Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [108]
“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 morning 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