Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “Don’t tell me anything,” he whispered. “That’s for kids. And be quiet. Listen. There’s a bird scratching in the tree outside. Hear it?”

  She did not. Margaret bent down to kiss his forehead and made her way out of the room, sick with vertigo. The hallway stretched and shrank while she balanced herself like a tightrope walker in a forward progress to the elevator. Three floors down, Mr. Bartlett was waiting for her, wearing a cap and a jacket in his wheelchair, but she tottered past him, out into the sun, which she saw had turned a sickly blue.

  There was something wrong with the bus.

  She sat near the back. The bus would start, reach twenty-five miles an hour, then stop. Not slow down. Stop. In midair, as it were. When it stopped, so did the world. The trees, pedestrians, and birds froze in midair, the birds glued to the sky. And when this occurred, Margaret grabbed the top of the seat in front of her, pressing it hard with her thumbs, hoping she could restart the world again.

  She looked up. In front of her a little girl was kneeling on the plastic seat next to her mother, facing the back, staring at Margaret. The little girl had two pigtails of brown hair, a bright red coat, and round-rimmed glasses too large for her face. As the bus began to move, Margaret stared at the girl, frowning because she wanted the youngster to know that staring is rude, a sign of bad breeding. But as she scowled and frowned, and the bus passengers swayed like a chorus together, she was horrified to feel her own eyes producing tears, which would run partway down her cheeks and then stop, as the bus itself stopped, as time halted. The little girl reminded Margaret of someone, someone she would never exactly remember again.

  The girl’s mouth opened slightly. Her eyes widened, and now she, too, was crying. Her glasses magnified her tears, which were caught by the rims in tiny pools. Margaret gathered herself together. It was one thing to cry herself for no special reason. It was quite another to make a little girl cry. That was contagion, and a mistake in anyone’s part of the world. So Margaret wiped her eyes with her coat sleeve and smiled fiercely at the girl, even laughing now, the laugh sounding like the yip of a small dog. “Toujours gai, toujours gai,” she said, louder than necessary, before she realized that little girls on buses don’t speak French and would never have heard of archy and mehitabel even if they did. “There’s a dance in the old dame yet,” Margaret said, to finish the phrase, quietly and to herself. She drew herself up and looked serious, as if she were on her way to someplace. She was not about to be cried at on a public bus in broad daylight.

  “What a nice day!” Margaret said aloud, but no one turned toward her. The little girl took off her glasses, wiped her eyes on her mother’s coat, and gave Margaret a hostile look before turning around. “The old lady shows her mettle,” Margaret continued, editorializing to herself, simultaneously making a mental note not to engage in private conversations where other people could hear her. It takes a minimum of sixty years’ experience to recognize how useful and necessary talking to oneself actually is. When you’re young, it just seems like a crazy habit. Margaret did not speak these thoughts aloud, as the bus whirled upside down and righted itself; she whispered them.

  They went past a world of details. Sidewalks broke into spiderweb patterns. A green squirt gun was in a boy’s hand, but the bus was moving too quickly for her to see the rest of the boy. In a tree that she noticed by accident, a brown bird flew out of a nest. Something redbreast. Robin redbreast. The bus driver’s head, suddenly in the way of the sun, shone a fine gunmetal blue. On a jungle gym, a boy wearing a green sweatshirt, smaller than Horace’s, hung down from a steel bar with only his legs, his knees, holding him there. Margaret stared at him. How was it possible for a human being to hang by his knees from a bar? More important, why would anyone want to do it? Before an answer came, the boy faded out and was replaced by another detail, of a seagull standing proudly in someone’s alley, an arrogant look on its face. The seagull cheered Margaret. She admired its pluck. The other details she saw were less invigorating: an old man, very white in all respects, asleep in a doorway; two young people, across the street from the art institute, kissing underneath a tree (the tree and the kissing made her flesh crawl); and now, at last, a cumulating, bright pink, puffing cloud of smoke exploding out of someone’s backyard, someone’s shed, on fire or dynamited, even the smell reaching her. The bus drove on and Margaret forgot about it.

  She remembered her stop, however, and was halfway up the sidewalk when she remembered that she had forgotten to get out at the Safeway to buy groceries. She counted all her canned goods, in her mind’s eye. “I’ll be all right,” she said, “and besides, there are more buses going here and there. It’s their fate in life.” She trudged on into the building.

  Skinny Mr. Fletcher, employee of the United States Postal Service, had already come and gone with his Santa’s sack of bills and messages. Margaret unlocked her mailbox, hoping for a free sample of a new soap. Instead, there was a solitary postcard inside, showing on its picture side Buster Keaton walking squarely down the middle of a railroad track. On the other side was a message from Horace, written in his miserable script. Some letters had been crossed out, but he had not given up.

  Dear Margaret,

  Happy birthaniversery

  today

  from love Horace

  ps remember lightbulbs

  Where had he mailed the message? Where, more important, had he found the stamp? How had he remembered the address? It was all very mysterious. The postcard was, of course, simply one of his monstrously large postcard collection, which he had taken with him to the First Christian Residence, over two hundred of them. He had traded a few for cigarettes. Margaret looked at Buster Keaton as she went up the stairs, the stairway extending and shortening, like a human-sized accordion.

  She opened her door and stepped into the living room. On the left was her pastel blue sofa, next to her radio and television set, and on the right was her mother’s harmonium, underneath a mirror. Behind the sofa were bookshelves, filled with books she and Horace had read to each other: Robert Benchley, Don Marquis, Brooks Atkinson. She could remember their names but not the character of their work. “Feels like I’m walking through gelatin,” she meant to say, but no sound could make its way out of her throat.

  She stood stranded inside the door, waiting for something to happen. At last the invisible steel wires holding her feet loosened for a moment, and she managed to get as far as the harmonium. Then the movie came to a halt again. She hadn’t taken her coat off, nor could she. She was forced to look at more details: the spiral pattern on her white rug; the legs of the harmonium; her own white surprised face in the mirror. “I know where I am,” she said. “I’m home.” But she didn’t remember the mirror. Who had brought it here? Had it been delivered by Mr. Fletcher, from his sack?

  “I should go to the kitchen,” she said. “Or I should take a nap.” Step by step, feeling the great work her progress required, she walked to the kitchen, weighted down by the thousands of details that were in her way. A nick in the floor, a jolly afternoon sun, a cookie crumb in the shape of an elf sleeping on the dinner table. A brown lamp with a tiny dial switch on its base, and hundreds of slits in its metal shade. And on the harmonium, photographs. Photographs of her three daughters, and one of herself, Margaret, and her husband, Horace, sitting down beneath a chandelier somewhere, and smiling. In the chandelier were eight lightbulbs, their glass transparent, shaped from a broad base to a sharp tip, like a flame. “Well, I never noticed,” she said. “You can’t blame me for that.”

  In the kitchen, she was drinking water when she looked out the window and saw them. They were dressed in uniforms, and they had big arms and big faces. They had their truck in the alley and were carefully loading chairs, lamps, sofas, and tables into it. She noticed that they didn’t joke as they took Mrs. Silverman’s furniture away, that it was a solemn event, like running up a flag. Feeling foolish and annoyed, Margaret cranked open the window and began to shout. “Who told you boys to come h
ere? Where do you think you’re taking those things?” She noticed a lion painted on the side of the moving van and was momentarily disconcerted. “I hope you boys know what you’re doing!” she shouted at last, down to the large, astonished faces. When they finally looked away from her, she lifted the glass of water to them, drank, then spilled out the rest into the sink.

  She tried to remember what she had planned to eat for either lunch or dinner and found her way back into the living room, where she sat down in front of the television set. She saw, reflected in the dark screen, herself, in black-and-white, miniaturized. She smiled and laughed at the tricks television could play, whether on or off. And then, behind her, but also in the background of the set, she saw a tree, waiting for her. Horace had left his trees behind when she and he had moved out of the house. She stood up and went to the window again, and with the clatter of furniture being hauled away in the alley serving as a background, she began to stare at the branches and dried leaves of the one tree the management had planted, and then she began to talk. She told the tree about Horace. Then she laughed and said that she and he would probably sit together again, checking on the sun and the other tricks of light shining from odd directions on the open gulf lying radiant and bare between them.

  Harmony of the World

  IN THE SMALL Ohio town where I grew up, many homes had parlors that contained pianos, sideboards, and sofas, heavy objects signifying gentility. These pianos were rarely tuned. They went flat in summer around the Fourth of July and sharp in winter at Christmas. Ours was a Story and Clark. On its music stand were copies of Stephen Foster and Ethelbert Nevin favorites, along with one Chopin prelude that my mother would practice for twenty minutes every three years. She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio—all of it, every scrap—made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything. Happiness is not infectious, but somehow her happiness infected my father, a pharmacist, and then spread through the rest of the household. My whole family was obstinately cheerful. I think of my two sisters, my brother, and my parents as having artificial, pasted-on smiles, like circus clowns. They apparently thought cheer and good Christian words were universals, respected everywhere. The pianos were part of this cheer. They played for celebrations and moments of pleasant pain. Or rather, someone played them, but not too well, since excellent playing would have been faintly antisocial. “Chopin,” my mother said, shaking her head as she stumbled through the prelude. “Why is he famous?”

  When I was six, I received my first standing ovation. On the stage of the community auditorium, where the temperature was about ninety-four degrees, sweat fell from my forehead onto the piano keys, making their ivory surfaces slippery. At the conclusion of the piece, when everyone stood up to applaud, I thought they were just being nice. My playing had been mediocre; only my sweating had been extraordinary. Two years later, they stood up again. When I was eleven, they cheered. By that time I was astonishing these small-town audiences with Chopin and Rachmaninoff recital chestnuts. I thought I was a genius and read biographies of Einstein. Already the townspeople were saying that I was the best thing Parkersville had ever seen, that I would put the place on the map. Mothers would send their children by to watch me practice. The kids sat with their mouths open while I polished off more classics.

  Like many musicians, I cannot remember ever playing badly, in the sense of not knowing what I was doing. In high school, my identity was being sealed shut: my classmates called me “el señor longhair,” even though I wore a crew cut, this being the 1950s. Whenever the town needed a demonstration of local genius, it called upon me. There were newspaper articles detailing my accomplishments, and I must have heard the phrase “future concert career” at least two hundred times. My parents smiled and smiled as I collected applause. My senior year I gave a solo recital and was hired for umpteen weddings and funerals. I was good luck. On the Fourth of July the townspeople brought a piano out to the city square so that I could improvise music between explosions at the fireworks display. Just before I left for college, I noticed that our neighbors wanted to come up to me, ostensibly for small talk, but actually to touch me.

  In college I made a shocking discovery: other people existed in the world who were as talented as I was. If I sat down to play a Debussy étude, they would sit down and play Beethoven, only faster and louder than I had. I felt their breath on my neck. Apparently there were other small towns. In each one of these small towns there was a genius. Perhaps some geniuses were not actually geniuses. I practiced constantly and began to specialize in the non-Germanic piano repertoire. I kept my eye out for students younger than I was, who might have flashier technique. At my senior recital I played Mozart, Chopin, Ravel, and Debussy, with encore pieces by Scriabin. I managed to get the audience to stand up for the last time.

  I was accepted into a large midwestern music school, famous for its high standards. Once there, I discovered that genius, to say nothing of talent, was a common commodity. Since I was only a middling composer, with no interesting musical ideas as such, I would have to make my career as a performer or teacher. But I didn’t want to teach, and as a performer I lacked pizzazz. For the first time, it occurred to me that my life might be evolving into something unpleasant, something with the taste of stale bread.

  I was beginning to meet performers with more confidence than I had, young musicians to whom doubt was as alien as proper etiquette. Often these people dressed like tramps, smelled, smoked constantly, were gay or sadistic. Whatever their imbalances, they were not genteel. They did not represent small towns. I was struck by their eyes. Their eyes seemed to proclaim, “The universe believes in me. It always has.”

  My piano teacher was a man I will call Luther Stecker. Every year he taught at the music school for six months. For the following six months he toured. He turned me away from the repertoire with which I was familiar and demanded that I learn several pieces by composers whom I had not often played, including Bach, Brahms, and Liszt. Each one of these composers discovered a weak point in me: I had trouble keeping up the consistent frenzy required by Liszt, the mathematical precision required by Bach, the unpianistic fingerings of Brahms.

  I saw Stecker every week. While I played, he would doze off. When he woke, he would mumble some inaudible comment. He also coached a trio I participated in, and he spoke no more audibly then than he did during my private lessons.

  I couldn’t understand why, apart from his reputation, the school had hired him. Then I learned that in every Stecker-student’s life, the time came when the Master collected his thoughts, became blunt, and told the student exactly what his future would be. For me, the moment arrived on the third of November 1966. I was playing sections of the Brahms Paganini Variations, a fiendish piece on which I had spent many hours. When I finished, I saw him sit up.

  “Very good,” he said, squinting at me. “You have talents.”

  There was a pause. I waited. “Thank you,” I said.

  “You have a nice house?” he asked.

  “A nice house? No.”

  “You should get a nice house somewhere,” he said, taking his handkerchief out of his pocket and waving it at me. “With windows. Windows with a view.”

  I didn’t like the drift of his remarks. “I can’t afford a house,” I said.

  “You will. A nice house. For you and your family.”

  I resolved to get to the heart of this. “Professor,” I asked, “what did you think of my playing?”

  “Excellent,” he said. “That piece is very difficult.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes, technically excellent,” he said, and my heart began to pound. “Intelligent phrasing. Not much for me to say. Yes. That piece has many notes,” he added, enjoying the non sequitur.

  I nodded. “Many notes.”

  “And you hit all of them accurately. Good pedal and good discipline. I like how you hit the notes.”

  I was dangling on his string, a little puppet.

  “Thousands of notes
, I suppose,” he said, staring at my forehead, which was beginning to get damp, “and you hit all of them. You only forgot one thing.”

  “What?”

  “The passion!” he roared. “You forgot the passion! You always forget it! Where is it? Did you leave it at home? You never bring it with you! Never! I listen to you and think of a robot playing! A smart robot, but a robot! No passion! Never ever ever!” He stopped shouting long enough to sneeze. “You should buy a house. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because the only way you will ever praise God is with a family, that’s why! Not with this piano! You are a fine student,” he wound up, “but you make me sick! Why do you make me sick?”

  He waited for me to answer.

  “Why do you make me sick?” he shouted. “Answer me!”

  “How can I possibly answer you?”

  “By articulating words in English! Be courageous! Offer a suggestion! Why do you make me sick?”

  I waited for a minute, the longest minute of my life. “Passion,” I said at last. “You said there wasn’t enough passion. I thought there was. Perhaps not.”

  He nodded. “No. You are right. No passion. A corruption of music itself. Your playing is gentle, too much good taste. To play the piano like a genius, you must have a bit of the fanatic. Just a bit. But it is essential. You have stubbornness and talent but no fanaticism. You don’t have the salt on the rice. Without salt, the rice is inedible, no matter what its quality otherwise.” He stood up. “I tell you this because sooner or later someone else will. You will have a life of disappointments if you stay in music. You may find a teacher who likes you. Good, good. But you will never be taken up! Never! You should buy a house, young man. With a beautiful view. Move to it. Don’t stay here. You are close to success, but it is the difference between leaping the chasm and falling into it, one inch short. You are an inch short. You could come back for more lessons. You could graduate from here. But if you are truly intelligent, you will say good-bye. Good-bye.” He looked down at the floor and did not offer me his hand.