Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [81]
“Thank you.” When the man removed his hands from his face, Cooper saw in his eyes a moment of complete lucidity and sanity, a glance that took in the street and himself, made a judgment about them all, and quickly withdrew from any engagement with them. He took the hamburger out of its wrapping, studied it for a moment, and then bit into it. As he ate, he gazed toward the horizon.
“I have to go to work now,” Cooper said.
The man glanced at him, nodded again, and turned his face away.
“What are we going to do?” Cooper said to his wife. They were lying in bed at sunrise, when they liked to talk. His hand was on her thigh and was caressing it absently and familiarly. “What are we going to do about these characters? They’re on the street corners. Every month there are more of them. Kids, men, women, everybody. It’s a horde. They’re sleeping in the arcade, and they’re pushing those terrible grocery carts around with all their worldly belongings, and it makes me nuts to watch them. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Christine, but whatever it is, I have to do it.” With his other hand, he rubbed his eyes. “I dream about them.”
“You’re such a good person,” she said sleepily. Her hand brushed over him. “I’ve noticed that about you.”
“No, that’s wrong,” Cooper said. “This has nothing to do with good. Virtue doesn’t interest me. What this is about is not feeling crazy when I see those people.”
“So what’s your plan?”
He rose halfway out of bed and looked out the back window at the tree house he had started for Alexander, their seven-year-old. Dawn was breaking, and the light came in through the slats of the blinds and fell in strips over him.
When he didn’t say anything, she said, “I was just thinking. When I first met you, before you dropped out of law school, you always used to have your shirts laundered, with starch, and I remember the neat creases in your trouser legs, from somebody ironing them. You smelled of aftershave in those days. Sexually, you were ambitious. You took notes slowly. Fastidious penmanship. I like you better now.”
“I remember,” he said. “It was a lecture on proximate cause.”
“No,” she said. “It was contribution and indemnification.”
“Whatever.”
He took her hand and led her to the bathroom. Every morning Cooper and his wife showered together. He called it soul-showering. He had picked up the phrase from a previous girlfriend, though he had never told Christine that. Cooper had told his wife that by the time they were thirty they would probably not want to do this anymore, but they were both now thirty-one, and she still seemed to like it.
Under the sputter of the water, Christine brushed some soap out of her eyes and said, “Cooper, were you ever a street person?”
“No.”
“Smoke a lot of dope in high school?”
“No.”
“I bet you drank a lot once.” She was an assistant prosecutor in the district attorney’s office and sometimes brought her professional habits home. “You tapped kegs and lay out on the lawns and howled at the sorority girls.”
“Sometimes I did that,” he said. He was soaping her back. She had wide, flaring shoulders from all the swimming she had done, and the soap and water flowed down toward her waist in a pattern of V’s. “I did all those things,” he said, “but I never became that kind of person. What’s your point?”
She turned around and faced him, the full display of her smile. “I think you’re a latent vagrant,” she said.
“But I’m not,” he said. “I’m here. I have a job. This is where I am. I’m a father. How can you say that?”
“Do I love you?” she asked, water pouring over her face. “Stay with me.”
“Well, sure,” he said. “That’s my plan.”
The second one he decided to do something about was standing out of the hot summer sun in the shade of a large catalpa tree near a corner newsstand. This one was holding what seemed to be a laundry sack with the words AMERICAN LINEN SUPPLY stenciled on it. She was wearing light summer clothes—a Hawaiian shirt showing a palm tree against a bloody splash of sunset, and a pair of light cotton trousers, and red Converse tennis