Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

The touch of the shore is silt. The graspings of hands on his elbow are almost unfriendly, aggressive. Jeremy is there, pulling, and what Conor hears, through his own coughing and spitting, is Jeremy’s voice.

“Dad! What the fuck are you doing? What in the fucking … Daddy! Are you okay? Jesus. Are you … What the fuck is this? Shit! Jesus. Daddy!”

Conor looks at his son and says, “Watch your language.”

“What? What! Get out of there.” Conor is being pulled and pushed by his son. Pulled and pushed also, it seems, by his son’s girlfriend. Perhaps she is simply trying to help. But the help she is giving him has been salted with violence.

“What do you think?” Conor asks, turning toward her. “Do you think he pulled at the nails?”

Conor’s trousers are dripping water on the grass. Water pours out of his shirt. It drains off his hands. Now in the air his ears register their pain; his eardrums are in pain, a complex aching inside the ravine of his head. And Merilyn, the source, the beneficiary of his grand gesture, is simply saying, with her nurse’s voice, “He’s in shock. Get him into the car.”

“Merilyn,” he says. He can’t see her. She’s behind him.

“What?”

“I couldn’t help it. I never got over it.” He says it more loudly, because he can’t see her. He might as well be talking to the air. “I never got over it! I never did.”

“Daddy, stop it,” Jeremy says. “For God’s sake, shut up. Please. Get in the car.”

Jeremy opens the door of the old clunker Buick he bought on his sixteenth birthday for four hundred dollars, and Conor, without thinking, gets in. Before he is quite conscious of the sequence of one event after another, the car’s engine has started, and the Buick moves slowly away — away from Merilyn: Conor remembers to look. She grows smaller with every foot of distance between them, and Conor, pleased with himself, pleased with his inscribed fate as the unhappy lover, tries to wipe his eyes with his wet shirt.

“I won’t tell anybody about this if you don’t,” Jeremy says.

“Okay.”

“I’ll tell them you fell into the river. I’ll say that you slipped in the mud.”

“Thanks.”

“That can happen. I mean really.” Jeremy is enthusiastic now, creating a cover story for his father. “You were taking pictures and stuff, and you got too close to the river, and, you know, bang, you slipped, and like that. Just don’t ever tell Mom, okay? We’ll just … Holy shit! What’s that?”

The car has been climbing a hill, and near the top, where a slight curve to the right banks the road toward the passenger side, there comes into view an amazing sight that has cut Jeremy into silence: an old wooden two-story house on an enormous platform truck, squarely in the middle of the road, blocking them. The house on the truck is moving at five or ten miles an hour. Who knows what its speed is, this white clapboard monument, this parade, a smaller truck in front, and one in back, with flashing lights, and a WIDE LOAD sign? No one would think of measuring its speed. Conor looks up and sees what he knows is a bedroom window. He imagines himself in that bedroom. He is dripping water all over his son’s car, and he is beginning now to shiver, as the truck, carrying the burden it was made to carry, struggles up the next hill.

ON THE DAY he left her for good, she put on one of his caps. It fit snugly over her light brown hair. The cap had the manufacturer’s name of his pickup truck embossed above the visor in gold letters. She wore the cap backward, the way he once had, while she cooked dinner. Then she kept it on in her bath that evening. When she leaned back in the tub, the visor hitting the tiles, she could smell his sweat from the inside of the headband, even over the smell of the soap. His sweat had always smelled like freshly broiled whitefish.

What he owned, he took. Except for the cap, he hadn’t left much else behind in the apartment. He had what he thought was a soulful indifference to material possessions, so he didn’t bother saving them. It hadn’t occurred to her until later that she might be one of those possessions. He had liked having things — quality durable goods — around for a little while, she thought bitterly, and then he enthusiastically threw them all out. They were there one day — his leather vest, his gold clubs — and then they were gone. She had borrowed one of his gray T-shirts months ago to wear to bed when she had had a cold, and she still had it, a gray tee in her bottom dresser drawer. But she had accidentally washed it, and she couldn’t smell him on the fabric anymore, not a trace of him.

Her cat now yowled around five thirty, at exactly the time when he used to come home. She — the cat — had fallen for him the moment she’d seen him, rushing over to him, squirming on her back in his lap, declawed paws waving in the air. The guy had had a gift, a tiny genius for relentless charm, that caused anything — women, men, cats, trees for all she knew — to fall in love with him, and not calmly, either, but at the upper frequencies.

Her clocks ached. Time had congealed. For the last two days, knowing he would go, she had tried to be busy. She had tried reading books, for example. They couldn’t preoccupy her. They were just somebody’s thoughts. Her wounded imagination included him and herself, but only those two, bone hurtling against bone.

She was not a romantic and did not like the word “romance.” They hadn’t had a romance, the two of them. Nothing soft or tender, like that. They had just, well, driven into each other like reckless drivers at an intersection, neither one wanting to yield the right-of-way. She was a classicist recently out of graduate school, and for a job she taught Latin and Greek in a Chicago private school, and she understood from her reading of Thucydides and Catullus and Sophocles and Sappho, among others, how people actually fought, and what happened when they actually fell in love and were genuinely and almost immediately incompatible. The old guys told the truth, she believed, about love and warfare, the peculiar combination of attraction and hatred existing together. They had told the truth before Christianity put civilization into a dreamworld.

After she got out of the bathtub, she went to bed without drying herself off first. She removed the baseball cap and rolled around under the covers, dampening the sheets. It’s like this , she said to herself.

She thought of herself as “she.” At home she narrated her actions to herself as she performed them: “Now she is watering the plants.” “Now she is feeding the cat.” “Now she is staring off into space.” “Now she is calling her friend Ticia, who is not at home. She will not leave a message on Ticia’s machine. She doesn’t do that.”

She stood naked in front of the mirror. She thought: I am the sexiest woman who can read Latin and Greek in the state of Illinois. She surveyed her legs and her face, which he had praised many times. I look great and feel like shit and that’s that.

The next morning she made breakfast but couldn’t eat it. She hated it that she had gotten into this situation, loaded down with humiliating feelings. She wouldn’t tell anyone. Pushing the scrambled eggs around on the plate, making a mess of them, the buttered wheat toast, and the strawberry jam, her head down on her arm, she fell into speculation: Okay, yes, right, it’s a mistake to think that infatuation has anything to do with personality, or personal tastes. You don’t, uh , decide about any of this, do you? she asked herself, half forming the words on her lips. Love puts anyone in a state outside the realm of thought, like one of those Eleusinian cults where no one ever gets permission to speak of the mysteries. When you’re not looking, your mouth gets taped shut. You fall in love with someone not because he’s nice to you or can read your mind but because, when he kisses you, your knees weaken, or because you can’t stop looking at his skin or at the way his legs, inside his jeans, shape the fabric. His breath meets your breath, and the two breaths either intermingle and create a charge or they don’t. Personality comes later; personality, she thought, reaching for the copy of Ovid that was about to fall off the table, is the consolation prize of middle age.