Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (61 page)

“Trying to make them normal?” the cabdriver asked. “Oh, well. You are a good man, to give her flowers.” He gazed out at the night. “Look at this dark air,” he said. “It will snow soon.”

With my suitcase, my apple, and my flowers, I stood waiting on the front porch of our house. Instead of unlocking the door as I normally would have, I thought I would ring the bell just as a stranger might, someone hoping to be welcomed and taken in. I always enjoyed surprising Giulietta and the boys whenever I returned from trips, and with that male pride in homecoming from a battle, large or small, I was eager to tell them tales about where I had been and what I had done and whom I had defeated and the trophies with which I had returned. Standing on the welcome mat, I looked inside through the windows into the entryway and beyond into the living room, and I saw my son Jacob lying on the floor reading from his history textbook. His class had been studying the American Revolution. He ran his hand through his hair. He needed a haircut. He had a sweet, studious look on his face, and I felt proud of him beyond measure. I rang the bell. They would all rush to greet me.

The bell apparently wasn’t working, and Jacob didn’t move from his settled position. I would have to fix that bell. Again I rang and again no one answered. If it had made a noise, I couldn’t hear it. So I went around to the back, brushing past the hateful peonies, stepping over a broken
sidewalk stone, and I took up a spot in the grassy yard, still carrying my spray of flowers. Behind me, I could smell a skunk, and I heard a car alarm in the distance. If I had been Brantford, all the yard animals would have approached me. But if I had been Brantford, I wouldn’t be living in this house. I wouldn’t be here.

Giulietta sat in the back den. I could see her through the windows. She was home-tutoring a little Somali girl along a floor balance beam, and when that task was finished, they began to toss a beanbag back and forth to each other, practicing midline exercises. Her parents sat on two chairs by the wall, watching her, the mother dressed in a flowing robe.

I felt the presence of my cousin next to me out there in the yard, and in that contagious silence I was reminded of my beautiful wife and children who were stubbornly not coming to the door in response to my little joke with the doorbell. So I rapped on the window, expecting to startle Giulietta, but when she looked up, I could not see through her dark glasses to where she was looking, nor could I tell whether she saw me.

I have loved this life so much. I was prepared to wait out there forever.

The Winner

IN THE HILLS BORDERING
Lake Superior’s northern shore, Krumholtz was lost. Behind the wheel, searching for a landmark, he had not seen a road sign or any other indication of a human presence for miles. The surface on which he had been driving had altered from asphalt pavement to rutted dirt, and the route appeared to be undecided about its direction. It had been headed north, but after a sharp curve, it had angled south again. The rotting telephone poles, without wires, had been listing down toward the ground and now had disappeared entirely, swallowed up by forest-matter.

Having advanced for the last half hour feeling that he had moved back into an era of primeval undergrowth, Krumholtz found himself in a thick wooded area of spruce and maple trees. They were edging closer to the road as one mile followed another. He had lost sight of the lake and was getting anxious about the time. He pulled his rental car over—there was no shoulder, just a patch of weedy grass—to consult his directions, which appeared to be contradictory. The rental car’s GPS system wasn’t working. Having little idea of where he was, exactly, he turned off the engine and got out of the car.

The sharp raw pine scent made him think of his childhood in rural Oregon. He noticed a hawk circling above him. Nearby to the right, a sumac bush displayed deep autumnal red leaves. When he looked at it, the leaves trembled, as if his gazing had caused the bush to shiver.

He took in a deep breath, then coughed. Slowly and with careful deliberation over word choices, he began cursing.

Krumholtz was a freelance journalist and had been assigned by
Success
magazine to interview the subject of February’s cover story. Just as
Playboy
always had a foldout,
Success
always had a Winner. The title always
appeared in uppercase format. February’s Winner, James Mallard, lived back in this forest somewhere in a large compound of his own design, Krumholtz had been informed. His article on Mallard was to include a combination of background information and personal narrative—the rise to fortune, lifestyle choices, opinions, etc.—along with anecdotes about the winner’s current well-being. To deserve a place in
Success
, the subject had to have made a significant mark measured in dollars. These feature articles, celebratory but not effusive or craven, would have as their subtext an understanding of the
complexity
of achieving great wealth. Seasonings of wit and irony were acceptable if dropped knowingly here and there throughout the article, but even a hint of skepticism in the face of affluence would be ruthlessly blue-penciled. “
Vogue
does not mock fashion, and
we
do not mock riches,” Krumholtz’s editor had told him. “The amassing of a large fortune is to the readers of our magazine a sweetly solemn thought.”

James Mallard, pronounced Mall
ard
, British style, accent on the second syllable, had been difficult to research. The biography was paltry. He was almost an unknown. The Wikipedia article on him was “under revision,” and several other Web articles on him had been withdrawn or were impossible to access. The print media had mostly ignored him. Mallard appeared to have lived and worked in the shadows. He “valued his privacy,” according to one source. Colleagues of his had been reluctant to discuss anything about him over the phone. Voices dropped melodramatically when Mallard’s name was mentioned. “I haven’t talked to you, and you haven’t made this call,” one of Krumholtz’s interviewees said to him.

A photographer, a stringer, would supposedly be sent out to do portraits-and-poolsides a few days after Krumholtz’s interview, but that prospect now seemed unlikely, even preposterous, given the remoteness and isolation of Mallard’s compound.

Krumholtz had never heard of Mallard before getting his assignment but was glad to have the work. Given the current economic climate, feature-article jobs like this one were drying up, as subscription levels plunged and newsstand sales declined. Even
Success
itself had experienced its first red-ink quarter, as if the act of reading about fortunes had become too laborious for the average would-be winner to master.

He checked his watch: two thirty. The hawk was still circling above him, and from the west a breeze touched his face. He heard a distant
songbird, a melancholy warbling. He felt as if the song might be directed to him or against him.

According to the bits and pieces of information that Krumholtz had cobbled together, his subject, James Mallard, had been born on a farm in Iowa. The young man had lettered in football and had quarterbacked the hometown team in his senior year to a conference championship. He had been named prom king and class valedictorian before attending Dartmouth on a full scholarship, where he had participated in intramural sports including water polo and rugby. He had graduated cum laude with honors in economics. His nicknames had been “Duck” and “the Duckster.” After having dropped out of business school at Northwestern, Mallard had attended Columbia Law (graduating in ’93, specialty: patent law). Soon after receiving his law degree and passing the bar exam, he had married the former Jane Estes (Columbia, Class of 1992), with whom he had had two children, James “Jiminy” Mallard Jr. and Mary Stuart “Gubbie” Mallard. His hobbies were listed as mountain climbing and art collecting. Using finance capital borrowed from a fellow student at Dartmouth, Mallard had bought several apartment buildings in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had fixed them up, converted them to condos, sold them for a good profit, and then had escaped from the real estate market before the bottom fell out of it. As a consequence, he had won the annual King Midas Award from the Omaha Chamber of Commerce. A year later, with an electrical engineer as partner, he had founded a privately held medical tech start-up; this company, InnovoMedic, had formulated a proton-based imaging device now commonly used for diagnoses in hospitals worldwide, the financial rewards for which—Mallard owned the patent; he had bought out his partner—were in the high nine figures. After acquiring these great riches, Mallard had divorced Jane Estes, and in 2004 had married Eleanor “Ellie” Bacon-Starhope, no college degree listed, and had fathered two more children, the twins, Angus and Gretel, both homeschooled. He owned several houses, including a brownstone on the Upper West Side in New York, another one in the desert Southwest, and this one, near Lake Superior and the city of D———. Mallard also owned a freshwater yacht, the
Temps Perdu
, which apparently he rarely sailed. He was noted as a fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. He served on the boards of several hospitals and charities; however, he had not appeared in public for eighteen months.

Krumholtz’s typical procedure was to research the winner and then to do follow-ups after the face-to-face interview. Most winners left behind them a slime trail of ex-wives and embittered business partners. But neither Mallard’s ex-wife nor his business partners would agree to speak to Krumholtz.

He was watching the hawk, circling slowly above him. Aloud, Krumholtz said, “I am lost. I am
nowhere.
” He took out his cell phone to check the time. No signal.

Several hours before, sitting in an airport lounge before his flight to D———, attended by a pleasantly overweight server with ketchup stains on her apron, Krumholtz had searched through his fact sheet for an angle. Certainly the medical device. Perhaps the art collection? The trophy wife with the preposterous name? The failed ambition to be a business-school student? The trick of buying out his partner before the medical device began to spout gobbets of cash? The rural Iowa upbringing? The liberalism? The house outside of D———? None of it seemed particularly promising. In fact the entire biography was anti-promising. Mallard might fall into that dangerous category of rich people who were non-narratable, who were story-unworthy: invisible, bland Olympians with no apparent personality and no social graces and no worldly interests of any kind apart from the amassing of treasure. Hearing the announcement of his plane’s departure, Krumholtz had tossed back his scotch, taken one last bite of his veggie-everything pizza, signaled to the server for the check, and, after having paid with the company’s credit card, had made his way down to the gate, stumbling against a refuse container near a water fountain.

Nervously he had combed his hair on the jetway before getting on board. This ritual had kept all his airplanes aloft.

Seated in row 27, wedged in between a manufacturer’s rep and a dozing matron, Krumholtz had felt an aurora of pain around his heart. He took two antacids from a roll in his pocket. After chewing and swallowing the tablets, which tasted of drywall, he felt the aurora diminish for a few moments before it returned with greater force, burning down his arm. He groaned inwardly as the plane hit an area of turbulence and the passengers were instructed to fasten their seat belts. The matron sitting next to him woke up and screamed once, quietly.

In D———, Krumholtz had picked up the keys for the rental car from an agent wearing rainbow suspenders. As soon as he found himself in traffic, he knew he had been misdirected. His goal had been Happy Valley Road, which led north out of the city in the general direction of Mallard’s compound, but somehow he had detoured onto a collection of chain restaurants and stores on Sam Wallis Boulevard, which was not actually a boulevard but a narrow two-way street with left-turn lanes that appeared out of nowhere and traffic lights that turned red almost without warning. On both sides Krumholtz saw slumped drivers, their faces shadowed with glumly placid Christian resignation. He was used to the honking of defiant urban car horns, but here in D———, traffic proceeded within an ominous defeated silence. The GPS in the rental car had been disabled, but Krumholtz decided he wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. After stopping at a FirePower gas station for directions, he asked the kid behind the inside counter where Happy Valley Road was.