The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  She sits me down at her table and says, Honey, whatcha want to know about? So I say that I’ve got this boyfriend, Oscar . . . and Mrs. Maggaroulian nods, ’cause of course she knows what I want to know, being able to read my mind. She says we’ll do a palm reading first.

  She takes my hand, opens up the fingers and studies my palm like a road map. She frowns. “This is your love line,” she says, tracing her finger along a crease. “Notice this.”

  I look at it. “What?”

  “You have a relationship with this Oscar? This Oscar relationship,” Mrs. Maggaroulian says, “is soon going to be over, it would appear.”

  “How do you mean, ‘over’? You sure about that?”

  “We could ask the cards,” Mrs. Maggaroulian informs me, as if she really doesn’t like my hand at all and doesn’t want to read it anymore, and she takes out her tarot cards, which, get this, she kisses first, on the box. Me, I would never do that. I would never kiss a deck of cards. She tells the cards in painful detail the questions she wants to ask and she proceeds to lay them out on the table. I will not tell about the cards that came up — that is such bad luck — but it was, like, a magical mystery train wreck.

  “Well,” says Mrs. Maggaroulian, in a sort of guy-imitating-a-woman Monty Python bagpipe drag queen voice, “I’ve certainly seen better cards, I’ll say that.”

  “Is there any hope?” I asked. “For the two of us, Oscar and me? ’Cause I love him and everything.”

  “Did you bring any item of his?” Mrs. Maggaroulian asks, emphasizing the word item like it was word-candy. “Any of his possessions? That he’s touched often?”

  “Besides me, you mean? Yeah. This sock,” I say, plopping it down on the table, “and this track team baton.” I wait for a moment, and I do my very best to grin. “And this knife.”

  She takes the sock in one hand, and the relay baton in the other. She looks up at me, and the wig on her head shifts a little, to the right, toward one o’clock. I can hear Laurel and Hardy ticking my precious time away. I’m afraid she’s going to tell me about her glory days when she was on the track team herself. “I don’t have to hold Oscar’s knife,” Mrs. Maggaroulian says. “You can hold Oscar’s knife. I can see everything clearly enough without it. Honey, what did you say your name was?”

  “Chloé.”

  “Chloé, honey, you know we’re not always right. Sometimes it’s a good idea to take the future with a grain of salt. We psychics, well, I don’t know. Psychics have bad days, too. We have our up days and our down days.” She puts the baton and the sock back on the table.

  “Is this your bad day, Mrs. Maggaroulian?”

  “Yes, it is, dear. I have a headache. I have a very terrible headache. All those little hammers.”

  “What do you see about Oscar, Mrs. Maggaroulian?”

  The room really filled up with the smell of meatloaf right about then, like a freight train of meatloaf just went by. I was beginning to want to get out of there, in the worst possible way. I could feel the cells of my skin revolting against the room. My individual skin cells wanted to get free of me just for being there. Mrs. Maggaroulian kept trying to smile at me, and she kept failing at it. “Well, honey,” she said, “everything I see about your boyfriend is not so hotsy-totsy. Both Laurel and Hardy are telling me that his future prospects are not bright. Did you say he was still alive?”

  “Oscar? Oh yeah, he’s still alive.” I decided not to ask her about Laurel and Hardy, or how she talked to them. Some things don’t stand much looking into.

  “Well, that’s wonderful. You go home to him and give him a big kiss and a bear hug, honey. That’s what I would do if I were you. You know, I haven’t seen all that much in your future, so I’m going to . . .” She stood up and went over to her little steel cashier’s box and took two fives out of it and handed them back to me. “I’m going to give you a little refund. Ten dollars. Think of this as a refund on your future. You should stop and get a cheeseburger on the way home, honey. Get two cheeseburgers. And some fries. Take it all to Oscar. He’ll be so grateful, I can guarantee. If you love him, he’s bound to stay alive for a while. Then go out bowling tonight with him like a good girlfriend. Do you like bowling? You do go bowling, don’t you?”

  “I guess.”

  “Okay. Go bowling with Oscar. ’Cause what I see is . . . you want something to eat? I’m making some meatloaf back there, in the kitchen.”

  “No thanks.” I figured I had to ask. “Is it bad, Mrs. Maggaroulian, what you see? You gotta tell me. I paid you all this money. It’s like this week’s savings. Wages and even tips, that our customers put in the jar on the front counter? I have to know. About Oscar?”

  “Listen to me.” She gave me a moment to look into her eyes. There was another person living in there, at least. You couldn’t tell if what was inside Mrs. Maggaroulian was human or just an honorary human. Maybe she was a resident alien. The IRS wouldn’t dare audit her, ’cause they’d find out she was an alternate life-form, and they don’t have income tables for that. “I can’t believe he’s alive, this Oscar of yours,” she said. “But if you really love him, he’ll stay alive for a while longer. Trust me on that. People can keep other people alive, you know. Now go, honey. You drive home.”

  “I will.” I stopped at the door. “Mrs. Maggaroulian,” I said, “are you really a girl?”

  She didn’t even look up. “No, dear,” she said, sniffing. “I am a lady.”

  WHEN I CAME INTO the apartment, Oscar was all over the bed, half-asleep after his exertions and his shower and his beers. He had the TV on to baseball, and his eyes were closed, and I figured, worst-case scenario, that he was dead. So I took my shoes off and I put the two cheeseburgers and the big thing of French fries on the kitchen table, and I went running over to where he was, and I gave him a good shake. And, just like that — presto — his eyes open.

  “Hey, Chloé,” he says, “whassup?”

  I’m straddling him, and shaking him, and he smiles at me. “How was basketball?” I ask.

  “Great,” he says. “Man, I was so hot, I was like an action figure. Hey, I see you took the car. Wheredja go?”

  “Ypsi,” I said. “I went to a psychic. Mrs. Maggaroulian. I wanted to find some things out.”

  “Yeah?” he says. “Cool. What’d she say?”

  And that’s when I took a deep breath, and I looked down at Oscar, and I said, “Oscar, I’ve got this idea. Don’t get mad at me, okay?”

  “Naw,” Oscar says, “I wouldn’t get mad. What’s your idea?”

  “Well,” I say, “I know it’s early and all, and maybe we should go slow and everything, and I know that girls aren’t supposed to say this, but after talking to Mrs. Maggaroulian I’ve been thinking that maybe I should. I mean, this is going to sound real weird, ’cause here it is Saturday afternoon . . . anyway, what I was wondering was, Oscar, maybe we should get married. Oscar, would you marry me?”

  And Oscar, who’s said that he loves me about a thousand times in the last week alone, he doesn’t even stop to think about it, he just sits up a little in bed, and he says, “Oh, yeah.” Just that, “Oh, yeah.” Like it’s a great idea that he hadn’t thought of recently, but should have. Then he says, “That’s a real cool idea, Chloé. You and me married. Like I’d be your husband, and you’d be my wife, right? Wow. I’d like to do that.”

  Some things you think can’t ever happen, and then they do.

  I gave him the hugest kiss he’d ever had, and then I went over and got the bag, and we did a four-alarm fuck, and afterward I fed him the cheeseburgers, both of them, his and mine too, from my hand to his mouth, bite after bite after bite after bite after bite.

  FOURTEEN

  YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE? I hate it when someone turns to me and says, “What’re you thinking, Bradley? Tell me. What’re you thinking?” Well, no. If it’s a-penny-for-your-thought time, here’s your penny back. Because, first of all, it’s private, whatever my thoughts are — and don’t think I’ll tell y
ou all my thoughts, either — but secondly, most of the time I don’t, in the way of things, have any thoughts. There aren’t any thoughts, per se, is what I’m saying. Day after day it’s a long hallway up there, just a yard sale, interrupted with random images of my paintings, or my dog, or the coffee store, or memories, or a woman, her face or her body or something she said, all of it in free fall through the synapses.

  And I don’t care if I’m mixing my metaphors. This is my second marriage I’m talking about now. I can damn well mix my metaphors on that marriage if I want to. I’ve got my rights.

  The reason I say all this is that I couldn’t stop asking Diana what she was thinking. We’d be somewhere, like a restaurant, before or during our engagement, and she’d drop into these states, staring off into space or down at the breadsticks in the glass container. Then she’d look at the butter plate or the hors d’oeuvres instead of at me. And I just knew she was carrying on a serious conversation with herself. You could all but see her lips moving.

  So I’d say, “Hey, Diana. What’re you thinking?”

  She’d smile, suddenly. She’d sort of pick at her engagement ring. “Nothing.” As if she had been recalled to Earth from some asteroid belt or other. “Nothing. Why do you ask, Bradley?”

  When they — women — are serious about you, they’ll use your full name. Bradley. “You just looked deep in thought, that’s all.”

  “I’m thinking about us,” she’d say, and reach for my hand. Another big smile, like a smile you’d do for a flashbulb, a smile like arriving in France after seven cramped hours on the plane, that’s what she’d give me. But those smiles of hers didn’t even have a half-life. They were on her face, optically illusional, and then they’d be gone so quickly you couldn’t be sure you’d seen them at all.

  She’d go absent without leave at meals, she’d go absent in the car, and she’d go absent after our lovemaking. She looked like a woman gazing out from the railing of a cruise ship toward an island of some sort, and her bangs would fall over her eyebrows while her feet twitched in time to an interior melody. She was a great one for examining the ceiling. The molding fascinated her. Lying beside me, she could carry off her fleshly existence away from me, but, after a moment, she couldn’t. I mean, my God, I was so in love with her that I almost didn’t notice. I thought I was made of plutonium, I was that powerful. Radioactive Man. I would imagine Diana walking toward me, looking at me with recognition — I am your woman, you are my man, we are mated — and I’d think: How did I get this lucky? Not that I’m selling myself short.

  Other men envied me, I was sure. I longed for her. I looked forward to her, not to her sweetness, because she didn’t have any of that, but to her acids and spices, the way she made me feel more alive. To hear Diana talking or to kiss her, to wake up beside her, you’d just know, I mean any man in his right mind would know, that she was a goddess, and not one of those New Age goddesses either, but one of the old ones, the genuine kind of goddess, the sort they don’t make anymore, with lightning coming out of her eyes. She filled my eyes with her beauty; her eyes put me on trial.

  I mean, Diana was a handful, but after one of our largish moments she would lie in a still, solemn posture while her feet beat in time to her inaudible music and her fingers touched my ribs like a fretboard, and she would stare off ceilingward, as if . . . well, it was then that I’d ask her what she was thinking, and she’d turn to me and give me a flashbulb smile, and she’d say, “I’m thinking about you, honey.”

  And I didn’t know whether that was good news or bad, given the fact that she was almost frowning, and her lower lip beginning to stick out, pouty, as if she were reading poetry or something like that that’s more trouble to figure out than it’s worth. I didn’t really want to know what she was thinking after such moments. I just kept that door shut. Bluebeard kept one of his castle doors shut too. Well, I said to myself: she’s a lawyer, and she’s contemplating her next case.

  At our wedding, which was not at a church, because she and I didn’t believe in anything that large, but which occurred in the expansive back yard of a reception hall near the Saline River, she had said, “I do,” with considerable force. We were under a large white canopy and there would be dancing afterward. But she had seemed almost surprised when at the conclusion of the ceremony I leaned down to kiss her, the way you do when the ritual is finished. She was made light-headed by my kiss, the fact of it. You could tell from the way she looked at me. Her eyes grew wide and she seemed frightened for a split second as my lips attached themselves to hers. She said later that she had been studying the pattern of the woodwork in the bandstand and had been distracted. Distracted? At our wedding? For the kiss? I used to think that technically the wedding doesn’t happen unless you kiss each other.

  After the kiss, though, she remembered to smile. She could be polite. And following the reception, we had a horse-drawn carriage take us to the motel. The carriage was antique-elegant, with inlaid wood though it had a wet bar inside, and a TV, and as we got into it, we were pelted with rice and flowers by her lawyer friends and my artist-and-coffee friends, and by our parents and relatives and hangers-on. Chloé and Oscar were there in thrift-shop formal attire, and they threw flowers at us, too. My sister Agatha was there, and Harold, and my nephews, my friends, and my father and mother, and some of Diana’s friends including an old boyfriend of hers named David, whom I didn’t exactly get to meet, not then.

  The sun was out, not a cloud in the sky. The driver wore a top hat. This was unlike my first wedding to Kathryn, which took place in city hall, where people do not typically wear costumes. We clip-clopped away from the reception hall, and I kissed Diana again, and she didn’t seem so surprised this time. The horse smelled of straw and oats, I remember.

  My best man had said, long before this, You may end up like the happiest man on Earth, old Buddy, or you may end up like someone on daytime television.

  During the first night, after we had made love as man and wife, as wedded partners, instead of just lovers, Diana said, “Bradley, you’re such a nice guy,” as she drifted off to sleep. I thought: Well, I’ll take my compliments where I can get them, but “nice” is not what a man wants to hear under these particular circumstances. I mean, she had nothing to complain about. I had satisfied her. She looked satisfied. We had groaned together during our lovemaking. But “nice”? When you make love to a goddess, you want a fierce compliment. Or speechlessness. Speechlessness will do just fine.

  DIANA’S AGORAPHOBIA PRESENTED a bit of a problem as regards the honeymoon.

  Her idea had been that we should remain in Ann Arbor and perhaps, as a kind of respite from ordinary life, stay in different motels and hotels around town for a week or two. We could laze in lounge chairs near the indoor pools and order vast crazy meals complete with champagne from room service, if there happened to be room service. We would make love a lot and metaphorically cement ourselves together. We would go to movies if we felt like it. Despite its attractions, however, I found this entire prospect unappealing. It lacked, I don’t know, the charisma of the exotic.

  She didn’t like open spaces at all, and she didn’t care for locales she’d never been to before. She did not like to travel and did not care for airplanes, except when her legal business required rapid transit. Nevertheless, I suggested that we drive to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and spend our honeymoon at a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Gogebic, near the Porcupine Mountains. Eventually I wore her down. I asserted myself, and she shrugged — Jesus, she had a beautiful shrug — and agreed. I’d been to this B&B, the Porcupine Inn, before, alone, and thought she’d like the vistas. We held hands as we talked about what we’d do there.

  We boarded Bradley at a kennel. Chloé and Oscar would mind the store. Harry Ginsberg said he’d keep an eye on the house. Diana hadn’t sold her house. She had rented it out.

  I suspected that we were in for trouble when we began to cross the Mackinac Bridge. Diana began to breathe hard, and she put her hand to her face
and smoothed her eyebrows. I shouldn’t say this about my ex-wife, but she farted, I’m not kidding, out of sheer fright. The sky and the bridge and the water far below her were oddly and intensely incorrect to her at that moment, or so she reported. You can’t see much from up on that bridge except the infinity of fresh water and some uncommonly distant islands. Spatial malevolence. She felt this wrongness surrounding her and ganging up against her. The empty air was unpleasantly interested in her. Funny to find this phobia in a woman so strong in other ways. I turned the radio on, thinking it would help, but the radio was tuned to an oldies station, and the first line out of the speakers was, “Well, I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day . . .” and of course Diana reached down and snapped off that song.

  It’s not unusual for people to go phobic on that bridge. Sometimes they just stop the car at one end and have to be escorted, or driven, to the other side. We made it intact to St. Ignace, the first town you meet up with in the Upper Peninsula, but her episode of horizon panic had established a bad precedent.