Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Who was that?” she asked Walton.

He shook his head like a spring-loaded toy on the back shelf of a car. As usual, he smiled before answering. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some guy. Tad or Tadeusz or like that. He always asks people for money. Usually people ignore him. Nobody’s given him any money in a long time. Come on. We’re going to my place to make some phone calls. Then we’ll go on a treasure hunt.”

When they came out to the sidewalk, Einstein cried and shivered with happiness to see them, barking twice as a greeting. Walton loosened her from a bicycle stand to which she had been tethered, while Jodie breathed in the hot summer air and said, “By the way, Walton, where did you get that thing in your walk? Is it, like, arthritis?”

He turned and smiled at her. Her heart started thumping again. She couldn’t imagine why men didn’t smile more often than they did. It was the most effective action they knew how to take, but they were always amateurs at it. Jodie thought that maybe she hadn’t been smiled upon that much in her life. Perhaps that was it.

“Fascists,” Walton said, getting up. “My dog and I fought the fascists.”

Walton’s apartment was upstairs from an ice-cream parlor, and it smelled of fudge and heavy cream. Although the apartment had a small study area with bookshelves and a desk, and a bedroom where the bed was neatly made and where even the dog’s rubber squeak toys were kept in the corner, the effect of neatness was offset by a quality of gloom characteristic of places where sunlight had never penetrated. It was like Bluebeard’s castle. The only unobstructed windows faced north. All the other windows faced brick or stone walls so that no matter what time of day it was, the lamps had to be kept on.

They went through the circled want ads, made some telephone calls, and arranged for two interviews, one for Jodie as a receptionist at a discount brokerage house and one for Walton as a shipping clerk.

Having finished that task, Jodie dropped herself onto one of the floor pillows and examined a photograph on the wall over the desk showing a young couple, both smiling. Wearing a flowery summer dress, the woman sat on a swing, and the man stood behind her, about to give her a push.

“That’s my father,” Walton said, standing behind Jodie.

“It’s your mother, too.”

“I know it. I know it’s my mother, too. But it’s mostly my father. He always liked to meet my girlfriends.”

“I’m not your girlfriend, Walton,” she said. “I hardly know you.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Want a beer?” he asked. “For lunch?”

He said unemployed people should always seek out castoffs and that was what they would do during the afternoon, but just as they were about to go out to his car, he fell asleep in his chair, his dog at his feet, her front paws crossed.

Jodie sat where she was for a moment, painfully resisting the impulse to go rummaging through Walton’s medicine cabinet and desk and dresser drawers. Instead, she brought a chair over next to him, sat down in it, and studied his face. Although it wasn’t an unusual face, at this distance certain features about it were certainly noteworthy. The line where the beard began on his cheek — he was cleanshaven — was so straight that it seemed to have been implanted there with a ruler. He had two tiny, almost microscopic pieces of dandruff in his eyebrows. His lashes were rather long, for a man. His lower lip was also rather full, but his upper lip was so small and flat at the bottom that you might not notice it unless you looked carefully. When he exhaled, his breath came in two puffs: It sounded like hurr hurr . He had a thin nose, and his left cheek appeared to have the remnant of an acne scar, a little blossom of reddening just beneath the skin like a truffle. With his head leaning forward, his hair in back fell halfway to his shoulders; these shoulders seemed to her to be about average width for a man of his height and weight. Even in sleep, his forehead was creased as if in thought. His hair had a wavy back-and-forth directionality, and it reminded Jodie of corrugated tin roofing. She found wavy hair mysterious; her own was quite straight. She reached up to touch his hair, being careful not to touch his scalp. That would wake him. She liked the feeling of his hair in her fingers. It was like managing a small profit after two quarters of losses.

She was sitting again on the floor pillow when he woke up five minutes later. He shook his head and rubbed his face with his hands. He looked over to where Jodie was sitting. “Hi,” he said.

“Here’s ‘hi’ comin’ back at you,” she said. She waved all the fingers of her right hand at him.

That evening she went to a pay telephone and called her older sister, the married and employed success story. Her older sister told Jodie to take her time, to buy some nice clothes, to be careful not to lend him her credit card, and to watch and wait to see what would happen. Be careful; he might be a psychopath. Sit tight, she said. Jodie thought the advice was ironic because that kind of sitting was the only sort her sister knew how to do. She told Jodie to have her phone reconnected; it wouldn’t cost that much, and after all, telephones were a necessity for a working girl in whom a man was taking an interest. She asked if Jodie needed a loan, and Jodie said no.

Her best friend gave Jodie the same advice, except with more happy laughter and enthusiasm. Wait and see, go for it, she said. What’s the difference? It’ll be fun either way. Come over. Let’s talk.

Soon, Jodie said. We’ll see each other soon.

Her dreams that night were packs of lies, lies piled on lies, an exhibit of lies. Mayhem, penises on parade, angels in seersucker suits, that sort of thing. She woke up on the sleeping porch ashamed of her unconscious life. She hated the vulgarity and silliness of her own dreams, their subtle unstated untruths.

Her job interview was scheduled for eleven o’clock the following morning, and after Walton had called up to her and taken her to the café, she stared down into her third cup of coffee and considered how she might make the best impression on her potential employers. She had worn a rather formal white ruffled blouse with the palm tree pin and a dark blue skirt, and she had a semi-matching blue purse, at the sight of which Walton had announced that Jodie had “starchy ideas of elegance,” a phrase he didn’t care to explain. He told her that at the interview she should be eager and honest and self-possessed. “It’s a brokerage house,” he said. “They like possession in places like that, especially self-possession. Be polite. Don’t call them motherfuckers. They don’t like that. But be honest. If you’re straightforward, they’ll notice and take to you right away. Just be yourself, you know, whatever that is.”

But she wasn’t convinced. At the moment, the idea of drifting like a broken twig on the surface of a muddy river was much more appealing. All through college she had worked at a clothing store as a checkout clerk, and the experience had filled her with bitter wisdom about the compromises of tedium and the hard bloody edge of necessity. She had had a gun pointed at her during a holdup her fourth day on the job. On two other occasions, the assistant manager had propositioned her in the stockroom. When she turned him down, she expected to be fired, but for some reason she had been kept on.

“There you are.” A voice: her left ear: a phlegm rumble.

Jodie turned on her stool and saw the fat man with yellow-green eyes staring at her. “Yes,” she said.

“I hadda get things in order,” he said, grinning and snorting. He pulled out a handkerchief speckled with excretions and blew his nose into it. “I hadda get my ducks in a row. So. Here we are again. What’s your three wishes?”