Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [109]
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