Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

You couldn’t eat a chili dog in this airport sitting down. It was not permitted. You had to stand at the plastic counter of Here’s Mr. Chili, trying not to spill on the polyester guy reading USA Today , your volume of Publius Ovidius Naso next to you, your napkin in your other hand, thinking about Ovid’s exile to the fringe of the Roman empire, to Tomis, where, broken in spirit, solitary, he wrote the Tristia , some of the saddest poems written by anyone anywhere, but a — what? — male sadness about being far from where the action was. There was no action in Tomis, no glamour, no togas — just peasants and plenty of mud labor. On the opposite side of Here’s Mr. Chili was another gate where post-frightened passengers were scurrying out of the plane from Minneapolis. A woman in jeans and carrying a backpack fell into the arms of her boyfriend. They had started to kiss, the way people do in airports, in that depressing public style, all hands and tongues. And over here a chunky Scandinavian grandma was grasping her grandchildren in her arms like ships tied up tightly to a dock. You should go where people are happy, Ovid was saying. You should witness the high visibility of joy. You should believe. In …?

Si quis amas nec vis, facito contagia vites

Right, right: “If you don’t

want to love,

don’t expose yourself to

the sight

of love, the contagion.”

Evening would be coming on soon; she had to get back.

She was feeling a bit light-headed, the effect of the additives in the chili dog: the Red concourse of O’Hare, with its glacially smooth floors and reflecting surfaces, was, at the hour before twilight, the scariest man-made place she’d ever seen. This airport is really man-made, she thought. They don’t get more man-made than this. Of course, she had seen it a hundred times before, she just hadn’t bothered looking. If something hadn’t been hammered or fired, it wasn’t in this airport. Stone, metal, and glass, like the hyperextended surfaces of eternity, across which insect-people moved, briefly, trying before time ran out to find a designated anthill. Here was a gate for Phoenix. There was a gate for Raleigh-Durham. One locale was pretty much like another. People made a big deal of their own geographical differences to give themselves specific details to talk about. Los Angeles, Cedar Rapids, Duluth. What did it matter where anyone lived — Rome, Chicago, or Romania? All she really wanted was to be in the same room with her as-of-yesterday ex. Just being around him had made her happy. It was horrible but true. She had loved him so much it gave her the creeps. He wasn’t worthy of her love but so what. Maybe, she thought, she should start doing an inventory of her faults, you know, figure the whole thing out — scars, bad habits, phrases she had used that he hadn’t liked. Then she could do an inventory of his faults. She felt some ketchup under her shoe and let herself fall.

She looked up.

Hands gripped her. Random sounds of sympathy. “Hey, lady, are you all right?” “Can you stand?” “Do you need some help?” A man, a woman, a second man: Ovid’s public brigade of first-aiders held her, clutched at her where she had sprawled sort of deliberately, here in the Red concourse. Expressions of fake concern like faces painted on flesh-colored balloons lowered themselves to her level. “I just slipped.” “You’re okay, you’re fine?” “Yes.” She felt her breast being brushed against, not totally and completely unpleasantly. It felt like the memory of a touch rather than a touch itself, no desire in it, no nothing. There: She was up. Upright. And dragging herself off, Ovid under her arm, to the bus back to the Loop and her apartment. Falling in the airport and being lifted up: okay, so it happened as predicted, but it didn’t make you feel wonderful. Comfortably numb was more like it. She dropped the Remedia amoris into a trash bin. Then she thought, Uh-oh, big mistake, maybe the advice is all wrong but at least he wants to cheer me up, who else wants to do that? She reached her hand into the trash bin and, looking like a wino grasping for return bottles, she pulled out her soiled book, smeared with mustard and relish.

“Kit?”

A voice.

“Yes?” She turned around. She faced an expression of pleased surprise, on a woman she couldn’t remember ever seeing before.

“It’s me. Caroline.”

“Caroline?” As if she recognized her. Which she didn’t. At all.

“What a coincidence! This is too amazing! What are you doing here?”

“I’m, um, I was here. Seeing someone off. You know. To … ah, Seattle.”

“Seattle.” The Caroline-person nodded, in a, well, professional way, one of those therapeutic nods. Her hair had a spiky thickness, like straw or hay. Maybe Caroline would mention the traffic in Seattle. The ferries? Puget Sound? “What’s that?” She pointed at the haplessly soiled book.

“Oh, this?” Kit shrugged. “Ovid.”

More nodding. Blondish hair spiked here and there, arrows pointing at the ceiling and the light fixtures and the arrival-and-departure screens. The Caroline-person carried — no, actually pulled on wheels — a tan suitcase, and she wore a business suit, account executive attire, a little gold pin in the shape of the Greek lambda on her lapel. Not a very pretty pin, but maybe a clue: lambda, lambda, now what would that … possibly mean? Suitcase: This woman didn’t live here in Chicago. Or else she did .

“You were always reading, Kit. All that Greek and Latin!” She stepped back and surveyed. “You look simply fabulous! With the cap? Such a cute retro look, it’s so street-smart, like … who’s that actress?”

“Yeah, well, I have to … It’s nice to see you, Caroline, but I’m headed back to the Loop, it’s late, and I have to—”

“Is your car here?” A hand wave: Caroline-person wedding ring: tasteful diamond, of course, that’s the way it goes in the Midwest, wedding rings everyfuckingwhere.

“Uh, no, we took, I mean, he and I took the taxi out.” Somehow it seemed important to repeat that. “We took a taxi.”

“Great! I’ll give you a ride back. I’ll take you to your place. I’ll drop you right at the doorstep. Would you like some company? Come on!”

She felt her elbow being touched.

Down the long corridors of O’Hare Airport shaped like the ever-ballooning hallways of eternity, the Caroline-person pulled her suitcase, its tiny wheels humming behind her high-heeled businesslike stride; and easily keeping up in her jogging shoes, in which she jogged when the mood struck her, Kit tried to remember where on this planet, and in this life, she’d met this person. Graduate school? College? She wasn’t a parent of one of her students, that was certain. You were always reading . Must’ve been college. “It’s been so long,” the woman was saying. “Must be … what?” They edged out of the way of a beeping handicap cart.

Kit shook her head as if equally exasperated by their mutual ignorance.

“Well, I don’t know either,” Caroline-person said. “So, who’d you see off?”

“What?”

“To Seattle.”

“Oh,” Kit said.

“Something the matter?”

“It was Billy,” Kit said. “It was Billy I put on the plane.”

“Kit,” she said, “I haven’t seen you in years. Who’s this Billy?” She gave her a sly girlish smile. “Must be somebody special.”

Kit nodded. “Yeah. Must be.”

“Oh,” Caroline said, “you can tell me.”

“Actually, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, I’d just rather not.”

A smile took over Caroline’s face like the moon taking over the sun during an eclipse. “But you can. You can tell me.”