There's Something I Want You to Do

by Charles Baxter

  “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 hallucinations?”

  “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.

  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 unsubstantiated generalizations 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 coll
ect 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 pronouncements, 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 simultaneously, 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.

  The gist of their talk was that Donna’s parents wanted to meet with Elijah—just with him, and no one else. They had made this request to their daughter, and she had passed it on to Rafe, who had passed it on to his mother. Now, here it was. Why hadn’t they called him? At the office? He would have returned their call! Well, they just hadn’t. Nor had they explained their rationale, or what the conversation would be about.

  They wanted him to visit them late Sunday afternoon. This Sunday. In three days. Around five p.m. Given the Minnesota late autumn, the skies would be darkening by then. They lived in Delano, a semirural town west of Minneapolis. They were looking forward to talking to him, Susan said. They also planned, she told him, to give him some Christmas cookies, though it was still November.

  When the doctor agreed, Rafe said he would text Donna, who would then tell her parents that his father would be coming. The most simple encounters could be made complicated with just a bit of effort. Rafe gave his father the address of Donna’s parents, out in Delano.

  —

  That Sunday, the doctor pulled into their driveway with the aid of his car’s GPS system. The family name, Lundgren, was attached with red metal letters to the driveway’s mailbox. From the outside, the house itself projected an eerie normality, a rigidly resolute cheerfulness. A two-story colonial, it seemed to be projecting tremendous quantities of light from each window, as if every lamp and overhead fixture had been turned on to counter some terrible visitation, which was himself. The light was not just incandescent but somehow inflammatory, as if the walls and knickknacks were giving off a fiery plume that extended out onto the lawn, with its flecks of snow. The doctor shook his head to free himself from drowsiness and then groaned as he turned off the car’s engine, opened the door, and heaved himself out, shaking off potato chip particles from his overcoat.

  When he pressed the doorbell, he heard from inside the house a chime that sounded like the first few notes of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” When the door opened, he saw Donna’s parents, both approximately his own age, somberly smiling in greeting as they ushered him in. Donna’s mother held a plate of cookies, which she transferred to one hand as she waved him inside and shouted her greetings. Elijah was used to talking to parents about their children in his medical practice. He knew all the parental styles. Although he felt he was ready for any variety of family drama, he had forgotten how country people like the Lundgrens hooted in loud welcome for social occasions even when they weren’t glad to see you. Noisy hospitality of this kind could be cold and heartless. The whole point was to avoid any trace of intimacy. In the Midwest, you just had to get used to it.

  Mrs. Lundgren, neither pretty nor beautiful but solid, wore her brown hair in a moderately ostentatious beehive. Her eyes looked out from behind glasses attached to a tiny chain around her neck. Her shapeless skirt, a dull gray, gave the impression of formality heightened by the cameo brooch she wore on her blouse. She reminded the doctor of a loan officer he had once known at a bank, a no-nonsense woman whose face, after much experience of the world and probably much practice, radiated aggressive neutrality, seasoned with a bit of distaste for humanity.

  Mr. Lundgren wore jeans and a sweater. His eyes were the impossibly deep blue that had so frightened the Native Americans when they gazed for the first time at the conquistadors. He shook hands with the doctor with a machinelike pneumatic g
rip, which out here signified masculine force and solidarity. “Hello,” the host said, showing his teeth briefly, in what might have been a smile.

  Donna’s mother grinned at the doctor and directed him toward a living room chair planted in front of an audio speaker. Nearby was a side table with Ritz crackers topped with whipped cheese-colored goo. Each cracker had been placed carefully on a tiny paper napkin on which were printed minuscule blue flowers. A giant flat-screen TV, as large and solemn as an altar, held pride of place in front of the window, blocking the view. The TV’s screen was dark, but music from The Nutcracker suite poured out from the speakers, making it hard to hear anything else over the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The doctor thought he heard Mrs. Lundgren shout out her own name, Eleanor, over the music, and she gestured at her husband and instructed the doctor to call him Herb. “We’re Eleanor and Herb!” she said brightly, with an icy hostile smile. “Nice to meet you! Thanks for coming!” Without a rising inflection, she asked, “Can we get you a glass of water!” The doctor shook his head. He wanted whiskey and crusty bread, but you wouldn’t get that in this household even if you begged for it on your knees.

  He felt another moment of sleepiness.

  Across the room, Herb Lundgren, slumped majestically in his La-Z-Boy chair, stared at the doctor impolitely. There was a clear division of labor in this marriage: talking would be Mrs. Lundgren’s job, while her husband examined the guest for visual clues.

  “I wonder,” Elijah said, “if you could turn the music down? I can’t quite hear you.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Lundgren said, advancing toward the audio system and fiddling with the dial. The sound dropped to a nearly inaudible hush, like an orchestra of mice playing inside the walls.

  Mrs. Lundgren remarked on the weather, how cold it was getting. Her church, she said, worried about the homeless at this time of year. While she talked, the doctor surveyed the opposite wall above the sofa, where the Lundgrens had hung a cross-stitched Last Supper. Looking closer, the doctor suspected that the piece had been made from a mail-order hobby kit. Hours had been spent putting it together, in mad devotion. The mouse orchestra inside the walls continued to play Tchaikovsky while the doctor nodded in agreement to something Mrs. Lundgren had said that he actually hadn’t quite heard. Over in the corner, on a bookshelf, was the Oxford English Dictionary. What was that doing here? Talk about clues: you must never underestimate your opponent. Someone here did a lot of reading.