Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [141]
Emily is sitting on the floor over in the other corner now, a stain in the shape of a Y on her T-shirt. She’s taking a breather. I can smell her sweat, a vinegary sweetness, and quite pleasant. She’s drinking a beer, though it’s only two in the afternoon. She’s barefoot, little traces of polish on her toenails. Her pretty brown hair, always one of her best features, hangs fixed back by a rubber band in the sort of ponytail women sometimes make when they’re housecleaning. Her face is pink from her exertions, and on her forehead is a bruise from where she fell.
She’s saying that it’s strange, but the very sight of me causes her sadness, a complicated sadness, she informs me, inflecting the adjective, though she’s smiling when she says it, a half smile, some grudges mixed in there with this late-term affability. She takes a swig of the beer. I can see that she’s trying to make our troubles into a manageable comedy. I was Laurel; she was Hardy. I was Abbott; she was Costello. We failed together at the job we had been given, our marriage. But I don’t think this comedic version of us will work out, even in retrospect. She tells me that one of my mistakes was that I thought I knew her, but, in fact, no, I never really knew her, and she can prove it. This is old ground, but I let her talk. She’s not speaking to me so much as she’s meditating aloud in the direction of the wall a few feet above my head. It’s as if I’ve become a problem in linear algebra.
My general ignorance of her character causes her sorrow, she now admits. She wonders whether I was deluded about women in general and her in particular. To illustrate what I don’t know about her, she begins to tell me a story.
But before she can really get started, I interrupt her. “ ‘Sorrow,’ ” I say. “Now there’s a noun from our grandparents’ generation. Nobody our age uses words like that anymore except you. Or ‘weary.’ You’re the only person I know who ever used that word. I’m weary, you’d say, when you didn’t look weary at all, just irritable. And ‘forbearance.’ I don’t even fucking know what forbearance is. ‘Show some forbearance’—that was a line you used. Where did you find those words, anyway?”
“Are you done?” she asks me. We’re like a couple of tired fighters in the fifteenth round.
“What’s wrong with saying ‘I’m bummed’?” I ask her. “Everyone else says that. ‘I’m bummed.’ ‘I’m down.’ ‘I’m depressed.’ ‘I’m blue.’ But you—you have a gift for the … archaic.” I am trying to amuse her and irritate her at the same time, so I wink.
“I wasn’t depressed back then,” she says. “I was sad. There’s a difference.” I scuttle over to where she is sitting and take a swig from the beer can she’s been clutching. Only there’s no beer left. I take a swig of air. Okay: we may be divorced, but we’re still married.
Before I met her, but after she had dropped out of college, Emily had moved to the Bay Area, quite a few summers after the Summers of Love, which she had missed, both the summers and the love. She had rented a cheap basement apartment in the Noe Valley, one of those ground-floor places with a view of the sidewalk and of passing shoes, and during the day she was working in a department store, the Emporium, in the luggage department.
I interrupt her. “I know this,” I say. “I know this entire story.”
“No, you don’t,” Emily tells me. “Not this one.” One of her coworkers was a guy named Jeffrey, a pleasant fellow most of the time, tall and handsome, though with an occasional stammer, and, as it happens, gay. He proved himself an effective salesman, one of those cheerful and witty and charming characters you buy expensive items from, big-ticket items, out of sheer delight in their company.
This coworker, Jeffrey, had befriended Emily soon after she had moved to San Francisco. He had shown her around the city, taken her to the wharf and the Tenderloin, an amateur guide and historian to the tourist spots and the dives. He loved the city; he had had his first real taste of a possible future life there, a potential hereafter of happiness. My wife-to-be and this Jeffrey rode