Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [53]
At dinner Darlene was gulping her wine. “I don’t get to drink this much at home. And furthermore, I shouldn’t. Wine keeps you awake. Did you know that? What is this, French?” She peered at the label. “Romanian. Well. That was my next guess.”
“A nice table wine,” Mr. Bradbury said. “And when it turns, you can use it as salad dressing.”
She looked at Eric. Eric shook his head, shrugged, and continued eating.
“He never says much at dinner,” Darlene said, pointing at Eric. Mr. Bradbury nodded. After a pause, she said, “I don’t think I ever told you about the time I met Bill Cosby.”
At one o’clock Mr. Bradbury found himself lying awake, staring at the curtains. His back itched, and as he rubbed his neck he thought he felt a swelling. The damnable Romanian wine had given him a headache. Sitting up, he lowered his feet to the floor and put on his slippers. Then, shuffling across the bedroom, he opened the door that led out to the hallway.
He was halfway to the kitchen when he stopped outside Eric’s bedroom door. He heard whispering. He stood and listened. It wasn’t whispering so much as a drone from his son. “ ‘The only completely stationary object in the room,’ ” he was saying, “ ‘was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.’ ” As Eric went on—Daisy and Tom and Jordan Baker undramatically droned into existence—his voice, indifferent to the story, spread out its soporific waves of narration. His father turned around and padded back into his own bedroom.
Three hours later, still feeling sleepless, Mr. Bradbury rose again out of bed and again advanced down the hall. All the lights were blazing. Halfway to the kitchen, he looked toward the refrigerator and saw the two of them huddled together side by side at the dining-room table, Darlene in her bathrobe, Eric in a nightshirt. Randomly he noticed the width of his son’s shoulders, the fullness of Darlene’s breasts. Her head was in her hands. Unobserved, Mr. Bradbury watched his son butter the bread, apply the mayonnaise, add the sandwich meat and the lettuce, close the sandwich, cut it in half, remove the crusts, and then hand it on its plate to her. “Thank you,” she said. She began to eat. She chewed with her mouth open. She said, “You’re so sweet. I love you.” She kissed the air in his direction. Mr. Bradbury moved back, stood still, then turned toward his bedroom.
He closed the door and clicked on the bedside lamp. From far down on the other side of the hallway, he heard Darlene’s loud laugh. He started to slip in under the covers, thought better of it, and went to his window to part the curtains. Getting back into bed, he switched off the bulb; then, with his head on the pillow, he gazed at the city skyline, half consciously counting the few apartments in the high-rise across the street that still had all their lights burning.
Gryphon
ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter—dazed and infrequent—sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see his face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. “I’ll bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.”
Carol sat at the desk in front of mine and was a bad person—when she thought no one was looking she would blow her nose on notebook paper, then crumple it up and throw it into the wastebasket