Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [52]
She was far ahead of them on the ice, pulling two children on skates around in a circle. The children yelled with pleasure.
“She’s … different, Pop. With her, everything’s simpler. They don’t have women like her around here, I don’t think. You don’t get what I mean at all.”
“Oh, I get it. You went up north looking for nature, and you found it, and you brought it back, and there it, I mean she, is. Overbite, straight hair, chapped hands, whopping tits, and all.”
“You wouldn’t believe,” Eric said, watching her, “how comforting she is.”
“What?” He stopped and waited. “Well, I might.”
“When I wake up, she’s always awake. She has a way of touching that makes me feel wonderful. Generous.” Now they were both watching her. “It’s like love comes easily to her.”
“God, you’re romantic,” his father said. “It must be your age.”
“Want to hear about how wonderful she is? In bed?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“You used to want to hear.”
“I shouldn’t’ve asked. That was a mistake. Glückschmerz. Besides, couples don’t live in bed. You can’t insult a waiter or cash a check in bed. As a paradigm for life, it’s inadequate.”
Eric was showing an unsteady smile. “I want to throw myself at her feet,” he said. “We’re the king and queen of lovers. Love. God, I just lap it up. We can go and go. I don’t want life. I want love. And so does she.”
“Have we always talked this way?” his father asked. “It’s deplorable.”
“We started getting a little raw about two years ago. That was when you began asking me about my girlfriends. Some pretty raw questions, things you shouldn’t have been asking. I mean, we all know why, right?”
“Just looking out for my boy.” In the cold, he could feel his eyelid twitching.
“You could mind your own business, Pop. You could try that.” He said this with equanimity. Darlene was running back toward them. She ran awkwardly, with her upper torso leaning forward and her arms flailing. Three children were following her. As she panted, her breath was visible in the cold air.
“Sometimes I think I lead a strange life,” Eric’s father said. “Sometimes I think that none of this is real.”
“Yeah, Chekhov,” Eric said. “I read him, just like you told me to.” Darlene ran straight up to Eric and put her blue mittens, which had bullet-sized balls of snow stuck to them, up to both sides of his face. She exposed all her teeth when she smiled. She took Eric’s left hand. Then she reached down with her other hand and grasped Mr. Bradbury’s doeskin glove. Standing between them, she said, “I love winter. I love the cold.”
“Yes,” Mr. Bradbury said. “The bitterness invigorates.”
Not letting go of either of their hands, she walked between them back to the apartment building.
They sat around for the rest of the afternoon; Darlene tried to take a nap, and Eric and his father watched a basketball game, DePaul against Marquette. When the game was half over, Eric turned to his father and asked, “Where are your cigarettes, Pop?”
“My little friends? I evicted them.”
“How come?”
“I quit in December. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I was fixing to die. The outlines of my heart were all but visible under the skin, it hurt so much. I felt like a corpse ready for the anatomy lesson. So: I stopped. Imagine this. I threw my gold Dunhill lighter, the one your mother gave me, down the building’s trash shaft, along with all the cigarettes in the house. I heard the lighter whine and clatter all the way to the heap at the bottom. What a scarifying loss was there. And how I miss the nicotine. But I wasn’t about to go. I may look like Samuel Gompers, but I’m only fifty-two. I figured there must be more to life than patient despair, right?”
Sitting on the floor, leaning against the sofa on which his father was sitting, Eric held his hand up in the air behind him. “Congratulations,” he said. The two of them shook hands. “That took real guts.”
“Thank you.” He checked his fingers, still yellow from nicotine