Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [83]
“No,” Christine said. “I’m tired of Hannah.”
“The adventures of Roderick, insurance adjuster?”
“I’m sick of him, too.”
“How about another boring day in Paradise?”
“Yeah. Do that.”
For the next twenty minutes, Cooper described the beauty and tedium of Paradise—the perfect rainfalls, the parks with roped-off grassy areas, the sideshows and hot-air-balloon rides, the soufflés that never fell—and in twenty minutes, Christine was asleep, her fingers touching him. He was aroused. “Christine?” he whispered. But she was sleeping.
The next morning, as Cooper worked at his baker’s bench, rolling chocolate-almond croissants, he decided that he would check out the shelter in the afternoon to see if they needed any help. He looked up from his hands, with a trace of dough and sugar under the fingernails, over toward his boss, Gilbert, who was brewing coffee and humming along to some Coltrane coming out of his old radio perched on top of the mixer. Cooper loved the bakery where he worked. He loved the smell and everything they made there. He had noticed that bread made people unusually happy. Customers closed their eyes when they ate Cooper’s doughnuts and croissants and Danishes. He looked up toward the skylight and saw that the sky had turned from pale blue to dark blue, what the Crayola 64 box called blue-indigo. He could tell from the tint of the sky that it was seven o’clock, time to unlock the front doors to let in the first of the customers. After Gilbert turned the key and the mechanics from down the street shuffled in to get their morning doughnuts and coffee in Styrofoam cups, Cooper stood behind the counter in his whites and watched their faces, the slow private smiles that always registered when they first caught the scent of the baked dough and the sugared fruit.
The shelter was in a downtown furniture store that had gone out of business during the recession of ’79. To provide some privacy, the first volunteers had covered over the front plate-glass window with long strips of paper from giant rolls, with the result that during the daytime the light inside was colored an unusual tint, somewhere between orange and off-white. As soon as he volunteered, he was asked to do odd jobs. He first went to work in the evening ladling out food—stew, usually, with ice-cream-scoop mounds of mashed potatoes.
The director of the shelter was a brisk and slightly overweight woman named Marilyn Adams, who, though tough and efficient, seemed vaguely annoyed about everything. Cooper liked her officious irritability. He didn’t want any baths of feeling in this place.
Around five o’clock on a Thursday afternoon—the bakery closed at four—Cooper was making beds near the front window when he heard a voice from behind him. “Hey,” the voice said. “I want to get in here.”
Cooper turned around. He saw the reddest person he had ever laid eyes on: the young man’s hair was red, his face flamed with sunburn and freckles, and, as if to accentuate his skin and hair tone, he was wearing a bright pink Roxy Music T-shirt. He was standing near the window, with the light behind him, and all Cooper could see of him was a still, flat expression and deeply watchful eyes. When he turned, he had the concentrated otherworldliness of figures in religious paintings.
Cooper told the young man about the shelter’s regulations and told him which bed he could have. The young man—he seemed almost a boy—stood listening, his right foot thumping against the floor and his right hand shaking in the air as if he were trying to get water off it. When the young man nodded, his head went up and down too fast, and Cooper thought he was being ironic. “Who are you?” he finally asked. “My name’s Cooper.”
“Billy Bell,” the young man said. “That’s a real weird name, isn’t it?” He shook his head but didn’t look at Cooper or wait for him to agree or disagree. “My mother threw me out last week. Why shouldn’t she? She thought I was doing drugs. I wasn’t doing drugs. Drugs are so boring. Look at those awful capitalist lizards using them and you’ll know what I mean. But I was