Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [147]
“She really said that?” Emily asks, coming down from the play structure. “That God and his archangels had a gun pointed at your head?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Those were her exact words. But I can’t imagine anyone being obsessed with me. I have such a …” But I can’t think of the phrase.
“Where did you find these girls, Dennis?” she asks.
“The place where everybody finds them. In the street, and so on.”
“You should look in different places.”
“There are no different places.” It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t know what Emily and I are talking about. I’ve completely lost the thread.
“No,” she says, “there aren’t.” She waits. “Did you see that woman and her little boy? Did you see how … I don’t know, how calm they were with each other? God, I loved seeing that. That calm. It makes you want to be a kid again. Of course, I always want that anyway.”
I take her hand and we walk back.
When we get to the house, my ex-wife is about to unlock her car and drive away, but she’s left her purse and wallet in the kitchen. So, together, the two of us go in the front door, and we step into the foyer and the living room. They’re completely dark—it’s night by now—and only the streetlight is spraying a little bit of illumination into the room, barely enough to see by.
“Close your eyes,” Emily says. “Could you find your way around in this place with your eyes closed? I bet you could.”
“Of course,” I say.
So I close my eyes and hold my arms out in the dark, and I walk all around the room where the lamps and tables and chairs were, where Em and I once lived, and I go into the dining room, still with my eyes closed, and I walk into the kitchen, past the counter and the dishwasher and then back out, taking my steps one at a time through these spaces I’ve come to know so intimately. It’s just as well that my eyes are closed as I’m walking through this dark house where Emily and I tried to stage our marriage, because I have this image of Santa jogging—no, sprinting—away from me, and I probably have a grim look.
It’s right about then that I’m back in the living room and I bump up against Emily, whose arms also have been out, in this game we’re playing. In the story that I don’t tell, we excuse ourselves, but then, very slowly and tenderly, we are inspired by each other at last, and we take each other in our arms, and all the bad times fall away, and we kiss, and we mutter our apologies, our long-standing whispered complicated remorse, and perhaps we sink to the floor, and we make love together in the dark empty living room, on the floor, understanding that maybe it will not be the last time, after all. And as we make love, Emily makes her utterly familiar trembling cry when she comes.
That’s the story that I don’t tell, because it doesn’t happen, and couldn’t, and would not, because I am unforgivable, and so is she. Two poor devils: what we don’t feel is remorse, the word on that postcard. We bump into each other, two blind staggerers, two solitudes, and then, yes, we apologize. And that’s when Emily goes into the kitchen, her eyes open, but still in the dark house that she knows, as they say, by heart, and she picks up her purse from where she has left it, and she comes out, sailing past me, and she maybe half turns in the dark, and blows me a kiss, but probably she doesn’t.
She closes the front door behind her, absentmindedly locking it, locking me into the house. And it’s then, and only then, that I speak up. “Good-bye, honey,