There's something I want you to do : stories

155 Pages·2015·1.92 MB·English

by  Baxter

ALSO BY CHARLES BAXTER
FICTION
Gryphon
The Soul Thief
Saul and Patsy
The Feast of Love
Believers
Shadow Play
A Relative Stranger
First Light
Through the Safety Net
Harmony of the World
POETRY
Imaginary Paintings and Other Poems
PROSE
The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot
Burning Down the House
AS EDITOR
A William Maxwell Portrait (with Edward Hirsch and Michael Collier) The Business of Memory: The Art of
Remembering in an Age of Forgetting
Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life (with Peter Turchi) The Collected
Stories of Sherwood Anderson

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Charles Baxter All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto,
Penguin Random House companies.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Selected stories first appeared in the following: “Bravery” in Tin House 54 (Winter 2012) and subsequently in
Best American Short Stories 2013, edited by Elizabeth Strout with Heidi Pitlor (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2013); “Forbearance” in Michigan Quarterly Review 52, no. 2 (Spring 2013); “Charity” in
McSweeney’s, issue #43 (April 2013) and subsequently in Best American Short Stories 2014, edited by Jennifer
Egan with Heidi Pitlor (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); “Loyalty” in Harper’s (May 2013);
“Chastity” in Kenyon Review (Winter 2014); and “Sloth” in New England Review 34, nos. 3–4 (Winter 2014).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to reprint an excerpt
from “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine” by Delmore Schwartz, from Selected Poems, copyright ©
1959 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baxter, Charles, [date]
[Short stories. Selections]
There’s something I want you to do : stories / Charles Baxter.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-101-87001-3 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-10187002-0 (eBook).
I. Baxter, Charles, [date] Bravery. II. Title.
PS3552.A854A6 2014 813’.54—dc23 2014003352
eBook ISBN 9781101870020
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover photograph by Tema Stauffer Cover design by Oliver Munday
v4.0
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Contents
Cover
Also by Charles Baxter
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Bravery
Loyalty
Chastity
Charity
Forbearance
Part Two
Lust
Sloth
Avarice
Gluttony
Vanity
Coda
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Daniel and Hannah Baxter and for Arturo Steely
It is common knowledge that nobody is born with a decalogue already formed, but that
everyone builds his own either during his life or at the end, on the basis of his own
experiences, or of those of others which can be assimilated to his own; so that
everybody’s moral universe, suitably interpreted, comes to be identified with the sum of
his former experiences, and so represents an abridged form of his biography.
—Primo Levi, The Reawakening
PART ONE
Bravery
When she was a teenager, her junior year, her favorite trick involved riding in cars
with at least two other girls. You needed a female cluster in there, and you needed
to have the plainest one driving. They’d cruise University Avenue in Palo Alto until
they spotted some boys together near a street corner. Boys were always ganged up
at high-visibility intersections, marking territory and giving off cigarette smoke
and musk. At the red light, she’d roll down the window and shout, “Hey, you
guys!” The boys would turn toward the car slowly—very slowly—trying for cool.
Smoke emerged from their faces, from the nose or mouth. “Hey! Do you think
we’re pretty?” she’d shout. “Do you think we’re cute?”
Except for the plain one behind the wheel, the girls she consorted with were
cute, so the question wasn’t really a test. The light would turn green, and they’d
speed away before the boys could answer. The pleasure was in seeing them
flummoxed. Usually one of the guys, probably the sweetest, or the most eager,
would nod and raise his hand to wave. Susan would spy him, the sweet one,
through the back window, and she’d smile so that he’d have that smile to hold on to
all night. The not-so-sweet good-looking guys just stood there. They were
accustomed to being teased, and they always liked it. As for the other boys—well,
no one ever cared about them.
Despite what other girls said, boys were not all alike: you had to make your way
through their variables blindly, guessing at hidden qualities, the ones you could live
with.
Years later, in college, her roommate said to her, “You always go for the kind
ones, the considerate ones, those types. I mean, where’s the fun? I hate those guys.
They’re so humane, and shit like that. Give me a troublemaker any day.”
“Yeah, but a troublemaker will give you trouble.” She was painting her toenails,
even though the guys she dated never noticed her toenails. “Trouble comes home.
It moves in. It’s contagious.”
“I can take it. I’m an old-fashioned girl,” her roommate said with her
complicated irony.