Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [154]
She deleted the last three sentences—too baroque—both for their meaning and her responsibility for writing them. The joking tone might be mistaken for friendliness. She ducked her head, hearing Eric staying quiet (she didn’t want to breast-feed him again tonight, her nipples were sore—but it was odd, she also had suffered a sudden brokenhearted need for sex, for friendly nakedness), and then she continued writing.
as far as i know, the previous owners of this house were named anderson. that’s who my mom and dad bought it from. “augenblick” isn’t even a name. it’s just a german noun.
so, my question is: who are you? where are you from? what were you doing in my house?
—melinda everson, ph.d.
She deleted the reference to the doctoral degree, then put it back, then deleted it again, then put it back in, before touching the SEND button.
Half an hour later, a new letter appeared in the electronic in-box, from eyeblink@droopingleaf.com.
THINK OF ME AS THE RAGE OVER THE LOST PENNY. BUT LIKE I TOLD YOU IM ACTUALLY VERY HARMLESS. W/R/T YOUR QUESTIONS, I CAN DROP BY AGAIN. INFORMATION IS ALL I WANT TO GIVE YOU. eye two LIVED THERE.
HA HA.—TED
The school year would be starting soon, and she needed to prepare her classes. She needed to study Peréz Galdós’s Miau again, for the umpteenth time, for its story of a man lost in a mazelike bureaucracy—her lecture notes were getting mazelike themselves, Kafkaesque. And worse: bland. She would get to that. But for now she was waiting. She knew without knowing how she knew that when Augenblick came back, he would show himself at night, when both her father and her son were asleep; that he would come at the end of a week of hot, dry late-summer weather orchestrated by crickets, that he would show up as a polite intruder again, halfway handsome, early-middle-aged semi-degraded-Clapton, well dressed, like a piano tuner, and that he would say, as soon as he was out of the driver’s-side door of his unidentifiable car, perhaps handmade, and had advanced so that he stood there on the other side of the screen door, “You look very nice tonight. I got your letter. Thanks for inviting me over.”
These events occurred because she was living in her father’s house.
“And I got yours,” she said, from behind the screen. The screen provided scanning lines; his face was high-definition. “You’re the rage over the lost penny. But I didn’t invite you over. You’re not invited. It wasn’t an invitation.” She hesitated. “Shit. Well, come in anyway.”
This time, once inside, he approached her and shook her hand, and in removing his hand, rubbed hers, as if this were the custom somewhere upon greeting someone whom you didn’t know but with whom you wanted a relationship. It was a failed tentative caress but so bizarre that she let it happen.
“My father is upstairs,” she said. “And my son, too. Maybe you could explain who you are?”
“This is the living room,” he told her, as if he hadn’t heard her question, “and over there we once had a baby grand piano in that corner, by the stairs.” He pointed. “A Mason and Hamlin. I was never any good at playing it, but my sister was. She’s the real musician in the family.”
“What does she play?” she asked, testing him. “What’s her specialty?”
“Scriabin études,” he said. “Chopin and Schumann, too, and Schubert, the B-minor.”
“She didn’t play the violin, did she?”
“No. The piano. She still does. She’s a pediatric endocrinologist now. Doctors like music, you know. It’s a professional thing.” He waited. “Ours was the only piano on the block.” He glanced toward the dining room. “In the dining room we used to have another chandelier, it was cut glass—”
“Mr. Augenblick, uh, maybe you could tell me why you’re here? And why you’re lying to me?” She scooped a bit of perspiration off her forehead and gazed into his game face. “Why all these stories about this locality? Scriabin, Schubert: every house has a story. The truth is, I’m not actually interested in who did what, where, here.” She saw him glance down at her body, then at the baby toys scattered across the living-room