Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“You said I was desperate. You said you knew me. That was unkind. No. It was wicked.”

“You are desperate. I do know you. Desperation is knowable.”

“That’s a funny way of courting a woman, saying things like that.”

“We have the same soul, you and I,” he said. He said it awkwardly. Still, she was moved, beside or despite herself. The sovereign power of nonsensical compliments: a woman never had any defenses against them.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Come back in a few days and tell me about the house.”

“It’s just an ordinary house,” he told her, glaring critically at its corners. “Anyway, you’re right, I never lived here. I lived a few blocks away.”

“So make it up,” she said. “You were going to make it up anyway. Do what you can with it. Impress me.”

The next time Augenblick came by, he brought a bottle of wine, a kind of lubricant for his narrative, Melinda thought.

They drank half the bottle, and then he began with the medical details about the house and what had happened in its rooms. There had been a little girl with polio who lived in the house in the 1950s, encased in an iron lung, with the result that her parents had been the first on the block to buy a TV set, in those days a low-class forgetfulness machine. In those days only two stations broadcast programs, a few hours in the morning, then off the air during the afternoons until four p.m., when The Howdy Doody Show, Superman , and Beulah came on.

He touched Melinda’s hand. From somewhere he poured her another glass of wine, a glass that she had taken down from her kitchen shelf an hour or two ago, and she took it. He did an inventory of ghosts. Every house had them. He told her that the living room had once been an organizing center for Farmer-Labor Party socials of the Scandinavian variety, and that they had planned their strikes there, including the truckers’ strike in the 1930s.

“Any violence?” she asked, taking the wine for her second glass.

“None,” he said. As a little boy, he said, he had heard that there had once been a murder in these environs, and maybe it had been in this house. He wasn’t sure. The body of the murder victim, it was said, had been propped up on the freezer, sitting there, and the police had come in to investigate after the neighbors had called in with reports of screaming, and one of the cops looked directly at the body of the murdered woman, her hair down over her face, and he hadn’t seen it, and the police had left.

“Who are you?” Melinda asked Augenblick after they had finished the wine and he had concluded his story. Now they sat on the back porch in discount-store foldout chairs, and through the screens they could see her father’s garage with the car on one side and her father’s discards, his memory pile, on the other. “Because, right here, there’s quite a bit about you that’s completely wrong. You tell me a story, the absolutely wrong story, about happiness and a murder, and you say you know me and you say I’m desperate, and I think you said that you and I have the same souls, and your card claimed that you were an investment counselor, and then you informed me that you were a landscape architect.” Melinda put her tongue inside her wineglass and licked at the dew of wine still affixed there. “None of it adds up. Because,” she said, “what I think it is, what I think you are, sitting here beside me, is a devil.” She waited. “Not one of the major ones, in fact really minor, but one all the same.”

Through the air pocket of dead silence the crickets chirped. Augenblick did not immediately reply. “Um, okay,” he said.

“ ‘Okay’?”

“Yeah, okay. I used to be an investment counselor until I went broke. I couldn’t part with the business cards. So then I went into planting things, landscaping. Not much income, but some. The life I have is modest. I have a kind of ability to, you know, hit the wrong note. And sometimes I tell stories that aren’t quite true. It passes the time. Untruths are what I learned how to do in high school and never quite shook off.”

“You should work at it,” she said.

“I should work at it,” he repeated.

“Was there anything, anywhere, you said that was true?”

“Yes,” he said. “My name’s really Augenblick. You and I have the same souls. I believe that. I still sort of believe that you’re desperate. I used to live in this neighborhood. You had a mother once. I remember her. And actually, from the first moment I saw you, weeding out there in the garden, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”

She waited. “Could we go back to the topic sentence?”

He leaned sideways in her direction. She could smell the wine on his breath. “About devils, you mean?”

“Yeah, that part.”

“There are no devils anymore,” he said. “There are only people who are messed up and have to spread it around. And they’re everywhere. See, what you have to do is, if you’re going to get it, you have to imagine a devil who is also maybe a nice guy.” And he leaned over farther, so that he almost lost his balance in his chair, and he gave her a peck on each cheek, a devil’s kiss.

Making love to him (which she would never, ever do) would be like taking a long journey to a foreign locale you didn’t exactly want to visit, like Tangier, a place built on the slopes of a chalky limestone hill. The sun’s intensity would be unpleasant, and the general poverty would get in the way of everything. He would make love like a man who didn’t quite know what he was doing and who would press that ignorance, hard, on someone else, specifically on her, on her flesh. Still, he would be careful with her, as if he remembered that she was still nursing a child. In the middle of the bed, she would suddenly recall that when she had first seen him, she had thought that there was nothing to him, and she would wonder if there was still nothing to him now. Whether he was actually named Augenblick, despite his claims, whether he did anything actual for a living, whether he would ever hurt her, whether he really might be a devil, though devils didn’t exist. Because if they did, times would change and the devils would take new forms. If the name of God is changing in our time, then so are the other names. Then she would come, rapidly, and would forget her questions the way you forget dreams. But it would never happen, not that way.

“You made love to him?” Germaine was outraged. The cell phone itself seemed to be outraged with her anger; even the plastic seemed annoyed. Melinda had called her friend in the middle of the night to consult.

“No, I didn’t,” Melinda said. “No. No love. But I did fuck him. I was lonely. I wanted to get naked with somebody.”

“How was it?”

“Okay.”

“Well, in the immortal words of the great Albert Einstein, ‘Don’t do that again.’ ”

She wondered if he would disappear. Everything about him suggested a vanishing act. He would not invite her to his house, wherever that was, nor would he ever give her an address. Like everyone else, though, he did have a cell phone, and he gave her the number to that. One night when he told her (she was lying in her bed, and he was lying in his bed, across town, and the phone call had gone on for over an hour), “I lived in your soul before you owned it,” she decided that he was one of those crazy people who gets by from day to day, but just barely — he was what he said he was, a failed borderline personality. She resolved to tell him that she would not see him anymore, under any circumstances, but then he invited her to dinner at a pricey downtown restaurant, so she located a babysitter both for the baby and for her father, and when Edward Augenblick arrived to pick her up, she felt ready for whatever was going to happen, accessorized for it, with a bracelet of beautiful tiny gold spikes.