The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  “Like, the foyer?”

  “Fucking A.” He nodded. “The foyer.” He was so pleased with himself or with me, he woke up utterly and got a boomer Woodrow immediately. It lifted my hand up. His dick is like a human barometer that way. I started to go down on him but he said, “No, no, wait.” He put his fingers on my face and drew it up back to the pillow. His woody didn’t get discouraged. It stayed nestled in my girl-grip, and I could feel his heart beat through it. “See, here I am, comin’ home. Here’s Oscar. Oscar-of-the-future.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, you gotta imagine this. Okay? Here I am, Oscar, and I’m comin’ home.”

  “All right. You’re comin’ home. I’m imagining it.”

  “Right. From what am I coming home? From whatever shit it is that I do. From my work.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s, like, the end of the day. Quitting time. Factory whistles are blowing. And I’m comin’ home. Right? And in my truck, I’ve run into a detour which takes me around that new drive-in bank and this pond where the ducks have already flown south and that mini-mall and the multiplex. I’m just drivin’, my hands on the wheel. And I’m like, I don’t care about this detour. I am not bummed. We’re thinking up the future, okay? Now? This is what we’re doin’?”

  “Okay.” Outside, I heard the sound of an airplane or something taking off. The furnace in the house started up.

  “I’m comin’ home.” He got distracted and kissed me on the mouth and our tongues swirled for a while. Tongue stud action again. He shook his head like he was waking up. “I’m not comin’ home, I am home, see, and I’m comin’ in the door. My truck’s in the driveway.”

  “Where am I, Oscar?”

  “Where are you? Oh, okay. Honey, you’re inside. You’re inside this big house, Chloé, you’re doing household shit. How the fuck should I know? You gotta decide that for yourself, right? ’Cause you’d be totally adult and feminist and everything about it. You want something done in the house, you give orders and it happens. You’re tough. You’re a take-no-prisoners woman. A real tough chick. We’re alike, that way. Tough, I mean.”

  “I’m in the house? I live with you?”

  “Yeah, you’re there.”

  “Wow. Okay.” I moved over and slipped his cock inside me. He was ultra-hard like a broomstick, but softer, Oscar being human.

  “Don’t distract me,” he said. “So I’m comin’ in the front door, and I’ve got, like, the bills, that’ve come in the mail?”

  “Right.”

  “And Chloé, these are fucking huge bills. You never saw bills like this! These are bills for mortgages and shit, bills for the fucking dentist, bills for — I don’t know — the eye guy, and the shrink, and bills for the phone and the electricity, these are the biggest colossal bills you ever saw, and they came in the mail, and I’ve got them. I got them in my hand.”

  “What’s so great about this?” We were lying side by side, doin’ our thing with our hips sedately, but it’s weird because it’s so secondary, though I’m heating up? I was so wet down there but I was also trying to concentrate on what he was saying. “What’s so great about getting bills?”

  “Hello? You’re not listening to me,” he said. “’Cause I’ve got these bills, they’re like, uh, you know, the national debt, but look at the look on my face.”

  “Now?” His eyes were kind of not-focusing just then. He was staring toward the Monopoly game, on the other side of the room, and his glass Mason jar full of pennies, and the other Mason jar full of old shoelaces.

  “No, not now. In the future. Look at me, Oscar-of-the-future. Uh. Do I look scared?”

  “I can’t see you.”

  “Yes, you can. Look harder. Close your eyes.”

  I closed them.

  “Okay, now imagine Oscar-of-the-future. That’s me. That’s me comin’ home to the house, not-bummed by the detour. Look at the look on my face while I’m holding these huge bills I gotta pay. Do I look scared?”

  “No.”

  “How do I look?”

  I kept my eyes closed. “Like a man. Confident and like that. A hero, even. You’re smiling?”

  “Fucking A. I’m smiling. You know why I’m smilin’?”

  “’Cause you can pay all those bills, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. ’Cause I’m a big man and nothin’ scares me and I can pay all the bills because we got plenty of money, and, uh, I’m fearless —”

  He made a yelp, and he suddenly came, to his surprise. When he comes, his shoulders sometimes jerk back, and they did this time, too. It made me so happy to see him that I came with him, right on the dotted line, but quick. Efficient. It’s like we’re connected with wires that way. Something happens to him, it happens to me. We’re concerted. Is that a word? It should be. Now it is.

  We took a minute out for a breather, though we kept ourselves together. No condoms, I don’t like them, I’m on the pill. It’s funny about Oscar, he can come and pretty soon he’s got his hard-on back, standing up and smiling at me. Weird. Maybe this was, like, the month of his sexual peak. I mean, in some ways he was still a boy. You could tell how he was still treating sex like it was a drug and vastly illegal. He had that addict glint in his eye. But it could be tiring also, like shoplifting. It goes from being hip to being a chore. You get to where you want to do something else. The righteousness goes out of it. That can happen.

  “Now you,” he said.

  “What about me?”

  “The future, man. We were talkin’ about the future.” He put his finger on my earlobe, where it had been pierced, as per his suggestion, my earlobe where I wasn’t underpierced anymore, thanks to him.

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “Sure you can. Chicks can always see the future, it’s what they do. Guys don’t, so much, except those weathermen, you know — meteorologists. Forecasters. So whattya see?”

  “I can’t see anything,” I repeated.

  “Don’t be lame. Close your eyes.” I did. “Okay. Whattya see?”

  I put my head on his chest. “Well, maybe in that foyer we were talkin’ about? With the, what do you call it? umbrella stand?” I was speaking real slow. Groping love-talk.

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a table made out of wood? And there’s, like, this vase, and it’s red glass, and it’s got flowers and . . . wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “Your heart sounds weird.”

  “Oh, yeah, that.”

  I had my ear to his chest, where usually with humans you hear chunka-thoom, chunka-thoom, chunka-thoom. But! Oscar had this other sound, chunka-jazz-thoom, chunka-jazz-thoom, chunka-jazz-thoom.

  “I’ve got this heart thing,” Oscar said. “Valves and shit. Like a murmur.” He shrugged. His dick went down from where it was, but he was working up the confidence look and the greaser sneer on his face, like what’s-his-name, the movie star. Even in bed he was working hard on his attitude. “It’s nothin’,” he said.

  “Fuck and alas, Oscar! It’s something. You should, like, have it looked at?”

  “They did already. And they said, Forget it, he’ll live. So tell me about this vase, Chloé, that you mentioned.”

  But now, I sort of didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to imagine the future. The righteousness had gone out of that, too. But I thought maybe I should, a favor to Oscar. “There’s flowers, you know, people have flowers in vases.”

  “What kind?”

  He had his hands now in my hair, which was tricky, ’cause my hair’s so short. “I don’t know.” It was hard for me to imagine the fucking flowers in the damn vase while Oscar’s heart was murmuring and death was taking a close look at him. “Roses,” I said. I took a big breath, to imagine them. “Red roses, with petals? Like they have them.”

  “Okay. We’ve done this. What’s upstairs?”

  “Oscar, I’m sort of tired of this.” I shined a big fakey smile at him, then dropped the idea.

  “Come on, Ch
loé, what’s upstairs?”

  I shut my eyes. I was working at it. I was imagining. Imagining is hard work for me, at times.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I’m still goin’ up the stairs.”

  “Okay.” He waited. “You up there, yet?”

  “Yeah. Just about. I got my hand on the banister.”

  “So what’s up there?”

  I had this problem then. Because what I was seeing was, all the kids Oscar and I would have. Like three kids in their kid clothes, OshKosh overalls with spit-up on the bibs, and they’re yelling and jumping up and down and breaking shit and having fun, like a kid party. And maybe a baby in a crib or something.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Big bedrooms, Oscar. The thickest carpeting you ever saw.”

  “Right. I can see it. It’s, like, gotta be white.”

  “Yeah. It’s the second floor. White carpeting in the hallways. Thing is, Oscar, I’ve never been in a house with a second floor. So it’s hard for me to know.”

  “I have,” he said. “They got bedrooms up there.”

  “Okay.” He closed my eyes with his fingers. He did it real softly. “Okay. I guess I’m, like, supposed to imagine the rest of it,” I said.

  “What’s in the bedrooms, Chloé?”

  “We are.”

  “And what else?”

  I took a deep breath, from way down in, what do they call it? the diaphragm. By which I mean my heart. Because I have one, too. “Kids, Oscar. There’s kids everywhere. They’re our kids. We’ve got, like, three? I can’t count them all.”

  His dick started standing up again. “I was hopin’ you’d say that.”

  “Bullshit. You were? Really?”

  “Yeah. On account of I am the person who is not scared, like I said. Fearless. So that would also include kids, right? I like kids, man. Gettin’ into trouble and shit. I was a kid. Absolutely.”

  “Absolutely!” I said, so happy my toes were tingling, little battery-operated things zapping them. “So . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  I was thinking of his heart. “So I have this idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I brought it with me,” I said.

  So what I did then was, I got out of bed, naked, and I walked over to my backpack, and I was about to get the thing I wanted to show him out of there, but I had to clean myself up, I was dripping, so I said, like the Princess of Wales: Excuse me, I’ll be right back.

  I went out into the hall, I guess you’d call it. Oscar’s bedroom is on one side, and his father, the Bat, well, the Bat’s bedroom is on the other side, and that’s it, in this little ranch house. Oscar’s older brother, he’d moved out, and there’s no mother because she’s dead and everything. It was about four in the afternoon. I was going to the bathroom to clean the remnants of Oscar off of myself. And I did. But when I was returning to Oscar’s bedroom, I thought I saw something way down out there on the corner of my eye. It was Oscar’s dad, the Bat, in the kitchen, sitting at the table, peeling some kind of awful fruit, and I sort of thought he got a measuring look at me, without my clothes on. Maybe I was imagining it. That can happen.

  “I think your dad’s home,” I said, standing there. My hand stayed on the doorknob.

  “Fuck him,” Oscar said.

  “No, I think he’s really home.” I waited. “He’s peeling food,” I said, to prove it.

  “So what’re you going to show me?”

  I took the videocam out of my backpack. “This,” I said. I hoisted it on my bare shoulder and aimed it down at him.

  “Where’d you get that, Chloé?”

  “I sort of stole it. The people who own it, they won’t miss it.” I meant my parents, who I knew pretty well.

  “And what’s your plan?”

  I put the camera down on the floor and got back into bed with him, my forearm on his chest. “Well, this girl told me how, you make a tape, you know, us in bed, you sort of invent a name for yourself and a story and then, I mean, we, well, what we do is, we just make a tape of ourselves doing it, like what we usually do, maybe some additions, fancy stuff, costumes that we take off for the camera, and there’s an address these sex industry magazines have where you send the tape, or, well, you send them a sampler first, then the tape, and they send you huge bucks. This girl I know, Janey, she’ll do it all for us. She wants to break into the video industry.”

  Oscar didn’t look that happy about it. You could see he was kind of divided. ’Cause after all we had just been talking about a house, and, like, vases and stairs. And so much money that you weren’t afraid of anything in the world. It’s hard to make big bucks at Dr. Enchilada’s or Jitters. But he was the one who said our sex lives were so good we ought to be able to make some money out of it, but clueless as to how, leaving it to me. He was the one who said we were magnificent, or some word like that. I told him I knew he was smart and could think of a story we could act out. It would be harmless.

  But. I also had a little disgusting feeling, even as I was saying what I was saying. I mean, Oscar’s got a nice body and, me, I’ve got a nice body, but I could see these old men looking at our tape and drooling. Excuse me, that’s not always the road to vases and flowers and kids upstairs. That’s radically poor karma, guys drooling. Also, as a rule, guys who drool don’t shave. Gargoyles! But I thought, hey, a few times, why not, hey, nothing ventured? And we don’t have to see the guys. We’ll be safely inside the television screen.

  Anyway, this friend I had, this video person named Janey, would help us make it look cool. And tasteful. She was the one who gave me the idea in the first place. She said she knew what to do with it, to sell it. She had taken film and video classes at the community college. She knew lighting and how to focus.

  This is where, out of the blue, Oscar said, “Chloé, it’s weird, but I love you.” He waited. “I never said that before.”

  And I said, “Oscar, I love you, you are everything.”

  “You think we can make some money out of this?”

  “Maybe.” Then I said my nothing-ventured thing and how we were so minimum-wage and actually desperate right now.

  “It’s way creepy,” he said. “But it’s okay. I guess. ’Cause of the money.”

  “Right.”

  “And it’s not like work, either.”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  “Chloé, tell me somethin’ about when you were a girl.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to hear it. I just want to see you from then.” He looked right in my eyes. He wasn’t zoned. So I, like, got up and sort of straddled him.

  “Okay,” I said. “When me and my sister, we rode in the car? long trips? We sat in the backseat. And time goes slower in the backseat than the front seat because the front seat gets everywhere first, in case you haven’t noticed. Just zombie slow. So what my sister Rhonda and me did was, we took Kleenex tissues, just plain Kleenex, from our mother, who had zillions of them in her purse, and we’d take them, and this was a contest. We invented this.” I had my hands on his shoulders, pinning the boy down. “I’d open my back window, just partway, and put the Kleenex, just, sort of, the edge of it, into that groove that the window makes, and then I’d, like, close the window? Rhonda did that with her Kleenex on her side. So there was mostly Kleenex tissues flapping outside, but held in place, and the car’s speeding along, with these white Kleenex ears on both sides of it. And Rhonda and me, we’d watch our respective Kleenexes, out there, as the landscapes flew by, cows and farmland and cities and landfills, and the one whose Kleenex lasted the longest, didn’t get torn up by the wind, she was the one who won the contest. I know it sounds dumb. But I — you know — I kinda enjoyed this. It kinda passed the time.” I waited. “Well, you wanted a story.”

  That was when I heard footsteps outside our door. I was sure I heard them.

  “Oscar,” I said. “Oscar, I think your dad’s outside. I think he’s listening.”

  Oscar
looked toward the door. “Dad?” he said. “You there?”

  I heard a floorboard creak. The Bat was standing, just standing out there, giving off ghoul-auras. Jesus. My philosophy is, if somebody’s standing outside your bedroom door, not saying anything, they’re not going to be good for you. They are going to be the devil’s hatchlings.

  “Dad?” Oscar sat up in bed. He lowered his feet to the floor and stood up. He reached down under the bed. He got a knife from the box he had under there. The blade was very shiny and pointed. I didn’t like Oscar being naked, though, under those circumstances. A man’s gotta have clothes on to be in a fight. Shorts, anyway, like in boxing. Just my opinion. Oscar could’ve probably taken him, though, he’s so buff.

  “I tell you what,” the ghoul-voice said. “You get that girl out of your room and your bed, Oscar, and you do it now. Or else,” and here he coughed, just like a human-bat would, “I’ll have to do it myself. I’m not running a motel here.”

  “You drunk dumb fuck,” Oscar said under his breath. “Would you like that?”

  “Did you hear me?” the Bat asked, flapping his bat wings, out there outside the door, where I couldn’t see him.

  “Yeah,” Oscar said, real quietly. But dangerously, too, like he wasn’t scared of mayhem. “He is one mean son-of-a-bitch,” Oscar said quietly, turning toward me. “But I can be, too, if I gotta be. You better get dressed, Chloé. Just don’t be scared. I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch if I have to. You know why?”

  I was putting on my underpants — black ones, that I had bought for him to see — and my jeans, and then my bra, and my tee-shirt that said RAGING HORMONES on the front, right across my tits, and then my jacket and the backpack. I was doing it fast. “Why?”

  “’Cause I’m so into you, I’d protect you.” He leaned down and put his clothes on, but not fast like me. Slow and slick, the jeans slowly rising up his legs where you can see the muscles to his waist. Like he could take his time. That was Oscar all over. Then he put away the big knife and got another one out of his dresser drawer. This one was, like, all folded up. “I gotta move out of here. Outta this house.”

  “Cool. Move in with me. We can make space.” My efficiency was tiny but I could always create room for Oscar, seeing as how he was saying he loved me.