Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

The cards kept turning up in a peculiar manner. Instead of the cards promising blessings and fruitfulness, she found herself staring at the autumn and winter cards, the coins and the swords. This is before me: the nine of swords, whose illustration is that of a woman waking at night with her face in her hands.

She had also been unnerved by the repeated appearance of the Chariot in reverse, a sign described in the guidebooks as “failure in carrying out a project, riot, litigation.”

Propped up in her living-room chair, she had been dozing after dinner when the phone rang. She answered it in a stupor. She barely managed a whispered “hello.”

She could make out the voice, but it seemed to come from the tomb, it was so faint. It belonged to a woman and it had some business to transact, but Jodie couldn’t make out what the business was. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?”

“I said we should talk,” the woman told her in a voice barely above a whisper, but still rich in wounded private authority. “We could meet. I know I shouldn’t intrude like this, but I feel that I could tell you things. About Glaze. I know that you know him.”

“Who are you? Are you seeing him?”

“Oh no no no,” the woman said. “It isn’t that.” Then she said her name was Glynnis or Glenna — something odd and possibly resistant to spelling. “You don’t know anything about him, do you?” The woman waited a moment. “His past, I mean.”

“I guess I don’t know that much,” Jodie admitted. “Who are you?”

“I can fill you in. Look,” she said, “I hate to do this, I hate sounding like this and I hate being like this, but I just think there are some facts you should know. These are facts I have. I’m just … I don’t know what I am. Maybe I’m just trying to help.”

“All right,” Jodie said. She uncrossed her legs and put her feet on the floor and tried to clear her mind. “I get off work at five. The office is near downtown.” She named a bar where her friends sometimes went in the late afternoons.

“Oh, there?” the woman asked, her voice rising with disappointment. “Do you really like that place?” When Jodie didn’t respond, the woman said, “The smoke in there makes me cough . I have allergies. Quite a few allergies.” She suggested another restaurant, an expensive Italian place with lazily stylish wrought-iron furniture on the terrace and its name above the door in leaded glass. Jodie remembered the decor — she hadn’t liked it. However, she didn’t want to prolong these negotiations for another minute. “And don’t tell Glaze I called,” the woman said. Her speech was full of italics.

When Jodie hung up, she began to chew her thumbnail. She glanced up and saw her reflection in a window. She pulled her thumb away quickly; then she tried to smile at herself.

She was seated in what she considered a good spot near a window in the nonsmoking section when the woman entered the restaurant and was directed by the headwaiter to Jodie’s table. The woman was twelve minutes late. Jodie leaned back and arranged her face into a temporary pleasantness. The stranger was pregnant and was walking with a slightly prideful sway, as if she herself were the china shop. Although she was sporting an attractive watercolor-hued peacock-blue maternity blouse, she was also wearing shorts and sandals, apparently to show off her legs, which were deeply tanned. The ensemble didn’t quite fit together, but it compelled attention. Her hair was carefully messed up, as if she had just come from an assignation, and she wore two opal earrings that went with the blouse. She was pretty enough, but it was the sort of prettiness that Jodie distrusted because there was nothing friendly about it, nothing settled or calm. She was the sort of woman whom other women instinctively didn’t like. She looked like an aging groupie, a veteran of many beds, and she had the deadest eyes Jodie had ever seen, pale gray and icy.

“You must be Jodie,” the woman said, putting one hand over her stomach and thrusting the other hand out. “I’m Gleinya Roberts.” She laughed twice, as if her name itself was witty. When she stopped laughing, her mouth stayed open and her face froze momentarily, as more soundless laughter continued to emerge from her. Jodie found everything about her disconcerting, though she couldn’t say why. “May I sit down?” the woman asked.

Feeling that she had been indeliberately rude, Jodie nodded and waved her hand toward the chair with the good view. The question had struck her as either preposterous or injured, and because she felt off balance, she didn’t remember to introduce herself until the right moment had passed. “I’m Jodie Sklar,” she said.

“Well, I know that, ” Gleinya Roberts said, settling herself delicately into her chair. “You must be wondering if this baby is Glaze’s. Don’t worry. I can assure you that it’s not,” she said with a frozen half grin, a grin that seemed preserved in ice. The thought of the baby’s father hadn’t occurred to Jodie until that moment. “I’m in my fifth month,” the woman continued, “and the Little Furnace is certainly heating me up these days. Bad timing! It’s much better to be pregnant in Minnesota in the winter. You can keep yourself warm that way. You don’t have any children yourself, Jodie, do you?”

Jodie was so taken aback by the woman’s prying and familiarity that she just smiled and shook her head. All the same, she felt it was time to establish some boundaries. “No, not yet,” she said, after a moment. “Maybe someday.” She paused for a second to take a breath and then said, “You know, I’m pleased to meet you and everything, but you must know that I’m … well, I’m really curious about why you’re here. Why’d you call me?”

“Oh, don’t let’s rush it. In a minute, in a minute,” Gleinya Roberts said, tipping her head and staring with her dead eyes at Jodie’s hair. “I just want to establish a friendly basis.” She opened her mouth, and her face froze again as soundless laughter rattled its way in Jodie’s direction. “Jodie, I just can’t take my eyes off your hair. You have such beautiful black hair. Men must love it. Where do you get it from?”

“From? Where do I get it from? Well, my father had dark hair. It was quite glossy. It shone sometimes.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “I don’t think women get their hair from their fathers. I don’t think that’s where that gene comes from. It’s the mother, I believe. I’m a zoologist, an ornithologist, actually, so I’m not up on hair. But I do know you don’t get much from your father except trouble. Sklar. What kind of name is that? Do Sklars have beautiful black hair?”

Before Jodie could answer, the waitress appeared and asked for their order. Gleinya Roberts reached for the menu, and while Jodie ordered a beer, the woman — Jodie was having trouble thinking of her as “Gleinya”—scanned the bill of fare with eyes slitted with skepticism and one eyebrow partially raised. “I’d like wine,” Gleinya Roberts said, and just as the waitress was about to ask what kind, she continued, “but I can’t have any because of the baby. What I would like is sparkling water but with no flavoring, no ice, and no sliced lemon or lime, please.” The waitress wrote this down. “Are you ordering anything to eat?” Gleinya Roberts asked Jodie. “I am. Perhaps a salad. Do your salads have croutons?” The waitress said that they did. “Well, please take them out for me. I can’t eat them. They’re treated.” She asked for the Caesar salad, explaining that she positively lived on Caesar salad these days. “But no additives of any kind, please,” she said, after the waitress had already turned to leave. Apparently the waitress hadn’t heard, because she didn’t stop or turn around. If Jodie had been that waitress, she believed that she wouldn’t have turned around, either. “I’m afraid I’m terribly picky,” Gleinya Roberts announced. “You have to be, these days. It’s the Age of Additives.”