Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

She put the breakfast dishes in the sink. She turned on the radio and noticed after five minutes that she hadn’t listened to any of it. She snapped it off and glanced angrily in the direction of the bedroom, where all this trouble had started.

She and he had ridden each other in that bed. She glowered at it, framed in the doorway of the bedroom, sun pouring in the east window and across the yellow bedspread. They had a style, but, well, yes, almost everyone had a style. For starters, they took their time. Nothing for the manuals, nothing for the record books. But the point wasn’t the lovemaking, not exactly. What they did started with sex but ended somewhere else. She believed that the sex they had together invoked the old gods, just invited them right in, until, boom, there they were. She wondered over the way the spirit-gods, the ones she lonesomely believed in, descended over them and surrounded them and briefly made them feel like gods themselves. She felt huge and powerful, together with him. It was archaic, this descent, and pleasantly scary. They both felt it happening; at least he said he did. The difference was that, after a while, he didn’t care about the descent of the old gods or the spirits or whatever the hell he thought they were. He was from Arizona, and he had a taste for deserts and heat and golf and emptiness. Perhaps that explained it.

He had once blindfolded her with her silk bathrobe belt during their lovemaking and she had still felt the spirit coming down. Blindfolded, she could see it more clearly than ever.

Ovid. At the breakfast table she held on to the book that had almost fallen to the floor. Ovid: an urbane know-it-all with a taste for taking inventories. She had seldom enjoyed reading Ovid. He had a masculine smirking cynicism, and then its opposite, self-pity, which she found offensive.

And this was the Remedia amoris , a book she couldn’t remember studying in graduate school or anywhere else. The remedies for love. She hadn’t realized she even owned it. It was in the back of her edition of the Ars amatoria . Funny how books put themselves into your hands when they wanted you to read them.

Because spring had hit Chicago, and sunlight had given this particular Saturday morning a light fever, and because her black mood was making her soul sore, she decided to get on the Chicago Transit Authority bus and read Ovid while she rode to the suburbs and back. Absentmindedly, she found herself crying while she stood at the corner bus stop, next to the graffitied shelter, waiting. She was grateful that no one looked at her.

After the bus arrived in a jovial roar of diesel fumes and she got on, she found a seat near a smudgy semi-clean window. The noise was therapeutic, and the absence on the bus of businessmen with their golf magazines relieved her. No one on this bus on Saturday morning had a clue about how to conduct a life. She gazed at the tattered jackets and gummy spotted clothes of the other passengers. No one with a serious relationship with money rode a bus like this at such a time. It was the fuck-up express. Hollow and stoned and vacant-eyed people like herself sat there, men who worked in car washes, women who worked in diners. They looked as if their rights to their own sufferings had already been revoked months ago.

Over the terrible clatter, trees in blossom rushed past, dogwood and lilacs and like that. The blossoms seemed every bit as noisy as the bus. She shook her head and glanced down at her book.

Scripta cave relegas blandae servata puellae:

Constantis animos scripta relecta movent .

Omnia pone feros (pones invitus) in ignes

Et dic ‘ardoris sit rogus iste mei. ’

Oh, right. Yeah. Burn the love letters? Throw them all in the flames? And then announce, “This is the pyre of my love”? Hey, thanks a lot. What love letters? He hadn’t left any love letters, just this cap — she was still wearing it — with CHEVY embossed on it in gold.

Quisquis amas, loca sola nocent: loca sola caveto;

Quo fugis? in populo tutior esse potes .

Non tibi secretis (augent secreta furores)

Est opus; auxilio turba futura tibi est .

Riding the CTA bus, and now glimpsing Lake Michigan through a canyon of buildings, she felt herself stepping into an emotional lull, the eye of the storm that had been knocking her around. In the storm’s eye, everyone spoke Latin. The case endings and the declensions and Ovid’s I-know-it-all syntax and tone remained absolutely stable, however, no matter what the subject was. They were like formulas recited from a comfortable sofa by a banker who had never made a dangerous investment. The urbanity and the calm of the poem clawed at her. She decided to translate the four lines so that they sounded heartbroken and absentminded, jostled around in the aisles.

The lonely places

are the worst. I tell you,

when you’re heart-

sick, go

where the pushing and shoving

crowd gives you

some nerve. Don’t be

alone, up in your

burning room, burning—

trust me:

get knocked

down in public,

you’ll be helped up.

All right: so it was a free translation. So what? She scribbled it on the back of a deposit slip from the Harris Bank and put it into her purse. She wouldn’t do any more translating just now. Any advice blew unwelcome winds into her. Especially advice from Ovid.

Now they were just north of the Loop. This time, when she looked out of the window, she saw an apartment building on fire: firetrucks flamesroof waterlights crowdsbluesky smoke-smoke. There, and gone just that rapidly. Suffering, too, probably, experienced by someone, but not immediately visible, not from here, at forty miles per hour. She thought: Well, that’s corny, an apartment fire as seen from a bus. Nothing to do about that one. Quickly she smelled smoke, and then, just as quickly, it was gone. To herself, she grinned without realizing what she was doing. Then she looked around. No one had seen her smile. She had always liked fires. She felt ashamed of herself, but momentarily cheerful.

She found herself in Evanston, got out, and took the return bus back. She had observed too much of the lake on the way. Lake Michigan was at its most decorative and bourgeois in the northern suburbs: whitecaps, blue water, waves lapping the shore, abjectly picturesque.

By afternoon she was sitting in O’Hare Airport, at gate 23A, the waiting area for a flight to Memphis. She wasn’t going to Memphis — she didn’t have a ticket to anywhere — and she wasn’t about to meet anyone, but she had decided to take Ovid’s advice to go where the crowds were, for the tonic effect. She had always liked the anonymity of airports anyway. A businessman carrying a laptop computer and whose face had a WASPy nondescript pudgy blankness fueled by liquor and avarice was raising his voice at the gate agent, an African-American woman. Men like that raised their voices and made demands as a way of life; it was as automatic and as thoughtless as cement turning and slopping around inside a cement mixer. “I don’t think you understand the situation,” he was saying. He had a standby ticket but had not been in the gate area when they had called his name, and now, the plane being full, he would have to take a later flight. “You have no understanding of my predicament here. Who is your superior?” His wingtip shoes were scuffed, and his suit was tailored one size too small for him, so that it bulged at the waist. He had combed strands of hair across his sizable bald spot. His forehead was damp with sweat, and his nose sported broken capillaries. He was not quite first-class. She decided to eat a chili dog and find another gate to sit in. Walking away, she heard the gate agent saying, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry.”