The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  In the shadows, one side of his face seems about to collapse, as if the effort to keep up appearances has finally failed and daylight optimism has abandoned him. He sighs and scratches Junior behind the ears. In response, the dog smiles broadly. “Gears. I never heard of that one. I guess you don’t sleep any better than I do. We’re two members of the insomnia army.” He stretches now and reaches up to grab some air. “A brotherhood. And sisterhood. Did you know that Marlene Dietrich was a great insomniac?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Do you know what she did to keep herself occupied at night?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “She baked cakes,” he tells me. “I read this in the Sunday paper. She baked angel food cakes and then in the daytime she gave them away to her friends. Marlene Dietrich. She looked like she did, those eyes of hers, because she couldn’t sleep well. Now me,” he says, rearranging himself on the bench, “I just sit still here, very still, you know, like what’s-his-name, the compassionate Buddha, thinking about the world, the one you and I live in, and I come to conclusions. Conclusions and remedies. Lately I’ve been thinking of extreme remedies. For extreme problems we need extreme remedies. That’s the phrase.”

  “ ‘Extreme remedies’? What d’you mean? And don’t go putting me in your brotherhood. I’m just on a neighborhood stroll.”

  “ ‘A neighborhood stroll’! Man,” he says, pointing a revolver-finger at me, “you’ll be lucky if a patrol car doesn’t pick you up.”

  “Oh, I’m respectable,” I tell him.

  “Listen to yourself. ‘Respectable’! You’re dressed like a vagabond. A goon. It’s illegal to walk around at night in this town, didn’t you know that?” He stands up to give me an inquiring once-over. He apparently doesn’t like what he sees. “It makes you look like a danger to public safety. Vagrancy! They’ll haul your ass down to jail, man. They don’t allow it anymore unless you have a dog with you. The dog” — he nods at his own dog — “makes it legal. The dog makes it legitimate. I have a dog. You should have a dog. It’s best to have an upper-class dog like a collie or a golden retriever, a licensed dog. But any dog will do. Believe me, the happy people are all at home and asleep, snuggled together in their dreams.” He says this phrase with contempt. “All the lucky ones.” He sits down but still seems agitated. “The goddamn lucky ones . . . What’s your trouble?” He grins at me gnomishly. “Conscience bothering you? Got a writing block?”

  “No. I told you. I woke up disoriented. It happens all the time. Thinking about a book, I guess. I have to walk it off. Anyway, I already have a dog.”

  “I didn’t know that. Where is it?” He glances around, pretending to search.

  “Sleeping. She doesn’t like to walk with me at night. She doesn’t like how disoriented I am.”

  “Smart. So what you’re saying is, you don’t know where you are? Is that it?”

  “Right. I know where I am now.”

  “Maybe you’re too involved with fiction. Well, don’t mind me. But listen, since we’re here, tell me: how does this new book of yours begin? What’s the first line?”

  I start to pick some chewing gum off my shoe. “Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t give things like that away.”

  “Come on. I’m your neighbor, Charlie. I’ve known you, what is it — ?”

  “Twelve years,” I say.

  “Twelve years. You think I’m going to steal your line? I would never do that. I don’t do that. I’m not a writer, thank God. I’m a businessman. And an artist. Go ahead. Just tell me. Tell me how your novel starts.”

  I sit back for a moment. “ ‘The man,’ ” I recite, “ ‘me — no one else, it seems — wakes in fright.’ ”

  He kicks the toe of his shoe in the dirt and tanbark, and Junior sniffs at it. Now Bradley tries out a sympathetic tone. “That’s the line?”

  “That’s the line. It’s still in rough draft. Actually, it’s just in my head.”

  He nods. “Kind of melodramatic, though, right? I thought it was a cardinal rule not to start a novel with someone waking up in bed. And what’s all this about fright? Do you really awaken in terror? That doesn’t seem like you at all. And by the way I believe the word is awakens.”

  Irritated, I stare at him. “When did you become Mr. Usage? All right, I’ll revise it. Besides, I do wake in terror. Ask my wife.”

  “No, I would never do that. What’s the book called?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You should call it The Feast of Love. I’m the expert on that. I should write that book. Actually, I should be in that book. You should put me into your novel. I’m an expert on love. I’ve just broken up with my second wife, after all. I’m in an emotional tangle. Maybe I’d shoot myself before the final chapter. Your readers would wonder about the outcome. Yeah, the feast of love. It certainly isn’t what I expected when I was in high school and I was imagining what love was going to be, honeymoon jaunts, joy forever and that sort of thing.”

  I glance at the dog, who is yawning in my face. I bore this dog. “Aren’t you going out with a doctor now? Some new woman?”

  “That’s private.”

  “Hey, you came up with the title, and then you decide I can’t have it because it’s a metaphor? And you want to be a character in this book, and you won’t give me the details of your love life?”

  “Metaphor my ass. I don’t know. Call it The Feast of Love. I know: call it Unchain My Heart. Now there’s a good title. Call it anything you want to. But remember: metaphors mean something,” he says, sitting up. Junior also sits up. “You remember Kathryn, my ex? My first ex? When Kathryn called me a toad, which she did sometimes to punish me, I’m sure she chose that metaphor carefully. She took great care with her language. She was fastidious. She probably searched for that metaphor all day. She went shopping for metaphors, Kathryn did. X marked the spot where she found them. Then she displayed them, all these metaphors, to me. After a while it became her nickname for me, as in ‘Toad, my love, would you pass the potatoes?’ They were always about me, these metaphors, as it turned out. She got that one from The Wind in the Willows, her favorite book. You know: Mr. Toad?”

  He says this in his low voice and surveys the gloom of the playground, and now, in the dark, he does sound a bit like a toad.

  “It could have been worse,” he informs me. “A toad has dignity.” He looks around. Then he breaks into song.

  The Clever Men at Oxford

  Know all that there is to be knowed

  But they none of them know one

  half as much

  As intelligent Mr. Toad.

  “Anyway, I got on her nerves after a while. And of course, she was a lesbian, sort of, a little bit of one, a sexual tourist, but we could have handled the tourism part, given enough time. At least that’s what I thought. The real problem was that she didn’t like how inconsistent I was. She thought I was the man of a thousand faces, nice in the morning, not so nice at night. Men like me exasperated her. She once called me the Lon Chaney of the Midwest, the Lon Chaney with the monster light bulb burning inside his cheekbone. The phantom, she called me, of the opera.” He waits for a moment. “What opera? There’s no opera in this town.”

  He stares up into the night sky, then continues. “Well, at least I was a star. You know, women admire physical beauty in men more than they claim they do.” He says this to me conspiratorially, as if imparting a deep secret. He sighs. “Don’t kid yourself on that score.”

  “I would never kid myself about that,” I tell him. “This isn’t Diana you’re talking about? This is Kathryn?”

  “No,” he sighs angrily, “not Diana. Of course not. No, goddamn it, I told you: this was my first. My starter marriage. You met her, I know that. Kathryn.”

  “No,” I say, “I don’t remember her. But you weren’t married to Diana so long either.”

  “Maybe not,” he mutters, “but I loved her. Especially after we were divorced. A fate-prank. She loved someone else before I ma
rried her and she loved him while I was married to her, and she loves him now. The dog and I sit out here and we think about her, and about the business that I own, the coffee business. I don’t actually know what the dog thinks about.” A little air pocket of silence opens up between us. I hear him breathing, and I look down at his clasped hands. One of the hands reaches into his pants pocket for a dog treat, which he hands to Junior, who gobbles it down.

  “You shouldn’t do that. Get lost in nostalgia, I mean. But Diana was beautiful,” I say.

  “She still is. And I’m not nostalgic.”

  “But she was unfaithful to you,” I tell him. “You can’t love someone who does that.”

  “I almost could. She was powerful. She had me in a kind of spell, I’m not kidding.” He looks straight at me. “Nearly a goddess, Diana. I could let her destroy me. In flames. I’d go down in flames watching her.”

  Just as he finishes this sentence, some noise — it sounds like a crow cawing — filters down to us from very high in the nearby trees. Odd: I cannot remember ever hearing a crow at night. At the same time that I have this thought, I hear a man laugh twice, distantly, from the houses behind us. A horribly mean laugh, this is. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  “Oh, by the way,” I say, “I just came from the football stadium. Guess what I saw.”

  “They’re going to put a big fence around that place.” He laughs. “Didn’t you know that? A big fence. With a gigantic new Vegas-style scoreboard. People like you keep trying to get in.”

  “There’s no fence around it now,” I tell him.

  “I can see where this is going,” Bradley snorts. “Walking around at night, you’re soaking up material for your book, The Feast of Love, and what to your wandering eyes should appear? I know exactly what appeared. You saw some kids who’d snuck into the stadium and were actively naked on the fifty-yard line.”

  “Well, yes.” I wait, disappointed. “How did you know? I mean, I thought it was rather sweet. And you know, I was touched.”

  “Touched.”

  “It’s hard to describe. Their . . .”

  His curiosity gleams at me from his permanently love-struck face.

  “Oh, you know,” I say. “The waning moon was shining down on them. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or something of the sort.”

  “All right, sure. I know. Love on the field of play. Happens all the time, though,” he says in a calmer and possibly sedated voice. For a moment I wonder if he’s on Prozac. “Didn’t you know that? I grew up around here, so I should know. Kids sneaking in, it’s a big deal for them, they can point to the fifty-yard line and say, ‘Hey, man, guess what I did down there with my girlfriend? That’s where I got laid, Bub, right down there where that big guy is being taken off on a stretcher.’ ”

  “Well,” I say, “I gotta go.”

  He grabs my arm in a strong grip. “No you don’t. That’s the most ridiculous claim I ever heard. It’s two in the morning. You don’t have to go anywhere.”

  “My wife’s expecting me back.”

  He sits up suddenly. “Listen, Charlie,” he says. “I’ve got an idea. It’ll solve all your problems and it’ll solve mine. Why don’t you let me talk? Let everybody talk. I’ll send you people, you know, actual people, for a change, like for instance human beings who genuinely exist, and you listen to them for a while. Everybody’s got a story, and we’ll just start telling you the stories we have.”

  “What do you think I am, an anthropologist?” I mull it over. “No, sorry, Bradley, it won’t work. I’d have to fictionalize you. I’d have to fictionalize this dog here.” I pat Junior on the head. Junior smiles again: a very stupid and very friendly dog, but not a character in a novel.

  “Well, change your habits. And, believe me, it will work. Listen to this.” He clears his throat. “Okay. Chapter One. Every relationship has at least one really good day . . .”

  TWO

  EVERY RELATIONSHIP HAS at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there’s always that day. That day is always in your possession. That’s the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don’t. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, “Yeah, that’s the day we had an angel around.”

  I DON’T THINK that Kathryn and I had been married more than about two months when this event I’m about to describe occurred. About five years ago, we were living in a little basement apartment, and we both were working two jobs. She had a part-time job at the library during the day and she was waiting tables at night. I was the day manager at a coffee shop — not the place where I am now — and getting headaches from the overhead lighting, and I was also doing some house painting, but it was late autumn and the work came in fits and starts.

  Kathryn was strong and spirited, she once even threw a chair at me, but she had one fear. She was profoundly afraid of dogs. And not because she had ever been bitten. She claimed she hadn’t been bitten. No: it was just that when she saw one of these animals, on or off a leash, walking toward her, the hair on the back of her neck stood up. What you might call primal terror. She had no idea of the source of this fear. She just wanted to run away. I once saw her gallop down a steep hill in the Arboretum to escape a dog, a German shepherd puppy that had trotted up to her, its tail wagging, for a head pat. When I caught up to her, she was crying. “I don’t ever want to come back here again,” she said. “I can’t bear it.”

  “It was a puppy, Kathryn,” I told her.

  “I don’t care what it was. None of that matters,” she said. I had my arms around her, but then she turned so that she broke free of my embrace. She ran back to our car and locked herself inside, and I had to beg her to let me in. Man, I had to beg. And I ain’t too proud to beg. She had had her hair pinned up, but in her panic it had fallen down around her face, little tendrils, and her face was blotched with her crying. God, you know I hate to say it, but she was gorgeous like that, and I would have liked to help her. You need to do something for people when they get terrified, but terror is usually so vague, you can’t talk it out of anyone. What are you going to do when it doesn’t matter what you say?

  But it’s a funny thing about other people’s phobias, when you don’t share them: you pick at them, like a scab. You want to remove them.

  So on this day I’m telling you about, we were both free of our jobs, Kathryn and I, one of those late autumn midwestern Sundays, with a few golden leaves still attached to the trees, you know, last remnants, leaves soaked with cold rain and sticking to the car windshield or clinging to the branches they came from. She woke up and we made love and I said, I’ll make you breakfast, and I did, my specialty, scrambled eggs with onions and hot sauce, and then I made coffee, while she sat at the table, smiling, with her legs tucked under her. That was something she did. She sat in chairs with her legs tucked under her like that.

  We lazed around and read the Sunday paper and I massaged her neck and then we made love again, and then she said, “I want to go somewhere. Toadie, take me somewhere today, please?” So I said, Okay, sure. We got dressed for the second or third time that day, and we cleared off the pizza boxes from the front seat of my car, do you remember it? that old Ford Escort with the bad clutch? and we drove off. By this time it was about noon, maybe a bit after that.

  Without considering what I was doing, I found myself driving up toward the Humane Society, and I thought, the Humane Society? No, I really shouldn’t be doing this, but I kept driving because I was distracted by the leaves and by a knocking noise from the engine, which turned out to be the lifters, though I only discovered that later.

  “Uh, excuse me, but where’re we going?” Kathryn asked.

  “Up there,” I said in my cryptic secretive way. I did have those kennels and cages in mind but thought I should keep quiet about it. You can’t tell some women everything. You just can’t. Once we arrived, we parked in
the lot, close to this animal bunker that the Humane Society is housed in, and you could hear the barking echoing off the walls and the trees. My God, could you hear it. A deaf person could hear it. It’s constant and unrelenting. When they’re in that condition, dogs have a kind of howl that’s close to human, and it makes your body grip up; your nerves get restless and uneasy, listening to dogs crying out, carrying on. The old alarms seep down into your bones, right into the marrow where fear is lodged. And what I did in the car was, I sneezed, and Kathryn watched me sneeze without saying anything. No gesundheit, no God bless you, no nothing. She let me sneeze. Then she waited some more. I waited, too.

  “Is this what I think it is?” she asked. “Is this your great idea of where to take me on Sunday, our day off? Because, the thing is, I’m not going in there.”

  “Kathryn,” I said, “it’s the Humane Society. They’re in cages.”

  “No, Bradley,” she said. “I won’t. You probably mean well, probably, I’ll give you credit, but, no, I won’t go in there.”

  “I’ll hold you,” I said.

  “Hold me?”

  “Honey, I’ll hold you around the shoulders. And I have an idea. Kathryn, I have an idea about what you should do when you get inside.”

  “I don’t care what your idea is.”

  “I know it. I know you don’t care. But let’s try. Come on, honey,” I said, and I took her hand for a moment. After we got out of the car, I could tell she was terrified because her knees were shaking. Have you ever seen a woman’s knees in a spasm? From fear? It is not a sight that lifts you up.

  In the anteroom, which I remember because the floor was covered with green-mottled linoleum and also because the air was fragrant with a mixture of Lysol and Mr. Clean, the receptionist asked us what we were there for, and I said, well, we, that is, Kathryn and I, thought it was a little early to start a child, but maybe we could manage a dog. We were contemplating adopting a dog, I said, and Kathryn made a little sound, a sort of glottal grunt of apprehension, or a groan, but quietly, so that only I heard it. Guttural. And the receptionist, this young red-haired woman in a yellow jumpsuit, said, Well, it’s fortunate for you that these are visiting hours, so you can just go through that door there, and then turn to the left, and proceed down the hallway, and you’ll see them, the dogs I mean, because they’ll be on both sides. And if you want anything, you just come back and let me know.