Charles Baxter: Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

“When did you stop kissing me?” Horace asked.

“What?”

“After the war. You wouldn’t kiss me after the war. Why not?”

“I think this is very unpleasant, Horace. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do. You wouldn’t kiss me after the war. Why?”

“You know very well,” she said.

“Tell me again,” Horace said. “I’ve lost my memory.”

“I didn’t like it,” she muttered, standing up to look out of the window.

“What didn’t you like?”

“I didn’t like the way you kissed me. Too many germs.”

“We weren’t old yet,” Horace said. “It’s what adults do. They have passions. You can’t fool me about that.”

Margaret felt tired and hungry. She wished she hadn’t taken the breakfast roll out to the hallway.

“I’m not here to settle old scores,” she said. “Do you want to split one of these candy bars?” Outside, a blue convertible with a white canvas roof came to a stop at an intersection and seemed unable to move, and all around it the small pedestrians froze into timeless attitudes, and the sun blinked on and off, as if a boy were flipping a wall switch.

Horace struck a kitchen match on the zipper of his pants and lit up a cigarette. “I love cigarettes,” he said. “I get ideas from the smoke. Call me crazy if you want to, but yesterday I was thinking about how few decisions in my life were truly important. I didn’t decide about the war and I didn’t decide to drop the bomb. They didn’t ask me about nuclear generators, or, for that matter, about coal generators. I had opinions. They could have asked me. But they didn’t. Mr. List and I were discussing this yesterday. The only thing they ever asked us was what we were going to do on the weekends. That’s all. ‘What are you doing Saturday night?’ That’s the only question I can remember.”

Margaret tore the brown paper away from the candy bar, then crumpled up the inner wrapper before she snapped off four little squares of the chocolate. Someone seemed to be flicking lights inside the First Christian Residence as well. The taste of the chocolate rushed across her tongue, straight from heaven.

“Want any rum?” Horace asked. “I have some in the closet. Mr. List brought it for me. On days like this, I take to the rum with a fierce joy.” This line sounded like, and was, one of his favorites.

“Horace, you can’t have liquor in here! You’ll be expelled!”

Suddenly he appeared not to hear her. His face lost its color, and she could tell he would probably not say another word for the rest of the morning. She took the opportunity to snap off one more piece of the chocolate and to straighten the room, to put smelly ashtrays, pens, shirts, and dulled pencils in their rightful places. There were pencil sketches of trees, which she stacked into a neat pile. In this mess she noticed a photograph of the two of them together, young, sitting under a large chandelier, smiling fixedly. Where was that? Margaret couldn’t remember. Another photo showed Natwick, Horace’s dog in the 1950s, under a tree, his mouth open and his dirty retriever’s teeth prominent. Horace had trained him to smile on cue.

“Someday, Horace,” Margaret said, “you’ll remember to keep your valuables and to throw away the trash. You’ve got the whole thing backward.” Seeing that he said nothing, she went on. “So often I myself have … so often I, too, have found that I have been myself in a place where I have found myself so often in a place where I have found myself.” Standing there, squarely in the middle of the room, she felt herself tipping toward Horace’s cigarette smoke, falling through it, tumbling as if off a building, end over end, floor after floor. Horace held his hand up. Margaret, whose mind was still plunging, walked toward him. He whirled his hand counterclockwise as an invitation to bring her ear down to his mouth.

“Don’t tell me anything,” he whispered. “That’s for kids. And be quiet. Listen. There’s a bird scratching in the tree outside. Hear it?”

She did not. Margaret bent down to kiss his forehead and made her way out of the room, sick with vertigo. The hallway stretched and shrank while she balanced herself like a tightrope walker in a forward progress to the elevator. Three floors down, Mr. Bartlett was waiting for her, wearing a cap and a jacket in his wheelchair, but she tottered past him, out into the sun, which she saw had turned a sickly blue.

There was something wrong with the bus.

She sat near the back. The bus would start, reach twenty-five miles an hour, then stop. Not slow down. Stop. In midair, as it were. When it stopped, so did the world. The trees, pedestrians, and birds froze in midair, the birds glued to the sky. And when this occurred, Margaret grabbed the top of the seat in front of her, pressing it hard with her thumbs, hoping she could restart the world again.

She looked up. In front of her a little girl was kneeling on the plastic seat next to her mother, facing the back, staring at Margaret. The little girl had two pigtails of brown hair, a bright red coat, and round-rimmed glasses too large for her face. As the bus began to move, Margaret stared at the girl, frowning because she wanted the youngster to know that staring is rude, a sign of bad breeding. But as she scowled and frowned, and the bus passengers swayed like a chorus together, she was horrified to feel her own eyes producing tears, which would run partway down her cheeks and then stop, as the bus itself stopped, as time halted. The little girl reminded Margaret of someone, someone she would never exactly remember again.

The girl’s mouth opened slightly. Her eyes widened, and now she, too, was crying. Her glasses magnified her tears, which were caught by the rims in tiny pools. Margaret gathered herself together. It was one thing to cry herself for no special reason. It was quite another to make a little girl cry. That was contagion, and a mistake in anyone’s part of the world. So Margaret wiped her eyes with her coat sleeve and smiled fiercely at the girl, even laughing now, the laugh sounding like the yip of a small dog. “ Toujours gai, toujours gai, ” she said, louder than necessary, before she realized that little girls on buses don’t speak French and would never have heard of archy and mehitabel even if they did. “There’s a dance in the old dame yet,” Margaret said, to finish the phrase, quietly and to herself. She drew herself up and looked serious, as if she were on her way to someplace. She was not about to be cried at on a public bus in broad daylight.

“What a nice day!” Margaret said aloud, but no one turned toward her. The little girl took off her glasses, wiped her eyes on her mother’s coat, and gave Margaret a hostile look before turning around. “The old lady shows her mettle,” Margaret continued, editorializing to herself, simultaneously making a mental note not to engage in private conversations where other people could hear her. It takes a minimum of sixty years’ experience to recognize how useful and necessary talking to oneself actually is. When you’re young, it just seems like a crazy habit. Margaret did not speak these thoughts aloud, as the bus whirled upside down and righted itself; she whispered them.

They went past a world of details. Sidewalks broke into spiderweb patterns. A green squirt gun was in a boy’s hand, but the bus was moving too quickly for her to see the rest of the boy. In a tree that she noticed by accident, a brown bird flew out of a nest. Something redbreast. Robin redbreast. The bus driver’s head, suddenly in the way of the sun, shone a fine gunmetal blue. On a jungle gym, a boy wearing a green sweatshirt, smaller than Horace’s, hung down from a steel bar with only his legs, his knees, holding him there. Margaret stared at him. How was it possible for a human being to hang by his knees from a bar? More important, why would anyone want to do it? Before an answer came, the boy faded out and was replaced by another detail, of a seagull standing proudly in someone’s alley, an arrogant look on its face. The seagull cheered Margaret. She admired its pluck. The other details she saw were less invigorating: an old man, very white in all respects, asleep in a doorway; two young people, across the street from the art institute, kissing underneath a tree (the tree and the kissing made her flesh crawl); and now, at last, a cumulating, bright pink, puffing cloud of smoke exploding out of someone’s backyard, someone’s shed, on fire or dynamited, even the smell reaching her. The bus drove on and Margaret forgot about it.