Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [157]
“No, I didn’t,” Melinda said. “No. No love. But I did fuck him. I was lonely. I wanted to get naked with somebody.”
“How was it?”
“Okay.”
“Well, in the immortal words of the great Albert Einstein, ‘Don’t do that again.’ ”
She wondered if he would disappear. Everything about him suggested a vanishing act. He would not invite her to his house, wherever that was, nor would he ever give her an address. Like everyone else, though, he did have a cell phone, and he gave her the number to that. One night when he told her (she was lying in her bed, and he was lying in his bed, across town, and the phone call had gone on for over an hour), “I lived in your soul before you owned it,” she decided that he was one of those crazy people who gets by from day to day, but just barely—he was what he said he was, a failed borderline personality. She resolved to tell him that she would not see him anymore, under any circumstances, but then he invited her to dinner at a pricey downtown restaurant, so she located a babysitter both for the baby and for her father, and when Edward Augenblick arrived to pick her up, she felt ready for whatever was going to happen, accessorized for it, with a bracelet of beautiful tiny gold spikes.
But in the restaurant, he played the gentleman: he talked about landscape architecture, landscaping generally, so that the conversation took a lackadaisical turn toward the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, and she talked about her work and her scholarship, about Pérez Galdós, the polite chitchat of two people who possibly want to get to know each other, post-sex, and she wondered whether they would ever talk about anything that mattered to them, and whether all his talk about souls was just a bluff, a conversational shell game. She was about to ask him where he had grown up, where he had been educated, what his parents had been like, when he said, “Let’s take a walk. Let’s go down to the river.” The bill for the dinner came, a considerable sum, and he paid in cash, drawing out a mass of twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, a monotonous and mountainous pile of twenties, all the cash looking like novelty items, and Melinda thought, This man has no usable credit.
Across the Mississippi River near St. Anthony Falls stands the Stone Arch Bridge, built of limestone in the nineteenth century for the railroad traffic of lumber and grain and coal in and out of Minneapolis. After the railroad traffic ceased, the bridge had been converted to a tourist pedestrian walkway, and he took her hand in his as they strolled over the Mississippi River, looking at the abandoned mills on either side, and the rapids and the locks directly below.
“They don’t manufacture anything here anymore, you know,” he said to her, close to a whisper.
“The buildings are still here.”
“Yes,” he said, “but they’re ghosts. They’re all ghosts. They’re shells.”
“But look at the lights,” she said. “Lofts and condos.”
“They don’t make anything in there anymore,” he said. “Except babies, sometimes, the thirtysomethings. Otherwise, it’s all a museum. American cities are all becoming museums.” He said this with a wild, incongruous cheer, as a devil would. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you one true thing. Listen up.”
“What’s that?”
“When I was a little boy, I lived three or four blocks down from where you lived. I’ve told you this. You don’t remember me. That’s all. You don’t remember. I remember you, but you don’t remember me. No one ever remembers me. One night I was playing in the living room, with my toy armies, and your mother came to our door. I think she was drunk. But I didn’t know that. She rang the bell and she entered our house. My parents were upstairs, or somewhere. Your mother came into the house and looked at me playing with my soldiers, and she looked and looked and looked. She smiled and nodded. And then she asked me if I would like to go away with her, said that she had always wanted to take a boy