Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (43 page)

“I have to go now,” Kit said, turning away. She walked fast, and then ran, in the opposite direction.

Of course I remember you. We were both in a calculus class. We had hamburgers after the class sometimes in the college greasy spoon, and we talked about boys and the future and your dog at home, Brutus, in New Buffalo, Minnesota, where your mother bred cairn terriers. In the backyard there was fencing for a kennel, and that’s where Brutus stayed. He sometimes climbed to the top of his little pile of stones to survey what there was to survey of the fields around your house. He barked at hawks and skunks. Thunderstorms scared him, and he was so lazy, he hated to take walks. When he was inside, he’d hide under the bed, where he
thought no one could see him, with his telltale leash visible, trailing out on the bedroom floor. You told that story back then. You were pretty in those days. You still are. You wear a pin in the shape of the Greek letter lambda and a diamond wedding ring. In those days, I recited poetry. I can remember you. I just can’t do it in front of you. I can’t remember you when you’re there.

She gazed out the window of the bus. She didn’t feel all right but she could feel all right approaching her, somewhere off there in the distance.

She had felt it lifting when she had said his name was Billy. It wasn’t Billy. It was Ben. Billy hadn’t left her; Ben had. There never had been a Billy, but maybe now there was. She was saying good-bye to him; he wasn’t saying good-bye to her. She turned on the overhead light as the bus sped through Des Plaines, and she tried to read some Ovid, but she immediately dozed off.

Roaring through the traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, the bus lurched and rocked, and Kit’s head on the headrest turned from side to side, an irregular rhythm, but a rhythm all the same: enjambments, caesuras, strophes.

My darling girl
, (he said, thinner
than she’d ever thought he’d be,
     mostly bald, a few sprout curls,
and sad-but-cheerful, certainly,
   Roman and wryly unfeminist, unhumanist,
unliving), child of gall and wormwood (he pointed his
thin malnourished finger at her,
     soil inside the nail),
   what on earth
   brought you to that unlikely place?
An airport! Didn’t I tell you,
        clearly,
to shun such spots? A city park on a warm
Sunday afternoon wouldn’t be as bad. People fall
into one another’s arms out there all the time.
  Hundreds of them! (He seemed exasperated.)
   Thank you (he said)
     for reading me, but for the sake
of your own well-being, don’t go there
  again without a ticket. It seems
   you have found me out. (He
shrugged.) Advice? I don’t have any
      worth passing on. It’s easier
to give advice when you’re alive
        than when you’re not,
  and besides, I swore it off. Oh I liked
what you did with Caroline, the lambda-girl
  who wears that pin because her husband
   gave it to her on her birthday,
March twenty-first—now that
  I’m dead, I know everything
but it does me not a particle of good—
      but naturally she thinks it has no
special meaning, and that’s the way
     she conducts her life. Him, too. He
bought it at a jewelry store next to a shoe
        shop in the mall at 2 p.m.
  March 13, a Thursday—but I digress—
  and the salesgirl,
cute thing, hair done in a short cut
   style, flirted with him
    showing him no mercy,
touching his coat sleeve,
   thin wool, because she was on commission. Her
          name was
   Eleanor, she had green eyes.
  The pin cost him $175, plus tax.
   She took him, I mean, took him for a ride,
    as you would say,
then went out for coffee. By herself, that is,
     thinking of her true
  and best beloved, Claire, an obstetrician
   with lovely hands. I always did admire
Sapphic love. But I’m
        still digressing. (He smirked.)

The distant failed humor of the dead.
Our timing’s bad,
        
the jokes are dusty,
and we can’t concentrate
     on just
      one thing. I’m as interested
in Eleanor as I am
      in you. Lambda. Who cares? Lambda: I suppose
    I mean, I
know
,
he thought the eleventh letter, that uncompleted triangle,
    looked like his wife’s legs. Look:
     I can’t help it,
I’m—what is the word?—salacious, that’s
   the way I always was,
  the bard of breasts and puberty, I was
exiled for it, I turned to powder
six feet under all the topsoil
   in Romania. Sweetheart, what on earth
     are you
doing
on
this bus? Wake up, kiddo, that guy
   Ben is gone, good riddance
is my verdict from two thousand
     years ago, to you.
   Listen: I have a present for you.

He took her hand.
   His hand didn’t feel like much,
    it felt like water when you’re reaching
   down for a stone or shell
under the water, something you don’t
  have, but want, and your fingers
     strain toward it.
  Here, he said, this is the one stunt
I can do: look up, sweetie, check out
    this:
(he raised his arm in ceremony)
    See? he said proudly. It’s raining.
I made it rain. I can do that.
   The rain is falling, only
     it’s not water, it’s
this other thing. It’s the other thing
    that’s raining, soaking you. Good-bye.

When she awoke, at the sound of the air brakes, the bus driver announced that they had arrived at their first stop, the Palmer House. It wasn’t quite her stop, but Kit decided to get out. The driver stood at the curb as the passengers stepped down, and the streetlight gave his cap an odd bluish glow. His teeth were so discolored they looked like pencil erasers. He asked her if she had any luggage, and Kit said no, she hadn’t brought any luggage with her.

The El clattered overhead. She was in front of a restaurant with thick glass windows. On the other side of the glass, a man with a soiled unpressed tie was talking and eating prime rib. On the sidewalk, just down the block, under an orange neon light, an old woman was shouting curses at the moon and Mayor Daley. She wore a paper hat and her glasses had only one lens in them, on the left side, and her curses were so interesting, so incoherently articulate, uttered in that voice, which was like sandpaper worried across a brick, that Kit forgot that she was supposed to be unhappy, she was listening so hard, and watching the way the orange was reflected in that one lens.

Poor Devil

MY EX-WIFE AND I
are sitting on the floor of what was once our living room. The room stands empty now except for us. This place is the site of our marital decline and we are performing a ritual cleansing on it. I’ve been washing the hardwood with a soapy disinfectant solution, using a soft brush and an old mop, working toward the front window, which has a view of the street. My hands smell of soap and bleach. We’re trying to freshen the place up for the new owners. The terms of sale do not require this kind of scouring, but somehow we have brought ourselves here to perform it.

We’re both bruised from the work: Emily fell off a kitchen stool this morning while washing the upstairs windows, and I banged my head against a drainpipe when I was cleaning under the bathroom sink. When I heard her drop to the floor, I yelled upstairs to ask if she was okay, and she yelled back down to say that she was, but I didn’t run up there to check.

When my wife and I were in the process of splitting up, the house itself participated. Lamps dismounted from their tables at the slightest touch, pictures plummeted from the wall and their frames shattered whenever anyone walked past them. Destruction abounded. You couldn’t touch anything in here without breaking it. The air in the living room acquired a poisonous residue from the things we had said to each other. I sometimes thought I could discern a malignant green mist, invisible to everyone else, floating just above the coffee table. We excreted malice, the two of us. The house was haunted with pain. You felt it the minute you walked in the door.

Therefore this cleaning. We both like the young couple who have bought the house—smiling, just-out-of-school types with one toddler and another child on the way. We want to give them a decent chance. During
our eight years together, Emily and I never had any kids ourselves—luckily, or: unluckily, who can say.

Anyway, now that we’ve been cleaning it, our former dwelling seems to have calmed down. The air in the living room has achieved a settled stale quietude. It’s as if we’d never lived here. The unhappiness has seeped out of it.

Emily is sitting on the floor over in the other corner now, a stain in the shape of a Y on her T-shirt. She’s taking a breather. I can smell her sweat, a vinegary sweetness, and quite pleasant. She’s drinking a beer, though it’s only two in the afternoon. She’s barefoot, little traces of polish on her toenails. Her pretty brown hair, always one of her best features, hangs fixed back by a rubber band in the sort of ponytail women sometimes make when they’re housecleaning. Her face is pink from her exertions, and on her forehead is a bruise from where she fell.

She’s saying that it’s strange, but the very sight of me causes her sadness, a
complicated
sadness, she informs me, inflecting the adjective, though she’s smiling when she says it, a half smile, some grudges mixed in there with this late-term affability. She takes a swig of the beer. I can see that she’s trying to make our troubles into a manageable comedy. I was Laurel; she was Hardy. I was Abbott; she was Costello. We failed together at the job we had been given, our marriage. But I don’t think this comedic version of us will work out, even in retrospect. She tells me that one of my mistakes was that I thought I knew her, but, in fact, no, I never really knew her, and she can prove it. This is old ground, but I let her talk. She’s not speaking to me so much as she’s meditating aloud in the direction of the wall a few feet above my head. It’s as if I’ve become a problem in linear algebra.

My general ignorance of her character causes her
sorrow
, she now admits. She wonders whether I was deluded about women in general and her in particular. To illustrate what I don’t know about her, she begins to tell me a story.

But before she can really get started, I interrupt her. “ ‘Sorrow,’ ” I say. “Now there’s a noun from our grandparents’ generation. Nobody our age uses words like that anymore except you. Or ‘weary.’ You’re the only person I know who ever used that word.
I’m weary
, you’d say, when you didn’t look weary at all, just irritable. And ‘forbearance.’ I don’t even fucking know what forbearance
is
. ‘Show some forbearance’—that was a line you used. Where did you find those words, anyway?”

“Are you done?” she asks me. We’re like a couple of tired fighters in the fifteenth round.

“What’s wrong with saying ‘I’m bummed’?” I ask her. “Everyone
else
says that. ‘I’m bummed.’ ‘I’m down.’ ‘I’m depressed.’ ‘I’m blue.’ But you—you have a gift for the … archaic.” I am trying to amuse her and irritate her at the same time, so I wink.

“I wasn’t depressed back then,” she says. “I was sad. There’s a difference.” I scuttle over to where she is sitting and take a swig from the beer can she’s been clutching. Only there’s no beer left. I take a swig of air. Okay: we may be divorced, but we’re still married.

Before I met her, but after she had dropped out of college, Emily had moved to the Bay Area, quite a few summers after the Summers of Love, which she had missed, both the summers and the love. She had rented a cheap basement apartment in the Noe Valley, one of those ground-floor places with a view of the sidewalk and of passing shoes, and during the day she was working in a department store, the Emporium, in the luggage department.

I interrupt her. “I know this,” I say. “I know this entire story.”

“No, you don’t,” Emily tells me. “Not this one.” One of her coworkers was a guy named Jeffrey, a pleasant fellow most of the time, tall and handsome, though with an occasional stammer, and, as it happens, gay. He proved himself an effective salesman, one of those cheerful and witty and charming characters you buy expensive items from, big-ticket items, out of sheer delight in their company.