There's Something I Want You to Do

by Charles Baxter

  “You threw away your cell phone. Anyway, I can’t predict what you will or won’t do. I don’t know you.”

  “My cell phone was old. It was broken. I hated it. People kept calling me and asking me for things.”

  “Nevertheless,” Benny said.

  She twisted her head, a subtle hint of mockery in the movement. “So. It seems that the Samaritan is not going to go away. What do you do, Emergency Guy? I mean, Benny?”

  “I’m an architect.”

  “An architect? Prove it.” She gave him a teasing expression.

  “Okay, look over there.” He pointed at the art museum on the other side of the river. “That’s the Weisman Art Museum. Frank Gehry designed it. He’s famous. The exterior, all those bumps and bulges, are stainless-steel sheets fabricated in Kansas City, and where the museum faces the river, the design’s supposed to look like a waterfall and a fish, but personally I don’t think it does. I could tell you more, but that’s enough.”

  “All right,” she said. “You know who Frank Gehry is. Guess what? So do I. Anyway, I’ll go home now.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Yes, I will.” He waited. “Otherwise you might come back here.”

  “Opportunist.” She seemed to be estimating him, like an insurance adjuster. “If you try anything, I’ll scream like a banshee. I can do that. So nothing weird, okay?”

  “You’re talking to me about weird?” he asked.

  After walking off the bridge, they turned south into a Somali neighborhood where men sat in erect postures at the sidewalk cafés animatedly debating, not even glancing at the two white people as they went by. A wonderful aroma seemed to be suspended in the unbreathing air, a musky cloud of coffee and chocolate and vanilla apparently imported from sub-Saharan Africa and deposited here in Minneapolis, and the atmosphere made Benny feel both provincial and ready for an adventure. The woman—he couldn’t think of her as Desdemona, a joke name—had a surprisingly long and rapid stride, diving ahead of him. They turned off on a poorly lit side street into a neighborhood near a small Lutheran college, where she stopped in front of a nondescript apartment building on whose third floor, she claimed, she lived. Standing fixedly out on the sidewalk, Benny felt a shock of attraction for her, an eerie electrical charge. The attraction alarmed him. For what possible reason would she interest him? No prior cause ever explained his rogue desires, but this one maybe had to do with grieving a person who was still alive. He didn’t want to leave her, that was all, and he had to think of what to say immediately.

  “So, Desdemona, what do you do?” he asked.

  “So, okay, it isn’t Desdemona, it’s Sarah, and I don’t do anything important.” She shrugged. He saw that her fingernails had been gnawed at. “I merely take up space. I’m one of those little underemployed people that you hear about. You know, one of those my-noot service persons. I have many degrees. I work in a day-care center where I look after the munchkins and I play the piano.”

  “Well, that’s something. What’s your last name?”

  “Lemming. Kinda ironic, isn’t it? What’s yours?”

  “Takemitsu.” He braced himself for the moment when she’d say that he didn’t look Japanese. Instead, she scanned his face for a quality she apparently required in a man. A moment later she slipped sideways away from close proximity to him.

  “I also do stand-up comedy now and then,” she said. She waited for him to laugh, and he laughed. “See? I made you crack up. That’s my line. Really, Benny…that is your name, right? Benny?” He nodded. “You didn’t really think I was going to off myself tonight, did you? Like someone in a movie?” Then she spun around, quickly touching him. “The mysteriously self-destructive and glamorous-but-funny lady on the edge of the bridge and of existence itself? And you, the brave macho rescuer? That’s such a male fantasy, isn’t it? Wow, for banal. Hey, are you one of those comic-book heroes? One of the Fantastic Four? Which one are you? Do I get to guess?” Without waiting for an answer, she went into her building, saying neither thank you nor goodbye.

  When Benny returned to his apartment, the phone was ringing. “This ayatollah walks into a bar,” the caller began. It was her. “He’s got the ayatollah headdress, ayatollah beard, and ayatollah white robe, the little ayatollah sandals on his little ayatollah feet. And the bartender says, ‘Whattya have?’ The ayatollah says, ‘Let’s not rush things. First of all, which way is east?’ ”

  The joke went on for a long time, and he laughed politely at its punch line. When she had finished it and had hung up, he stood there feeling a slow trickle of infatuation, like a poison or its antidote, dripping down onto his heart.

  The next day, he drove by her building and dropped off a note inside her mailbox in the building’s vestibule. The note asked, May I see you? Somehow she found out where he lived, because two days later he received a mailed letter with her return address. Inside the envelope she’d folded a single sheet of paper on which she had written Yes. At the bottom of the letter the signature read Madeline Elster. Who was Madeline Elster? One of her aliases? Desdemona, Madeline Elster—circus names. Using Internet sources, he had managed to check her out: she was Sarah Lemming, exactly as she’d claimed, and she worked at the Cedar-Riverside Little Folks Center. That evening after drinking a double Scotch, he called his girlfriend, Reena, and told her he was sorry but their thing, their arrangement, was over, and they were through as a couple. Gazing at the minute hand of his watch, he patiently listened to her inevitable sobbing questions. It’s just not working, he said. Not working, as if they were an unemployed couple. He made his voice as vacuous as possible while she wept. You just had to wade through the tears to get to the opposing shore.

  Then he called Sarah back, and they arranged to have lunch at a Mexican restaurant. On the appointed day, eating tacos, she spoke pleasantly and impersonally about her former ambitions as a musician; someday, she said, she would play Ravel and Bach for him, so that he could witness her at her best. She hadn’t been able to support herself as a rehearsal pianist or as an accompanist, and she’d been stymied by her expectations of what had been promised and what actually happened. A performance degree from a midwestern university: What good was that? Where was the future in it? There had been no future.

  Even while talking, she had a slight stoop, as if she were ducking under a door frame. She bent slightly to camouflage her attractiveness. Her posture was like an apology of sorts for her prettiness, not the demure kind that shy women tended to project, but another sort—impudent, but infected by reticence.

  Neither of them mentioned how they had met. The subject no longer qualified as speakable. That temporarily desperate woman had been replaced by this one in front of him, eating tacos. This daytime Sarah conversed and was sensible about herself. But the nighttime one pestered his waking dreams. She leaned out over the river, and he saw himself reaching for her arm.

  In one of his dreams, she and Benny were handcuffed to each other.

  Eventually she agreed to have dinner with him, and in the weeks that followed they had other dinners, other walks. He would escort her back to her building, but she wouldn’t invite him in. She talked about children and music—especially the music of Bach, comparing it to intricate God-given architecture. When nervous, she grew stylishly knowing and flippant, and nightfall intensified the effect of a nocturnal joker self emerging from the rubble of daytime. She often gave the appearance of thinking about something she would not say. On the evening when she first wore eyeliner for him, she told him that she had grown up in Connecticut horse country, had gone to college here in Minnesota and had stayed around, had been married for a few months before she and her husband had ended it amicably. She had two sisters, both very rich. One worked in an investment bank; the other had married well. Her sisters both had kids—two apiece, along with the private schools, the ballet lessons, the soccer, French and Mandarin immersion. She herself was the black sheep of the family, the
artiste. She spoke of her personal history as if it were a dull annoyance.

  —

  Now, many years later, gazing at Julian and seeing a remnant of Sarah’s face in the boy’s characteristic skeptical expression, Benny imagines those days—including the trip to the mall and a little gag they played on a clerk—as a charade of sorts in which he was being invited to try out different roles, shedding one after another as Sarah herself did, until he might find one that suited him, although what he didn’t understand at the time (as he does now, of course) is that what he mistook for a charade and a pastime, a stunt, a form of harmless amateur wickedness, was for her a tether that tied her to the Earth.

  —

  She called him a week later on a Wednesday night. “I want to play something for you,” she said. “I’ve been practicing and practicing. I’ll play it on my very own piano.” For comic effect she pronounced it “pye-ano.” She had never invited him into her apartment, so he felt that his patience might be rewarded at last, along with his curiosity.

  After being buzzed upstairs, he saw that her door was already open, and she stood inside with her hand on her hip. She wore jeans and a pink T-shirt and was barefoot. The trace of some perfume shielded her lightly but protectively. Her living room contained a sofa and chair and coffee table in the big-box Swedish contemporary style of assemble-it-yourself furniture. Near poverty now had a kind of opaque, cool cleanliness and an odor of sanctimony. You didn’t have to sit down in cast-off wing chairs smelling of marijuana and mildew anymore, but the sparse impersonality of her living room had the quality of an emergency, as if no one had bothered to think about what should be located here or had the patience or inclination to arrange it. A few books were out. The human presence had been nearly eradicated from the room except for the scratched-up spinet piano in the corner. Other than that, the room had a claustrophobic cleanliness. Everything here seemed temporary.

  “So,” Benny said. “A concert? What are we privileged to hear?”

  She had disappeared into the kitchen and came back out with a cold beer, which she handed to him. He could tell that she had an agenda that included whatever she was about to play.

  “So,” she said. “I’ve been working on this piece. It’s called ‘Ondine’ and it’s from this composer’s, Ravel’s, group of pieces Gaspard de la Nuit. There’s a story behind it. Do you want to hear the story?” Benny nodded, although he already knew the story. He had been a keyboard musician, and, though he’d never been capable of playing this particular piece, he knew about it. “So: Ondine is a water sprite. She’s very pale and intriguing. Seductive, too. She appears to the poet and she offers him a ring—a ring! how about that?—and she also offers him the kingdom of the waters although, duh, he can’t live there because he doesn’t have gills. Anyway, the poet tells her that he loves a mortal woman, so Ondine gets upset and jealous and angry, and she sulks. So like a woman, right? After she’s finished crying, she laughs and disappears in a shower of droplets on the windowpane. The point is, he can’t have her.”

  Benny nodded and took a swig of the beer.

  Sarah sat down at the piano and put both of her bare feet on the pedals. She started to play. The piece was in seven sharps, C-sharp major, and it began softly, starting with a rumbling swift shower of thirty-second notes. Around the third bar, Ondine comes out, sweet and expressive, calling him to her. Sarah’s hands sped over the keys as she followed the score, and Benny got up from the sofa and went over to where she sat to turn the page for her.

  She stopped playing. “What? You can read music?” He nodded. She started up again, unhappily scowling. The piece was showy and fantastically difficult, and from her approximations he could tell that she was a very good but not a first-rate pianist who was just slopping her way through it, energized by the former musical ambitions she wished to put on display. Also, he saw that she wanted to show off. She made some clumsy mistakes but bushwhacked to the end, Benny standing beside her, turning the pages.

  When she finished, he put down his beer and clapped. “Jeez,” he said. “That was great. You’re terrific.”

  “You liked it?” she asked shyly. She wouldn’t smile. She waited, looking straight ahead at the last page of the score.

  “I loved it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not flattering me?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said. White lies didn’t cost you much in the short term.

  “I made a lot of mistakes. When did you ever play the piano?” she asked.

  “Junior high. High school. College. I was all right. I was in a few bands. But I couldn’t play like that.”

  “Benny,” she said. His hand rested on her shoulder. He didn’t quite know how it had gotten there. “Benny,” she repeated. “Benjamin. Here’s the deal. I know you want me, and I know you’ve been patient with me, and I want you to know that I have feelings for you, too.”

  “It’s more than that,” he said. “I—”

  “Don’t say it,” she interrupted. “You can tell me later if you want to. But first I have to tell you something. You would like to make love to me, I know, and I would like that too. It would be good to have you in my bed, and not just as an occasional visitor. But there are two conditions.”

  —

  Whenever he told this story, as he did to Elijah one night several weeks later, Benny would stop here. Some stories, he felt, you should never repeat. If you do tell them, a trust is violated. But this story had become so bacterial that he had to pass its contagion on to others who might help him bear it. He’d become incapable of carrying it around alone. Besides, Elijah was a doctor.

  “So?” Elijah asked. “What were the conditions she gave you?” Benny squirmed. “Come on, Benny, out with it. I’ve heard everything by now. Confess.”

  “Well, they weren’t that big,” Benny said.

  “Out with it.”

  “I couldn’t kiss her,” Benny admitted. “That was the first condition. We could make love, but I couldn’t ever kiss her on the lips. Anywhere else, fine. On the lips, no. She said she was phobic about it. She couldn’t help it, she said.”

  “And did you agree to this?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes, but I gave her a condition of my own.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because women shouldn’t be the only ones to set the conditions. Men should be able to set conditions, too. You can’t just cave in on everything if you’re negotiating. I agree with feminism but I need a place to stand. Anyway, I told her I wanted her to color her hair. I told her that I wanted her hair to be red. I was forceful on the subject.”

  “You did? That’s messed up. What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Sure.’ ”

  “Did she ask you why? Did you show her that red hair of yours from the sidewalk? I certainly hope not. Please tell me you didn’t do that. What was the other condition?”

  “She wanted me to design a house she could be happy in. Just a sketch would do. I told her I would try.”

  “A house? So you were agreeable to all this? What happened then?”

  “We made love, sort of. Until then I had never made love without starting with the kisses. I mean, a person can do it. You can have sex without kissing on the lips. Ever seen porn?” Elijah gravely nodded. “They don’t kiss much in porn, do they? Well, this was like that.”

  “Yeah, but how did it feel?”

  “I don’t know. Beautiful. Lonely. Sweet. Distant. Remote. It was what I wanted in a way I didn’t want it. God, I can’t say. Like she was guarding her soul or something.”

  “I really hate to tell you this, Benny, but I think the, uh, really obvious thing is that she doesn’t love you. She’d like to, she really would, and she’s been working at it, but she can’t. The nonkissing is the big clue. If I were you, I’d get out now. Finita la commedia is my advice. Oh, and did she color her hair?”

  “Yeah,” Benny said. “It’s beautiful. Li
sten: I think she might love me someday, only she can’t say so. And there’s this one other thing.”

  “Another thing. I can’t stand it. Which is?”

  “She’s gotten herself a stand-up gig. Did I mention this already? She’s going to be at the Longfellow Comedy Club a few weeks from now. Two nights, Friday and Saturday. I’ve never heard her do stand-up. She says she’s done it for years but not lately. She’s been working on it.”

  “You better watch out. She’s going to get up onstage and tell everybody you have a small dick, and they’ll all laugh.”

  “No, she won’t. First of all, I don’t have that, and second of all, she wouldn’t.”

  “Wait and see.”

  “Maybe you should come out and witness it. Would you do that?”

  “Depends. I might drop by if I don’t have rounds. Or child care. Or obligations to Susan. Or house repair. I’m a busy fellow.” He sat up. “After all, I am a married man. And I am a physician. I am a citizen. I have multiple responsibilities.” Elijah’s cell phone rang as if on cue. He checked the screen but did not answer it.

  “Then why are you here?” Benny waved his hand to indicate the coffee shop where they both sat. “If you’re so busy, why are you here?”

  “Have you slept with her again?” Elijah asked. “Have you two become lovers?” He waited. “I don’t mean to pry.” He smiled at his own hypocrisy.

  “Yes,” Benny said. “Yes, we have slept together again. And no, we have not become lovers. Not really.” He bunched up a paper napkin and threw it in the wastebasket. “At least she hasn’t. Because I told her that I was falling in love with her. I got out on a limb.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Well, I can’t say the same.’ ”

  —

  Sometimes when Benny sat on the barren furniture in Sarah’s apartment, he could hear her in the bathroom, the door closed, practicing her comedy routine. She kept her voice down to a rushed murmuring followed by exclamations. She practiced her stage laugh, a prompt to the audience. When she eventually came out to the living room, he volunteered to listen to her monologue, but she always said no, she had to keep it to herself for a while.