Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Somebody far away, practicing,” he told her. “A violinist. She’s doing trills and double-stops. She’s practicing someone-or-other’s concerto in D. You really don’t hear it?” Her father had not been a professional musician, but he had always had perfect pitch. If he heard music in D major, then that was the key signature, hallucination or not.

In the silent room, Melinda gazed down at her father, at his thinning gray hair, the food stains scattered on his shirt, the sleepy, half-withdrawn look in his eyes, the magazine now on the floor, the untied shoelaces, the trouser zipper imperfectly closed, the mismatched socks, the shirt with the buttons in the wrong buttonholes, the precancerous blotches on his face, the half-eaten muffin spread with margarine nearby on the side table, and she was so overcome with a lifelong affection for this calm, decent man that she felt faint for a moment. Her soul left her body and then came back in an instant. “Oh, wait,” she said suddenly. “Yup. I do hear it. It’s very soft. From across the street. You know, it’s who, that scary brilliant teenager, that Asian girl, what’s her name, Maria Chang. And I know who wrote that music, too.”

“You do?”

“Sure,” Melinda said. “It’s Glazunov. Alexander Glazunov. It’s the Glazunov concerto for violin in D major.” She was making it all up as she went along.

“Yes,” her father said. “Glazunov. The teacher of Shostakovich. That must be right.” He smiled again at her. “But that concerto is in A, baby doll.” Turning his head to face her at a strange angle, he asked, “Who was that person who j-j-j-j-just came to the door? Did he come upstairs? Did he watch me? Did he come for me? Was it death? I was half asleep.”

“An intruder,” she said. “Somebody who said his name was Augenblick.”

“Well, that’s almost like death. What’d he want?”

“He said he used to live here. As a baby or something.”

“Impossible. I know who I bought this house from thirty-five years ago, and it wasn’t anybody by that name. Besides, that’s not his real name. It’s German. It means …”

“Blink of an eye,” Melinda said. “An instant.”

“Right. But he’s lying to you. I never heard of any German person named Augenblick. It’s a fiction, that name. There’s no such name in German. It’s total bullshit.” He waved his hand dismissively. Since his stroke, her father had started to employ gutterisms in his day-to-day speech. His new degraded vocabulary was disconcerting. His mind had suffered depreciation. She didn’t like obscenity from him; it didn’t match his character, or what remained of it.

Her father’s potted plant in the corner needed watering — its leaves were shriveling. Lately she had become a caretaker: Eric, and her father, and the lawn and garden out in front, and her father’s house, and the plants in it — and if she weren’t careful, that caretaking condition might become permanent, she would move into permanent stewardship, they would be her accumulations, and they would pile up and surround her. The present would dry up and disappear, except for the baby, and there would be nothing else around her except the past.

Downstairs on a side table was a business card.

Edward Augenblick

INVESTMENT COUNSELOR

“Fortune Favors the Few”

e-mail: eyeblink@droopingleaf.com

Anger spat up from somewhere near her stomach. “Fortune favors the few”! Damn him. And this zealotry from an intruder. At once, the languages roused themselves, spewing out their local-color bile. First, the Catalan. ¡Malparit. Fot el camp de casa meva ara mateix! And then the Spanish. ¡Me cago en tu madre, hijo de puta! What a relief it was to have other languages available for your obscenities. They pitched in.

A day later, she and her friend Germaine were walking in Minnehaha Creek, their pants rolled up, shoes in hand, Eric babypacked on Melinda. They were searching the creek for vegetative wonders as they bird-watched and conversed. Melinda liked Germaine’s witty impatience and had befriended her for it. They had bumped into each other in a bookstore a year ago, and Germaine had grumbled at her amiably. Melinda was bowled over by her wit and asked her out for coffee, an invitation that Germaine accepted. Germaine, a teacher and poet, was now back from New York, where she had toured the restaurants.

“There’s a blue jay,” Melinda said, pointing. She splashed her feet in the water, being careful not to slip on the rocks.

“Did I tell you how all the staff at one place spoke with accents? Did I mention that?” Germaine asked. “ ‘Ladies and gentle, let me know eef I can help you in any how.’ They sounded worse during the wine-tasting session. ‘Yooou like theeese vine? Have a zip.’ ” She walked up to Eric and kissed him on the ear. The baby giggled. “ ‘Hold theeese vine to the liiiight to determinate the lascivity.’ ”

“You should be more tolerant of foreigners,” Melinda murmured, turning to face her.

“Why should I? I’m not like you. I put salt in my coffee.” She looked at her friend. “You take that beautiful baby of yours around on your back just to flaunt him in front of nature.”

“No, I don’t. Your leg is cut,” Melinda said, pointing. “Where’d you get that mess of scabs?”

“Roses. I was staring at the clematis vine. Its growth habits were unpleasing. I held the ideal in my head so firmly that I obliterated awareness of the rest of the garden, especially the very large, known-to-be-violent rosebush between the clematis and me. I must have lunged at the vine. The rosebush grabbed at my leg, which continued to move. Seconds later I realized that the whole front of my leg had been savagely torn.”

“Savagely torn? That’s awful.”

“ ‘Laceration’ is what the form said, when I finally got out of the ER. I looked the word up, from lacerate, distress deeply, torn, mangled . Then I had a drug reaction to the prophylactic antibiotic. It sent me back to the ER. I couldn’t walk.”

“What’s that?” Melinda nodded toward something growing in the creek.

“Watercress?” Germaine said. Her black hair fell downward as she bent to see it, and for a moment Melinda thought of Persephone on her way back from the underworld. Germaine had the wildly intelligent eyes of a genius. “No, it’s just an unknown, anonymous weed. By the way, how close are we to the Mississippi? I have an appointment. Well, I think of it as an appointment. You might not.”

Melinda stood up straight, feeling the baby’s weight shift. He was making sucking sounds. “I had a visitor yesterday. Well, not a visitor. A man, an intruder. He looked like Eric Clapton. He walked right into the house. He said he used to live there. But he didn’t. He couldn’t have. His name was Augenblick.”

“You call the cops?”

“No.”

“I would have,” Germaine told her. “I’d have the law scurrying right over, with the cuffs and the beaters out.”

“He said Eric’s nursery had once been his own room. He said he knew things about the house, bad things. He said, this stranger, that I was desperate . Can you imagine?”

“He got the wrong address,” Germaine said. “He meant me.”

“Damn him anyway,” said Melinda. She pointed to an opening of the creek where the Mississippi River was visible. “There it is. There’s the river. We made it.”

“Yeah.” Germaine slapped at a mosquito on her forearm, leaving a little smear of blood just above her wristwatch. “Is this about your mother?” she asked. Her tone was studiously neutral. “This is about your mother, isn’t it? Maybe this guy lived in the neighborhood when you were growing up. Maybe your mother was known to him.”