Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [156]
“Who are you?” Melinda asked Augenblick after they had finished the wine and he had concluded his story. Now they sat on the back porch in discount-store foldout chairs, and through the screens they could see her father’s garage with the car on one side and her father’s discards, his memory pile, on the other. “Because, right here, there’s quite a bit about you that’s completely wrong. You tell me a story, the absolutely wrong story, about happiness and a murder, and you say you know me and you say I’m desperate, and I think you said that you and I have the same souls, and your card claimed that you were an investment counselor, and then you informed me that you were a landscape architect.” Melinda put her tongue inside her wineglass and licked at the dew of wine still affixed there. “None of it adds up. Because,” she said, “what I think it is, what I think you are, sitting here beside me, is a devil.” She waited. “Not one of the major ones, in fact really minor, but one all the same.”
Through the air pocket of dead silence the crickets chirped. Augenblick did not immediately reply. “Um, okay,” he said.
“ ‘Okay’?”
“Yeah, okay. I used to be an investment counselor until I went broke. I couldn’t part with the business cards. So then I went into planting things, landscaping. Not much income, but some. The life I have is modest. I have a kind of ability to, you know, hit the wrong note. And sometimes I tell stories that aren’t quite true. It passes the time. Untruths are what I learned how to do in high school and never quite shook off.”
“You should work at it,” she said.
“I should work at it,” he repeated.
“Was there anything, anywhere, you said that was true?”
“Yes,” he said. “My name’s really Augenblick. You and I have the same souls. I believe that. I still sort of believe that you’re desperate. I used to live in this neighborhood. You had a mother once. I remember her. And actually, from the first moment I saw you, weeding out there in the garden, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”
She waited. “Could we go back to the topic sentence?”
He leaned sideways in her direction. She could smell the wine on his breath. “About devils, you mean?”
“Yeah, that part.”
“There are no devils anymore,” he said. “There are only people who are messed up and have to spread it around. And they’re everywhere. See, what you have to do is, if you’re going to get it, you have to imagine a devil who is also maybe a nice guy.” And he leaned over farther, so that he almost lost his balance in his chair, and he gave her a peck on each cheek, a devil’s kiss.
Making love to him (which she would never, ever do) would be like taking a long journey to a foreign locale you didn’t exactly want to visit, like Tangier, a place built on the slopes of a chalky limestone hill. The sun’s intensity would be unpleasant, and the general poverty would get in the way of everything. He would make love like a man who didn’t quite know what he was doing and who would press that ignorance, hard, on someone else, specifically on her, on her flesh. Still, he would be careful with her, as if he remembered that she was still nursing a child. In the middle of the bed, she would suddenly recall that when she had first seen him, she had thought that there was nothing to him, and she would wonder if there was still nothing to him now. Whether he was actually named Augenblick, despite his claims, whether he did anything actual for a living, whether he would ever hurt her, whether he really might be a devil, though devils didn’t exist. Because if they did, times would change and the devils would take new forms. If the name of God is changing in our time, then so are the other names. Then she would come, rapidly, and would forget her questions the way you forget dreams. But it would never happen, not that way.
“You made love to him?” Germaine was outraged. The cell phone