Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [189]
“Bunny,” he said to me, sitting down with an audible expunging of air. He still used my childhood name. No one else did. He didn’t give me a hug because we don’t do that. “I see you’ve gotten started. You’re having a martini?”
I nodded. “Morning tune-up,” I said.
“Brave choice.” Brantford grinned, simultaneously waving down the server. “Waitress,” he said, pointing at my drink, “I’ll have one of those. Very dry, please, no olive.” The server nodded before giving Brantford a thin professional smile and gliding over to the bar.
We had a kind of solidarity, Brantford and I. I had two decades on him, but we were oddly similar, more like brothers than cousins. I had always seen in him some better qualities than those I actually possessed. For example, he was one of those people who always make you happier the moment you see them.
Before his drink arrived, we caught ourselves up. Brantford’s mother, Aunt Margaret, had by that time been married to several different husbands, including a three-star army general, and she currently resided in a small apartment cluttered with knickknacks near the corner of Ninety-second and Broadway.
Having spent herself in a wild youth and at all times given to manias, Brantford’s mother had started taking a new medication called Elysium-Max, which seemed to be keeping her on a steady course where life was concerned. Brantford instructed me to please phone her while I was in town, and I said I would. As for Brantford’s two half sisters, they were doing fine.
With this information out of the way, I asked Brantford how he was.
“I don’t know. It’s strange. Sometimes at night I have the feeling that I’ve murdered somebody.” He stopped and glanced down at the tableware. “Someone’s dead. Only I don’t know who or what, or when I did it. I must’ve killed somebody. I’m sure of it. Thank you,” he said with his first real smile of the day, as the server placed a martini in front of him.
“Well, that’s just crazy,” I said. “You haven’t killed anyone.”
“Doesn’t matter if I have or haven’t,” he said, “if it feels that way. Maybe I should take a vacation.”
“Brantford,” I said, “you can’t take a vacation. You don’t work.” I waited for a moment. “Do you?”
“Well,” he said, “I’d like to. Besides, I work, in my way,” he claimed, taking a sip of the martini. “And don’t forget that I can be anything I want to be.” This sentence was enunciated carefully and with precise despair, as if it had served as one of those lifelong mottoes that he no longer believed in.
What year was this? 1994? When someone begins to carry on as my cousin did, I’m never sure what to say. Tact is required. As a teenager, Brantford had told me that he aspired to be a concert pianist, and I was the one who had to remind him that he wasn’t a musician and didn’t play the piano. But he had seen a fiery angel somewhere in the sky and thought it might descend on him. I hate those angels. I haven’t always behaved well when people open their hearts to me.
“Well, what about the animals?” I asked. Brantford was always caring for damaged animals and had done so from the time he was a boy. He found them in streets and alleys and nursed them back to health and then let them go. But they tended to fall in with him and to get crushes on him. Wherever he lived you would find recovering cats, mutts, and sparrows barking and chirping and mewling in response to him.
“No, not that,” he said. “I would never make a living off those critters,” he said. “That’s a sideline. I love them too much.”
“Veterinary school?” I asked.
“No, I couldn’t. Absolutely not. I don’t want to practice that kind of