Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“No, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t remember you, Caroline. I don’t remember the first thing about you. I know a person’s not supposed to admit that, but it’s been a bad couple of days, and I just don’t know who you are. Probably we went to college together or something, classics majors and all that, but I can’t remember.” People rushed past them and around them. “I don’t remember you at all.”

“You’re kidding,” the woman said.

“No,” Kit said, “I’m not. I can’t remember seeing you before.”

The woman who said her name was Caroline put her hand on her forehead and stared at Kit with a what-have-we-here? shocked look. Kit knew she was supposed to feel humiliated and embarrassed, but instead she felt shiny and new and fine for the first time all day. She didn’t like to be tactless, but that seemed to be the direction, at least right now, this weekend, where her freedom lay. She’d been so good for so long, she thought, so loving and sweet and agreeable, and look where it had gotten her. “You’re telling me,” the woman said, “that you don’t remember our—”

“Stop,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me.”

“Wait. You don’t even want to be reminded? You’re … But why? Now I’m offended,” the woman told her. “Let’s start over. Let’s begin again. Kit, I feel very hurt.”

“I know,” Kit said. “It’s been a really strange afternoon.”

“I just don’t think …,” the woman said, but then she was unable to finish the sentence. “Our ride into the city …”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Kit said. “I couldn’t take up your offer. I’ll ride the bus back. They have good buses here,” she added.

“No,” she said. “Go with me.”

“I can’t, Caroline. I don’t remember you. We’re strangers.”

“Well, uh, good-bye then,” the woman muttered. “You certainly have changed.”

“I certainly have. But I’m almost never like this. It’s Billy who did this to me.” She gazed in Caroline’s direction. “And my vocabulary,” she said, not quite knowing what she meant. But she liked it, so she repeated it. “My vocabulary did this to me.”

“It’s that bad?” the woman said.

Standing in O’Hare Airport, where she had gone for no good reason except that she could not stand to be alone in her apartment, she felt, for about ten seconds, tiny and scaled-down, like a model person in a model airport as viewed from above, and she reached out and balanced herself on the driver’s-side door handle and then shook her head and closed her eyes. If she accepted compassion from this woman, there would be nothing left of her in the morning. Sympathy would give her chills and fever, and she would start shaking, and the shaking would move her out of the hurricane’s eye into the hurricane itself, and it would batter her, and then wear her away to the zero. Nothing in life had ever hurt her more than sympathy.

“I have to go now,” Kit said, turning away. She walked fast, and then ran, in the opposite direction.

Of course I remember you. We were both in a calculus class. We had hamburgers after the class sometimes in the college greasy spoon, and we talked about boys and the future and your dog at home, Brutus, in New Buffalo, Minnesota, where your mother bred cairn terriers. In the backyard there was fencing for a kennel, and that’s where Brutus stayed. He sometimes climbed to the top of his little pile of stones to survey what there was to survey of the fields around your house. He barked at hawks and skunks. Thunderstorms scared him, and he was so lazy, he hated to take walks. When he was inside, he’d hide under the bed, where he thought no one could see him, with his telltale leash visible, trailing out on the bedroom floor. You told that story back then. You were pretty in those days. You still are. You wear a pin in the shape of the Greek letter lambda and a diamond wedding ring. In those days, I recited poetry. I can remember you. I just can’t do it in front of you. I can’t remember you when you’re there.

She gazed out the window of the bus. She didn’t feel all right but she could feel all right approaching her, somewhere off there in the distance.

She had felt it lifting when she had said his name was Billy. It wasn’t Billy. It was Ben. Billy hadn’t left her; Ben had. There never had been a Billy, but maybe now there was. She was saying good-bye to him; he wasn’t saying good-bye to her. She turned on the overhead light as the bus sped through Des Plaines, and she tried to read some Ovid, but she immediately dozed off.

Roaring through the traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, the bus lurched and rocked, and Kit’s head on the headrest turned from side to side, an irregular rhythm, but a rhythm all the same: enjambments, caesuras, strophes.

My darling girl , (he said, thinner

than she’d ever thought he’d be,

mostly bald, a few sprout curls,

and sad-but-cheerful, certainly,

Roman and wryly unfeminist, unhumanist,

unliving), child of gall and wormwood (he pointed his

thin malnourished finger at her,

soil inside the nail),

what on earth

brought you to that unlikely place?

An airport! Didn’t I tell you,

clearly,

to shun such spots? A city park on a warm

Sunday afternoon wouldn’t be as bad. People fall

into one another’s arms out there all the time.

Hundreds of them! (He seemed exasperated.)

Thank you (he said)

for reading me, but for the sake

of your own well-being, don’t go there

again without a ticket. It seems

you have found me out. (He

shrugged.) Advice? I don’t have any

worth passing on. It’s easier

to give advice when you’re alive

than when you’re not,

and besides, I swore it off. Oh I liked

what you did with Caroline, the lambda-girl

who wears that pin because her husband

gave it to her on her birthday,

March twenty-first — now that

I’m dead, I know everything

but it does me not a particle of good—

but naturally she thinks it has no

special meaning, and that’s the way

she conducts her life. Him, too. He

bought it at a jewelry store next to a shoe

shop in the mall at 2 p.m.

March 13, a Thursday — but I digress—

and the salesgirl,

cute thing, hair done in a short cut

style, flirted with him

showing him no mercy,

touching his coat sleeve,

thin wool, because she was on commission. Her

name was

Eleanor, she had green eyes.

The pin cost him $175, plus tax.

She took him, I mean, took him for a ride,

as you would say,

then went out for coffee. By herself, that is,

thinking of her true

and best beloved, Claire, an obstetrician

with lovely hands. I always did admire

Sapphic love. But I’m

still digressing. (He smirked.)

The distant failed humor of the dead.

Our timing’s bad,

the jokes are dusty,

and we can’t concentrate

on just

one thing. I’m as interested

in Eleanor as I am

in you. Lambda. Who cares? Lambda: I suppose

I mean, I know ,

he thought the eleventh letter, that uncompleted triangle,

looked like his wife’s legs. Look:

I can’t help it,

I’m — what is the word? — salacious, that’s

the way I always was,

the bard of breasts and puberty, I was

exiled for it, I turned to powder

six feet under all the topsoil

in Romania. Sweetheart, what on earth

are you doing on

this bus? Wake up, kiddo, that guy

Ben is gone, good riddance

is my verdict from two thousand

years ago, to you.

Listen: I have a present for you.