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

“Your voice. Wow. I was undone,” he said, taking a sip of the church-basement coffee, his voice thick. Undone . He had a collection of unusual adjectives like that. Devoted was another. And committed. He used that adjective all the time. Never before had she ever met a man who was comfortable with that particular adjective.

—

A few months after they were married, they took a trip to Prague. The plan was to get pregnant there amid the European bric-a-brac. On the flight over the Atlantic, he held her hand when the Airbus hit some turbulence. In the seats next to theirs, another young couple sat together, and as the plane lurched, the woman fanned her face with a magazine while the man read passages aloud from the Psalms. “ ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand by thy right hand,’ ” he read. When the plane bucked, passengers laughed nervously. The flight attendants had hastily removed the drink carts and were sitting at the back doing crossword puzzles. The woman sitting next to Susan excused herself and rushed toward the bathroom, holding her hand in front of her mouth as she hurried down the fun-house-lurching aisle. When she returned, her companion was staring at his Bible. Having traded seats with Susan, Elijah then said some words to the sick woman that Susan couldn’t hear, whereupon the woman nodded and seemed to calm down.

How strange it was, his ability to give comfort. He doled it out in every direction. He wasn’t just trained as a doctor; he was a doctor all the way down to the root. Looking over at him, at his hair flecked with early gray, she thought uneasily of his generosity and its possible consequences, and then, in almost the same moment, she felt overcome with pride and love.

—

In Prague, the Soviet-era hotel where they stayed smelled of onions, chlorine, and goulash. The lobby had mirrored ceilings. Upstairs, the rooms were small and claustroph obic; the TV didn’t work, and all the signs were nonsensical. Pozor! for example, which seemed to mean “Beware!” Beware of what? The signs were garbles of consonants. Prague wasn’t Kafka’s birthplace for nothing. Still, Susan believed the city was the perfect place for them to conceive a child. For the first one, you always needed some sexual magic, and this place had a particular old-world variety of it. As for Elijah, he seemed to be in a mood: early on their second morning in the hotel, he stood in front of the window rubbing his scalp and commenting on Prague’s air quality. “Stony, like a castle,” he said. Because he always slept naked, he stood before the window naked, with a doctor’s offhandedness about the body, surveying the neighborhood. She thought he resembled the pope blessing the multitudes in Vatican Square, but no: on second thought he didn’t resemble the pope at all, starting with the nakedness. A sexual sentimenta list, he loved the body as much as he loved the spirit: he liked getting down on his knees in front of her nakedness to kiss her belly and incite her to soft moans.

“We should go somewhere,” she said, thumbing through a guidebook, which he had already read. “I’d like to see the Old Town Square. We’d have to take the tram there. Are you up for that?”

“Hmm. How about the chapels in the Loreto?” he asked. “That’s right up here. We could walk to it in ten minutes and then go to the river.” He turned around and approached her, sitting next to her on the bed, taking her hand in his. “It’s all so close, we could soak it all up, first thing.”

“Sure,” she said, although she didn’t remember anything from the guidebooks about the Loreto chapels and couldn’t guess why he wanted to go see them. He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one, which always gave her chills.

“Oh, honey,” she said, leaning into him. He was the only man she had ever loved, and she was still trying to get used to it. She had done her best not to be scared by the way she often felt about him. His intelligence, the concern for children, the quiet loving homage he paid to her, the wit, the indifference to sports, the generosity, and then the weird secret toughness— where could you find another guy like that? It didn’t even matter that they were staying in a bad hotel. Nothing else mattered. “What’s in those chapels?” she asked. “How come we’re going there?”

“Babies,” he told her. “Hundreds of babies.” He gave her a smile. “Our baby is in there.”

—

After dressing in street clothes, they walked down Bělohorská toward the spot on the map where the chapel was supposed to be. In the late-summer morning, Susan detected traceries of autumnal chill, a specifically Czech irony in the air, with high wispy cirrus clouds threading the sky like promissory notes. Elijah took her hand, clasping it very hard, checking both ways as they crossed the tramway tracks, the usual Pozor! warnings posted on their side of the platform telling them to exercise caution toward…wha tever. The number 18 tram lumbered toward them silently from a distance up the hill to the west.

Fifteen minutes later, standing inside one of the chapels, Susan felt herself soften from all the procreative excess on display. Eli had been right: carved babies took up every available space. Surrounding them on all sides — in the front, at the altar; in the back, near the choir loft, where the carved cherubs played various musical instruments; and on both walls — were plump winged infants in various postures of angelic gladness. She’d never seen so many sculpted babies in one place: cherubs not doing much of anything except engaging in a kind of abstract giggling frolic, freed from both gravity and the Earth, the great play of Being inviting worship. What bliss! God was in the babies. But you had to look up, or you wouldn’t see them. The angelic orders were always above you. At the front, the small cross on the altar rested at eye level, apparently trivial, unimportant, outnumbered, in this nursery of angels. For once, the famous agony had been trumped by babies, who didn’t care about the Crucifixion or hadn’t figured it out.

“They loved their children,” Susan whispered to Eli. “They worshipped infants.”

“Yeah,” Eli said. She glanced up at him. On his face rested an expression of great calm, as if he were in a kingdom of sorts where he knew the location of everything. He was a pediatrician, after all. “Little kids were little ambassadors from God in those days. Look at that one.” He pointed. “Kind of a lascivious smile. Kind of knowing .”

She wiped a smudge off his cheek with her finger. “Are you hungry? Do you want lunch yet?”

He dug into his pocket and pulled out a nickel, holding it as if he were about to drop it into her hand. Then he took it back. “We just got here. It’s not lunchtime. We got out of bed less than two hours ago. I love you,” he said matter-of-factly, apropos of nothing. “Did I already tell you this morning? I love you like crazy.” His voice rose with an odd conviction. The other tourists in the chapel glanced at them. Was their love that obvious? Outside, the previous day, sitting near a fountain, Susan had seen a young man and a young woman, lovers, steadfastly facing each other and stroking each other’s thighs, both of them crazed with desire and, somehow, calm about it.

“Yes,” she said, and a cool wind passed through her at that moment, right in through her abdomen and then out the back near her spine. “Yes, you do, and thanks for bringing me here, honey, and I agree that we should go to the Kafka Museum, too, but you know what? We need to see if we can get tickets to The Marriage of Figaro tonight, and anyway I want to walk around for a while before we go back to that hotel.”