Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [139]
Of course I remember you. We were both in a calculus class. We had hamburgers after the class sometimes in the college greasy spoon, and we talked about boys and the future and your dog at home, Brutus, in New Buffalo, Minnesota, where your mother bred cairn terriers. In the backyard there was fencing for a kennel, and that’s where Brutus stayed. He sometimes climbed to the top of his little pile of stones to survey what there was to survey of the fields around your house. He barked at hawks and skunks. Thunderstorms scared him, and he was so lazy, he hated to take walks. When he was inside, he’d hide under the bed, where he thought no one could see him, with his telltale leash visible, trailing out on the bedroom floor. You told that story back then. You were pretty in those days. You still are. You wear a pin in the shape of the Greek letter lambda and a diamond wedding ring. In those days, I recited poetry. I can remember you. I just can’t do it in front of you. I can’t remember you when you’re there.
She gazed out the window of the bus. She didn’t feel all right but she could feel all right approaching her, somewhere off there in the distance.
She had felt it lifting when she had said his name was Billy. It wasn’t Billy. It was Ben. Billy hadn’t left her; Ben had. There never had been a Billy, but maybe now there was. She was saying good-bye to him; he wasn’t saying good-bye to her. She turned on the overhead light as the bus sped through Des Plaines, and she tried to read some Ovid, but she immediately dozed off.
Roaring through the traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, the bus lurched and rocked, and Kit’s head on the headrest turned from side to side, an irregular rhythm, but a rhythm all the same: enjambments, caesuras, strophes.
My darling girl, (he said, thinner
than she’d ever thought he’d be,
mostly bald, a few sprout curls,
and sad-but-cheerful, certainly,
Roman and wryly unfeminist, unhumanist,
unliving), child of gall and wormwood (he pointed his
thin malnourished finger at her,
soil inside the nail),
what on earth
brought you to that unlikely place?
An airport! Didn’t I tell you,
clearly,
to shun such spots? A city park on a warm
Sunday afternoon wouldn’t be as bad. People fall
into one another’s arms out there all the time.
Hundreds of them! (He seemed exasperated.)
Thank you (he said)
for reading me, but for the sake
of your own well-being, don’t go there
again without a ticket. It seems
you have found me out. (He
shrugged.) Advice? I don’t have any
worth passing on. It’s easier
to give advice when you’re alive
than when you’re not,
and besides, I swore it off. Oh I liked
what you did with Caroline, the lambda-girl
who wears that pin because her husband
gave it to her on her birthday,
March twenty-first—now that
I’m dead, I know everything
but it does me not a particle of good—
but naturally she thinks it has no
special meaning, and that’s the way
she conducts her life. Him, too. He
bought it at a jewelry store next to a shoe
shop in the mall at 2 p.m.
March 13, a Thursday—but I digress—
and the salesgirl,
cute thing, hair done in a short cut
style, flirted with him
showing him no mercy,
touching his coat sleeve,
thin wool, because she was on commission. Her
name was
Eleanor, she had green eyes.
The pin cost him $175, plus tax.
She took him, I mean, took him for a ride,
as you would say,
then went out for coffee. By herself, that is,
thinking of her true
and best beloved, Claire, an obstetrician
with lovely hands. I always did admire
Sapphic love. But I’m
still digressing. (He smirked.)
The distant failed humor of the dead.
Our timing’s bad,
the jokes are dusty,
and we can’t concentrate
on just
one thing. I’m as interested
in Eleanor as I am
in you. Lambda. Who cares? Lambda: I suppose
I mean, I know,
he thought the eleventh letter, that uncompleted triangle,
looked like his wife’s legs. Look:
I can’t help it,
I’m—what is the word?—salacious, that’s
the way I always was,
the bard of breasts and puberty, I