Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

They would walk down Hennepin Avenue past what he called the Church of the Holy Oil Can — because of its unbecoming disproportionate spire — to one of several greasy smoky restaurants with plate-glass front windows and red-and-white-checkered café curtains and front counters with stools. They always sat at the stools because Walton liked to watch the grill. The first time he bought Jodie a breakfast of scrambled eggs and a biscuit and orange juice. As the breakfast went on, he became more assertive. Outside, Einstein sat near a lamppost and watched the passing pedestrians.

Walton Tyner Ross — looking very much like a fool as he spilled his breakfast on his shirt — was a Roman candle of theories and ideas. Jodie admired his idea that unemployment was like a virus. This virus was spreading and was contagious. The middle class was developing a positive taste for sloth. One person’s unemployment could infect anyone else. “Take you,” he said. “Take us.” He wolfed down his toast slathered with jam. “We shouldn’t feel guilty over not working. It’s like a flu we’ve both got. We’re infected with indifference. We didn’t ask to get it. We inhaled it, or someone sneezed it on us.”

“I don’t know,” she said. In front of her, the fry cook, a skinny African-American kid with half-steamed glasses, was sweating and wiping his brow on his shirtsleeve. The restaurant had the smell of morning ambition and resolution: coffee and cigarette smoke and maple syrup and cheap aftershave and hair spray. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But maybe we’re both just kind of lazy. My sister says I’m lazy. I think it’s more complicated than that. I once had plans, too,” Jodie said, indicating with a flick of her wrist the small importance of these plans.

“Like what? What sort of plans?”

She was watching the fry cook and could hardly remember. “Oh,” she said. “What I wanted was an office job. Keeping accounts and books. Something modest, a job that would leave the rest of my life alone and not eat up my resources.” She waited a moment and touched her cheek with her finger. “In those days — I mean, a few months ago — my big project was love. I always wanted big love. Like that game, Careers, where you decide what you want out of life? I wanted a small job and huge love, like a big event . An event so big you couldn’t say when it would ever stop.”

He nodded. “But so far all the love you’ve gotten has been small.”

She looked at him and shrugged. “Maybe it’s the times. Maybe I’m not pretty enough.”

He leaned back and grinned at her to dispute this.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “I can say all this to you because we don’t know each other. Anyway, I was once almost engaged. The guy was nice, and I guess he meant well, and my parents liked him. They didn’t mind that he was kind of ragged, but almost as soon as he became serious about me, he was taking everything for granted. It’s hard to explain,” she said, pushing her scrambled eggs around on the plate and eyeing the ketchup bottle. “It wasn’t his fault, exactly. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t play me.” She gave up and poured some ketchup on her eggs. “You don’t have to play me all the time, but if you’re going to get married, you should be played sometimes . You should play him, he should play you. With him, there was no tune coming out of me. Just prose. You know, Walton,” she said suddenly, “you sometimes look like the fool illustration on the tarot pack. No offense. You just do.”

“Sure, I do,” he said, and when he turned, she could see that his ears were pierced, two crease incisions on each lobe. “Okay, look. Here’s what’s going to happen. You and me, we’re going to go out together in the morning and look for work. Then in the afternoon we’ll drive around, I don’t know, a treasure hunt, something that doesn’t cost anything. Then I don’t know what we’re going to do in the evening. You can decide that.” He explained that good fortune had put them together but that maybe they should at least try to fight the virus of sloth.

She noticed a fat balding man on Walton’s other side, with hideous yellow-green eyes, staring at her. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

The next day, he was there in the hot dusty alley with his morning paper and his dog and his limp, and she came down to him without his having to call up to her. She wasn’t totally presentable — she was wearing the same jeans as the day before, and a hand-me-down shirt from her sister — but she had put on a silver bracelet for him. As they walked to the restaurant he complimented her on her pleasant sexiness. He told her that in the moments when she had descended the back steps, his heart had been stirred. “Your heart. Yeah, right,” she said.

Walking with her toward the café, Einstein trotting behind them and snapping at flies, he said that today they would scan the want ads and would calculate their prospects. In the late morning they would go to his apartment — he had a phone — and make a few calls. They would be active and brisk and aggressive. They would pretend that adulthood — getting a job — made sense. Matching his stride, enjoying his optimism, Jodie felt a passing impulse to take Walton’s arm. He was gazing straight ahead, not glazed at all, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and she briefly admired his arms and the light on his skin.

In the restaurant, at the counter spotted with dried jam and brown gravy, where the waitress said, “Hiya, Glaze,” and poured him his coffee without being asked, Jodie felt a pleasant shiver of jealousy. So many people seemed to know and to like this unremarkable but handsome guy; he, or something about him, was infectious. The thought occurred to her that he might change her life. By the time her Belgian waffle arrived, Jodie had circled six want ads for temp secretaries with extensive computer experience. She knew and understood computers backward and forward and hated them all, but they were like family members and she could work with them if she had to. She didn’t really want the jobs — she wanted to sit on the sleeping porch with her feet up on the windowsill and listen to the piano music of Granados and watch things go by in the alley — but the atmosphere of early-morning ambition in the café was beginning to move her to action. She had even brought along a pen.

She felt a nudge in her ribs.

She turned to her left and saw sitting next to her the same fat balding man with horrible yellow-green eyes whom she had seen the day before. His breath smelled of gin and graham crackers. He was smiling at her unpleasantly. He was quite a package. “ ’Scuse me, miss,” he said. “Hate to bother you. I’m short bus fare. You got seventy-five cents?” His speech wore the clothes of an obscure untraceable Eastern European accent.

“Sure,” she said without thinking. She fished out three quarters from her pocket and gave the money to him. “Here.” She turned back to the want ads.

“Oboy,” he said, scooping it up. “Are you lucky.”

“Am I?” she asked.

“You got that right,” he said. He rose unsteadily and his yellow-green eyes leered at her, and for a moment Jodie thought that he might topple over, like a collapsed circus tent, covering her underneath his untucked shirt and soiled beltless trousers. “I,” he announced to the restaurant, although no one was paying any attention to him, “am the Genie of the Magic Lamp.”

No one even looked up.

The fat man bent down toward her. “Come back tomorrow,” he said in a ghoulish whisper. Now he smelled of fireplace ash. “You get your prize.” After a moment, he staggered out of the restaurant in a series of forward and sideways lurching motions, almost knocking over on the way a stainless-steel coatrack. The waitress behind the counter watched him leave with an expression on her face of irritated indifference made more explicit by her hand on her hip and a pink bubble almost the color of blood expanding from her lips. Bubble gum was shockingly effective at expressing contempt, Jodie thought. All the great waitresses chewed gum.