Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [118]
Jodie swallowed but could not bring herself to nod.
“He got it in a bar fight. Somebody kicked him in the ankle and shattered the bone. I mean, that’s all right, men get into fights, but what you have to know is that he used to beat me up—and the girl before me, he beat her up, too. He’d get drunk and coked up and start in on me. Sometimes he did it carefully so it wouldn’t show—”
“He doesn’t drink,” Jodie said, her mouth instantly dry. “He doesn’t do drugs.”
“Maybe not now, he doesn’t,” Gleinya Roberts said, smiling for a microsecond and patting the tablecloth with little grace-note gestures. “But he has and probably will again. His sweet side is so sweet that it’s hard to figure out the other side. He just explodes. He’s such a good lover that you don’t want to notice it. He’s quite the dick artist. But then he just turns, and it’s like a nightmare. He waits until you’re really, really happy, and then he blows up. Once, months and months and months ago, I told him that someday I wanted to go out to the West Coast and sit on the banks of the Pacific Ocean and go whale watching. You know, see the whales go spouting by, on their migrations. We both had a vacation around the same time—”
“I don’t think it’s the ‘banks’ of the Pacific Ocean. That’s for rivers. I think you mean ‘shore,’ ” Jodie said.
Gleinya Roberts shrugged. “All right. ‘Shore.’ Anyway, we both had a vacation around the same time, and we drove out there … no, we flew … and then we rented a car …”
She put her hand over her mouth, appearing to remember, but instead her eyes began to fill with dramatic, restaurant-scene tears; and at that moment Jodie felt a conviction that this woman was lying and was still probably in love with Walton.
“We rented a car,” she was saying, “and we drove up from San Francisco toward Arcata, along there, along that coast. There are redwood forests a few miles back from the coastline, those big old trees. We’d stay in motels, and I’d make a picnic in the morning, and we’d go out, and Glaze would start drinking after breakfast, and by midafternoon he’d be silent and surly—he’d stop speaking to me—and by the time we got back to our motel, he’d be muttering, and I’d try to talk about what we had seen that day. I mean, usually when you go whale watching there aren’t any whales. But there are always seals. You can hear the seals barking, down there on those rocks. I’d ask him if he didn’t think the cliffs were beautiful or the wildflowers or the birds or whatever I had pointed out to him. But I always said something wrong. Something that was like a lighted match, and he’d blow up. And he’d start in on me. You ever been hit in the face?”
Jodie had turned so that she could see the sidewalk through the window. She was getting herself ready. It wasn’t going to take much more.
“I didn’t think so. It comes out of nowhere,” Gleinya Roberts was saying, “and you’re not ready for it, and then, boom, he lands the second one on you. The first time he beats you up, it’s an initiation, and then he makes love to you to make up for it, but it makes the second one easier to do, because he’s already done it. You don’t expect it. Why should you? Why do you think he got thrown out of medical school? He hurt somebody there. He broke two of my ribs. I had a shoulder separation from him. He got very practiced in the ways of apology and remorse. He has a genius for remorse. And then of course he’s a demon under the sheets. The man can fuck, I’ll give him that, but, I don’t know, after a while great sex is sort of a gimmick. It’s like a 3-D movie, and you get tired of it. Well, maybe you