Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Who, me?” Darlene was now out of earshot. “That’s for suckers. Can you tell me yet how long you’re staying?”

“Why do you keep asking? A few days. Then we’re going north again. I’m going to be up there for the rest of the winter and then re-enroll next fall and graduate in the spring.”

“I don’t suppose she’s going with you.”

“I don’t know.” He waited. “She’s interested in our money. The money.”

“A good woman’s failing. I kind of like her,” Mr. Bradbury said. “Diamond in the rough and all that. At first I thought she was queen of the roller derby. Didn’t know if she was playing with a full deck.”

“I almost proposed to her,” Eric said. “Almost.”

“Oh Christ.” His father stomped his right foot in the snow. “You, with all your, well, call it potential, and you want to marry a girl who counts out change?”

She was far ahead of them on the ice, pulling two children on skates around in a circle. The children yelled with pleasure.

“She’s … different, Pop. With her, everything’s simpler. They don’t have women like her around here, I don’t think. You don’t get what I mean at all.”

“Oh, I get it. You went up north looking for nature, and you found it, and you brought it back, and there it, I mean she, is. Overbite, straight hair, chapped hands, whopping tits, and all.”

“You wouldn’t believe,” Eric said, watching her, “how comforting she is.”

“What?” He stopped and waited. “Well, I might.”

“When I wake up, she’s always awake. She has a way of touching that makes me feel wonderful. Generous.” Now they were both watching her. “It’s like love comes easily to her.”

“God, you’re romantic,” his father said. “It must be your age.”

“Want to hear about how wonderful she is? In bed?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“You used to want to hear.”

“I shouldn’t’ve asked. That was a mistake. Glückschmerz . Besides, couples don’t live in bed. You can’t insult a waiter or cash a check in bed. As a paradigm for life, it’s inadequate.”

Eric was showing an unsteady smile. “I want to throw myself at her feet,” he said. “We’re the king and queen of lovers. Love. God, I just lap it up. We can go and go. I don’t want life. I want love. And so does she.”

“Have we always talked this way?” his father asked. “It’s deplorable.”

“We started getting a little raw about two years ago. That was when you began asking me about my girlfriends. Some pretty raw questions, things you shouldn’t have been asking. I mean, we all know why , right?”

“Just looking out for my boy.” In the cold, he could feel his eyelid twitching.

“You could mind your own business, Pop. You could try that.” He said this with equanimity. Darlene was running back toward them. She ran awkwardly, with her upper torso leaning forward and her arms flailing. Three children were following her. As she panted, her breath was visible in the cold air.

“Sometimes I think I lead a strange life,” Eric’s father said. “Sometimes I think that none of this is real.”

“Yeah, Chekhov,” Eric said. “I read him, just like you told me to.” Darlene ran straight up to Eric and put her blue mittens, which had bullet-sized balls of snow stuck to them, up to both sides of his face. She exposed all her teeth when she smiled. She took Eric’s left hand. Then she reached down with her other hand and grasped Mr. Bradbury’s doeskin glove. Standing between them, she said, “I love winter. I love the cold.”

“Yes,” Mr. Bradbury said. “The bitterness invigorates.”

Not letting go of either of their hands, she walked between them back to the apartment building.

They sat around for the rest of the afternoon; Darlene tried to take a nap, and Eric and his father watched a basketball game, DePaul against Marquette. When the game was half over, Eric turned to his father and asked, “Where are your cigarettes, Pop?”

“My little friends? I evicted them.”

“How come?”

“I quit in December. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I was fixing to die. The outlines of my heart were all but visible under the skin, it hurt so much. I felt like a corpse ready for the anatomy lesson. So: I stopped. Imagine this. I threw my gold Dunhill lighter, the one your mother gave me, down the building’s trash shaft, along with all the cigarettes in the house. I heard the lighter whine and clatter all the way to the heap at the bottom. What a scarifying loss was there. And how I miss the nicotine. But I wasn’t about to go. I may look like Samuel Gompers, but I’m only fifty-two. I figured there must be more to life than patient despair, right?”

Sitting on the floor, leaning against the sofa on which his father was sitting, Eric held his hand up in the air behind him. “Congratulations,” he said. The two of them shook hands. “That took real guts.”

“Thank you.” He checked his fingers, still yellow from nicotine stains. “Yes, it did. I agree.” He thumped his chest. “Guts.”

At dinner Darlene was gulping her wine. “I don’t get to drink this much at home. And furthermore, I shouldn’t. Wine keeps you awake. Did you know that? What is this, French?” She peered at the label. “Romanian. Well. That was my next guess.”

“A nice table wine,” Mr. Bradbury said. “And when it turns, you can use it as salad dressing.”

She looked at Eric. Eric shook his head, shrugged, and continued eating.

“He never says much at dinner,” Darlene said, pointing at Eric. Mr. Bradbury nodded. After a pause, she said, “I don’t think I ever told you about the time I met Bill Cosby.”

At one o’clock Mr. Bradbury found himself lying awake, staring at the curtains. His back itched, and as he rubbed his neck he thought he felt a swelling. The damnable Romanian wine had given him a headache. Sitting up, he lowered his feet to the floor and put on his slippers. Then, shuffling across the bedroom, he opened the door that led out to the hallway.

He was halfway to the kitchen when he stopped outside Eric’s bedroom door. He heard whispering. He stood and listened. It wasn’t whispering so much as a drone from his son. “ ‘The only completely stationary object in the room,’ ” he was saying, “ ‘was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.’ ” As Eric went on — Daisy and Tom and Jordan Baker undramatically droned into existence — his voice, indifferent to the story, spread out its soporific waves of narration. His father turned around and padded back into his own bedroom.

Three hours later, still feeling sleepless, Mr. Bradbury rose again out of bed and again advanced down the hall. All the lights were blazing. Halfway to the kitchen, he looked toward the refrigerator and saw the two of them huddled together side by side at the dining-room table, Darlene in her bathrobe, Eric in a nightshirt. Randomly he noticed the width of his son’s shoulders, the fullness of Darlene’s breasts. Her head was in her hands. Unobserved, Mr. Bradbury watched his son butter the bread, apply the mayonnaise, add the sandwich meat and the lettuce, close the sandwich, cut it in half, remove the crusts, and then hand it on its plate to her. “Thank you,” she said. She began to eat. She chewed with her mouth open. She said, “You’re so sweet. I love you.” She kissed the air in his direction. Mr. Bradbury moved back, stood still, then turned toward his bedroom.

He closed the door and clicked on the bedside lamp. From far down on the other side of the hallway, he heard Darlene’s loud laugh. He started to slip in under the covers, thought better of it, and went to his window to part the curtains. Getting back into bed, he switched off the bulb; then, with his head on the pillow, he gazed at the city skyline, half consciously counting the few apartments in the high-rise across the street that still had all their lights burning.