Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [128]
“I just do,” the girl says. “And I think they came out, because he was God, but not in time.” Conor touches the button, the rabbit pops up, and the girl laughs. In five minutes her mother returns, and the session ends; but Conor’s mood has soured, and he wouldn’t mind having a drink.
The next day, Sunday, Conor stands in the doorway of Jeremy’s bedroom. Jeremy is dressing to see Merilyn. “Just keep it light with her,” he says, as Jeremy struggles into a sweatshirt at least one size too large for him. “Nothing too serious.” The boy’s head, with its ponytail and earrings, pokes out into the air with a controlled thrashing motion. His big hands never do emerge fully from the sleeves. Only Jeremy’s calloused fingertips are visible. They will come out fully when they are needed. Hands three-quarters hidden: Youthful fashion-irony, Conor thinks.
After putting his glasses back on, Jeremy gives himself a quick appraisal in the mirror. Sweatshirt, exploding-purple Bermuda shorts, sneakers, ponytail, earrings. Conor believes that his son looks weird and athletic, just the right sixteen-year-old pose: menacing, handsome, still under construction. As if to belie his appearance, Jeremy does a pivot and a layup near the doorframe. It’s hard for him to pass through the doors in this house without jumping up and tapping the lintels, even in the living room, where he jumps and touches the nail hole—used for mistletoe in December—in the hallway.
Satisfied with himself, Jeremy nods, one of those private gestures of self-approval that Conor isn’t supposed to notice but does. “Nothing too earnest, okay?”
“Daad,” Jeremy says, giving the word a sitcom delivery. Most of the time he treats his father as if he were a sitcom dad: good-natured, bumbling, basically a fool. Jeremy’s right eyebrow is pierced, but out of deference to the occasion he’s left the ring out of it. He shakes his head as if he had a sudden neck pain. “Merilyn’s just another mom. It’s not a big puzzle or anything, being with her. You just take her places. You just talk to her. Remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Well, you were married to her, right? Once? You must’ve talked and taken her places. That’s what you did. Except you guys were young. So that’s what I’ll do. I’m young. We’ll just talk. Stuff will happen. It’s cool.”
“Right,” Conor says. “So where will you take her?”
“I don’t know. The flood, maybe. I bet she hasn’t seen a flood. This guy I know, he said a cow floated down the river yesterday.”
“A cow? In the river? Oh, Merilyn would like that, all right.”
“She’s my mom. Come on, Dad. Relax. Nothing to it.”
Jeremy says he will drive down to the motel where Merilyn is staying. After that, they will do what they are going to do. At the back stairs, playing with the cat’s dish with his foot and biting his fingernail, Jeremy hesitates, smiles, and says, “Well, why don’t you loosen up and wish me luck?” and Conor does.
Five days before Merilyn left, fourteen years ago, Conor found a grocery list in green ink under the phone in the kitchen. “Grapefruit, yogurt,” the list began, then followed with, “cereal, diapers, baby wipes, wheat germ, sadness.” And then, the next line: “Sadness, sadness, sadness.”
In those days, Merilyn had a shocking physical beauty: startlingly blue eyes, and a sort of compact uneasy voluptuousness. She was fretful about her appearance, didn’t like to be looked at—she had never liked being beautiful, didn’t like the attention it got her—and wore drab scarves to cover herself.
For weeks she had been maintaining an unsuccessful and debilitating cheerfulness in front of Conor, a stagy display of frozen failed smiles, and most of what she said those last few evenings seemed memorized, as if she didn’t trust herself to say anything spontaneously. She half laughed, half coughed after many of her sentences and often raised her fingers to her face and hair as if Conor were staring at them, which he was. He had never known why a beautiful woman had agreed to marry him in the first place. Now he knew he was losing her.
She worked as a nurse, and