Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [100]
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“That?” She looked at it. “That was an accident that was done to me.”
Half an hour later, resting with her, his hands on her back, he felt a wave of happiness; he felt it was a wave of color traveling through his body, surging from his forehead down to his stomach. It took him over again, and then a third time, with such force that he almost sat up.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It is like … I felt a color moving through my body.”
“Oh that?” She smiled at him in the dark. “It’s your soul, Anders. That’s all. That’s all it is. Never felt it before, huh?”
“I must be very drunk,” he said.
She put her hand up into his hair. “Call it anything you want to. Didn’t you feel it before? Our souls were curled together.”
“You’re crazy,” he said. “You are a crazy woman.”
“Oh yeah?” she whispered. “Is that what you think? Watch. Watch what happens now. You think this is all physical. Guess what. You’re the crazy one. Watch. Watch.”
She went to work on him, and at first it was pleasurable, but as she moved over him it became a succession of waves that had specific colorations, even when he turned her and thought he was taking charge. Soon he felt some substance, some glossy blue possession entangled in the air above him.
“I bet you’re going to say that you’re imagining all this,” she said, her hand skidding across him.
“Who are you?” he said. “Who in the world are you?”
“I warned you,” she whispered, her mouth directly over his ear. “I warned you. You people with your things, your rusty things, you suffer so bad when you come into where we live. Did they tell you we were all soulless here? Did they say that?”
He put his hands on her. “This is not love, but it—”
“Of course not,” she said. “It’s something else. Do you know the word? Do you know the word for something that opens your soul at once? Like that?” She snapped her fingers on the pillow. Her tongue was touching his ear. “Do you?” The words were almost inaudible.
“No.”
“Addiction.” She waited. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
In the middle of the night he rose up and went to the window. He felt like a stump, amputated from the physical body of the woman. At the window he looked down, to the right of the billboard, and saw another apartment building with heavy decorations with human forms near the roof’s edge, and on the third floor he saw a man at the window, as naked as he himself was but almost completely in shadow, gazing out at the street. There were so far away from each other that being unclothed didn’t matter. It was vague and small and impersonal.
“Do you always stand at the window without clothes on?” she asked, from the bed.
“Not in Sweden,” he said. He turned around. “This is odd,” he said. “At night no one walks out on the streets. But there, over on that block, there’s a man like me, at the window, and he is looking out, too. Do people stand everywhere at the windows here?”
“Come to bed.”
“When I was in the army, the Swedish army,” he said, still looking out, “they taught us to think that we could decide to do anything. They talked about the will. Your word ‘willpower.’ All Sweden believes this—choice, will, willpower. Maybe not so much now. I wonder if they talk about it here.”
“You’re funny,” she said. She had moved up from behind him and embraced him.
In the morning he watched her as she dressed. His eyes hurt from sleeplessness. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m already late.” She was putting on a light blue skirt. As she did, she smiled. “You’re a lovely lover,” she said. “I like your body very much.”
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“We? There is no ‘we,’ Anders. There’s you and then there’s me. We’re not a couple. I’m going to work. You’re going back to