Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

In those days, Merilyn had a shocking physical beauty: startlingly blue eyes, and a sort of compact uneasy voluptuousness. She was fretful about her appearance, didn’t like to be looked at — she had never liked being beautiful, didn’t like the attention it got her — and wore drab scarves to cover herself.

For weeks she had been maintaining an unsuccessful and debilitating cheerfulness in front of Conor, a stagy display of frozen failed smiles, and most of what she said those last few evenings seemed memorized, as if she didn’t trust herself to say anything spontaneously. She half laughed, half coughed after many of her sentences and often raised her fingers to her face and hair as if Conor were staring at them, which he was. He had never known why a beautiful woman had agreed to marry him in the first place. Now he knew he was losing her.

She worked as a nurse, and they had met when he’d gone up to her ward to visit a friend. The first time he ever talked to her, and then the first time they kissed — after a movie they both agreed they disliked — he thought she was the meaning of his life. He would love her, and that would be the point of his being alive. There didn’t have to be any other point. When they made love, he had to keep himself from trembling.

Women like her, he thought, didn’t usually allow themselves to be loved by a man like him. But there she was.

When, two and a half years later, she said that she was leaving him, and leaving Jeremy behind with him, and that that was the only action she could think of taking that wouldn’t destroy her life, because it wasn’t his fault but she couldn’t stand to be married to anybody, that she could not be a mother, that it wasn’t personal, Conor had agreed to let her go and not to follow her. Her desperation impressed him, silenced him.

She had loaded up the Ford and a trailer with everything she wanted to go with her. The rain had turned to sleet, and by the time she had packed the books and the clothes, she had collected small flecks of ice on her blue scarf. She’d been so eager to go that she hadn’t turned on the windshield wiper until she was halfway down the block. Conor had watched her from the front porch. From the side, her beautiful face — the meaning of his life — looked somehow both determined and blank. She turned the corner, the tires splashed slush, the front end dipped from the bad shocks, and she was gone.

He had a trunk in the attic filled with photographs he had taken of her. Some of the shots were studio portraits, while others were taken more quickly, outdoors. In them, she is sitting on stumps, leaning against trees, and so on. In the photographs she is trying to look spontaneous and friendly, but the photographs emphasize, through tricks of angle and lighting, her body and its voluptuousness. All of the shots have a painfully thick and willful artistry, as if she had been mortified, in her somewhat involuntary beauty.

She had asked him to destroy these photographs, but he never had.

Now, having seen Jeremy go off to find his mother somewhere in Eurekaville and maybe take her to the flood, Conor wanders into the living room. Janet’s sprawled on the floor, reading the Sunday comics to Annah. Annah is picking her nose and laughing. Joe, over in the corner, is staging a war with his plastic mutant men. The forces of good muscle face down evil muscle. Conor sits on the floor next to his wife and daughter, and Annah rumbles herself backward into Conor’s lap.

“Jeremy’s off?” Janet asks. “To find Merilyn?”

Conor nods. Half consciously, he’s bouncing his daughter, who holds on to him by grasping his wrist.

Janet looks back at the paper. “They’ll have a good time.”

“What does that mean?”

She flicks her hair back. “ ‘What does that mean?’ ” she repeats. “I’m not using code here. It means what it says. He’ll show her around. He’ll be the mayor of Eurekaville. At last he’s got Merilyn on his turf. She’ll be impressed.”

“Nothing,” Conor says, “ever impressed Merilyn, ever, in her life.”

“Her life isn’t over.”

“No,” Conor says, “it isn’t. I mean, nothing has impressed her so far.”

“How would you know? You didn’t follow her down to Tulsa. There could be all sorts of things in Tulsa that impress Merilyn.”

“All right,” Conor says. “Maybe the oil wells. Maybe something. Maybe the dust bowl and the shopping malls. All I’m saying is that nothing impressed her here.”

A little air pocket of silence opens between them, then shuts again.

“Daddy,” Annah says, “tip me.”

Conor grasps her and tips her over, and Annah gives out a little pleased shriek. Then he rights her again.

“I wonder,” Janet says, “if she isn’t getting a little old for that.”

“Are you getting too old for this, Annie?” Annah shakes her head. “She’s only five.” Conor tips her again. Annah shrieks again, and when she does, Janet drops the section of the newspaper that she’s reading and lies backward on the floor, until her head is propped on her arm, and she can watch Conor.

“Mom!” Joe shouts from the corner. “The plutonium creatures are winning!”

“Fight back,” Janet instructs. “Show ’em what you’ve got.” She reaches out and touches Conor on the thigh. “Honey,” she says, “you can’t impress everybody. You impress me sometimes. You just didn’t impress Merilyn. No one did. Marriage didn’t. What’s wrong with a beautiful woman wanting to live alone? It’s her beauty. She can keep it to herself if she wants to.”

Conor shrugs. He’s not in the mood to argue about this. “It’s funny to think of her in town, that’s all.”

“No, it’s not. It’s only funny,” Janet says, “to think of her in town if you still love her, and I’d say that if you still love her, after fourteen years, then you’re a damn fool, and I don’t want to hear about it. It’s Jeremy, not you, who could use some attention from Merilyn. It’s his to get, being her son and all. She left him more than she left you. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to go on with this conversation one further sentence more.”

Both Annah and Joe have stopped their playing to listen. They are not watching their parents, but their heads are raised, like forest animals who can smell smoke nearby.

“All I ever wanted from her was a reason,” Conor says. “I just got tired of all that enigmatic shit.”

“Hey,” Janet says, “I told you about that one further sentence.” Annah gets out of her father’s lap and snuggles next to Janet. “All right,” Janet says. “Listen. Listen to this. Here’s something I never told you. One night Merilyn and I were working the same station, we were both in pediatrics that night, third floor, it was a quiet night, not many sick kids that week. And, you know, we started talking. Nursing stuff, women stuff. And Merilyn sort of got going.”

“About what?”

“About you, dummy, she got going about you. Herself and you. She said you two had gone bowling. You’d dressed in your rags and gone off to Colonial Lanes, the both of you, and you’d been bowling, and she’d thrown the ball down the lane and turned around and you were looking at her, appreciating her, and of course all the other men in the bowling alley were looking at her, too, and what was bothering her was that you were looking at her the way they did, sort of a leer, I guess, as if you didn’t know her, as if you weren’t married to her. Who could blame you? She looked like a cover girl or something. Perfect this, perfect that, she was perfect all over, it would make anybody sweat. So she said she had a sore thumb and wanted to go home. You were staring at your wife the way a man looks at a woman walking by in the street. Boy, how she hated that, that guy stuff. You went back home, it was cold, a cold blister night, she got you into bed, she made love to you, she threw herself into it, and then in the dark you were your usual gladsome self, and you know what you did?”