Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  Nicholas had found this signboard in Kansas a year or so after he had started up a private dealership. A retired dairy farmer, Nahum Fester Cobb, who had put up this sign and others alongside the dirt road leading to his cow barn, had painted it. Nicholas knew that the Adult, his best client, would like it, although “like” was not quite the correct word for the way she responded to these artifacts. He had once asked her if she wanted folk art around the house because it was cutting-edge, and she had scowled.

  “The ‘cutting edge,’ ” she said, “has cut its way right out of what I’m interested in. I wish you wouldn’t use clichés like that, Nicholas.”

  “What are you interested in?” Nicholas inquired.

  “Terror and prophecy,” the Adult said quietly, taking a sip of her iced tea. Scattered around her house were little Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons riding their bicycles in processions with grinning voodoo dolls behind them, along with handmade coaches with spectral mad dogs and cats in the passenger seats, followed by more skeletons. Several signboards, with horrifying warnings and predictions printed on them, were hanging on the walls right above the beautiful expensive furniture. She had passed through irony a long time ago and had made a stop somewhere else.

  Nicholas hadn’t heard about the Twin Towers until he got back into his car, after his lunch with the Adult, and had been driving back home when he had turned on the radio and listened to people being suddenly hysterical. Still on the freeway, he called Daphne to see if she was okay (she was), and then he had called Mrs. Andriessen.

  “Yes,” she said. Her voice was strange, with an odd stillness. “I just heard. Someone else, a friend, called to tell me.”

  “Isn’t it terrible?” Nicholas asked. “My God.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said calmly. “Quite terrible.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Nicholas said, imagining the smoke and the piles of the dead.

  “Oh, you don’t?” the Adult asked him. “I do.”

  Two weeks later, on the day that Nicholas flew up to Alaska, the airplane had so few passengers in economy class that the flight attendants were handing out free meals—this, from an airline known internationally for its stinginess. Nicholas himself had taken a seat in first class, suspecting (correctly) that no one would question his right to be there. The anxious, unattractive people clumping down the aisle toward steerage stared at him helplessly.

  Once airborne, after eating the broiled chicken, green beans, muddy mashed potatoes, and brownie, and gulping back the last of his scotch, he turned off the reading light, expecting to see from his window the empty black familiar nothingness of space and the Yukon Territories. Instead, he gazed outward at a vast velvety array of northern lights folding and unfolding. Shimmering with color, purple and blue, as hideously majestic as a floor show in heaven, they kept up with the plane, not underneath or above but beside it, and beside him, somehow. He closed his book and for a moment felt deranged by humility.

  In Fairbanks he checked into a Holiday Inn near the airport. The next morning, he decided to take a walk after breakfast. The sky had acquired a peculiar royal blue, and when he returned to the hotel lobby, an airline pilot told him that the sky looked that way thanks to the ban on airplane travel that had been in effect for the past two weeks. The upper atmospheres had cleared themselves. Deep colors had returned overhead, at least for now.

  The trees around Fairbanks were in full autumnal display. Leaf gold was everywhere. There were no maples up here, so all the usual reds had gone permanently missing. Nicholas drove north of Fairbanks to the house of Granny Westerby, one of his regular suppliers. Like Nahum Fester Cobb, Granny W. was a bit of a graphomaniac, and like him—like all of them—she imagined up for herself Blakean angels, devils, and end-times. A retired cleaning lady whose husband had worked for the Alaska Railroad, Granny painted words on the sides of jug lamps and bottles, though she also made the occasional message board. Her specialty was visionary Eros.

  I AM COME INTO HIS GARDEN WHERE MY LOVE HAS BREATHED MY NAME. MY LOVE IS LIKE UNTO THE CLIMBING VINES, FOR HIS LUNGS INSPIRE THE FAIREST WINDS AND HE BLOWS HIS GOD-BREATH AGAINST MY CHEEKS. I AM FAINTED FOR HIM & XIST. I AM HIS LILY SECRET, I AM PLANTED AS A SEAL UPON HIS LIPS, HE WATERS ME. G.W.

  The sources for these feelings, the words themselves, stumped him. Nevertheless, that blue love-craziness on a painted closet door happened to be the first piece of folk art Nicholas had bought from her. Shipping it down to the lower forty-eight had cost him hours of trouble. A client of his in Connecticut, a lawyer, had bought it and used it as the door to her guest room. When Nicholas had paid out the sum Granny W. had demanded in cash, he had asked her who the lucky guy had been she was referring to on the door. Was it Grandpa Westerby, rest his soul?

  Granny Westerby had given Nicholas a look. “Nicholas,” she had said, “don’t be that way. The blessèd words are there for all to see, these words.” Occasionally she treated him like a schoolboy. He was used to this treatment from women, who doted on him.

  Of course, she didn’t really want to sell her art. None of these proletarian folk artists did, and they wouldn’t have parted with their signboards and dolls and little sculptures, their private expressive outbursts, if they hadn’t needed the money, usually for advanced—that is, optional—medical procedures, or if they had owned personal computers hooked up to the Internet and a blogosphere on which they could have editorialized. The art they made was dying out, as they were. Most working-class oldsters had cancer and diabetes and heart troubles from lifetimes of labor-intensive work and carbo-overloaded diets. Sometimes the income from their art rescued them from the crowds at the outpatient clinics and got them some form of private care. Anyway, he liked to think so.

  Granny Westerby was out in her backyard, seated on a bench in front of what looked like a picnic table scattered with brushes, paints, bottles, brake drums, and turpentine, when Nicholas arrived in his rental car. A radio playing rural white gospel was blasting away from inside the house. The old lady’s gray hair was pulled back in a bun, and she had one eye shut as she finished painting a phrase on the side of a wine bottle. Beside her, her golden retriever, Roscoe, eyed Nicholas as he approached. But the dog did not get up; he seemed to lack manners in this respect. Everyone in Alaska had at least one dog, Nicholas had noticed. The dogs seemed to be instrumental in getting their owners through the winter. On the Alaska license plates, Nicholas thought, the state motto should have been “The Dog State.” Granny W. looked up from her work.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “Well, I told you I was coming. Hi, Granny,” Nicholas said, presenting her, suitor-style, with a clump of cut flowers he had bought at the florist’s on the way out. She glanced at them, grinned briefly, and nodded. “Thank you kindly. Would you please put them in water?” she said. “Inside?” With the slightest movement of her head, she indicated the back door of her house. Like her dog, Granny W. lacked conventional hospitality. Nicholas scritched Roscoe on the head before going inside. The dog continued to ignore him.

  In the kitchen he found himself surrounded by a welter of antique kitchen equipment: a bread box, flour sifters, rolling pins, popover trays, a flyswatter, a manual toaster. A soiled teddy bear looked down from one of the cabinets. He found a flower vase in a heavily painted blue cupboard above the radio, from whose loudspeaker the gospel music had concluded and some maniac was now shouting rubbishy doomsday predictions. Nicholas cut the stems of the flowers with a steak knife, filled the vase with water, and dropped them in before noticing that, on the side of the glass, Granny had written, in her characteristic royal blue lettering, MY GOD WILL HEAVE ME.

  “Heave”? Granny W. sometimes had the diction of a rustic religioecstatic prophet. Maybe she meant “heare.”

  Okay. So be it. He saw an unplugged TV set in the corner of the kitchen, next to the dog dish. Across the glass face of the picture tube, Granny had painted, DO NOT GIVE OVER YOUR HEART TO IGNORANCE. The set would
not be turned on again anytime soon, not with this lettering on it. It was like a personal admonitory test pattern. Nicholas loved it; the altered TV would be worth quite a sum on the open market.

  Back outside, he sat down next to her and waited while she finished decorating the wine bottle with words. “I used to like autumn,” she said, without looking up. “I always loved the spiritual requirements. Not anymore. How about you?”

  “Oh, actually, no,” he said. “I’ve never thought that. I like warmth better than cold.”

  “Of course you do,” she said, with a crone’s smirk. “You belong in the tropics. Do you know where I get this blue paint? This hue?”

  “No,” Nicholas admitted. “I don’t.”

  “From the sky,” she said, pointing upward. She was an old tease. “I paint with sky.” She finished inscribing the sentence on the side of the bottle and gave it a hard professional look. FEAR AND LOVE HIS LOINS, the bottle instructed. It was perfect: wacky lovelorn profundity written in beautiful blue lettering. The Adult might want this one. Finally Granny W. sat back and looked directly at Nicholas. “You can’t have this,” she said. “The paint’s all wet.”

  “I can wait,” he said. “I can just sit here patiently.”

  “Only if I let you,” she said. She put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. “You’ll have to learn about patience, Nicholas. Everybody has to learn about that. I was beautiful and short-tempered, once, if you can imagine it. You take this backyard here. I’ve always lived here. I was birthed here. I died here and then I came back, and that’s why I’m so patient. Do you ever sit quietly? Do you ever contemplate the mountains?” she asked, nodding in their direction. “They say that He lives in the hills.”

  “There aren’t any mountains where I live,” he told her. “As you know.”

  “I expect you’re right. Too bad,” she said, smiling. “You do realize,” she said, after a lengthy pause, “what a pleasure it is for me to see you? I like to sit here and stare at you. Do you mind that?” She rubbed her forehead as if she were embarrassed. “You make me girlish.”

  “No, I don’t mind.” Vanity constituted his central spiritual problem. He was ball-and-chained to his good looks. “You know I love you, Granny,” he told her. “You know I love what you do. By the way, is the kitchen TV set for sale?”

  “The TV? No. The only show I watch is those words,” she said, shaking her head and clearing her throat with a bleating sound. She gave off a perfume of turpentine. “So many are giving their hearts over to foolishness that I thought I’d better remind myself not to do the same. It’s a little sermon I give myself, up here. A few words are all I need. What do you need, Nicholas?”

  “A correction. And doors,” Nicholas said, without thinking.

  “Beautiful Nicholas,” she said, smiling at him. “Stuck forever in the foyer, stuck in the mudroom.” Then she gestured at the wine bottle with the message about loins and love and fear on it. She named a price, Nicholas made a counteroffer, which Granny accepted, and which Nicholas had conveniently brought along in cash. This was their routine. She always sermonized in his direction, often about his appearance or his lifestyle, until she named her price. Then she was all business. When the wine bottle’s paint was dry, he wrapped it up in newspapers, inquired again about the TV set, received a firm response, said good-bye, and went off to his next appointment.

  In Seattle, on the connecting flight back, his plane was stuck on the ground at the gate. Several Arab-American men had boarded and had been seated at different scattered locations. An alarmed passenger, hearing the men speaking Arabic in the waiting area, had alerted the flight attendant; the flight attendant had alerted the gate agent; and the gate agent had called the FBI and the Seattle Bomb Squad. Nicholas, up in first class, finished his first scotch and asked for a second. A voice came on the public-address system: “Please do not pat the bomb dog. This is a working dog. Please do not pat the bomb dog.” A big grinning yellow Labrador wearing a police department scarf, obviously happy with his job and his authority, padded up the aisle, then back and forth in the plane, sniffing in a show-offy way for bomb materials. He passed right by Nicholas without noticing him. Dogs did not seem to care for him anymore.

  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.”