Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (46 page)

“I used to live here,” the man said quietly, “when I was little. This was my room when I was small.” After emphasizing the last word with a strange vehemence, he seemed to be surveying the walls and the ceilings and the floors and the windows until at last his gaze fell on Eric. The baby saw him and instead of screaming held out his arm.

“Jesus. Who are you?” Melinda said. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” the man said. “Old habits die hard.” The baby was now tugging downward at Melinda’s blouse buttons, one after the other, which he did whenever he was hungry. “I heard him crying,” the man said. “I thought I might help. Is that your father?” He pointed toward the second bedroom, where Melinda’s father dozed, his head slumped forward, a magazine in his lap.

“Yes, it is.
He
is,” Melinda said. “Now please leave. I don’t know you. You’re a trespasser. You have serious boundary issues. You have no right to be here. Please get the fuck out. Now.” The baby was staring at the man. “I’ve said ‘please’ twice, and I won’t say it again.”

“Quite correct,” the man said, apparently thinking this over. “I really
don’t
have any right to be here.” He made a noise in his throat like a sheep cough. He had the unbudging calm of a practiced intruder. “Truly I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that I used to live here. I used to
be
here.” With the hand not holding the apple, he held out his index finger to Eric, and the baby, distracted from the button project, grabbed it. The man loosened the baby’s grip, turned around, and began to walk down the stairs. “If I told you everything about this house,” he said as he was leaving, “and all the things in it, you wouldn’t live here. I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

She followed him. From the landing she watched him until he had crossed the threshold and was halfway back to his car. Then he stopped, turned around, and said in a loud voice, a half shout, “Are you desperate? You look kind of desperate to me.” He waited in the same stock-still posture she had seen on him earlier. He seemed to be in a state of absolute concentration on something that was not there. People were getting
into this style nowadays; really, nothing could outdo the urban zombie affect. It was post-anxiety. It promised a kind of death you could live with. He was waiting eternally for her to answer and wouldn’t move until she replied.

“Yes. No,” she called through the screen door. “But that’s no business of yours.”

“My name’s Augenblick,” the man said, just before he got into his car. “Edward Augenblick. Everyone calls me Ted. And I won’t bother you again. I left a business card in the living room, though, if you’re curious about this house.” He turned one last time toward her front screen door, behind which she was now standing. “I’m not dangerous,” he said, holding his apple. “And the other thing is, I
know
you.”

The car started—it purred expensively, making a sound like a diesel sedan, but Melinda had never known one brand of car from another, they were all just assemblages of metal to her, and he, this semi-handsome person who said he was Edward Augenblick, whoever that was, and the car, the two of them, the human machine and the actual machine, proceeded down the block in a low chuckling putter, turned right, and disappeared.

Picking up the baby, she went out to gather up her trowel and the birdlike metallic weeder. She would leave the weeds where they were, for now. Doing another sort of chore might conceivably restore her calm.

After taking the tools back to the garage, she surveyed her father’s things scattered on the garage’s left-hand side, which now served mostly as a shed. You could get a car in there on the right-hand side if you were very careful. Cast-off fishing poles, broken flashlights, back issues of
American Record Guide
and
Fanfare
, operas and chamber music on worn-out vinyl, and more lawn and garden implements that gave off a smell of soil and fertilizer—everything her father didn’t have the heart to throw away had been dumped here into a memory pile in the space where the other car, her mother’s, used to be. Melinda put her gardening implements on a tool shelf next to a can of motor oil for the lawn mower, and she bowed her head. When she did, the baby grabbed at her hair.

She wasn’t desperate. The almost-handsome stranger had got that particular detail wrong. A man given to generalizations might launch into nonsense about desperation, seeing a single mom with a baby boy, the
two of them living in her father’s house, temporarily. Eric pulled hard at her bangs. She was trembling. Her hands shook. The visitation felt like … like what? Like a little big thing—a micro-rape.

She had grown up in this house; he hadn’t. It was that simple.

As if taking an inventory to restore herself, she thought of the tasks she had to perform: her property taxes would come due very soon and she would have to pay them on her own house across town, where she would be residing this very minute if her father weren’t in recovery from his stroke. She imagined it: her Arts and Crafts home stood empty (of her and of Eric) on its beautiful wooded lot, with a decorative rose arbor in the backyard, climbing in spite of her, in her absence. She missed the orderly clean lines of her own house and its nursery and its mostly empty spaces and what it required of her.

“Desperate”—the nerve of the guy.

Over there, at her own house, she would not be susceptible to the visitations of strangers. Over there, she would be within walking distance of the local college where she taught Spanish literature of the nineteenth century—her specialty being the novels of Pérez Galdós. Over there, she was on leave just now, during her father’s convalescence, while she lived here, the house of her childhood.

Looking at her father’s ragtag accumulations in the garage, she worried at a pile of books with her foot. The books leaned away from her, and the top three volumes (
Gatsby
, Edith Wharton, and Lloyd C. Douglas) fell over and scattered. The baby laughed.

These garage accumulations exemplified a characteristic weakness of the late-middle-aged, the broken estate planning of all the doddering Lear-like fathers. Still holding her son, she sorted her father’s books and restacked them.

Melinda’s ex-husband had been a great fan of
Gatsby
. He loved fakery. He had even owned a pair of spats and a top hat that he had purchased at an antique-clothing store. He had been the catalyst for a brief trivial marriage Melinda had committed herself to during graduate school. A month or so ago at a party where, slightly drunk on the Chardonnay—she shouldn’t have been drinking, she knew, she was still nursing the baby—she was telling funny stories about herself, and for a few moments, she hadn’t been able to remember her ex-husband’s name. Anyway, he was just an ex-husband. Now that she had the baby, solitude and its difficulties no longer troubled her. Her child had put an end to
selfish longings. And besides—she was gazing at her father’s old
National Geographic
s—she had the languages. She spoke four of them, including Catalan, which no one over here in the States spoke, ever; most Americans didn’t seem to have heard of it. And of course they didn’t know where it was spoken. Or why.

Her languages were a charm against loneliness; they gave her a kind of imaginary community. The benevolent spirits came to her in dreams and spoke in Catalan.

During her junior year abroad she had lived in Madrid for a few months and then in Barcelona, where she had acquired a Catalan boyfriend who had taught her the language during the times when he prepared meals for her in his small apartment kitchen—standard fare, paella or fried sausage and onions, which in his absentminded ardor he often burned. He gave her little drills in syntax and the names of kitchen appliances. He took her around Barcelona and lectured her about its history, the civil war, the causes for the bullet holes still visible in certain exterior walls.

He had told her that anyone could learn Spanish, but that she, a stupendously unique and beautiful American girl, must learn Catalan, so she did. What a charming liar he’d been.

Time passed, she returned to the States, got her degrees, and then eighteen months ago, when she had taken a college group to Barcelona for a week, she had met up again with him, this ex-lover, this Jordi, and they had gone out to a tapas bar where she had spoken Catalan (with her uncertain grammar, she sounded, Jordi said, like a pig farmer’s wife). At least with her long legs, her sensitive face, and her Catalan, she wouldn’t be taken for a typical American, recognizable for innocence and obesity. Then she and Jordi went back to his apartment, a different apartment by now, larger than the one they had spent time in as students, this one near the Gaudí cathedral. Jordi’s wife was away on a business trip to Madrid. Melinda and Jordi made love in the living room so as not to defile his marriage bed. Out of the purity of their nostalgia, they came at the same time. He had used a condom but something happened, and that had been the night when her son was conceived.

She had never told Jordi about her pregnancy. He possessed a certain hysterical formality and would have been scandalized. As the father, he
would never have permitted a Scandia-American name like “Eric” to be affixed to his child. God, he would think, had intervened. Sperm penetrating the condom would be so much like the immaculate conception that Jordi, a Catholic, would have trouble explaining it away. And because he wept easily, he would first weep and then talk, the talk accompanied by his endearing operatic gestures. The sanctity of life! The whatever of parenthood. He had a tendency to make pronouncements, like the pope. Or was this Spanish in nature? A Catalan tendency? A male thing? Or just Jordi? Melinda sometimes got her stereotypes confused.

Anyway, her news about the baby would in all likelihood have destroyed his marriage, an arrangement that Melinda supposed was undoubtedly steady, in a relaxed Euro sort of way, despite Jordi’s one-off infidelity that particular night, with her.

Maybe he was habitually unfaithful. What was a married man doing with a condom in the drawer of the bedside table? Hidden but in plain view? Did husbands use condoms when making love to their wives? It seemed defeatist.

It was what it was. Still, she had loved Jordi once. She would say to her Catalan friends, “Have you seen his eyes, and those eyelashes?”—the most beautiful brown eyes she had ever seen on a man. He had other qualities difficult to summarize. All the same, men, at least the ones she had known, including Jordi, were a long-term nuisance, a drain on human resources. Whenever intimacy threatened, they often seemed unexpectedly obtuse. If you were going to couple with straight men—and what choice did you have?—you often had to deal with their strange semi-comic fogs afterward. Jordi snored and after lovemaking clipped his toenails. As Hemingway, another man, once wrote: the bill always came.

Anyway, she was not desperate. Melinda roused herself from her reverie. Augenblick! The stranger had got that part wrong, about the desperation.

She went back upstairs. She put Eric into his crib. The baby occupied himself by listening to a white-throated sparrow singing outside the window. Across the hall, her father sat staring at his dresser. It had been positioned beneath family pictures—Melinda, her brother, her mother, and her father—hung in a photo cluster where he could see them as he made his heroic post-stroke efforts to dress and to greet the morning. Behind
the pictures was the ancient wallpaper with green horizontal stripes. He turned toward her, and the right side of his face smiled at her.

“Do you hear it?” he asked.

She waited. Hear what? The sparrow? He wouldn’t be asking about that. “No,” she said; the room was quite silent. Lately her father had been suffering from music hallucinations, what he called “ear worms,” and she wasn’t sure whether to grant him his hallucinations or not. Did the pink elephant problem grow larger whenever, being affable, you agreed that there was indeed a pink elephant right outside the door, or shambling about in the street? “What is it? What do you hear?”

“Somebody far away, practicing,” he told her. “A violinist. She’s doing trills and double-stops. She’s practicing someone-or-other’s concerto in D. You really don’t hear it?” Her father had not been a professional musician, but he had always had perfect pitch. If he heard music in D major, then that was the key signature, hallucination or not.

In the silent room, Melinda gazed down at her father, at his thinning gray hair, the food stains scattered on his shirt, the sleepy, half-withdrawn look in his eyes, the magazine now on the floor, the untied shoelaces, the trouser zipper imperfectly closed, the mismatched socks, the shirt with the buttons in the wrong buttonholes, the precancerous blotches on his face, the half-eaten muffin spread with margarine nearby on the side table, and she was so overcome with a lifelong affection for this calm, decent man that she felt faint for a moment. Her soul left her body and then came back in an instant. “Oh, wait,” she said suddenly. “Yup. I do hear it. It’s very soft. From across the street. You know, it’s who, that scary brilliant teenager, that Asian girl, what’s her name, Maria Chang. And I know who wrote that music, too.”

“You do?”

“Sure,” Melinda said. “It’s Glazunov. Alexander Glazunov. It’s the Glazunov concerto for violin in D major.” She was making it all up as she went along.

“Yes,” her father said. “Glazunov. The teacher of Shostakovich. That must be right.” He smiled again at her. “But that concerto is in A, baby doll.” Turning his head to face her at a strange angle, he asked, “Who was that person who j-j-j-j-just came to the door? Did he come upstairs? Did he watch me? Did he come for me? Was it death? I was half asleep.”

“An intruder,” she said. “Somebody who said his name was Augenblick.”

“Well, that’s almost like death. What’d he want?”

“He said he used to live here. As a baby or something.”

“Impossible. I know who I bought this house from thirty-five years ago, and it wasn’t anybody by that name. Besides, that’s not his real name. It’s German. It means …”