Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [144]
“Spare me your irony,” she says.
“I’m not being ironic. I’m telling you what you told me. But the thing is, your story isn’t about you, except on the sides, by comparison. You’re a minor saintly character in that story. You’re just the affable friend,” I say, which isn’t true, because that’s not what the story has been about. I’m feeling a little competitive now, in this singing contest we’re having. “After all, I’ve known plenty of people I’ve never described to you.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she says.
“Well, no, you haven’t,” I say. “Not exactly.”
I am not an admirable man, and my character, or lack of character, accounts for my presence on that living-room floor on that particular day. If I am unadmirable, however, I am not actually bad, in the sense that evil people are bad; if I were genuinely and truly bad, my ex-wife wouldn’t have been sitting there on the floor with me, her ex-husband, after we had cleaned the house for the next occupants.
My trouble was that after our first two years together, I couldn’t concentrate on her anymore. I was distracted by what life was throwing at me. I couldn’t be, what is the word, faithful, but actually that was the least of it, because unfaithfulness is a secondary manifestation of something we don’t have a word for.
When I met Emily, I was a clerk in a lighting store; I sold lighting fixtures. I suppose this is a pretty good job for someone who majored in studio art during college. I know something about light. My little atelier was filled with life-study drawings and rolled-up canvases of nakedness. That was pretty much what I did: nudes, the human body, the place where most artists start, though I never got past it.
There was this woman I was always drawing and always painting, and it wasn’t Emily. It was never Emily. She was a woman I had seen for about two minutes waiting in line for coffee at one of those bookstore cafés. She had an ankle bracelet, and I could describe her to you top to bottom, every inch, I could do that, trust me—just take my obsession on faith. She had come into my life for two minutes, and when, that afternoon, I couldn’t forget her, I began to draw her. The next day I drew her again, and the next week I began a painting of her, and a month after that, I did another painting of her, and so on and so on.
One afternoon—this was about two years after we had been married—Emily came into my studio, sometime in midafternoon, a Saturday. I had college football playing on the radio. Once again, I was painting the woman I had seen standing in line at this bookstore café. Emily asked me again who this person was and I told her again that it was just someone I caught a glimpse of, once; it didn’t matter who she was, she was just this person. Which is, of course, untrue. She wasn’t just a person. Emily stared at what I was doing with the canvas and then she unbuttoned her blouse and hung it on a clothes hook near the door. She took off her shoes and socks and stood there with her bra and jeans still on, and then she unclasped the jeans and the bra and off they went, onto the littered floor. Finally the underpants went, and she was in the altogether, standing in my studio just under the skylight, the smell of turpentine in the room. I interrupted what I was doing and eventually went over to her and took her in my arms, but that turned out to be the wrong response, so wrong that I can date the decline of our marriage from that moment. What I was supposed to do was look at her. I was supposed to draw her, I was supposed to be obsessed by her, and, finally, I was supposed to be inspired by her.
But that’s not how everyday love works. “I want to be your everything,” Emily once said to me, and I cringed.
The next time we made love, she was crying. “Please draw me,” she says. “Dennis, please please please draw me.”
“I can’t,” I said, because she didn’t inspire me and never