Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [143]
Emily tried to console him, but he turned away from her, shaking his head. He went into his bedroom, got dressed, and told her that they were going for a car ride in the blue VW. He asked her to drive. He said that he had to have his hands free.
He directed her down toward the Presidio and then across the Golden Gate Bridge, and when they were about midway across the bridge, he took the packet of photographs and held up the photos of himself one by one outside the window. The wind seized these portraits of him—some of them fluttered over the side of the bridge into the bay and some of them just lay there on the gridded pavement for the other cars to drive over. Emily told him that he could be ticketed for littering, but he didn’t listen to her; he was too busy getting rid of these snapshots. “They won’t arrest me,” he shouted over the road noise. “Not after they get a good look at me.”
Then he instructed Emily to drive up the coast so that they could go whale watching. However, it was the wrong season: no whales that time of year. After a couple of hours, they pulled over at a roadside rest area in sight of the Pacific. The two of them got out of the car. Though no whales were visible, Jeffrey, leaning against his car and staring out at the water, said he saw some. For the next half hour, he described the whales swimming by, all the shapes and sizes and varieties of them, whale after whale under the surface. He was like an encyclopedia entry: here were the humpback whales, and there the bottle-nosed, and the pilot, and the beluga, the right whales, and the blue. When he was done with this harmless hallucinatory description, he got back into the car, and my wife, that is, then my wife-to-be and now my ex-wife, drove him back home, to his apartment on Clement. When they got back to his place, he was distracted and confused, so she undressed him and put him to bed, Good Samaritan that she is. And then, and this is the part I couldn’t have imagined, she got into bed with him and put her arms around him until he fell asleep.
She’s still sitting there in the living room, looking at me in silence, still unsmilingly. The point of this story is that she loved this man, loved him, I think the phrase is, to death.
“No,” I say, “you’re absolutely right, you never told me that story.” My heart is pounding slightly, and I have to work to sound calm. “So you loved him. What happened to this Jeffrey?” I ask her.
She looks at me. “Duh,” she says. She removes her foot from my grasp. I hadn’t realized I was holding on to it. I wonder what else she might have done for him that she hasn’t told me, but I don’t ask. “The thing is,” she says, “I often dream about him. And these dreams, I often wake up from them, and they’re terrible dreams, no comfort at all.” She looks at me and waits. “They’re really insane dreams,” she says.
“How are they insane?”
“Oh,” she says, “let’s not spoil it with words.” But I know my wife, and what she means is that in these dreams she is still lying down next to him. She glances out the window. “There goes Santa again.” She laughs. It’s not a good laugh, more like a fun-house laugh. I get up, make my way to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, take out two beers—we’ve cleaned out the refrigerator except for a twelve-pack of low-carb Budweiser—and I bring one of them back to her. I open the other one and gaze out the window, but Santa has turned the corner and is no longer visible, to my great disappointment. It’s getting to be late afternoon, the time of day when you could use some Santa and aren’t going to get it.
I take a good slug of the