There's Something I Want You to Do

by Charles Baxter

  She led him upstairs and sat him down on the edge of the bathtub. With a washcloth, she dabbed off the blood from his hands and face. There was something about his story she didn’t believe, and then for a moment she didn’t believe a word of it, but she continued to wash him tenderly as if he were the hero he said he was. He groaned quietly when she touched some newly bruised part of him. He would look terrible for a while. How happy that would make him! She could easily get some steak, or hamburger, or whatever you were supposed to apply to black eyes to make the swelling go away, but no, he wouldn’t want that. He would want his badge. They all wanted that.

  “Should we go to bed, Doctor?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I love you,” she said. They would postpone the argument about feedings until tomorrow, or next week.

  “I love you, too.”

  She undressed him, just as if he were a child, before lowering him onto the sheets. He sighed loudly. She could hear Raphael’s breaths coming from the nursery. She was about to go into her son’s room to check on him and then thought better of it. Standing in the hallway, she heard a voice asking, “What will you do with another day?” Who had asked that? Eli was asleep. Anyway, it was a nonsensical question. The air had asked it, or she was hearing voices. She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She didn’t quite recognize her own face in the mirror, but the reflected swollen tender breasts were still hers, and the smile, when she thought of sweet Elijah bravely fighting someone, somewhere—that was hers, too.

  Loyalty

  As much as I love her, I blame Astrid. Astrid told my wife, Corinne, that she could achieve happiness if only she’d leave me. It sounded simple. “Leave that guy, walk out that door, you’ll achieve happiness, you’ll be free.” Achieve happiness. Now there’s a phrase. Into the Ford with the busted shocks and out onto the American road, then—that was the prescription.

  I stood in the driveway. It was sleeting the day she left. I had agreed not to follow her. She was so eager to go, she forgot to use the windshield wipers until she was halfway down the block. She turned the corner, the tires splashed slush, the front end dipped from the bad shocks, and she was gone.

  Holding on to my son, I walked into the garage, taking an inventory. Jeremy, in my arms. My rusting pickup truck. The broken rake, the bent saw, the corroded timing light still on the ledge beneath the back window with the curtains. Yes, the garage window had curtains. Don’t ask me why I put them there. More inventory: the house itself. My life. My health. My job. A case of beer. My mother, Dolores, upstairs in her room. Let them arrive here, whatever they are, is my first motto, and my second is Let them stay.

  Astrid thought that happiness was within poor Corinne’s grasp, and she said so, day after day. Happiness for you, she would say, is a day without Wes. You are right to say that Wes crowds you and confuses you. Any morning you wake up without that guy’s stale beer breath on you will be pure profit. Astrid was relentless on the subject of me. She and Corinne worked at the same nurses’ station, 3-F. In the quiet of the hospital night, plans were hatched. A nurse can always get a job, anyplace. Those were Astrid’s words, I have no doubt.

  Corinne had been bitching about me, to me, and the topics were, I don’t know, the usual. I drank too much on weekends, my dog, Scooter, slobbered on the bedroom floor, my hands were always dirty from the shop—and the killer accusation: I was inattentive to her needs, whatever they were. Mostly Corinne complained about herself, her rickety soiled unrecognizable life, her confusion, her panic over our baby, her fear of being an inadequate mother, her sadness, that stuff.

  But I loved her, and she left me. Then I loved Astrid, and I married her. I’m married to her now, and I still love her. She has—and I’ve got to use this word—guile. Corinne, my first wife, had none. You’d think a nurse of all people could take care of her own baby and not be bewildered. But she was. Mousy brown hair, mystified by most conversations, unable to fix a dinner you could serve to guests, she was about the most lovable thing you ever saw. I lost my heart to her helplessness time and again. I’m not saying this is admirable.

  The minute Corinne was gone, Astrid showed up. I don’t recall that, prior to that day, we had so much as exchanged a moody, sparking glance. She took me into her expert arms. It was consolation and sympathy at first, I guess. I didn’t question it. In about the time it takes to change the painted background in a photographer’s studio from a woodland scene to a brick wall, she had left her boyfriend and was presenting me with casseroles and opened bottles of cold beer. I took some advantage of her, but she didn’t mind my advances. She was saying, “Wes, it seems you are the one. I am surprised.” She discounted the flaws I owned up to. My first wife lost her credibility as a character witness, and I got a spell cast on me. And then I softened. Love for Astrid like a climbing vine grew out of my heart. I don’t know how else to say it.

  She was competent and assured with child rearing, calm in the face of infant tantrums. On Sunday morning, next to me, Astrid would read the travel section, pencil in hand, naming far-flung places we would go someday. In this household, confusion was dispelled. Now we had pedestals. Things like clarity and plans and pleasure and love went on top of them. What luck I’d been given, I thought. Here was all this day-in-day-out whoopee. Astrid brought all surfaces to an unlikely shine. Jeremy stopped yelling all the time and began to grow. Teeth, toddling, jabber, talk.

  New toys appeared. The divorce went through without Corinne wanting any custody whatsoever or getting any. Astrid and I married, and pretty soon we had ourselves another child, a startlingly beautiful daughter. Lucy. A new path, the next stage.

  Corinne called Jeremy when he was grown enough to talk, but she couldn’t manage to see him, or so she said in her jumbled, haphazard way. She was too delicate, and she claimed her strings were too tightly strung for ordinary social life. Visits would put stress on her immune system. Anyway, she couldn’t manage them, or so she said. Jeremy suffered from this absence, but when it became permanent, he didn’t suffer anymore because Astrid had taken over the mom chores with such competence and love. So Corinne called instead of visiting, and mostly she wrote letters.

  My God, those letters! Moms aren’t supposed to write letters like that. The coffee spills, the anarchic handwriting, the paragraphs without topics, the sentences without subjects and verbs. Jeremy’s letters back to Corinne were full of the news of his childhood. After a while, his letters became very halfhearted, quoting baseball statistics. He wrote them with decreasing frequency.

  The time when Corinne went on daytime TV, the show was about runaway moms. She sat on the stage with three other women. What made her willing to appear there, I’ll never know. For the first ten minutes, the foppish host of the show and the question-askers from the audience sounded reasonable and sympathetic, but by the end of the hour, they were indignant. Out in the peanut gallery they were pointing fingers and shouting at the runaway moms, and others applauded and woofed when the accusations concluded. I only heard about it from a neighbor who watches TV all day and who said that Corinne’s hair was darker than she remembered it, with gray streaks.

  I felt terrible for Corinne, for her eager incompetence and wish to be on national television. I could imagine her befuddled face as she sat there being razzed by hooligans in the studio.

  Dolores, my mother, came to live with us in the spare room upstairs right before Corinne left. She said she’d help with Jeremy, and she did for a while. Mostly she stayed up there knitting and staring out the window, checking for strangers to our neighborhood, including door-to-door salesmen. On Thursdays she would go to her bridge club and on Friday nights to Bible study. Despite her name (dolores means “sad” according to the Latin), my mother is quite upbeat. Take a chance on life is her motto. She and Astrid bonded immediately. She has tried to keep it a secret from me, but I know my mother was and is interested in extraterrestrials (although she is a registered Republican) and believes that Jesus will be back any
day now. She imagines that we are in the end-time and must meet the challenges of life with Christian dignity.

  Astrid humors her, though they avoid this topic when I am in the room.

  My mother’s help was not required after our daughter, Lucy, was born. But Lucy was never any trouble at all. She could have raised herself. She came out of the birth canal with an accusing look on her face directed at me.

  Jeremy is seventeen and has a tattoo of a Japanese word on his left calf. I still don’t know what it means, and he won’t say. On his hip is another tiny tattoo, a grinning gremlin, hands on hips. It’s illegal for children and adolescents to get tattoos, but he evidently got them in a low place known only to his set. I read Jeremy the riot act that time he came home with the Japanese character but was treated with amused, affectionate scorn, as if I were a historical artifact. Get this: in deep winter he’s been known to wear a sweatshirt, jeans, and flip-flops outside. Summer clothes in a snowstorm—a pretense of immortality. He wants to be a young god as they all do and defy the seasons. In Minnesota that’s a brave stand, and many teenage boys take it. Therefore he’s wildly popular. He has several hundred friends and is constantly texting them. His face has some of the sweet beauty of his mother, Corinne. The three women in the household dote on him. They comb his hair and would tie his shoelaces for him if he’d let them. His little sister sketches his face when he is sitting down. Imagine the possible result: a spoiled brat. However, he’s not really spoiled, just blasé. Naturally he smiles all the time, having done nothing to earn all this love. He looks past me as if I were a footnote.

  —

  The point is, Corinne is back in town, and we have a situation on our hands. She has sent a postcard saying that she will be arriving by bus, and so I take a few hours off from work at the garage to go downtown to get her. Explanations for her arrival? None. Some idea of what the agenda might be? Not a clue. Her arrival has no more rationale than her departure did all those years ago.

  Although I am not secretive by nature, I have told no one else in the house about Corinne’s reappearance. When I arrive at the Greyhound station on Hawthorne Avenue, I enter the doors and smell that rich bus-station smell of humus mixed with nitrates. You feel like editorializing on humanity when you enter a bus station. But you don’t, because Corinne is already sitting there, waiting on a bench. She has two brown paper bags with her. Soiled clothes are peeking out of the tops of the bags, sweaters and unmentionables, and she’s staring at the wall clock.

  And here I must try to describe my ex-wife in her current condition.

  Imagine a beautiful woman of middle age who has somehow gone through a car wash. She has dried out, but the car wash has rumpled her up, left the hair going every which way, and on her face is a dazed expression and she has new parallel lines on her forehead and crow’s-feet around her eyes. Life has worried and picked at her. But that’s not the point. The point is that she’s still beautiful to me, which is strange. It’s counter to common sense.

  She’s wearing a pink sweatshirt with the name of a TV show printed on it. It’s the TV show she was on and where she was mocked. The show’s name is the name of the small-minded and mean millionaire host with the thin mustache. Corinne looks up at me as I take her hand. She stands audibly. She kisses me on the cheek. For that instant her warm lips are familiar. I feel an antiquated tingle.

  “Wes,” she says, “I knew you’d save me.”

  “Haven’t saved you yet, Corinne,” I say, trying to laugh it off. She smells of french fries and hamburger and ketchup. A fast-food smell. The poor soul. What’s happened to her? “How are you?”

  “How am I? As you can see.”

  I don’t say anything in the face of the incomparable wreckage she presents.

  “Well,” she says, “is the inspection over? Would you take one of these bags? I’ll take the other.” She picks up one of the aforementioned bags, and when I look down I see that her shoes are split at the seams. Through the hole in her left shoe, toes are visible.

  My first wife has become a bag lady, and here she is.

  —

  This is what she says in the truck on the way back to the house.

  “It’s the economy. There’s suffering. You were always a grease monkey, Wes, and you could always get a job fixing cars. So you wouldn’t know. But they’re making it really personal in my case and saying that I can’t keep track of things. Perhaps I was losing track, but only in the afternoons when I was off by myself, and the experts wouldn’t deny that, although they tried to. In a way, the multinational banks did this to me, because I couldn’t live on my income and I was eventually fired from the hospital, and even though sorrow isn’t necessarily contagious, I know I caught it directly from one of my patients. He was a man who groaned all day. The groans got into my head and took up residence there. I’m hearing them now. Can you hear them? No? Lucky you. God bless you for picking me up, Wes. I know I should have given you more of a warning, but I couldn’t. My goodness, it’s cold.” She wraps a scarf around her neck. But it’s not cold. The cold is all in her head. It’s a warm and humid early October day, seventy degrees. Indian summer. To stay warm and to give herself a greenhouse effect, she’s wrapped herself up like a mummy.

  “That’s all right, Corinne,” I tell her. “Where are you staying, by the way?”

  She looks at me.

  “What I meant was, how long are you staying? Here? With us?”

  Gazing out, she says, “American cities are so dirty.” She points to an abandoned, boarded-up drugstore. “I do remember an apothecary, and hereabouts a-dwells,” she says meaninglessly, as if she’s quoting from somewhere. She breathes in deeply and coughs twice. “Let me tell you a story. There was this woman. And she was just fine for a while, and her husband was just fine, too, and no one was to blame for anything. Let’s say this happened in the past. They lived in comfort and kindness with each other. But then something happened. Let’s say a volcano erupted. And she never knew what happened, I mean who caused the volcano, but she knew something did happen, because gradually she was never fine. The dust made her cough, and the water seemed to be poisoned, and the air smelled terrible, of lava, and there were voices, and she realized she had made a big mistake bringing a child into the world. Into this world, my God, how terrible it is, and no one has any idea.”

  “Oh, Corinne,” is all I can say. Trouble is waiting for me patiently at home. Because I have not told Astrid, my wife, or Dolores, my mother, or Jeremy, my son, or Lucy, my daughter, that Corinne is in town, there will be tribulation. Why couldn’t I tell anyone that I was going to the bus station to pick her up? I know why. Give me some credit. After all these years, I wanted to see her, and therefore I would see her. I had forgiven her. I forgive her now. But would they? It was a bad bet. Still, I am the head of the household.

  She pulls down the sun visor and moves the little slide to the left and looks at herself in the visor’s mirror, primping her hair. “They’ve done things to me. They don’t let up.”

  “I know.”

  “Wes,” she says, turning to face me, “I can’t help it. I need taking care of for a time.”

  The neutrality on her face has vanished. There is another expression there now. It is one of supplication such as you see from homeless veterans on street corners. Supplication. Does anybody ever use that word in normal life? I doubt it.

  “There’s something I want you to do,” she says, but then she won’t say what it is. “Is this your neighborhood?” she asks.

  “We’re getting there,” I say.

  Houses pass by, old houses with large front porches, and I note a screech from my F-150’s engine, a loose fan belt.

  “Wes, did you ever think of me?”

  It’s a trick question. They are always asking you for outright expressions of affection and love. But I have to be careful. My answer may be quoted back to me. For a moment I am spooked.

  “Yes, I did think of you. Often.”

  “Even
after you were married to Astrid?”

  “Yes.” I drive down a full city block before I say, “I worried about you.”

  This is not the answer she has been fishing for. But she seems to relax and to settle back. On the floor of the truck, on the passenger side, there is an empty beer can I forgot to throw out. With a regal air, she puts her right foot on it to keep it from rolling around.

  “I thought that maybe you did. Sometimes I had dreams about you. In the dreams you were a young man, and you were still being kind to me. You carried me once out of a burning apartment house. You did it for free. In the dream.”

  —

  We pull into the driveway. I can see from the blue Honda Civic parked in the garage that Astrid is already home. My mother—today is Wednesday—will certainly be upstairs in her room knitting a shawl or surfing the Internet for stories about true crime or the coming apocalypse. Jeremy may still be out tomcatting around town with his crazed friends before dinner, but Lucy will be in residence in the living room, reading one of her horse books.

  Really, I should take Corinne to a motel until I can figure out what to do with her. But instead I pick up her two brown paper bags. We go in through the side door, stop for a moment in the mudroom, and then go up the three stairs into the kitchen past several pairs of soiled empty shoes. I’m behind her, and I notice how gray her hair has become and how it, too, gives off a fast-food odor.

  In the kitchen, Astrid has been sprinkling seasoning onto some salmon when she glances up and sees Corinne, who looks worse than she did a few minutes ago because of the kitchen’s overhead light. First Astrid looks at Corinne. Then she looks at me, and then she looks at Corinne again. Expressions pass across her face so quickly that you might think you hadn’t seen the previous one before the next one appears. First she’s confused: her eyebrows rise up. Who’s that? Then she’s in full recognition mode: her mouth opens, slightly, though she says nothing. Her tongue licks her upper lip. Then it’s time for pity and compassion, and her eyes start to water. Then she’s shocked, and her hand with lemon juice on it rises to her face. “Uh,” she says, but nothing else comes out. A little spot of seasoning stays on her cheek. Then she’s angry, and that’s when she looks at me, as if I were the cause of all this. But the anger doesn’t stay posted up there on her face for long. It’s displaced by an expression we don’t have a word for. You see this expression when someone is hit by circumstances that are much bigger than expected, and the person is trying to restore things to normal, which can’t be done. Actors can’t duplicate this look. It only happens in real life.