Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [211]
“Scotch?”
“No, thanks, not just yet. What happened to all the blood? You were covered in blood, last I saw you.”
“You’re sure you don’t want a scotch? It’ll warm you up. Single malt.”
“No. That’s all right.” He took the glass and drank from it. “Thanks.”
“His mind rejects it, but his hand accepts it,” Ellie Mallard said with delight. “Will you have dinner with us?”
“I really should get back into town. It’s time to go. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
“You’ll get lost!” He noticed that she was very exclamatory. “You’ll never get back. Weeks later, searchers will find you. Oh, but where are you staying?” Ellie sat down opposite him on a love seat, and James Mallard sat down beside her. She raised her legs so that they were crossed on her husband’s lap. He began to massage her feet.
“In D———,” Krumholtz said. “I have a reservation at a hotel there.”
“You’ll never get back. A hotel! Those smoky rooms! Those TV sets!” She pretended to shudder. “Oh, stay with us,” Ellie said. “Never go away!”
“Yes,” Mallard said, agreeing with his wife, though unsmilingly. “Ask us the questions that you want to have the answers to, and maybe, just maybe,” he said, with the ghost of an ironic smile, “we’ll answer them someday.”
Krumholtz took another slug of the scotch. “All right,” he said. “Here’s my question.” He took out his digital recorder and pretended to turn it on.
“Shoot,” Ellie Mallard said pleasantly. As her husband massaged her feet, she closed her eyes in bliss.
“Why do you get to be happy?” Krumholtz asked. “I asked your boy Angus this very same question a minute ago, and he was stumped.”
“Why do we get to be happy?” Mallard repeated. “What an absurd question. But I’ll tell you. We have a lot of money. Geld macht frei. We worked for it, we worked very hard, long days and long nights, and then, of course, we were lucky.”
“The royal ‘we’ again?” Krumholtz muttered to himself. More loudly, he said, “Yes, it’s the luck I’m interested in. About that ‘luck.’ The reason I asked is that other people, little people, work long days and long nights, very long days, days that go on for longer than twenty-four hours, days that go for weeks at a time.” He felt a sudden lift-over into either joy or rage. “That kind of day, you know, a working day that lasts for weeks. And they’re not happy, and, well, maybe that’s because they’re not lucky. Also, they have to live with neighbors, you know, that Rear Window situation? Just surrounded by mere people with every sort of problem. And I wondered what you thought about that.”
Krumholtz heard what sounded like a grandfather clock ticking somewhere down the hallway to his left. In front of him, the teeth opened ever so slightly.
“Is there a question in there somewhere?” Ellie Mallard asked, still not opening her eyes.
“You take me, for example,” Krumholtz said, feeling some crucial disconnection. “We, that is, my wife and I, have neighbors. And the two of us, we … well, I was once a musician, and she wanted to be a social worker, and she was a social worker for a while before they cut the state and federal funding, which they never restored, and then, well, this thing happened to us, and this, what I’m about to tell you, this was about eighteen months after we were married, and she became pregnant. And immediately she had complications.” He took another swig of the scotch, emptying the glass. “For the last four months of the pregnancy, she was spotting, so they kept her in bed. But she got through it. The baby—it was a breech, so they had to perform a Cesarean, and they didn’t give my wife, Cathy, enough anesthetic, so the whole procedure took a bad toll on her, she was