Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“No.”

“You thanked her. You two made hot love and then you thanked her, and then in the dark you went on staring at her, you couldn’t believe how lucky you were. There she was in your arms, the beauteous Merilyn. I bet it never occurred to you at the time that you aren’t supposed to thank women after you make love to them and they make love to you, because you know what, sweetie? They’re not doing you a favor. They’re doing it because they want to. Usually. Anyway, that was the night she got pregnant with Jeremy and it was the same night she decided she would leave you, because you couldn’t stop looking at her, and thanking her, and she hated that. For sure she hated it. She lives in Tulsa, that’s how much.”

Conor is watching Janet say this, focusing on her mouth, watching the lips move. “Son of a bitch,” he says.

“So she told me this,” Janet says, “one night, at our nursing station. And we laughed and sort of cried when we had coffee later, but you know what I was thinking?” She waits. “Do you? You don’t, do you?”

“No.”

“I was thinking,” Janet says, “that I’m going to get my hands on this guy, I am going to get that man come hell or high water. I am going to get him and he is going to be mine. Mine forever. And do you know why?”

“Give me a clue.”

“To hell with clues. I wanted a man who looked at me like that. I wanted a man who would work up a lather with me in bed and then thank me. No one had ever thanked me before, that was for goddamn certain sure. And you know what? That’s what happened. You married another nurse. Me, this time. And it was me you looked at, me you thanked. Heaven in a bottle. Are you listening to me? Conor, pay attention. I’m about to do something.”

Conor follows her gaze. A living room, newspaper on the floor, Sunday morning, the twins playing, a family, a house, a life, sunlight coming in through the window. Janet walks over to Conor, unties her bathrobe, pulls it open, drops it at his feet, lifts her arms up and pulls her nightgown over her head. In front of her children and her husband, she stands naked. She is beautiful, all right, but he is used to her.

“I’m different from Merilyn,” she says. “You can look at me anytime you want.”

Now, on Sunday afternoon, Conor cleans out his pickup, throwing out the bank deposit slips. When he’s finished, with his binoculars around his neck and his telephoto lens attached to his camera, the 400-millimeter one that he uses for shots of birds, beside him on the seat, he drives down to the river, hoping for a good view of an osprey, or maybe a teal.

He parks near a cottonwood. He is on the opposite side from the park. Above him are scattered the usual sparrows, the usual crows. He gets out his telephoto lens and frames an ugly field sparrow flittering and shivering in the flat light. A grackle, and then a pigeon, follow the sparrow into his viewfinder. It is a parade of the common, the colorless, the dreary. The birds with color do not want to perch anywhere near the Chaska River, not even the swallows or swifts. He puts his camera back in his truck.

He’s standing there, searching the sky and the opposite bank with his binoculars, looking for what he thought he saw here last week, a Wilson’s snipe, when he lowers the lenses and sees, at some distance, Jeremy and Merilyn. Merilyn is sitting on a bench, watching Jeremy, who has taken off his sweatshirt and is talking to his mother. Merilyn isn’t especially pretty anymore. She’s gained weight. Conor had heard from Jeremy that she’d gained weight but hadn’t seen it for himself. Now, through the binoculars, Merilyn appears to be overweight and rather calm. She has that loaf-of-bread quality. There’s a peaceful expression on her face. It’s the happy contentment of someone who probably doesn’t bother about very much anymore.

Jeremy stands up, throws his hands down on the ground, and begins walking on his hands. He walks in a circle on his hands. He’s very strong and can do this for a long time. It’s one of his parlor tricks.

Conor moves his binoculars and sees that Jeremy has brought a girl along, the girl he saw yesterday at the flood show, the one who was dancing with him. Conor doesn’t know this girl’s name. She’s standing behind the bench and smiling while Jeremy walks on his hands. It’s that same aggressive smile.

Goddamn it, Conor thinks, they’re lovers, they’ve been sleeping together, and he didn’t tell me.

He moves the binoculars back to Merilyn. She’s still watching Jeremy, but she seems only mildly interested in his display. She’s not smiling. She’s not pretending to be impressed. Apparently that’s what she’s turned into. That’s what all these years have done to her. She doesn’t have to look interested in anything if she doesn’t want to.

To see better, Conor walks down past his truck to the bank. He lifts the binoculars to his eyes again, and when he gets the group in view, Merilyn turns her head to his side of the river. She sees Conor. Conor’s large bearlike body is recognizable anywhere. And what she does is, she raises her hand and seems to wave.

From where he is standing, Conor thinks that Merilyn has invited him over to join their group. Through the binoculars a trace of a smile, Conor believes, has appeared on Merilyn’s face. This smile is one that Conor recognizes. In the middle of her pudginess, this smile is the same one that he saw sixteen years ago. It’s the smile he lost his heart to. A little crow’s-foot of delight in Conor’s presence. A merriment.

And this is why Conor believes she is asking him to join them, right this minute, and to be his old self. And this is why he steps into the river, smiling that smile of his. It’s not a wide river after all, no more than sixty or seventy feet across. Anyone could swim it. What are a few wet clothes? He will swim across the Chaska to Merilyn and Jeremy and Jeremy’s girlfriend, and they will laugh, pleased with his impulsiveness and passion, and that will be that.

He is up to his thighs in water when the shocking coldness of the river registers on him. This is a river of recently melted snow. It isn’t flowing past so much as biting him. It feels like cheerful party ice picks, like happy knives. Without meaning to, Conor gasps. But once you start something like this, you have to finish it. Conor wades deeper.

The sun has come out. He looks up. A long-billed marsh wren is in a tree above the bank. He cannot breathe, and he dives in.

Conor is a fair swimmer, but the water is putting his body into shock and he has to remember to move his arms. Having dived, he feels the current taking him downriver, at first slowly, and then with some urgency. He is hopeless with cold. Tiny bells, the size of gnats, ring on every inch of his skin. He thinks, This is crazy. He thinks, It wasn’t an invitation, that wave. He thinks, I will die. The river’s current, which is now the sleepy hand of his death waking up, reaches into his chest and feels his heart. Conor moves his arms back and forth, but he can’t see the bank now and doesn’t know which way he’s going. Of course, by this time he’s choking on water, and the bells on his skin are beginning to ring audibly. He is moving his arms more slowly. Flash-card random pictures pop up in his mind, and he sees the girl in his studio the day before, and she says, “I don’t like you.”

He doesn’t want to die a comic death. It occurs to him that the binoculars are pulling him toward the river bottom, and he reaches for them and takes them off of his neck.

He swirls around like a broom.

He pulls his arms. It seems to him that he is not making any progress. It also seems to him that he cannot breathe at all. But he has always been a large, easygoing man, incapable of panic, and he does not panic now. His sinking will take its time.