Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“I eat anything,” Jodie said, rather aggressively. “I’ve always eaten anything.” Gleinya Roberts patted her stomach and smiled sadly at Jodie but said nothing. “Now, Gleinya,” she pressed on, “perhaps you can tell me why we’re here.”

Gleinya held her left hand out with the fingers straight and examined her wedding ring. It was a quick mean-spirited gesture, but it was not lost on Jodie. “It’s about Glaze, of course,” she said. “Maybe you can guess that I used to be with him. It ended two years ago, but we still talk from time to time.” She took a long sip of her water, and while she did, Jodie allowed herself to wonder who called whom. And when: probably late at night. “Anyway,” she went on, “that’s how I know about you.” She put down her water glass and smiled unpleasantly. “That’s how I know about your sleeping porch. He’s been spending some nights there. He’s terribly in love with you,” she said. “You’re just all he talks about.”

Jodie moved back in her chair, sat up straight, and said, “He’s a wonderful guy.”

“Yes,” the other woman said, rather slowly, to affirm that Jodie had said what she had in fact said but not to agree to it. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Gleinya Roberts half stood up, then sat down again and settled herself, flinging her elbows out, and before Jodie could ask why she had done so, though at this point the inquiry did seem rather pointless, Gleinya Roberts said, “It’s so hard to get comfortable in your second term. All those little infant kicks.” She patted her stomach again.

“They don’t seem to have hurt you, exactly,” Jodie said.

“No, but you have to be careful.” She touched the base of her neck with the third finger of her right hand, tapping the skin thoughtfully. “You have to try to keep your looks up. You have to try to keep yourself up. Men get fickle. Of course, my husband, Jerry, says I’m still pretty, ‘prettier than ever,’ he says, a sweet lie, though I don’t mind hearing it. He only says that to please me. It’s just a love-lie. Still, I try to believe him when he says those things.”

I bet you do, Jodie thought. I bet it’s no effort at all. “You were going to tell me about Walton.”

“Yes, I was,” she said. The waitress reappeared, placed Jodie’s glass of beer, gowned in frost, in front of her, and Jodie took a long, comforting gulp. All at once Gleinya Roberts’s voice changed, going up half an octave. She had leaned forward, and her face was infected with old grudges and hatreds. “Jodie,” she said, “I have to warn you. I have to do this, woman to woman. I want you to protect yourself. I know how suspicious this seems, coming from an old girlfriend, and I know that it must sound like sour grapes, but I have to tell you that what I’m saying is true, and I wouldn’t say it unless I was worried for your safety. He likes fights. He likes fighting. You’ve seen how he favors his right foot, haven’t you? That old injury?”

Jodie swallowed but could not bring herself to nod.

“He got it in a bar fight. Somebody kicked him in the ankle and shattered the bone. I mean, that’s all right, men get into fights, but what you have to know is that he used to beat me up — and the girl before me, he beat her up, too. He’d get drunk and coked up and start in on me. Sometimes he did it carefully so it wouldn’t show—”

“He doesn’t drink,” Jodie said, her mouth instantly dry. “He doesn’t do drugs.”

“Maybe not now , he doesn’t,” Gleinya Roberts said, smiling for a microsecond and patting the tablecloth with little grace-note gestures. “But he has and probably will again. His sweet side is so sweet that it’s hard to figure out the other side. He just explodes. He’s such a good lover that you don’t want to notice it. He’s quite the dick artist. But then he just turns, and it’s like a nightmare. He waits until you’re really, really happy, and then he blows up. Once, months and months and months ago, I told him that someday I wanted to go out to the West Coast and sit on the banks of the Pacific Ocean and go whale watching. You know, see the whales go spouting by, on their migrations. We both had a vacation around the same time—”

“I don’t think it’s the ‘banks’ of the Pacific Ocean. That’s for rivers. I think you mean ‘shore,’ ” Jodie said.

Gleinya Roberts shrugged. “All right . ‘Shore.’ Anyway, we both had a vacation around the same time, and we drove out there … no, we flew … and then we rented a car …”

She put her hand over her mouth, appearing to remember, but instead her eyes began to fill with dramatic, restaurant-scene tears; and at that moment Jodie felt a conviction that this woman was lying and was still probably in love with Walton.

“We rented a car,” she was saying, “and we drove up from San Francisco toward Arcata, along there, along that coast. There are redwood forests a few miles back from the coastline, those big old trees. We’d stay in motels, and I’d make a picnic in the morning, and we’d go out, and Glaze would start drinking after breakfast, and by midafternoon he’d be silent and surly — he’d stop speaking to me — and by the time we got back to our motel, he’d be muttering, and I’d try to talk about what we had seen that day. I mean, usually when you go whale watching there aren’t any whales . But there are always seals. You can hear the seals barking, down there on those rocks. I’d ask him if he didn’t think the cliffs were beautiful or the wildflowers or the birds or whatever I had pointed out to him. But I always said something wrong. Something that was like a lighted match, and he’d blow up. And he’d start in on me. You ever been hit in the face?”

Jodie had turned so that she could see the sidewalk through the window. She was getting herself ready. It wasn’t going to take much more.

“I didn’t think so. It comes out of nowhere,” Gleinya Roberts was saying, “and you’re not ready for it, and then, boom, he lands the second one on you. The first time he beats you up, it’s an initiation, and then he makes love to you to make up for it, but it makes the second one easier to do, because he’s already done it. You don’t expect it. Why should you? Why do you think he got thrown out of medical school? He hurt somebody there. He broke two of my ribs. I had a shoulder separation from him. He got very practiced in the ways of apology and remorse. He has a genius for remorse. And then of course he’s a demon under the sheets. The man can fuck, I’ll give him that, but, I don’t know, after a while great sex is sort of a gimmick . It’s like a 3-D movie, and you get tired of it. Well, maybe you’re not tired of it yet.”

Jodie said nothing.

“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t say anything, either. I thought he was Prince Charming, too. I’ve been there. And believe me, I had to kiss a lot of frogs before I found the right guy. I had to kiss them in every damn place they had. But he won’t tell you. He won’t tell you about himself,” she repeated. “Ask his father, though. His father will tell you. Well, maybe he’ll tell you. You haven’t met his father yet, have you?”

She speared a piece of her Caesar salad, chewed thoughtfully, then put down her fork.

“A woman has to tell another woman,” she said, “in the case of a man like this. I wanted to help you. I wouldn’t want you to be on daytime TV, one of those afternoon talk shows, in a body cast onstage, warning other women about men like this. Jodie, you can look in my eyes and see that what I’m telling you is true.”

Jodie looked. The eyes she saw were gray and blank, and for a moment they reminded her of the blankness of the surface of the ocean, and then the waters parted, and she saw a seemingly endless landscape of rancor, a desert of gray rocks and black ashy flowers. Demons lived there. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the desert was covered over again, and Jodie knew that she had been right not to believe her.