The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  So after a little, you know, after I’d recovered, I thought, now Oscar gets his reward, now he gets a prize, so I took his clothes off with my hands and teeth thread by thread and laid him down on the grass and scrambled on top of him. He looked up at me, no kidding, with hunger and impatience and appreciation. It doesn’t take much to make a boy happy, often the basics are enough.

  So he was lying there, sky-gazing. Deep inside me was Oscar, big and hard as thunder, doing the reliable thrusts that keep life going, the meteors showering all around us. And I was working away on him, moving my premium American-girl hips up and down, and then I looked up at the stands, built solidly way in the distance and bolted into the concrete.

  And that’s when I saw some guy sitting in the stands and looking down at us in the dark. It gave me a karma whiplash, and an idea.

  SIX

  SINCE YOU ASKED, I live next door to Bradley W. Smith. I see him walking his dog, also called Bradley. What is this, that a man should name his dog after himself? The man runs a local coffee franchise, a modest achievement, in all truth. Megalomania can strike anywhere, I suppose is the point.

  After he lost his second wife to another man, I decided to explain to him about Kierkegaard.

  AS A JEW, I am drawn in a suicidal manner toward the maddest of Christians. Kierkegaard, being one of the craziest and most lovable of the lot, and therefore, dialectically, possibly the most sane of them all, is of compelling interest to me. All my life, I have tracked his ghost doggedly through the snow. Lonely, eccentric, and crazed, the man Kierkegaard worried continuously about the mode in which one might think, or could think, about two unknowns: God and love. These were for the hapless Kierkegaard the most compelling topics. They bound him in tantalizing straps. Of the two vast subjects about which one can never be certain and should therefore perhaps keep silent, God and love, Kierkegaard, a bachelor, claimed especial expertise. Kierkegaard’s homage to both was multifarious verbiage. He wrote intricately beautiful seminonsense and thus became a hero of the intellectual type.

  AS A MEMBER of the bourgeoisie, I live quietly in this midwestern city of ghosts and mutterers. Everywhere you go in this town you hear people muttering. Often this is brilliant muttering, tenurable muttering, but that is not my point. All these mini-vocalizations are the effect of the local university, the Amalgamated Education Corporation, as I call it, my employer. It is in the nature of universities to promote ideas that should not be put to use, whose glories must reside exclusively in the cranium. Therefore the muttering. There are exceptions, of course. The multimillionaire lawyers and doctors and engineers — how did they get into the university in the first place? — live here among us in their, to quote Cole Porter, stinking pink palazzos, and motor about in their lustrous sleek cars. The warped personalities, like myself, like my prey Kierkegaard, walk hunched over and unnoticed, or we wait at the bus stops, managing our intricate and tiny mental kingdoms as the rain falls on our unhatted heads. We wait for the millennium and for Elijah.

  MY WIFE IS ESTHER, a tough bird, the love of my existence. She works as a biochemist for one of the local drug companies. It was Esther who years ago found out that the wonder medication Clodobrazole deformed babies in the womb, gave them unnatural shapes, took away toes and fingers and entire arms. If Esther’s mother hadn’t joined the Party as a young woman (and who else but the Reds was trying to desegregate the public beaches in those days? who else had a single social idea worth implementing?) and hadn’t put Esther in red diapers, and hadn’t signed Esther up for the Party as a child, she would have been proclaimed, my Esther, from the rooftops. But somehow, in the shower of publicity, some measuring worm looked up her background, and, though Esther as a youngster was blameless, and not a Leninist but a reader of Trotsky, that was that.

  We live, in all truth, a tranquil domestic life. We have a year or two to go before retirement. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I cook dinner. My specialty is a beef burgundy, very tasty, you have to remember to cook it slowly, covered of course, in the liquids so that the meat and the onions and the potatoes become tender. Tuesday and Thursdays are the nights when Esther cooks. We read, we talk, we play canasta and Scrabble. We feed the two goldfish, Julius and Ethel. They must live.

  As is proper, the children — all grown — have left home. We have three. The oldest, our beautiful daughter Sarah, is, like her mother, a biochemist. She is successful but, so far, unmarried. She would be a handful for any man. I mean this as praise and description. The middle one, Ephraim, is a mathematician and father to three wonderful little ones, our grandchildren. I have pictures here somewhere. Of the youngest, Aaron, who is crazy, I should not speak. And not because he blames me for the mess in his head. No: he deserves to be left alone with his commonplace lunacies — he calls them ideas — and given peace. He lives in Los Angeles.

  AFTER KATHRYN, Bradley’s first wife — a woman I never met, I should add — left him, Bradley became the manager of a local coffee shop and bought the house next door to us. He became our neighbor. He moved into a haunted house, haunted not by ghosts but divorce. A divorce dybbuk scuttled around inside the woodwork. Young couples would purchase that property, they would take up occupancy, they would quarrel, the quarreling would escalate to shouting and table-pounding, they would anathematize each other, and, presto, they would move out, not together but separately. They would scatter. Then back the house would go onto the real estate market. Three couples we saw this happen to.

  I should explain. At first sight, each time they arrived, they were fine, scrubbed American pragmatists you might see photographed in a glossy magazine. Blond, blue-eyed Rotarians, fresh owners of real estate, Hemingway readers, they would unload their cheerful sunny furniture from U-Haul vans. By the time they moved out, they would have acquired mottled gray skin and haggard Eastern European expressions. Even the children by that time would have the greenish appearance of owl-eyed Soviet refugees stumbling out of Aeroflot. These young families emerged from that house bent and broken, like vegetables left forgotten in the crisper.

  So, when Bradley arrived, alone except for his dog, we thought: the curse is over. The dybbuk will have to locate itself elsewhere . . . This Bradley, an interesting man, invited Esther and me to dinner the second week he was installed in that house. A courageous gesture. He was not afraid of Jews. He served veal, which Esther will not eat. In the dining room, she picked at it delicately. She left small scraps of it distributed randomly around her plate. I said later: at least no ham, no pork, no shrimp mousse, no trayf. But Harry, she said, veal to me is like a frozen scream. I can’t eat it. So don’t eat it, I said. So I don’t, she said. So?

  The man, Bradley, had a certain hangdog diffuseness characteristic of the recently divorced. But he was trying against certain odds to be cheerful. He asked me about my work, he asked Esther about her work, and he listened pleasantly while we did our best to explain. These topics do not provide good conversation. He listened, though. He had large watchful eyes. I was reminded of an extremely handsome toad, a toad with class and style and good tailoring. He seemed to be living far down inside himself, perhaps in a secret passageway connected to his heart. Biochemistry does not scintillate at the dinner table, however, nor do neo-Kantian aesthetics. Only when I mentioned Kierkegaard did Bradley perk up. From behind a locked bedroom door, his dog simultaneously barked. I assumed that the dog had caught sight of the dybbuk or was interested in Kierkegaard.

  Prompted by his interest, I said that Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, had fallen in love with an attractive girl, Regine Olsen, and then he had concluded that they would be incompatible, that the love was mistaken, that he himself was complex and she was simple, and he contrived to break the engagement so as to give the appearance that it was the young lady’s fault, not his.

  He succeeded in breaking the engagement, in never marrying her. Cowardice was probably involved here. Kierkegaard wished to believe that the fault lay with the nature of love itself, the problem of love
, its fate in his life. From the personal he extrapolated to the general. A philosopher’s trick. Regine married another man and moved away from Copenhagen to the West Indies, but Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, carried a burning torch for her, in the form of his philosophy, the rest of his days. This is madness of a complex lifelong variety. He spent his career writing philosophy that would, among other things, justify his actions toward Regine Olsen. He died of a warped spine.

  Esther says that when I am seated at a dinner table, plates and food in front of me, I am transmogrified into a bore. Yak yak, she says. At the table she adjusted her watchband and raised her eyebrows to me. I felt her kicking me in the shins.

  Still I pressed on.

  Søren Kierkegaard maintained that everyone intuits what love is, and yet it cannot be spoken of directly. Or distinctly. It falls into the category of the unknown, where plain speech is inadequate to the obscurity of the subject. Similarly, everyone experiences God, but the experience of God is so unlike the rest of our experiences that there, too, plain speech is defeated. According to Kierkegaard, nearly everyone intuits the subtlety of God, but almost no one knows how to speak of Him. This is where our troubles begin.

  At this point I noticed Bradley’s attention flagging somewhat. Esther kicked me again. She glanced toward Bradley, our new neighbor. Don’t lecture the boy, she meant.

  I raised my voice to keep his attention: Speaking about God is not, I said, pounding the dinner table lightly with my spoon for emphasis, the same as talking about car dealerships or Phillips screwdrivers. The salt and pepper shakers clattered. The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up — wordless, inarticulate — by denying their existence altogether, and pfffffft, they die. (They can, however, come back. Because God is a god, when He is dead, He doesn’t have to stay dead. He can come back if He chooses to. Nietzsche somehow failed to mention this.)

  Both God and love are best described and addressed by means of poetry. Poetry, however, is also stone dead at the present time, like its first cousin, God. Love will very quickly follow, no? Hmm? Don’t you agree? I asked. After God dies, must love, a smaller god, not follow?

  Uh, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it, said Bradley, our new neighbor. Do you want some dessert, Professor? I got some ice cream here in the refrigerator. It’s chocolate.

  A very nice change of subject, Esther said, breathless with relief. Harry, she continued, I think you should save Kierkegaard for some other time. For perhaps another party. A party with more Ph.Ds.

  She gave me a loving but boldly impatient look, perfected from a lifetime of practice. Esther does not like it when I philosophize about love. She feels implicated.

  Okay, I said, I’m sorry. I get going and I can’t help myself. I’m like a man trying to rid himself of an obsession. Actually, I am that man. I’m not like him at all.

  Esther turned toward Bradley Smith. Harry is on the outs in his department, she said. He does all the unfashionable philosophers, he’s a baggage handler of Bigthink. What do you do, again, Mr. Smith? You explained but I forgot.

  Well, he said, I’ve just bought into a coffee shop in the mall, I have a partnership, and now I’m managing it.

  This interested me because I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant.

  Also, he continued, I’m an artist. I paint pictures. There was an appreciable pause in the conversation while Esther and I took this in. Would you like to see my paintings? he asked. They’re all in the basement. Except for that one — he pointed — up there on the living room wall.

  Esther appeared discountenanced but recovered herself quickly.

  The artwork he had indicated had a great deal of open space in it. The painting itself covered much of the wall. However, three quarters of the canvas appeared to be vacant. It was like undeveloped commercial property. It hadn’t even been compromised with white paint. It was just unfulfilled canvas. Perhaps the open space was a commentary on what was there. In the upper right-hand corner of the picture, though, was the appearance of a window, or what might have been a window if you were disposed to think of it representationally. Through this window you could discern, distantly, a patch of green — which I took to be a field — and in the center of this green one could construe a figure. A figure of sorts. Unmistakably a woman.

  Who’s that? I asked.

  The painting’s called Synergy #1, Bradley said.

  Okay, but who’s that?

  Just a person.

  What sort of person? Who were you thinking of?

  Oh, it’s just an abstract person.

  Esther laughed. Bradley, she said, I never heard of an abstract person before. Except for the persons that my husband thinks of professionally. Example-persons, for example.

  Well, this one is. Abstract, I mean.

  It looks like a woman to me, Esther said. Viewed from a distance. As long as it’s a woman, it’s not abstract.

  Well, maybe she’s on the way to becoming abstract.

  Oh, you mean, as if she’s all women? A symbol for women? There she is, not a woman but all women, wrapped up in one woman, there in the distance?

  Maybe.

  Well, Esther said, I don’t like that. No such thing as Woman. Just women, and a woman, such as me, for example, clomping around in my mud boots. But that’s not to say that I don’t like your painting. I do like it.

  Thank you. I haven’t sold it yet.

  I like the window, Esther continued, and all those scrappy unpainted areas.

  It’s not quite unpainted, he informed us. It’s underpainted. I splashed some coffee on the canvas to stain it. Blend-of-the-day coffee from the place where I work. It’s a statement. You just can’t see the stains from here.

  Ah, I said, nodding. A statement about capitalism?

  Esther glared at me.

  You want to see my pictures in the basement? Bradley asked.

  Sure, I said, why not?

  Only thing is, he said, there’re some yellow jackets nesting in the walls — or wasps — and you’ll have to watch yourself when you get down there. Careful not to get stung.

  We’ll do that, I said.

  ABOUT THIS BASEMENT and the paintings residing there, what can I say? I held Esther’s hand as we descended the stairs. I feared that she might stumble. Wasps, likewise, were on my mind. I did not want to have her stung and would protect her if necessary. Bradley had leaned his paintings against the walls, as painters do, on the floor. Each painting leaned into another like a derelict reclining against other derelicts. He had installed a fervent showering of fluorescent light overhead. A quantity of light like that will give you a headache if you’re inclined, as I am, to pain. The basement smelled of turpentine and paint substances, the pleasant sinus-clearing elemental ingredients of art, backed by the more pessimistic odors of subsurface cellar mold and mildew.

  One by one he brought out his visions.

  This, he said, is Composition in Gray and Black. He held up for our inspection images of syphilis and gonorrhea.

  And this, he said, is called Free Weights.

  Very interesting, Esther said, scratching her nose with a pencil she had found somewhere, as she contemplated our neighbor’s abstract dumbbells and barbells, seemingly hanging, like acorns, from badly imagined and executed surrealist trees, growing in a forest of fog and painterly confusion that no revision could hope to clarify.

  And here, he said, lugging out a larger canvas from behind the others, is a different sort of picture. In my former style. He placed it before us.

  Until that moment I had thought the boy, our neighbor, a dim bulb. This painting was breath-snatching. What’s this called? I asked him.

  I call it The Feast of Love, Bradley said.

  In contrast to his other paintings, which appeared to have been slo
pped over with mud and coffee grounds, this one, this feast of love, consisted of color. A sunlit table — on which had been set dishes and cups and glasses — appeared to be overflowing with light. The table and the feast had been placed in the foreground, and on all sides the background fell backward into a sort of visible darkness. The eye returned to the table. In the glasses was not wine but light, on the plates were dishes of brightest hues, as if the appetite the guest brought to this feast was an appetite not for food but for the entire spectrum as lit by celestial arc lamps. The food had no shape. It had only color, burning pastels, of the pale but intense variety. Visionary magic flowed from one end of the table to the other, all the suggestions of food having been abstracted into too-bright shapes, as if one had stepped out of a movie theater into a bright afternoon summer downtown where all the objects were so overcrowded with light that the eye couldn’t process any of it. The painting was like a flashbulb, a blinding, cataract art. This food laid out before us was like that. Then I noticed that the front of the table seemed to be tipped toward the viewer, as if all this light, and all this food, and all this love, was about to slide into our laps. The feast of love was the feast of light, and it was about to become ours.

  Esther sighed: Oh oh oh. It’s beautiful. And then she said, Where are the people?

  There aren’t any, Bradley told her.

  Why not?

  Because, he said, no one’s ever allowed to go there. You can see it but you can’t reach it.