Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

He smiled and said that they hadn’t told him anything to that effect.

“Well, they should have.” She dropped her cup into a trash can, and he thought he saw the beginning of a scar, a white line, traveling up the underside of her arm toward her shoulder.

“Who do you mean?” he asked. “You said ‘they.’ Who is ‘they’?”

“Any they at all,” she said. “Your guardians.” She sighed. “All right. Come on. Follow me.” She went outside and broke into a run. For a moment he thought that she was running away from him, then realized that he was expected to run with her; it was what people did now, instead of holding hands, to get acquainted. He sprinted up next to her, and as she ran, she asked him, “Who are you?”

Being careful not to tire — she wouldn’t like it if his endurance was poor — he told her his name, his professional interests, and he patched together a narrative about his mother, father, two sisters, and his aunt Ingrid. Running past a slower couple, he told her that his aunt was eccentric and broke china by throwing it on the floor on Fridays, which she called “the devil’s day.”

“Years ago, they would have branded her a witch,” Anders said. “But she isn’t a witch. She’s just moody.”

He watched her reactions and noticed that she didn’t seem at all interested in his family, or any sort of background. “Do you run a lot?” she asked. “You look as if you’re in pretty good shape.”

He admitted that, yes, he ran, but that people in Sweden didn’t do this as much as they did in America.

“You look a little like that tennis star, that Swede,” she said. “By the way, I’m Lauren.” Still running, she held out her hand, and, still running, he shook it. “Which god do you believe in?”

“Excuse me?”

“Which god?” she asked. “Which god do you think is in control?”

“I had not thought about it.”

“You’d better,” she said. “Because one of them is.” She stopped suddenly and put her hands on her hips and walked in a small circle. She put her hand to her neck and took her pulse, timing it on her wristwatch. Then she placed her fingers on Anders’s neck and took his pulse. “One hundred fourteen,” she said. “Pretty good.” Again she walked away from him and again he found himself following her. In the growing darkness he noticed other men, standing in the parking lot, watching her, this American with pinned-up hair, dressed in a running outfit. He thought she was pretty, but maybe Americans had other standards so that here, in fact, she wasn’t pretty, and it was some kind of optical illusion.

When he caught up with her, she was unlocking the door of a blue Chevrolet rusting near the hubcaps. He gazed down at the rust with professional interest — it had the characteristic blister pattern of rust caused by salt. She slipped inside the car and reached across to unlock the passenger side, and when he got in — he hadn’t been invited to get in, but he thought it was all right — he sat down on several small plastic tape cassette cases. He picked them out from underneath him and tried to read their labels. She was taking off her shoes. Debussy, Bach, 10,000 Maniacs, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

“Where are we going?” he asked. He glanced down at her bare foot on the accelerator. She put the car into reverse. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Stop this car.” She put on the brake and turned off the ignition. “I just want to look at you,” he said.

“Okay, look.” She turned on the interior light and kept her face turned so that he was looking at her in profile. Something about her suggested a lovely disorder, a ragged brightness toward the back of her face.

“Are we going to do things?” he asked, touching her on the arm.

“Of course,” she said. “Strangers should always do things.”

She said that she would drop him off at his hotel, that he must change clothes. This was important. She would then pick him up. On the way over, he saw almost no one downtown. For some reason, it was quite empty of shoppers, strollers, or pedestrians of any kind. “I’m going to tell you some things you should know,” she said. He settled back. He was used to this kind of talk on dates: everyone, everywhere, liked to reveal intimate details. It was an international convention.

They were slowing for a red light. “God is love,” she said, downshifting, her bare left foot on the clutch. “At least I think so. It’s my hope. In the world we have left, only love matters. Do you understand? I’m one of the Last Ones. Maybe you’ve heard of us.”

“No, I have not. What do you do?”

“We do what everyone else does. We work and we go home and have dinner and go to bed. There is only one thing we do that is special.”

“What is that?” he asked.

“We don’t make plans,” she said. “No big plans at all.”

“That is not so unusual,” he said, trying to normalize what she was saying. “Many people don’t like to make—”

“It’s not liking,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with liking or not liking. It’s a faith. Look at those buildings.” She pointed toward several abandoned multistoried buildings with broken or vacant windows. “What face is moving behind all that? Something is. I live and work here. I’m not blind. Anyone can see what’s taking place here. You’re not blind, either. Our church is over on the east side, off Van Dyke Avenue. It’s not a good part of town, but we want to be near where the face is doing its work.”

“Your church?”

“The Church of the Millennium,” she said. “Where they preach the Gospel of Last Things.” They were now on the freeway, heading up toward the General Motors Building and his hotel. “Do you understand me?”

“Of course,” he said. He had heard of American cult religions but thought they were all in California. He didn’t mind her talk of religion. It was like talk of the sunset or childhood; it kept things going. “Of course I have been listening.”

“Because I won’t sleep with you unless you listen to me,” she said. “It’s the one thing I care about, that people listen. It’s so damn rare, listening I mean, that you might as well care about it. I don’t sleep with strangers too often. Almost never.” She turned to look at him. “Anders,” she said, “what do you pray to?”

He laughed. “I don’t.”

“Okay, then, what do you plan for?”

“A few things,” he said.

“Like what?”

“My dinner every night. My job. My friends.”

“You don’t let accidents happen? You should. Things reveal themselves in accidents.”

“Are there many people like you?” he asked.

“What do you think?” He looked again at her face, taken over by the darkness in the car but dimly lit by the dashboard lights and the oncoming flare of traffic. “Do you think there are many people like me?”

“Not very many,” he said. “But maybe more than there used to be.”

“Any of us in Sweden?”

“I don’t think so. It’s not a religion over there. People don’t … They didn’t tell us in Sweden about American girls who listen to Debussy and 10,000 Maniacs in their automobiles and who believe in gods and accidents.”

“They don’t say ‘girls’ here,” she told him. “They say ‘women.’ ”

She dropped him off at the hotel and said that she would pick him up in forty-five minutes. In his room, as he chose a clean shirt and a sport coat and a pair of trousers, he found himself laughing happily. He felt giddy. It was all happening so fast; he could hardly believe his luck. I am a very lucky man, he thought.