Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “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.

  But in the restaurant, he played the gentleman: he talked about landscape architecture, landscaping generally, so that the conversation took a lackadaisical turn toward the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, and she talked about her work and her scholarship, about Pérez Galdós, the polite chitchat of two people who possibly want to get to know each other, post-sex, and she wondered whether they would ever talk about anything that mattered to them, and whether all his
talk about souls was just a bluff, a conversational shell game. She was about to ask him where he had grown up, where he had been educated, what his parents had been like, when he said, “Let’s take a walk. Let’s go down to the river.” The bill for the dinner came, a considerable sum, and he paid in cash, drawing out a mass of twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, a monotonous and mountainous pile of twenties, all the cash looking like novelty items, and Melinda thought, This man has no usable credit.

  Across the Mississippi River near St. Anthony Falls stands the Stone Arch Bridge, built of limestone in the nineteenth century for the railroad traffic of lumber and grain and coal in and out of Minneapolis. After the railroad traffic ceased, the bridge had been converted to a tourist pedestrian walkway, and he took her hand in his as they strolled over the Mississippi River, looking at the abandoned mills on either side, and the rapids and the locks directly below.

  “They don’t manufacture anything here anymore, you know,” he said to her, close to a whisper.

  “The buildings are still here.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but they’re ghosts. They’re all ghosts. They’re shells.”

  “But look at the lights,” she said. “Lofts and condos.”

  “They don’t make anything in there anymore,” he said. “Except babies, sometimes, the thirtysomethings. Otherwise, it’s all a museum. American cities are all becoming museums.” He said this with a wild, incongruous cheer, as a devil would. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you one true thing. Listen up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When I was a little boy, I lived three or four blocks down from where you lived. I’ve told you this. You don’t remember me. That’s all. You don’t remember. I remember you, but you don’t remember me. No one ever remembers me. One night I was playing in the living room, with my toy armies, and your mother came to our door. I think she was drunk. But I didn’t know that. She rang the bell and she entered our house. My parents were upstairs, or somewhere. Your mother came into the house and looked at me playing with my soldiers, and she looked and looked and looked. She smiled and nodded. And then she asked me if I would like to go away with her, said that she had always wanted to take a boy like me with her on her travels.”

  “How did you know it was my mother?” Melinda asked, between shivers.

  “I was eight years old. Maybe nine. Everyone knew about your mother. Everyone. I had been warned. You knew that. Everyone knew that. But she had a nice face.”

  “Where did she say she wanted to take you away to?”

  “She had this look in her eyes, I still remember it,” Augenblick said. “You have it, too. She wanted to disappear and to take someone along with her. That night, it was going to be me. Your mother was famous in this neighborhood. But everybody thought she was harmless.”

  “Well, she was a success,” Melinda said, the shivers taking her over, so that she had to clutch a guardrail. “In disappearing.” She leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek, a show of bravery. “Death is such a cliché,” she said. “She disappeared into a cliché.”

  “Is it?” He wasn’t looking at her. “That’s news to me. She grabbed me by the hand and she took me for a walk and then she tried to get me into the car, but I broke her hold on me and I ran back to my house.”

  “Yeah,” she said, dreamily. “Death. It’s so retro. It’s for kids and old people. It’s an adolescent thing. You can do better than dying. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough,” she quoted from somewhere. “Anyway, she disappeared, and so what?” It occurred to her at that moment that Augenblick might have leapt off the bridge to his death but that he had, just then, changed his mind, because she had said that death was a cliché. That was it: he looked like a failed suicide. He was one of those.

  “She gave me the scare of my life,” he said. “Your harmless mother. She scared everybody until she was gone. Shall we go back now?” he asked. “Should we go somewhere?”

  “No,” she said. “Not again. Not this time.” She waited. “We’re going to stay right here for a while.”

  He eventually dropped her off at the front door of her father’s house, thanked her, and drove off in his car, which, he had explained, was a Sterling, a nonsense car. She guessed that the license plates on the car had been stolen so that he could not be traced. Whoever he was—Augenblick! what a name!—he would not return. She wondered for a moment or two what his name actually had been, where he had worked, and whether any of it, that is, the actual, mattered, now or ever.

  She paid the babysitter and then went upstairs to check on Eric.

  The ghosts of the house, she imagined, were gathered around her son. The couples who had lived here from one generation to the next, the solitaries, the happy and unhappy, the gay and the straight and the young and the old: she felt them grouped behind her as a community corralled in the room, touching her questioningly as she bent over the crib and watched her boy, her perfection, breathe in and out, his Catalan-American breaths.

  She tiptoed into her father’s room. He was still sitting up, carefully studying the wallpaper.

  “Hey, Daddy,” she said.

  “Hey, sugar,” he replied, tilting his head in his characteristically odd way. “How did it go? Your date with this Augenblick?”

  “Oh, fine,” she said, shunning the narrative of what had happened, how she had fought off his information with a little kiss. Her father wouldn’t be interested—especially about her mother.

  “I didn’t like him. He wasn’t out of the top drawer.”

  “More like the middle drawer. But that’s all right,” Melinda said. “I won’t see him again.”

  “Good,” her father said. “I thought he was a fortune-hunter, after your millions.” He laughed hoarsely. “Heh heh. He looked very unsuccessful, I must say, with that dyed hair.” He tilted his head the other way. “I went to the Gates of Heaven today,” he said, “on the bus. The number eight bus.”

  “How did it look?” she asked. “The gates?”

  “Tarnished,” he said. “They could use a shine. No one ever seems to do maintenance anymore. The bus was empty. Even though I was the thing riding on it.” He tilted his head the other way. “Completely empty, with me at a window seat. That was how I knew I was almost gone. Honey, you should have more friends, better friends. Someone who doesn’t make you groan.”

  It didn’t shock her, somehow, that he had heard them. “I have friends. Just not here. I’m moving back home,” she said. “To my house. Where I live. I can’t stay here anymore, Daddy. I can’t take care of you anymore. I love you, Daddy, but I can’t do it. I’ll arrange for somebody to watch you and to cook.” She leaned down to kiss the top of his head.

  “I know,” he said. “Oh, I know, honey. Staying here makes you a child, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She could feel the goddamn tears flooding over her. And she could feel the ghosts of the house gathering around him, now, easing his way into the next world that awaited him. And somewhere on the planet, her mother, too, drove toward the horizon, forever. “I’ll watch out for you, though. I’ll drop in. I’ll check on you.”

  “No, you probably won’t,” he said. “No one does. But that’s all right. That’s how it happens. By the way, do you hear that violin? That girl is practicing as if her life depended on it.”

  Melinda bent her ear to the silence. “Yes,” she agreed. “I do hear it. All the time. Morning and night. It never stops.”

  Royal Blue

  AFTER CALLING IT QUITS with being a model and actor—his eyes were a bit too close together for the big time—Nicholas went into the business of acquiring and selling folk art. He and Daphne lived in Brooklyn, where she worked as a real estate agent, and in early autumn he had been up in New Paltz, at the country house of one of his clients, Mrs. Andriessen. Daphne referred to Mrs. Andriessen as “the Adult.”

  The Adult, a childless woman of a certain age, owned a largish woodstone-and-glass house with a lap p
ool, along with views of trees and a lake. She had a crush on Nicholas, which evened things out slightly between them. Every month they ate lunch together in either New Paltz or one of the neighboring restaurants near her city place on East Eighty-sixth, where she spent the weekdays during the winter. On weekends, and during much of the spring, summer, and fall, she stayed put in the country, filling her days with gardening, reading, and bird-watching. The Adult had two degrees from Princeton, one in art history and another in Slavic languages, and she sat on top of several million dollars that she shared with her husband, who resided most of the year in Shanghai. He spoke fluent Mandarin and had a business that the Adult never referred to, because, she said, she was ashamed of it. His income allowed her a measure of indolence. Various accommodations had been made.

  She was a tall, brown-haired woman who walked with the deliberation and poise of a former dancer. She laughed easily, but her beauty was complicated by her eyes, which were deep and haunted, and by her distracting habit of falling into thoughtful silences.

  When you entered the Adult’s house, period-instrument Baroque music would usually be making its way out of the audio system in the living room, and in the foyer you would be confronted with a signboard painted in red on oak slats.

  The chariots rage in the streets, they rush to and fro in the squares, they gleam like torches, they dart like lightning, they are the messengers, they are like stones thrown from the field for the plows straight path. Who shall tell the truth of the law and of righteousness? Only I, saith THE LORD.