Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (58 page)

Brantford had roared through his college fund so rapidly that by the age of twenty-three, he was down to pocket change. One bright spring day when I was visiting New York City and had called him up, he insisted on taking me to lunch at a midtown restaurant where the cost of the entrées was so high that a respectful noonday hush hung over the restaurant’s skeletal postmodern interior. Muttering oligarchs with monogrammed shirt cuffs gazed at entering patrons with a languid alertness. The maître d’ wore one of those dark blue restaurant suits, and the wine list had been printed on velvety pages set in a stainless-steel three-ring binder.

By the time my cousin arrived, I had read the menu four times. He was late. You had to know Brantford to get used to him. A friend of mine said that my cousin looked like the mayor of a ruined city. Appearances mattered a great deal to Brantford, but his own were on a gradual slide. His face had a permanent alcoholic flush. His brownish-blond hair was parted on the right side and was too long by a few millimeters, trailing over his collar. Although he was dressed well, in flannel trousers and cordovan shoes, you could see the telltale food stains on his shirt, and the expression underneath his blond mustache had something subtly wrong with it—he smiled with a strangely discouraged affability.

“Bunny,” he said to me, sitting down with an audible expunging of air. He still used my childhood name. No one else did. He didn’t give me
a hug because we don’t do that. “I see you’ve gotten started. You’re having a martini?”

I nodded. “Morning tune-up,” I said.

“Brave choice.” Brantford grinned, simultaneously waving down the server. “Waitress,” he said, pointing at my drink, “I’ll have one of those. Very dry, please, no olive.” The server nodded before giving Brantford a thin professional smile and gliding over to the bar.

We had a kind of solidarity, Brantford and I. I had two decades on him, but we were oddly similar, more like brothers than cousins. I had always seen in him some better qualities than those I actually possessed. For example, he was one of those people who always make you happier the moment you see them.

Before his drink arrived, we caught ourselves up. Brantford’s mother, Aunt Margaret, had by that time been married to several different husbands, including a three-star army general, and she currently resided in a small apartment cluttered with knickknacks near the corner of Ninety-second and Broadway.

Having spent herself in a wild youth and at all times given to manias, Brantford’s mother had started taking a new medication called Elysium-Max, which seemed to be keeping her on a steady course where life was concerned. Brantford instructed me to please phone her while I was in town, and I said I would. As for Brantford’s two half sisters, they were doing fine.

With this information out of the way, I asked Brantford how he was.

“I don’t know. It’s strange. Sometimes at night I have the feeling that I’ve murdered somebody.” He stopped and glanced down at the tableware. “Someone’s dead. Only I don’t know who or what, or
when
I did it. I must’ve killed
somebody
. I’m sure of it. Thank you,” he said with his first real smile of the day, as the server placed a martini in front of him.

“Well, that’s just crazy,” I said. “You haven’t killed anyone.”

“Doesn’t matter if I have or haven’t,” he said, “if it feels that way. Maybe I should take a vacation.”

“Brantford,” I said, “you
can’t
take a vacation. You don’t work.” I waited for a moment. “Do you?”

“Well,” he said, “I’d
like
to. Besides, I work, in my way,” he claimed, taking a sip of the martini. “And don’t forget that I can be anything I want to be.” This sentence was enunciated carefully and with precise
despair, as if it had served as one of those lifelong mottoes that he no longer believed in.

What year was this? 1994? When someone begins to carry on as my cousin did, I’m never sure what to say. Tact is required. As a teenager, Brantford had told me that he aspired to be a concert pianist, and I was the one who had to remind him that he wasn’t a musician and didn’t play the piano. But he had seen a fiery angel somewhere in the sky and thought it might descend on him. I hate those angels. I haven’t always behaved well when people open their hearts to me.

“Well, what about the animals?” I asked. Brantford was always caring for damaged animals and had done so from the time he was a boy. He found them in streets and alleys and nursed them back to health and then let them go. But they tended to fall in with him and to get crushes on him. Wherever he lived you would find recovering cats, mutts, and sparrows barking and chirping and mewling in response to him.

“No, not that,” he said. “I would never make a living off those critters,” he said. “That’s a sideline. I love them too much.”

“Veterinary school?” I asked.

“No, I couldn’t. Absolutely not. I don’t want to practice that kind of medicine with them,” he said, as if he were speaking of family members. “If I made money off those little guys, I’d lose the gift. Besides, I don’t have the discipline to get through another school. Willpower is not my strong suit. The world is made out of willpower,” he said, as if perplexed. He put his head back into his hands. “Willpower! Anyhow, would you please explain to me why it feels as if I’ve committed a murder?”

When I had first come to New York in the 1970s as an aspiring actor, I rode the subways everywhere, particularly the number 6, which in those days was still the Lexington IRT line. Sitting on that train one afternoon, squeezed between my fellow passengers as I helped one of them, a schoolboy, with a nosebleed, I felt pleased with myself. I had assimilated. Having come to New York from the Midwest, I was anticipating my big break and meanwhile waited tables at a little bistro near Astor Place. Mine was a familiar story, one of those drabby little tales of ideals and artistic high-mindedness that wouldn’t bear repeating if it weren’t for the woman with whom I was then involved.

She had a quietly insubstantial quality. When you looked away from her, you couldn’t be sure that she’d still be there when you looked back again. She knew how to vanish quickly from scenes she didn’t like. Her ability to dematerialize was purposeful and was complicated by her appearance: day and night, she wore dark glasses. She had sensitivity to light, a photophobia, which she had acquired as a result of a corneal infection. In those days, her casual friends thought that the dark glasses constituted a praiseworthy affectation. “She looks very cool,” they would say.

Even her name—Giulietta, spelled in the Italian manner—seemed like an affectation. But Giulietta it was, the name with which, as a Catholic, she had been baptized. We’d met at the bistro where I carried menus and trays laden with food back and forth. Dining alone, cornered under a light fixture, she was reading a book by Bruno Bettelheim, and I deliberately served her a risotto entrée that she hadn’t ordered. I wanted to provoke her to conversation, even if it was hostile. I couldn’t see her eyes behind those dark glasses, but I wanted to. Self-possession in any form attracts me, especially at night, in cities. Anyway, my studied incompetence as a waiter amused her. Eventually she gave me her phone number.

She worked in Brooklyn at a special school for mildly autistic and emotionally impaired little kids. The first time we slept together we had to move the teddy bears and the copies of the
New Yorker
off her bed. Sophistication and a certain childlike guilelessness lived side by side in her behavior. On Sunday morning she watched cartoons and
Meet the Press
, and in the afternoon she listened to the Bartók quartets while smoking marijuana, which she claimed was good for her eyesight. In her bathtub was a rubber duck, and in the living room a copy of
Anna Karenina
, which she had read three times.

We were inventive and energetic in our lovemaking, Giulietta and I, but her eyes stayed hidden no matter how dark it was. From her, I knew nothing of the look of recognition a woman can give to a man. All the same, I was beginning to love her. She comforted me and sustained me by attaching me to ordinary things: reading the Sunday paper in bed, making bad jokes—the rewards of plain everyday life.

One night I took her uptown for a party near Columbia, at the apartment of another actor, Freddy Avery, who also happened to be a poet. Like many actors, Freddy enjoyed performing and was good at mimicry,
and his parties tended to be raucous. You could easily commit an error in tone at those parties. You’d expose yourself as a hayseed if you were too sincere about anything. There was an Iron Law of Irony at Freddy’s parties, so I was worried that if Giulietta and I arrived too early, we’d be mocked. No one was ever prompt at Freddy’s parties (they always began at their midpoint, if I could put it that way), so we ducked into a bar to waste a bit of time before going up.

Under a leaded-glass, greenish lamp hanging down over our booth, Giulietta took my hand. “We don’t have to go to this … thing,” she said. “We could just escape to a movie and then head home.”

“No,” I said. “We have to do this. Anyway, all the movies have started.”

“What’s the big deal with this party, Benjamin?” she asked me. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her dark glasses, but I knew they were trained on me. She wore a dark blue blouse, and her hair had been pinned back with a rainbow-colored barrette. The fingers of her hands, now on the table, had a long, aristocratic delicacy, but she bit her nails; the tips of her fingers had a raggedy appearance.

“Oh, interesting people will be there,” I said. “Other actors. And literary types, you know, and dancers. They’ll make you laugh.”

“No,” she said. “They’ll make
you
laugh.” She took a sip of her beer. She lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Dancers can’t converse anyway. They’re all autoerotic. If we go to this, I’m only doing it because of you. I want you to know that.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Listen, could you do me a favor?”

“Anything,” she nodded.

“Well, it’s one of those parties where the guests …”

“What?”

“It’s like this. Those people are clever. You know, it’s one of those uptown crowds. So what I’m asking is … do you think you could be clever tonight, please? As a favor to me? I know you can be like that. You can be funny; I know you, Giulietta. I’ve seen you sparkle. So could you be amusing? That’s really all I ask.”

This was years ago. Men were still asking women—or telling them—how to behave in public. I flinch, now, thinking about that request, but it didn’t seem like much of anything to me back then. Giulietta leaned back and took her hand away from mine. Then she cleared her throat.

“You are so funny.” She wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be evaluating
me. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right.” She dug her right index fingernail into the wood of the table, as if making a calculation. “I can be clever if you want me to be.”

After buzzing us up, Freddy Avery met us at the door of his apartment with an expression of jovial melancholy. “Hey hey hey,” he said, ushering us in. “Ah. And this is Giulietta,” he continued, staring at her dark glasses and her rainbow barrette. “Howdy do. You look like that character in the movie where the flowers started singing. Wasn’t that sort of freaky and great?” He didn’t wait for our answer. “It was a special effect. Flowers don’t actually know
how
to sing. So it was sentimental. Well,” he said, “now that you’re both here, you brave kids should get something to drink. Help yourselves. Welcome, like I said.” Even Freddy’s bad grammar was between quotation marks.

Giulietta drifted away from me, and I found myself near the refrigerator listening to a tall, strikingly attractive brunette. She didn’t introduce herself. With a vaguely French accent, she launched into a little speech. “I have something you must explain,” she said. “I can’t make good sense of who I am now. And so, what am I? First I am a candidate for one me, and then I am another. I am blown about. Just a little leaf—that is my self. What do you think I will be?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I ask, ‘Who am I, Renée?’ I cannot sleep, wondering. Is life like this, in America? Full of such puzzles? Do you believe it is like this?”

I nodded. I said, “That’s a very good accent you have there.” She began to forage around in her purse as if she hadn’t heard me. I hurried toward the living room and found myself in a corner next to another guest, the famous Pulitzer prize–winning poet Burroughs Hammond, who was sitting in the only available chair. Freddy had befriended him, I had heard, at a literary gathering and had taught him how to modulate his voice during readings. At the present moment, Burroughs Hammond was gripping a bottle of ginger ale and was smoking an unfiltered mentholated cigarette. No one seemed to be engaging him in conversation. Apparently, he had intimidated the other guests, all of whom had wandered away from his corner.

I knew who he was. Everyone did. He was built like a linebacker—he had played high-school football in Ohio—but he had a perpetually oversensitive expression on his wide face. “The hothouse flower inside the
Mack truck” was one phrase I had heard to describe him. He had survived bouts of alcoholism, two broken marriages, and losing custody of his children, and had finally moved to New York, where he had sobered up. His poems, some of which I knew by heart, typically dealt with the sudden explosion of the inner life in the midst of an almost fatal loneliness. I particularly liked the concluding lines of “Poem with Several Birds,” about a moment of resigned spiritual radiance.

Some god or other must be tracing, now,
its way,
this
way, and the blossoms
like the god are suspended in midair,
and seeing shivers in the face of all this brilliance.

I had repeated those lines to myself as I waited tables and took orders for salads. The fierce delicacy of Burroughs Hammond’s poetry! On those nights when I had despaired and had waited for a god, any one of them, to arrive, his poetry had kept me sane. So when I spotted him at Freddy Avery’s, I introduced myself and told him that I knew his poems and loved them. Gazing up at me through his thick horn-rim glasses, he asked politely what I did for a living. I said I waited tables, was an unemployed actor, and was working on a screenplay. He asked me what my screenplay was about and what it was called. I told him that it was a horror film and was entitled
Planet of Bugs
.