Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (26 page)

“Oh, that’s all right. If you want. Where’s this shelter?”

“Over there.” The woman gestured with a french fry she had picked out. She lifted the bag and began to eat. Cooper looked down at the
book and saw that it was in a foreign language. The cover had fallen off. He asked her about it.

“Oh, that?” she said. She spoke with her mouth full of food, and Cooper felt a moment of superiority about her bad manners. “It’s about women—what happens to women in this world. It’s in French. I used to be Canadian. My mother taught me French.”

Cooper stood uncomfortably. He took a key ring out of his pocket and twirled it around his index finger. “So what happens to women in this world?”

“What
doesn’t
?” the woman said. “Everything happens. It’s terrible but sometimes it’s all right, and, besides, you get used to it.”

“You seem so normal,” Cooper said. “How come you’re out here?”

The woman straightened up and looked at him. “My mind’s not quite right,” she said, scratching an eyelid. “Mostly it is but sometimes it isn’t. They messed up my medication and one thing led to another and here I am. I’m not complaining. I don’t have a bad life.”

Cooper wanted to say that she
did
have a bad life, but stopped himself.

“If you want to help people,” the woman said, “you should go to the shelter. They need volunteers. People to clean up. You could get rid of your guilt over there, mopping the floors.”

“What guilt?” he asked.

“All men are guilty,” she said. She was chewing but had put her bag of food on the ground and was staring hard and directly into Cooper’s face. He turned toward the street. When he looked at the cars, everyone heading somewhere with a kind of fierce intentionality, braking hard at red lights and peeling rubber at the green, he felt as though he had been pushed out of his own life.

“You’re still here,” the woman said. “What do you want?”

“I was about to leave.” He was surprised by how rude she was.

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen the Rocky Mountains or even the Swiss Alps, for that matter,” the woman said, bending down to inspect something close to the sidewalk.

“No, you’re right. I haven’t traveled much.”

“We’re not going to kiss, if that’s what you think,” the woman said, still bent over. Now she straightened up again, glanced at him, and looked away.

“No,” Cooper said. “I just wanted to give you a meal.”

“Yes, thank you,” the woman said. “And now you have to go.”

“I was … I
was
going to go.”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” the woman said. “It’s nothing against you personally, but talking to men just tires me out terribly and drains me of all my strength. Thank you very much, and good-bye.” She sat down again and opened up her paperback. She took some more french fries out of the sack and began to eat as she read.

“They’re polite,” Cooper said, lying next to his wife. “They’re polite, but they aren’t nice.”

“Nice? Nice? Jesus, Cooper, I prosecute rapists! Why should they be nice? They’d be crazy to be nice. Who cares about nice except you? This is the 1980s, Cooper. Get real.”

He rolled over in bed and put his hand on her hip. “All right,” he said.

They lay together for a while, listening to Alexander snoring in his bedroom across the hall.

“I can’t sleep, Cooper,” she said. “Tell me a story.”

“Which one tonight?” Cooper was a good improviser of stories to help his wife relax and doze off. “Hannah, the snoopy cleaning woman?”

“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
a problem. She was right. She had to get on my case. She decided to throw me away for a while. Trash trash. So I’ve been sleeping in alleys and benches and I slept for a couple of nights in the Arboretum, but there are too many mosquitoes this time of year for that and I’ve got bites. I was living with a girl but all my desires left me. You live here, Cooper? You homeless yourself, or what?”

“I’m a volunteer,” he said. “I just work here. I’ve got a home.”

“I don’t,” Billy Bell said. “People should have homes. I don’t work now. I lost my job. I’m full of energy but I’m apathetic. Very little appeals to me. I guess I’m going to start some of those greasy minimum-wage things if I can stand them. I’m smart. I’m not a loser. I’m definitely not one of these messed-up ghouls who call this place home.”

Cooper stood up and walked toward the kitchen, knowing that the young man would follow him. “They aren’t ghouls,” he said. “Look around. They’re more normal than you are, probably. They’re down on their luck.”

“Of course they are, of course they are,” Billy said, his voice floating a few inches behind Cooper’s head. Cooper began to wipe off the kitchen counter, as the young man watched him. Then Billy began waving his right hand again. “My problem, Cooper, my problem is the problem of the month, which is pointlessness and the point of doing anything, which I can’t see most of the time. I want to heal people but I can’t do that. I’m stalled. What happened was, about a year ago, there was this day. I remember it was sunny, I mean the sun was out, and I heard these wings flapping over my head because I was out in the park with my girlfriend feeding Cheerios to the pigeons. Then this noise:
flap flap flap
. Wings, Cooper,
big
wings, taking my soul away. I didn’t want to look
behind me because I was afraid they’d taken my shadow, too. It could happen, Cooper, it could happen to anybody. Anyhow, after that, what I knew was, I didn’t want what everybody else did, I mean I don’t have any desires for anything, and at some times of day I
don’t
cast a shadow. My desires just went away like that—poof, poor desires. I’m a saint now but I’m not enjoying it one bit. I can bless people but not heal them. Anybody could lose his soul the way I did. Now all I got is that sad robot feeling. You know, that five-o’clock feeling? But all day, with me.”

“You mentioned your mother,” Cooper said. He dropped some cleanser into the sink and began to scour. “What about your father?”

“Let me do that.” Billy nudged Cooper aside and started to clean the sink with agitated, almost frantic hand motions. “I’ve done a
lot
of this. My father died last year. I did a lot of housecleaning. I’m a man-maid. My father was in the hospital, but we took him out, and I was trying to be, I don’t know, a sophomore in college, which is a pretty dumb thing to aspire to, if you think about it. But I was also sitting by my father’s bed and taking care of him—he had pancreatic cancer—and I was reading
Popular Mechanics
to him, the home-improvement section, and feeding him when he could eat, and then when he died, the wings flew over me, though that was later, and there wasn’t much I wanted to do. What a sink.”

As he talked, Billy’s hand accelerated in its motions around the drain.

“Come on,” Cooper said. “I’m going to take you somewhere.”

His idea was to lift the young man’s spirits, but he didn’t know quite how to proceed. He took him to his car and drove him down the river road to a park, where Billy got out of the car, took his shoes off, and waded into the water. He bent down, and, as Cooper watched, cupped his hands in the river before splashing it over his face. Cooper thought his face had a strange expression, something between ecstasy and despair. He couldn’t think of a word in English for this expression but thought there might be a word in another language for it. German, for example. When Billy was finished washing his face, he looked up into the sky. Pigeons and killdeer were flying overhead. After he had settled back into the front seat of Cooper’s car, drops of water from his face dripping onto the seat, Billy said, “That’s a good feeling, Cooper. You should try it. You wash your
face in the flowing water and then you hear the cries of the birds. I’d like to think it makes me a new man but I know it doesn’t. How old are you, Cooper?”

“I’m thirty-one.”

“Seven years older than me. And what did you say you did?”

“I’ll show you.”

He drove Billy to the bakery and parked in the back alley. It was getting close to twilight. After Cooper had unlocked the back door, Billy walked into the dark bakery kitchen and began to sniff. “I like this place,” he said. “I like it very much.” He shook some invisible water off his hand, then ran his finger along the bench. “What’s this made of?”

“Hardrock maple. It’s like the wood they use in bowling alleys. Hardest wood there is. You can’t dent it or break it. Look up.”

Billy twisted backward. “A skylight,” he said. “Cooper, your life is on the very top of the eggshell. You have grain from the earth and you have the sky overhead. Ever been broken into?”

“No.”

Cooper looked at Billy and saw, returning to him, a steady gaze made out of the watchful and flat expression he had first seen on the young man’s face when he had met him a few hours before. “No,” he repeated, “never have.” He felt, suddenly, that he had embarked all at once on a series of misjudgments. “What did your father do, Billy?”

“He was a surgeon,” Billy said. “He did surgery on people.”

They stood and studied each other in the dark bakery for a moment.

“We’ll go one more place,” Cooper said. “I’ll get you a beer. Then I have to take you back to the shelter.”

Cooper’s dog, Hugo, came out through the backyard and jumped up on him as he got out of his car. A load of wash, mostly Alexander’s shirts, flapped on the clothesline in the evening breeze. Cooper heard children calling from down the street.

“Here we are,” Cooper said. “We’ll go in through this door.”

Inside the house, Christine was sitting at the dining-room table with two legal pads set up in front of her and a briefcase down by the floor. Behind her, in the living room, Alexander was lying on the floor in front of the TV set, his chin cupped in his hands. He was watching a Detroit
Tigers game. They both looked up when Cooper knocked on the kitchen doorframe and came into the hallway, followed by Billy, whose hands were in his pockets and who nodded as he walked.

“Christine,” Cooper said. “This is Billy. I met him at the shelter.” Billy walked quickly around the table and shook Christine’s hand. “I brought him here for a beer.”