Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (31 page)

Suddenly he asked her, “Why are you so interested in me?”

“Interested?” She laughed, and her long black hair, no longer pinned up, shook in quick thick waves. “Well, all right. I have an interest. I like it that you’re so foreign that you take cabs to the park. I like the way you look. You’re kind of cute. And the other thing is, your soul is so raw and new, Anders, it’s like an oyster.”

“What?” He looked at her near him at the table. Their drinks were half finished. “My soul?”

“Yeah, your soul. I can almost see it.”

“Where is it?”

She leaned forward, friendly and sexual and now slightly elegant. “You want me to show you?”

“Yes,” Anders said. “Sure.”

“It’s in two places,” she said. “One part is up here.” She released his hand and put her thumb on his forehead. “And the other part is down here.” She touched him in the middle of his stomach. “Right there. And they’re connected.”

“What are they like?” he asked, playing along.

“Yours? Raw and shiny, just like I said.”

“And what about your soul?” he asked.

She looked at him. “My soul is radioactive,” she said. “It’s like plutonium. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

He thought that this was another American idiom he hadn’t heard before, and he decided not to spoil things by asking her about it. In Sweden, people didn’t talk much about the soul, at least not in conjunction with oysters or plutonium. It was probably some local metaphor he had never heard in Sweden.

In the dark he couldn’t make out much about her building, except that it was several floors high and at least fifty years old. Her living-room window looked out distantly at the river—once upstairs, he could see the lights of another passing freighter—and through the left side of the window
he could see an electrical billboard. The name of the product was made out of hundreds of small incandescent bulbs, which went on and off from left to right. One of the letters was missing.

It’s today’s CHEVR  LET!

All around her living-room walls were brightly framed watercolors, almost celebratory and Matisse-like, but in vague shapes. She went down the hallway, tapped on one of the doors, and said, “I’m home.” Then she returned to the living room and kicked off her shoes. “My grandmother,” she said. “She has her own room.”

“Are these your pictures?” he asked. “Did you draw them?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t tell what they are. What are they?”

“They’re abstract. You use wet paper to get that effect. They’re abstract because God has gotten abstract. God used to have a form but now He’s dissolving into pure light. That’s what you see in those pictures. They’re pictures of the trails that God leaves behind.”

“Like the vapor trails”—he smiled—“behind jets.”

“Yes,” she said. “Like that.”

He went over to her in the dark and drew her to him and kissed her. Her breath was layered with smoke, apparently from cigarettes. Immediately he felt an unusual physical sensation inside his skin, like something heating up in a frypan.

She drew back. He heard another siren go by on the street outside. He wondered whether they should talk some more in the living room—share a few more verbal intimacies—to be really civilized about this and decided, no, it was not necessary, not when strangers make love, as they do, sometimes, in strange cities, away from home. They went into her bedroom and undressed each other. Her body, by the light of a dim bedside lamp, was as beautiful and as exotic as he had hoped it would be, darker than his own skin in the dark room, native somehow to this continent. She had the flared shoulders and hips of a dancer. She bent down and snapped off the bedside light, and as he approached her, she was lit from behind by the billboard. Her skin felt vaguely electrical to him.

They stood in the middle of her bedroom, arms around each other, swaying, and he knew, in his arousal, that something odd was about to occur: he had no words for it in either his own language or English.

They moved over and under each other, changing positions to stay in the breeze created by the window fan. They were both lively and attentive, and at first he thought it would be just the usual fun, this time with an almost anonymous American woman. He looked at her in the bed and saw her dark leg alongside his own, and he saw that same scar line running up her arm to her shoulder, where it disappeared.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“That?” She looked at it. “That was an accident that was done to me.”

Half an hour later, resting with her, his hands on her back, he felt a wave of happiness; he felt it was a wave of color traveling through his body, surging from his forehead down to his stomach. It took him over again, and then a third time, with such force that he almost sat up.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It is like … I felt a color moving through my body.”

“Oh that?” She smiled at him in the dark. “It’s your soul, Anders. That’s all. That’s all it is. Never felt it before, huh?”

“I must be very drunk,” he said.

She put her hand up into his hair. “Call it anything you want to. Didn’t you feel it before? Our souls were curled together.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “You are a crazy woman.”

“Oh yeah?” she whispered. “Is that what you think? Watch. Watch what happens now. You think this is all physical. Guess what. You’re the crazy one. Watch. Watch.”

She went to work on him, and at first it was pleasurable, but as she moved over him it became a succession of waves that had specific colorations, even when he turned her and thought he was taking charge. Soon he felt some substance, some glossy blue possession entangled in the air above him.

“I bet you’re going to say that you’re imagining all this,” she said, her hand skidding across him.

“Who are you?” he said. “Who in the world are you?”

“I warned you,” she whispered, her mouth directly over his ear. “I warned you. You people with your things, your rusty things, you suffer so bad when you come into where
we
live. Did they tell you we were all soulless here? Did they say that?”

He put his hands on her. “This is not love, but it—”

“Of course not,” she said. “It’s something else. Do you know the
word? Do you know the word for something that opens your soul at once? Like that?” She snapped her fingers on the pillow. Her tongue was touching his ear. “Do you?” The words were almost inaudible.

“No.”

“Addiction.” She waited. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

In the middle of the night he rose up and went to the window. He felt like a stump, amputated from the physical body of the woman. At the window he looked down, to the right of the billboard, and saw another apartment building with heavy decorations with human forms near the roof’s edge, and on the third floor he saw a man at the window, as naked as he himself was but almost completely in shadow, gazing out at the street. There were so far away from each other that being unclothed didn’t matter. It was vague and small and impersonal.

“Do you always stand at the window without clothes on?” she asked, from the bed.

“Not in Sweden,” he said. He turned around. “This is odd,” he said. “At night no one walks out on the streets. But there, over on that block, there’s a man like me, at the window, and he is looking out, too. Do people stand everywhere at the windows here?”

“Come to bed.”

“When I was in the army, the Swedish army,” he said, still looking out, “they taught us to think that we could
decide
to do anything. They talked about the will. Your word ‘willpower.’ All Sweden believes this—choice, will, willpower. Maybe not so much now. I wonder if they talk about it here.”

“You’re funny,” she said. She had moved up from behind him and embraced him.

In the morning he watched her as she dressed. His eyes hurt from sleeplessness. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m already late.” She was putting on a light blue skirt. As she did, she smiled. “You’re a lovely lover,” she said. “I like your body very much.”

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“We? There is no ‘we,’ Anders. There’s you and then there’s me. We’re not a couple. I’m going to work. You’re going back to your country soon. What are you planning to do?”

“May I stay here?”

“For an hour,” she said, “and then you should go back to your hotel. I don’t think you should stay. You don’t live here.”

“May I take you to dinner tonight?” he asked, trying not to watch her as he watched her. “What can we do tonight?”

“There’s that ‘we’ again. Well, maybe. You can teach me a few words of Swedish. Why don’t you hang around at your hotel and maybe I’ll come by around six and get you, but don’t call me if I don’t come by, because if I don’t, I don’t.”

“I can’t call you,” he said. “I don’t know your last name.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “Well, listen. I’ll probably come at six.” She looked at him lying in the bed. “I don’t believe this,” she said.

“What?”

“You think you’re in love, don’t you?”

“No,” he said. “Not exactly.” He waited. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“I get the point,” she said. “Well, you’d better get used to it. Welcome to our town. We’re not always good at love but we are good at that.” She bent to kiss him and then was gone. Happiness and agony simultaneously reached down and pressed against his chest. They, too, were like colors, but when you mixed the two together, you got something greenish-pink, excruciating.

He stood up, put on his trousers, and began looking into her dresser drawers. He expected to find trinkets and whatnot, but all she had were folded clothes, and, in the corner of the top drawer, a small turquoise heart for a charm bracelet. He put it into his pocket.

In the bathroom, he examined the labels on her medicines and facial creams before washing his face. He wanted evidence but didn’t know for what. He looked, to himself, like a slightly different version of what he had once been. In the mirror his face had a puffy look and a passive expression, as if he had been assaulted during the night.

After he had dressed and entered the living room, he saw Lauren’s grandmother sitting at a small dining-room table. She was eating a piece of toast and looking out of the window toward the river. The apartment, in daylight, had an aggressively scrubbed and mopped look. On the kitchen counter a small black-and-white television was blaring, but the
old woman wasn’t watching it. Her black hair was streaked with gray, and she wore a ragged pink bathrobe decorated with pictures of orchids. She was very frail. Her skin was as dark as her granddaughter’s. Looking at her, Anders was once again unable to guess what race she was. She might be Arabic, or a Native American, or Hispanic, or black. Because he couldn’t tell, he didn’t care.

Without even looking at him, she motioned at him to sit down.

“Want anything?” she asked. She had a high, distant voice, as if it had come into the room over wires. “There are bananas over there.” She made no gesture. “And grapefruit, I think, in the refrigerator.”

“That’s all right.” He sat down on the other side of the table and folded his hands together, studying his fingers. The sound of traffic came up from the street outside.

“You’re from somewhere,” she said. “Scandinavia?”

“Yes,” he said. “How can you tell?” Talking had become a terrible effort.

“Vowels,” she said. “You sound like one of those Finns up north of here. When will you go back? To your country?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps a few days. Perhaps not. My name is Anders.” He held out his hand.

“Nice to meet you.” She touched but did not shake his hand. “Why don’t you know when you’re going back?” She turned to look at him at last. It was a face on which curiosity still registered. She observed him as if he were an example of a certain kind of human being in whom she still had an interest.

“I don’t know … I am not sure. Last night, I …”

“You don’t finish your sentences,” the old woman said.

“I am trying to. I don’t want to leave your granddaughter,” he said. “She is”—he tried to think of the right adjective—“amazing to me.”

“Yes, she is.” The old woman peered at him. “You don’t think you’re in love, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, don’t be. She won’t ever be married, so there’s no point in being in love with her. There’s no point in being married
here
. I see them, you know.”

“Who?”

“All the young men. Well, there aren’t many. A few. Every so often. They come and sleep here with her and then in the morning they come
out for breakfast with me and then they go away. We sit and talk. They’re usually very pleasant. Men are, in the morning. They should be. She’s a beautiful girl.”

“Yes, she is.”

“But there’s no future in her, you know,” the old woman said. “Sure you don’t want a grapefruit? You should eat something.”

“No, thank you. What do you mean, ‘no future’?”

“Well, the young men usually understand that.” The old woman looked at the television set, scowled, and shifted her eyes to the window. She rubbed her hands together. “You can’t invest in her. You can’t do that at all. She won’t let you. I know. I know how she thinks.”

“We have women like that in my country,” Anders said. “They are—”

“Oh no you don’t,” the old woman said. “Sooner or later they want to get married, don’t they?”

“I suppose most of them.”

She glanced out the window toward the Detroit River and the city of Windsor on the opposite shore. Just when he thought that she had forgotten all about him, he felt her hand, dry as a winter leaf, taking hold of his own. Another siren went by outside. He felt a weight descending in his stomach. The touch of the old woman’s hand made him feel worse than before, and he stood up quickly, looking around the room as if there were some object nearby he had to pick up and take away immediately. Her hand dropped away from his.

“No plans,” she said. “Didn’t she tell you?” the old woman asked. “It’s what she believes.” She shrugged. “It makes her happy.”

“I am not sure I understand.”

The old woman lifted her right hand and made a dismissive wave in his direction. She pursed her mouth; he knew she had stopped speaking to him. He called a cab, and in half an hour he was back in his hotel room. In the shower he realized that he had forgotten to write down her address or phone number.