Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“You’re lying to me,” Jodie said. She hadn’t meant to say it, only to think it, but it had come out, and there it was.

Gleinya Roberts nodded, acknowledging her own implausibility. “You’re just denying. You’re gaga over him. Just as I was. Taking a cruise on his pleasure ship. But, Jodie, trust me, that cruise is going to end. Don’t play the fool.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Don’t play the fool.’ ”

“I thought that was what you said.”

Jodie, her head buzzing, and most of her cells on fire, found herself standing up. “You come in here,” she said, “with your trophy wedding ring, and your trophy pregnancy, and your husband who says you’re still pretty, and you tell me this , about Walton, spoiling the first happiness I’ve had in I don’t know how long? Who the hell are you? What are you? You don’t even look especially human.” Gleinya Roberts tilted her head, considering this statement. Her face was unaccountably radiant. “I don’t have to listen to you,” Jodie said. “I don’t have to listen to this nonsensical bullshit.”

Her hands shaking, she reached into her purse for some money for the beer, and she heard Gleinya Roberts say, “Oh, I’ll pay for it,” while Jodie found a ten-dollar bill and flung it on the table. She saw that Gleinya Roberts’s face was paralyzed in that attitude of soundless laughter — maybe it was just strain — and Jodie was stricken to see that the woman’s teeth were perfect and white and symmetrical, and her tongue — her tongue! — was dark red and sensual as it licked her upper lip. Jodie leaned forward to tip over her beer in Gleinya Roberts’s direction, careful to give the action the clear appearance of accident.

What was left of the beer made its dull way over to the other side of the table and dribbled halfheartedly downward.

“He’s beautiful,” Jodie said quietly, as the other woman gathered up the cloth napkins to sop up the beer, “and he makes sense to me, and I don’t have to listen to you now.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “You go live with Glaze. You do that. But just remember: That man is like the kea. Ever heard of it? I didn’t think so. It’s a beautiful bright green New Zealand bird. It’s known for its playfulness. But it’s a sheep killer. It picks out their eyes. Just remember the kea. And take this.” From somewhere underneath the table she grasped for and then handed Jodie an audiocassette. “It’s a predator tape. Used for attracting hawks and coyotes. It used to be his favorite listening. Just fascinated the hell out of him. It’ll surprise you. Women don’t know about men . Men don’t let them.”

Jodie had taken the tape, but she was now halfway out of the restaurant. Still, she heard behind her that voice coming after her. “Men don’t want us to know. Jodie, they don’t!”

In a purely distanced and distracted state, she took a bus over to Minnehaha Creek and walked down the path alongside the flowing waters to the bank of the Mississippi River. The air smelled rotten and dreary. Underneath a bush she found two bottle caps and a tuna fish can. She left them there.

Sitting on the bus toward home, she tried to lean into the love she felt for Walton, and the love he said he felt for her, but instead of solid ground and rock just underneath the soil, and rock cliffs that composed a wall where a human being could prop herself and stand, there was nothing: stone gave way to sand, and sand gave way to water, and the water drained away into darkness and emptiness. Into this emptiness, violence, like an ever-flowing stream, was poured — the violence of the kea, Walton’s violence, Gleinya Roberts’s violence, and finally her own. She traced every inch of her consciousness for a place on which she might set her foot against doubt, and she could not find it. Inside her was the impulse, as clear as blue sky on a fine summer morning, to acquire a pistol and shoot Gleinya Roberts through the heart. Her mind raced through the maze, back and forth, trying to find an exit.

Gleinya Roberts had lied to her. She was sure of that.

But it didn’t matter. She was in fear of being struck. Although she had never been beaten by anyone, ever, in her life, the prospect frightened her so deeply that she felt parts of her psyche and her soul turning to stone. Other women might not be frightened. Other women would fight back, or were beaten and survived. But she was not them. She was herself, a woman mortally afraid of being violated.

Three blocks away from her apartment, she bought, in a drugstore, a radio with a cassette player in it, and she took it with her upstairs; and in the living room she placed it on the coffee table, next to Walton’s latest found treasures: a pleasantly shaped rock with streaks of red, probably jasper; a squirt gun; and a little ring through which was placed a ballpoint pen.

She dropped the predator tape Gleinya Roberts had given her into the machine, and she pushed the PLAY button.

From the speaker came the scream of a rabbit. Whoever had made this tape had probably snapped the serrated metal jaws of a trap on the rabbit’s leg and then turned on the recorder. It wasn’t a tape loop: the rabbit’s screams were varied, no two alike. Although the screams had a certain sameness, the clarifying monotony of terror, there existed, as in a row of corn, a range of distinctive external variety. Terror gave way to pain, pain made room for terror. The soul of the animal was audibly ripped apart, and out of its mouth came this shrieking. Jodie felt herself getting sick and dizzy. The screams continued. They went on and on. In the forests of the night these screams rose with predictable regularity once darkness fell. Though wordless, they had supreme eloquence and a huge claim upon truth. Jodie was weeping now, the heels of her hands dug into her cheekbones. The screams did not cease. They rose in frequency and intensity. The tape almost academically laid out at disarming length the necessity of terror. All things innocent and forsaken had their moment of expression, as the strong, following their nature, crushed themselves into their prey. Still it went on, this bloody fluting. Apparently it was not to be stopped.

Jodie reached out and pressed the PAUSE button. She was shaking now, shivering. She felt herself falling into shock, and when she looked up, she saw Walton standing near the door — he had a key by now — with Einstein wagging her tail next to him, and he was carrying his daily gift, this time a birdhouse, and he said, “She found you, didn’t she? That miserable, crazy woman.”

He puts down the birdhouse and squats near her. From this position, he drops to his knees. Kneeling thus before her, he tries to smile, and his eyes have that pleasant fool quality they have always had. This man may never make a fortune. He may never amount to much. That would be fine. His dog pants behind him, like a backup singer emphasizing the vocal line and giving it a harmony. Walton’s hands start at her hair and then slowly descend to her shoulders and arms. Before she can stop him, he has taken her into his embrace.

He is murmuring. Yes, he knew Gleinya Roberts, and, yes, they did own a predator tape she had found somewhere, but, no, he did not listen to it more than once. Yes, he had lived with her for a while, but she was insane (his father had been dead for a year; she had lied about that, too), and she was insanely jealous, hysterical, actually, and given to lies and lying, habitual lies, crazy bedeviling lies, and casual lies: lies about whether the milk was spoiled, lies about how many stamps were still in the drawer, lies about trivial matters and large ones, a cornucopia of lies, a feast of untruth. Gleinya Roberts was not married, for starters. He could prove that.