Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“I drove home, as you know,” he said. “It took a long time.”

“Ah, Nicholas,” she said. “Your foot is bleeding.” She reached out and took his foot in her hand and gave him an expression of sweet concern. From a pocket, she drew out a piece of cloth and daubed at a small bloody scratch on his instep.

She was beautiful enough to sleep with, he thought, and it wouldn’t exactly be demeaning or patronizing, but he wasn’t going to make that particular pass at her and take her into the bedroom and undress her and sleep with her underneath one of Granny W.’s signs. Another blue motto. It had been hung above the bed, a cryptic sentence: SORROW ABIDETH BESIDE MY JOYOUS HEART. He wouldn’t willingly give the Adult the Nicholas-treatment in that bed no matter what, even if there were no possible unforeseen complications — and there were always unforeseen complications. If he made her momentarily happy, she would no longer be herself. And if Mrs. Andriessen were no longer herself, she would not be interesting; she would no longer be the Adult but just like the rest of them, and he himself would lose his bargaining chips. Besides, some women simply required suffering. She was, Nicholas thought, one of those.

“Patricia,” Nicholas said, “I should really go.”

“Should you?” she asked, releasing his foot. “All right. I suppose you should.”

He and Daphne were walking around the Great Lawn in Central Park when the thought occurred to Nicholas that the woman he was holding hands with should marry him. Or — what was the wording? — he should marry her . “Make it official,” as they used to say. “Make an honest woman of her,” they also said. Most of the leaves had changed color and fallen by now, but a few clung to their branches, and he could feel a rough cooling in the air. He didn’t quite know why he and Daphne needed to be married; he just felt that they should be. They had known each other forever, almost since they were kids. What he felt for her was as close to love as he was ever going to get. Something stood between him and the full blast of it, but nothing he had ever done for anybody had brought him closer.

On the baseball diamonds, the groups of boys who were playing softball yelled and smiled and pantomime-slugged each other, coached and encouraged by their parents, mostly the fathers. It was getting too late in autumn to play baseball, but apparently no one wanted to give it up. One team, the Slickers, was wearing white uniforms with green letters, and the other team, the Backpackers, wore white uniforms with blue letters. One of the Backpackers stood at the plate, wearing his batting helmet. He swung at a pitch and missed.

He seemed to be about ten or eleven years old. Nicholas thought of Gustav, the story the Adult had told of him, and of the piles of household items lying in the driveway.

The boy swung again and missed. “Strike two,” announced the umpire.

“Something is wrong,” Daphne said to Nicholas. She reached for his arm.

“That boy isn’t watching the ball,” Nicholas told her. “He’s distracted.”

“Something is wrong,” Daphne said again.

The pitcher stood on the mound and studied the batter. Daphne’s hand dug into his biceps. “Ow,” he said. “That hurts.”

All at once Daphne bent over, winced, and then began screaming softly. “Oh god oh god,” she said, between deep breaths, and at first Nicholas thought she might fall to the ground in pain, but, no: she had sufficient resources to take his arm and to stagger to Fifth Avenue, where he flagged down a cab to take them both to the emergency room.

“We lost it,” Nicholas said to the Adult.

Mrs. Andriessen let the pause go on for a long moment until Nicholas found himself able to say something else into his telephone. “She had a miscarriage,” he said. “She miscarried.”

“No, not quite,” the Adult told him, rather firmly. “You both did, didn’t you? You both miscarried.”

What did she mean this time? What did she ever mean? “Daphne’s still in the hospital, Patricia. She’ll be there overnight. She’s going to be there overnight. She’s very weak. She lost a lot of blood.” How rare for him to repeat himself, he thought. He felt more of his composure slipping away, following the composure he had already lost. “I’m going right back over there.”

“Why aren’t you there now? In the hospital? Why are you in Brooklyn?” the Adult asked him. “Why are you at home?”

“I had to feed the cat,” Nicholas told her. “I had to feed Plankton.”

“The cat can live. You should be with Daphne now. You should be sitting next to her in the hospital and you should be holding her hand and kissing her on the forehead and on both cheeks. You should try to revive her. Poor thing, she’s lying in bed with no one with her, and she’s kissing the air. Desperate women kiss the air, did you know that, Nicholas? When they’re alone, they kiss the air.”

“They do?”

“Yes. Or you could always pray to Saint Anthony. He’s the saint of lost things. I was raised Catholic, did you know?” Another pause. “ ‘Dear Saint Anthony, please look around: something is lost that must be found.’ That’s the Saint Anthony prayer. It works. It’s the only thing in Catholicism that still works for me, that prayer.”

“It can’t be found,” Nicholas said. “It’s not lost. It’s gone.”

“They kiss the air, Nicholas,” she repeated. “My darling friend, you are such a dilettante with us. You have just watched us, all your life. You have watched us as we fell in your direction.”

“Us?” It was a habit, this repetition. Of course she was right.

“You should go over there right now, where Daphne is.” Outside the apartment something was stirring, perhaps just down the block.

At the foot of Daphne’s bed, Nicholas stood gazing at the pale green wall behind where she lay. He stared at the wall because it was so hard to keep his eyes on her. Inside and within the room were tubes and pipes and expensive stainless-steel machines, some of which were breathing softly, while outside the room, many floors down, Manhattan traffic beeped on like the errant sounds of children playing with toy cars and plastic noisemakers. Daphne, for the moment, was unwatchable: on her face had been placed an expression he had never seen before. Her skin had taken on a terrible pallor. He couldn’t stand to see it there. It hurt him every time his eyes swept across her. Every time he took her in, he felt as if he aged another year.

He approached her and tried to do as the Adult had advised: he kissed Daphne on the forehead and tried to bend over the sides of the bed so he could kiss her. When he bent over, he thought he would pass out.

Daphne did not open her eyes. “The next time you go to Alaska,” she whispered, “you can tell Granny Westerby about us.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Yes, but we have a story now.” She opened her eyes to look at him. She did it slowly, as if it were a great effort — a terrible amount of work — to do so. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said tenderly, almost with pride, “you look awful.”

“Do I?” he asked.

“You look all broken and sideways,” she said disconnectedly. The medications had started to affect her speech. Still, no one had ever used those adjectives about him before. Rather desperately, he turned toward the window, but there was no refuge there, either, not for him. He felt himself fading toward Daphne in an effort to comfort her. He lowered himself again and touched his lips to her cheek.