Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (35 page)

“All right, all right,” Jodie said. She leaned toward him and lowered her voice toward the Genie of the Magic Lamp so that only he could hear. She just wanted to be left alone with Walton. She wanted to finish her coffee. Her needs were small. “I want a job,” she said softly, “and I’d like that guy sitting next to me to love me, and I’d like a better radio when I listen to music in the morning.”

“
That’s it?
” The fat man stood up, a look of storybook outrage on his face. “I give you three wishes and you kiss them away like that? What’s the matter with you? Give an American three wishes, and what do they do? Kiss them away! That’s the trouble with this country.
No imagination when it comes to wishes!
All right, my pretty, you got it.” And he dropped his dirty handkerchief in her lap. When she picked it up to remove it, she felt something travel up her arm—the electricity of disgust. The fat man rose and waddled out of the restaurant. She let go of the handkerchief and it drifted toward the floor.

“What was that?” Jodie asked. “What just happened?” She was shaking.

“That,” Walton told her, “was a typical incident at Clara’s Country Kitchen Café. The last time Tad gave someone three wishes, it was because the guy’d bought him a cup of coffee, and a tornado hit the guy’s garage a couple of weeks later. Fat guys have really funny delusions, have you noticed that?” He waited. “You’re shaking,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder. “What’d you ask for, Jodie?”

She turned to look out the front window and saw Walton’s dog gazing straight back at her in an eerie manner.

“I asked for a job, and a better radio, and a million dollars.”

“Then what was all that stuff about ‘kiss away’?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Walton, can we go, please? Can we pay our bill and leave?”

“I just remembered,” Walton said. “It’s that Rolling Stones tune. It’s on one of those antique albums, I think.” He raised his head to sing.

Love, sister, is just a kiss away,
Kiss away, kiss away, kiss away.

“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Jodie said.

Walton leaned forward and gave her a little harmless peck on the cheek. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe it was. Anyhow, just think of him as an overweight placebo-person. He doesn’t grant you the wish because, after all, he’s just a fat psycho, but he
could
put you in the right frame of mind. We’ve got to think positively here.”

“I like how you defended me,” Jodie said. “Getting all male and everything.”

“No problem,” Walton said, holding up his fist for inspection. “I like fights.”

She thought that she had interviewed well, but she wasn’t offered the job she had applied for that day. They called her a week later—she had finally had a phone installed—and told her that they had given the position to someone else but that they had been impressed by her qualities and might call her again soon if another position opened up.

She and Walton continued their job-and-castoffs hunt, and it was Walton who found a job first, at the loading dock of a retailer in the suburbs, a twenty-four-hour discount store known internationally for shoddy merchandise. The job went from midnight to eight a.m.

She thought he wasn’t quite physically robust enough for such work, but he claimed that he was stronger than he appeared. “It’s all down here,” he said, pointing to his lower back. “This is where you need it.”

She didn’t ask him what he was referring to—the muscles or the vertebrae
or the cartilage. She had never seen his lower back. However, she was beginning to want to. On the passenger side of his car, she considered the swinging fuzzy dice and the intricately woven twigs of a bird’s nest tossed on the top of the dashboard as he drove her to her various job interviews. His conversation was sprinkled with references to local geology and puzzles in medicine and biology. He was interested in most observable phenomena, and the pileup of souvenirs in the car reflected him. She liked this car. She had become accustomed to its ratty disarray and to the happy panting of Einstein, who always sat in the backseat, monitoring other dogs in other cars at intersections.

At one job interview, in a glass building so sterile she thought she should wear surgery-room snoods over her shoes, she was asked about her computer skills; at another, about what hobbies she liked to fill her spare time. She didn’t think that the personnel director had any business asking her such questions. These days she filled her spare time daydreaming about sex with Walton. She didn’t say so and didn’t get the job. But at a wholesale supplier of office furniture and stationery, she was offered a position on the spot by a man whose suit was so wrinkled that it was prideful and emblematic. He was a gaudy slob. He owned the business. She was being asked to help them work on a program for inventory control. She would have other tasks. She sighed—those fucking computers were in her future again, they were unavoidable—but she took what they offered her. If she hadn’t met Walton, if Walton and Einstein hadn’t escorted her to the interview, she wouldn’t have.

To celebrate, she and Walton decided to escape the August heat by hiking down Minnehaha Creek to its mouth at the Mississippi River across from Saint Paul. He didn’t have to be at work for another four hours. He had brought his fishing pole and tackle box, and while he cast his line into the water, his dog sat behind him in the shade of a gnarled cottonwood and Jodie walked downriver, looking, but not looking for anything, exactly, just looking without a goal, for which she felt she had a talent. She found a bowling ball in usable condition and one bruised and broken point-and-shoot camera that she left under a bush.

She walked back along the river to Walton, carrying the bowling ball. On her face she had constructed an expression of delight. She was feeling hot and extremely beautiful.

“See what I’ve found?” She hoisted the ball.

“Hey, great,” he said, casting her a smile. “See what I’ve caught?” He held up an imaginary line of invisible fish.

“Good for you,” she said. His eyes were steady on her. He had been gazing at her for the last few days in a prolonged way; she’d been watching him do it. She could feel his presence now in her stomach and her knees. She heard the double blast of a boat horn. Another boat passed, pulling a water-skier with a strangely unhappy look on her face. The clock stopped; the moment paused: when he said he wanted to make love to her, that he almost couldn’t wait, that he had lost his appetite lately just thinking about her and couldn’t sleep, she didn’t quite hear him saying it, she was so happy. She threw the bowling ball out as far as she could into the river. She didn’t notice whether it splashed. She took her time getting into his arms, and when he kissed her, first at the base of her neck and then, lifting her up, all over her exposed skin, she put her hands in his hair. Suddenly she liked kissing in public. She wanted people to see them together. “Walton,” she said, “make love to me. Right here.”

“Let’s go to your place,” he said. “Let’s go there, okay?”

“Happy days,” she said in agreement, putting her fingers down inside his loose beltless jeans.

He was a slow-motion lover. She had made him some iced tea, but instead of drinking from it, he raised the cold glass to her forehead. Einstein had found a corner where she was panting with her eyes closed.

Jodie had taken him by the hand and had led him out to the sleeping porch. You couldn’t have known it from the way he looked in his street clothes, but his body was lean and muscular, and he made love shyly at first and didn’t really become easy and wild over her until he saw how she was responding to him. She was embarrassed by how quickly and how effortlessly he made her come. She put her arms up above her head and just gave in.

Maybe fools made the best lovers. They were devotees of passing pleasures, connoisseurs of them, and this, being the best of the passing pleasures, was the one at which they were most adept. His fire didn’t burn away. He wasn’t ashamed of any impulse he had, so he kept having them. He couldn’t stop bringing himself into her. “Look at me,” she said, as she was about to come again, and he looked at her with a slow grin on
his face, pleased with himself and pleased with her. When she looked back at him, she let him see into her soul, all the way down, where she’d never allowed anyone to own her nakedness before.

“So. Happy ever after?”

Walton was asleep after a night’s work, and Jodie had gone down to Clara’s Country Kitchen Café by herself. This morning the fat man with yellow-green eyes was full of mirthless merriment, and he seemed to be spilling over the counter stool on all sides. If anything, he was twice as big as before. He was like a balloon filled with gravy. Jodie had been in the middle of her second cup of coffee and her scrambled eggs with ketchup when he sat down next to her. It was hard to imagine someone who could be more deliberately disgusting than this gentleman. He had a rare talent, Jodie thought, for inspiring revulsion. The possible images of the Family of Humankind did not somehow include him. He sat there shoveling an omelet and sausages into his mouth. Only occasionally did he chew.

“Happy enough,” she said.

He nodded and snorted. “ ‘Happy enough,’ ” he quoted back to her. Sounds of swallowing and digestion erupted from him. “I give you a wish and you ask for a radio. There you have it.” His accent was even more obscure and curious this morning.

“Where are you from?” Jodie asked. She had to angle her left leg away from his because his took up so much space under the counter. “You’re not from here.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not really from anywhere. I was imported from Venice. A beautiful city, Venice. You ever been there?”

“Yes,” she said, although she had not been. But she did love to read histories. “Lagoons, the Bridge of Sighs, and typhoid. Yeah, I’ve been there.” She put her money down on the counter, and when she stood up, she felt a faint throbbing, almost a soreness but not quite that, Walton’s desire, its trace, still inside her. “I have to go.”

He resumed eating. “You didn’t even thank me,” the fat man said. “You smell of love and you didn’t even thank me.”

“All right. Thank you.” She was hurrying out.

When she saw him in the mirror behind the cash register, he tipped an imaginary hat. She had seen something in his eyes: malice, she thought. As soon as she was out on the sidewalk, under the café’s faded orange
awning, her thoughts returned to Walton. She wanted to see him immediately and touch him. She headed for the crosswalk, all thoughts of the fat man dispersing and vanishing like smoke.

On the way back, she saw a thimble in the gutter. She deposited it in her purse. A fountain pen on the brick ledge of a storefront income-tax service gleamed at her in the cottony hazy heat, and she took that, too. Walton had given her the habit of appreciating foundlings. When she walked onto the sleeping porch, she took off her shoes. She still felt ceremonial with him. She showed him the thimble and the fountain pen. Then they were making love, their bodies slippery with sweat, and this time she stopped him for a moment and said, “I saw that fat man again,” but he covered her mouth, and she sucked on his fingers. Afterward, she showered and dressed and caught the bus to work. Einstein groaned in her sleep as Jodie passed her in the hallway. The dog, Jodie thought, was probably jealous.

On the bus, Jodie hummed and smiled privately. She hadn’t known about all these resources of pleasure in the world. It was a great secret. She looked at the other passengers with politeness but no special interest. Her love was a power that could attract and charm. She was radiantly burning with it. Everyone could see it.

Through the window she spotted a flock of geese in a V pattern flying east and then veering south.

From time to time, at work—where she was bringing people rapidly into her orbit thanks to her aura of good fortune—she would think of her happiness and try to hide it. She remembered not to speak of it, good luck having a tendency to turn to its opposite when mentioned.

She called her sister and her mother, both of whom wanted to meet Walton as soon as possible. Jodie tried to be dryly objective about him, but she couldn’t keep it up for long; with her sister, she began giggling and weeping with happiness. Her best friend, Marge, came over one stormy afternoon in a visit of planned spontaneity and was so impressed by Walton that she took off her glasses and sang for him, thunder and lightning crashing outside and the electric lights flickering. She’d once been the vocalist in a band called Leaping Salmon, which had failed
because of the insipid legato prettiness of their songs; when they changed their name to Toxic Waste and went for a grunge sound, the other band members had ousted her. Singing in Leaping Salmon had been her only life adventure, and she always mentioned it in conversations to people she had just met and wanted to impress, but while she was singing in her high, honeyed soprano, Walton walked over to Jodie, sat down next to her, and put his hand on the inside of her thigh. So that was that.

I have a lover, Jodie thought. Most people have lovers without paying any attention to what they have. They think pleasure is a birthright. They don’t even know what luck they have when they have it.

At the end of the day she couldn’t wait to see him. Every time she came into the room, his face seemed alert, relaxed, and sensual. Sometimes, thinking about him, she could feel a tightening, a prickling, all over her body. She was so in love and her skin so sensitive that she had to wear soft fabrics, cottons repeatedly washed. Her bras began to feel confining and priggish; on some days, she wouldn’t wear them. The whole enterprise of love was old-fashioned and retrograde, she knew, but so what? Sometimes she thought, What’s happening to me? She felt a certain evangelical enthusiasm and piety about sex, and pity for those who were unlucky in love.

Her soul became absentminded.

On some nights when Walton didn’t have to go to the loading dock, she lay awake, with him draped around her. After lovemaking, his breath smelled of almonds. She would detach herself from him limb by limb and tiptoe into the kitchen. There, naked under the overhead light, she would remove her tarot pack from the coupon drawer and lay out the cards on the table.