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

The plane bounced, and 32-A sat back. “You’re a queer?”

“Yup.”

“You don’t look like it. What’s the point in that? Please explain.”

“Excuse me?”

“Why would anyone want such a thing? No showgirls for you? Just showboys? With nice hair? Tap dancers? Playing the gold piano?”

“Could be.”

The old man leaned back and puffed out his cheeks. “I’ve known people like you. And, let me say, I am open-minded. Every hedgehog has a law for itself, hedgehog law. For me, however, queer has no appeal. Your particular kingdom is closed to me. So, you get to Vegas, no showgirls, no pretty waitresses, what have you got?”

“Plenty,” Harry Albert said.

“Please don’t describe. A cute smile I suppose can be anywhere. But okay. Prince, listen to me. Like I said, open-minded is my motto. You got your book there, you’re reading about Schindler, but this is America now, different hedgehog laws. So, okay, what am I—? I’m saying, and this is very simple, so listen. These other people on the plane, screaming now, turbulence, they would say it too if they only stopped screaming. Which is: enjoy life. In your hedgehog royalty way.”

“Thank you,” Harry Albert said. “Trust me. I do enjoy it.”

“You’re kind of solid-looking. You don’t look delicate, if I may say. Or sensitive, even, which, I might as well tell you, I despise. Feelings? No, not for me.”

“I work out.”

“You work out what?”

“In the gym. Circuit training. Also, I box. I’m a fighter.” Harry Albert made a fist, and the old man nodded. “I have a good punch.”

“That’s right. You must. That’s right .” The old man had become quite vehement. “So there’s something I want you to do, Prince.” The old man reached into his pocket and drew out a business card. On it had been printed his name, the name of his business, Go-Clean, with its website, and an e-mail address. He handed it to Harry Albert. “First we shake hands. Not every day do I meet a member of the English royal family trained in pugilism.”

“But I’m not—”

The old man held up his hand. “Don’t deny. You’re thinking: this old man, he’s crazy, a Schindler Jew, suffering has made him insane, and I’m telling you, no, it didn’t. Maybe a joker.” He held out his hand, and Harry Albert shook it. “A joker is what it made me. A joker vacationer. An American going on vacation to Las Vegas, where my wife already is, that’s what I am. An American like you. So what you do is, you go to your business conference and then night falls, and you enjoy the nightlife in your hedgehog way with your hedgehog friends, and you write to me, you send me a note telling me you’re okay. Because now we are friends. You said you are honored to meet me.”

“Yes, I am.”

“And I am likewise honored to meet you, English royalty. Freed at last from the palace, like Roman Holiday. Even though you don’t look like Audrey Hepburn. Maybe more Oscar De La Hoya. Are you vain, like him?”

“Yes. But I’m not—”

“Like I said: don’t bother to deny.” The old man turned to gaze out the window. “We’ll be landing soon. Where are the free peanuts? The free beverage?” He turned back to Harry Albert, and all at once a smile broke out on his profoundly ugly face, a transfixing smile. “This is a very annoying flight. Except for you. Prince, you’re good company,” he said. “You keep a person interested. Send me a letter. Tell me what it’s like.”

—

Sitting in his hotel room, satiated with pleasure, the other young man still in bed, prettily sleeping, Harry Albert opened his laptop and began to write.

Dear David, he wrote, I promised that I would write to you and now I’m doing just that. I’ve had some lucky streaks in Las Vegas since I got here. The conference went well, I made some contacts, I met some people. He glanced at the bed before turning back to the computer screen and the keyboard. You could say I won.

Business in my field is good. I don’t have to worry about money.

For a moment he gazed out the open window at the lights of the city. He liked to keep the windows open with the curtains drawn back in case other visitors, in other hotels, happened to glance out, Rear Window style, in his direction. They would see him disporting himself in the company of others. Let them envy him. Let them envy his good looks, his luck.

You asked me if I’m vain. And I sure am. I don’t think about my looks too much, anyhow not much more than most people do, but it gets me results. When I get older, I’ll have to drop it. My appearance will start to fail. But by then I’ll be in love. I’m too busy for love right now. But by then, in the future, I won’t care how pretty anybody is, and they won’t care about my looks either, and we’ll be fine.

The point is, I love my life. So do you. I was pleased and honored to meet you.

Thanks for the conversation.

He signed the e-mail “Prince Albert.”

A week later, back in Minneapolis, he received a reply, three words. Don’t kid yourself.

The e-mail note was unsigned.

The Stone Arch Bridge crosses the Mississippi River between Father Hennepin Bluffs Park on the east bank and Mill Ruins Park on the west in the heart of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This bridge, which once supported railroad traffic in and out of the city, has twenty-one stone arch spans. Wikipedia tells us that James J. Hill, the Empire Builder, had the bridge constructed in 1883, and in the early 1990s it was converted to a pedestrian-and-bicycle bridge.

On warm days in late spring or summer, the bridge serves as a kind of promenade, or gallery, for pedestrians, and on such days you are likely to see both visitors and city dwellers walking across it with no particular destination in view. That obese man, for example, with rainbow suspenders, who is wearing a frown and a faraway look, and whose wife — they both have wedding rings — has her hand through his arm for support, might he be a doctor, a pediatrician? Close behind him is a woman mumbling to herself, and you might imagine that she’s translating a poem in her head out of an Eastern European language into English. And on this side, speeding past you, are two people on bicycles, one of them looking vaguely Asian-American, the other, his girlfriend or wife (they pass by too quickly for the idle pedestrian to spot any evidence that they are married) smiling and happily shouting instructions in his direction.

Near Wilde Roast Café, a gay-themed restaurant on St. Anthony Main, you bump into a man who is texting on his iPhone, and you excuse yourself and continue on your way.

The day is beautiful: royal-blue skies, a light breeze, temperature in the high sixties, the sort of day that Sinclair Lewis, who once lived here, would mark in his journal as “p.d.”—that is, a perfect day. These people are gathered here like the Sunday strollers in Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, where the beautiful laziness, the indolence of those out for a breath of air, offers itself as a glimpse of Paradise. Delmore Schwartz, obsessed with that painting, wrote these lines in his poem “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine”:

The sunlight, the soaring trees and the Seine

Are as a great net in which Seurat seeks to seize and hold

All living being in a parade and promenade of mild, calm happiness:

The river, quivering, silver blue under the light’s variety

Is almost motionless.