Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [140]
exiled for it, I turned to powder
six feet under all the topsoil
in Romania. Sweetheart, what on earth
are you doing on
this bus? Wake up, kiddo, that guy
Ben is gone, good riddance
is my verdict from two thousand
years ago, to you.
Listen: I have a present for you.
He took her hand.
His hand didn’t feel like much,
it felt like water when you’re reaching
down for a stone or shell
under the water, something you don’t
have, but want, and your fingers
strain toward it.
Here, he said, this is the one stunt
I can do: look up, sweetie, check out
this:
(he raised his arm in ceremony)
See? he said proudly. It’s raining.
I made it rain. I can do that.
The rain is falling, only
it’s not water, it’s
this other thing. It’s the other thing
that’s raining, soaking you. Good-bye.
When she awoke, at the sound of the air brakes, the bus driver announced that they had arrived at their first stop, the Palmer House. It wasn’t quite her stop, but Kit decided to get out. The driver stood at the curb as the passengers stepped down, and the streetlight gave his cap an odd bluish glow. His teeth were so discolored they looked like pencil erasers. He asked her if she had any luggage, and Kit said no, she hadn’t brought any luggage with her.
The El clattered overhead. She was in front of a restaurant with thick glass windows. On the other side of the glass, a man with a soiled unpressed tie was talking and eating prime rib. On the sidewalk, just down the block, under an orange neon light, an old woman was shouting curses at the moon and Mayor Daley. She wore a paper hat and her glasses had only one lens in them, on the left side, and her curses were so interesting, so incoherently articulate, uttered in that voice, which was like sandpaper worried across a brick, that Kit forgot that she was supposed to be unhappy, she was listening so hard, and watching the way the orange was reflected in that one lens.
Poor Devil
MY EX-WIFE AND I are sitting on the floor of what was once our living room. The room stands empty now except for us. This place is the site of our marital decline and we are performing a ritual cleansing on it. I’ve been washing the hardwood with a soapy disinfectant solution, using a soft brush and an old mop, working toward the front window, which has a view of the street. My hands smell of soap and bleach. We’re trying to freshen the place up for the new owners. The terms of sale do not require this kind of scouring, but somehow we have brought ourselves here to perform it.
We’re both bruised from the work: Emily fell off a kitchen stool this morning while washing the upstairs windows, and I banged my head against a drainpipe when I was cleaning under the bathroom sink. When I heard her drop to the floor, I yelled upstairs to ask if she was okay, and she yelled back down to say that she was, but I didn’t run up there to check.
When my wife and I were in the process of splitting up, the house itself participated. Lamps dismounted from their tables at the slightest touch, pictures plummeted from the wall and their frames shattered whenever anyone walked past them. Destruction abounded. You couldn’t touch anything in here without breaking it. The air in the living room acquired a poisonous residue from the things we had said to each other. I sometimes thought I could discern a malignant green mist, invisible to everyone else, floating just above the coffee table. We excreted malice, the two of us. The house was haunted with pain. You felt it the minute you walked in the door.
Therefore this cleaning. We both like the young couple who have bought the house—smiling, just-out-of-school types with one toddler and another child on the way. We want to give them a decent chance. During our eight years together, Emily and I never had any kids ourselves—luckily, or: unluckily, who can say.
Anyway, now that we’ve been cleaning it, our former dwelling seems to have calmed down. The air in the living room has achieved a settled stale quietude. It’s as if we’d never lived here. The unhappiness has seeped