Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (50 page)

“No,” Nicholas admitted. “I don’t.”

“From the sky,” she said, pointing upward. She was an old tease. “I paint with sky.” She finished inscribing the sentence on the side of the bottle and gave it a hard professional look.
FEAR AND LOVE HIS LOINS
, the bottle instructed. It was perfect: wacky lovelorn profundity written in beautiful blue lettering. The Adult might want this one. Finally Granny W. sat back and looked directly at Nicholas. “You can’t have this,” she said. “The paint’s all wet.”

“I can wait,” he said. “I can just sit here patiently.”

“Only if I let you,” she said. She put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. “You’ll have to learn about patience, Nicholas. Everybody has to learn about that. I was beautiful and short-tempered, once, if you can imagine it. You take this backyard here. I’ve always lived here. I was birthed here. I died here and then I came back, and that’s why I’m so patient. Do you ever sit quietly? Do you ever contemplate the mountains?” she asked, nodding in their direction. “They say that He lives in the hills.”

“There aren’t any mountains where I live,” he told her. “As you know.”

“I expect you’re right. Too bad,” she said, smiling. “You do realize,” she said, after a lengthy pause, “what a pleasure it is for me to see you? I like to sit here and stare at you. Do you mind that?” She rubbed her forehead as if she were embarrassed. “You make me girlish.”

“No, I don’t mind.” Vanity constituted his central spiritual problem. He was ball-and-chained to his good looks. “You know I love you, Granny,” he told her. “You know I love what you do. By the way, is the kitchen TV set for sale?”

“The TV? No. The only show I watch is those words,” she said, shaking her head and clearing her throat with a bleating sound. She gave off a perfume of turpentine. “So many are giving their hearts over to foolishness that I thought I’d better remind myself not to do the same. It’s a little sermon I give myself, up here. A few words are all I need. What do you need, Nicholas?”

“A correction. And doors,” Nicholas said, without thinking.

“Beautiful Nicholas,” she said, smiling at him. “Stuck forever in the
foyer, stuck in the mudroom.” Then she gestured at the wine bottle with the message about loins and love and fear on it. She named a price, Nicholas made a counteroffer, which Granny accepted, and which Nicholas had conveniently brought along in cash. This was their routine. She always sermonized in his direction, often about his appearance or his lifestyle, until she named her price. Then she was all business. When the wine bottle’s paint was dry, he wrapped it up in newspapers, inquired again about the TV set, received a firm response, said good-bye, and went off to his next appointment.

In Seattle, on the connecting flight back, his plane was stuck on the ground at the gate. Several Arab-American men had boarded and had been seated at different scattered locations. An alarmed passenger, hearing the men speaking Arabic in the waiting area, had alerted the flight attendant; the flight attendant had alerted the gate agent; and the gate agent had called the FBI and the Seattle Bomb Squad. Nicholas, up in first class, finished his first scotch and asked for a second. A voice came on the public-address system: “Please do not pat the bomb dog. This is a working dog. Please do not pat the bomb dog.” A big grinning yellow Labrador wearing a police department scarf, obviously happy with his job and his authority, padded up the aisle, then back and forth in the plane, sniffing in a show-offy way for bomb materials. He passed right by Nicholas without noticing him. Dogs did not seem to care for him anymore.

In due course, the Arab-American men were escorted off the airplane to some dim destination. The Airbus door was shut and latched, and the flight took off. The flight attendant, sitting in her forward jump seat, stared at Nicholas and licked her lips as he read his magazine. He had that effect on people.

Hours earlier, when he had boarded, he had told Daphne by cell phone that the airport looked so empty that the terminal might as well have been the Museum of Transportation, there were so few people in it. Forlorn little passengers could be seen scurrying down there at the ends of the corridors, on their errands. The vendors of hot dogs and newspapers presented the public with expressions of end-of-the-world nihilism. From the TV sets hanging from the ceiling came the unreassuring voice of the president of the United States, encouraging the terrified citizenry
to help the economy by buying things. It was all very grungy and Amtrak-ish.

“ ‘Fear and love his loins’?” Daphne asked. “What’s that about?”

They were eating in their favorite Brooklyn sushi restaurant, and Daphne, sitting next to an orange window curtain, delicately nibbled at her California roll, held like a prized specimen at the tip of her chopsticks. Beside her, the curtain’s folds blew in lightly, ruffled by a mild breeze, and, watching the fabric, Nicholas thought of the northern lights he had seen from the airplane window, and of how Daphne’s hair sometimes looked like that, too, a magical electric shivering beyond anyone’s descriptive powers. Thinking of his girlfriend’s hair, he himself shivered.

“What?” He had lost track of the topic.

“The thing she wrote,” Daphne said, noting his inattention. The curtain brushed against her arm. “On the wine bottle.” She pointed her chopsticks at him. “Do I even know what loins are? I don’t think I do. Why should I fear them?”

“They’re down here, I think,” Nicholas said, glancing in the general direction of his waist and crotch. “In French I think it’s ‘
reins
’ or something like that.”

“Oh,” Daphne said. “Those.” She chewed thoughtfully. “Loins. Like a cut of meat. I wonder if she was ever assaulted. Well, probably not.”

Following a respectful pause, Nicholas said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s about that. It’s about her husband, or God, or maybe her husband-as-God, or God-as-her-husband, one of those messed-up dirt-road deals. Beats me.”

Daphne scowled at her sushi plate, while she fiddled with a piece of raw salmon. “Hey, guess what? I’m pregnant again,” she announced with the flat apologetic tone she always employed for big declarations. “What do you think of that?” She tried on a quick, blissful expression for him. “I threw up this morning,” she said, trying to disguise her happiness. “But I knew a few days ago.”

The calamari in Nicholas’s mouth went a little dry as he leaned forward to kiss her. They had been through this whole business a couple of years ago, so in a sense he was prepared, and he remembered to resume chewing. Somehow, they both had been negligent when it came to reproductive issues down through the years, and they had slipped up
before. They had known each other since high school and had a devotion to each other that neither of them could quite accept. The last time Daphne had found herself in the family way, the problem had been disposed of rapidly and efficiently, and they had—or at least Nicholas had—chalked it up to one of those unexpected outcomes of sex. Love was one; babies were another. Something told Nicholas it would not go that way this time around. Easefulness, ever so gently, was slipping out of his grasp. He gazed at her hair again. Somewhat against his will, he felt the voltage of his love for her pass through him.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s
great
. I’m … happy, I guess. Oh, honey. It’s so …” He searched for an adjective. “
Decisive.
” He gave her one of his great grins, out of his arsenal of grins and smiles. “I hadn’t expected.”

“Me, neither. Well, listen, Nickie. We can talk about this more later. You know? We don’t have to talk about it now. Not over sushi. I didn’t mean to stop the conversation. I didn’t mean to drop a bombshell. Well, of course, I guess it
is
a bombshell, but I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Daph, it’s
not
a bombshell,” he said, speaking out of his one general principle that a man should never appear to be fazed by anything a woman does. “We’ll deal with it. I love you, right? Everything fixes itself when two people love each other. Which we do.”

“Speaking of loins and money,” she said, “when are you next going to be seeing the Adult?” She had a way of changing the topic when Nicholas didn’t expect her to. Even the fact of her pregnancy didn’t have a long conversational shelf life with her. Happiness made her shy.

“In a few days. I’ve called her. I’m taking that wine bottle to her. It strikes the right note. She’ll love it. I’ll drive up on Tuesday.”

“It’s you she loves,” Daphne said, looking at Nicholas tenderly, as the gangster’s wife might look at the gangster. Next to their table, another couple glanced over at them, and Nicholas realized that Daphne had been speaking more loudly than she usually did. “You and that face of yours! It’s
mean
, actually, what you do to her—making her all … I don’t know, gooey. And then you take her money and go home. It’s not cruel, but it
is
mean.” She used her bad-girl tone on him. “You’re
such
a rascal. She just pines and sighs for you. Poor Mrs. Andriessen. Poor Adult.”

“Yeah,” Nicholas said. “Well, that’s life, honey. It’s what people expect of me. It pays various bills.”

“I pay the bills, too,” she said, her voice modulating, and as the curtains
continued to blow inward, Nicholas thought of a piece Daphne used to play occasionally on the flute, when she had thought that in order to be hired as a session musician, just out of Juilliard, she’d have to be versatile. She’d sit in the apartment’s bathroom, because she liked the acoustics in there, on the edge of the tub, wearing her flowered pajamas, and this miraculous music would come out, the most beautiful music Nicholas had ever heard up to that point in his life, Debussy’s “Syrinx,” about a girl turned into a reed. “They buy from
me
, too,” she said, spearing something white on the plate. She smiled at him. “You and me, we just can’t be resisted.”

An hour or so after he had arrived in New Paltz and had shown her the Granny-inscribed wine bottle, the Adult asked Nicholas to do a favor for her. She wanted him to clamber up into her backyard apple tree and cut off one of its dead branches. He gave her a skeptical look. Didn’t she realize that he was an art dealer, not a tree service? He was miffed. And he wasn’t dressed for the job, the sort of chore you’d ask your husband or boyfriend to do. But some complicated subtext had probably attached itself to her request, and he felt a roiling of curiosity. By the time she mentioned the dead branch, they had already had lunch and had talked about the relationship between Granny W.’s work and the famous road signs of Jesse Smith, now on display in several museums, and he wanted to close the deal and get home. Still, there was that gleam in her eye. The Adult had studied Granny W.’s bottle as if she were unsure whether she would purchase it—as if she were waiting for him to do this favor as an act of friendship, or masculine graciousness.

He unbuttoned his white shirt and took off his shoes and socks. The Adult stood on the perfectly mown grass in her running shoes and slacks and blouse, observing him with precise attention. As a boy, he had been an avid tree climber. What had happened to that prehistoric skill, now that he lived in Brooklyn? The proficiency had gone dormant, like all his other childhood aptitudes. Holding on to the handsaw, he made his way up into the tree, and he heard the Adult say, “Be careful.”

The dead branch, scaly and virus-ridden, was located about halfway up. The tree branches felt pleasantly rough on the soles of his bare feet, and when he reached the dead branch, after an easy climb past ripe
autumnal apples about to fall, he realized that sawing through the dead wood would be effortless. He glanced down at Mrs. Andriessen, and then up at the sky. He began to work.

He had almost finished when he heard the Adult say, “
Nicholas, I really do appreciate what you’re doing, believe me.
”

Maybe he was tired, or feverish, but he heard her utter the sentence
in blue
, royal blue, the color of the northern lights and Granny W.’s inscriptions, and he felt himself spiral into light-headedness. The blue words, having entered his brain, had a sky-feeling to them, a spirit of clarity. But that was crazy. Spoken words had no color to them and never would, in this world. The first words spoken by God had been in color, according to the ancient texts, but who believed in that now? He gripped a branch in order to stabilize himself, to keep himself from swaying. The dizziness left him, but the blue, somehow, remained.…

He dropped the handsaw. The Adult hopped out of the way of it, though it had landed nowhere near her feet. Nicholas clutched a branch to keep himself from falling.

By the time he came out of the shower and had dressed, Mrs. Andriessen had brewed some espresso and was sitting in her living room reading Edith Wharton’s stories. “Want some?” she asked, glancing at him and holding up her cup.

“Espresso? In the afternoon? No, thanks,” he said, shaking his hands to dry them. He was still barefoot, because one of his socks had a hole in it, which he did not care to display.

She put her book aside, having placed a marker on the page where she had stopped, and rubbed rather violently at her forehead. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to climb up in that tree to cut that branch. But a few weeks ago, I had a dream about you, Nicholas. In this particular dream, you were aloft in an apple tree, and you were surveying the countryside. God knows how you got up there, but then you were sawing away at a dead branch, and I was down below, and when I woke, I thought: Well, maybe I should see to it that the dream is … I don’t know, enacted.” She said the last word with a slightly embarrassed inflection. “A person rarely gets that chance.”

“I used to climb trees,” Nicholas said. “When I was a boy.”

“Yes, I know,” the Adult said. “You once told me. Perhaps that’s what
led to the dream.” She gazed at him quickly, as if a longer gaze would incriminate her. Mrs. Andriessen had a spooky way of suffering silently in Nicholas’s presence, but her reticence appeared to be impregnable. Now she looked over at Granny Westerby’s wine bottle. “ ‘Fear and love his loins,’ ” she read. “That’s a royal blue she used.”