Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (42 page)

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 doing 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.”

“Seattle.” The Caroline-person nodded, in a, well, professional way, one of those therapeutic nods. Her hair had a spiky thickness, like straw or hay. Maybe Caroline would mention the traffic in Seattle. The ferries? Puget Sound? “What’s that?” She pointed at the haplessly soiled book.

“Oh, this?” Kit shrugged. “Ovid.”

More nodding. Blondish hair spiked here and there, arrows pointing at the ceiling and the light fixtures and the arrival-and-departure screens. The Caroline-person carried—no, actually pulled on wheels—a tan suitcase, and she wore a business suit, account executive attire, a little gold pin in the shape of the Greek lambda on her lapel. Not a very pretty pin, but maybe a clue: lambda, lambda, now what would that … possibly mean? Suitcase: This woman
didn’t
live here in Chicago. Or else she
did
.

“You were always reading, Kit. All that Greek and Latin!” She stepped back and surveyed. “You look simply fabulous! With the cap? Such a cute retro look, it’s so street-smart, like … who’s that actress?”

“Yeah, well, I have to … It’s nice to see you, Caroline, but I’m headed back to the Loop, it’s late, and I have to—”

“Is your car here?” A hand wave: Caroline-person wedding ring: tasteful diamond, of course, that’s the way it goes in the Midwest, wedding rings everyfuckingwhere.

“Uh, no, we took, I mean, he and I took the taxi out.” Somehow it seemed important to repeat that. “We took a taxi.”

“Great! I’ll give you a ride back. I’ll take you to your place. I’ll drop you right at the doorstep. Would you like some company? Come on!”

She felt her elbow being touched.

Down the long corridors of O’Hare Airport shaped like the ever-ballooning hallways of eternity, the Caroline-person pulled her suitcase, its tiny wheels humming behind her high-heeled businesslike stride; and easily keeping up in her jogging shoes, in which she jogged when the mood struck her, Kit tried to remember where on this planet, and in this life, she’d met this person. Graduate school? College? She wasn’t a parent of one of her students, that was certain.
You were always reading
. Must’ve been college. “It’s been so long,” the woman was saying. “Must be … what?” They edged out of the way of a beeping handicap cart.

Kit shook her head as if equally exasperated by their mutual ignorance.

“Well, I don’t know either,” Caroline-person said. “So, who’d you see off?”

“What?”

“To Seattle.”

“Oh,” Kit said.

“Something the matter?”

“It was Billy,” Kit said. “It was Billy I put on the plane.”

“Kit,” she said, “I haven’t seen you in years. Who’s this Billy?” She gave her a sly girlish smile. “Must be somebody special.”

Kit nodded. “Yeah. Must be.”

“Oh,” Caroline said, “you can tell me.”

“Actually, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, I’d just rather not.”

A smile took over Caroline’s face like the moon taking over the sun during an eclipse. “But you can. You can tell me.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t remember you, Caroline. I don’t remember the first thing about you. I know a person’s not supposed to admit that, but it’s been a bad couple of days, and I just don’t know who you are. Probably we went to college together or something, classics majors and all that, but I can’t remember.” People rushed past them and around them. “I don’t remember you at all.”

“You’re kidding,” the woman said.

“No,” Kit said, “I’m not. I can’t remember seeing you before.”

The woman who said her name was Caroline put her hand on her forehead and stared at Kit with a what-have-we-here? shocked look. Kit knew she was supposed to feel humiliated and embarrassed, but instead she felt shiny and new and fine for the first time all day. She didn’t like to be tactless, but that seemed to be the direction, at least right now, this weekend, where her freedom lay. She’d been so good for so long, she thought, so loving and sweet and agreeable, and look where it had gotten her. “You’re telling me,” the woman said, “that you don’t remember our—”

“Stop,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me.”

“Wait. You don’t even want to be reminded? You’re … But why? Now I’m offended,” the woman told her. “Let’s start over. Let’s begin again. Kit, I feel very hurt.”

“I know,” Kit said. “It’s been a really strange afternoon.”

“I just don’t think …,” the woman said, but then she was unable to finish the sentence. “Our ride into the city …”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Kit said. “I couldn’t take up your offer. I’ll ride the bus back. They have good buses here,” she added.

“No,” she said. “Go with me.”

“I can’t, Caroline. I don’t remember you. We’re strangers.”

“Well, uh, good-bye then,” the woman muttered. “You certainly have changed.”

“I certainly have. But I’m almost never like this. It’s Billy who did this to me.” She gazed in Caroline’s direction. “And my vocabulary,” she said, not quite knowing what she meant. But she liked it, so she repeated it. “My vocabulary did this to me.”

“It’s that bad?” the woman said.

Standing in O’Hare Airport, where she had gone for no good reason except that she could not stand to be alone in her apartment, she felt, for about ten seconds, tiny and scaled-down, like a model person in a model airport as viewed from above, and she reached out and balanced herself on the driver’s-side door handle and then shook her head and closed her eyes. If she accepted compassion from this woman, there would be nothing left of her in the morning. Sympathy would give her chills and fever, and she would start shaking, and the shaking would move her out of the hurricane’s eye into the hurricane itself, and it would batter her, and then wear her away to the zero. Nothing in life had ever hurt her more than sympathy.