Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [115]
I have a lover, Jodie thought. Most people have lovers without paying any attention to what they have. They think pleasure is a birthright. They don’t even know what luck they have when they have it.
At the end of the day she couldn’t wait to see him. Every time she came into the room, his face seemed alert, relaxed, and sensual. Sometimes, thinking about him, she could feel a tightening, a prickling, all over her body. She was so in love and her skin so sensitive that she had to wear soft fabrics, cottons repeatedly washed. Her bras began to feel confining and priggish; on some days, she wouldn’t wear them. The whole enterprise of love was old-fashioned and retrograde, she knew, but so what? Sometimes she thought, What’s happening to me? She felt a certain evangelical enthusiasm and piety about sex, and pity for those who were unlucky in love.
Her soul became absentminded.
On some nights when Walton didn’t have to go to the loading dock, she lay awake, with him draped around her. After lovemaking, his breath smelled of almonds. She would detach herself from him limb by limb and tiptoe into the kitchen. There, naked under the overhead light, she would remove her tarot pack from the coupon drawer and lay out the cards on the table.
Using the Celtic method of divination in the book of instructions, she would set down the cards.
This covers me.
This crosses me.
This crowns me, this is beneath me, this is behind me, this is before me, this is myself.
These are my hopes and fears.
The cards kept turning up in a peculiar manner. Instead of the cards promising blessings and fruitfulness, she found herself staring at the autumn and winter cards, the coins and the swords. This is before me: the nine of swords, whose illustration is that of a woman waking at night with her face in her hands.
She had also been unnerved by the repeated appearance of the Chariot in reverse, a sign described in the guidebooks as “failure in carrying out a project, riot, litigation.”
Propped up in her living-room chair, she had been dozing after dinner when the phone rang. She answered it in a stupor. She barely managed a whispered “hello.”
She could make out the voice, but it seemed to come from the tomb, it was so faint. It belonged to a woman and it had some business to transact, but Jodie couldn’t make out what the business was. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?”
“I said we should talk,” the woman told her in a voice barely above a whisper, but still rich in wounded private authority. “We could meet. I know I shouldn’t intrude like this, but I feel that I could tell you things. About Glaze. I know that you know him.”
“Who are you? Are you seeing him?”
“Oh no no no,” the woman said. “It isn’t that.” Then she said her name was Glynnis or Glenna—something odd and possibly resistant to spelling. “You don’t know anything about him, do you?” The woman waited a moment. “His past, I mean.”
“I guess I don’t know that much,” Jodie admitted. “Who are you?”
“I can fill you in. Look,” she said, “I hate to do this, I hate sounding like this and I hate being like this, but I just think there are some facts you should know. These are facts I have. I’m just … I don’t know what I am. Maybe I’m just trying to help.”
“All right,” Jodie said. She uncrossed her legs and put her feet on the floor and tried to clear her mind. “I get off work at five. The office is near downtown.” She named a bar where her friends sometimes went in the late afternoons.
“Oh, there?” the woman asked, her voice rising with disappointment. “Do you really like that place?” When Jodie didn