The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  He dropped the beer can and the grass he had pulled out and started to walk toward the garage. When he came around to the front again, he was buck naked. In his grief he had taken off his boxer shorts. God knows what he did with them. Thrown them up into a tree, maybe. He was in a state of erotic semicomic despair. At last he had well and truly surprised me. I was dumbstruck, and I was thinking of the nearest phone, but all David did was to come inside and return to the bedroom and slowly and almost shyly put on his beautifully tailored clothes, item by item, carefully, though of course without the boxer shorts. I wondered what he would tell his wife about their absence, but maybe she would be asleep when he came in, oblivious in her dreams. Maybe she never noticed what he wore. He attached his cuff links: David. If he lost his composure quickly and violently, he recovered it just as quickly. There’s that particular man for you.

  I had followed him into the room. My face stung. “David,” I said. “This doesn’t mean —”

  “ — You shouldn’t marry someone you don’t love,” he said, his back to me. “Oh sweetie, it’s a soul-error.” He waited. He stared at the dragon drawing on my dresser mirror. “Yeah, and see if I’m right. Hey, where’s that famous coffee of yours? The cup I asked for? Again and again and again? You never made it, did you? You couldn’t bring yourself to do that, could you, for my sake? That little thing. Well, too late now.”

  And those were the last words I heard from him until after Bradley and I were married, when David and I started up our relationship once more. I was the one who called him. I was the initiator. Then he called me. Before too long, we were back to where we were before, slamming each other around. By anyone’s standards, I suppose, I’m bad and ill-tempered, but David matches me in that and it’s why we were so compatible. We go about our hypocrisy with aplomb. And we’re complacent, too, mostly about what we have and what we can get. He is my other. But, you know, these are the cards I was dealt, and that’s the way I played my hand, and I don’t much care what you think.

  TWELVE

  BECAUSE THE NEXT MORNING was a Saturday, and my Esther was sleeping at last, perhaps only for a few minutes, the tossing-and-turning kind of sleep, I rolled quietly off my side of the bed and took a shower. I took care not to drop the bar of soap. I shaved my face (my features are porcine, coarse, and bristly — I have a snout like a wild boar, and yet, I think, I am handsome), not looking into my own eyes, avoiding self-commentary on the bags underneath them. I cooked some oatmeal for myself and then fed the goldfish, Julius and Ethel.

  I went into my study and pulled out the checkbook from the desk drawer. I am familiar with clutter, with the diffusion of philosophy into papers and bookmarks and the scatterings of thought. I wrote out a check to the order of my son Aaron Ginsberg (it was not for as much as he had asked). And then I realized: no no no, I cannot send the boy a check with my bank account number on it. He is wily, he and his strange dangerous friends. They will find a way of ordering the bank to send them all the money in my account. I do not know how they will do this, but they will know. These children of ours have befriended computers, and the terrible dangerous computers will help them help themselves.

  So I therefore drove, this bright sunny morning, to the branch bank that kept its offices open on Saturday. By this time it was nine o’clock, by the official clocks. The sun shone its burning rays on the landscapes of my life, the real world that made Plato so unhappy. My bank teller’s name was Theresa. I seem to remember that she wore glasses. I was beyond having any certain opinions on her appearance, however, this girl, her beauty or lack of it. Perhaps she belonged to somebody, in the amorous way of things. Perhaps she gave off an odor of lilac. What was that to me? What, may I ask, was the odor of sachet of lilac from a bank teller to me that morning? We were in separate galaxies. We were lit by separate lights and we cast separate shadows. I was managing a catastrophe, and she was working as a clerk in a bank.

  Theresa, I said when I reached her window, my throat dry, I need a cashier’s check made out to my son, Aaron Ginsberg. It must come from my savings. I handed the passbook and the withdrawal slip to her, and she checked my balance and quickly typed up the check on a machine. Thank you, I said. She must have smiled, such people do all the time, after all, but I must confess that it made no impression on me. I returned to my Ford car and drove home.

  Back in my study I wrote a brief note to my son, asking for . . . asking for what? For his assurance that he would spend it wisely? We were beyond such tender father-son messages. (A maddening tune was going through my head, “Twentieth-Century Blues.”) I asked my son Aaron not to make good on his threat to end his life. On my desk was a picture of him, smiling into the white-cotton sunshine on a tennis court, on a singular day when he was healthy and happy.

  I enclosed the check with this note. On the front of the envelope I attached a stamp — the American flag. Well, I don’t mean for these details to have an oppressive poignancy. I stamped the letter and wrote his name and address, a post office box number, on it. I walked to the corner and dropped it in the mailbox. In the dark it lay among the other fellow letters, whispering to one another their messages of love and longing and betrayal.

  But almost as soon as I released the metallic lip of the box, I remembered that Aaron had instructed me to send the money by express mail, as a sign of his last-minute emergency condition, the bloodletting of his threatened mortality. What could I do? The letter had been thoughtlessly mailed. Briefly I considered calling the airlines to get a ticket immediately out to Los Angeles, to intervene personally. But by now I knew that to him I was worse in person and therefore more ineffective as a father than I was when reduced microscopically to a mere voice over the phone. In person, revulsion at the mere sight of my paternal features would settle over his face instantly, before I had committed the first father crime of the day.

  Inside the house, Esther slept on restlessly, poor old girl.

  ENWOMBED WITHIN MY FORD CAR, not knowing where to go but recognizing for my own good that I should not go anywhere near the Amalgamated Education Corporation, I drove to my neighbor’s coffee shop in the mall. Bradley was not there in person. Instead, I found in front of me a young American girl whose tee-shirt was labeled RAGING HORMONES and who asked me for my order.

  Coffee, young lady, please.

  Any kind?

  Any kind is fine.

  Blend-of-the-day?

  Fine, fine.

  Comin’ right up.

  Excuse me, I asked, but where is the manager? Where is Bradley?

  In back somewheres, she said. Ordering stock. You know him?

  He is my neighbor, I informed her. In fact he lives next door.

  Wow. You’re Mr. S’s neighbor. No kidding. Hey, you want a Kleenex? she asked. Here. She held one out to me.

  For what purpose?

  You look like you need it, she said. She pointed at my face. Like, tears or something?

  I hadn’t realized, I said. Thank you. Thank you very much. After paying her, I took the coffee and the Kleenex and found my way to a chair near the back. I dabbed at my eyes. My eyes were damp but not yet completely overflowing. I was the only customer. In desperation I glanced around for something to read. The newspapers, however, were in the front.

  She came toward the back to clear the tables near mine.

  So, she said, whattya do?

  I teach philosophy, I said.

  Oh jeez. I could use a philosopher, she said, like right this week. Right now. This minute. She stopped and put her hand on her hip. Like, I’m about to do something? Maybe you don’t mind my asking. And this thing I’m about to do, it’s bad? But it’s going to result in something good? So, in your opinion, should I do it?

  What’s your name, young lady? I asked.

  Chloé. Clow-ay.

  Not Clow-ee?

  Naw. I customized it. Everybody should customize their names.

  The answer is no, Chloé. The ends never justify the means. Almost every ethical phi
losophy of consequence will tell you so. Kant’s categorical . . . well, bad actions make the result turn out bad.

  I thought that was what you’d say. Thanks. Uh, she said, do I owe you anything?

  What?

  Like money? For your opinion. Because it’s your job as a philosopher to give advice, right? And besides, you live next door to Mr. S. Since it’s your job to think, I should pay you. Anyway, do I owe you anything?

  No, Chloé, you don’t. But thank you for offering. I bowed my head. In silence, she went away. I drank my coffee. Never once had Aaron as an adult child asked me for advice. To my best recollection, never as an adult had he ever asked me so much as a single question.

  Bradley returned. He stopped by my chair. He sat to make neighborly conversation. He asked me how I was. And I told him, the genial man, I told him everything, because I hardly knew him, and because Chloé was taking care of his customers, and because he had hung up The Feast of Love in the back, and because he was so vacant as a human being — I do not mean this as criticism — that I could fill him, that morning, with my difficulties, and not cause a flood condition. Toward the end, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was a consolation of sorts.

  And how are you, Bradley? I asked.

  I’m in love, he said. It’s recent. I’ve met this wonderful woman.

  And who is the lucky lady?

  Her name’s Diana, he said. We’re going to be married, I think.

  Well, you must bring her over to meet Esther and me.

  And with that, I rose to leave.

  THIRTEEN

  I CAN BE SO UNMOTIVATED. For example. You know the dust that can, like, float in the air? Me, I was totally capable of sitting in a chair for hours, watching the dust-fuzz hanging in front of me. If there was sunlight in the room, just the particles of visible molecules or whatever, I was excellent and enthralled.

  I’m not saying that I’m deep, I’m just saying I watch the dust, and I’m not stoned either, when I do it. Just observant. I’m concentrating on it, figuring out its mystery, its purpose for being here in the same universe with us.

  When I tried to get Oscar to study the dust, he went: you’re so, like, Looney Tunes, Chloé. Jeez, dust. He was smiling when he said that, criticizing my dust interest. But you could tell that he didn’t get the profundity of dust at all. Poor guy. Well, some people can’t sing, either.

  But what I’m saying is, I can get motivated when I have to. I can stop dust-meditating and get off my ass and get the job done. Which means that when I had to figure out the future, I took steps.

  Oscar’s friends, these boy-men from his high school jock clique — Speedy and Ranger and Fats (who was not fat — where do guys get names like this?) — came by our apartment, grab-assing Oscar and demanding that he come out to play basketball, it being early summer, and the two of us, Oscar and me, not having to work at Jitters that day. Oscar! Hey, man, they said, first of all hollering up to our window, dude, you just gotta come shoot some hoop, dooooooode, Oscaaaaaaaar, we just gotta have another guy. Oscar hears the call of male needs, he barks his yes downward to them, so then he puts on his shorts and his Nikes and kisses me and gets his shoulders punched in the parking lot and his ass whapped and he is gone. Like poof, like a husband. Empty nest.

  I had to figure out if Oscar and me had any prospects at all, as a couple, together. So there I was, me, Chloé, alone. But with the keys to Oscar’s ancient AMC Matador, and I sat there, and I’m like, I gotta find out the future from an expert. So I took some money and put it into my pockets and my shoes in case I got robbed, and I drove over to Ypsilanti, where the psychics are. You can’t do psychics off of TV. The TV psychics are mostly wrong, and way too expensive besides.

  I had been reading my tarot cards on Oscar and wanted a second opinion. And I figured I’d need to take something of his, so I took a mungy sweat sock and his track team relay baton and one of his knives, which he had told me not to touch, but which I did touch, for his own good and mine too.

  YOU GOTTA GO TO YPSILANTI to find out the future. Or Willow Run. See, what you do is, you leave the ho-hum middle-class environs of Ann Arbor and Pittsfield Township, and then you explore your way down the strip, past the used car lots and the Arby’s and the Dairy Queen, and then there’s Eastern Michigan University with its stiff-dick watertower (but there’s a brick condom on it — go see it for yourself if you think I’m kidding), and then downtown Ypsi, but then, when you get east of there, that’s when it turns really interesting and nasty over there in the Twilight Zone, that’s where the future-experts ply their trade.

  I mean, most cities have got their own Twilight Zones, right? Where the old wrecked factories and warehouses live? ’Cause East Ypsi has got these ancient car assembly plants, these old humping kickass grounds of steel and scrapyards, and the scrapyards sort of find their way next to topless bars and tattoo parlors, and these freakazoidal video stores where you don’t want to know what or who they’re renting in there, and outside on the curb the underfed cats and dogs are staring at you and begging for puppy chow when you drive past, and then there’s razor wire around most of the warehouses, so you just know the karma’s really complicated there. It’s like the future has already happened, and it’s all past by now? Like that?

  Anyway, you gotta drive over there on a sunny day. Otherwise it doesn’t work. You get bad head colds in your psyche if you go there on a cloudy day. Then your psyche sneezes your good karma out into the ozone layer, where, of course, it burns away.

  And that’s how come I was driving the Matador in the sunshine past Odd Lots Supermart and a pawn shop and a gun shop and then a vacant patch of struggling grass, with a thing in the middle of it you couldn’t identify except it was metal, and no one had ever found out how to work it, and it was ultra-dead. Rust never sleeps, said the bard. I’m bummed. Where’s the professional psychic whose office I thought was here? I saw it once last time I found myself located in this locale. In this hyper-slum there were, like, shoes everywhere, shoes without anybody standing in them, old shoes. On the sidewalk here and there, brown leather shoes. Very Plan 9 from Outer Space. So how come people, such as men, leave their shoes out here? What’s going on with these shoes out on the pavement? My advice is: Guys, find a wastebasket.

  And now I’m near Willow Run, where they made the big World War Two bombers back when life still had a purpose in this area and people knew what their work was good for, and I’m seeing more pawn shops with iron bars on the front, and bunched-up tallboy-beer-in-the-brown-bag guys standing but mostly sitting on the sidewalk doing their smiling openmouthed but no teeth chickenshit thing, har har har, hey man, there’s a girl in that big ol’ Matador, is that door on the driver’s side unlocked, and then I see the place I was looking for, that I’d seen the last time I was over here. And which I knew was here. Which had to be here.

  Professional Psychic

  Fortunes Told

  Tarot or Palm Reading

  Walk-in

  I park the Matador out front, which is a dangerous move to start with, but I figure the psychic has got to have some control over what goes on outside her store and in the neighborhood — she’s psychic, after all, right? — and I go inside.

  It’s dark. No crystal balls. She’s in possession of this gross corduroy sofa that smells of spilled meatloaf and cat food, and over to the side there’s a partially assembled table and two chairs, and a church rummage sale table lamp with birds and bunnies painted on it, and over on the walls there’s a Laurel and Hardy clock, with their eyes moving back and forth, like pendulums except not quite. There’s other Laurel and Hardy stuff in the room: L&H porcelain cups, and a souvenir L&H dinner plate mounted on the wall, and a one-foot-high L&H statue set in the corner. On the other wall is a picture of down-by-the-old-mill-stream that you’d buy at Woolworth’s. By my ankles a black vampire-cat is stroking against my legs and purring. God, I hate cats. I’m the only girl my age I know who hates cats.

  Meanwhile, country-weste
rn, moron music if you ask me, Tricia Yearwood or somebody, your-cheatin’-this-and-your-cheatin’-that, is playing off some staticky AM radio in the back. I hear this voice, “I’ll be right with you,” and then the sound of a toilet flushing and somebody gargling.

  In comes Mrs. Maggaroulian, which I know is her name because her business card is out on the table, and her name is also in little print on the front window, and she says, “Hi, I’ll be with you in a minute, honey.”

  I look at the wall. She’s posted the prices. Tarot readings are twelve dollars, and palm readings are twelve dollars, and the guaranteed predictions of the future based on psychic determinism, which she happens to know how to do, are also twelve dollars. It’s all twelve dollars each. If I get everything she’s offering, one from column A and one from column B, plus dessert on column C, this is going to cost me a full day’s salary.

  But! you can’t get your hands on the future for free, fuck and alas, so I shell out almost every piece of folded money I have, and I give them to Mrs. Maggaroulian, and she puts on her reading glasses that she has on a beaded chain around her neck, and she locks the front door and puts my money in a little steel box underneath the table, where it’s hiding. By this time I am noticing that Mrs. Maggaroulian is big, I mean she is really big, the way a giant is big, at least compared to the way women usually are shaped and sized, and she has a mohair wig, it looks like, and something there on her jaw that looks like facial hair. Her nose looks like it’s made out of modeling clay. Her dress didn’t even come off the rack, ’cause it’s a tablecloth fastened together with safety pins. She wears black nail polish, not the sexy black but the scary black. She’s got big hands and feet, big hoppers and big choppers. This Ypsi chick is not the Better Business Bureau’s idea of a respectable psychic. But, duh, if she were prettier she’d be broadcasting on the Dionne Warwick psychic network at forty dollars per minute and she’d be whispering predictions to Oprah. Hey, I don’t give a shit if she is a drag queen, I’m cool with that, she could be the fucking Queen of the May for all I care, I just want the future out of her, provided it’s one hundred percent accurate.