Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “I won’t tell anybody about this if you don’t,” Jeremy says.

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll tell them you fell into the river. I’ll say that you slipped in the mud.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That can happen. I mean really.” Jeremy is enthusiastic now, creating a cover story for his father. “You were taking pictures and stuff, and you got too close to the river, and, you know, bang, you slipped, and like that. Just don’t ever tell Mom, okay? We’ll just … Holy shit! What’s that?”

  The car has been climbing a hill, and near the top, where a slight curve to the right banks the road toward the passenger side, there comes into view an amazing sight that has cut Jeremy into silence: an old wooden two-story house on an enormous platform truck, squarely in the middle of the road, blocking them. The house on the truck is moving at five or ten miles an hour. Who knows what its speed is, this white clapboard monument, this parade, a smaller truck in front, and one in back, with flashing lights, and a WIDE LOAD sign? No one would think of measuring its speed. Conor looks up and sees what he knows is a bedroom window. He imagines himself in that bedroom. He is dripping water all over his son’s car, and he is beginning now to shiver, as the truck, carrying the burden it was made to carry, struggles up the next hill.

  The Cures for Love

  ON THE DAY he left her for good, she put on one of his caps. It fit snugly over her light brown hair. The cap had the manufacturer’s name of his pickup truck embossed above the visor in gold letters. She wore the cap backward, the way he once had, while she cooked dinner. Then she kept it on in her bath that evening. When she leaned back in the tub, the visor hitting the tiles, she could smell his sweat from the inside of the headband, even over the smell of the soap. His sweat had always smelled like freshly broiled whitefish.

  What he owned, he took. Except for the cap, he hadn’t left much else behind in the apartment. He had what he thought was a soulful indifference to material possessions, so he didn’t bother saving them. It hadn’t occurred to her until later that she might be one of those possessions. He had liked having things—quality durable goods—around for a little while, she thought bitterly, and then he enthusiastically threw them all out. They were there one day—his leather vest, his gold clubs—and then they were gone. She had borrowed one of his gray T-shirts months ago to wear to bed when she had had a cold, and she still had it, a gray tee in her bottom dresser drawer. But she had accidentally washed it, and she couldn’t smell him on the fabric anymore, not a trace of him.

  Her cat now yowled around five thirty, at exactly the time when he used to come home. She—the cat—had fallen for him the moment she’d seen him, rushing over to him, squirming on her back in his lap, declawed paws waving in the air. The guy had had a gift, a tiny genius for relentless charm, that caused anything—women, men, cats, trees for all she knew—to fall in love with him, and not calmly, either, but at the upper frequencies.

  Her clocks ached. Time had congealed. For the last two days, knowing he would go, she had tried to be busy. She had tried reading books, for example. They couldn’t preoccupy her. They were just somebody’s thoughts. Her wounded imagination included him and herself, but only those two, bone hurtling against bone.

  She was not a romantic and did not like the word “romance.” They hadn’t had a romance, the two of them. Nothing soft or tender, like that. They had just, well, driven into each other like reckless drivers at an intersection, neither one wanting to yield the right-of-way. She was a classicist recently out of graduate school, and for a job she taught Latin and Greek in a Chicago private school, and she understood from her reading of Thucydides and Catullus and Sophocles and Sappho, among others, how people actually fought, and what happened when they actually fell in love and were genuinely and almost immediately incompatible. The old guys told the truth, she believed, about love and warfare, the peculiar combination of attraction and hatred existing together. They had told the truth before Christianity put civilization into a dreamworld.

  After she got out of the bathtub, she went to bed without drying herself off first. She removed the baseball cap and rolled around under the covers, dampening the sheets. It’s like this, she said to herself.

  She thought of herself as “she.” At home she narrated her actions to herself as she performed them: “Now she is watering the plants.” “Now she is feeding the cat.” “Now she is staring off into space.” “Now she is calling her friend Ticia, who is not at home. She will not leave a message on Ticia’s machine. She doesn’t do that.”

  She stood naked in front of the mirror. She thought: I am the sexiest woman who can read Latin and Greek in the state of Illinois. She surveyed her legs and her face, which he had praised many times. I look great and feel like shit and that’s that.

  The next morning she made breakfast but couldn’t eat it. She hated it that she had gotten into this situation, loaded down with humiliating feelings. She wouldn’t tell anyone. Pushing the scrambled eggs around on the plate, making a mess of them, the buttered wheat toast, and the strawberry jam, her head down on her arm, she fell into speculation: Okay, yes, right, it’s a mistake to think that infatuation has anything to do with personality, or personal tastes. You don’t, uh, decide about any of this, do you? she asked herself, half forming the words on her lips. Love puts anyone in a state outside the realm of thought, like one of those Eleusinian cults where no one ever gets permission to speak of the mysteries. When you’re not looking, your mouth gets taped shut. You fall in love with someone not because he’s nice to you or can read your mind but because, when he kisses you, your knees weaken, or because you can’t stop looking at his skin or at the way his legs, inside his jeans, shape the fabric. His breath meets your breath, and the two breaths either intermingle and create a charge or they don’t. Personality comes later; personality, she thought, reaching for the copy of Ovid that was about to fall off the table, is the consolation prize of middle age.

  She put the breakfast dishes in the sink. She turned on the radio and noticed after five minutes that she hadn’t listened to any of it. She snapped it off and glanced angrily in the direction of the bedroom, where all this trouble had started.

  She and he had ridden each other in that bed. She glowered at it, framed in the doorway of the bedroom, sun pouring in the east window and across the yellow bedspread. They had a style, but, well, yes, almost everyone had a style. For starters, they took their time. Nothing for the manuals, nothing for the record books. But the point wasn’t the lovemaking, not exactly. What they did started with sex but ended somewhere else. She believed that the sex they had together invoked the old gods, just invited them right in, until, boom, there they were. She wondered over the way the spirit-gods, the ones she lonesomely believed in, descended over them and surrounded them and briefly made them feel like gods themselves. She felt huge and powerful, together with him. It was archaic, this descent, and pleasantly scary. They both felt it happening; at least he said he did. The difference was that, after a while, he didn’t care about the descent of the old gods or the spirits or whatever the hell he thought they were. He was from Arizona, and he had a taste for deserts and heat and golf and emptiness. Perhaps that explained it.

  He had once blindfolded her with her silk bathrobe belt during their lovemaking and she had still felt the spirit coming down. Blindfolded, she could see it more clearly than ever.

  Ovid. At the breakfast table she held on to the book that had almost fallen to the floor. Ovid: an urbane know-it-all with a taste for taking inventories. She had seldom enjoyed reading Ovid. He had a masculine smirking cynicism, and then its opposite, self-pity, which she found offensive.

  And this was the Remedia amoris, a book she couldn’t remember studying in graduate school or anywhere else. The remedies for love. She hadn’t realized she even owned it. It was in the back of her edition of the Ars amatoria. Funny how books put themselves into your hands when they wanted you to read them.

  Because s
pring had hit Chicago, and sunlight had given this particular Saturday morning a light fever, and because her black mood was making her soul sore, she decided to get on the Chicago Transit Authority bus and read Ovid while she rode to the suburbs and back. Absentmindedly, she found herself crying while she stood at the corner bus stop, next to the graffitied shelter, waiting. She was grateful that no one looked at her.

  After the bus arrived in a jovial roar of diesel fumes and she got on, she found a seat near a smudgy semi-clean window. The noise was therapeutic, and the absence on the bus of businessmen with their golf magazines relieved her. No one on this bus on Saturday morning had a clue about how to conduct a life. She gazed at the tattered jackets and gummy spotted clothes of the other passengers. No one with a serious relationship with money rode a bus like this at such a time. It was the fuck-up express. Hollow and stoned and vacant-eyed people like herself sat there, men who worked in car washes, women who worked in diners. They looked as if their rights to their own sufferings had already been revoked months ago.

  Over the terrible clatter, trees in blossom rushed past, dogwood and lilacs and like that. The blossoms seemed every bit as noisy as the bus. She shook her head and glanced down at her book.

  Scripta cave relegas blandae servata puellae:

  Constantis animos scripta relecta movent.

  Omnia pone feros (pones invitus) in ignes

  Et dic ‘ardoris sit rogus iste mei.’

  Oh, right. Yeah. Burn the love letters? Throw them all in the flames? And then announce, “This is the pyre of my love”? Hey, thanks a lot. What love letters? He hadn’t left any love letters, just this cap—she was still wearing it—with CHEVY embossed on it in gold.

  Quisquis amas, loca sola nocent: loca sola caveto;

  Quo fugis? in populo tutior esse potes.

  Non tibi secretis (augent secreta furores)

  Est opus; auxilio turba futura tibi est.

  Riding the CTA bus, and now glimpsing Lake Michigan through a canyon of buildings, she felt herself stepping into an emotional lull, the eye of the storm that had been knocking her around. In the storm’s eye, everyone spoke Latin. The case endings and the declensions and Ovid’s I-know-it-all syntax and tone remained absolutely stable, however, no matter what the subject was. They were like formulas recited from a comfortable sofa by a banker who had never made a dangerous investment. The urbanity and the calm of the poem clawed at her. She decided to translate the four lines so that they sounded heartbroken and absentminded, jostled around in the aisles.

  The lonely places

  are the worst. I tell you,

  when you’re heart-

  sick, go

  where the pushing and shoving

  crowd gives you

  some nerve. Don’t be

  alone, up in your

  burning room, burning—

  trust me:

  get knocked

  down in public,

  you’ll be helped up.

  All right: so it was a free translation. So what? She scribbled it on the back of a deposit slip from the Harris Bank and put it into her purse. She wouldn’t do any more translating just now. Any advice blew unwelcome winds into her. Especially advice from Ovid.

  Now they were just north of the Loop. This time, when she looked out of the window, she saw an apartment building on fire: firetrucks flamesroof waterlights crowdsbluesky smoke-smoke. There, and gone just that rapidly. Suffering, too, probably, experienced by someone, but not immediately visible, not from here, at forty miles per hour. She thought: Well, that’s corny, an apartment fire as seen from a bus. Nothing to do about that one. Quickly she smelled smoke, and then, just as quickly, it was gone. To herself, she grinned without realizing what she was doing. Then she looked around. No one had seen her smile. She had always liked fires. She felt ashamed of herself, but momentarily cheerful.

  She found herself in Evanston, got out, and took the return bus back. She had observed too much of the lake on the way. Lake Michigan was at its most decorative and bourgeois in the northern suburbs: whitecaps, blue water, waves lapping the shore, abjectly picturesque.

  By afternoon she was sitting in O’Hare Airport, at gate 23A, the waiting area for a flight to Memphis. She wasn’t going to Memphis—she didn’t have a ticket to anywhere—and she wasn’t about to meet anyone, but she had decided to take Ovid’s advice to go where the crowds were, for the tonic effect. She had always liked the anonymity of airports anyway. A businessman carrying a laptop computer and whose face had a WASPy nondescript pudgy blankness fueled by liquor and avarice was raising his voice at the gate agent, an African-American woman. Men like that raised their voices and made demands as a way of life; it was as automatic and as thoughtless as cement turning and slopping around inside a cement mixer. “I don’t think you understand the situation,” he was saying. He had a standby ticket but had not been in the gate area when they had called his name, and now, the plane being full, he would have to take a later flight. “You have no understanding of my predicament here. Who is your superior?” His wingtip shoes were scuffed, and his suit was tailored one size too small for him, so that it bulged at the waist. He had combed strands of hair across his sizable bald spot. His forehead was damp with sweat, and his nose sported broken capillaries. He was not quite first-class. She decided to eat a chili dog and find another gate to sit in. Walking away, she heard the gate agent saying, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry.”

  You couldn’t eat a chili dog in this airport sitting down. It was not permitted. You had to stand at the plastic counter of Here’s Mr. Chili, trying not to spill on the polyester guy reading USA Today, your volume of Publius Ovidius Naso next to you, your napkin in your other hand, thinking about Ovid’s exile to the fringe of the Roman empire, to Tomis, where, broken in spirit, solitary, he wrote the Tristia, some of the saddest poems written by anyone anywhere, but a—what?—male sadness about being far from where the action was. There was no action in Tomis, no glamour, no togas—just peasants and plenty of mud labor. On the opposite side of Here’s Mr. Chili was another gate where post-frightened passengers were scurrying out of the plane from Minneapolis. A woman in jeans and carrying a backpack fell into the arms of her boyfriend. They had started to kiss, the way people do in airports, in that depressing public style, all hands and tongues. And over here a chunky Scandinavian grandma was grasping her grandchildren in her arms like ships tied up tightly to a dock. You should go where people are happy, Ovid was saying. You should witness the high visibility of joy. You should believe. In …?

  Si quis amas nec vis, facito contagia vites

  Right, right: “If you don’t

  want to love,

  don’t expose yourself to

  the sight

  of love, the contagion.”

  Evening would be coming on soon; she had to get back.

  She was feeling a bit light-headed, the effect of the additives in the chili dog: the Red concourse of O’Hare, with its glacially smooth floors and reflecting surfaces, was, at the hour before twilight, the scariest man-made place she’d ever seen. This airport is really man-made, she thought. They don’t get more man-made than this. Of course, she had seen it a hundred times before, she just hadn’t bothered looking. If something hadn’t been hammered or fired, it wasn’t in this airport. Stone, metal, and glass, like the hyperextended surfaces of eternity, across which insect-people moved, briefly, trying before time ran out to find a designated anthill. Here was a gate for Phoenix. There was a gate for Raleigh-Durham. One locale was pretty much like another. People made a big deal of their own geographical differences to give themselves specific details to talk about. Los Angeles, Cedar Rapids, Duluth. What did it matter where anyone lived—Rome, Chicago, or Romania? All she really wanted was to be in the same room with her as-of-yesterday ex. Just being around him had made her happy. It was horrible but true. She had loved him so much it gave her the creeps. He wasn’t worthy of her love but so what. Maybe, she thought, she should start do
ing an inventory of her faults, you know, figure the whole thing out—scars, bad habits, phrases she had used that he hadn’t liked. Then she could do an inventory of his faults. She felt some ketchup under her shoe and let herself fall.

  She looked up.

  Hands gripped her. Random sounds of sympathy. “Hey, lady, are you all right?” “Can you stand?” “Do you need some help?” A man, a woman, a second man: Ovid’s public brigade of first-aiders held her, clutched at her where she had sprawled sort of deliberately, here in the Red concourse. Expressions of fake concern like faces painted on flesh-colored balloons lowered themselves to her level. “I just slipped.” “You’re okay, you’re fine?” “Yes.” She felt her breast being brushed against, not totally and completely unpleasantly. It felt like the memory of a touch rather than a touch itself, no desire in it, no nothing. There: She was up. Upright. And dragging herself off, Ovid under her arm, to the bus back to the Loop and her apartment. Falling in the airport and being lifted up: okay, so it happened as predicted, but it didn’t make you feel wonderful. Comfortably numb was more like it. She dropped the Remedia amoris into a trash bin. Then she thought, Uh-oh, big mistake, maybe the advice is all wrong but at least he wants to cheer me up, who else wants to do that? She reached her hand into the trash bin and, looking like a wino grasping for return bottles, she pulled out her soiled book, smeared with mustard and relish.

  “Kit?”

  A voice.

  “Yes?” She turned around. She faced an expression of pleased surprise, on a woman she couldn’t remember ever seeing before.

  “It’s me. Caroline.”

  “Caroline?” As if she recognized her. Which she didn’t. At all.

  “What a coincidence! This is too amazing! What are you doing here?”

  “I’m, um, I was here. Seeing someone off. You know. To … ah, Seattle.”