Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Ghosts

OUT ON THE FRONT LAWN, Melinda was weeding her father’s garden with a birdlike metal claw when a car drifted up to the curb. A man with brown hair highlighted with blond streaks got out on the driver’s side. He stood still for a moment, staring at the house as if he owned it and was mulling over possible improvements. In his left hand he held an apple with teeth marks in it, though the apple was still whole. Melinda had never laid eyes on the guy before. Her father’s house was located in an affordable but slightly run-down city neighborhood with its share of characters. They either gawked at you or wouldn’t meet your gaze. Many of them were mutterers who deadwalked their way past other pedestrians in pursuit of their oddball destinations. She returned to her weeding.

“Hot day,” the man said loudly, as if comments on the weather might interest her. Melinda glanced at him again. With a narrow Eric Claptonish face, and dressed in blue jeans and a plain white shirt, he was on his way to handsomeness without quite arriving there. The apple was probably an accessory for nerves, like a chewed pencil behind the ear.

The baby monitor on the ground beside her began to squawk.

“I have to go inside,” Melinda said, half to herself. She dropped her metal claw, rubbed her hands to get some of the topsoil off, and hurried into the house, taking the steps two at a time. Upstairs, her nine-month-old son, Eric, lay fussing in his crib. With dirt still under her fingernails, she picked him up to kiss him and caught a whiff of wet diaper. At the changing table, she raised her son’s legs with one hand and removed the diaper with the other while she observed the stranger advancing up the front walk toward the entryway. The doorbell rang, startling the baby and making his arms quiver. Melinda called over to her father, whose bedroom was across the hall, to alert him about the stranger. Her father didn’t answer. Sleep often captured him these days and absented him for hours.

She pinned the clean diaper together, and with slow tenderness brought Eric to her shoulder. She smoothed his hair, the same shade of brown as her own, and at that moment the man who had been standing outside appeared in front of her in the bedroom doorway, smiling dreamily, still holding the bitten apple.

“I used to live here,” the man said quietly, “when I was little. This was my room when I was small.” After emphasizing the last word with a strange vehemence, he seemed to be surveying the walls and the ceilings and the floors and the windows until at last his gaze fell on Eric. The baby saw him and instead of screaming held out his arm.

“Jesus. Who are you?” Melinda said. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” the man said. “Old habits die hard.” The baby was now tugging downward at Melinda’s blouse buttons, one after the other, which he did whenever he was hungry. “I heard him crying,” the man said. “I thought I might help. Is that your father?” He pointed toward the second bedroom, where Melinda’s father dozed, his head slumped forward, a magazine in his lap.

“Yes, it is. He is,” Melinda said. “Now please leave. I don’t know you. You’re a trespasser. You have serious boundary issues. You have no right to be here. Please get the fuck out. Now.” The baby was staring at the man. “I’ve said ‘please’ twice, and I won’t say it again.”

“Quite correct,” the man said, apparently thinking this over. “I really don’t have any right to be here.” He made a noise in his throat like a sheep cough. He had the unbudging calm of a practiced intruder. “Truly I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that I used to live here. I used to be here.” With the hand not holding the apple, he held out his index finger to Eric, and the baby, distracted from the button project, grabbed it. The man loosened the baby’s grip, turned around, and began to walk down the stairs. “If I told you everything about this house,” he said as he was leaving, “and all the things in it, you wouldn’t live here. I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

She followed him. From the landing she watched him until he had crossed the threshold and was halfway back to his car. Then he stopped, turned around, and said in a loud voice, a half shout, “Are you desperate? You look kind of desperate to me.” He waited in the same stock-still posture she had seen on him earlier. He seemed to be in a state of absolute concentration on something that was not there. People were getting into this style nowadays; really, nothing could outdo the urban zombie affect. It was post-anxiety. It promised a kind of death you could live with. He was waiting eternally for her to answer and wouldn’t move until she replied.

“Yes. No,” she called through the screen door. “But that’s no business of yours.”

“My name’s Augenblick,” the man said, just before he got into his car. “Edward Augenblick. Everyone calls me Ted. And I won’t bother you again. I left a business card in the living room, though, if you’re curious about this house.” He turned one last time toward her front screen door, behind which she was now standing. “I’m not dangerous,” he said, holding his apple. “And the other thing is, I know you.”

The car started — it purred expensively, making a sound like a diesel sedan, but Melinda had never known one brand of car from another, they were all just assemblages of metal to her, and he, this semi-handsome person who said he was Edward Augenblick, whoever that was, and the car, the two of them, the human machine and the actual machine, proceeded down the block in a low chuckling putter, turned right, and disappeared.

Picking up the baby, she went out to gather up her trowel and the birdlike metallic weeder. She would leave the weeds where they were, for now. Doing another sort of chore might conceivably restore her calm.

After taking the tools back to the garage, she surveyed her father’s things scattered on the garage’s left-hand side, which now served mostly as a shed. You could get a car in there on the right-hand side if you were very careful. Cast-off fishing poles, broken flashlights, back issues of American Record Guide and Fanfare, operas and chamber music on worn-out vinyl, and more lawn and garden implements that gave off a smell of soil and fertilizer — everything her father didn’t have the heart to throw away had been dumped here into a memory pile in the space where the other car, her mother’s, used to be. Melinda put her gardening implements on a tool shelf next to a can of motor oil for the lawn mower, and she bowed her head. When she did, the baby grabbed at her hair.

She wasn’t desperate. The almost-handsome stranger had got that particular detail wrong. A man given to generalizations might launch into nonsense about desperation, seeing a single mom with a baby boy, the two of them living in her father’s house, temporarily. Eric pulled hard at her bangs. She was trembling. Her hands shook. The visitation felt like … like what? Like a little big thing — a micro-rape.

She had grown up in this house; he hadn’t. It was that simple.

As if taking an inventory to restore herself, she thought of the tasks she had to perform: her property taxes would come due very soon and she would have to pay them on her own house across town, where she would be residing this very minute if her father weren’t in recovery from his stroke. She imagined it: her Arts and Crafts home stood empty (of her and of Eric) on its beautiful wooded lot, with a decorative rose arbor in the backyard, climbing in spite of her, in her absence. She missed the orderly clean lines of her own house and its nursery and its mostly empty spaces and what it required of her.

“Desperate”—the nerve of the guy.

Over there, at her own house, she would not be susceptible to the visitations of strangers. Over there, she would be within walking distance of the local college where she taught Spanish literature of the nineteenth century — her specialty being the novels of Pérez Galdós. Over there, she was on leave just now, during her father’s convalescence, while she lived here, the house of her childhood.

Looking at her father’s ragtag accumulations in the garage, she worried at a pile of books with her foot. The books leaned away from her, and the top three volumes (Gatsby, Edith Wharton, and Lloyd C. Douglas) fell over and scattered. The baby laughed.

These garage accumulations exemplified a characteristic weakness of the late-middle-aged, the broken estate planning of all the doddering Lear-like fathers. Still holding her son, she sorted her father’s books and restacked them.

Melinda’s ex-husband had been a great fan of Gatsby. He loved fakery. He had even owned a pair of spats and a top hat that he had purchased at an antique-clothing store. He had been the catalyst for a brief trivial marriage Melinda had committed herself to during graduate school. A month or so ago at a party where, slightly drunk on the Chardonnay — she shouldn’t have been drinking, she knew, she was still nursing the baby — she was telling funny stories about herself, and for a few moments, she hadn’t been able to remember her ex-husband’s name. Anyway, he was just an ex-husband. Now that she had the baby, solitude and its difficulties no longer troubled her. Her child had put an end to selfish longings. And besides — she was gazing at her father’s old National Geographics — she had the languages. She spoke four of them, including Catalan, which no one over here in the States spoke, ever; most Americans didn’t seem to have heard of it. And of course they didn’t know where it was spoken. Or why.

Her languages were a charm against loneliness; they gave her a kind of imaginary community. The benevolent spirits came to her in dreams and spoke in Catalan.

During her junior year abroad she had lived in Madrid for a few months and then in Barcelona, where she had acquired a Catalan boyfriend who had taught her the language during the times when he prepared meals for her in his small apartment kitchen — standard fare, paella or fried sausage and onions, which in his absentminded ardor he often burned. He gave her little drills in syntax and the names of kitchen appliances. He took her around Barcelona and lectured her about its history, the civil war, the causes for the bullet holes still visible in certain exterior walls.

He had told her that anyone could learn Spanish, but that she, a stupendously unique and beautiful American girl, must learn Catalan, so she did. What a charming liar he’d been.

Time passed, she returned to the States, got her degrees, and then eighteen months ago, when she had taken a college group to Barcelona for a week, she had met up again with him, this ex-lover, this Jordi, and they had gone out to a tapas bar where she had spoken Catalan (with her uncertain grammar, she sounded, Jordi said, like a pig farmer’s wife). At least with her long legs, her sensitive face, and her Catalan, she wouldn’t be taken for a typical American, recognizable for innocence and obesity. Then she and Jordi went back to his apartment, a different apartment by now, larger than the one they had spent time in as students, this one near the Gaudí cathedral. Jordi’s wife was away on a business trip to Madrid. Melinda and Jordi made love in the living room so as not to defile his marriage bed. Out of the purity of their nostalgia, they came at the same time. He had used a condom but something happened, and that had been the night when her son was conceived.

She had never told Jordi about her pregnancy. He possessed a certain hysterical formality and would have been scandalized. As the father, he would never have permitted a Scandia-American name like “Eric” to be affixed to his child. God, he would think, had intervened. Sperm penetrating the condom would be so much like the immaculate conception that Jordi, a Catholic, would have trouble explaining it away. And because he wept easily, he would first weep and then talk, the talk accompanied by his endearing operatic gestures. The sanctity of life! The whatever of parenthood. He had a tendency to make pronouncements, like the pope. Or was this Spanish in nature? A Catalan tendency? A male thing? Or just Jordi? Melinda sometimes got her stereotypes confused.

Anyway, her news about the baby would in all likelihood have destroyed his marriage, an arrangement that Melinda supposed was undoubtedly steady, in a relaxed Euro sort of way, despite Jordi’s one-off infidelity that particular night, with her.

Maybe he was habitually unfaithful. What was a married man doing with a condom in the drawer of the bedside table? Hidden but in plain view? Did husbands use condoms when making love to their wives? It seemed defeatist.

It was what it was. Still, she had loved Jordi once. She would say to her Catalan friends, “Have you seen his eyes, and those eyelashes?”—the most beautiful brown eyes she had ever seen on a man. He had other qualities difficult to summarize. All the same, men, at least the ones she had known, including Jordi, were a long-term nuisance, a drain on human resources. Whenever intimacy threatened, they often seemed unexpectedly obtuse. If you were going to couple with straight men — and what choice did you have? — you often had to deal with their strange semi-comic fogs afterward. Jordi snored and after lovemaking clipped his toenails. As Hemingway, another man, once wrote: the bill always came.

Anyway, she was not desperate. Melinda roused herself from her reverie. Augenblick! The stranger had got that part wrong, about the desperation.

She went back upstairs. She put Eric into his crib. The baby occupied himself by listening to a white-throated sparrow singing outside the window. Across the hall, her father sat staring at his dresser. It had been positioned beneath family pictures — Melinda, her brother, her mother, and her father — hung in a photo cluster where he could see them as he made his heroic post-stroke efforts to dress and to greet the morning. Behind the pictures was the ancient wallpaper with green horizontal stripes. He turned toward her, and the right side of his face smiled at her.

“Do you hear it?” he asked.

She waited. Hear what? The sparrow? He wouldn’t be asking about that. “No,” she said; the room was quite silent. Lately her father had been suffering from music hallucinations, what he called “ear worms,” and she wasn’t sure whether to grant him his hallucinations or not. Did the pink elephant problem grow larger whenever, being affable, you agreed that there was indeed a pink elephant right outside the door, or shambling about in the street? “What is it? What do you hear?”

“Somebody far away, practicing,” he told her. “A violinist. She’s doing trills and double-stops. She’s practicing someone-or-other’s concerto in D. You really don’t hear it?” Her father had not been a professional musician, but he had always had perfect pitch. If he heard music in D major, then that was the key signature, hallucination or not.

In the silent room, Melinda gazed down at her father, at his thinning gray hair, the food stains scattered on his shirt, the sleepy, half-withdrawn look in his eyes, the magazine now on the floor, the untied shoelaces, the trouser zipper imperfectly closed, the mismatched socks, the shirt with the buttons in the wrong buttonholes, the precancerous blotches on his face, the half-eaten muffin spread with margarine nearby on the side table, and she was so overcome with a lifelong affection for this calm, decent man that she felt faint for a moment. Her soul left her body and then came back in an instant. “Oh, wait,” she said suddenly. “Yup. I do hear it. It’s very soft. From across the street. You know, it’s who, that scary brilliant teenager, that Asian girl, what’s her name, Maria Chang. And I know who wrote that music, too.”

“You do?”

“Sure,” Melinda said. “It’s Glazunov. Alexander Glazunov. It’s the Glazunov concerto for violin in D major.” She was making it all up as she went along.

“Yes,” her father said. “Glazunov. The teacher of Shostakovich. That must be right.” He smiled again at her. “But that concerto is in A, baby doll.” Turning his head to face her at a strange angle, he asked, “Who was that person who j-j-j-j-just came to the door? Did he come upstairs? Did he watch me? Did he come for me? Was it death? I was half asleep.”

“An intruder,” she said. “Somebody who said his name was Augenblick.”

“Well, that’s almost like death. What’d he want?”

“He said he used to live here. As a baby or something.”

“Impossible. I know who I bought this house from thirty-five years ago, and it wasn’t anybody by that name. Besides, that’s not his real name. It’s German. It means …”

“Blink of an eye,” Melinda said. “An instant.”

“Right. But he’s lying to you. I never heard of any German person named Augenblick. It’s a fiction, that name. There’s no such name in German. It’s total bullshit.” He waved his hand dismissively. Since his stroke, her father had started to employ gutterisms in his day-to-day speech. His new degraded vocabulary was disconcerting. His mind had suffered depreciation. She didn’t like obscenity from him; it didn’t match his character, or what remained of it.

Her father’s potted plant in the corner needed watering — its leaves were shriveling. Lately she had become a caretaker: Eric, and her father, and the lawn and garden out in front, and her father’s house, and the plants in it — and if she weren’t careful, that caretaking condition might become permanent, she would move into permanent stewardship, they would be her accumulations, and they would pile up and surround her. The present would dry up and disappear, except for the baby, and there would be nothing else around her except the past.

Downstairs on a side table was a business card.

Edward Augenblick

INVESTMENT COUNSELOR

“Fortune Favors the Few”

e-mail: eyeblink@droopingleaf.com

Anger spat up from somewhere near her stomach. “Fortune favors the few”! Damn him. And this zealotry from an intruder. At once, the languages roused themselves, spewing out their local-color bile. First, the Catalan. ¡Malparit. Fot el camp de casa meva ara mateix! And then the Spanish. ¡Me cago en tu madre, hijo de puta! What a relief it was to have other languages available for your obscenities. They pitched in.

A day later, she and her friend Germaine were walking in Minnehaha Creek, their pants rolled up, shoes in hand, Eric babypacked on Melinda. They were searching the creek for vegetative wonders as they bird-watched and conversed. Melinda liked Germaine’s witty impatience and had befriended her for it. They had bumped into each other in a bookstore a year ago, and Germaine had grumbled at her amiably. Melinda was bowled over by her wit and asked her out for coffee, an invitation that Germaine accepted. Germaine, a teacher and poet, was now back from New York, where she had toured the restaurants.

“There’s a blue jay,” Melinda said, pointing. She splashed her feet in the water, being careful not to slip on the rocks.

“Did I tell you how all the staff at one place spoke with accents? Did I mention that?” Germaine asked. “ ‘Ladies and gentle, let me know eef I can help you in any how.’ They sounded worse during the wine-tasting session. ‘Yooou like theeese vine? Have a zip.’ ” She walked up to Eric and kissed him on the ear. The baby giggled. “ ‘Hold theeese vine to the liiiight to determinate the lascivity.’ ”

“You should be more tolerant of foreigners,” Melinda murmured, turning to face her.

“Why should I? I’m not like you. I put salt in my coffee.” She looked at her friend. “You take that beautiful baby of yours around on your back just to flaunt him in front of nature.”

“No, I don’t. Your leg is cut,” Melinda said, pointing. “Where’d you get that mess of scabs?”

“Roses. I was staring at the clematis vine. Its growth habits were unpleasing. I held the ideal in my head so firmly that I obliterated awareness of the rest of the garden, especially the very large, known-to-be-violent rosebush between the clematis and me. I must have lunged at the vine. The rosebush grabbed at my leg, which continued to move. Seconds later I realized that the whole front of my leg had been savagely torn.”

“Savagely torn? That’s awful.”

“ ‘Laceration’ is what the form said, when I finally got out of the ER. I looked the word up, from lacerate, distress deeply, torn, mangled. Then I had a drug reaction to the prophylactic antibiotic. It sent me back to the ER. I couldn’t walk.”

“What’s that?” Melinda nodded toward something growing in the creek.

“Watercress?” Germaine said. Her black hair fell downward as she bent to see it, and for a moment Melinda thought of Persephone on her way back from the underworld. Germaine had the wildly intelligent eyes of a genius. “No, it’s just an unknown, anonymous weed. By the way, how close are we to the Mississippi? I have an appointment. Well, I think of it as an appointment. You might not.”

Melinda stood up straight, feeling the baby’s weight shift. He was making sucking sounds. “I had a visitor yesterday. Well, not a visitor. A man, an intruder. He looked like Eric Clapton. He walked right into the house. He said he used to live there. But he didn’t. He couldn’t have. His name was Augenblick.”

“You call the cops?”

“No.”

“I would have,” Germaine told her. “I’d have the law scurrying right over, with the cuffs and the beaters out.”

“He said Eric’s nursery had once been his own room. He said he knew things about the house, bad things. He said, this stranger, that I was desperate. Can you imagine?”

“He got the wrong address,” Germaine said. “He meant me.”

“Damn him anyway,” said Melinda. She pointed to an opening of the creek where the Mississippi River was visible. “There it is. There’s the river. We made it.”

“Yeah.” Germaine slapped at a mosquito on her forearm, leaving a little smear of blood just above her wristwatch. “Is this about your mother?” she asked. Her tone was studiously neutral. “This is about your mother, isn’t it? Maybe this guy lived in the neighborhood when you were growing up. Maybe your mother was known to him.”

Melinda stopped and looked at her friend. Seedpods from a cottonwood overhead drifted down onto her hair and into the water. “Oh, well,” she said, as if something had been settled. Melinda’s mother had been in and out of institutions. Melinda refused to come to terms with it, now or ever; a mad parent could not be rescued or reasoned with. Things were getting dark all of a sudden. “I’m, um, feeling a bit light-headed.” She felt her knees weakening, and she made her way to the side of the creek, where she sat down abruptly on the wet sands.

“Are you fainting?” she heard Germaine say, in front of, or behind, a crow cawing. “Here. Let me take your hand.…” The force of her friend’s voice drifted into her consciousness, as did her voice, someone turning the volume knob back and forth, as she held her own nausea at bay, her head down between her knees. Creek water was suddenly splashed on her face, thrown by her friend, to rouse her.

At certain times, usually in the afternoons, her father would ride the buses, but Melinda had no idea where he went, and he himself could not always remember. He said that he visited the markets, but one time he came back and said that he had knocked at the Gates of Heaven. He would not elaborate. Where were these gates? He had forgotten. Perhaps downtown? Many people were going in, all at once. He felt he wasn’t ready, and took the bus home.

This traveling around was a habit he had picked up from his wife, whose wandering had started right after the death of their first child, Melinda’s older sister, Sarah, who had died of a blood infection at the age of two. Her mother gave birth to Melinda and then went into a very long, slow, discreetly managed and genteel decline. One day, when Melinda was eleven, her mother, unable to keep up appearances anymore, drove away and disappeared altogether. She was spotted in Madison before she evaporated.

Back in her father’s house, Melinda went straight from the phone to her computer. She typed in Augenblick’s e-mail address and then wrote a note.

hi. i don’t know who you are, but you’re not who you say you are, and my father has never heard of you or your family. i shouldn’t be writing to you and i wouldn’t be except i didn’t like it that you said you knew me. from where? we’ve never met. you don’t know me. i hardly know myself. kidding, i mean, i’ve met you and i still haven’t met you. you’re a ghost, for all i know.

She deleted the last three sentences — too baroque — both for their meaning and her responsibility for writing them. The joking tone might be mistaken for friendliness. She ducked her head, hearing Eric staying quiet (she didn’t want to breast-feed him again tonight, her nipples were sore — but it was odd, she also had suffered a sudden brokenhearted need for sex, for friendly nakedness), and then she continued writing.

as far as i know, the previous owners of this house were named anderson. that’s who my mom and dad bought it from. “augenblick” isn’t even a name. it’s just a german noun.

so, my question is: who are you? where are you from? what were you doing in my house?

— melinda everson, ph.d.

She deleted the reference to the doctoral degree, then put it back, then deleted it again, then put it back in, before touching the SEND button.

Half an hour later, a new letter appeared in the electronic in-box, from eyeblink@droopingleaf.com.

THINK OF ME AS THE RAGE OVER THE LOST PENNY. BUT LIKE I TOLD YOU IM ACTUALLY VERY HARMLESS. W/R/T YOUR QUESTIONS, I CAN DROP BY AGAIN. INFORMATION IS ALL I WANT TO GIVE YOU. eye two LIVED THERE.

HA HA. — TED

The school year would be starting soon, and she needed to prepare her classes. She needed to study Peréz Galdós’s Miau again, for the umpteenth time, for its story of a man lost in a mazelike bureaucracy — her lecture notes were getting mazelike themselves, Kafkaesque. And worse: bland. She would get to that. But for now she was waiting. She knew without knowing how she knew that when Augenblick came back, he would show himself at night, when both her father and her son were asleep; that he would come at the end of a week of hot, dry late-summer weather orchestrated by crickets, that he would show up as a polite intruder again, halfway handsome, early-middle-aged semi-degraded-Clapton, well dressed, like a piano tuner, and that he would say, as soon as he was out of the driver’s-side door of his unidentifiable car, perhaps handmade, and had advanced so that he stood there on the other side of the screen door, “You look very nice tonight. I got your letter. Thanks for inviting me over.”

These events occurred because she was living in her father’s house.

“And I got yours,” she said, from behind the screen. The screen provided scanning lines; his face was high-definition. “You’re the rage over the lost penny. But I didn’t invite you over. You’re not invited. It wasn’t an invitation.” She hesitated. “Shit. Well, come in anyway.”

This time, once inside, he approached her and shook her hand, and in removing his hand, rubbed hers, as if this were the custom somewhere upon greeting someone whom you didn’t know but with whom you wanted a relationship. It was a failed tentative caress but so bizarre that she let it happen.

“My father is upstairs,” she said. “And my son, too. Maybe you could explain who you are?”

“This is the living room,” he told her, as if he hadn’t heard her question, “and over there we once had a baby grand piano in that corner, by the stairs.” He pointed. “A Mason and Hamlin. I was never any good at playing it, but my sister was. She’s the real musician in the family.”

“What does she play?” she asked, testing him. “What’s her specialty?”

“Scriabin études,” he said. “Chopin and Schumann, too, and Schubert, the B-minor.”

“She didn’t play the violin, did she?”

“No. The piano. She still does. She’s a pediatric endocrinologist now. Doctors like music, you know. It’s a professional thing.” He waited. “Ours was the only piano on the block.” He glanced toward the dining room. “In the dining room we used to have another chandelier, it was cut glass—”

“Mr. Augenblick, uh, maybe you could tell me why you’re here? And why you’re lying to me?” She scooped a bit of perspiration off her forehead and gazed into his game face. “Why all these stories about this locality? Scriabin, Schubert: every house has a story. The truth is, I’m not actually interested in who did what, where, here.” She saw him glance down at her body, then at the baby toys scattered across the living-room floor. Her breasts were swollen, and she had always been pretty. She was a bit disheveled now, though still a beauty. “I’m a mother. New life is going on here these days. My son is here, my father, too, upstairs, recuperating from a stroke. I don’t have time for a personal history. For all I know, you’re an intruder. A dangerous maniac.”

“No,” he said, “I’ve noticed that. No one has time for a history.” Augenblick stood in the living room for a moment, apparently pondering what to say next. At last he looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought, and asked, “May I have a glass of iced tea?”

“No.” She folded her arms. “If you were a guest, I would provide the iced tea. But, as I said, I didn’t invite you here. I don’t mean to be rude, but—”

“Actually,” he said, “you are rude. You wrote back to me, and that was, well, an invitation. Wasn’t it? At least that’s how I took it, it’s how any man would have taken it.” He pasted onto his face a momentarily wounded look. “So all right. So there’s to be no iced tea, no water, no hospitality of any kind. No stories, either, about the house. All right. You want to know why I’m here? You really want to know why I’m here? My life hasn’t been going so well. I was doing a bit of that living-in-the-past thing. I was driving around, in this neighborhood, my former neighborhood, and I saw a really attractive woman working in her garden, weeding, and I thought: Well, maybe she isn’t married or attached, maybe I have a chance, maybe I can strike up a conversation with that woman working there in that garden. I wasn’t out on the prowl, exactly, but I did see you. And then I discovered that you had a baby. A beautiful boy. You know, I’m actually a nice guy, though you’d never know it. I’m a landscape architect. I have a college degree. All I wanted was to meet you.”

“You said I was desperate. You said you knew me. That was unkind. No. It was wicked.”

“You are desperate. I do know you. Desperation is knowable.”

“That’s a funny way of courting a woman, saying things like that.”

“We have the same soul, you and I,” he said. He said it awkwardly. Still, she was moved, beside or despite herself. The sovereign power of nonsensical compliments: a woman never had any defenses against them.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Come back in a few days and tell me about the house.”

“It’s just an ordinary house,” he told her, glaring critically at its corners. “Anyway, you’re right, I never lived here. I lived a few blocks away.”

“So make it up,” she said. “You were going to make it up anyway. Do what you can with it. Impress me.”

The next time Augenblick came by, he brought a bottle of wine, a kind of lubricant for his narrative, Melinda thought.

They drank half the bottle, and then he began with the medical details about the house and what had happened in its rooms. There had been a little girl with polio who lived in the house in the 1950s, encased in an iron lung, with the result that her parents had been the first on the block to buy a TV set, in those days a low-class forgetfulness machine. In those days only two stations broadcast programs, a few hours in the morning, then off the air during the afternoons until four p.m., when The Howdy Doody Show, Superman, and Beulah came on.

He touched Melinda’s hand. From somewhere he poured her another glass of wine, a glass that she had taken down from her kitchen shelf an hour or two ago, and she took it. He did an inventory of ghosts. Every house had them. He told her that the living room had once been an organizing center for Farmer-Labor Party socials of the Scandinavian variety, and that they had planned their strikes there, including the truckers’ strike in the 1930s.

“Any violence?” she asked, taking the wine for her second glass.

“None,” he said. As a little boy, he said, he had heard that there had once been a murder in these environs, and maybe it had been in this house. He wasn’t sure. The body of the murder victim, it was said, had been propped up on the freezer, sitting there, and the police had come in to investigate after the neighbors had called in with reports of screaming, and one of the cops looked directly at the body of the murdered woman, her hair down over her face, and he hadn’t seen it, and the police had left.

“Who are you?” Melinda asked Augenblick after they had finished the wine and he had concluded his story. Now they sat on the back porch in discount-store foldout chairs, and through the screens they could see her father’s garage with the car on one side and her father’s discards, his memory pile, on the other. “Because, right here, there’s quite a bit about you that’s completely wrong. You tell me a story, the absolutely wrong story, about happiness and a murder, and you say you know me and you say I’m desperate, and I think you said that you and I have the same souls, and your card claimed that you were an investment counselor, and then you informed me that you were a landscape architect.” Melinda put her tongue inside her wineglass and licked at the dew of wine still affixed there. “None of it adds up. Because,” she said, “what I think it is, what I think you are, sitting here beside me, is a devil.” She waited. “Not one of the major ones, in fact really minor, but one all the same.”

Through the air pocket of dead silence the crickets chirped. Augenblick did not immediately reply. “Um, okay,” he said.

“ ‘Okay’?”

“Yeah, okay. I used to be an investment counselor until I went broke. I couldn’t part with the business cards. So then I went into planting things, landscaping. Not much income, but some. The life I have is modest. I have a kind of ability to, you know, hit the wrong note. And sometimes I tell stories that aren’t quite true. It passes the time. Untruths are what I learned how to do in high school and never quite shook off.”

“You should work at it,” she said.

“I should work at it,” he repeated.

“Was there anything, anywhere, you said that was true?”

“Yes,” he said. “My name’s really Augenblick. You and I have the same souls. I believe that. I still sort of believe that you’re desperate. I used to live in this neighborhood. You had a mother once. I remember her. And actually, from the first moment I saw you, weeding out there in the garden, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”

She waited. “Could we go back to the topic sentence?”

He leaned sideways in her direction. She could smell the wine on his breath. “About devils, you mean?”

“Yeah, that part.”

“There are no devils anymore,” he said. “There are only people who are messed up and have to spread it around. And they’re everywhere. See, what you have to do is, if you’re going to get it, you have to imagine a devil who is also maybe a nice guy.” And he leaned over farther, so that he almost lost his balance in his chair, and he gave her a peck on each cheek, a devil’s kiss.

Making love to him (which she would never, ever do) would be like taking a long journey to a foreign locale you didn’t exactly want to visit, like Tangier, a place built on the slopes of a chalky limestone hill. The sun’s intensity would be unpleasant, and the general poverty would get in the way of everything. He would make love like a man who didn’t quite know what he was doing and who would press that ignorance, hard, on someone else, specifically on her, on her flesh. Still, he would be careful with her, as if he remembered that she was still nursing a child. In the middle of the bed, she would suddenly recall that when she had first seen him, she had thought that there was nothing to him, and she would wonder if there was still nothing to him now. Whether he was actually named Augenblick, despite his claims, whether he did anything actual for a living, whether he would ever hurt her, whether he really might be a devil, though devils didn’t exist. Because if they did, times would change and the devils would take new forms. If the name of God is changing in our time, then so are the other names. Then she would come, rapidly, and would forget her questions the way you forget dreams. But it would never happen, not that way.

“You made love to him?” Germaine was outraged. The cell phone itself seemed to be outraged with her anger; even the plastic seemed annoyed. Melinda had called her friend in the middle of the night to consult.

“No, I didn’t,” Melinda said. “No. No love. But I did fuck him. I was lonely. I wanted to get naked with somebody.”

“How was it?”

“Okay.”

“Well, in the immortal words of the great Albert Einstein, ‘Don’t do that again.’ ”

She wondered if he would disappear. Everything about him suggested a vanishing act. He would not invite her to his house, wherever that was, nor would he ever give her an address. Like everyone else, though, he did have a cell phone, and he gave her the number to that. One night when he told her (she was lying in her bed, and he was lying in his bed, across town, and the phone call had gone on for over an hour), “I lived in your soul before you owned it,” she decided that he was one of those crazy people who gets by from day to day, but just barely — he was what he said he was, a failed borderline personality. She resolved to tell him that she would not see him anymore, under any circumstances, but then he invited her to dinner at a pricey downtown restaurant, so she located a babysitter both for the baby and for her father, and when Edward Augenblick arrived to pick her up, she felt ready for whatever was going to happen, accessorized for it, with a bracelet of beautiful tiny gold spikes.

But in the restaurant, he played the gentleman: he talked about landscape architecture, landscaping generally, so that the conversation took a lackadaisical turn toward the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, and she talked about her work and her scholarship, about Pérez Galdós, the polite chitchat of two people who possibly want to get to know each other, post-sex, and she wondered whether they would ever talk about anything that mattered to them, and whether all his talk about souls was just a bluff, a conversational shell game. She was about to ask him where he had grown up, where he had been educated, what his parents had been like, when he said, “Let’s take a walk. Let’s go down to the river.” The bill for the dinner came, a considerable sum, and he paid in cash, drawing out a mass of twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, a monotonous and mountainous pile of twenties, all the cash looking like novelty items, and Melinda thought, This man has no usable credit.

Across the Mississippi River near St. Anthony Falls stands the Stone Arch Bridge, built of limestone in the nineteenth century for the railroad traffic of lumber and grain and coal in and out of Minneapolis. After the railroad traffic ceased, the bridge had been converted to a tourist pedestrian walkway, and he took her hand in his as they strolled over the Mississippi River, looking at the abandoned mills on either side, and the rapids and the locks directly below.

“They don’t manufacture anything here anymore, you know,” he said to her, close to a whisper.

“The buildings are still here.”

“Yes,” he said, “but they’re ghosts. They’re all ghosts. They’re shells.”

“But look at the lights,” she said. “Lofts and condos.”

“They don’t make anything in there anymore,” he said. “Except babies, sometimes, the thirtysomethings. Otherwise, it’s all a museum. American cities are all becoming museums.” He said this with a wild, incongruous cheer, as a devil would. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you one true thing. Listen up.”

“What’s that?”

“When I was a little boy, I lived three or four blocks down from where you lived. I’ve told you this. You don’t remember me. That’s all. You don’t remember. I remember you, but you don’t remember me. No one ever remembers me. One night I was playing in the living room, with my toy armies, and your mother came to our door. I think she was drunk. But I didn’t know that. She rang the bell and she entered our house. My parents were upstairs, or somewhere. Your mother came into the house and looked at me playing with my soldiers, and she looked and looked and looked. She smiled and nodded. And then she asked me if I would like to go away with her, said that she had always wanted to take a boy like me with her on her travels.”

“How did you know it was my mother?” Melinda asked, between shivers.

“I was eight years old. Maybe nine. Everyone knew about your mother. Everyone. I had been warned. You knew that. Everyone knew that. But she had a nice face.”

“Where did she say she wanted to take you away to?”

“She had this look in her eyes, I still remember it,” Augenblick said. “You have it, too. She wanted to disappear and to take someone along with her. That night, it was going to be me. Your mother was famous in this neighborhood. But everybody thought she was harmless.”

“Well, she was a success,” Melinda said, the shivers taking her over, so that she had to clutch a guardrail. “In disappearing.” She leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek, a show of bravery. “Death is such a cliché,” she said. “She disappeared into a cliché.”

“Is it?” He wasn’t looking at her. “That’s news to me. She grabbed me by the hand and she took me for a walk and then she tried to get me into the car, but I broke her hold on me and I ran back to my house.”

“Yeah,” she said, dreamily. “Death. It’s so retro. It’s for kids and old people. It’s an adolescent thing. You can do better than dying. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough,” she quoted from somewhere. “Anyway, she disappeared, and so what?” It occurred to her at that moment that Augenblick might have leapt off the bridge to his death but that he had, just then, changed his mind, because she had said that death was a cliché. That was it: he looked like a failed suicide. He was one of those.

“She gave me the scare of my life,” he said. “Your harmless mother. She scared everybody until she was gone. Shall we go back now?” he asked. “Should we go somewhere?”

“No,” she said. “Not again. Not this time.” She waited. “We’re going to stay right here for a while.”

He eventually dropped her off at the front door of her father’s house, thanked her, and drove off in his car, which, he had explained, was a Sterling, a nonsense car. She guessed that the license plates on the car had been stolen so that he could not be traced. Whoever he was — Augenblick! what a name! — he would not return. She wondered for a moment or two what his name actually had been, where he had worked, and whether any of it, that is, the actual, mattered, now or ever.

She paid the babysitter and then went upstairs to check on Eric.

The ghosts of the house, she imagined, were gathered around her son. The couples who had lived here from one generation to the next, the solitaries, the happy and unhappy, the gay and the straight and the young and the old: she felt them grouped behind her as a community corralled in the room, touching her questioningly as she bent over the crib and watched her boy, her perfection, breathe in and out, his Catalan-American breaths.

She tiptoed into her father’s room. He was still sitting up, carefully studying the wallpaper.

“Hey, Daddy,” she said.

“Hey, sugar,” he replied, tilting his head in his characteristically odd way. “How did it go? Your date with this Augenblick?”

“Oh, fine,” she said, shunning the narrative of what had happened, how she had fought off his information with a little kiss. Her father wouldn’t be interested — especially about her mother.

“I didn’t like him. He wasn’t out of the top drawer.”

“More like the middle drawer. But that’s all right,” Melinda said. “I won’t see him again.”

“Good,” her father said. “I thought he was a fortune-hunter, after your millions.” He laughed hoarsely. “Heh heh. He looked very unsuccessful, I must say, with that dyed hair.” He tilted his head the other way. “I went to the Gates of Heaven today,” he said, “on the bus. The number eight bus.”

“How did it look?” she asked. “The gates?”

“Tarnished,” he said. “They could use a shine. No one ever seems to do maintenance anymore. The bus was empty. Even though I was the thing riding on it.” He tilted his head the other way. “Completely empty, with me at a window seat. That was how I knew I was almost gone. Honey, you should have more friends, better friends. Someone who doesn’t make you groan.”

It didn’t shock her, somehow, that he had heard them. “I have friends. Just not here. I’m moving back home,” she said. “To my house. Where I live. I can’t stay here anymore, Daddy. I can’t take care of you anymore. I love you, Daddy, but I can’t do it. I’ll arrange for somebody to watch you and to cook.” She leaned down to kiss the top of his head.

“I know,” he said. “Oh, I know, honey. Staying here makes you a child, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” She could feel the goddamn tears flooding over her. And she could feel the ghosts of the house gathering around him, now, easing his way into the next world that awaited him. And somewhere on the planet, her mother, too, drove toward the horizon, forever. “I’ll watch out for you, though. I’ll drop in. I’ll check on you.”

“No, you probably won’t,” he said. “No one does. But that’s all right. That’s how it happens. By the way, do you hear that violin? That girl is practicing as if her life depended on it.”

Melinda bent her ear to the silence. “Yes,” she agreed. “I do hear it. All the time. Morning and night. It never stops.”