Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Excuse me?”

“Just ignore the guy,” Walton said, pouring some cream into his coffee. “Just ignore the guy.”

“If I was you,” the fat man said, “I’d ignore him . They don’t call him Glaze for nothing. So what’s your three wishes? I am the Genie of the Magic Lamp, like I said. You did me a favor, I do you a favor.” Jodie noticed that the fat man’s voice was hollow, as if it had emerged out of an echo chamber. Also, she had the momentary perception that the fat man’s limbs were attached to the rest of his body with safety pins.

“I don’t have three wishes,” Jodie said, studying her coffee cup.

“Everybody’s got three wishes,” the fat man said. “Don’t bullshit the Genie. There’s nobody on Earth that doesn’t have three wishes. The three wishes,” he proclaimed, “are universal.”

“Listen, Tad,” Walton said, turning himself toward the fat man and spreading himself a bit wider at the shoulders. He was beginning, Jodie noticed, a slow, threatening, male dancelike sway back and forth, the formal prelude to a fight. “Leave the lady alone.”

“All I’m asking her for is three wishes,” the fat man said. “That’s not much.” He ran his dirty fingers through his thinning hair. “You can whisper them if you want,” he said. “There’s some people that prefer that.”

“All right, all right,” Jodie said. She leaned toward him and lowered her voice toward the Genie of the Magic Lamp so that only he could hear. She just wanted to be left alone with Walton. She wanted to finish her coffee. Her needs were small. “I want a job,” she said softly, “and I’d like that guy sitting next to me to love me, and I’d like a better radio when I listen to music in the morning.”

“ That’s it? ” The fat man stood up, a look of storybook outrage on his face. “I give you three wishes and you kiss them away like that? What’s the matter with you? Give an American three wishes, and what do they do? Kiss them away! That’s the trouble with this country. No imagination when it comes to wishes! All right, my pretty, you got it.” And he dropped his dirty handkerchief in her lap. When she picked it up to remove it, she felt something travel up her arm — the electricity of disgust. The fat man rose and waddled out of the restaurant. She let go of the handkerchief and it drifted toward the floor.

“What was that?” Jodie asked. “What just happened?” She was shaking.

“That,” Walton told her, “was a typical incident at Clara’s Country Kitchen Café. The last time Tad gave someone three wishes, it was because the guy’d bought him a cup of coffee, and a tornado hit the guy’s garage a couple of weeks later. Fat guys have really funny delusions, have you noticed that?” He waited. “You’re shaking,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder. “What’d you ask for, Jodie?”

She turned to look out the front window and saw Walton’s dog gazing straight back at her in an eerie manner.

“I asked for a job, and a better radio, and a million dollars.”

“Then what was all that stuff about ‘kiss away’?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Walton, can we go, please? Can we pay our bill and leave?”

“I just remembered,” Walton said. “It’s that Rolling Stones tune. It’s on one of those antique albums, I think.” He raised his head to sing.

Love, sister, is just a kiss away,

Kiss away, kiss away, kiss away.

“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Jodie said.

Walton leaned forward and gave her a little harmless peck on the cheek. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe it was. Anyhow, just think of him as an overweight placebo-person. He doesn’t grant you the wish because, after all, he’s just a fat psycho, but he could put you in the right frame of mind. We’ve got to think positively here.”

“I like how you defended me,” Jodie said. “Getting all male and everything.”

“No problem,” Walton said, holding up his fist for inspection. “I like fights.”

She thought that she had interviewed well, but she wasn’t offered the job she had applied for that day. They called her a week later — she had finally had a phone installed — and told her that they had given the position to someone else but that they had been impressed by her qualities and might call her again soon if another position opened up.

She and Walton continued their job-and-castoffs hunt, and it was Walton who found a job first, at the loading dock of a retailer in the suburbs, a twenty-four-hour discount store known internationally for shoddy merchandise. The job went from midnight to eight a.m.

She thought he wasn’t quite physically robust enough for such work, but he claimed that he was stronger than he appeared. “It’s all down here,” he said, pointing to his lower back. “This is where you need it.”

She didn’t ask him what he was referring to — the muscles or the vertebrae or the cartilage. She had never seen his lower back. However, she was beginning to want to. On the passenger side of his car, she considered the swinging fuzzy dice and the intricately woven twigs of a bird’s nest tossed on the top of the dashboard as he drove her to her various job interviews. His conversation was sprinkled with references to local geology and puzzles in medicine and biology. He was interested in most observable phenomena, and the pileup of souvenirs in the car reflected him. She liked this car. She had become accustomed to its ratty disarray and to the happy panting of Einstein, who always sat in the backseat, monitoring other dogs in other cars at intersections.

At one job interview, in a glass building so sterile she thought she should wear surgery-room snoods over her shoes, she was asked about her computer skills; at another, about what hobbies she liked to fill her spare time. She didn’t think that the personnel director had any business asking her such questions. These days she filled her spare time daydreaming about sex with Walton. She didn’t say so and didn’t get the job. But at a wholesale supplier of office furniture and stationery, she was offered a position on the spot by a man whose suit was so wrinkled that it was prideful and emblematic. He was a gaudy slob. He owned the business. She was being asked to help them work on a program for inventory control. She would have other tasks. She sighed — those fucking computers were in her future again, they were unavoidable — but she took what they offered her. If she hadn’t met Walton, if Walton and Einstein hadn’t escorted her to the interview, she wouldn’t have.

To celebrate, she and Walton decided to escape the August heat by hiking down Minnehaha Creek to its mouth at the Mississippi River across from Saint Paul. He didn’t have to be at work for another four hours. He had brought his fishing pole and tackle box, and while he cast his line into the water, his dog sat behind him in the shade of a gnarled cottonwood and Jodie walked downriver, looking, but not looking for anything, exactly, just looking without a goal, for which she felt she had a talent. She found a bowling ball in usable condition and one bruised and broken point-and-shoot camera that she left under a bush.

She walked back along the river to Walton, carrying the bowling ball. On her face she had constructed an expression of delight. She was feeling hot and extremely beautiful.

“See what I’ve found?” She hoisted the ball.

“Hey, great,” he said, casting her a smile. “See what I’ve caught?” He held up an imaginary line of invisible fish.

“Good for you,” she said. His eyes were steady on her. He had been gazing at her for the last few days in a prolonged way; she’d been watching him do it. She could feel his presence now in her stomach and her knees. She heard the double blast of a boat horn. Another boat passed, pulling a water-skier with a strangely unhappy look on her face. The clock stopped; the moment paused: when he said he wanted to make love to her, that he almost couldn’t wait, that he had lost his appetite lately just thinking about her and couldn’t sleep, she didn’t quite hear him saying it, she was so happy. She threw the bowling ball out as far as she could into the river. She didn’t notice whether it splashed. She took her time getting into his arms, and when he kissed her, first at the base of her neck and then, lifting her up, all over her exposed skin, she put her hands in his hair. Suddenly she liked kissing in public. She wanted people to see them together. “Walton,” she said, “make love to me. Right here.”