Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (45 page)

We were like two becalmed sailing ships, with sailors from different countries shouting curses at each other, as we drifted farther and farther away.

“No, right, sure, of course,” she says, standing up and stretching. “Two ships.” She turns toward me and loosens her hair, so that it falls lightly over her shoulders and so I can see her do it. Her eyes are glittery with a momentary thrill of distaste for me. No more housework today. “Right. You just told me stories and listened to the radio and painted your dream girl.” She looks at me. “If you had been Picasso, everyone would have forgiven you.”

Now, late in the afternoon, we go walking toward the park, a way of recovering our equilibrium before we get into our separate cars and drive off toward our separate residences. Anyone seeing us strolling past the piles of bright leaves on the sidewalk, the last light of the sun in our eyes, might think that we’re still a couple. Emily’s wearing a little knitted red cap and a snug brown jacket, and she’s squinting against the sun’s rays, and because we are also facing a cool breeze from the west, her eyes fill with water—I refuse at this moment to think of them as tears—that she must wipe away before she says anything to me.

“It’s true,” she says. “Sometimes I forget the nicest things you did for me. Like that time you bought me flowers for my birthday.”

“Which birthday was this?” I ask. The sun is in my eyes, too.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “What matters is that you walked into the house with these six red roses clutched in your hand, and I smiled, and I saw, from the puzzlement on your face, that in your absentminded way you had forgotten that you had bought roses for me and that you were holding them in your hand at that very moment. Imagine! Imagine a guy who buys roses for his wife and then carries them into the house and still forgets that that’s what he’s doing. Imagine being so fucking absentminded. It’s a form of male hysteria.”

“Watch your language,” I say, kidding her. “It’s true,” I say. “I was presenting you with roses that I had forgotten about.”

“And what it meant,” Emily tells me, as if I hadn’t said anything, “was that your instincts, your … I don’t know what you would call it, your unconscious, still loved me, even if your conscious mind didn’t. I thought, My husband, Dennis, still loves me. Despite everything. You could absentmindedly get me roses on my birthday without knowing what you were doing. Somewhere in there, you were still kindly disposed toward me. Your little love light still was shining, before its last flickerings.”

We arrive at the park. On this side of it is a small playground with a slide, a climbing structure, swings, and one little boy is still playing while his mother sits on a bench and reads the paper, but now that it’s getting to be dusk, she’s squinting, bending down in order to make out the print. She calls to her son, but he won’t return to her quite yet. He won’t follow her orders. Emily sits down in one of the swings, and I sit down next to her. She puts her shoes in the pocketed dirt and slowly begins to swing herself back and forth. Behind us, the woods seem to be breathing in and out.

“I liked childhood,” Emily says to me, softly. “I liked being a kid. A lot of the other girls wanted to grow up, but
I
didn’t. They wanted to go out on dates, the excitement of all that—boys, cars, sex, the whole scene. But not me. I didn’t want to launch my ship into adolescence, I didn’t want my periods to start, I didn’t want what was about to happen, to happen. I had this dread of it. I wanted to stay a kid forever. I thought being an adult was the awful afterlife of childhood.”

I can’t remember ever being afraid of growing up, so I don’t say anything
in response. Even at this late date, Emily can still surprise me with what she says.

“And it was awful, I mean, it
is
awful. It’s terrible, but of course you can learn to live with it, and it’s okay after a while even if it’s terrible, and besides, what choice do you have?”

“No choice,” I say to her. The woman on the bench calls to her son again, and this time he comes down to where she’s sitting, and he stands by her side and put his hand on her arm as a signal that he’s ready. She nods, briefly looking at him, then folds her paper, stands up, and takes his hand. These gestures are of such gentle, subtle sweetness that they feel like a private language to me, and my mind clouds up, given the weight of the day, given my own situation.

“You know,” I say to Emily, as I swing back and forth in my swing, “I’ve been getting postcards. Anonymous postcards.”

“Dennis,” Emily tells me, “I don’t have time for another story. I have to get home. I have a date tonight, if you can believe it.”

“No,
listen,
” I say. “They’ve been arriving in the mail every few days. They’re anonymous, I don’t know who’s sending them. Not to work, but to my home address, the apartment. And they have these picture postcard photographs on the flip side—Miami Beach, the Bahamas, the Empire State Building, the usual. But on the message side, it’s something else.”

“Dennis, really,” she says, “I have to go.” But she’s still sitting there, in the playground, on her swing. “I have to get ready,” she says, in a flat, neutral tone.

But I’m going to finish, and I say, “And what it is, these messages—they’re always handwritten, always in blue ink, always in large letters, uppercase, all of them. Short, punchy sentences. Condemnations, against me. Judgments.” I hold up my hand to suggest a headline, even though the words have to fit on postcards. ‘
Your work has come to nothing.’ ‘Your life is a disaster.’ ‘Someone is watching you.’ ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
’ Now who do you suppose would send postcard messages like that?”

She looks over at me, in the gathering dusk, a genuine expression of surprise, and I understand at the moment that I see her face that it’s not she, it’s not Emily who has been sending me these postcards. All along I had thought it would be her idea of retribution, these insane postcards. But she hasn’t been sending them, and this sends a brief shudder through me. But really, perhaps I had known all along. After all, I would know
what her handwriting was like even if she tried to disguise it. We’re almost twins that way.

“If you’re thinking it was me,” Emily says, “think again. It wasn’t.”

“And last week, I got one that said, ‘
Have you no remorse?
’ ”

“Well,” Emily says, after a pause, “whoever is sending them must know you. That’s a good word, ‘remorse.’ I could have used that word on you. A flea-market word. Maybe I actually did. It would’ve been one of my grandparent words.
You
never used a word like that. Must be one of your little girlfriends sending these messages. Somebody who’s a little obsessed with you, Dennis.”

“Some poor devil,” I say.

“Yes,” she says, “a poor devil, that sounds about right.” She gets up out of the swing and goes over to the climbing structure. “Which one do you suppose it is?”

“Well,” I say, “I don’t know.” But actually I think I do know. Once this woman and I were at dinner together, a woman who in her day had done a lot of drugs, the ones that give you those dimestore visions, and out of nowhere, she said, “I can see all your thoughts, you know. I can see them, and you don’t even have to say them aloud, because I know what they are.” She was holding her wineglass, this woman, and it had been a good evening until then, but when she said she could see my thoughts, it seemed time to get out of there. She sat up straight. “God and his archangels have taken a real dislike to you,” she said, as I was motioning to the waiter. “They have a gun pointed at your head. I just think I should tell you that.”

“She really said that?” Emily asks, coming down from the play structure. “That God and his archangels had a gun pointed at your head?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Those were her exact words. But I can’t imagine anyone being obsessed with me. I have such a …” But I can’t think of the phrase.

“Where did you find these girls, Dennis?” she asks.

“The place where everybody finds them. In the street, and so on.”

“You should look in different places.”

“There are no different places.” It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know what Emily and I are talking about. I’ve completely lost the thread.

“No,” she says, “there aren’t.” She waits. “Did you see that woman and her little boy? Did you see how … I don’t know, how calm they were
with each other? God, I loved seeing that. That calm. It makes you want to be a kid again. Of course, I always want that anyway.”

I take her hand and we walk back.

When we get to the house, my ex-wife is about to unlock her car and drive away, but she’s left her purse and wallet in the kitchen. So, together, the two of us go in the front door, and we step into the foyer and the living room. They’re completely dark—it’s night by now—and only the streetlight is spraying a little bit of illumination into the room, barely enough to see by.

“Close your eyes,” Emily says. “Could you find your way around in this place with your eyes closed? I bet you could.”

“Of course,” I say.

So I close my eyes and hold my arms out in the dark, and I walk all around the room where the lamps and tables and chairs were, where Em and I once lived, and I go into the dining room, still with my eyes closed, and I walk into the kitchen, past the counter and the dishwasher and then back out, taking my steps one at a time through these spaces I’ve come to know so intimately. It’s just as well that my eyes are closed as I’m walking through this dark house where Emily and I tried to stage our marriage, because I have this image of Santa jogging—no, sprinting—away from me, and I probably have a grim look.

It’s right about then that I’m back in the living room and I bump up against Emily, whose arms also have been out, in this game we’re playing. In the story that I don’t tell, we excuse ourselves, but then, very slowly and tenderly, we are inspired by each other at last, and we take each other in our arms, and all the bad times fall away, and we kiss, and we mutter our apologies, our long-standing whispered complicated remorse, and perhaps we sink to the floor, and we make love together in the dark empty living room, on the floor, understanding that maybe it will not be the last time, after all. And as we make love, Emily makes her utterly familiar trembling cry when she comes.

That’s the story that I don’t tell, because it doesn’t happen, and couldn’t, and would not, because I am unforgivable, and so is she. Two poor devils: what we don’t feel is remorse, the word on that postcard. We bump into each other, two blind staggerers, two solitudes, and then, yes,
we apologize. And that’s when Emily goes into the kitchen, her eyes open, but still in the dark house that she knows, as they say, by heart, and she picks up her purse from where she has left it, and she comes out, sailing past me, and she maybe half turns in the dark, and blows me a kiss, but probably she doesn’t.

She closes the front door behind her, absentmindedly locking it, locking me into the house. And it’s then, and only then, that I speak up. “Good-bye, honey,” I say.

Ghosts

OUT ON THE FRONT LAWN
, Melinda was weeding her father’s garden with a birdlike metal claw when a car drifted up to the curb. A man with brown hair highlighted with blond streaks got out on the driver’s side. He stood still for a moment, staring at the house as if he owned it and was mulling over possible improvements. In his left hand he held an apple with teeth marks in it, though the apple was still whole. Melinda had never laid eyes on the guy before. Her father’s house was located in an affordable but slightly run-down city neighborhood with its share of characters. They either gawked at you or wouldn’t meet your gaze. Many of them were mutterers who deadwalked their way past other pedestrians in pursuit of their oddball destinations. She returned to her weeding.

“Hot day,” the man said loudly, as if comments on the weather might interest her. Melinda glanced at him again. With a narrow Eric Claptonish face, and dressed in blue jeans and a plain white shirt, he was on his way to handsomeness without quite arriving there. The apple was probably an accessory for nerves, like a chewed pencil behind the ear.

The baby monitor on the ground beside her began to squawk.

“I have to go inside,” Melinda said, half to herself. She dropped her metal claw, rubbed her hands to get some of the topsoil off, and hurried into the house, taking the steps two at a time. Upstairs, her nine-month-old son, Eric, lay fussing in his crib. With dirt still under her fingernails, she picked him up to kiss him and caught a whiff of wet diaper. At the changing table, she raised her son’s legs with one hand and removed the diaper with the other while she observed the stranger advancing up the front walk toward the entryway. The doorbell rang, startling the baby and making his arms quiver. Melinda called over to her father, whose bedroom was across the hall, to alert him about the stranger. Her father didn’t answer. Sleep often captured him these days and absented him for hours.

She pinned the clean diaper together, and with slow tenderness brought Eric to her shoulder. She smoothed his hair, the same shade of brown as her own, and at that moment the man who had been standing outside appeared in front of her in the bedroom doorway, smiling dreamily, still holding the bitten apple.