Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [145]
At night I would hug her and kiss her and tell her that I loved her, my flesh pressed against her flesh, and it just made her cry all the more. I never struck her or hit her, but the poisons in the house grew. Emily was not my everything, and not my muse and inspiration; I never knew why she wanted that role, but she did, and because she wanted it and I couldn’t lie to her about how she could never be what she said she wanted to be, I could fold my arms around her as we stood or lay quietly together, and it was never enough, and because it was never enough, it was hateful.
We were like two becalmed sailing ships, with sailors from different countries shouting curses at each other, as we drifted farther and farther away.
“No, right, sure, of course,” she says, standing up and stretching. “Two ships.” She turns toward me and loosens her hair, so that it falls lightly over her shoulders and so I can see her do it. Her eyes are glittery with a momentary thrill of distaste for me. No more housework today. “Right. You just told me stories and listened to the radio and painted your dream girl.” She looks at me. “If you had been Picasso, everyone would have forgiven you.”
Now, late in the afternoon, we go walking toward the park, a way of recovering our equilibrium before we get into our separate cars and drive off toward our separate residences. Anyone seeing us strolling past the piles of bright leaves on the sidewalk, the last light of the sun in our eyes, might think that we’re still a couple. Emily’s wearing a little knitted red cap and a snug brown jacket, and she’s squinting against the sun’s rays, and because we are also facing a cool breeze from the west, her eyes fill with water—I refuse at this moment to think of them as tears—that she must wipe away before she says anything to me.
“It’s true,” she says. “Sometimes I forget the nicest things you did for me. Like that time you bought me flowers for my birthday.”
“Which birthday was this?” I ask. The sun is in my eyes, too.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “What matters is that you walked into the house with these six red roses clutched in your hand, and I smiled, and I saw, from the puzzlement on your face, that in your absentminded way you had forgotten that you had bought roses for me and that you were holding them in your hand at that very moment. Imagine! Imagine a guy who buys roses for his wife and then carries them into the house and still forgets that that’s what he’s doing. Imagine being so fucking absentminded. It’s a form of male hysteria.”
“Watch your language,” I say, kidding her. “It’s true,” I say. “I was presenting you with roses that I had forgotten about.”
“And what it meant,” Emily tells me, as if I hadn’t said anything, “was that your instincts, your … I don’t know what you would call it, your unconscious, still loved me, even if your conscious mind didn’t. I thought, My husband, Dennis, still loves me. Despite everything. You could absentmindedly get me roses on my birthday without knowing what you were doing. Somewhere in there, you were still kindly disposed toward me. Your little love light still was shining, before its last flickerings.”
We arrive at the park. On this side of it is a small playground with a slide, a climbing structure, swings, and one little boy is still playing while his mother sits on a bench and reads the paper, but now that it’s getting to be dusk, she’s squinting, bending down in order to make out the print. She calls to her son, but he won’t return to her quite yet. He won’t follow her orders. Emily sits down in one of the swings,