Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [207]
Outside, in the backyard, Mallard, or someone, had set up a small platform of slatted wood and, a few feet away, a sawhorse. Off to the side were axes, hatchets, a steel wedge, and a chain saw neatly arranged inside a wooden holding-frame with pegs at the top from which to hang other tools. A large pile of unsplit logs had been dumped nearby, and now Mallard picked up a log and stood it up on the platform. He took out an ax before stepping away from the log. With one powerful blow, he raised the ax and brought it down on the log, splitting it cleanly in two.
“Is this your hobby?” Krumholtz asked. “Splitting wood?”
“It’s not a hobby, no. Hobbies are for others. It’s an activity, a physical exertion, that we like to engage in,” Mallard said. Again he placed a log vertically on the platform, and again the ax came down in one clean arc. The two parts of the log dropped away on either side. “A few minutes, and then you can take over.”
Krumholtz took a long look at Mallard’s face, which now, in the diminishing light, seemed to have a rock-jawed solidity, with eyes set far apart and a heavy five-o’clock shadow over a thick neck. Wherever Mallard turned, he gave off an air of command: the velvet glove over the iron fist had grown very thin with him. He split logs with efficiency, Krumholtz thought, but also as if he were in a permanent rage.
“So, you have questions? Ask questions,” Mallard said, his breath coming out in snorts. “Ask me questions.”
“Why did you move out here? It’s a bit remote.”
“We didn’t want to see any neighbors. So we bought up the entire valley. You can look in any direction, and you won’t see anybody. It gives you a … freedom, you know?”
“Yes, well. Something else I meant to ask right away. This can be on or off the record, but your wife mentioned something about ‘the other woman,’ and I think she said her name is Lorraine. When I came to the gate—”
“Lorraine?” The ax came down. “Are you doing a gossip sheet? I thought this was for Success magazine. Well. This isn’t for publication. Lorraine’s my girlfriend. My mistress, if you will.”
“She’s here?”
“Of course she’s here. You didn’t meet her? Sometimes—” He set up another log, then took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “Sometimes Lorraine stays down at her end of the house. Or she’s out in back.” He waved his arm at the air.
“Your wife doesn’t mind? Your having a live-in girlfriend?”
“Off the record? Or on it? Well, write what you please. We don’t care. No, she doesn’t mind. She knows that a man like me needs more than one woman. That’s how it happens to be. Always has been. From the start. We simply choose not to lie about it and not to indulge in the usual middling hypocrisies. I could tell you about men who have a different mistress every month. If you can afford it, you can do it. Everyone knows and nobody cares. So. Have you met Lorraine?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you go back into the house and go back toward the other wing and introduce yourself to her and get her version of things, then come back and split some logs? Obviously, you need to get the girlfriend thing out of the way. Then we’ll have a drink.” Mallard pointed at the door.
Walking down the hallways in a kind of trance, with the artwork appearing to register his presence—here was another video installation, switched on possibly for his benefit, this one by an artist, Frederic Winkelman, whose work he recognized, the flat screen showing a woman staring straight out at the viewer, this same woman wearing a slightly antique stained silk chiffon bridal gown à la Miss Havisham but posed sitting in a folding chair on a busy urban sidewalk (it looked like midtown Manhattan somewhere near Forty-second Street) while all around her the blurry pedestrians parted and then reclustered—walking away from this visual