Free Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin Page B

for a while, and then she took off one of her bracelets to show me. She said she wanted me to see how beautiful it was, how the turquoise changed color in dim light. She put it into my hand, and then I knew for sure what was going on. I looked at it for a long time, listening to the little sounds in the building, before I looked up.
    “Charlie?” Jodi says now in the dark.
    “Yes?”
    “Would you do whatever I asked you to do?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, would you do anything in the world that I asked you to do?”
    “That depends,” I say.
    “On what?”
    “On what you asked. If you asked me to rob someone, then maybe I wouldn’t.”
    I hear her roll over, and I know she’s looking at me. “But don’t you think I would have a good reason to ask you if I did?”
    “Probably.”
    “And wouldn’t you do it just because I asked?”
    She turns away again and I try to think of an answer. We’ve already argued once today, while she was making dinner, but I don’t want to lie to her. That’s what we argued about earlier. She asked me what I thought of the house we looked at, and I told her the truth, that a house just wasn’t important to me.
    “Then what is important to you?”
    I was putting the forks and knives on the table. “Leveling with other people is important to me,” I answered. “And you’re important to me.” Then I said, “And whales.”
    “What?”
    “Whales are important to me.”
    That was when it started. We didn’t say much after that, so it wasn’t an argument exactly. I don’t know why I mentioned the whales. They’re great animals, the biggest things on earth, but they’re not important to me.
    “What if it was something not so bad,” she says now, “but still something you didn’t want to do?”
    “What?”
    The moonlight is shining in her hair. “What if I asked you to do something that ordinarily you wouldn’t do yourself—would you do it if I asked?”
    “And it wasn’t something so bad?”
    “Right.”
    “Yes,” I say. “Then I would do it.”
     
    “What I want you to do,” she says on Wednesday, “is look at another house.” We’re eating dinner. “But I want them to take us seriously,” she says. “I want to act as if we’re really thinking of buying it, right on the verge. You know—maybe we will, maybe we won’t.”
    I take a sip of water, look out the window. “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Nobody walks in off the street and decides in an afternoon whether to buy a house.”
    “Maybe we’ve been looking at it from a distance for a long time,” she says, “assessing things.” She isn’t eating her dinner. I cooked it, chicken, and it’s steaming on her plate. “Maybe we’ve been waiting for the market to change.”
    “Why is it so important to you?”
    “It just is. And you said you’d do it if it was important to me. Didn’t you say that?”
    “I had a conversation with the old woman in the yellow house.”
    “What?”
    “When we looked at the other house,” I say, “I went off by myself for a while. I talked with the old woman who was sitting upstairs.”
    “What did you say?”
    “Do you remember her?”
    “Yes.”
    “She told me that the owner was selling the house so he could use the money to smuggle drugs.”
    “So?”
    “So,” I say, “you have to be careful.”
     
    This Sunday Jodi drives. The day is bright and blue, with a breeze from the ocean, and along Santa Monica Boulevard the palm fronds are rustling. I’m in my suit. If Jodi talks to the agent about offers, I’ve decided I’ll stay to the back, nod or shrug at questions. She parks the car on a side street and we walk around the corner and go into the lobby of one of the hotels. We sit down in cloth chairs near the entrance. A bellman carries over an ashtray on a stand and sets it between us; Jodi hands him a bill from her purse. I look at her. The bellman is the age of my father. He moves away fast, and I lean forward to get my