He felt that he must get home to Sweden quickly, before he became a very different person, unrecognizable even to himself.
At the fifth floor the doors opened and he stepped out. Close to the elevators was a nurses’ station, and beyond it a long hallway leading to an alcove. He walked down this hallway, turned the corner, and heard small squalling sounds ahead. At the same time, he saw the windows in the hallway and understood that he had wandered onto the maternity floor. He made his way to the viewing window and looked inside. He counted twenty-five newborns, each one in its own clear plastic crib. He stared down at the babies, hearing, through the glass, the cries of those who were awake.
He was about to turn around and go back to his hotel when one of the nurses saw him. She raised her eyebrows quizzically and spread her hands over the children. He shook his head to indicate no. Still she persisted. She pointed to a baby with white skin and a head of already-blond hair. He shook his head no once again. He would need to get back to the hotel, call his bank in Sweden, get money for the return trip. He touched his pants pocket and found that the wallet was still there. What had they taken? The nurse, smiling, nodded as if she understood, and motioned toward the newborns with darker skin, the Hispanics and light-skinned blacks and all the others, babies of a kind he never saw in Sweden.
Well, he thought, why not? Now that they had done this to him.
His right arm rose. He pointed at a baby whose skin was the color of clay, the color of polished bronze. Now the nurse was wheeling the baby he had pointed to closer to the window. When it was directly in front of him, she left it there, returning to the back of the nursery. Standing on the other side of the glass, staring down at the sleeping infant, he tapped on the panel twice and waved, as he thought fathers should. The baby did not awaken. Anders put his hand in his pocket, then pressed his forehead against the glass of the window and recovered himself. He stood for what seemed to him a long time, before taking the elevator down to the ground floor and stepping out onto the front sidewalk, and to the air, which smelled as it always had, of powerful combustible materials and their traces, fire and ash.
Kiss Away
THE HOUSE had an upstairs sleeping porch, and she first saw the young man from up there, limping through the alley and carrying a torn orange-and-yellow Chinese kite. He had a dog with him, and both the dog and the man had an air of scruffy unseriousness. From the look of it, no project these two got involved with could last longer than ten minutes. That was the first thing she liked about them.
Midmorning, midweek, midsummer: even teenagers were working, and in this flat July heat no one with any sense was trying to fly kites. No one but a fool would fly a kite in this weather.
The young man threw the ball of string and the ripped cloth into the alley’s trash bin while the dog watched him. Then the dog sat down and with an expression of pained concentration scratched violently behind its ear. It looked around for something else to be interested in, barked at a cat on a window ledge, then gave up the effort and scratched its ear again.
From the upstairs sleeping porch, the young man looked exactly like the fool in the tarot pack—shaggy and loose-limbed, a songster at the edge of cliffs—and the dog was the image of the fool’s dog, a frisky yellow mutt. Dogs tended to like fools. They had an affinity. Fools always gave dogs plenty to do. Considering this, the woman near the window felt her heart pound twice. Her heart was precise. It was like a doorbell.
She was unemployed. She had been out of college for a year, hadn’t been able to find a job she could tolerate for more than a few days, and with the last of her savings had rented the second floor of this house in Minneapolis, which included an old-fashioned sleeping porch facing east. She slept out here, and then in the mornings she sat in a hard-backed chair reading books from the library, drinking coffee, and listening to classical music on the public radio station. Right now they were playing the Goyescas of Enrique Granados. She was running out of money and trying to stay calm about it, and the music helped her. The music seemed to say that she could sit like this all morning, and no one would punish her. It was very Spanish.
She put on her shoes and threw her keys into the pocket of her jeans. She raised the slatted blinds. “Hey!” she yelled down into the alley.
“Hey, yourself,” the young man yelled back. He smiled at her and squinted. Apparently he couldn’t see her clearly. That was the second thing she liked about him.
“You can’t throw that kite in there,” she said. “That Dumpster’s only for people who live in this building.” She shaded her eyes against the sun to see him better. The guy’s dog was now standing and wagging its tail.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it out,” and when she told him not to and that she’d be down in a second and he should just wait there, she knew he would do what she asked. What she hadn’t expected was that he would smile enormously at her and, when she appeared, give her a hug—they were strangers after all—right out of the blue. She pushed him away but could not manage to get angry at him. Then she felt the dog’s tongue slurping on her fingers, as if she’d spilled sauce on them and they needed some cleaning.
He offered to buy her coffee, and he explained himself as they walked. He had once had good prospects, he said, and a future about which he could boast. He had been accepted into medical school eighteen months ago but had come down with a combination of mononucleosis and bacterial pneumonia, and after recuperating, he had lost all his interest in great plans. The two illnesses—one virus and one bacteria—had taken the starch out of him, he said. He actually used expressions like that. He had a handsome face when you saw him up close, but as soon as you walked a few feet away something went wrong with his appearance; it degenerated somehow.
His name was Walton Tyner Ross, but he liked to be called Glaze because of his taste for doughnuts and his habitual faraway expression. She didn’t think someone whose nickname was Glaze was ever going to become a successful practitioner of medicine, but in a certain light in the morning he was the finest thing she had seen in some time, especially when viewed from a few inches away, as they walked down Hennepin Avenue for breakfast.
Stopping under a tree that gave them both a moment of shade, he told her that if she wanted him to, he would show up regularly in the morning from now on. He needed motivation. Maybe she did, too. They would project themselves into the world, he said. She agreed, and on the next few mornings he appeared in the alley with his dog, Einstein, a few feet behind him. He called up to her, and the dog barked in chorus. She didn’t think it was very gallant, his yelling up at her like that, but she had had her phone disconnected, and his passion for her company pleased and moved her.
They would walk down Hennepin Avenue past what he called the Church of the Holy Oil Can—because of its unbecoming disproportionate spire—to one of several greasy smoky restaurants with plate-glass front windows and red-and-white-checkered café curtains and front counters with stools. They always sat at the stools because Walton liked to watch the grill. The first time he bought Jodie a breakfast of scrambled eggs and a biscuit and orange juice. As the breakfast went on, he became more assertive. Outside, Einstein sat near a lamppost and watched the passing pedestrians.
Walton Tyner Ross—looking very much like a fool as he spilled his breakfast on his shirt—was a Roman candle of theories and ideas. Jodie admired his idea that unemployment was like a virus. This virus was spreading and was contagious. The middle class was developing a positive taste for sloth. One person’s unemployment could infect anyone else. “Take you,” he said. “Take us.” He wolfed down his toast slathered with jam. “We shouldn’t feel guilty over not working. It’s like a flu we’ve both got. We’re infected with indifference. We didn’t ask to get it. We inhaled it, or someone sneezed it on us.”
“I don’t know,” she said. In front of her, the fry cook, a skinny African-American kid with half-steamed glasses, was sweating and wiping his brow on his shirtsleeve. The restaurant had the smell of mor
ning ambition and resolution: coffee and cigarette smoke and maple syrup and cheap aftershave and hair spray. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But maybe we’re both just kind of lazy. My sister says I’m lazy. I think it’s more complicated than that. I once had plans, too,” Jodie said, indicating with a flick of her wrist the small importance of these plans.
“Like what? What sort of plans?”
She was watching the fry cook and could hardly remember. “Oh,” she said. “What I wanted was an office job. Keeping accounts and books. Something modest, a job that would leave the rest of my life alone and not eat up my resources.” She waited a moment and touched her cheek with her finger. “In those days—I mean, a few months ago—my big project was love. I always wanted big love. Like that game, Careers, where you decide what you want out of life? I wanted a small job and huge love, like a big event. An event so big you couldn’t say when it would ever stop.”
He nodded. “But so far all the love you’ve gotten has been small.”
She looked at him and shrugged. “Maybe it’s the times. Maybe I’m not pretty enough.”
He leaned back and grinned at her to dispute this.
“No, I mean it,” she said. “I can say all this to you because we don’t know each other. Anyway, I was once almost engaged. The guy was nice, and I guess he meant well, and my parents liked him. They didn’t mind that he was kind of ragged, but almost as soon as he became serious about me, he was taking everything for granted. It’s hard to explain,” she said, pushing her scrambled eggs around on the plate and eyeing the ketchup bottle. “It wasn’t his fault, exactly. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t play me.” She gave up and poured some ketchup on her eggs. “You don’t have to play me all the time, but if you’re going to get married, you should be played sometimes. You should play him, he should play you. With him, there was no tune coming out of me. Just prose. You know, Walton,” she said suddenly, “you sometimes look like the fool illustration on the tarot pack. No offense. You just do.”
“Sure, I do,” he said, and when he turned, she could see that his ears were pierced, two crease incisions on each lobe. “Okay, look. Here’s what’s going to happen. You and me, we’re going to go out together in the morning and look for work. Then in the afternoon we’ll drive around, I don’t know, a treasure hunt, something that doesn’t cost anything. Then I don’t know what we’re going to do in the evening. You can decide that.” He explained that good fortune had put them together but that maybe they should at least try to fight the virus of sloth.
She noticed a fat balding man on Walton’s other side, with hideous yellow-green eyes, staring at her. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
The next day, he was there in the hot dusty alley with his morning paper and his dog and his limp, and she came down to him without his having to call up to her. She wasn’t totally presentable—she was wearing the same jeans as the day before, and a hand-me-down shirt from her sister—but she had put on a silver bracelet for him. As they walked to the restaurant he complimented her on her pleasant sexiness. He told her that in the moments when she had descended the back steps, his heart had been stirred. “Your heart. Yeah, right,” she said.
Walking with her toward the café, Einstein trotting behind them and snapping at flies, he said that today they would scan the want ads and would calculate their prospects. In the late morning they would go to his apartment—he had a phone—and make a few calls. They would be active and brisk and aggressive. They would pretend that adulthood—getting a job—made sense. Matching his stride, enjoying his optimism, Jodie felt a passing impulse to take Walton’s arm. He was gazing straight ahead, not glazed at all, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and she briefly admired his arms and the light on his skin.
In the restaurant, at the counter spotted with dried jam and brown gravy, where the waitress said, “Hiya, Glaze,” and poured him his coffee without being asked, Jodie felt a pleasant shiver of jealousy. So many people seemed to know and to like this unremarkable but handsome guy; he, or something about him, was infectious. The thought occurred to her that he might change her life. By the time her Belgian waffle arrived, Jodie had circled six want ads for temp secretaries with extensive computer experience. She knew and understood computers backward and forward and hated them all, but they were like family members and she could work with them if she had to. She didn’t really want the jobs—she wanted to sit on the sleeping porch with her feet up on the windowsill and listen to the piano music of Granados and watch things go by in the alley—but the atmosphere of early-morning ambition in the café was beginning to move her to action. She had even brought along a pen.
She felt a nudge in her ribs.
She turned to her left and saw sitting next to her the same fat balding man with horrible yellow-green eyes whom she had seen the day before. His breath smelled of gin and graham crackers. He was smiling at her unpleasantly. He was quite a package. “ ’Scuse me, miss,” he said. “Hate to bother you. I’m short bus fare. You got seventy-five cents?” His speech wore the clothes of an obscure untraceable Eastern European accent.
“Sure,” she said without thinking. She fished out three quarters from her pocket and gave the money to him. “Here.” She turned back to the want ads.
“Oboy,” he said, scooping it up. “Are you lucky.”
“Am I?” she asked.
“You got that right,” he said. He rose unsteadily and his yellow-green eyes leered at her, and for a moment Jodie thought that he might topple over, like a collapsed circus tent, covering her underneath his untucked shirt and soiled beltless trousers. “I,” he announced to the restaurant, although no one was paying any attention to him, “am the Genie of the Magic Lamp.”
No one even looked up.
The fat man bent down toward her. “Come back tomorrow,” he said in a ghoulish whisper. Now he smelled of fireplace ash. “You get your prize.” After a moment, he staggered out of the restaurant in a series of forward and sideways lurching motions, almost knocking over on the way a stainless-steel coatrack. The waitress behind the counter watched him leave with an expression on her face of irritated indifference made more explicit by her hand on her hip and a pink bubble almost the color of blood expanding from her lips. Bubble gum was shockingly effective at expressing contempt, Jodie thought. All the great waitresses chewed gum.
“Who was that?” she asked Walton.
He shook his head like a spring-loaded toy on the back shelf of a car. As usual, he smiled before answering. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some guy. Tad or Tadeusz or like that. He always asks people for money. Usually people ignore him. Nobody’s given him any money in a long time. Come on. We’re going to my place to make some phone calls. Then we’ll go on a treasure hunt.”
When they came out to the sidewalk, Einstein cried and shivered with happiness to see them, barking twice as a greeting. Walton loosened her from a bicycle stand to which she had been tethered, while Jodie breathed in the hot summer air and said, “By the way, Walton, where did you get that thing in your walk? Is it, like, arthritis?”
He turned and smiled at her. Her heart started thumping again. She couldn’t imagine why men didn’t smile more often than they did. It was the most effective action they knew how to take, but they were always amateurs at it. Jodie thought that maybe she hadn’t been smiled upon that much in her life. Perhaps that was it.
“Fascists,” Walton said, getting up. “My dog and I fought the fascists.”
Walton’s apartment was upstairs from an ice-cream parlor, and it smelled of fudge and heavy cream. Although the apartment had a small study area with bookshelves and a desk, and a bedroom where the bed was neatly made and where even the dog’s rubber squeak toys were kept in the corner, the effect of neatness was offset by a quality of gloom characteristic of places where sunlight had never penetrated. It was like Bluebeard’s castle. The only unobstructed windows faced north. All the other windows faced brick or stone walls so that no matter
what time of day it was, the lamps had to be kept on.
They went through the circled want ads, made some telephone calls, and arranged for two interviews, one for Jodie as a receptionist at a discount brokerage house and one for Walton as a shipping clerk.
Having finished that task, Jodie dropped herself onto one of the floor pillows and examined a photograph on the wall over the desk showing a young couple, both smiling. Wearing a flowery summer dress, the woman sat on a swing, and the man stood behind her, about to give her a push.
“That’s my father,” Walton said, standing behind Jodie.
“It’s your mother, too.”
“I know it. I know it’s my mother, too. But it’s mostly my father. He always liked to meet my girlfriends.”
“I’m not your girlfriend, Walton,” she said. “I hardly know you.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Want a beer?” he asked. “For lunch?”
He said unemployed people should always seek out castoffs and that was what they would do during the afternoon, but just as they were about to go out to his car, he fell asleep in his chair, his dog at his feet, her front paws crossed.
Jodie sat where she was for a moment, painfully resisting the impulse to go rummaging through Walton’s medicine cabinet and desk and dresser drawers. Instead, she brought a chair over next to him, sat down in it, and studied his face. Although it wasn’t an unusual face, at this distance certain features about it were certainly noteworthy. The line where the beard began on his cheek—he was cleanshaven—was so straight that it seemed to have been implanted there with a ruler. He had two tiny, almost microscopic pieces of dandruff in his eyebrows. His lashes were rather long, for a man. His lower lip was also rather full, but his upper lip was so small and flat at the bottom that you might not notice it unless you looked carefully. When he exhaled, his breath came in two puffs: It sounded like hurr hurr. He had a thin nose, and his left cheek appeared to have the remnant of an acne scar, a little blossom of reddening just beneath the skin like a truffle. With his head leaning forward, his hair in back fell halfway to his shoulders; these shoulders seemed to her to be about average width for a man of his height and weight. Even in sleep, his forehead was creased as if in thought. His hair had a wavy back-and-forth directionality, and it reminded Jodie of corrugated tin roofing. She found wavy hair mysterious; her own was quite straight. She reached up to touch his hair, being careful not to touch his scalp. That would wake him. She liked the feeling of his hair in her fingers. It was like managing a small profit after two quarters of losses.
Gryphon Page 25
