Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“How are they insane?”

“Oh,” she says, “let’s not spoil it with words.” But I know my wife, and what she means is that in these dreams she is still lying down next to him. She glances out the window. “There goes Santa again.” She laughs. It’s not a good laugh, more like a fun-house laugh. I get up, make my way to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, take out two beers — we’ve cleaned out the refrigerator except for a twelve-pack of low-carb Budweiser — and I bring one of them back to her. I open the other one and gaze out the window, but Santa has turned the corner and is no longer visible, to my great disappointment. It’s getting to be late afternoon, the time of day when you could use some Santa and aren’t going to get it.

I take a good slug of the beer before I say, “No, you never told me that story. My God. Maybe it’s true. Maybe we didn’t know each other. Can you imagine that? We were married, and we never knew the first thing.”

“Spare me your irony,” she says.

“I’m not being ironic. I’m telling you what you told me. But the thing is, your story isn’t about you, except on the sides, by comparison. You’re a minor saintly character in that story. You’re just the affable friend,” I say, which isn’t true, because that’s not what the story has been about. I’m feeling a little competitive now, in this singing contest we’re having. “After all, I’ve known plenty of people I’ve never described to you.”

“I’ve heard that before,” she says.

“Well, no, you haven’t,” I say. “Not exactly.”

I am not an admirable man, and my character, or lack of character, accounts for my presence on that living-room floor on that particular day. If I am unadmirable, however, I am not actually bad, in the sense that evil people are bad; if I were genuinely and truly bad, my ex-wife wouldn’t have been sitting there on the floor with me, her ex-husband, after we had cleaned the house for the next occupants.

My trouble was that after our first two years together, I couldn’t concentrate on her anymore. I was distracted by what life was throwing at me. I couldn’t be, what is the word, faithful, but actually that was the least of it, because unfaithfulness is a secondary manifestation of something we don’t have a word for.

When I met Emily, I was a clerk in a lighting store; I sold lighting fixtures. I suppose this is a pretty good job for someone who majored in studio art during college. I know something about light. My little atelier was filled with life-study drawings and rolled-up canvases of nakedness. That was pretty much what I did: nudes, the human body, the place where most artists start, though I never got past it.

There was this woman I was always drawing and always painting, and it wasn’t Emily. It was never Emily. She was a woman I had seen for about two minutes waiting in line for coffee at one of those bookstore cafés. She had an ankle bracelet, and I could describe her to you top to bottom, every inch, I could do that, trust me — just take my obsession on faith. She had come into my life for two minutes, and when, that afternoon, I couldn’t forget her, I began to draw her. The next day I drew her again, and the next week I began a painting of her, and a month after that, I did another painting of her, and so on and so on.

One afternoon — this was about two years after we had been married — Emily came into my studio, sometime in midafternoon, a Saturday. I had college football playing on the radio. Once again, I was painting the woman I had seen standing in line at this bookstore café. Emily asked me again who this person was and I told her again that it was just someone I caught a glimpse of, once; it didn’t matter who she was, she was just this person. Which is, of course, untrue. She wasn’t just a person. Emily stared at what I was doing with the canvas and then she unbuttoned her blouse and hung it on a clothes hook near the door. She took off her shoes and socks and stood there with her bra and jeans still on, and then she unclasped the jeans and the bra and off they went, onto the littered floor. Finally the underpants went, and she was in the altogether, standing in my studio just under the skylight, the smell of turpentine in the room. I interrupted what I was doing and eventually went over to her and took her in my arms, but that turned out to be the wrong response, so wrong that I can date the decline of our marriage from that moment. What I was supposed to do was look at her. I was supposed to draw her, I was supposed to be obsessed by her, and, finally, I was supposed to be inspired by her.

But that’s not how everyday love works. “I want to be your everything,” Emily once said to me, and I cringed.

The next time we made love, she was crying. “Please draw me,” she says. “Dennis, please please please draw me.”

“I can’t,” I said, because she didn’t inspire me and never had, and although I might not have been a great artist, I wasn’t going to draw her just because she asked me to. She was my companion. We were getting through this life day by day, the two of us. I loved her, I’m sure, and she loved me, and I’m sure of that, too, but she has never inspired me and she has never obsessed me, and because I couldn’t draw her in good faith, everything followed from there, including the affairs, both hers and mine, which were small potatoes, compared to that.

At night I would hug her and kiss her and tell her that I loved her, my flesh pressed against her flesh, and it just made her cry all the more. I never struck her or hit her, but the poisons in the house grew. Emily was not my everything, and not my muse and inspiration; I never knew why she wanted that role, but she did, and because she wanted it and I couldn’t lie to her about how she could never be what she said she wanted to be, I could fold my arms around her as we stood or lay quietly together, and it was never enough, and because it was never enough, it was hateful.

We were like two becalmed sailing ships, with sailors from different countries shouting curses at each other, as we drifted farther and farther away.

“No, right, sure, of course,” she says, standing up and stretching. “Two ships.” She turns toward me and loosens her hair, so that it falls lightly over her shoulders and so I can see her do it. Her eyes are glittery with a momentary thrill of distaste for me. No more housework today. “Right. You just told me stories and listened to the radio and painted your dream girl.” She looks at me. “If you had been Picasso, everyone would have forgiven you.”

Now, late in the afternoon, we go walking toward the park, a way of recovering our equilibrium before we get into our separate cars and drive off toward our separate residences. Anyone seeing us strolling past the piles of bright leaves on the sidewalk, the last light of the sun in our eyes, might think that we’re still a couple. Emily’s wearing a little knitted red cap and a snug brown jacket, and she’s squinting against the sun’s rays, and because we are also facing a cool breeze from the west, her eyes fill with water — I refuse at this moment to think of them as tears — that she must wipe away before she says anything to me.

“It’s true,” she says. “Sometimes I forget the nicest things you did for me. Like that time you bought me flowers for my birthday.”

“Which birthday was this?” I ask. The sun is in my eyes, too.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “What matters is that you walked into the house with these six red roses clutched in your hand, and I smiled, and I saw, from the puzzlement on your face, that in your absentminded way you had forgotten that you had bought roses for me and that you were holding them in your hand at that very moment. Imagine! Imagine a guy who buys roses for his wife and then carries them into the house and still forgets that that’s what he’s doing. Imagine being so fucking absentminded. It’s a form of male hysteria.”