ALSO BY CHARLES BAXTER
FICTION
Gryphon
The Soul Thief
Saul and Patsy
The Feast of Love
Believers
Shadow Play
A Relative Stranger
First Light
Through the Safety Net
Harmony of the World
POETRY
Imaginary Paintings and Other Poems
PROSE
The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot
Burning Down the House
AS EDITOR
A William Maxwell Portrait (with Edward Hirsch and Michael Collier)
The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting
Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life (with Peter Turchi)
The Collected Stories of Sherwood Anderson
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Charles Baxter
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Selected stories first appeared in the following: “Bravery” in Tin House 54 (Winter 2012) and subsequently in Best American Short Stories 2013, edited by Elizabeth Strout with Heidi Pitlor (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013); “Forbearance” in Michigan Quarterly Review 52, no. 2 (Spring 2013); “Charity” in McSweeney’s, issue #43 (April 2013) and subsequently in Best American Short Stories 2014, edited by Jennifer Egan with Heidi Pitlor (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); “Loyalty” in Harper’s (May 2013); “Chastity” in Kenyon Review (Winter 2014); and “Sloth” in New England Review 34, nos. 3–4 (Winter 2014).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine” by Delmore Schwartz, from Selected Poems, copyright © 1959 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baxter, Charles, [date]
[Short stories. Selections]
There’s something I want you to do : stories / Charles Baxter.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-101-87001-3 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-101-87002-0 (eBook).
I. Baxter, Charles, [date] Bravery. II. Title.
PS3552.A854A6 2014 813’.54—dc23 2014003352
eBook ISBN 9781101870020
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover photograph by Tema Stauffer
Cover design by Oliver Munday
v4.0
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Charles Baxter
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Bravery
Loyalty
Chastity
Charity
Forbearance
Part Two
Lust
Sloth
Avarice
Gluttony
Vanity
Coda
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Daniel and Hannah Baxter and for Arturo Steely
It is common knowledge that nobody is born with a decalogue already formed, but that everyone builds his own either during his life or at the end, on the basis of his own experiences, or of those of others which can be assimilated to his own; so that everybody’s moral universe, suitably interpreted, comes to be identified with the sum of his former experiences, and so represents an abridged form of his biography.
—Primo Levi, The Reawakening
PART ONE
Bravery
When she was a teenager, her junior year, her favorite trick involved riding in cars with at least two other girls. You needed a female cluster in there, and you needed to have the plainest one driving. They’d cruise University Avenue in Palo Alto until they spotted some boys together near a street corner. Boys were always ganged up at high-visibility intersections, marking territory and giving off cigarette smoke and musk. At the red light, she’d roll down the window and shout, “Hey, you guys!” The boys would turn toward the car slowly—very slowly—trying for cool. Smoke emerged from their faces, from the nose or mouth. “Hey! Do you think we’re pretty?” she’d shout. “Do you think we’re cute?”
Except for the plain one behind the wheel, the girls she consorted with were cute, so the question wasn’t really a test. The light would turn green, and they’d speed away before the boys could answer. The pleasure was in seeing them flummoxed. Usually one of the guys, probably the sweetest, or the most eager, would nod and raise his hand to wave. Susan would spy him, the sweet one, through the back window, and she’d smile so that he’d have that smile to hold on to all night. The not-so-sweet good-looking guys just stood there. They were accustomed to being teased, and they always liked it. As for the other boys—well, no one ever cared about them.
Despite what other girls said, boys were not all alike: you had to make your way through their variables blindly, guessing at hidden qualities, the ones you could live with.
Years later, in college, her roommate said to her, “You always go for the kind ones, the considerate ones, those types. I mean, where’s the fun? I hate those guys. They’re so humane, and shit like that. Give me a troublemaker any day.”
“Yeah, but a troublemaker will give you trouble.” She was painting her toenails, even though the guys she dated never noticed her toenails. “Trouble comes home. It moves in. It’s contagious.”
“I can take it. I’m an old-fashioned girl,” her roommate said with her complicated irony.
—
Susan married one of the sweet ones, the kind of man who waved at you. At a San Francisco art gallery on Van Ness, gazing at a painting of a giant pointed index finger with icicles hanging from it, she had felt her concentration jarred when a guy standing next to her said, “Do you smell something?”
He sniffed and glanced up at the ceiling. Metaphor, irony, a come-on? As a pickup line, that one was new to her. In fact, she had smelled a slightly rotten-egg scent, so she nodded. “We should get out of here,” he said, gesturing toward the door, past the table with the wineglasses and the sign-in book. “It’s a gas leak. Before the explosion.”
“But maybe it’s the paintings,” she said.
“The paintings? Giving off explosive gas? That’s an odd theory.”
“Could be. Part of the modernist assault on the audience?”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s rotten eggs or natural gas, one of the two. I don’t like the odds. Let’s leave.”
On the way out, he introduced himself as Elijah, and she laughed and spilled some white wine (she had forgotten she was holding a glass of it) onto her dress just above the hemline. He handed her a monogrammed handkerchief that he had pulled out of some pocket or other, and the first letter on it was E, so he probably was an Elijah after all. A monogrammed handkerchief! Maybe he had money. “Here,” he said. “Go ahead. Sop it up.” He hadn’t tried to press his advantage by touching the handkerchief against the dress; he just handed it over, and she pretended to use it to soak up the wine. With the pedestrians passing by and an overhead neon sign audibly humming, he gave off a blue-eyed air of benevolence, but he
also looked on guard, hypervigilant, as if he were an ex-Marine. God knows where he had found the benevolence, or where any man ever found it.
“Elijah.” She looked at him. In the distance a car honked. The evening sky contained suggestions of rain. His smile persisted: a sturdy street-corner boy turned into a handsome pensive man but very solid-seeming, one thumb inside a belt loop, with a streetlamp behind him giving him an incandescent aura. Physically, he had the frame of a gym rat. She had the odd thought that his skin might taste of sugar, his smile was so kind. Kindness had always attracted her. It made her weak in the knees. “Elijah the prophet? Who answers all questions at the end of time? That one? Your parents must have been religious or something.”
“Yeah,” he said noncommittally, bored by the topic. “ ‘Or something’ was exactly what they were. They liked to loiter around in the Old Testament. They trusted it. They were farmers, and they believed in catastrophes. But when you have to explain your own name, you…well, this isn’t a rewarding conversation, is it?” He had a particularly deliberate way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them.
She coughed. “So what do you do, Elijah?”
“Oh, that comes later,” he said. “Occupations come later. First tell me your name.”
“Susan,” she said. “So much for the introductions.” She leaned forward, showing off her great smile. “This wine. It’s so bad. I’m kind of glad I spilled it. Shall I spill more of it?” She hadn’t had more than a sip, but she felt seriously drunk.
“Well, you could spill it here.” He reversed his index finger and lifted up his necktie. “Or there.” He pointed at the sidewalk.
“But it’s white wine. White wine doesn’t really stain.” She threw the wineglass into the gutter, where it shattered.
Twenty minutes later, in a coffee shop down by the Embarcadero, she learned that he was a pediatric resident with a particular interest in mitochondrial disorders. Now she understood: out on the street, he had looked at her the way a doctor looks at a child. She herself was a psychiatric social worker, with a job waiting for her at an outpatient clinic in Millbrae. She and Elijah exchanged phone numbers. That night, rattled by their encounter, she couldn’t sleep. Three days later, still rattled, she called him and proposed a date, something her mother had advised her never to do with a man. They went to dinner and a movie, and Elijah fell asleep during the previews and didn’t wake up for another hour—poor guy, he was so worn out from his work. She didn’t bother to explain the plot: a villain had threatened the end of the world—the usual. Elijah was too tired to care.
He didn’t warm up to her convincingly—not as she really hoped he would—for a month, until he heard her sing in a local choir, a program that included the Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor. She had a solo in the opening measures of the Benedictus, and when Elijah found her at the reception afterward, his face, as he looked at her, was softened for the first time with actual love, the real thing, that yearning, both hungry and quizzical.
“Your voice. Wow. I was undone,” he said, taking a sip of the church-basement coffee, his voice thick. Undone. He had a collection of unusual adjectives like that. Devoted was another. And committed. He used that adjective all the time. Never before had she ever met a man who was comfortable with that particular adjective.
—
A few months after they were married, they took a trip to Prague. The plan was to get pregnant there amid the European bric-a-brac. On the flight over the Atlantic, he held her hand when the Airbus hit some turbulence. In the seats next to theirs, another young couple sat together, and as the plane lurched, the woman fanned her face with a magazine while the man read passages aloud from the Psalms. “ ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand by thy right hand,’ ” he read. When the plane bucked, passengers laughed nervously. The flight attendants had hastily removed the drink carts and were sitting at the back doing crossword puzzles. The woman sitting next to Susan excused herself and rushed toward the bathroom, holding her hand in front of her mouth as she hurried down the fun-house-lurching aisle. When she returned, her companion was staring at his Bible. Having traded seats with Susan, Elijah then said some words to the sick woman that Susan couldn’t hear, whereupon the woman nodded and seemed to calm down.
How strange it was, his ability to give comfort. He doled it out in every direction. He wasn’t just trained as a doctor; he was a doctor all the way down to the root. Looking over at him, at his hair flecked with early gray, she thought uneasily of his generosity and its possible consequences, and then, in almost the same moment, she felt overcome with pride and love.
—
In Prague, the Soviet-era hotel where they stayed smelled of onions, chlorine, and goulash. The lobby had mirrored ceilings. Upstairs, the rooms were small and claustrophobic; the TV didn’t work, and all the signs were nonsensical. Pozor! for example, which seemed to mean “Beware!” Beware of what? The signs were garbles of consonants. Prague wasn’t Kafka’s birthplace for nothing. Still, Susan believed the city was the perfect place for them to conceive a child. For the first one, you always needed some sexual magic, and this place had a particular old-world variety of it. As for Elijah, he seemed to be in a mood: early on their second morning in the hotel, he stood in front of the window rubbing his scalp and commenting on Prague’s air quality. “Stony, like a castle,” he said. Because he always slept naked, he stood before the window naked, with a doctor’s offhandedness about the body, surveying the neighborhood. She thought he resembled the pope blessing the multitudes in Vatican Square, but no: on second thought he didn’t resemble the pope at all, starting with the nakedness. A sexual sentimentalist, he loved the body as much as he loved the spirit: he liked getting down on his knees in front of her nakedness to kiss her belly and incite her to soft moans.
“We should go somewhere,” she said, thumbing through a guidebook, which he had already read. “I’d like to see the Old Town Square. We’d have to take the tram there. Are you up for that?”
“Hmm. How about the chapels in the Loreto?” he asked. “That’s right up here. We could walk to it in ten minutes and then go to the river.” He turned around and approached her, sitting next to her on the bed, taking her hand in his. “It’s all so close, we could soak it all up, first thing.”
“Sure,” she said, although she didn’t remember anything from the guidebooks about the Loreto chapels and couldn’t guess why he wanted to go see them. He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one, which always gave her chills.
“Oh, honey,” she said, leaning into him. He was the only man she had ever loved, and she was still trying to get used to it. She had done her best not to be scared by the way she often felt about him. His intelligence, the concern for children, the quiet loving homage he paid to her, the wit, the indifference to sports, the generosity, and then the weird secret toughness—where could you find another guy like that? It didn’t even matter that they were staying in a bad hotel. Nothing else mattered. “What’s in those chapels?” she asked. “How come we’re going there?”
“Babies,” he told her. “Hundreds of babies.” He gave her a smile. “Our baby is in there.”
—
After dressing in street clothes, they walked down Bělohorská toward the spot on the map where the chapel was supposed to be. In the late-summer morning, Susan detected traceries of autumnal chill, a specifically Czech irony in the air, with high wispy cirrus clouds threading the sky like promissory notes. Elijah took her hand, clasping it very hard, checking both ways as they crossed the tramway tracks, the usual Pozor! warnings posted on their side of the platform telling them to exercise caution toward…whatever. The number 18 tram lumbered toward them silently from a distance up the hill to the west.
Fifteen minutes later, standing inside one of the chapels, Susan felt herself soften from all the procreative excess on display. Eli had been rig
ht: carved babies took up every available space. Surrounding them on all sides—in the front, at the altar; in the back, near the choir loft, where the carved cherubs played various musical instruments; and on both walls—were plump winged infants in various postures of angelic gladness. She’d never seen so many sculpted babies in one place: cherubs not doing much of anything except engaging in a kind of abstract giggling frolic, freed from both gravity and the Earth, the great play of Being inviting worship. What bliss! God was in the babies. But you had to look up, or you wouldn’t see them. The angelic orders were always above you. At the front, the small cross on the altar rested at eye level, apparently trivial, unimportant, outnumbered, in this nursery of angels. For once, the famous agony had been trumped by babies, who didn’t care about the Crucifixion or hadn’t figured it out.
“They loved their children,” Susan whispered to Eli. “They worshipped infants.”
“Yeah,” Eli said. She glanced up at him. On his face rested an expression of great calm, as if he were in a kingdom of sorts where he knew the location of everything. He was a pediatrician, after all. “Little kids were little ambassadors from God in those days. Look at that one.” He pointed. “Kind of a lascivious smile. Kind of knowing.”
She wiped a smudge off his cheek with her finger. “Are you hungry? Do you want lunch yet?”
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a nickel, holding it as if he were about to drop it into her hand. Then he took it back. “We just got here. It’s not lunchtime. We got out of bed less than two hours ago. I love you,” he said matter-of-factly, apropos of nothing. “Did I already tell you this morning? I love you like crazy.” His voice rose with an odd conviction. The other tourists in the chapel glanced at them. Was their love that obvious? Outside, the previous day, sitting near a fountain, Susan had seen a young man and a young woman, lovers, steadfastly facing each other and stroking each other’s thighs, both of them crazed with desire and, somehow, calm about it.
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