Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Let’s go to your place,” he said. “Let’s go there, okay?”

“Happy days,” she said in agreement, putting her fingers down inside his loose beltless jeans.

He was a slow-motion lover. She had made him some iced tea, but instead of drinking from it, he raised the cold glass to her forehead. Einstein had found a corner where she was panting with her eyes closed.

Jodie had taken him by the hand and had led him out to the sleeping porch. You couldn’t have known it from the way he looked in his street clothes, but his body was lean and muscular, and he made love shyly at first and didn’t really become easy and wild over her until he saw how she was responding to him. She was embarrassed by how quickly and how effortlessly he made her come. She put her arms up above her head and just gave in.

Maybe fools made the best lovers. They were devotees of passing pleasures, connoisseurs of them, and this, being the best of the passing pleasures, was the one at which they were most adept. His fire didn’t burn away. He wasn’t ashamed of any impulse he had, so he kept having them. He couldn’t stop bringing himself into her. “Look at me,” she said, as she was about to come again, and he looked at her with a slow grin on his face, pleased with himself and pleased with her. When she looked back at him, she let him see into her soul, all the way down, where she’d never allowed anyone to own her nakedness before.

“So. Happy ever after?”

Walton was asleep after a night’s work, and Jodie had gone down to Clara’s Country Kitchen Café by herself. This morning the fat man with yellow-green eyes was full of mirthless merriment, and he seemed to be spilling over the counter stool on all sides. If anything, he was twice as big as before. He was like a balloon filled with gravy. Jodie had been in the middle of her second cup of coffee and her scrambled eggs with ketchup when he sat down next to her. It was hard to imagine someone who could be more deliberately disgusting than this gentleman. He had a rare talent, Jodie thought, for inspiring revulsion. The possible images of the Family of Humankind did not somehow include him. He sat there shoveling an omelet and sausages into his mouth. Only occasionally did he chew.

“Happy enough,” she said.

He nodded and snorted. “ ‘Happy enough,’ ” he quoted back to her. Sounds of swallowing and digestion erupted from him. “I give you a wish and you ask for a radio. There you have it.” His accent was even more obscure and curious this morning.

“Where are you from?” Jodie asked. She had to angle her left leg away from his because his took up so much space under the counter. “You’re not from here.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not really from anywhere. I was imported from Venice. A beautiful city, Venice. You ever been there?”

“Yes,” she said, although she had not been. But she did love to read histories. “Lagoons, the Bridge of Sighs, and typhoid. Yeah, I’ve been there.” She put her money down on the counter, and when she stood up, she felt a faint throbbing, almost a soreness but not quite that, Walton’s desire, its trace, still inside her. “I have to go.”

He resumed eating. “You didn’t even thank me,” the fat man said. “You smell of love and you didn’t even thank me.”

“All right. Thank you.” She was hurrying out.

When she saw him in the mirror behind the cash register, he tipped an imaginary hat. She had seen something in his eyes: malice, she thought. As soon as she was out on the sidewalk, under the café’s faded orange awning, her thoughts returned to Walton. She wanted to see him immediately and touch him. She headed for the crosswalk, all thoughts of the fat man dispersing and vanishing like smoke.

On the way back, she saw a thimble in the gutter. She deposited it in her purse. A fountain pen on the brick ledge of a storefront income-tax service gleamed at her in the cottony hazy heat, and she took that, too. Walton had given her the habit of appreciating foundlings. When she walked onto the sleeping porch, she took off her shoes. She still felt ceremonial with him. She showed him the thimble and the fountain pen. Then they were making love, their bodies slippery with sweat, and this time she stopped him for a moment and said, “I saw that fat man again,” but he covered her mouth, and she sucked on his fingers. Afterward, she showered and dressed and caught the bus to work. Einstein groaned in her sleep as Jodie passed her in the hallway. The dog, Jodie thought, was probably jealous.

On the bus, Jodie hummed and smiled privately. She hadn’t known about all these resources of pleasure in the world. It was a great secret. She looked at the other passengers with politeness but no special interest. Her love was a power that could attract and charm. She was radiantly burning with it. Everyone could see it.

Through the window she spotted a flock of geese in a V pattern flying east and then veering south.

From time to time, at work — where she was bringing people rapidly into her orbit thanks to her aura of good fortune — she would think of her happiness and try to hide it. She remembered not to speak of it, good luck having a tendency to turn to its opposite when mentioned.

She called her sister and her mother, both of whom wanted to meet Walton as soon as possible. Jodie tried to be dryly objective about him, but she couldn’t keep it up for long; with her sister, she began giggling and weeping with happiness. Her best friend, Marge, came over one stormy afternoon in a visit of planned spontaneity and was so impressed by Walton that she took off her glasses and sang for him, thunder and lightning crashing outside and the electric lights flickering. She’d once been the vocalist in a band called Leaping Salmon, which had failed because of the insipid legato prettiness of their songs; when they changed their name to Toxic Waste and went for a grunge sound, the other band members had ousted her. Singing in Leaping Salmon had been her only life adventure, and she always mentioned it in conversations to people she had just met and wanted to impress, but while she was singing in her high, honeyed soprano, Walton walked over to Jodie, sat down next to her, and put his hand on the inside of her thigh. So that was that.

I have a lover, Jodie thought. Most people have lovers without paying any attention to what they have. They think pleasure is a birthright. They don’t even know what luck they have when they have it.

At the end of the day she couldn’t wait to see him. Every time she came into the room, his face seemed alert, relaxed, and sensual. Sometimes, thinking about him, she could feel a tightening, a prickling, all over her body. She was so in love and her skin so sensitive that she had to wear soft fabrics, cottons repeatedly washed. Her bras began to feel confining and priggish; on some days, she wouldn’t wear them. The whole enterprise of love was old-fashioned and retrograde, she knew, but so what? Sometimes she thought, What’s happening to me? She felt a certain evangelical enthusiasm and piety about sex, and pity for those who were unlucky in love.

Her soul became absentminded.

On some nights when Walton didn’t have to go to the loading dock, she lay awake, with him draped around her. After lovemaking, his breath smelled of almonds. She would detach herself from him limb by limb and tiptoe into the kitchen. There, naked under the overhead light, she would remove her tarot pack from the coupon drawer and lay out the cards on the table.

Using the Celtic method of divination in the book of instructions, she would set down the cards.

This covers me.

This crosses me.

This crowns me, this is beneath me, this is behind me, this is before me, this is myself.

These are my hopes and fears .