Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Watch your language,” I say, kidding her. “It’s true,” I say. “I was presenting you with roses that I had forgotten about.”

“And what it meant,” Emily tells me, as if I hadn’t said anything, “was that your instincts, your … I don’t know what you would call it, your unconscious, still loved me, even if your conscious mind didn’t. I thought, My husband, Dennis, still loves me. Despite everything. You could absentmindedly get me roses on my birthday without knowing what you were doing. Somewhere in there, you were still kindly disposed toward me. Your little love light still was shining, before its last flickerings.”

We arrive at the park. On this side of it is a small playground with a slide, a climbing structure, swings, and one little boy is still playing while his mother sits on a bench and reads the paper, but now that it’s getting to be dusk, she’s squinting, bending down in order to make out the print. She calls to her son, but he won’t return to her quite yet. He won’t follow her orders. Emily sits down in one of the swings, and I sit down next to her. She puts her shoes in the pocketed dirt and slowly begins to swing herself back and forth. Behind us, the woods seem to be breathing in and out.

“I liked childhood,” Emily says to me, softly. “I liked being a kid. A lot of the other girls wanted to grow up, but I didn’t. They wanted to go out on dates, the excitement of all that — boys, cars, sex, the whole scene. But not me. I didn’t want to launch my ship into adolescence, I didn’t want my periods to start, I didn’t want what was about to happen, to happen. I had this dread of it. I wanted to stay a kid forever. I thought being an adult was the awful afterlife of childhood.”

I can’t remember ever being afraid of growing up, so I don’t say anything in response. Even at this late date, Emily can still surprise me with what she says.

“And it was awful, I mean, it is awful. It’s terrible, but of course you can learn to live with it, and it’s okay after a while even if it’s terrible, and besides, what choice do you have?”

“No choice,” I say to her. The woman on the bench calls to her son again, and this time he comes down to where she’s sitting, and he stands by her side and put his hand on her arm as a signal that he’s ready. She nods, briefly looking at him, then folds her paper, stands up, and takes his hand. These gestures are of such gentle, subtle sweetness that they feel like a private language to me, and my mind clouds up, given the weight of the day, given my own situation.

“You know,” I say to Emily, as I swing back and forth in my swing, “I’ve been getting postcards. Anonymous postcards.”

“Dennis,” Emily tells me, “I don’t have time for another story. I have to get home. I have a date tonight, if you can believe it.”

“No, listen, ” I say. “They’ve been arriving in the mail every few days. They’re anonymous, I don’t know who’s sending them. Not to work, but to my home address, the apartment. And they have these picture postcard photographs on the flip side — Miami Beach, the Bahamas, the Empire State Building, the usual. But on the message side, it’s something else.”

“Dennis, really,” she says, “I have to go.” But she’s still sitting there, in the playground, on her swing. “I have to get ready,” she says, in a flat, neutral tone.

But I’m going to finish, and I say, “And what it is, these messages — they’re always handwritten, always in blue ink, always in large letters, uppercase, all of them. Short, punchy sentences. Condemnations, against me. Judgments.” I hold up my hand to suggest a headline, even though the words have to fit on postcards. ‘ Your work has come to nothing.’ ‘Your life is a disaster.’ ‘Someone is watching you.’ ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? ’ Now who do you suppose would send postcard messages like that?”

She looks over at me, in the gathering dusk, a genuine expression of surprise, and I understand at the moment that I see her face that it’s not she, it’s not Emily who has been sending me these postcards. All along I had thought it would be her idea of retribution, these insane postcards. But she hasn’t been sending them, and this sends a brief shudder through me. But really, perhaps I had known all along. After all, I would know what her handwriting was like even if she tried to disguise it. We’re almost twins that way.

“If you’re thinking it was me,” Emily says, “think again. It wasn’t.”

“And last week, I got one that said, ‘ Have you no remorse? ’ ”

“Well,” Emily says, after a pause, “whoever is sending them must know you. That’s a good word, ‘remorse.’ I could have used that word on you. A flea-market word. Maybe I actually did. It would’ve been one of my grandparent words. You never used a word like that. Must be one of your little girlfriends sending these messages. Somebody who’s a little obsessed with you, Dennis.”

“Some poor devil,” I say.

“Yes,” she says, “a poor devil, that sounds about right.” She gets up out of the swing and goes over to the climbing structure. “Which one do you suppose it is?”

“Well,” I say, “I don’t know.” But actually I think I do know. Once this woman and I were at dinner together, a woman who in her day had done a lot of drugs, the ones that give you those dimestore visions, and out of nowhere, she said, “I can see all your thoughts, you know. I can see them, and you don’t even have to say them aloud, because I know what they are.” She was holding her wineglass, this woman, and it had been a good evening until then, but when she said she could see my thoughts, it seemed time to get out of there. She sat up straight. “God and his archangels have taken a real dislike to you,” she said, as I was motioning to the waiter. “They have a gun pointed at your head. I just think I should tell you that.”

“She really said that?” Emily asks, coming down from the play structure. “That God and his archangels had a gun pointed at your head?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Those were her exact words. But I can’t imagine anyone being obsessed with me. I have such a …” But I can’t think of the phrase.

“Where did you find these girls, Dennis?” she asks.

“The place where everybody finds them. In the street, and so on.”

“You should look in different places.”

“There are no different places.” It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know what Emily and I are talking about. I’ve completely lost the thread.

“No,” she says, “there aren’t.” She waits. “Did you see that woman and her little boy? Did you see how … I don’t know, how calm they were with each other? God, I loved seeing that. That calm. It makes you want to be a kid again. Of course, I always want that anyway.”

I take her hand and we walk back.

When we get to the house, my ex-wife is about to unlock her car and drive away, but she’s left her purse and wallet in the kitchen. So, together, the two of us go in the front door, and we step into the foyer and the living room. They’re completely dark — it’s night by now — and only the streetlight is spraying a little bit of illumination into the room, barely enough to see by.

“Close your eyes,” Emily says. “Could you find your way around in this place with your eyes closed? I bet you could.”

“Of course,” I say.

So I close my eyes and hold my arms out in the dark, and I walk all around the room where the lamps and tables and chairs were, where Em and I once lived, and I go into the dining room, still with my eyes closed, and I walk into the kitchen, past the counter and the dishwasher and then back out, taking my steps one at a time through these spaces I’ve come to know so intimately. It’s just as well that my eyes are closed as I’m walking through this dark house where Emily and I tried to stage our marriage, because I have this image of Santa jogging — no, sprinting — away from me, and I probably have a grim look.