Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [45]
“I call her. She’s okay. She asks about you. Your health and things like that.” Mr. Bradbury was shading his eyes. “How’s your breathing?”
“My breathing?” Mr. Bradbury took his hand away from his eyes. “Fine. Why do you ask?”
“It seems sort of shallow or something.”
“You were never much for tact, were you, kid?” His father leaned back. “I don’t have emphysema yet, if that’s the question. But I still smoke. Oh, yes.” He smiled oddly. “Cigarettes,” he said, “are my friends. They have the faith.”
Eric hopped down, so that he was no longer looking at his father, and turned to survey the city park two blocks west. “How’s business?”
His father waved his hand in a gesture that wasn’t meant to express anything. “Good. Business is good. I’m doing commercials for a bank owned by a cartel of international slime, and I also have a breakfast-food account now, aimed at kids. Crispy Snax. The demographics are a challenge. We’re using animated cartoons and we’ve invented this character, Colonel Crisp, who orders the kids to eat the cereal. He raises a sword and the product appears in a sort of animated blizzard of sugar. We’re going for the Napoleonic touch. It’s coercive, of course, but it’s funny if you’re positioned behind the joke instead of in front of it. We’re getting angry letters from mothers. We must be doing something right.” He stared at his son’s back. “Of course, I get tired sometimes.”
“Tired?”
He waited, then said, “I don’t know. I should take a vacation.” He looked past his son at the other buildings across the street with their floors of patio-balconies, some with hanging plants, others with bicycles. “So I could recollect sensations sweet in hours of weariness ’mid the din of towns and cities. Listen, you want a drink? You know where it is.”
Eric turned and stared at his father. “Eleven thirty in the morning?” He lifted himself on the railing again.
Mr. Bradbury shrugged. “It’s all right. It’s Saturday. It warms up the mental permafrost. On weekends it’s okay to drink before lunch. I’ve got a book here that says so.”
“You wrote that book, Pop.”
“Well, maybe I did.” He sat up. “Damn it, stop worrying about me. I don’t worry about you. You’re too young to be worrying about me, and besides, I’m making out like a bandit.”
Eric said nothing. He was looking away from his father into the living room, at a Lichtenstein print above the sofa. It showed a comic-book woman passionately kissing a comic-book man.
“You won’t mind if I do?”
“What?” Eric said. “Have a drink? No, I won’t mind.”
Mr. Bradbury stood up and walked to the kitchen, remembering to aim himself and to keep his shoulders thrown back. “Your semester must be about done,” he said, his voice raised above the sound of ice cubes clattering out of the tray. “How much longer?”
“Two weeks.”
“You taking that lifeguarding job again this summer?”
“That’s part of what I came to talk to you about.”
“Oh.” In a moment he returned with what was identifiably a screwdriver. “Cheers,” he said, raising it. “I knew there must be some reason.” He settled down into the chair, reached over for the ashtray and lighter, and lit a cigarette. “How’s your love life? How’s the bad Penny?”
“Penny and I split.”
“You and Penny split up? I wasn’t informed.” He took a sip of the drink, inhaled from the cigarette, then laughed. Smoke came out his mouth as he did. “I’m going to miss that girl, wandering around here in her flower-pattern pajamas, her little feet sinking into the carpet, and asking me in broken French my opinions of Proust. ‘Monsieur Bradbury, aimez-vous Proust?’ ‘Oh, oui, Penny. Proust, c’est un écrivain très diligent.’ ” He waited, but his son didn’t smile. “Was she an inattentive lover?”
“Jesus Christ, Dad.” Eric picked at something beneath the hair on his right forearm. “You can’t ask about that.”
“Sure I can. You asked