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

“You called her? You told her? And she made an offer? No, she won’t do that.”

“You’re right, she won’t,” Sarah said. “And do you know why?”

“Because we’re going to get married?”

“Exactly! Bingo! We’re going to get married. What a nice proposal. Where’s my diamond ring?” Against the odds, she embraced him and held him, and then she turned so that her back was pressed against his chest, and his arms circled her waist.

“Your ring’s around here somewhere. And how will our marriage work out?” he asked.

“Wait and see,” she said. “I repeat: you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

—

Which is how Benny Takemitsu, a third-generation Japanese-American who spoke little or no Japanese, a citizen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a journeyman architect at the firm of Byrum and Haddam, a man who had such a weakness for women who could make him laugh that he could not help falling in love with such a woman, came to marry someone who had never kissed him but who had, at least, caressed his face. They conceived a child together and still she could not bear to kiss him, not before or after the child was born, a son whom they named Julian. Stranger things have happened, Benny would sometimes say to himself, about his wife’s particular form of chastity.

Sarah had laughed and groaned during the pains of labor to the consternation of the attending nurses, who had never witnessed such laughter before, or so much of it.

The baby’s pediatrician was Dr. Elijah Elliott Jones, who praised the boy’s health and equanimity and handsome features as if Julian were his own son.

—

Sometimes during the summer they sat together on a playground near the Mississippi River, the four of them: Benny, Sarah, Julian, and Benny’s mother, Dorothea, who usually watched the baby whenever Sarah fell into one of her periodic brown studies, which, following the birth, had increased in duration and intensity. Often they packed sandwiches for a picnic, Sarah’s favorite being curried chicken salad and deviled eggs. At such times, having finished nursing her son and having tied the loops of his sun hat, Sarah would stare off in the direction of the river’s other shore as if Sirens sang over there, and only nudges and direct address could call her back. “She’s just woolgather ing,” Benny’s mother would say, quietly and affectiona tely, with a shrug, about her red-haired daughter-in-law. “In my generation,” Dorothea whispered to her son, “women often looked like that. We were distracted. All of us.”

Once in late summer, however, Sarah startled to life and waved her hand in front of her face to dispel the mosquitoes. She seemed to be coming up from some depth somewhere in another life. Turning one by one to Benny, Julian, and her mother-in-law, she smiled as if she approved of all of them and could bless them. Benny sat on a bench next to her, the baby sleeping in his lap, and Benny’s mother, who had strolled to the edge of the Mississippi, was examining the wildflowers along the bank. Grade-school children yelled from the play structure, and nearby a freight train rattled over the river, heading north. Overhead, an airplane left behind a thin vapor trail, and in the trees the cicadas chirred. “I never played any Bach for you,” she said, her voice a soft murmur. “And I don’t do stand-up anymore.”

“You still can.”

“I’ve never played any Bach for you,” she repeated. “I always meant to. Do you know that story about Bach? The last night of his life?” Benny shook his head. Holding Benny’s hand, Sarah continued with the story. “I read it on the back of a record album. You know Bach went blind? He had cataracts and things, probably. And to make matters worse, he was treated by this guy, this traveling English quack doctor named Taylor. Goodbye, eyesight. So anyway, on the evening before he died, Bach is granted a momentary miraculous return of his vision. His sons take him outside, one on each arm, and, guess what, Bach gazes upward to see the stars. The next day he died.” She looked straight up as if in imitation.

“I like that story.”

“Me too.” She held up her index finger to make a final pronouncement, one that Benny would always remember. “To his servant Bach, God granted a final glimpse of the heavens.”

Julian, now awake in his father’s lap, reached up to his mother’s face, whereupon she smiled.

—

She didn’t die the way Benny thought she would, after a long life. Instead, she lost control of her car in a rainstorm. Her car skidded off the freeway and rolled four times down a hill. She would have survived the accident if she had been wearing a seat belt, but for some reason she hadn’t bothered to attach it that particular day.

—

After she died, he grieved for her as he had grieved for her when she had still been alive — as a passion thriving on an absence that feeds on itself year after year. For months, out of habit, he continued to sketch possible houses in which she might have been happy, although none of these houses ever had human figures inside them.

—

Benny’s second wife, Jane, also an architect, is a tall brainy woman who loves Benny and Julian dearly, and together they have had two more children, twins. Myths and fairy tales instruct us that the arrival of the stepmother is to be feared, but she has always treated Julian as her own child, and although she has learned to discipline him when the situation requires it, her scolding lacks a certain force and confidence. One coincidence, if it could be called that, is that Jane’s red hair is so similar to the color that Sarah imported to herself that the two women might have once been mistaken for each other, and when she dresses Julian in his snowsuit — a ctually, he’s too old for that now, he can put on his own snowsuit — she and Julian talk together like co-conspirators who have known each other forever. Jane’s red hair bounces behind her as she walks down the sidewalk to the school bus stop, hand in hand with her stepson, while Benny watches them both from the window.

On their free nights when they’ve arranged for a babysitter, Benny and Jane go dancing, her particular hobby. He has mastered most of the ballroom steps. When they tango, he drags her passionately across the studio floor. They stare into each other’s eyes, glowering with the formalized lust that their tango instructor demands. In Jane’s arms Benny has gained a kind of manly confidence. Also, Jane loves kisses. “Mommy kisses a lot, ” Julian has observed with affectionate irritability, wiping his face off boy-style after having had another Jane-kiss planted on his cheek or forehead. Her one deficit — a small one — is that she cannot make Benny laugh, and so she never tries. Besides, Julian, a boyish image of Sarah, has already grasped the essentials to being the class clown, and he has learned how to entertain his twin brothers and reduce them to giggles. Whenever Benny sees Julian laughing, his mind fogs over a bit. Julian may grow up to be a joker and a troublemaker, but Benny no longer tries to imagine his oldest son’s future, and in any case, what Julian might do in life is, as people say, another story altogether.

1.

He had fallen into bad trouble. He had worked in Ethiopia for a year — teaching in a school and lending a hand at a medical clinic. He had eaten all the local foods and been stung by the many airborne insects. When he’d returned to the States, he’d brought back an infection — the inflammation in his knees and his back and his shoulders was so bad that sometimes he could hardly stand up. Probably a viral arthritis, his doctor said. It happens. Here: have some painkillers.