Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

This coworker, Jeffrey, had befriended Emily soon after she had moved to San Francisco. He had shown her around the city, taken her to the wharf and the Tenderloin, an amateur guide and historian to the tourist spots and the dives. He loved the city; he had had his first real taste of a possible future life there, a potential hereafter of happiness. My wife-to-be and this Jeffrey rode BART over to Berkeley once and had a sidewalk vegetarian lunch, mock duck tacos, she says, at a seedy little restaurant devoted to higher consciousness. On another day he drove her to Mount Tam in his rattly old blue VW. He’d brought sandwiches and wine and some pastry concoction he had made himself, as a picnic offering. They ate their picnic in the shade of a tree with the FM radio in the car serenading them with Glenn Gould. Why had he gone to all this trouble? Emily says he was just being a friend, and then she pauses. “His boyfriend had left him a month before,” she says, looking at her bare feet on the floor of our empty living room. “So he was lonely. And he was one of those gay men who have a latent hetero-thing going on.” How does she know this? She shrugs. She could tell by the way he looked at her, sometimes. On a few rare occasions he looked at her the way a man looks at a woman.

It’s true, I haven’t heard this story. “So?” I ask.

So one day Jeffrey didn’t show up for work. Or the next day or the day after that. He was sick, of course, with pneumonia, and after he recovered, he came back to work for a few days and then disappeared again for another two weeks. But everyone knew he had the plague, and this is before all the antiretroviral drugs broke through to the population at large, so at work everyone avoided the subject of Jeffrey, whom they had all liked.

By this time I am looking out the front window at our street. It’s a nondescript neighborhood of similarly designed brick semi-colonials like ours, and as I’m watching, I see a guy in a Santa Claus suit jogging by.

“Look,” I say. “It’s Rolf, from down the block. He’s wearing that goddamn Santa Claus suit again.”

Emily glances out, bending upward, lifting herself halfway. “He must not be taking his meds.”

“It’s not that,” I tell her. “He thinks it’s better for visibility than a running outfit. Drivers see him right away. ‘You don’t accidentally hit Santa,’ he told me once. At least he hasn’t tied on the white beard. At least he’s not wearing the cap.”

“Who’re you kidding?” Emily asks me. “The guy’s bipolar. The Santa comes out in him whenever he gets manic.”

“You could do worse,” I say to her. “ You’ve done worse.”

We sit there, looking at each other for a moment, unsmilingly. Neither of us says anything, and I hear the furnace come on. The light flaring through the window has that burnished autumnal warmth. The furnace creates this low hum. Outside in the yard, the leaves could be raked, but I’m not going to do that now.

“What happened to Jeffrey?” I ask, after another long pause. “He died, right?”

No, he hadn’t died, but he was in one of the Kaiser hospitals when Emily went to see him. He didn’t look good. “Wasted” is probably the right word here. She tried to cheer him up, but he resisted her efforts. Still, he had one request. He wanted her to take some pictures of him, as a keepsake of how handsome he was despite his illness. He thought his looks had trumped the virus, somehow; beauty had staged its victory over infirmity, he thought. So she did it: she bought a camera at Castro Photo and took some pictures of her friend sitting up in the chair next to the hospital bed, out of his hospital clothes and into his best black jeans and a leather jacket, etc. “You probably didn’t know it,” he said, as she took his picture, “but I’m an aristocrat.” He posed as if he were a rake and a bit of a snob, smiling an old-money smile.

But once the film was developed, the pictures were unshowable: his skin wasn’t just sallow, but waxlike. His face seemed rigid, a staring mask. She didn’t know what to do with these pictures. Ten years ago, retouching photographs digitally wasn’t as easy as it is now. But if the guy could tell lies to himself when looking into the mirror, she thought, maybe he could tell himself the same lies when he saw these photographs.

She arrived at his apartment — he was convalescing at home — and sat down next to him at the dinette table. One by one the pictures were laid out, like playing cards, like the hand he’d been dealt. With his reading glasses on, Jeffrey looked at these images of himself. As it happened, the pneumonia had hung on for a while and he had lost a considerable amount of muscle tone, and in the photos his cheekbones were garishly visible, and his eyes, despite his smile, had that peering-into-the-void anguish — there, I used that word — that you see on the faces of the near-dead. So Jeffrey was sitting there, looking down at these photographs of his death sentence, and he began crying.

Emily tried to console him, but he turned away from her, shaking his head. He went into his bedroom, got dressed, and told her that they were going for a car ride in the blue VW. He asked her to drive. He said that he had to have his hands free.

He directed her down toward the Presidio and then across the Golden Gate Bridge, and when they were about midway across the bridge, he took the packet of photographs and held up the photos of himself one by one outside the window. The wind seized these portraits of him — some of them fluttered over the side of the bridge into the bay and some of them just lay there on the gridded pavement for the other cars to drive over. Emily told him that he could be ticketed for littering, but he didn’t listen to her; he was too busy getting rid of these snapshots. “They won’t arrest me,” he shouted over the road noise. “Not after they get a good look at me.”

Then he instructed Emily to drive up the coast so that they could go whale watching. However, it was the wrong season: no whales that time of year. After a couple of hours, they pulled over at a roadside rest area in sight of the Pacific. The two of them got out of the car. Though no whales were visible, Jeffrey, leaning against his car and staring out at the water, said he saw some. For the next half hour, he described the whales swimming by, all the shapes and sizes and varieties of them, whale after whale under the surface. He was like an encyclopedia entry: here were the humpback whales, and there the bottle-nosed, and the pilot, and the beluga, the right whales, and the blue. When he was done with this harmless hallucinatory description, he got back into the car, and my wife, that is, then my wife-to-be and now my ex-wife, drove him back home, to his apartment on Clement. When they got back to his place, he was distracted and confused, so she undressed him and put him to bed, Good Samaritan that she is. And then, and this is the part I couldn’t have imagined, she got into bed with him and put her arms around him until he fell asleep.

She’s still sitting there in the living room, looking at me in silence, still unsmilingly. The point of this story is that she loved this man, loved him, I think the phrase is, to death.

“No,” I say, “you’re absolutely right, you never told me that story.” My heart is pounding slightly, and I have to work to sound calm. “So you loved him. What happened to this Jeffrey?” I ask her.

She looks at me. “Duh,” she says. She removes her foot from my grasp. I hadn’t realized I was holding on to it. I wonder what else she might have done for him that she hasn’t told me, but I don’t ask. “The thing is,” she says, “I often dream about him. And these dreams, I often wake up from them, and they’re terrible dreams, no comfort at all.” She looks at me and waits. “They’re really insane dreams,” she says.