The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  Now it was my turn to scratch my balding head. Bradley, I barked at him, this is not like your other paintings, this is magnificent, why do you hide such things?

  Because it’s not true, he said.

  What do you mean, it’s not true? Of course it’s true if you can paint it.

  No, he said, still looking fixedly at his creation. If you can’t get there, then it’s not true. He looked up at me and Esther, two old people holding hands in our neighbor’s basement. I’m not a fool, he said. I don’t spend my time painting foolish dreams and fantasies. Once was enough.

  I could have argued with him but chose not to.

  And with that, he picked up the painting and hid it behind the silly ugly dumbbells growing like acorns on psychotic trees.

  WHAT A STRANGE YOUNG MAN, Esther said, tucked in next to me several hours later, sleepy but sleepless in the dark. Her nightgown swished as she tossed and turned. He seems so nondescript and midwestern, harmless, and then he produces from the back of his basement a picture that anyone would remember for the rest of their lives.

  Oh, I said, you could say it’s imitation Matisse or imitation Hockney. Besides, I said, light as a subject for contemporary paintings is passé.

  You could say that, Esther whispered, but you wouldn’t, and if you did, you’d be wrong.

  She gave me a little playful slap.

  I only said that you could say that, not that you would.

  You didn’t actually say it.

  No. Not actually.

  Good, Esther said. I realized that she was agitated. I turned to her and rubbed her back and her neck, and she put her hands on my face. I could feel her smiling in the darkness. I could feel her wrinkles rising.

  Harry, she said, it was a recognition for me, a moment of beauty. How strange that a wonderful painting should be created by such a seemingly mediocre man. Our neighbor, living in the Dybbuk House. How strange, how strange. Then she sighed. How strange, she said again.

  Then the phone rang.

  Don’t answer it, Esther quickly said. You mustn’t. Don’t, dear, don’t, don’t, don’t.

  No, I must, I told her. I must.

  I PICKED UP THE TELEPHONE RECEIVER and said, Hello? From across the continent, on the West Coast, my son Aaron began speaking to me. In a voice tireless with rage he cursed me and his mother who lay beside me. Once again I was invited to hear the story of how I had ruined his life, destroyed his soul, sacrificed him to the devils and angels of lost ambition. In numbing fashion he found words to batter my heart. Indictment: I had expected more of him than he could achieve. Indictment: I had had hopes for him that drove him, he said, insane. Indictment: I was who I was. Crazy, sick, and inspired with malice, he described his craziness and his sickness in detail, his terrible impulses to hurt others and to hurt himself, as if I had not heard this story many times before, several times, innumerable times. Razors, wire, gas. He called me, his father, a motherfucker. He told me that he did not want me to be his father anymore. Then he broke down in tears and asked for money. Demanded money. From the nothingness and everlasting night of his life, he demanded cash. I, too, was weeping with sorrow and rage, holding the earpiece tightly to my head so that not a word would escape to Esther. Cupping my hand around the mouthpiece, I asked him if he had hurt anyone, if he had hurt himself, and he said no, but he was thinking about it, he planned every single minute in advance, he planned monstrous personal calamities, he needed help, he would ask for help, but first he had to have money now, this very minute, my money, superhuman quantities of it. Don’t make me your sacrificial lamp, he said, then corrected himself, sacrificial lamb, don’t you do that now, not again. I said, against my better judgment, that I would see what I could do, I would send him what I had. He seemed briefly calm. He breathed in and out. He pleasantly wished me good night, as if at the conclusion of an effective performance.

  To have a son or daughter like this is to have a portion of the spirit shrivel and die, never to recover. You witness the lost soul of your child floating out into the ethers of eternity. Ethics is a dream, and tenderness a daytime phantasm, lost when night comes. Esther and I, eyes open, held each other until dawn broke. My darling wept in my arms, our hearts in ruin. We live in a large city, populated only by ourselves.

  Kafka: A false alarm on the night bell once answered — it cannot be made good, not ever.

  SEVEN

  ONCE I HAD BRADLEY THE DOG returned to his rightful owner (myself), I saved a bit of money for a down payment-actually, I was doing pretty well, financially — and moved out of my basement apartment into a white clapboard house next door to Harry and Esther Ginsberg, who became my friends and neighbors. Everything I owned fit into one small moving van. I brought the dog, and my easels, my paint tubes, my paintings, and every other worldly possession that I thought was fit to survive, and I found places for them where they seemed comfortable. I was the only entity in that house that didn’t have a place to be. Bradley had his back room and his dog bed, the paintings had the basement, the clothes had their closet, the clock had its wall, the audio system had its shelves. I roamed around the house trying to figure out my proper location. But I couldn’t get comfortable anywhere, including the bedroom, and finally I decided not to worry and just to go on being relaxed and uncomfortable and myself. After all, I was a single, recently divorced man. I was both a problem and a solution.

  A MAN LIVING ALONE is a king of sorts, but unfortunately only one minute at a time, and his kingdom is remote and typically unvisited and small, with few comforts. Moodiness and solitude are the order of the day. It’s easy to control moods and the king’s solitude as long as there is a royal project, a scheme, or narcotic drugs left over from root canal, but the drugs eventually run out.

  Those first few weeks, I was making business arrangements (I went from being a salaried employee to being an entrepreneur), but once I had organized the business in the mall and saw that it was up and running, I went back to my painting during my free time at home. I’d paint canvases and take the dog for endless walks around town, and we would watch sports on TV, Bradley the dog and I, though I was very often indifferent to the outcomes. Why should I cheer these steroid-stupefied guys? I’d watch seven innings, or two quarters, and then I’d turn the whole thing off, too confused about my allegiances to care.

  Typically on weekends I would go down to the basement and start with the brushes and the canvases. I had a battery-operated radio propped up on top of the water heater and tuned to the FM station, and some masterpiece from the repertoire would come on, let’s say Brahms, one of those symphonies, and I’d be all right until I started to listen. Since I’m visual, I converted everything audible into a visual, and while I was listening to this heavy Brahmsian music — it sounded like excited lamentation to me — I’d imagine a leaf being blown across a field, and then I saw myself as that same leaf being windswept on a drift of snow, and then I’d see a dry creek bed and people at a party at dawn wandering home and feeling hungover and sick in the key of D major, and I’d think: This isn’t about good emotional hygiene, this is about me. I don’t want to be a leaf, hell with that, I’m a king and not a leaf, I’m Bradley W. Smith, and I’d snap off the music. But once you’ve got yourself successfully imagined as a dry leaf and you’ve got that particular image stuck in your head, it’s difficult to get it out of your mental repository, and you’re committed to it.

  This is how people mess themselves up, getting obsessed with images.

  I’d wait for the news to come on and announce some noteworthy global disaster to take my mind off Brahms, but sometimes no global disasters present themselves when you require them, just a scandal or two to keep people interested in the informational scene, and so I’d start painting the leaf that I had become, I’d put the Bradley-leaf into a corner of the painting, and gradually the rest of the painting would become unimportant and I’d overpaint it and make it abstract with the only resolution in imagery being that Bradley-leaf rising out of a
dense fog of abstraction. After a while you wouldn’t even be able to tell what it was I had painted exactly; it had rearranged itself very far from the familiar home truths. I didn’t want it to seem melancholy — I can’t stand pathos — but there it was, hopeless and crazily metaphorical, nevertheless still a leaf, abstract as it was. Rothko wouldn’t have done it that way. Franz Kline wouldn’t have done it that way. No one else would have. It was my own autobiographical leaf, shadowing me and showing up in my painting, in pursuit.

  What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you — if you happen to be me — with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel.

  I would sometimes mention these matters to Harry Ginsberg. I figured, well, he is a philosopher, after all. He’d be shoveling snow off his sidewalk, and I’d be doing the same, and I’d come over to his side to help him out. This was March, when you’re sick of the snow and the overcast skies, and the sickness also has a way of settling down on your self, particularly on those days when money, more and more money, doesn’t seem like the solution to anything.

  Harry was glum, worried about Aaron again. “Good morning,” he would say, downcast.

  “Aloha,” I said this one time, to cheer him up, leaning on my snow shovel. “How’ve you been, Harry?”

  “It does not bear discussion,” he said, pushing snow in my direction. Then he propped his shovel on his arm as I had been doing. “Today I was thinking of a story. A poem, I think, that my mother used to recite.” He looked at me and breathed in. “About a dragon with a rubber nose. This dragon would erase all the signs in town at night. During the day, no one would know where to go or what to buy. No signs anywhere. Posters gone, information gone. Interesting, isn’t it? A world without signs of any kind. The poem was in Yiddish. Signlessness is perhaps a Jewish fixation. Very curious. I often think about that poem.”

  “Very interesting,” I said. “Harry, where did you meet Esther?”

  “At a political rally,” he told me, a twinge of impatience darkening his face. “Why do you ask?”

  “I sometimes think I need to meet someone.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Are there not conventions and get-togethers in your coffee business?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Then go to one,” he said, resuming his shoveling. “Meet someone. Meet anyone.” I could tell that in his present mood he didn’t want to talk to me anymore, so I left him there, disappointed with the snow, the fact of it.

  NEVERTHELESS, I DECIDED to follow his advice. A month later, I went off to a convention in Indianapolis of specialty coffee retailers, and I asked Chloé and Oscar to stay in my house, so that I wouldn’t have to pay the expense of boarding Bradley the dog at a kennel. They would house-sit, and they did. They moved in with cagey smiles on their faces.

  In Indianapolis, at the convention, I had a one-night stand with the assistant manager of a Starbucks in Minnesota, and the experience was extremely pleasant but quite hard to remember after it was over — she was, and I’m not this saying as criticism, taxing once you got past her superficial prettiness, and at breakfast we finally decided not to converse because of the difficulty in finding topics of common interest. Our sudden and surprising apathy toward each other made the time pass slowly, above the scrambled eggs and the toast and the coffee. With the haze of drunkenness having faded and sobriety taking its place, she apparently found me shabby and colorless in the way that people can often be in the morning. I do remember that her red hair smelled of smoke when we were in bed. Smoky red hair, as if the head were on fire.

  When I returned home from the convention in Indianapolis, the house was spick-and-span, nothing out of place. I mean those two, Oscar and Chloé, looked like castoffs and flotsam, but, being in love, their inner lives were conventionally brisk, and they were fastidious and neat, as if they wanted the world to continue for a while so that they could be in it.

  I’d only been back in the house for a day or so when I noticed that an imperceptible change had overtaken the first floor and the bedrooms upstairs. I was cooking dinner, a simple stir-fry, when I thought I heard some sound, a cry of some sort, coming from the living room. Thinking that it might be Bradley, I checked the room but found nothing out of place. Here on one side was the bookcase, and there against the west wall was the audio system. I shrugged to myself and soon forgot about it. As I was doing the dishes, my hands slippery with soap, the tap water splashing into the sink, I heard the cry again, more distinctly, and this time I knew that the cry had not been one of pain but of surprise. Pleasure was in it somewhere. I found this auditory memory quite perplexing.

  Suspicious, I went into the living room and did a thorough search, the dog following me. Finally I turned up a slip of paper hiding under the corner of the rug. On it was some handwriting that I recognized as Chloé’s. It seemed to be in code.

  Living room §

  Kitchen §

  Kitchen table ¤

  Bedroom

  Bathroom shower

  Basement

  It appeared to be some sort of checklist. At first I imagined that she had gone around the house checking to make sure that everything was where it should be. I tossed the paper into the wastebasket and went back to making my dinner.

  After dinner I fished the list back out of the wastebasket and checked it again, peering at the arcane doodled symbols. These kids, what had they done in my house? Living room, they wrote, followed by the strange coupled § symbol. I walked into the living room and sat down, not on the sofa, but on the floor. I closed my eyes and imagined these kids, the house sitters, also in the living room, engaged with each other so that their bodies formed a §. They laughed, they came together, they were solemn, and then they rested.

  I imagined them, these kids, these newcomers to love, doing what kids do, exploring a house, having sex in the rooms, then the girl making a list of where and how, and as I sat there I heard the happy cry again plain as nightfall, and I thought: this house isn’t haunted, but it does have a memory, this house remembers what people have done here, and then it plays back those sounds like a bored and absentminded African parrot. I moved through the rooms, feeling my way through the passions these kids had had, how they laid each other in bed, forming a

  In the basement I felt the two of them passing by me, felt the memory of their having been physically present there as the boy, Oscar, teased the girl, Chloé, while they looked at my paintings and talked about them, the girl leaning over and the boy, behind her, reaching over to touch her — there — at the base of her neck, a delicate spot for her. Then he extended his arms around her, still standing behind her, as if grasping for her animal heart. Words were spoken. They made love quickly, standing up, I think, and Chloé’s back, when she came, got damp. Then they turned off the lights and went upstairs. They were still somewhat frightened and impressed by the size and the majesty of their attraction to each other.

  I follow them up the stairs. I watch them go into the kitchen and observe them making a dinner of hamburgers and potato chips. They recover their senses by talking and listening to the radio. I watch them feed each other. This is love in the present tense, and finally I have had enough of them, and I close my eyes, and when I open my eyes again, they are gone, and the house is mine again, at least for the time being.

  All the same, there is still no comfortable place for me in the house. I am not much of a king, in my present condition. Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it.

  EIGHT

&n
bsp; SMELLING OF ONION and garlic, what we did was, we’d lie in bed together, jabbering about the future, Oscar and me. This was in his room, because I was moving out of my roommates’ palace into my own efficiency and spending more time just now in Oscar’s bedroom, except for those days we house-sat at Bradley Smith’s. Oscar’s bedroom: like I already told you: trophies with bronzed guys running in place up on the shelf, his track shoes still on their nail, and snow drifting down outside. On his bookshelf: board games like Monopoly and Clue, relay batons from his track team, and busted video cartridges, dead Super Mario circuits and dead Ninja Warriors likewise. And right over there, up above us, located on the wall, was a crucified bronze Jesus I didn’t want to ask about, what he was doing there or anything. I was lying snug under the covers one day with my hand peacefully on Oscar’s dick, you know, holding it, it being only half-awake, similar to Oscar himself, ’cause we’d already done our lovemaking a couple times, and he, Oscar, was talkin’ about the future.

  “I have this image,” he said.

  “What image?”

  “You know how people when they’re ultra-rich, they’ve got front hallways?”

  I said yeah.

  “There’s a name for it.”

  “For what?”

  He lowered himself down in bed and kissed me, a little tongue and lip thing, on my nipple. His tongue stud gave it, I don’t know, metallic content. Next to the bed we had acquired a bowl of popcorn that we microwaved a little while ago. When he kissed me, he tasted inside his mouth of buttered popcorn. Sometimes burned popcorn. It was like he was cooking snacks in there. My nipples stood up, it was almost painful.

  “They’ve got a name for that, that room inside the front door. Where they put the big grandfather clocks and shit. You know. Also those things they put the umbrellas into.”