.

“Fine? Did the flora and fauna suit you? I want a report. Did you discover yourself? Let’s hear something about the pastoral panorama.” Darlene, he noticed, was staring at his mouth.

“It was fine,” Eric said, staring, without subtlety, at the ceiling.

“I hate it when you look at the ceiling. A world without objects is a sensible emptiness. Come on, Eric, let’s have a few details. Did you from outward forms win the passion and the life, whose fountains are within?”

“My dad is a quoter,” Eric said. He glanced at Darlene. “He quotes.” He saw his father looking at him. “It was fine,” he repeated, facing his father.

“He won’t talk about that time alone in that cabin, Mr. Bradbury, so you might as well not ask. Lord knows I’ve tried.”

“Just between him and his psyche, eh?”

“ ‘Psyche,’ ” Eric said, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ.”

“There you go, criticizing my vocabulary again. When will I be allowed to use the six-dollar words they taught us at college? Never, it appears.” He smiled at Darlene. “Pay no attention to me. I inflict my irony on everybody.”

A long pause followed. Eric’s father had begun counting the seconds in groups of two when Darlene said, “You wouldn’t believe all the city people who come up north to commune with nature. Like that woman Lorraine, her family. We see them all summer. They buy designer backpacks and dehydrated foods they don’t eat. Then they sleep on the ground for two weeks, complain of colds, and whiz home in their station wagons. Me, I’m lucky if I can sleep in a bed.”

“Darlene has insomnia,” Eric explained.

“Right. I do. That’s why I don’t understand people sleeping on the ground. Who wants that when you can shower in a bathroom and sleep in a bed and look out from the eleventh floor? Not me.”

“Insomnia,” Mr. Bradbury said. “How interesting. Ever tried pills?”

“You have insomnia?” she asked. “Try bananas. Or turkey. They have an enzyme, tryptophan, and that’s what you need. Unless you’re hardcore, like me. I have to run, eat bananas, skip coffee, but it usually doesn’t make any difference.”

“We jog together,” Eric said.

They were cuddling there, Darlene and Eric, Mr. Bradbury decided, to test his powers of detachment. Before this was over he would be a Zen saint. He thought longingly of the vodka bottle in the kitchen cupboard, whose cap he had not, not , removed once today: his hands were folded in his lap, as he watched Darlene place her hand on Eric’s leg. The truth, he thought, raising one hand to scratch his ear, is an insufferable test of a man’s resources. Tilting his head imperceptibly, he glanced for relief at the Lichtenstein above the sofa. “Bananas?” he said.

“Eric says you wrote those Colonel Crisp commercials.” Her voice was egging him on into the kitchen: glass, ice cubes, and the tender care of the liquor.

“Yes.” He would not stand it. He could not stand it, and began to get up.

Darlene twisted around, so that Eric’s hand fell off her shoulders onto the sofa, to look at the wall behind her. “What’s that?” she asked.

“That? Oh, that’s a Lichtenstein.” He sat down again.

“Is it valuable?”

“Yes. I suppose so. Yes.”

She was looking at it closely, probably, Mr. Bradbury thought, counting the dots in the woman’s face. “Do you write radio commercials, too?”

“Oh, yes. I once wrote a spot for a lightbulb company with a Janá ek fanfare in the background. That made them sit up.”

“Jesus!” Eric stood suddenly. “I can’t stand this!” He went down the hallway, and they both heard a door slam. Just then Elena came into the living room to announce that lunch was ready.

“It’s a hard life up here on the eleventh floor,” Mr. Bradbury mused. “Maybe he went to get a banana.” He waited. “Or some white meat.”

“I’ll get him,” Darlene said, rising. “His moods’ve never bothered me. Did you know,” she began, then stopped. She apparently decided to plunge ahead, because she said, “He talks a lot about his mother.”

“Not to me. She died of cancer, you know.”

“Yeah. He said so. He remembers all of it. He likes you, Mr. Bradbury. Don’t get him wrong. He’s crazy about you. I shouldn’t say this.”

“Oh, please say it. Crazy about me?”

“Oh sure. Didn’t you know?” She looked surprised.

Mortified and pleased, he watched her disappear down the hall.

After lunch, whose terrain was crossed by Mr. Bradbury’s painfully constructed comic anecdotes about daily work in an advertising agency, he suggested that they all go out for a walk in the park. Eric and Darlene agreed with an odd fervor. After bundling themselves up, they took the elevator down, Darlene checking her face, making moues, in the elevator’s polished mirror.

Outside the temperature was ten degrees above zero, with no wind, and a sunny sky. When they reached the park, Darlene ran out ahead of them onto the pond, where the park authorities had cleared a rink for skating. A loudspeaker was playing Waldteufel.

“Don’t lecture me,” Eric said. “Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.”