Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [203]
An intercom with a white button stood in front of the gate. Krumholtz drove up in front of it and pressed the button.
“Yes?” A woman’s voice.
“It’s Jerry Krumholtz.” He waited. The silence continued for five seconds, ten seconds, almost half a minute. “From Success magazine. I have an appointment? With James Mallard?”
Now he might have a story: Mallard, perhaps emulating Howard Hughes, feared the world’s toxicity.
“It’s been arranged. I’m here to interview James Mallard.”
From the forest came an insucking breath of wind.
“This interview was set up a long time ago. And … and a photographer will be here in a few days for the artwork.”
He waited. The engine of the rental car hummed quietly.
“This has all been arranged. It’s been agreed to.”
“You don’t have to plead,” the voice on the intercom said. “Do you believe in angels?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a simple question.”
“Well, it may be simple, but I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you believe in angels?” Just then, the gate lifted as if on invisible wires, and Krumholtz drove in. He had the impression that video surveillance cameras were trained on him as his car made its way up a switchback dirt road around the bowl of a valley to the crest of the bluff, where he saw the house splayed out lengthwise across the top.
The house, Mallardhof, built of concrete and glass, commanded a distant view of Lake Superior in one direction and the forest in another. A green Jeep speckled with dried mud sat in the driveway along with a car whose make Krumholtz didn’t recognize. A small perennial garden had been planted to the right of the garage. From where he had parked, Krumholtz could not quite see where the house ended; it just went on and on. It was in Martian Embassy style: ostentatiously inhuman. Near the front door was a display area consisting of a fragile-seeming pile of rocks, like a cairn, possibly a sculpture of some kind, encircled by bricks. The austere lavishness of the house presented the viewer with showy neutrality, as if the old styles of grandiose display—Italian palazzos, Tudor palaces, and castles—had given way to a nondecorative fortress brutalism of glass and stone. How the floor-to-ceiling glass supported the concrete roof was a mystery, unless the glass was thicker than it appeared to be and was load-bearing, as required by law. Krumholtz did not feel like getting out of his rental car, but when he saw a woman emerging from the front door, he thought he had better get to work.
“Hello hello hello!” she said, smiling with what must have been forced cheer, but the smile was so dazzling that Krumholtz thought for a moment that she might actually be happy to see him. She wore beige capri pants and a simple gray blouse, and she looked, as the wives of the rich usually did, like a professional beauty. In fact she was terribly beautiful, so much so that he could hardly keep his eyes on her. Beautiful women had always made him shy, and gazing at this one was like looking at the sun. After a few seconds, he had to turn away. “Mr. Krumholtz,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Ellie Mallard.”
“Jerry,” he said. “Please call me Jerry.”
“I shall call you Mr. Krumholtz,” she said, holding her ground. “For the sake of your dignity.” Her skin, which at first he had assumed to be deeply tanned, he now saw had a permanent attractive darkness to it. Did she have an African-American mother or grandmother? Or was her family Persian? How to ask such a question? Her black tangled hair fell down to her shoulders, and gold hoop earrings sparkled against her skin in the fading