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

Of course teens were hazy because life was still hazy to them, but this Donna, this Jupiter, was a mistress of the unspecific. Political platitudes and unsubstant iated generaliza tions just came leaking out of her. Besides, their son was still in high school, a senior. Big political rhetoric turned him on.

“Actually,” Susan said, “we’ve got to stop calling her that. Her name’s Donna. If Rafe ever catches us calling her Jupie again, he’ll pitch a fit.”

“So…”

“So I guess he forgot about condoms one time, or they got careless, but anyway he got her knocked up, unbeknownst to us, and also, equally unbeknownst to us, they went off to Planned Parenthood last week.” This sentence came out of Susan in pieces, severed into parts. Elijah took his wife into his arms and felt his old damaged heart breaking again, momentarily. “After all,” his wife said into his shirt, “she’s eighteen. Or nineteen. Old enough anyway to get an abortion.”

“When did he tell you?”

“This evening. And here’s the thing. He’s been crying all afternoon. The poor kid. His crying is contagious. And…I don’t know. You don’t expect a tough young man to be torn up about it. You don’t expect the fathers to cry.”

“You don’t?” He waited. “ I do.”

She just looked at him, through the tears.

“But anyway Rafe’s not generic,” he said. “He’s not one of ‘the men.’ He’s not one of ‘the fathers.’ Rafe is himself. Of course he’d cry. Jesus, the poor kid.”

“I’d rather,” she said, stiffening, “I’d rather you didn’t lecture me about him. I believe that I know him as well as you do.” She paused for effect. “If not better.”

The doctor still held on to her. “Let’s not fight,” he said. “What should I do? Should I go talk to him?”

“Yes, but don’t lecture him, okay?”

“I don’t lecture.”

“Of course you do. You hold forth. You get started, and once you get going, you’re like an oscillating fan. Wisdom spews out of you in all directions.”

Sorrow had made her cruel this evening. The doctor felt hungry again, terribly hungry, mealless, and he removed his bulky arms from where they had been encircling his wife and dropped them to his sides.

He trudged upstairs to sit with his son. At the top, he stopped for breath. He would sit down on Rafe’s unmade bed, where conception had recently taken place. On the walls and shelves above them, the trophies and medals for his tae kwon do competitions would be on display. The smell of teenage boy would pervade the room: sweat, pizza, musk, and drugstore aftershave would be mixed together in there. Somewhat uninvited and slightly unwelcome, the doctor would just go on sitting there until something happened or nothing did. With another man in the room, Rafe would stop crying and collect himself. Rafe was devoted to benign authority: when sparring, he always bowed deeply and crisply and always walked away from his instructor backward. He had never gone through a rebellious, obnoxious phase and wouldn’t start now.

The doctor would wait patiently with the young man, his son, who had fathered a child, “sired” one, that old strange verb that people now applied only to pedigreed dogs. Anyway, patience being one of his gifts, maybe the best of them, he would listen as his son lectured him on progressive politics and tae kwon do and werewolf fiction, his three great passions, as he recovered his composure. Donna, the boy’s girlfriend, was in fourth place when it came to the passions, although the boy did not yet realize where she stood in his hierarchies. Only his father did. Poor thing, she would disappear eventually. They would all get over this.

—

Elijah’s wife had written a story with Jupie in it. She had always had ambitions as a writer and had joined a downtown writers’ organization called Scriveners’ Ink, where she attended a workshop once a week led by a young woman, a recent MFA graduate.

Susan had shyly shown the story, entitled “Like Father Unlike Son,” to her husband. In the story she had written, there is a young woman whose boyfriend is a sweet-tempered but infatuated adolescent male dupe. The girlfriend leads him around from one political meeting to another. The story is narrated by the boy’s mother, who is not afraid to label her athlete son (a football player) to his face as “pussy-whipped”—the accusation is meant in good fun. The boy’s father, a balding and overweight criminal lawyer given to pronouncem ents, provides comic relief and a regular income but somehow is not sufficiently supportive of his wife emotionally. He’s too wrapped up in his work, it seems. Near the end of the story, as he crosses the street near his office, he is struck down by a Prius driven by an angry former client named Nancy, seeking revenge. This melodramatic touch at the story’s climax leaves the boy’s mother and the boy alone together, with the girlfriend, named Venus, now out of the picture, or forgotten, following the lawyer’s painful death from internal bleeding. Together, in the story’s last paragraph, the boy and his mother engage in troubled speculation about their future.

Elijah had rather liked the story. He didn’t mind being killed off in it. He had complimented Susan on the narrative momentum, and he felt flattered that she would think of putting him into a piece of writing. In the story, the lawyer’s name was Gerald, and Elijah had started to think of himself that way from time to time, not as himself but as Gerald, a disputatious character who turned up in his consciousness and his voice whenever he, Elijah, was driving, or arguing with insurance companies over billing practices.

—

One night two weeks later, with snack-food salt and cooking grease once more on his lips and fingers, the Jones Diet Plan having failed him again, the doctor arrived home to find Susan and Rafe sitting in the living room, waiting for him. They were both on the sofa, and because they weren’t reading or watching TV or listening to music, he knew something was up.

“So?” he asked, as soon as he’d hung up his overcoat.

“Hey, Dad,” Rafe said. His tousled curly brown hair framed his face, under the standing lamp, and his broad shoulders cast a shadow across the upholstery. He was barefoot. He didn’t like to wear shoes or socks indoors and said that Asians had it right. With studied politeness, he said, “How was your day?”

How to describe a day that included a parade of sick kids and their parents, diagnoses, written prescriptions, and a trip to the hospital? “Oh, fine,” he said. “Yours?”

“There’s a thing,” Susan said. “There’s a thing that’s come up, Eli.”

“Yes? What thing would this be?” He waited. “Where’s Theresa?” This was Rafe’s sister.

“Upstairs.” At that, both Rafe and his mother started speaking at once. They didn’t seem to notice that they were talking simultaneo usly, or if they did notice, neither could stop to let the other one explain. They continued to talk over each other, although both of them were making the same point.

This simultaneous duo-outburst bothered the doctor even as he was listening to it. He knew his wife had a streak of self-absorption, a very little one, though still within normal range. Sometimes when other people were talking, she would excitedly interrupt as if no one else were in the room, as if no one else had ever existed. But to see Rafe talking over his mother — not even trying to outspeak her competitively, which would suggest that he knew she was there in the room with him, but calmly conversing with his father, as if the two of them were alone together — made Elijah feel a little sliver of despair.