Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [98]
“Of course,” he said. He had heard of American cult religions but thought they were all in California. He didn’t mind her talk of religion. It was like talk of the sunset or childhood; it kept things going. “Of course I have been listening.”
“Because I won’t sleep with you unless you listen to me,” she said. “It’s the one thing I care about, that people listen. It’s so damn rare, listening I mean, that you might as well care about it. I don’t sleep with strangers too often. Almost never.” She turned to look at him. “Anders,” she said, “what do you pray to?”
He laughed. “I don’t.”
“Okay, then, what do you plan for?”
“A few things,” he said.
“Like what?”
“My dinner every night. My job. My friends.”
“You don’t let accidents happen? You should. Things reveal themselves in accidents.”
“Are there many people like you?” he asked.
“What do you think?” He looked again at her face, taken over by the darkness in the car but dimly lit by the dashboard lights and the oncoming flare of traffic. “Do you think there are many people like me?”
“Not very many,” he said. “But maybe more than there used to be.”
“Any of us in Sweden?”
“I don’t think so. It’s not a religion over there. People don’t … They didn’t tell us in Sweden about American girls who listen to Debussy and 10,000 Maniacs in their automobiles and who believe in gods and accidents.”
“They don’t say ‘girls’ here,” she told him. “They say ‘women.’ ”
She dropped him off at the hotel and said that she would pick him up in forty-five minutes. In his room, as he chose a clean shirt and a sport coat and a pair of trousers, he found himself laughing happily. He felt giddy. It was all happening so fast; he could hardly believe his luck. I am a very lucky man, he thought.
He looked out his hotel window at the streetlights. They had an amber glow, the color of gemstones. This city, this American city, was unlike any he had ever seen. A downtown area emptied of people; a river with huge ships going by silently; a park with girls who believe in the millennium. No, not girls: women. He had learned his lesson.
He wanted to open the hotel window to smell the air, but the casement frames were welded shut.
After walking down the stairs to the lobby, he stood out in front of the hotel doorway. He felt a warm breeze against his face. He told the doorman, Luis, that he had met a woman on Belle Isle who was going to pick him up in a few minutes. She was going to take him dancing. The doorman nodded, rubbing his chin with his hand. Anders said that she was friendly and wanted to show him, a foreigner, things. The doorman nodded. “Yes, I agree,” Luis said. “Dancing. Make sure that this is what you do.”
“What?”
“Dancing,” Luis said, “yes. Go dancing. You know this woman?”
“I just met her.”
“Ah,” Luis said, and stepped back to observe Anders, as if to remember his face. “Dangerous fun.” When her car appeared in front of the hotel, she was wearing a light summer dress, and when she smiled, she looked like the melancholy baby he had heard about in an American song. As they pulled away from the hotel, he looked back at Luis, who was watching them closely, and then Anders realized that Luis was reading the numbers on Lauren’s license plate. To break the mood, he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. She smelled of cigarettes and something else—soap or cut flowers.
She took him uptown to a club where a trio played soft rock and some jazz. Some of this music was slow enough to dance to, in the slow way he wanted to dance. Her hand in his felt bony and muscular; physically, she was direct and immediate. He wondered, now, looking at her face, whether she might be an American Indian, and again he was frustrated because he couldn’t tell one race in this country from another. He knew it was improper to ask. When he sat at the table, holding hands with her and sipping from his drink, he began to feel