Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

She turned around and faced him, the full display of her smile. “I think you’re a latent vagrant,” she said.

“But I’m not,” he said. “I’m here. I have a job. This is where I am. I’m a father. How can you say that?”

“Do I love you?” she asked, water pouring over her face. “Stay with me.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “That’s my plan.”

The second one he decided to do something about was standing out of the hot summer sun in the shade of a large catalpa tree near a corner newsstand. This one was holding what seemed to be a laundry sack with the words AMERICAN LINEN SUPPLY stenciled on it. She was wearing light summer clothes — a Hawaiian shirt showing a palm tree against a bloody splash of sunset, and a pair of light cotton trousers, and red Converse tennis shoes — and she stood reading a paperback, beads of sweat falling off her face onto the pages.

This time Cooper went first to a fast-food restaurant, bought the hamburger, french fries, and milk, and then came back.

“I brought something for you,” Cooper said, walking to the reading woman. “I brought you some lunch.” He held out a bag. “I’ve seen you out here on the streets many times.”

“Thank you,” the woman said, taking the bag. She opened it, looked inside, and sniffed appreciatively.

“Are you homeless?” Cooper asked.

“They have a place where you can go,” the woman said. She put down the bag and looked at Cooper. “My name’s Estelle,” she said. “But we don’t have to talk.”

“Oh, that’s all right. If you want. Where’s this shelter?”

“Over there.” The woman gestured with a french fry she had picked out. She lifted the bag and began to eat. Cooper looked down at the book and saw that it was in a foreign language. The cover had fallen off. He asked her about it.

“Oh, that?” she said. She spoke with her mouth full of food, and Cooper felt a moment of superiority about her bad manners. “It’s about women — what happens to women in this world. It’s in French. I used to be Canadian. My mother taught me French.”

Cooper stood uncomfortably. He took a key ring out of his pocket and twirled it around his index finger. “So what happens to women in this world?”

“What doesn’t ?” the woman said. “Everything happens. It’s terrible but sometimes it’s all right, and, besides, you get used to it.”

“You seem so normal,” Cooper said. “How come you’re out here?”

The woman straightened up and looked at him. “My mind’s not quite right,” she said, scratching an eyelid. “Mostly it is but sometimes it isn’t. They messed up my medication and one thing led to another and here I am. I’m not complaining. I don’t have a bad life.”

Cooper wanted to say that she did have a bad life, but stopped himself.

“If you want to help people,” the woman said, “you should go to the shelter. They need volunteers. People to clean up. You could get rid of your guilt over there, mopping the floors.”

“What guilt?” he asked.

“All men are guilty,” she said. She was chewing but had put her bag of food on the ground and was staring hard and directly into Cooper’s face. He turned toward the street. When he looked at the cars, everyone heading somewhere with a kind of fierce intentionality, braking hard at red lights and peeling rubber at the green, he felt as though he had been pushed out of his own life.

“You’re still here,” the woman said. “What do you want?”

“I was about to leave.” He was surprised by how rude she was.

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen the Rocky Mountains or even the Swiss Alps, for that matter,” the woman said, bending down to inspect something close to the sidewalk.

“No, you’re right. I haven’t traveled much.”

“We’re not going to kiss, if that’s what you think,” the woman said, still bent over. Now she straightened up again, glanced at him, and looked away.

“No,” Cooper said. “I just wanted to give you a meal.”

“Yes, thank you,” the woman said. “And now you have to go.”

“I was … I was going to go.”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” the woman said. “It’s nothing against you personally, but talking to men just tires me out terribly and drains me of all my strength. Thank you very much, and good-bye.” She sat down again and opened up her paperback. She took some more french fries out of the sack and began to eat as she read.

“They’re polite,” Cooper said, lying next to his wife. “They’re polite, but they aren’t nice.”

“Nice? Nice? Jesus, Cooper, I prosecute rapists! Why should they be nice? They’d be crazy to be nice. Who cares about nice except you? This is the 1980s, Cooper. Get real.”

He rolled over in bed and put his hand on her hip. “All right,” he said.

They lay together for a while, listening to Alexander snoring in his bedroom across the hall.

“I can’t sleep, Cooper,” she said. “Tell me a story.”

“Which one tonight?” Cooper was a good improviser of stories to help his wife relax and doze off. “Hannah, the snoopy cleaning woman?”

“No,” Christine said. “I’m tired of Hannah.”

“The adventures of Roderick, insurance adjuster?”

“I’m sick of him, too.”

“How about another boring day in Paradise?”

“Yeah. Do that.”

For the next twenty minutes, Cooper described the beauty and tedium of Paradise — the perfect rainfalls, the parks with roped-off grassy areas, the sideshows and hot-air-balloon rides, the soufflés that never fell — and in twenty minutes, Christine was asleep, her fingers touching him. He was aroused. “Christine?” he whispered. But she was sleeping.

The next morning, as Cooper worked at his baker’s bench, rolling chocolate-almond croissants, he decided that he would check out the shelter in the afternoon to see if they needed any help. He looked up from his hands, with a trace of dough and sugar under the fingernails, over toward his boss, Gilbert, who was brewing coffee and humming along to some Coltrane coming out of his old radio perched on top of the mixer. Cooper loved the bakery where he worked. He loved the smell and everything they made there. He had noticed that bread made people unusually happy. Customers closed their eyes when they ate Cooper’s doughnuts and croissants and Danishes. He looked up toward the skylight and saw that the sky had turned from pale blue to dark blue, what the Crayola 64 box called blue-indigo. He could tell from the tint of the sky that it was seven o’clock, time to unlock the front doors to let in the first of the customers. After Gilbert turned the key and the mechanics from down the street shuffled in to get their morning doughnuts and coffee in Styrofoam cups, Cooper stood behind the counter in his whites and watched their faces, the slow private smiles that always registered when they first caught the scent of the baked dough and the sugared fruit.

The shelter was in a downtown furniture store that had gone out of business during the recession of ’79. To provide some privacy, the first volunteers had covered over the front plate-glass window with long strips of paper from giant rolls, with the result that during the daytime the light inside was colored an unusual tint, somewhere between orange and off-white. As soon as he volunteered, he was asked to do odd jobs. He first went to work in the evening ladling out food — stew, usually, with ice-cream-scoop mounds of mashed potatoes.

The director of the shelter was a brisk and slightly overweight woman named Marilyn Adams, who, though tough and efficient, seemed vaguely annoyed about everything. Cooper liked her officious irritability. He didn’t want any baths of feeling in this place.