Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

In due course, the Arab-American men were escorted off the airplane to some dim destination. The Airbus door was shut and latched, and the flight took off. The flight attendant, sitting in her forward jump seat, stared at Nicholas and licked her lips as he read his magazine. He had that effect on people.

Hours earlier, when he had boarded, he had told Daphne by cell phone that the airport looked so empty that the terminal might as well have been the Museum of Transportation, there were so few people in it. Forlorn little passengers could be seen scurrying down there at the ends of the corridors, on their errands. The vendors of hot dogs and newspapers presented the public with expressions of end-of-the-world nihilism. From the TV sets hanging from the ceiling came the unreassuring voice of the president of the United States, encouraging the terrified citizenry to help the economy by buying things. It was all very grungy and Amtrak-ish.

“ ‘Fear and love his loins’?” Daphne asked. “What’s that about?”

They were eating in their favorite Brooklyn sushi restaurant, and Daphne, sitting next to an orange window curtain, delicately nibbled at her California roll, held like a prized specimen at the tip of her chopsticks. Beside her, the curtain’s folds blew in lightly, ruffled by a mild breeze, and, watching the fabric, Nicholas thought of the northern lights he had seen from the airplane window, and of how Daphne’s hair sometimes looked like that, too, a magical electric shivering beyond anyone’s descriptive powers. Thinking of his girlfriend’s hair, he himself shivered.

“What?” He had lost track of the topic.

“The thing she wrote,” Daphne said, noting his inattention. The curtain brushed against her arm. “On the wine bottle.” She pointed her chopsticks at him. “Do I even know what loins are? I don’t think I do. Why should I fear them?”

“They’re down here, I think,” Nicholas said, glancing in the general direction of his waist and crotch. “In French I think it’s ‘ reins ’ or something like that.”

“Oh,” Daphne said. “Those.” She chewed thoughtfully. “Loins. Like a cut of meat. I wonder if she was ever assaulted. Well, probably not.”

Following a respectful pause, Nicholas said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s about that. It’s about her husband, or God, or maybe her husband-as-God, or God-as-her-husband, one of those messed-up dirt-road deals. Beats me.”

Daphne scowled at her sushi plate, while she fiddled with a piece of raw salmon. “Hey, guess what? I’m pregnant again,” she announced with the flat apologetic tone she always employed for big declarations. “What do you think of that?” She tried on a quick, blissful expression for him. “I threw up this morning,” she said, trying to disguise her happiness. “But I knew a few days ago.”

The calamari in Nicholas’s mouth went a little dry as he leaned forward to kiss her. They had been through this whole business a couple of years ago, so in a sense he was prepared, and he remembered to resume chewing. Somehow, they both had been negligent when it came to reproductive issues down through the years, and they had slipped up before. They had known each other since high school and had a devotion to each other that neither of them could quite accept. The last time Daphne had found herself in the family way, the problem had been disposed of rapidly and efficiently, and they had — or at least Nicholas had — chalked it up to one of those unexpected outcomes of sex. Love was one; babies were another. Something told Nicholas it would not go that way this time around. Easefulness, ever so gently, was slipping out of his grasp. He gazed at her hair again. Somewhat against his will, he felt the voltage of his love for her pass through him.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s great . I’m … happy, I guess. Oh, honey. It’s so …” He searched for an adjective. “ Decisive. ” He gave her one of his great grins, out of his arsenal of grins and smiles. “I hadn’t expected.”

“Me, neither. Well, listen, Nickie. We can talk about this more later. You know? We don’t have to talk about it now. Not over sushi. I didn’t mean to stop the conversation. I didn’t mean to drop a bombshell. Well, of course, I guess it is a bombshell, but I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Daph, it’s not a bombshell,” he said, speaking out of his one general principle that a man should never appear to be fazed by anything a woman does. “We’ll deal with it. I love you, right? Everything fixes itself when two people love each other. Which we do.”

“Speaking of loins and money,” she said, “when are you next going to be seeing the Adult?” She had a way of changing the topic when Nicholas didn’t expect her to. Even the fact of her pregnancy didn’t have a long conversational shelf life with her. Happiness made her shy.

“In a few days. I’ve called her. I’m taking that wine bottle to her. It strikes the right note. She’ll love it. I’ll drive up on Tuesday.”

“It’s you she loves,” Daphne said, looking at Nicholas tenderly, as the gangster’s wife might look at the gangster. Next to their table, another couple glanced over at them, and Nicholas realized that Daphne had been speaking more loudly than she usually did. “You and that face of yours! It’s mean , actually, what you do to her — making her all … I don’t know, gooey. And then you take her money and go home. It’s not cruel, but it is mean.” She used her bad-girl tone on him. “You’re such a rascal. She just pines and sighs for you. Poor Mrs. Andriessen. Poor Adult.”

“Yeah,” Nicholas said. “Well, that’s life, honey. It’s what people expect of me. It pays various bills.”

“I pay the bills, too,” she said, her voice modulating, and as the curtains continued to blow inward, Nicholas thought of a piece Daphne used to play occasionally on the flute, when she had thought that in order to be hired as a session musician, just out of Juilliard, she’d have to be versatile. She’d sit in the apartment’s bathroom, because she liked the acoustics in there, on the edge of the tub, wearing her flowered pajamas, and this miraculous music would come out, the most beautiful music Nicholas had ever heard up to that point in his life, Debussy’s “Syrinx,” about a girl turned into a reed. “They buy from me , too,” she said, spearing something white on the plate. She smiled at him. “You and me, we just can’t be resisted.”

An hour or so after he had arrived in New Paltz and had shown her the Granny-inscribed wine bottle, the Adult asked Nicholas to do a favor for her. She wanted him to clamber up into her backyard apple tree and cut off one of its dead branches. He gave her a skeptical look. Didn’t she realize that he was an art dealer, not a tree service? He was miffed. And he wasn’t dressed for the job, the sort of chore you’d ask your husband or boyfriend to do. But some complicated subtext had probably attached itself to her request, and he felt a roiling of curiosity. By the time she mentioned the dead branch, they had already had lunch and had talked about the relationship between Granny W.’s work and the famous road signs of Jesse Smith, now on display in several museums, and he wanted to close the deal and get home. Still, there was that gleam in her eye. The Adult had studied Granny W.’s bottle as if she were unsure whether she would purchase it — as if she were waiting for him to do this favor as an act of friendship, or masculine graciousness.

He unbuttoned his white shirt and took off his shoes and socks. The Adult stood on the perfectly mown grass in her running shoes and slacks and blouse, observing him with precise attention. As a boy, he had been an avid tree climber. What had happened to that prehistoric skill, now that he lived in Brooklyn? The proficiency had gone dormant, like all his other childhood aptitudes. Holding on to the handsaw, he made his way up into the tree, and he heard the Adult say, “Be careful.”