Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [133]
“I won’t tell anybody about this if you don’t,” Jeremy says.
“Okay.”
“I’ll tell them you fell into the river. I’ll say that you slipped in the mud.”
“Thanks.”
“That can happen. I mean really.” Jeremy is enthusiastic now, creating a cover story for his father. “You were taking pictures and stuff, and you got too close to the river, and, you know, bang, you slipped, and like that. Just don’t ever tell Mom, okay? We’ll just … Holy shit! What’s that?”
The car has been climbing a hill, and near the top, where a slight curve to the right banks the road toward the passenger side, there comes into view an amazing sight that has cut Jeremy into silence: an old wooden two-story house on an enormous platform truck, squarely in the middle of the road, blocking them. The house on the truck is moving at five or ten miles an hour. Who knows what its speed is, this white clapboard monument, this parade, a smaller truck in front, and one in back, with flashing lights, and a WIDE LOAD sign? No one would think of measuring its speed. Conor looks up and sees what he knows is a bedroom window. He imagines himself in that bedroom. He is dripping water all over his son’s car, and he is beginning now to shiver, as the truck, carrying the burden it was made to carry, struggles up the next hill.
The Cures for Love
ON THE DAY he left her for good, she put on one of his caps. It fit snugly over her light brown hair. The cap had the manufacturer’s name of his pickup truck embossed above the visor in gold letters. She wore the cap backward, the way he once had, while she cooked dinner. Then she kept it on in her bath that evening. When she leaned back in the tub, the visor hitting the tiles, she could smell his sweat from the inside of the headband, even over the smell of the soap. His sweat had always smelled like freshly broiled whitefish.
What he owned, he took. Except for the cap, he hadn’t left much else behind in the apartment. He had what he thought was a soulful indifference to material possessions, so he didn’t bother saving them. It hadn’t occurred to her until later that she might be one of those possessions. He had liked having things—quality durable goods—around for a little while, she thought bitterly, and then he enthusiastically threw them all out. They were there one day—his leather vest, his gold clubs—and then they were gone. She had borrowed one of his gray T-shirts months ago to wear to bed when she had had a cold, and she still had it, a gray tee in her bottom dresser drawer. But she had accidentally washed it, and she couldn’t smell him on the fabric anymore, not a trace of him.
Her cat now yowled around five thirty, at exactly the time when he used to come home. She—the cat—had fallen for him the moment she’d seen him, rushing over to him, squirming on her back in his lap, declawed paws waving in the air. The guy had had a gift, a tiny genius for relentless charm, that caused anything—women, men, cats, trees for all she knew—to fall in love with him, and not calmly, either, but at the upper frequencies.
Her clocks ached. Time had congealed. For the last two days, knowing he would go, she had tried to be busy. She had tried reading books, for example. They couldn’t preoccupy her. They were just somebody’s thoughts. Her wounded imagination included him and herself, but only those two, bone hurtling against bone.
She was not a romantic and did not like the word “romance.” They hadn’t had a romance, the two of them. Nothing soft or tender, like that. They had just, well, driven into each other like reckless drivers at an intersection, neither one wanting to yield the right-of-way. She was a classicist recently out of graduate school, and for a job she taught Latin and Greek in a Chicago private school, and she understood