There's Something I Want You to Do

by Charles Baxter

  Jack nodded. Gwyneth rose and walked over to Amelia, taking her hand as if she were offering preliminary condolences. “Do you still want dinner?” she asked. The girl gave off a musky odor, and her face was slightly flushed and sleepy; naturally they’d had quick sex in Amelia’s absence, and now they’d be soft and cuddly and compliant.

  “Of course,” Amelia said. “Of course, of course. And let’s get drunk. Okay? Are you willing to do that?”

  They all laughed. Laughing, Jack asked, “So what’s Catherine worse with?”

  “She’s dying,” Amelia said. “She can’t breathe. That’s what she’s worse with.”

  —

  Although she loved him, of course, Amelia didn’t like her brother very much, mostly because of his employment situation. He worked for a Minneapolis real estate tycoon, Ben Schneiderman, a feral-looking man barely over five feet tall, whose customary expression—Amelia had met him once—was one of superpredatory avarice that mingled from time to time with his one other singular expression, massive sleepy indifference whenever matters of common human experience, those that were not for sale, were exposed to him. Schneiderman had run several newspapers into the ground, bought and sold a few major league teams, and built multiple granite-and-glass high-rises and shopping malls. His wife, Bitsy Christianson, was a patron of the arts. Their personal website (and editorial sounding board) was www.whatsittoyou.com. They owned eight or nine homes. Schneiderman had said many times that his motto was I never suffer. And neither should you. Jerry served as the primary consigliere for Schneiderman’s various enterprises and spent much of his life on a private jet, scurrying from one financial brush fire to another. He negotiated, threatened, and placated. Amelia’s brother was balding from all the stress and had taken to brushing his remaining hair, like tendrils or waterweeds, across the top of his scalp.

  And of course there was the other thing: Jerry supported his sister financially. Some of Schneiderman’s money trickled down to her. He had paid for Jack’s private schools in Switzerland and Italy. Her brother’s charity was Amelia’s safety net, along with alimony from Jack’s father, the man who had caused Amelia to swear off love forever. Well, no one’s hands were clean.

  But now, in the St. Mary’s Hospital’s ICU, while Yvonne sat next to the bed holding her daughter’s hand, Jerry leaned back against the window, and the blank stare on his face showed Amelia exactly how inwardly broken her brother actually was. She went up to him and hugged him and pecked him on the cheek and quickly did the same to Yvonne, whose cheeks were tear-streaked. In the bed, her niece seemed to be gasping for breath. Another man was in the room, introduced to Amelia as the child’s pediatrician, Dr. Elijah Jones, who wore rainbow suspenders with cartoon faces on them. Everybody thanked Amelia for coming.

  “Anyone would have done it,” she said. “You would have done it for me, if Jack, God forbid, got sick. Where’s Gerald?” Gerald was Catherine’s little brother.

  “He’s home with the babysitter,” Jerry said, with a sigh. “The poor kid. We’ve been neglecting him. Can’t be helped.”

  The pediatrician, after a few pleasantries, took Amelia down the hall and told her that her brother needed as much comfort and solace as she could give him, and that it was a good thing she was there. He pulled off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his Donald Duck necktie. He explained about the gradual impairment of Catherine’s muscular control. Amelia nodded. “You have to try to love everybody,” the doctor said, embarrassed but also in earnest, as he smiled sadly. “They all need it. All of them.” When Amelia asked about the prognosis, the doctor shrugged. “Your brother and sister-in-law have been holding on. They’re the ones I’m worried about. Your niece…well, we’re doing everything we can.”

  She left the hospital with her heart pounding. She had always desperately loved pediatricians.

  —

  So bleary with jet lag that she could not sleep or make any sense in conversation, and feeling that her brain was a haunted house in which bats flew randomly from one attic beam to another, Amelia found herself at two a.m. walking outside her hotel and then along the Mississippi River. Catherine had been a beautiful baby but had been sickly, and, like Sorovinct’s son, she had multiple afflictions that had prevented her from growing into adolescence. She had remained a child for her entire life. One time when Amelia had been visiting, Catherine had approached her with a calendar she’d made herself with a ruler and crayons. Two pages: the months of April and May. Her niece had listed a price for the calendar at the top: fifty cents for each page. Amelia had bought the two calendar months and taken them home and put them up on the refrigerator, only to discover that they were inaccurate and in some sense imaginary. Her niece had filled in the date boxes any way she wanted to. They were surrealist calendars, with dates that would never exist: Tuesday, May 14, 2011, for example. Wednesday, May 15. There would never be such days.

  Amelia had loved Catherine. Why should such a child suffer? Or any child? Sitting on a bench that looked out at the Stone Arch Bridge, Amelia thought of Ivan Karamazov speaking of the suffering of children and saying, “I don’t understand anything, and I don’t want to understand anything,” and as the river flowed past her on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico, she leaned forward and put her head in her hands before straightening up again to wipe her face free of the tears that had accumulated there. Lucky me with my son, Jack; lucky Jack with his girlfriend; lucky me, she thought, and if I could only share my luck with everybody, every living soul, I would.

  —

  She walked back to her hotel, trudged up to her room, undressed again, and put on her nightgown. Maybe this time she’d find a hour or two of sleep. Almost as soon as her head touched the pillow, she entered a dream of astounding specificity: she was sitting in a slightly dingy living room in Eastern Europe, lit with four candles in pewter candleholders. To her left was a small sturdy wooden dinner table set for two, and in front of her was a fireplace in which the coals appeared to be dying. The room had a smoky and unclean smell. A mongrel dog sat to her right and barked once at her, as if the dream could now commence. It was like a film director shouting, “Action!” Amelia knew, without knowing how she knew, that she had found herself in Imyar Sorovinct’s home and that the poet’s wife stood off to the side, just out of sight, preparing a meal. In front of her, sitting in another chair, was Imyar Sorovinct.

  The poet held himself up with straight soldierly posture, like a veteran in a wheelchair, but his face betrayed him: his left eye, lower than his right, looked at Amelia with patient compassion, while his right eye gazed on indifferently, as if two separate selves were housed within him. His uncombed hair rose wildly from the back of his scalp, and his large ears stuck out from his head like jug handles. He was a very homely man with no appealing features. His hands trembled as they rested on his thighs. The expression on Sorovinct’s face was one of scrupulous interest dimmed by time-distance and dream-distance, both of which were causing him to disintegrate.

  Amelia waited for him to speak. When he said nothing, she told him, in his native dialect, “My name is Amelia, and I…”

  “I know who you are,” Sorovinct told her in perfect English. “You’ve been trying to translate ‘Impossibility.’ ”

  “You do? Well. Then you know that I can’t get anywhere with that poem.”

  “And you never will,” Sorovinct told her. “You’ll never get that one right. You’ll just have to give it up.”

  “I hate to. I’ve spent so long on it.”

  “Too bad,” Sorovinct said, rubbing his chin. “Just forget it.” He picked up his book of poems from the floor and opened it in front of her. “There’s something I want you to do,” he said. He pointed at a page, where a poem entitled “Forbearance” appeared. “This is the poem you should be translating. It’s more compatible with you. And the tone? Much easier. You’ll manage this one in no time, believe me. Please just do what I ask. Also, and I don’t mean to be rude, but it would be better
if you did it right now.”

  The dog to Amelia’s right barked twice, as if saying, “Cut! Print!”

  She awoke and turned on the bedside light. It was four a.m. She went over to her suitcase, took out the volume of Sorovinct’s poetry, and turned to the poem he had pointed to. After sitting down at the hotel room desk, she reached for her pen and translated the poem line by line, each line almost instantly suggesting its equivalent in English. She wrote out the translation on the hotel’s stationery. The entire process took less than thirty minutes. The poem didn’t really sound Sorovinct’s characteristic note, but so what? She was under orders. When she returned to bed, the time was five minutes past five o’clock.

  She had never seen a dog in a dream before. And the dream hadn’t allowed her to say goodbye. Why was that?

  —

  At Catherine’s memorial service, midway through, Amelia rose to speak, with the hotel stationery in her hand. Looking out at her family, she said, “I want to read a poem by Imyar Sorovinct. I’ve just translated it. It’s called ‘Forbearance.’ I’m reading it in memory of Catherine.” She lowered her head to recite, her voice trembling. “Forbearance,” she began.

  Who is the child who stands beside this sea, wind-broken, wracked

  With spray that seems to paint his skin with heaven’s tears?

  And who might be this man but the father of the boy, standing there

  In wrinkled clothes, holding a halo above the child to keep him dry

  Out of sorrow, out of love, at this abrupt and stony seashore

  Visited in autumnal days? This is the child who clutches at his father

  Who intercedes for him, this quiet, vested man guarding the boy

  From rain and spray. This is the child who does not speak,

  Who never speaks, who must be blessed. The gulls are circling.

  There is something patient in the waves that they both imitate,

  And it is in the rain and spray that one feels the power

  Of forbearance, in this autumnal drizzle

  Soaking the parent and his child, loving what is damaged

  And wholly theirs, held like a precious jewel

  Tightly, tightly, in their hands together.

  At the cemetery, in broad daylight, when it was her turn, she stabbed the shovel that had been handed to her into the pile of dirt, and, forcing the blade downward, scooped out a measure of clay and sand and soil. She carried the shovelful to the grave site and dropped it over Catherine’s casket, on whose surface it made a hollow sound—like a groan from another world, mixed with the sound of her own grief. Then she seemed to wake up and heard the sounds of the others assembled there, and someone took her hand, and someone else took the shovel.

  —

  Twenty-four months later, Amelia found herself in Baltimore, sitting in a hotel lobby at a conference of translators. From the cocktail lounge came peals of alcoholic laughter, followed by jokes told in Polish, Russian, French. It was a habit of translators to speak in collage-expressions in which three or four languages were mixed together. Ostentatious drunken polyglots! As she waited for her friend to meet her—they had reservations at Baltimore’s best seafood restaurant—she spied, across the lobby, Robert McGonigal, whom she thought of as the Old Translator. He sat slumped there in an ill-fitting suit, focused on the distance, rubbing his forehead above his massively overgrown eyebrows. He wore the thickest eyeglasses Amelia had ever seen, with lenses that made his eyes seem tiny. McGonigal’s versions of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid were still being taught in colleges and universities everywhere, as were his translations of Pasternak, whom he had known personally. He had known everybody. But now he was sitting in a hotel lobby alone, wearing a facial expression that said, “I have seen it. You cannot surprise me.”

  She rose and walked over to where he was sitting. She wanted a blessing from the old man. Jack and Gwyneth were to be married in two months, in Italy. What would the future bring them? There had to be a blessing. McGonigal seemed to be gazing through space-time. Standing in front of him, Amelia introduced herself, and McGonigal nodded at her, as if she were a speck on eternity’s wall. Nervously she prattled on, and, as she heard more polyglot joking from the bar, she thought, Well, I might as well tell him. Somewhat against her better judgment, she related the story of her efforts to translate Sorovinct’s poem “Impossibility.”

  “I couldn’t do it,” she said, and McGonigal gave an imperceptible nod. “It just wouldn’t go. And then I went to bed, and Sorovinct appeared to me in a dream.” McGonigal, startled, suddenly began to look at her closely. “I was in his house,” she said. “His wife and dog were there too.”

  “What happened then?” McGonigal asked, his voice ancient and whispery.

  “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.

  PART TWO

  Lust

  “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 pronouncements. 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 confrontation—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.