Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

He took her hand.

His hand didn’t feel like much,

it felt like water when you’re reaching

down for a stone or shell

under the water, something you don’t

have, but want, and your fingers

strain toward it.

Here, he said, this is the one stunt

I can do: look up, sweetie, check out

this:

(he raised his arm in ceremony)

See? he said proudly. It’s raining.

I made it rain. I can do that.

The rain is falling, only

it’s not water, it’s

this other thing. It’s the other thing

that’s raining, soaking you. Good-bye.

When she awoke, at the sound of the air brakes, the bus driver announced that they had arrived at their first stop, the Palmer House. It wasn’t quite her stop, but Kit decided to get out. The driver stood at the curb as the passengers stepped down, and the streetlight gave his cap an odd bluish glow. His teeth were so discolored they looked like pencil erasers. He asked her if she had any luggage, and Kit said no, she hadn’t brought any luggage with her.

The El clattered overhead. She was in front of a restaurant with thick glass windows. On the other side of the glass, a man with a soiled unpressed tie was talking and eating prime rib. On the sidewalk, just down the block, under an orange neon light, an old woman was shouting curses at the moon and Mayor Daley. She wore a paper hat and her glasses had only one lens in them, on the left side, and her curses were so interesting, so incoherently articulate, uttered in that voice, which was like sandpaper worried across a brick, that Kit forgot that she was supposed to be unhappy, she was listening so hard, and watching the way the orange was reflected in that one lens.

MY EX-WIFE AND I are sitting on the floor of what was once our living room. The room stands empty now except for us. This place is the site of our marital decline and we are performing a ritual cleansing on it. I’ve been washing the hardwood with a soapy disinfectant solution, using a soft brush and an old mop, working toward the front window, which has a view of the street. My hands smell of soap and bleach. We’re trying to freshen the place up for the new owners. The terms of sale do not require this kind of scouring, but somehow we have brought ourselves here to perform it.

We’re both bruised from the work: Emily fell off a kitchen stool this morning while washing the upstairs windows, and I banged my head against a drainpipe when I was cleaning under the bathroom sink. When I heard her drop to the floor, I yelled upstairs to ask if she was okay, and she yelled back down to say that she was, but I didn’t run up there to check.

When my wife and I were in the process of splitting up, the house itself participated. Lamps dismounted from their tables at the slightest touch, pictures plummeted from the wall and their frames shattered whenever anyone walked past them. Destruction abounded. You couldn’t touch anything in here without breaking it. The air in the living room acquired a poisonous residue from the things we had said to each other. I sometimes thought I could discern a malignant green mist, invisible to everyone else, floating just above the coffee table. We excreted malice, the two of us. The house was haunted with pain. You felt it the minute you walked in the door.

Therefore this cleaning. We both like the young couple who have bought the house — smiling, just-out-of-school types with one toddler and another child on the way. We want to give them a decent chance. During our eight years together, Emily and I never had any kids ourselves — luckily, or: unluckily, who can say.

Anyway, now that we’ve been cleaning it, our former dwelling seems to have calmed down. The air in the living room has achieved a settled stale quietude. It’s as if we’d never lived here. The unhappiness has seeped out of it.

Emily is sitting on the floor over in the other corner now, a stain in the shape of a Y on her T-shirt. She’s taking a breather. I can smell her sweat, a vinegary sweetness, and quite pleasant. She’s drinking a beer, though it’s only two in the afternoon. She’s barefoot, little traces of polish on her toenails. Her pretty brown hair, always one of her best features, hangs fixed back by a rubber band in the sort of ponytail women sometimes make when they’re housecleaning. Her face is pink from her exertions, and on her forehead is a bruise from where she fell.

She’s saying that it’s strange, but the very sight of me causes her sadness, a complicated sadness, she informs me, inflecting the adjective, though she’s smiling when she says it, a half smile, some grudges mixed in there with this late-term affability. She takes a swig of the beer. I can see that she’s trying to make our troubles into a manageable comedy. I was Laurel; she was Hardy. I was Abbott; she was Costello. We failed together at the job we had been given, our marriage. But I don’t think this comedic version of us will work out, even in retrospect. She tells me that one of my mistakes was that I thought I knew her, but, in fact, no, I never really knew her, and she can prove it. This is old ground, but I let her talk. She’s not speaking to me so much as she’s meditating aloud in the direction of the wall a few feet above my head. It’s as if I’ve become a problem in linear algebra.

My general ignorance of her character causes her sorrow , she now admits. She wonders whether I was deluded about women in general and her in particular. To illustrate what I don’t know about her, she begins to tell me a story.

But before she can really get started, I interrupt her. “ ‘Sorrow,’ ” I say. “Now there’s a noun from our grandparents’ generation. Nobody our age uses words like that anymore except you. Or ‘weary.’ You’re the only person I know who ever used that word. I’m weary , you’d say, when you didn’t look weary at all, just irritable. And ‘forbearance.’ I don’t even fucking know what forbearance is . ‘Show some forbearance’—that was a line you used. Where did you find those words, anyway?”

“Are you done?” she asks me. We’re like a couple of tired fighters in the fifteenth round.

“What’s wrong with saying ‘I’m bummed’?” I ask her. “Everyone else says that. ‘I’m bummed.’ ‘I’m down.’ ‘I’m depressed.’ ‘I’m blue.’ But you — you have a gift for the … archaic.” I am trying to amuse her and irritate her at the same time, so I wink.

“I wasn’t depressed back then,” she says. “I was sad. There’s a difference.” I scuttle over to where she is sitting and take a swig from the beer can she’s been clutching. Only there’s no beer left. I take a swig of air. Okay: we may be divorced, but we’re still married.

Before I met her, but after she had dropped out of college, Emily had moved to the Bay Area, quite a few summers after the Summers of Love, which she had missed, both the summers and the love. She had rented a cheap basement apartment in the Noe Valley, one of those ground-floor places with a view of the sidewalk and of passing shoes, and during the day she was working in a department store, the Emporium, in the luggage department.

I interrupt her. “I know this,” I say. “I know this entire story.”

“No, you don’t,” Emily tells me. “Not this one.” One of her coworkers was a guy named Jeffrey, a pleasant fellow most of the time, tall and handsome, though with an occasional stammer, and, as it happens, gay. He proved himself an effective salesman, one of those cheerful and witty and charming characters you buy expensive items from, big-ticket items, out of sheer delight in their company.