Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [155]
“No,” he said, “I’ve noticed that. No one has time for a history.” Augenblick stood in the living room for a moment, apparently pondering what to say next. At last he looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought, and asked, “May I have a glass of iced tea?”
“No.” She folded her arms. “If you were a guest, I would provide the iced tea. But, as I said, I didn’t invite you here. I don’t mean to be rude, but—”
“Actually,” he said, “you are rude. You wrote back to me, and that was, well, an invitation. Wasn’t it? At least that’s how I took it, it’s how any man would have taken it.” He pasted onto his face a momentarily wounded look. “So all right. So there’s to be no iced tea, no water, no hospitality of any kind. No stories, either, about the house. All right. You want to know why I’m here? You really want to know why I’m here? My life hasn’t been going so well. I was doing a bit of that living-in-the-past thing. I was driving around, in this neighborhood, my former neighborhood, and I saw a really attractive woman working in her garden, weeding, and I thought: Well, maybe she isn’t married or attached, maybe I have a chance, maybe I can strike up a conversation with that woman working there in that garden. I wasn’t out on the prowl, exactly, but I did see you. And then I discovered that you had a baby. A beautiful boy. You know, I’m actually a nice guy, though you’d never know it. I’m a landscape architect. I have a college degree. All I wanted was to meet you.”
“You said I was desperate. You said you knew me. That was unkind. No. It was wicked.”
“You are desperate. I do know you. Desperation is knowable.”
“That’s a funny way of courting a woman, saying things like that.”
“We have the same soul, you and I,” he said. He said it awkwardly. Still, she was moved, beside or despite herself. The sovereign power of nonsensical compliments: a woman never had any defenses against them.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Come back in a few days and tell me about the house.”
“It’s just an ordinary house,” he told her, glaring critically at its corners. “Anyway, you’re right, I never lived here. I lived a few blocks away.”
“So make it up,” she said. “You were going to make it up anyway. Do what you can with it. Impress me.”
The next time Augenblick came by, he brought a bottle of wine, a kind of lubricant for his narrative, Melinda thought.
They drank half the bottle, and then he began with the medical details about the house and what had happened in its rooms. There had been a little girl with polio who lived in the house in the 1950s, encased in an iron lung, with the result that her parents had been the first on the block to buy a TV set, in those days a low-class forgetfulness machine. In those days only two stations broadcast programs, a few hours in the morning, then off the air during the afternoons until four p.m., when The Howdy Doody Show, Superman, and Beulah came on.
He touched Melinda’s hand. From somewhere he poured her another glass of wine, a glass that she had taken down from her kitchen shelf an hour or two ago, and she took it. He did an inventory of ghosts. Every house had them. He told her that the living room had once been an organizing center for Farmer-Labor Party socials of the Scandinavian variety, and that they had planned their strikes there, including the truckers’ strike in the 1930s.
“Any violence?” she asked, taking the wine for her second glass.
“None,” he said. As a little boy, he said, he had heard that there had once been a murder in these environs, and maybe it had been in this house. He wasn’t sure. The body of the murder victim, it was said, had been propped up on the freezer, sitting there, and the police had come in to investigate after the neighbors had