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

As he chewed and swallowed, he piloted the little car homeward through the dark. The steering wheel, however, was greasy with salt and cooking oils and saturated fats transferred from his palm, and although he wiped his fingers on his trouser leg, he couldn’t get the grease off his skin. He felt drowsy. A literate man who entertained himself by reading Shakespeare, the doctor thought of Lady Macbeth: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” No, not these hands.

Against his own obesity, he had concocted his own diet plan, the Jones Plan. It was simplicity itself: every time you go into a restaurant, you order an entrée you do not want to eat. You don’t like the taste of pork? You order pork. If the very sight of lobster disgusts you, you order lobster. You search the menu for an unpalatable culinary miscalcula tion, and then you request it. You ask your wife to prepare distasteful meals. The whole point is to be presented, day after day, with the unwanted. Naturally your wife is horrified and insulted by these ideas, when she does not regard them as comical. So far, however, no weight has been lost by anyone, thanks to the plan.

He pulled up into the driveway and wiped his hands again but this time on the car’s dashboard. The lights were blazing inside the house, so Susan would still be up, vigilant about his arrival. When he stepped out of the car, he stood for a moment underneath the linden in the front yard and thoughtfully noted its seeds scattered on the lawn, pale green against the darker green of the grass illuminated by the streetlight. He felt a pain in his chest, and its attendant breathless ness. Ah, he thought, it’s that again .

Inside the house, dressed in her blue bathrobe, Susan put down her book, a history of the Armory Show, and rose to greet him. Her perfume preceded her. She kissed him, her eyes still on the door through which he had entered, a kiss both perfunctory and ironic, gestural in its well-meaning sweetness. “Your lips taste of salt,” she said.

“Snack food,” the doctor said. “I didn’t really have dinner.”

“Well, I could always heat up something for you. Are you still hungry? There’s some leftover roast in the icebox.” She enjoyed using antiquated words. “Or I could throw together a salad for you.” She refused to follow the Jones Diet Plan and had said so. He shook his head. “Hey, guess what’s going on here?” She gave him a brief and almost unreadable smile.

“I have no idea.”

“We need to go to the basement.” She waited. “We have to go down there if I’m going to tell you what’s going on here .” She cocked her head at the ceiling. “He might be listening.”

“Rafe?”

“Who else?”

The doctor smelled a trace of gin on his wife’s breath. She gave off an air of late-night melancholy elegance, an effect always intensified by alcohol, both the melancholy and the elegance. As she made her way toward the basement door entrance, her slippers shuffled on the linoleum, and her hips under the bathrobe swayed a little, a touch of womanly swagger intensified by the gin. Her expensively cut hair was streaked with gray, and her hair swayed with the same rhythm as her hips. He didn’t want the younger version of Susan back — he did not desire younger women and despised men of his age who did — because a younger woman would leave him alone and untended in middle age, and he wanted to share the process of aging with someone, and not just anybody, but with her.

He felt his love flaring up for her: he remembered exactly how beautiful she looked when they first met years ago in San Francisco and saw how she appeared to the world now, the result of what their lives together had done to her, and the two versions of her, the young and the…well, she wasn’t old, exactly, weathered was maybe a better word, touched him with an electric intensity that made it hard for him to breathe. How he loved her! He even loved her sadness. But loving your wife’s sadness was a soul-error. Everyone said so.

She flipped on the light for the basement stairs and descended slowly, turning her feet at an angle so that she wouldn’t slip on the narrow steps. At the bottom she flicked on another light. He followed her, trying to see the stairs over the mound of his belly. Her canned preserves lined the shelves behind her, fresh this past summer from the cauldron of the pressure cooker, including the stewed tomatoes in mason jars that sometimes started to ferment and caused the jars to explode. He remembered reading the paper one evening and hearing a canned-tomato bomb go off underneath him. When he had gone downstairs to inspect the damage, shards of glass and stewed tomatoes were strewn all over the basement floor. It looked like a crime scene.

“How was your day?” she asked without interest. “Any hallucinat ions?”

“No. Just the usual can of worms.” He was puffing from the exertion. At last he shrugged. “No. A little better than the usual worms.”

“Remind me,” she said, “to have someone come down here and inspect this place for mold. I smell mold.”

“Okay.” He noticed that she faced slightly away from him, though her right hand played with the fingers of his left hand, an old habit. She toyed with his wedding ring. He often felt that she was inspecting him.

“What’s this about?” he asked, as the furnace rumbled to life. “How come we’re down here?”

“What’s what about?”

“Why we’re down here.”

“Oh. Down here?” She had grown terribly absentminded. Maybe it was the gin. “Oh, yes, of course.” She nodded, a bit too forcefully, though she was still facing away from him. “Okay, so brace yourself. It seems that we were grandparents for, I don’t know, about four weeks. Well, I mean, virtual grandparents, because, well, you get the picture.”

“I do? No, I think I don’t get the picture. What picture is this? Does this have to do with Jupie?”

“Bingo.” She nodded and then wiped her eyes on her bathrobe sleeve. Jupie was their son, Rafe’s girlfriend —though Jupie was Eli and Susan’s private name for this girlfriend whose actual name was Donna. A serious martial artist in tae kwon do, Rafe also considered himself a Marxist and had met this girl at a downtown political rally for voting rights or whatever. She was a freshman at Macalester, and although she was a year older than he was, her political activism matched his. They had hooked up soon after they met, and she had attended his matches and cheered him on. An attractive young woman with long brown hair, big brown eyeglasses to match, and a habit of chewing on her lip after she said anything, she nevertheless had an essential blurriness to her, which had provoked the doctor, after one of her visits to the house when she and their son had engaged him in conversation about gender identity, to call her Jupiter, not because she was godlike but because she resembled a gas planet. You’d go down through the layers of gas with her, and you never got to anything solid.

Her well-meaning earnestness had a certain charm. All it lacked was specific content.

By contrast, Rafe was all specific content. His body had a wiry density: when he moved, he seemed not to walk but to float, his movements all perfectly coordinated. When sparring, he showed absolutely no mercy, and his face showed an utter lack of expression. Watching him, his father felt pride and wonder. Well, he himself had been a fighter once.