Charles Baxter - There's Something I Want You to Do

He reached out for her arm and clasped it. “Yes, I have. So. Please come back,” he said.

“Fuck you doin’?” she said, laughing. “Don’t harass me. Let go. Let go of me or maybe I’ll actually jump .” Irony was the new form of chastity and was everywhere these days. You never knew whether people meant what they said or whether it was all a goof.

“No,” Benny said. “I don’t think so. I won’t let go.” To his astonishment, a couple strolled past them without paying them any mind at all. He thought of crying out for help, but noise might panic this woman, startle her, inspiring her to make her move, unless she was playing a late-night prank. After all, she was grinning. Dear God, he thought, the perfect incongruity of that grin. He felt a sudden resolve to hold on to her forever if he had to.

“This isn’t a big plan I have,” she said cheerfully. “It’s just a personal happening.” She waited. “Don’t you ever want to get on the other side of the boundary? It’s so exciting over here, so lethal. It looks back at you.” She waited. “So much fun. And against boredom? Boredom,” she said urgently, “must be defeated.”

“You shouldn’t be standing there. It’s a terrible idea.”

“Don’t be like that,” she said, staring down at the river. “Okay, maybe it’s a terrible idea, but it’s my idea.” Now she appeared to be sneering. She had a blue barrette in her hair. “Do you think it would take a long time to fall? What would falling feel like?” She tipped her head back. “I think it would feel like being famous. I’d laugh all the way down. I’d sign autographs.”

“No. It would feel like nothing. Then like being ripped apart by water. It’d really hurt.” He waited with his hand around her arm. He was quite strong; like everyone else he knew, he went to the gym and kept fit, and just when he had begun to consider how much she weighed and how long he’d be able to hold on to her if she leaped off the ledge and dangled there, he remembered to ask, “What’s your name?”

“I won’t tell you,” she said. “Okay, yes, I will. It’s Desdemona.”

“Thanks.” He moved slightly so that he was behind her, and still holding her arm, he moved his other arm so that it encircled her waist. A car honked at them. “So-called Desdemona,” he said, “please come back to this side. Okay?”

“Um, no? Just leave me alone? Besides, don’t you even want to get on the other side of the railing with me? How about some solidarity? Don’t you ever want a thrill? Or a chill? Or a spill? Stop touching me!”

“No.”

She laughed. “Such a spoilsport. Such a square. ” She twisted her head back. “You must be from around here. You smell of the Midwest.”

He held on to her for another minute. Either he was trembling or she was. Finally she shook herself as if possessed by a thought. She turned around and clambered over to where Benny was standing. He released her. His heart was pounding. “Okay, I give up. Would you really have held on to me for good?” she asked. He nodded. “So that if I was dangling, you’d keep me? I thought so. You look sturdy. And stubborn. What’s amazing is your investment in me, all the coins you dropped in my slot.” She chattered nervously. “I’m such a dope, I really can’t follow through on anything.” She still hugged the railing, though on the pedestrian side, and continued to glance nervously down into the water now and then. “Did you really think I was going to jump? Would I have done that?”

“You threw away your cell phone. Anyway, I can’t predict what you will or won’t do. I don’t know you.”

“My cell phone was old. It was broken. I hated it. People kept calling me and asking me for things.”

“Neverthel ess,” Benny said.

She twisted her head, a subtle hint of mockery in the movement. “So. It seems that the Samaritan is not going to go away. What do you do, Emergency Guy? I mean, Benny?”

“I’m an architect.”

“An architect? Prove it.” She gave him a teasing expression.

“Okay, look over there.” He pointed at the art museum on the other side of the river. “That’s the Weisman Art Museum. Frank Gehry designed it. He’s famous. The exterior, all those bumps and bulges, are stainless-steel sheets fabricated in Kansas City, and where the museum faces the river, the design’s supposed to look like a waterfall and a fish, but personally I don’t think it does. I could tell you more, but that’s enough.”

“All right,” she said. “You know who Frank Gehry is. Guess what? So do I. Anyway, I’ll go home now.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will.” He waited. “Otherwise you might come back here.”

“Opportunist.” She seemed to be estimating him, like an insurance adjuster. “If you try anything, I’ll scream like a banshee. I can do that. So nothing weird, okay?”

“You’re talking to me about weird?” he asked.

After walking off the bridge, they turned south into a Somali neighborhood where men sat in erect postures at the sidewalk cafés animatedly debating, not even glancing at the two white people as they went by. A wonderful aroma seemed to be suspended in the unbreathing air, a musky cloud of coffee and chocolate and vanilla apparently imported from sub-Saharan Africa and deposited here in Minneapolis, and the atmosphere made Benny feel both provincial and ready for an adventure. The woman — he couldn’t think of her as Desdemona, a joke name — had a surprisingly long and rapid stride, diving ahead of him. They turned off on a poorly lit side street into a neighborhood near a small Lutheran college, where she stopped in front of a nondescript apartment building on whose third floor, she claimed, she lived. Standing fixedly out on the sidewalk, Benny felt a shock of attraction for her, an eerie electrical charge. The attraction alarmed him. For what possible reason would she interest him? No prior cause ever explained his rogue desires, but this one maybe had to do with grieving a person who was still alive. He didn’t want to leave her, that was all, and he had to think of what to say immediately.

“So, Desdemona, what do you do?” he asked.

“So, okay, it isn’t Desdemona, it’s Sarah, and I don’t do anything important.” She shrugged. He saw that her fingernails had been gnawed at. “I merely take up space. I’m one of those little underemployed people that you hear about. You know, one of those my-noot service persons. I have many degrees. I work in a day-care center where I look after the munchkins and I play the piano.”

“Well, that’s something. What’s your last name?”

“Lemming. Kinda ironic, isn’t it? What’s yours?”

“Takemitsu.” He braced himself for the moment when she’d say that he didn’t look Japanese. Instead, she scanned his face for a quality she apparently required in a man. A moment later she slipped sideways away from close proximity to him.

“I also do stand-up comedy now and then,” she said. She waited for him to laugh, and he laughed. “See? I made you crack up. That’s my line. Really, Benny…that is your name, right? Benny? ” He nodded. “You didn’t really think I was going to off myself tonight, did you? Like someone in a movie?” Then she spun around, quickly touching him. “The mysteriously self-destructive and glamorous-but-funny lady on the edge of the bridge and of existence itself? And you, the brave macho rescuer? That’s such a male fantasy, isn’t it? Wow, for banal. Hey, are you one of those comic-book heroes? One of the Fantastic Four? Which one are you? Do I get to guess?” Without waiting for an answer, she went into her building, saying neither thank you nor goodbye.