Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [196]
She looked at me with an expression of honesty, solemn and accusing. I said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
“Yes. It’s always a beautiful day. That’s not the subject.”
I had the feeling that I would never have a normal conversation with this woman. “You were so good for him,” I blurted out, and her expression did not change. “But you should have seen through him. He must have wanted to keep you for himself and his birds and cats and dogs. You were his last precious possession. And, no, he really didn’t invite me to meet you. Something happened to him,” I said, a bit manically. “He turned into something he hadn’t been. Maybe that was it. Being poor.”
“Oh,” she said, after turning back toward me and sizing me up, “poor. Well. We liked being poor. It was sort of Buddhist. It was harder for him than for me. We lived as a family, I’ll say that. And I loved him. He was a sweetie, and very devoted to me and Robert and his animals.” She hoisted the baby and burped him. “He had a very old soul. He wasn’t a suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you all right?”
“Why?”
“You look like you’re going to faint.”
“Oh, I’m managing,” I said. In truth, my head felt as if the late-afternoon sunlight were going right through the skull bones with ease, soaking the gray matter with photons. “Listen,” I asked her, “do you want to go for a drink?”
“I can’t drink,” she said. “I’m nursing. And you’re married, and you have children.” How old-fashioned she was! I decided to press forward anyway.
“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s have coffee.”
There is a peculiar lull that takes over New York in early afternoon, around two thirty. In the neighborhood coffee shops, the city’s initial morning energy drains out and a pleasant tedium, a trance, holds sway for a few minutes. In any other civilized urban setting, the people would be taking siestas. Here, voices grow subdued and gestures remain incomplete. You lean back in your chair to watch the vapor trails aimed toward LaGuardia or Newark, and for once no one calls you, there is nothing to do. Radios are tuned to baseball, and conversations stop as you drift off to imagine the runner on second, edging toward third. Camille and I went into a little greasy spoon called Here to Eat and sat down at a table near the front window. The cook stared out at the blurring sidewalk, his eyelids heavy. He seemed massively indifferent to our presence and our general needs. The server barely noticed that we were there. She sat at one of the counter stools working on a crossword. No one even looked up.
Eventually the server brought us two cups of stale, burned coffee.
“At last,” I said. “I thought it’d never come.”
The baby was asleep in the crook of Camille’s right arm. After a few minutes of pleasantries, Camille asked me, “So. Why are you here?”
“Why am I here? I’m here because of Brantford. For his memory. We were always close.”
“You were?” she said.
“I thought so,” I replied.
Her face, I now noticed, had the roundedness that women’s faces acquire after childbirth. Errant bangs fell over her forehead, and she blew a stream of air upward toward them. She gave me a straight look. “He talked about you as his long-lost brother, the one who never came to see him.”
“Please. I—”
She wasn’t finished. “You look alike,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean that you were close. You could have been his identical twin and you wouldn’t have been any closer to him than you are now. Anyway, what was I asking? Oh, yes. Why are you here? With me? Now.”
“For coffee. To talk. To get to know you.” I straightened my necktie. “After all, he was my cousin.” I thought for a moment. “I loved him. He was better than me. I need to talk about him, and you didn’t plan a reception. Isn’t that unusual?”
“No, it isn’t. You wanted to get to know me?