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

“Well, he told me that I’d never get that poem right. He brought out his book of poems and pointed at another poem.”

McGonigal’s face took on an air of astonishment.

“And he said, ‘This is the poem you must translate. This one you’ll get in no time.’ ”

“So?”

“So I woke up,” Amelia said, “and I translated the poem in half an hour.”

“I am astonished,” McGonigal said, struggling to get to his feet.

“Well, I…”

“I am astonished,” McGonigal repeated. By now he was standing in front of her unsteadily, studying her carefully. He had taken Amelia’s hand. “Are you seriously telling me…” He seemed momentarily incapable of speech. “Are you seriously telling me that that’s the first time that such a thing has ever happened to you?”

“Well, yes.”

“My dear,” he said, his voice coming out of eternity. “Oh, my dear.” He opened his mouth and exhaled, and his breath smelled of Catherine’s grave, and then, as Amelia drew back, the grave started to laugh at her.

“Sir,” the security guy says, “please move away from the gaming table while you are on the phone.” Benny finishes his call to his friend Dennis, who has been giving Benny advice, and he slips his phone into his pocket.

The guard, dressed in a tight sport coat, nods affably, an action that does not seem to come easily to him. He looks like a college-educated brute. He has a crew cut, a Bluetooth in his ear, and a thick neck that tests the collar button on his white shirt. Like those of every other mean motherfucker Benny has ever known, the guard’s eyes are as blank as the lens of a camera.

Benny returns to the blackjack table in the Gray Wolf Casino outside the town of Phelps Lake, Minnesota, where he has been trying to lose all the money he has in the world and to mess up his life in a thoroughly convincing way. He’s acting out, and he knows it, and his friend Dennis, over the phone, has been telling him so. Nevertheless, he’s not succeeding. Two guys seated at the blackjack table have observed Benny with polite disbelief. He had been hoping for a spell of bad luck, but all he can do is win.

Quoting from Touch of Evil, he texted Dennis a few hours ago to say that his future was all used up, but he was winning at blackjack nevertheless. Dennis called him right back.

“What’s this about your future being all used up?” he asked. “That’s from Touch of Evil .”

“Well, she left me, didn’t she?”

“You are in the grip of romantic mindlessness,” Dennis told him. “I like that.” The man has earned the right to say such things to him. After all, he’s attached to a morphine drip and is lying in a hospital bed. “Go on playing if you’re winning, Sport,” Dennis advised, between coughs. “Never buck a winning streak.” Dennis, who is Benny’s age, likes to make pronouncem ents. They’re part of his impeccable style.

“I’m roadkill,” Benny said.

“No. You’re just aggrieved.” Dennis coughed again. “Don’t forget: the best part of breaking up with a girl and finding a new girl is that all your stories are fresh again.”

Black crows of the spirit have been pecking at Benny for eighteen hours — his imagination is inflamed with metaphors, and the metaphors themselves are vampires, sucking the blood from his veins. His girlfriend, Nan, the former love of his life, a tall black-haired beauty in her first year of law school, good-hearted but fickle, broke up with him last night, having traded in Benny for a fellow law student, a triathlete. Nan, too, is a triathlete. “The stars aligned,” she told Benny with faux sadness that masked her glee. “His stars and my stars.”

Despair seized hold of Benny. Who fights the stars?

The previous night, Benny could see that Nan was doing her best to be diplomatic and kind, a misguided charity that made everything worse. She said, almost in sorrow, that this brand-new fellow with a body she couldn’t quite get over was her fate, her destiny. What sealed the deal — Nan’s phrase — was that the new guy is wildly compassionate and wants to practice what she calls “poverty law” once he passes the bar, making him a shining-armor knight riding to the rescue of the creepazoidal unwashed. Whereas Benny, as a boyfriend, constituted something else: a little oasis where her caravan had briefly stopped, one of those nice-guy interludes for which she would always be grateful.

“I just never fell in love with your niceness,” Nan said. “I tried. I guess I couldn’t. You’re not to blame — you’re a great guy, a model citizen. This is all my fault. I’m impaired.”

Sitting in a downtown Minneapolis bar with large plate-glass windows, over drinks, she had announced her breakup intentions and in a moment of possibly indeliberate cruelty had held up an iPhone photograph of the shining-armor knight triathlete in question. She displayed her phone full-frontally with the screen facing Benny. Benny ignored it, and he ignored her unsettled facial expression as she said, “There he is. That’s him. He’s crossing the finish line. Really, can you blame me?”

No one stages a scene in front of plate glass during happy hour, and Benny did not. He sat listening with studied impassivity and noted glumly that Nan had prettied herself for this confrontat ion — blouse with plunge, heels, necklace, red nail polish — in case of a scene. She’d want to make a good impression on witnesses if there was a first-ever Bennyish outburst. Her lacquered beauty enraged him, so he sat quietly seething, radiating bogus serenity.

“You’re not looking at the picture,” Nan said. “I said I was sorry about all this.”

“Exactly right. I accept your apology.”

“Please don’t shout.”

“You wish I were shouting,” Benny said, ostentatiously whispering. “You can hardly hear me. My dial is turned all the way down. We’re in the negative numbers now.” His hand shaking, Benny took a sip of his festive Bloody Mary. “So what’s this guy’s name?”

Nan peevishly put her phone back into her purse. “What? His name?”

“Yeah. You know, his name .”

“Well, his name isn’t him. A name is so…whatever. His identity is his own,” Nan said in a vague monotone, watching a toddler walk by outside clutching a teddy bear in one hand, his other hand in his father’s. “Okay,” she said, apparently gathering her thoughts while rubbing her left knuckle with her right thumb. “So maybe I’ll tell you.” Clearly the name constituted a difficulty, a distraction. Benny waited for whatever she would say, and while he waited he noticed that she gave off a scent of lavender, which, he feared, was from massage oil.

“Go right ahead,” Benny said, sensing an advantage.

“Okay, but you’re going to laugh. I know you. His name’s Thor.”

“Thor?” Benny exclaimed. “That’s a good one. He must be from around here. That’s a real Minnesota name for you. Is he a Lutheran?”

“See, I knew you would be like that. Under your nice hides the snide. And I have to point out that you’re being defensive. Talk about the predictability factor! Like I said, I feel bad for you and I blame myself, but I’m glad I’m moving on to those green pastures they all tell you about.”

On the other side of the plate-glass window, civilians went about their business, seemingly indifferent to the wars of love, and from time to time they glanced in at Benny and Nan, the pleasant-looking young couple sitting at a bar table, apparently lost in conversation. The midsummer sun eased itself behind an office building, casting a conical shadow that pierced Benny with melancholy, while the bar slowly filled up with professional-managerial types getting off work in time for happy hour, the men loosening their collars, the women quickly, almost surreptiti ously, checking their faces in the mahogany-framed mirror above the bar. To the side, a couple of outcast full-figured ladies in slimming dresses leaned toward each other in the corner, whispering.