Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (14 page)

“Not in the shrine,” he said. “I don’t see any.”

“What do you see?”

“A visitors’ register.” He had reached the door and had stepped inside. Then he came back out.

She was still ten feet away. “There must be more. You can’t have a shrine without something in it.”

“Well, there’s this white thing outside,” he said breathlessly. “Looks like a burial stone.” She was now standing next to him. “Yes. This is where his wife is buried.” They both looked at it. A small picture of Frieda was bolted into the stone.

“Well,” Jeremy said, “now for the shrine.” They shuffled inside. At the back was a small stained-glass window, a representation of the sun, thick literalized rays burning out from its center. To their left the visitors’ register lay open on a high desk, and above it in a display case three graying documents asserted that the ashes stored here were authentically those of D. H. Lawrence, the author. The chapel’s interior smelled of sage and cement. At the far side of the shrine, six feet away, was a roped-off area, and at the back an approximation of an altar, at whose base was a granite block with the letters DHL carved on it. “This is it?” Jeremy asked. “No wonder no one’s here.”

Harriet felt giddy from the altitude. “Should we pray?” she asked, but
before Jeremy could answer, she said, “Well, good for him. He got himself a fine shrine. Maybe he deserves it. God damn, it’s hot in here.” She turned around and walked outside, still laughing in a broken series of almost inaudible chuckles. When she was back in the sun, she pointed her finger the way the sign had indicated and said, “Shrine.”

Jeremy stepped close to her, and they both looked again at the mountains in the west. “I used to read him in college,” Harriet said, “and in high school I had a copy of
The Rainbow
I hid under my pillow where my mother wouldn’t find it. Jesus, it must be ninety-five degrees.” She looked suddenly at Jeremy, sweat dripping into her eyes. “I used to have a lot of fantasies when I was a teenager,” she said. He was wiping his face with a handkerchief. “Do you see anyone?” she asked.

“Do I see anybody? No. We would’ve heard a car coming up the road. Why?”

“Because I’m hot. I feel like doing something,” Harriet said. “I mean, here we are at the D. H. Lawrence shrine.” She was unbuttoning her blouse. “I just thought of this,” she said, beginning to laugh again. She put her blouse on the ground and quickly unhooked her bra, dropping it on top of the blouse. “There,” she said, sighing. “Now that’s better.” She turned to face the mountains. When Jeremy didn’t say anything, she swung around to look at him. He was staring at her, at the brown circles of her nipples, and his face seemed stricken. She reached over and took his hand. “Oh, Jay, sweetie,” she said, “no one will see us. Honey. What is it? Do you want me to get dressed?”

“That’s not it.” He was staring at her, as if she were not his wife.

“What? What is it?”

“You’re free of it.” He wiped his forehead.

“What?”

“You’re free of it. You’re leaving me alone here.”

“Alone? Alone in what?”

“You know perfectly damn well,” he said. “I’m alone back here.” He tapped his head. “I don’t know how you did it, but you did it. You broke free. You’re gone.” He bent down. “You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes, I do.” She put her bra and blouse back on and turned toward him again. His face was a mixture of agony and rage, but in the huge sunlight these emotions diminished to small vestigial puffs of feeling.
“It’s a path,” she said. “And then you’re surprised. You get out. It’ll happen to you. You’ll see. Honestly.”

She could see his legs shaking. His face was a barren but expressive landscape. “Okay,” he said. “Talk all you want. I was just thinking …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“You’ll be all right,” she said, stroking his back.

“I don’t
want
to be all right!” he said, his voice rising, a horrible smile appearing on his face: it was a devil’s face, Harriet saw, and it was radiant and calm. Sweat poured off his forehead, and his skin had started to flush pink. “It’s my pleasure not to be all right. Do you see that? My
pleasure
.”

She wiped her hands on her cotton pants. A stain appeared, then vanished. “You want that? You want to be back there by yourself?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “You bet. I feel like an explorer. I feel like a fucking pioneer.” He gave each one of the words a separate emphasis. Meanwhile, he had separated himself from her and was now tilting his head up toward the sky, letting the sun shine on his closed eyelids.

She looked at him. In the midst of the sunlight he was hugging his darkness. She stepped down the zigzag path to the car, leaving him there, but he followed her. Once they were both in the car, the dog inside the ranch house began its frantic barking, but it stopped after a few seconds. She took Jeremy’s hand and scanned the clouds in the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, trying to see the sky, the beckoning clouds, the way he did, but she couldn’t. All she could see was the land stretched out in front of her, and, far in the distance, fifty miles away, a few thunderheads and a narrow curtain of rain, so thin that the light passed straight through it.

The Eleventh Floor

CAREFULLY DRUNK
, Mr. Bradbury sat on his patio-balcony in the bland morning sunshine, sipping vodka-and-something. He was waiting for his son to visit. This son, Eric, had called and said he would arrive shortly, and that was an hour ago. It was Saturday: vodka day. He peered down from the eleventh floor at the sidewalk trees, where the sparrows were making a racket. Below the sparrows, Mr. Bradbury could see the velvet-brown dot of the doorman’s hat. He thought he could smell crab-apple blossoms and something more subtle, like dust.

In shivering glassy clarity, he observed a rusting blue subcompact move into a space in front of a fireplug. That would be Eric, who had a collection of parking tickets, little marks of risk and daring. Watching him lock his car, his father mashed out his cigarette in a blue pottery ashtray balanced on the balcony railing. He coughed, putting his hand in front of his mouth. Eric had stopped to talk to the doorman, George. George and Eric, two human dots. Eric’s pinpoint face turned, tilted, and stared up at the rows of balconies, finding his father on the eleventh. He did not wave.

Standing up, Mr. Bradbury tested his reflexes. He bent his knees and thought of a line from Byron: “From the dull palace to the dirty hovel, something something something novel.” The problem with poetry was that you were always having to look it up. He couldn’t recall which poem contained the dull palace, nor did he care. He stepped out of the sunlight into the living room and sank into the sofa, trying not to groan. Elena, the Peruvian housekeeper, was preparing lunch, probably one of her crude ethnic casseroles. She didn’t inform him of her plans in advance. He reached over to the coffee table and pressed the
MUTE
button on the remote control to silence the CNN announcer. His neck hurt. He rubbed it, and to his own fingers the skin felt scaly. At least no swellings or lumps. He let his right arm drop down onto the side
table. His thumb landed in the engraved silver scallop-shell ashtray and emerged from it with a gray coating of ash. He bent over and was rubbing the thumb on the carpet just as his son knocked.

The boy had a key; the knock was some kind of ritual announcement of estrangement. He heaved himself up to his feet and, remembering to stand straight, made his way past the bookshelves and the paintings to the foyer.

“Eric,” he said, opening the door and seeing his son in a blast of sentimental pride. “I’m glad you came.” The flaring of his love made him shy, so that he drew back his body even as he extended his hand. Eric shook his hand, gazed down at his father’s face with an examining look, and sniffed twice. Mr. Bradbury could tell that Eric was trying to catch the scent of his breath. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Don’t loiter out there in the hall. Why didn’t you just let yourself in with your key?”

“I lost it,” Eric said. “I lost all my keys.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. A party. Yeah, that’s right. A party.”

Eric stood in the center of the living room, checking out the familial furniture. Then he tossed his jacket on a chair and bent down to unlace his shoes. For some reason his father noticed that his son was wearing thick white cotton socks. Then Eric straightened up, pleased to be on display, his thumbs hooked in the back pockets of his jeans.

“You’re getting sizable. Is it the swimming?”

“Not this season,” Eric said. “It’s track. They had us on a training program.”

“I always forget what a big kid you are. I don’t remember anyone in the family being your size except your mother’s uncle Gus, who worked in the Water Department. He had the worst halitosis I’ve ever encountered in an adult human being. Your mother used to say that he smelled like a Labrador with stomach lesions.” He smiled as his son walked toward the open porch door and the balcony. It was an athletic, pantherish walk. “You let your hair grow,” his father said. “You have a beard. You look like a Renaissance aide-de-camp.”

Eric reached over for the ashtray on the railing and fastidiously put it down on the deck. Without turning around, he said, “I thought I’d try it out.” Mr. Bradbury saw him glance at his drink, measuring it, counting the ice cubes.

“Try what? Oh. The beard. You should. Absolutely.”

Eric lifted himself easily and sat on the railing, facing his father. He hooked his feet around the bars. He squinted toward the living room, where his father stood. “Did it surprise you?”

“What?” The beard: he meant the beard. “Oh, a bit, maybe. But I’m in a state of virtually constant surprise. George surprises me with tales of his riotous family, you surprise me with your sudden visits, and Elena out there in the kitchen surprises me every time she manages to serve me a meal. Your old dad lives in a state of paralyzed amazement. So. How’s college life? You’ve been kind of short on the letters.”

“It’s only across town, Dad.”

“I know how far away it is. You could call. You could put your finger on the old rugged dial.”

“I forget. And so do you.” Eric put his arms out and leaned his head back to catch the rays of the sun. If he fell, he’d fall eleven floors.

“In that sunlight,” his father said, “your skin looks shellacked.”

Eric eyed his father, then the patio deck, where the glass of vodka and fruit juice made a small festive group with the ashtray, a lighter, and an FM transistor radio. “Shellacked?”

Mr. Bradbury put his hands in his pockets. He took three steps forward. “I only meant that you look like you’ve already had some sun this year. That’s all I meant.” He laughed, one rushed chuckle. “I will not have my vocabulary questioned.” He stepped onto the balcony and sat down in a canvas chair, next to the drink and the cigarettes. “Do you ever write your sister?”

“I call her. She’s okay. She asks about you. Your health and things like that.” Mr. Bradbury was shading his eyes. “How’s your breathing?”

“My breathing?” Mr. Bradbury took his hand away from his eyes. “Fine. Why do you ask?”

“It seems sort of shallow or something.”

“You were never much for tact, were you, kid?” His father leaned back. “I don’t have emphysema yet, if that’s the question. But I still smoke. Oh, yes.” He smiled oddly. “Cigarettes,” he said, “are my friends. They have the faith.”

Eric hopped down, so that he was no longer looking at his father, and turned to survey the city park two blocks west. “How’s business?”

His father waved his hand in a gesture that wasn’t meant to express anything. “Good. Business is good. I’m doing commercials for a bank
owned by a cartel of international slime, and I also have a breakfast-food account now, aimed at kids. Crispy Snax. The demographics are a challenge. We’re using animated cartoons and we’ve invented this character, Colonel Crisp, who orders the kids to eat the cereal. He raises a sword and the product appears in a sort of animated blizzard of sugar. We’re going for the Napoleonic touch. It’s coercive, of course, but it’s funny if you’re positioned behind the joke instead of in front of it. We’re getting angry letters from mothers. We must be doing something right.” He stared at his son’s back. “Of course, I get tired sometimes.”

“Tired?”

He waited, then said, “I don’t know. I should take a vacation.” He looked past his son at the other buildings across the street with their floors of patio-balconies, some with hanging plants, others with bicycles. “So I could recollect sensations sweet in hours of weariness ’mid the din of towns and cities. Listen, you want a drink? You know where it is.”

Eric turned and stared at his father. “Eleven thirty in the morning?” He lifted himself on the railing again.

Mr. Bradbury shrugged. “It’s all right. It’s Saturday. It warms up the mental permafrost. On weekends it’s okay to drink before lunch. I’ve got a book here that says so.”

“You
wrote
that book, Pop.”

“Well, maybe I did.” He sat up. “Damn it, stop worrying about me.
I
don’t worry about
you
. You’re too young to be worrying about me, and besides, I’m making out like a bandit.”