Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [193]
The other man standing on the platform looked like the winos that Burroughs Hammond had written about in his fragmentary hymns to life following those nights he had spent in the drunk tank. No other life could be as precious to me / as this one, he had written. If only I could experience some kindly feeling for a stranger, I thought, possibly I might find myself redeemed by the fates who were quietly ordering my humiliations, one after the other.
Therefore, I did what you never do on a subway platform. I exchanged a glance with the other man.
He approached me. On his face there appeared for a moment an expression of the deepest lucidity. He raised his eyelids as if flabbergasted by my very existence. I noticed that he was wearing over his torn shirt a leather vest stained with dark red blotches—blood or wine, I suppose now. He wore no socks. For the second time that evening, someone pointed at me. “That’s a beer you have,” he said, his voice burbling up as if through clogged plumbing. “Is there extra?”
I handed over the plastic cup to him. He took a swig. Then, his eyes deep in mad concentration, he yanked down his trousers’ zipper and urinated into the beer. He handed the cup back to me.
I took the cup out of this poor madman’s grasp, put it down on the subway platform, and then I hauled back and slugged him in the face. He fell immediately. My knuckles stung. He began to crawl toward the subway tracks, and I heard distantly the local train rumbling toward the station, approaching us. With the studied calm of an accomplished actor who has had one or two early successes, I left that subway station and ascended the stairs two at a time to the street. Then, conscience-crippled and heartsick, I went back. I couldn’t see the man I had hit. Finally I returned to the street and flagged down a taxi and rode to my apartment.
For the next few days, I checked the newspapers for reports of an accidental death in the subway of a drunk who had crawled into the path of a train, and when I didn’t find any such story, I began to feel as if I had dreamed up the entire evening from start to finish, or, rather, that someone else had dreamed it up for me and put me as the lead actor into it—this cautionary tale whose moral was that I had no gift for the life I’d been leading. I took to bed the way you do when you have to think something out. My identity having overtaken me, I called in sick to the restaurant and didn’t manage to get to an audition I had scheduled. A lethargy thrummed through me, and I dreamed that someone pointed at my body stretched out on the floor and said, “It’s dead.” What frightened me was not my death, but that pronoun. “I” had become an “it.”
There’s no profit in dwelling on the foolishness of one’s youth. Everyone’s past is a mess. And I wouldn’t have thought of my days as an actor if it weren’t for my cousin Brantford’s having told me twenty years later over lunch in an expensive restaurant that he felt as if he had killed someone, and if my cousin and I hadn’t had a kind of solidarity. By that time, Giulietta and I had children of our own, two boys, Elijah and Jacob, and the guttering seediness that was the New York of the 1970s was distant history, and I only came to the city to visit my cousin and my aunt. By then, I was a visitor from Minnesota, where we had moved and where I was a partner in the firm of Wilwersheid and Lampe. I was no longer an inhabitant of New York. I had become a family man and a tourist.
Do I need to prove that I love my wife and children, or that my existence has become terribly precious to me? Once, back then in my twenties, all I wanted to do was to throw my life away. But then, somehow, usually by accident, you experience joy. And the problem with joy is that it binds you to life; it makes you greedy for more happiness. You