Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [129]
Women like her, he thought, didn’t usually allow themselves to be loved by a man like him. But there she was.
When, two and a half years later, she said that she was leaving him, and leaving Jeremy behind with him, and that that was the only action she could think of taking that wouldn’t destroy her life, because it wasn’t his fault but she couldn’t stand to be married to anybody, that she could not be a mother, that it wasn’t personal, Conor had agreed to let her go and not to follow her. Her desperation impressed him, silenced him.
She had loaded up the Ford and a trailer with everything she wanted to go with her. The rain had turned to sleet, and by the time she had packed the books and the clothes, she had collected small flecks of ice on her blue scarf. She’d been so eager to go that she hadn’t turned on the windshield wiper until she was halfway down the block. Conor had watched her from the front porch. From the side, her beautiful face—the meaning of his life—looked somehow both determined and blank. She turned the corner, the tires splashed slush, the front end dipped from the bad shocks, and she was gone.
He had a trunk in the attic filled with photographs he had taken of her. Some of the shots were studio portraits, while others were taken more quickly, outdoors. In them, she is sitting on stumps, leaning against trees, and so on. In the photographs she is trying to look spontaneous and friendly, but the photographs emphasize, through tricks of angle and lighting, her body and its voluptuousness. All of the shots have a painfully thick and willful artistry, as if she had been mortified, in her somewhat involuntary beauty.
She had asked him to destroy these photographs, but he never had.
Now, having seen Jeremy go off to find his mother somewhere in Eurekaville and maybe take her to the flood, Conor wanders into the living room. Janet’s sprawled on the floor, reading the Sunday comics to Annah. Annah is picking her nose and laughing. Joe, over in the corner, is staging a war with his plastic mutant men. The forces of good muscle face down evil muscle. Conor sits on the floor next to his wife and daughter, and Annah rumbles herself backward into Conor’s lap.
“Jeremy’s off?” Janet asks. “To find Merilyn?”
Conor nods. Half consciously, he’s bouncing his daughter, who holds on to him by grasping his wrist.
Janet looks back at the paper. “They’ll have a good time.”
“What does that mean?”
She flicks her hair back. “ ‘What does that mean?’ ” she repeats. “I’m not using code here. It means what it says. He’ll show her around. He’ll be the mayor of Eurekaville. At last he’s got Merilyn on his turf. She’ll be impressed.”
“Nothing,” Conor says, “ever impressed Merilyn, ever, in her life.”
“Her life isn’t over.”
“No,” Conor says, “it isn’t. I mean, nothing has impressed her so far.”
“How would you know? You didn’t follow her down to Tulsa. There could be all sorts of things in Tulsa that impress Merilyn.”
“All right,” Conor says. “Maybe the oil wells. Maybe something. Maybe the dust bowl and the shopping malls. All I’m saying is that nothing impressed her here.”
A little air pocket of silence opens between them, then shuts again.
“Daddy,” Annah says, “tip me.”
Conor grasps her and tips her over, and Annah gives out a little pleased shriek. Then he rights her again.
“I wonder,” Janet says, “if she isn’t getting a little old for that.”
“Are you getting too old for this, Annie?” Annah shakes her head. “She’s only five.” Conor tips her again. Annah shrieks again, and when she does, Janet drops the section of the newspaper that she’s reading and lies backward on the floor, until her head is propped on her arm, and she can