Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Melinda stopped and looked at her friend. Seedpods from a cottonwood overhead drifted down onto her hair and into the water. “Oh, well,” she said, as if something had been settled. Melinda’s mother had been in and out of institutions. Melinda refused to come to terms with it, now or ever; a mad parent could not be rescued or reasoned with. Things were getting dark all of a sudden. “I’m, um, feeling a bit light-headed.” She felt her knees weakening, and she made her way to the side of the creek, where she sat down abruptly on the wet sands.

“Are you fainting?” she heard Germaine say, in front of, or behind, a crow cawing. “Here. Let me take your hand.…” The force of her friend’s voice drifted into her consciousness, as did her voice, someone turning the volume knob back and forth, as she held her own nausea at bay, her head down between her knees. Creek water was suddenly splashed on her face, thrown by her friend, to rouse her.

At certain times, usually in the afternoons, her father would ride the buses, but Melinda had no idea where he went, and he himself could not always remember. He said that he visited the markets, but one time he came back and said that he had knocked at the Gates of Heaven. He would not elaborate. Where were these gates? He had forgotten. Perhaps downtown? Many people were going in, all at once. He felt he wasn’t ready, and took the bus home.

This traveling around was a habit he had picked up from his wife, whose wandering had started right after the death of their first child, Melinda’s older sister, Sarah, who had died of a blood infection at the age of two. Her mother gave birth to Melinda and then went into a very long, slow, discreetly managed and genteel decline. One day, when Melinda was eleven, her mother, unable to keep up appearances anymore, drove away and disappeared altogether. She was spotted in Madison before she evaporated.

Back in her father’s house, Melinda went straight from the phone to her computer. She typed in Augenblick’s e-mail address and then wrote a note.

hi. i don’t know who you are, but you’re not who you say you are, and my father has never heard of you or your family. i shouldn’t be writing to you and i wouldn’t be except i didn’t like it that you said you knew me. from where? we’ve never met. you don’t know me. i hardly know myself. kidding, i mean, i’ve met you and i still haven’t met you. you’re a ghost, for all i know.

She deleted the last three sentences — too baroque — both for their meaning and her responsibility for writing them. The joking tone might be mistaken for friendliness. She ducked her head, hearing Eric staying quiet (she didn’t want to breast-feed him again tonight, her nipples were sore — but it was odd, she also had suffered a sudden brokenhearted need for sex, for friendly nakedness), and then she continued writing.

as far as i know, the previous owners of this house were named anderson. that’s who my mom and dad bought it from. “augenblick” isn’t even a name. it’s just a german noun.

so, my question is: who are you? where are you from? what were you doing in my house?

— melinda everson, ph.d.

She deleted the reference to the doctoral degree, then put it back, then deleted it again, then put it back in, before touching the SEND button.

Half an hour later, a new letter appeared in the electronic in-box, from eyeblink@droopingleaf.com.

THINK OF ME AS THE RAGE OVER THE LOST PENNY. BUT LIKE I TOLD YOU IM ACTUALLY VERY HARMLESS. W/R/T YOUR QUESTIONS, I CAN DROP BY AGAIN. INFORMATION IS ALL I WANT TO GIVE YOU. eye two LIVED THERE.

HA HA. — TED

The school year would be starting soon, and she needed to prepare her classes. She needed to study Peréz Galdós’s Miau again, for the umpteenth time, for its story of a man lost in a mazelike bureaucracy — her lecture notes were getting mazelike themselves, Kafkaesque. And worse: bland. She would get to that. But for now she was waiting. She knew without knowing how she knew that when Augenblick came back, he would show himself at night, when both her father and her son were asleep; that he would come at the end of a week of hot, dry late-summer weather orchestrated by crickets, that he would show up as a polite intruder again, halfway handsome, early-middle-aged semi-degraded-Clapton, well dressed, like a piano tuner, and that he would say, as soon as he was out of the driver’s-side door of his unidentifiable car, perhaps handmade, and had advanced so that he stood there on the other side of the screen door, “You look very nice tonight. I got your letter. Thanks for inviting me over.”

These events occurred because she was living in her father’s house.

“And I got yours,” she said, from behind the screen. The screen provided scanning lines; his face was high-definition. “You’re the rage over the lost penny. But I didn’t invite you over. You’re not invited. It wasn’t an invitation.” She hesitated. “Shit. Well, come in anyway.”

This time, once inside, he approached her and shook her hand, and in removing his hand, rubbed hers, as if this were the custom somewhere upon greeting someone whom you didn’t know but with whom you wanted a relationship. It was a failed tentative caress but so bizarre that she let it happen.

“My father is upstairs,” she said. “And my son, too. Maybe you could explain who you are?”

“This is the living room,” he told her, as if he hadn’t heard her question, “and over there we once had a baby grand piano in that corner, by the stairs.” He pointed. “A Mason and Hamlin. I was never any good at playing it, but my sister was. She’s the real musician in the family.”

“What does she play?” she asked, testing him. “What’s her specialty?”

“Scriabin études,” he said. “Chopin and Schumann, too, and Schubert, the B-minor.”

“She didn’t play the violin, did she?”

“No. The piano. She still does. She’s a pediatric endocrinologist now. Doctors like music, you know. It’s a professional thing.” He waited. “Ours was the only piano on the block.” He glanced toward the dining room. “In the dining room we used to have another chandelier, it was cut glass—”

“Mr. Augenblick, uh, maybe you could tell me why you’re here? And why you’re lying to me?” She scooped a bit of perspiration off her forehead and gazed into his game face. “Why all these stories about this locality? Scriabin, Schubert: every house has a story. The truth is, I’m not actually interested in who did what, where, here.” She saw him glance down at her body, then at the baby toys scattered across the living-room floor. Her breasts were swollen, and she had always been pretty. She was a bit disheveled now, though still a beauty. “I’m a mother. New life is going on here these days. My son is here, my father, too, upstairs, recuperating from a stroke. I don’t have time for a personal history. For all I know, you’re an intruder. A dangerous maniac.”

“No,” he said, “I’ve noticed that. No one has time for a history.” Augenblick stood in the living room for a moment, apparently pondering what to say next. At last he looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought, and asked, “May I have a glass of iced tea?”

“No.” She folded her arms. “If you were a guest, I would provide the iced tea. But, as I said, I didn’t invite you here. I don’t mean to be rude, but—”

“Actually,” he said, “you are rude. You wrote back to me, and that was, well, an invitation. Wasn’t it? At least that’s how I took it, it’s how any man would have taken it.” He pasted onto his face a momentarily wounded look. “So all right. So there’s to be no iced tea, no water, no hospitality of any kind. No stories, either, about the house. All right. You want to know why I’m here? You really want to know why I’m here? My life hasn’t been going so well. I was doing a bit of that living-in-the-past thing. I was driving around, in this neighborhood, my former neighborhood, and I saw a really attractive woman working in her garden, weeding, and I thought: Well, maybe she isn’t married or attached, maybe I have a chance, maybe I can strike up a conversation with that woman working there in that garden. I wasn’t out on the prowl, exactly, but I did see you. And then I discovered that you had a baby. A beautiful boy. You know, I’m actually a nice guy, though you’d never know it. I’m a landscape architect. I have a college degree. All I wanted was to meet you.”