Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [102]
“Who?”
“All the young men. Well, there aren’t many. A few. Every so often. They come and sleep here with her and then in the morning they come out for breakfast with me and then they go away. We sit and talk. They’re usually very pleasant. Men are, in the morning. They should be. She’s a beautiful girl.”
“Yes, she is.”
“But there’s no future in her, you know,” the old woman said. “Sure you don’t want a grapefruit? You should eat something.”
“No, thank you. What do you mean, ‘no future’?”
“Well, the young men usually understand that.” The old woman looked at the television set, scowled, and shifted her eyes to the window. She rubbed her hands together. “You can’t invest in her. You can’t do that at all. She won’t let you. I know. I know how she thinks.”
“We have women like that in my country,” Anders said. “They are—”
“Oh no you don’t,” the old woman said. “Sooner or later they want to get married, don’t they?”
“I suppose most of them.”
She glanced out the window toward the Detroit River and the city of Windsor on the opposite shore. Just when he thought that she had forgotten all about him, he felt her hand, dry as a winter leaf, taking hold of his own. Another siren went by outside. He felt a weight descending in his stomach. The touch of the old woman’s hand made him feel worse than before, and he stood up quickly, looking around the room as if there were some object nearby he had to pick up and take away immediately. Her hand dropped away from his.
“No plans,” she said. “Didn’t she tell you?” the old woman asked. “It’s what she believes.” She shrugged. “It makes her happy.”
“I am not sure I understand.”
The old woman lifted her right hand and made a dismissive wave in his direction. She pursed her mouth; he knew she had stopped speaking to him. He called a cab, and in half an hour he was back in his hotel room. In the shower he realized that he had forgotten to write down her address or phone number.
He felt itchy: he went out running, returned to his room, and took another shower. He did thirty push-ups and jogged in place. He groaned and shouted, knowing that no one would hear. How would he explain this to anyone? He was feeling passionate puzzlement. He went down to the hotel’s dining room for lunch and ordered Dover sole and white wine but found himself unable to eat much of anything. He stared at his plate and at the other men and women consuming their meals calmly, and he was suddenly filled with wonder at ordinary life.
He couldn’t stand to be by himself, and after lunch he had the doorman hail a cab. He gave the cabdriver a fifty and asked him to drive him around the city until all the money was used up.
“You want to see the nice parts?” the cabbie asked.
“No.”
“What is it you want to see then?”
“The city.”
“You tryin’ to score, man? That it?”
Anders didn’t know what he meant. He was certain that no sport was intended. He decided to play it safe. “No,” he said.
The cabdriver shook his head and whistled. They drove east and then south; Anders watched the water-ball compass stuck to the front window. Along Jefferson Avenue they went past the shells of apartment buildings, and then, heading north, they passed block after block of vacated or boarded-up properties. One old building with Doric columns was draped with a banner.
PROGRESS! THE OLD MUST MAKE WAY
FOR THE NEW
Acme Wrecking Company
The banner was worn and tattered. Anders noticed broken beer bottles, sharp brown glass, on sidewalks and vacant lots, and the glass, in the sun, seemed perversely beautiful. Men were sleeping on sidewalks and in front stairwells; one man, wearing a hat, urinated against the corner of a burned-out building. He saw other men—there were very few women out here in the light of day—in groups gazing at him with cold slow deadly expressions. In his state of mind, he understood it all; he identified with it. All of it, the ruins and the remnants, made perfect sense.
At six o’clock she picked him up and took him to a Greek restaurant. All the