The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  Chloé comes in right about then, Chloé who works at Jitters because she says there’s a harmonic convergence right in this very spot in the mall. She says it’s a sacred place, like Sedona, Arizona. Sweet girl that she is, Chloé gives my nerves a good shaking every day. Sometimes she comes in so yeasty with sex she’s just had with her boyfriend that I feel like applauding. She gives off sexual odors like a flower out in the front yard trying to make a statement about gardens, which of course flowers don’t need to do. Her shirt says RAGING HORMONES across the front. She’s in love with Oscar now, it’s gone beyond sex, and Oscar has told her (after consulting me: should he tell her?) that he’s in love with her. They look so punk and disreputable, those two, but they’re just a couple of kids, dressed and costumed to affect a menacing appearance.

  On this particular day, she comes in and says, “So how’s it going, Mr. S?”

  “Oh, okay,” I tell her. “The usual. Monday, you know. I kept noticing those little crosses on the curves on the way here.”

  “Monday!” she exclaims. “Right. And those crosses. Did I ever tell you I went to school with one of the guys who, uh, got one of those crosses? He was a total asshole. He wasn’t even a fun asshole, which, you know, some of them are. Even dead, he’s lucky to get a cross. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t give that guy a shave.”

  “What was his name?” I ask.

  “Bumford,” she says. “Bumford McGonahy. A loser. With a loser name. Those crosses. Cry my eyes out. He was a mean guy. Guess I should have more sympathy, huh?”

  She puts on her apron and starts arranging the pastries, like an art project.

  “How’s Oscar?” I ask. “What time’s he coming in?”

  “You should know that,” she says. “I’m just labor. You’re management.” She smiles, and then she stops to think. “Around one.” She stands up straight. “No. One-thirty.”

  We have overhead track lighting, five lights over the service area, and Chloé has a habit of moving back and forth behind the counter so that she appears sequentially under the lights like an actress on a stage. She’s careful not to plant herself in the small shadowy vacant gaps between the lights. She’s star-practicing. She flicks her head to highlight her hair. She’d be breaking my heart if she weren’t my employee and a kid and Oscar’s lover, besides.

  “Do you think,” she asks, rubbing her cheekbone, “that it’s bad to do a bad thing if a good thing is going to come out of it eventually?”

  “Beats me,” I tell her. I’m staunchly stacking franchise coffee cups near the entryway. “What sort of bad things?”

  “Well, not way bad, just bad.”

  Now she’s positioned herself behind the display case so that she can see her reflection on it. The glass is at an angle, but when she’s under the lights, she can see her face reflected there, although she doesn’t know that I know she can. When she stands in exactly the correct spot, she looks down at herself and kisses the air as if her reflection is kissing her, she’s that pleased with the stringy unkempt unofficial beauty of herself. No doubt each time she undresses she unwraps herself like a Christmas present. I have a feeling she blesses her body for her various wild gifts every half-hour or so, now that she knows what they are and she can use them.

  “Well,” she says, “like putting yourself on display.”

  “I don’t follow you,” I tell her, having lost my concentration. I’ve been setting the copies of the New York Times and the Detroit Free Press on the reading rack. “Putting yourself on display how?”

  “Skip it,” she says quickly. She’s regrouping. “You hear the weather report this morning, Mr. S?”

  I tell her I didn’t.

  “Mucho thunderstorms and mucho kaboom. Sky evil. ‘Course, who’d know in a mall?”

  “Who’d know?” I agree.

  “What’s the worst thing ever happened to you?” she asks, frowning downward at her purple fingernails. She’s arranging the foods for our sandwiches.

  “The worst thing?” I wait. “How come?” I come back behind the counter and adjust my manager’s smock.

  “Just curious. Yeah. Just curious.” She gives me an odd square smile.

  “Hmm,” I say. “Hard to decide. I can’t think of it. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, it isn’t the worst, it’s just that I remember something, at this very moment. Here it is.” I straighten up to scratch my eyebrow. “One time, in college, a bunch of us somehow got cheap airplane tickets to Paris for a few days. We were hitchhiking once we got there. Anyhow, when you’re in Paris, you go to the cathedral, Notre Dame. Big tourist attraction.”

  She nods.

  “So the four of us go into Notre Dame. And Notre Dame, you know, is actually a working cathedral. People, supplicants, I guess you’d call them, go in there and pray. They have Mass every morning, despite all these tourists milling around.” She’s stopped arranging the food and looks up at me. “Well, we went in there. We started at the back. In the back of the cathedral you can buy votive candles from some nun or other and light them for a loved one who needs help, and even if you’re not a Catholic, you can still do this. And because someone I knew was sick, I bought a votive candle and lit it. I mean, a votive candle looks like a soul, doesn’t it? And then I went over to put it on the stand.”

  “It’s almost nine o’clock, Mr. S.”

  “I know. We’re almost ready. I got here early. Let me finish this story.” I could see some customers outside our chain security gate waiting for their morning coffee fix. “Well, we’d been traveling, so I was tired, so my hand was shaking. And these stands they have, they’re thin and spindly, like thin wrought iron, and delicate, because this is Europe. That’s where we are. And because my hand was shaking, I reached down to the holder, this freestanding holder or candelabra or whatever of votive candles, and somehow, I don’t know how this happened, my hand caused this holder of candles, all these small flames, all these souls, to fall over, and when it fell over, all the candles, lit for the sake of a soul somewhere, there must have been a hundred of them, all of them fell to the floor, because of me, and all of them went out. And you know what the nun did, Chloé, the nun who was standing there?”

  “She spoke French?”

  “No. She could have, but she didn’t. No, what she did was, she screamed.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, the nun screamed in my face. I felt like . . .”

  “You felt like pretty bad, Mr. S. I can believe it. But you know, Mr. S, those were just candles. They weren’t really souls. That’s all superstition, that soul stuff.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “No kidding, Mr. S, you shouldn’t be so totally morbid. I thought when you were telling me about the worst thing you ever did, it’d be, like, beating up a blind guy and stealing his car.”

  “No. I never did that.”

  “Oscar did, once. You should get him to tell you about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “He was drunk, though.” She prettily touches her perfect hair. “And the guy wasn’t really blind. He just said he was, to take advantage of people. It was, like, a scam. Oscar saw through all that. It’s nine o’clock now, Boss. We should open up.”

  “Right.” And I unlock the curtain, and touch a switch, and slowly the curtain rises on the working day. The candles are nothing to Chloé; they’re just candles. I feel instantly better. Bless her.

  The processional begins, and we have employees from nearby businesses coming in to get a cup of coffee and maybe something else, a brioche. We turn on the music: cool piano jazz to counteract the Mozart the mall is always playing on their PA system to keep the mall rats out. I look at them all, all our customers, and I smile. I chat them up. Many of them I know by name. But really, Chloé’s right. I’m too morbid. I need to work on it.

  For example, when I’m conversing with people, checking out the young women coming in and out, these women, even while I’m doing these day-to-day things, I’m in a reverie. I’ll be standing there, behind the
counter, and first I’ll think about women, possible women who might be my girlfriends or wives or something, you know, the usual fantasies, candlelit dinners, for example, and then, when I get bored with that, I’ll think about my own funeral, which always cheers me up. I mean, I’ll imagine the church, full of distraught supermodels listening to the eulogy and sobbing. All these supermodels boohooing over my death. And there in front of the church would be someone like what’s-his-name, Robert Schiller, the televangelist, the one with the silver hair and the electronic smile, and he’d be going on and on about me, shockingly eloquent.

  “Bradley W. Smith,” he’d say, and he’d shake his distinguished head. “No one really understood Bradley W. Smith, except maybe his dog. And, yet, unbeknownst to many, he was a great person —”

  “ — Could I have a double decaf cap, please?”

  “Sure,” I say, pulling myself out of my imaginings. It’s probably not healthy to maunder through a fantasy about your own funeral. Morbid, as Chloé says. But, as the song says, it’s a hard habit to break. And it’s harmless.

  Around eleven o’clock my next-door neighbor, Professor Harry Ginsberg, comes in, mostly soaked, his remaining hair plastered to the sides of his face. He shakes out his umbrella, the one with the duck’s head on it. He then waves at me — not to me, but at me — in greeting, before he says, “Have you seen it outside, Bradley? Really, this is something you should see.” He smiles and shakes his head, and raindrops drizzle downward off his face onto the floor.

  “What?” I say.

  “Skies so dark, my boy, that you can’t read under them, and this in the daytime! Go look.”

  “Harry, I can’t leave the business.”

  He checks out Jitters and spies some of my art. “I see you’ve hung The Feast of Love there in the back. Your very best effort. Is it for sale?”

  “No, Harry, it’s hors de commerce. And it’s —”

  All at once there’s a crack, like someone snapping a whip, and a low roaring, and a strange singeing smell, coming from I don’t know where, and Chloé, who’s been bussing the tables with the collection tray, looks up.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Harry asks me. “They’ve been predicting tornadoes.”

  “There’s no weather in malls, Harry,” I tell him. “Not even tornadoes. We’re impervious — is that the word? — we’re impervious to conditions.”

  “I should have such optimism,” Harry says, opening his mouth and laughing silently, a gesture I do not care for. “ ‘Impervious to conditions,’ an interesting phrase. I should have —”

  Another roaring, longer this time, seems to be approaching us, silencing Harry’s meditation on my wording, and when the storm sound starts to reverberate throughout the mall, like the echo in a bowling alley, my customers hear it, and they all look up, and at this point the lights blink, and the Oscar Peterson CD falls silent inside Jitters, and Mozart leaves the podium in the mall, and that’s when I hear the shard-crack sound of shattering glass.

  “My God,” Harry Ginsberg says. He takes his espresso-to-go and walks out into the atrium.

  At that point the power fails in Briardale. The emergency lighting flickers on, battery-operated evacuation spots, and all but one of my customers get up and leave. Why should they leave? They’re safe here. One woman near the entrance is drinking her cup of espresso and reading the New York Times, and she doesn’t so much as budge while everyone else scurries out. The light inside Jitters becomes emergency light: frosty and cold and glaring. But she just goes on reading, her head down, deep in concentration.

  You can hear the wind shaking the Masonic emblem skylight, then hail assaulting it, and you can hear the gusts shaking the exterior doors, but otherwise it’s gone very quiet in the mall. Windtunnel, looking imperturbably smug, saunters over from Heppelworth’s and says, “Power failure, huh?”

  “Yup, I guess so.”

  “It’ll be back on, no time flat,” he says, gazing at the ceiling. He has trained himself to be an optimist, a professional optimist, a success maniac, despite conditions. Look at his tie today! It has yachts on it!

  “Hope so,” I tell him. “You want anything?”

  “Naw,” Windtunnel says, breathing in my direction, his breath so heavy with wintergreen he could stun an ox with it. “Maybe in a little while.” And he saunters back toward his darkened motivation market, all of whose customers have fled. His protective gate lowers until it is halfway down.

  Chloé joins me near the counter. “This is freakazoidal,” she says. “Quel rush.”

  “Yeah,” I agree. “Come on.”

  We walk out toward the mall. You can hear the wind futilely attacking the mall’s exterior, but you would need a full-scale level-five tornado to blow this place apart, and so far we don’t have that. From here we can see into the depths of the mall. These cold emergency lights are giving all the merchandise a shakedown, and when you gaze into Motherhood, all the maternity-ware has turned ghastly. The clerks have their elbows on the cash counter, including Marilyn, a sweet babe, pure honeydew. I should talk to her. The orphaned shoes in the neighboring shoe store are like artifacts or clues to a crime. It’s uniformly gray inside the mall now. What few customers there are seem to be distressed or disheartened. They’re limping along, without purpose. It’s as if, when you turn the power off, the merchandise somehow becomes nothing but a ruin. People lose the desire to buy. Their hearts go out of it.

  Why is the light given? you think. Why is the light taken away?

  Down at the center of the mall, the fountain has stopped surging into the de-ionized air, and the water sits there, gathering dust. Here and there in the far recesses of the mall, the customers move around, totally unmotivated, confused and abandoned, quite conclusively Monday-morning, and everything we’ve got here for sale loses its allure. Nothing but wallflower commodities, spinster products. Two old people, arm in arm, help each other walk toward the exit.

  Across the acres of merchandise a vast silence prevails.

  “Wow. This is amazing,” Chloé says, and I nod in agreement. “You know what this makes me think of?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Well, uh, your candles going out.” She smiles at me, and one of her blond eyebrows lifts, as she thinks of what to say next. But she doesn’t say anything, eloquently sexy in her silence.

  “Hmm,” I say, pretending to think this over. But actually I am thinking it over.

  Chloé and I go back into Jitters. She ambles toward the back, taking off her apron, swaying as she goes, her hips alive to their possibilities. She sits down in a sort of wing chair back near the rest room, and seems to doze off. Oscar keeps her busy at night. I’ll wake her up when the customers return. I’m a demanding boss but a fair one.

  Then two things happen. I go up to the woman who’s been sitting at a small table near the front, reading the New York Times. I say to her, “How can you read in this light? It’s so dim.”

  “I’m used to dim bulbs,” she says, not looking up.

  “In that case, you’d be right at home here.”

  She seems startled by my witticism, and smiles at me, and in the dim light I can see that her eyes are blue. We introduce ourselves eventually, and I find out that her name is Diana.

  Not to get ahead of myself here, but she becomes my second wife.

  The other thing that happens is that before the lights go back on in the mall, a strange little man with greasy hair appears outside what I guess you’d call our doorway. He stands there and stands there, shifting from one foot to the other. He’s not large, but he looks strong and wiry, and when I first see him I get the impression that he’s not really looking over the brioche, he’s searching for someone, and then he finds what he’s searching for, which is Chloé. Even though she’s at the back, taking a catnap, he’s staring at her.

  “May I help you?” I ask him, to fill the time.

  He shakes his head. From where I’m standing, I can smell the whiskey on his breath. I can e
ven tell that it’s cheap whiskey, a Canadian blend, the worst of all possible whiskies. The next time I look over in his direction, he’s vanished.

  When I tell Chloé about him, and I describe him to her, all she says is, “Yuck. It’s the Bat. Señor Creep-o-rama.” Then she looks at her watch. “Where’s Oscar? He should be here by now? Where’s Oscar, Mr. S?”

  I tell her I don’t know. But right at one o’clock, on the dot, Oscar swaggers into Jitters. After soul-kissing him, Chloé tells Oscar about the Bat’s mysterious apparitional appearance. All Oscar says is, “Dumb old man.” Then he puts his apron on.

  But I am not really thinking about them because I am thinking about Diana, having already obtained her phone number. I took courage because she hadn’t been demeaned as yet with someone else’s engagement or wedding ring, I had taken care to notice. Before the lights came back on in the mall, I was thinking of eat-ing supper with this woman, Diana, whose blue eyes and stay-puttedness in the midst of storm and wrack had banished from my mind all thought of eulogies and votive candles and little white crosses accompanied by plastic flowers that poked up through the dirt and unfolded their zombie blossoms on a cheerless Monday morning.

  MIDDLES

  TEN

  “LISTEN, UH, what did you say your name was?” Diana asks.

  “Charlie.”

  “Listen, Charlie. I mean, I suppose this is all very interesting and everything, but it gives me the willies. First of all my story is not a story. Second of all, it’s not yours. It’s mine, isn’t it? I thought my life was mine and not yours. Third of all, I . . . I just lost my train of thought. Oh, I know: it’s all private. My life is not in the public domain. All right? Please don’t write about me.”

  “Oh, I won’t. Not exactly. But I’ll invent a replica of you.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t really have time to argue. I’m a busy woman. I’m an osteopath, you know.”