Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

He looked out his hotel window at the streetlights. They had an amber glow, the color of gemstones. This city, this American city, was unlike any he had ever seen. A downtown area emptied of people; a river with huge ships going by silently; a park with girls who believe in the millennium. No, not girls: women. He had learned his lesson.

He wanted to open the hotel window to smell the air, but the casement frames were welded shut.

After walking down the stairs to the lobby, he stood out in front of the hotel doorway. He felt a warm breeze against his face. He told the doorman, Luis, that he had met a woman on Belle Isle who was going to pick him up in a few minutes. She was going to take him dancing. The doorman nodded, rubbing his chin with his hand. Anders said that she was friendly and wanted to show him, a foreigner, things. The doorman nodded. “Yes, I agree,” Luis said. “Dancing. Make sure that this is what you do.”

“What?”

“Dancing,” Luis said, “yes. Go dancing. You know this woman?”

“I just met her.”

“Ah,” Luis said, and stepped back to observe Anders, as if to remember his face. “Dangerous fun.” When her car appeared in front of the hotel, she was wearing a light summer dress, and when she smiled, she looked like the melancholy baby he had heard about in an American song. As they pulled away from the hotel, he looked back at Luis, who was watching them closely, and then Anders realized that Luis was reading the numbers on Lauren’s license plate. To break the mood, he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. She smelled of cigarettes and something else — soap or cut flowers.

She took him uptown to a club where a trio played soft rock and some jazz. Some of this music was slow enough to dance to, in the slow way he wanted to dance. Her hand in his felt bony and muscular; physically, she was direct and immediate. He wondered, now, looking at her face, whether she might be an American Indian, and again he was frustrated because he couldn’t tell one race in this country from another. He knew it was improper to ask. When he sat at the table, holding hands with her and sipping from his drink, he began to feel as if he had known her for a long time and was related to her in some obscure way.

Suddenly he asked her, “Why are you so interested in me?”

“Interested?” She laughed, and her long black hair, no longer pinned up, shook in quick thick waves. “Well, all right. I have an interest. I like it that you’re so foreign that you take cabs to the park. I like the way you look. You’re kind of cute. And the other thing is, your soul is so raw and new, Anders, it’s like an oyster.”

“What?” He looked at her near him at the table. Their drinks were half finished. “My soul?”

“Yeah, your soul. I can almost see it.”

“Where is it?”

She leaned forward, friendly and sexual and now slightly elegant. “You want me to show you?”

“Yes,” Anders said. “Sure.”

“It’s in two places,” she said. “One part is up here.” She released his hand and put her thumb on his forehead. “And the other part is down here.” She touched him in the middle of his stomach. “Right there. And they’re connected.”

“What are they like?” he asked, playing along.

“Yours? Raw and shiny, just like I said.”

“And what about your soul?” he asked.

She looked at him. “My soul is radioactive,” she said. “It’s like plutonium. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

He thought that this was another American idiom he hadn’t heard before, and he decided not to spoil things by asking her about it. In Sweden, people didn’t talk much about the soul, at least not in conjunction with oysters or plutonium. It was probably some local metaphor he had never heard in Sweden.

In the dark he couldn’t make out much about her building, except that it was several floors high and at least fifty years old. Her living-room window looked out distantly at the river — once upstairs, he could see the lights of another passing freighter — and through the left side of the window he could see an electrical billboard. The name of the product was made out of hundreds of small incandescent bulbs, which went on and off from left to right. One of the letters was missing.

It’s today’s CHEVR LET!

All around her living-room walls were brightly framed watercolors, almost celebratory and Matisse-like, but in vague shapes. She went down the hallway, tapped on one of the doors, and said, “I’m home.” Then she returned to the living room and kicked off her shoes. “My grandmother,” she said. “She has her own room.”

“Are these your pictures?” he asked. “Did you draw them?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t tell what they are. What are they?”

“They’re abstract. You use wet paper to get that effect. They’re abstract because God has gotten abstract. God used to have a form but now He’s dissolving into pure light. That’s what you see in those pictures. They’re pictures of the trails that God leaves behind.”

“Like the vapor trails”—he smiled—“behind jets.”

“Yes,” she said. “Like that.”

He went over to her in the dark and drew her to him and kissed her. Her breath was layered with smoke, apparently from cigarettes. Immediately he felt an unusual physical sensation inside his skin, like something heating up in a frypan.

She drew back. He heard another siren go by on the street outside. He wondered whether they should talk some more in the living room — share a few more verbal intimacies — to be really civilized about this and decided, no, it was not necessary, not when strangers make love, as they do, sometimes, in strange cities, away from home. They went into her bedroom and undressed each other. Her body, by the light of a dim bedside lamp, was as beautiful and as exotic as he had hoped it would be, darker than his own skin in the dark room, native somehow to this continent. She had the flared shoulders and hips of a dancer. She bent down and snapped off the bedside light, and as he approached her, she was lit from behind by the billboard. Her skin felt vaguely electrical to him.

They stood in the middle of her bedroom, arms around each other, swaying, and he knew, in his arousal, that something odd was about to occur: he had no words for it in either his own language or English.

They moved over and under each other, changing positions to stay in the breeze created by the window fan. They were both lively and attentive, and at first he thought it would be just the usual fun, this time with an almost anonymous American woman. He looked at her in the bed and saw her dark leg alongside his own, and he saw that same scar line running up her arm to her shoulder, where it disappeared.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“That?” She looked at it. “That was an accident that was done to me.”

Half an hour later, resting with her, his hands on her back, he felt a wave of happiness; he felt it was a wave of color traveling through his body, surging from his forehead down to his stomach. It took him over again, and then a third time, with such force that he almost sat up.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It is like … I felt a color moving through my body.”

“Oh that?” She smiled at him in the dark. “It’s your soul, Anders. That’s all. That’s all it is. Never felt it before, huh?”

“I must be very drunk,” he said.

She put her hand up into his hair. “Call it anything you want to. Didn’t you feel it before? Our souls were curled together.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “You are a crazy woman.”

“Oh yeah?” she whispered. “Is that what you think? Watch. Watch what happens now. You think this is all physical. Guess what. You’re the crazy one. Watch. Watch.”