The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  “Do you have names for them?” Diana asked.

  “Oh no,” the old woman said, leaning back. “That would be sentimental.”

  “I think we have to go now,” I announced. All this was more than enough for one day. “Our car is parked on the other side of the ridge, and we need time to get back before it gets too dark to see. We’re on our honeymoon,” I added, without thinking. It was still midday. No one paid any attention to me. I was noticing that most of the children’s faces had worn away a bit too much, and the loss of detail was unnerving. No doubt there would be a clearance sale fairly soon.

  “I want that one,” Diana said, pointing toward the reclining boy whose head was propped up by his arm. “How much is it? No, I mean, how much is he?”

  “I could let you have him for thirty-six dollars,” the old woman said.

  “Bradley, you’ll have to bring the car around here to pick this up,” Diana said, smiling curiously at me and scratching her scalp as if in thought. “We can’t lug it back.”

  “You didn’t ask me if I wanted it.”

  “Oh, this is for me,” Diana told me. “I’ll just put it somewhere.” She was counting out dollar bills into Mrs. Watkins’s hand.

  “What mushrooms you got there?” Mrs. Watkins asked me, pointing toward my jacket pockets.

  “I don’t know their names,” I said.

  “Hand them to me,” she said. “I know mushrooms.”

  “No, no, I don’t think so,” I said.

  Diana put her hands into my own pockets and pulled all the mushrooms out. She turned them over to the old woman, who dropped them on the ground. Then Mrs. Watkins picked up one with a red cap in her left hand — her right hand still held the cigarette — and sniffed it several times. “This is called a pungent russula,” she said. “It’s not poisonous but it’ll make you vomit. Emetica, they call it. Very delicate structure though.” She passed her fingers around the mushroom’s gills before handing it to Diana. Then she reached down for another one. I wanted to get out of there but Diana was watching all this with considerable attention. Something was happening, and I didn’t know what it was.

  More sniffing from Mrs. Watkins. “This is a club foot. It’s no good for eating. The woods are full of those.” She threw it on the ground near one of the boys and reached down again. “Ah,” she said. She stubbed out her second cigarette. “Now this one is something. This one’s a parasol. This is one of the best.”

  Then, and I can’t say I was prepared for this, Mrs. Watkins — with her cataracts — bit off a tiny piece of the mushroom and chewed it. “Yes,” she said, smiling, like the ebullient hobgoblin she was, “that’s indeed what it is. Here.” She held it toward Diana.

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Don’t you do that.”

  “Shut up, Bradley,” Diana said. “Just shut up.”

  “No no no,” I said and forced it out of her hand.

  “Give it back here,” she said. “Or this will become very serious.”

  “This is serious right now,” I said.

  Mrs. Watkins looked at us with her inaccurate smile. Perhaps she meant well.

  “You don’t know what that is,” I said. “You don’t know what this is all about. Stop all of this, please, Diana.”

  “Oh yes, I do,” she said. She pulled the mushroom out of my hand. “This is about us.” She bit into the mushroom. I watched her chew and swallow. Then she leaned toward me. She whispered. “It’s a feeling. This is about this exact moment and where we are exactly right now.” She was biting off more mushroom, and chewing and swallowing. “This is about a favor that is being done to me. This is a spell. This is a charm. From one woman to another.”

  “Oh, dear,” the crone said. “A quarrel.” She turned around and went back into her house. She stumbled on the stairs going up.

  ON THE WAY HOME, with the reclining boy stashed in the trunk, Diana said to me, “When we get back, I’m going to make such love to you, it’ll take your roof right off.”

  When we arrived back at the Porcupine Inn, the bedroom smelled of lilacs, even though it was the wrong season for lilacs. We left the statue, or whatever it was, in the car. I wasn’t about to carry it up to the bedroom. It might have been a joke, that boy, but I couldn’t stop thinking of him, all thirty or forty pounds of him, ensconced in the trunk gazing through the darkness at the spare tire. Up in the bedroom, between us, Diana brought more fever to our lovemaking than she ever had before, but it was the wrong fever, as if she were trying to get rid of an internal pressure through physical means. She would ride me and close her eyes, and she would bend down to kiss my eyelids, and there wouldn’t be a sprig of affection in it, not a single solitary sign of love. It was just something she needed. She churned away and when she’d whip her head back and forth, the sweat from her forehead fell on my face. She slapped me several times as a sex thing, and as often as she came, it wasn’t enough, she wanted to come more often, and harder. She knocked the porcelain tabby cat off the bedside table, and the flowers too. They lay insensate on the floor in a puddle of water. She told me we were going to skip dinner. The mushroom didn’t make her sick, but I guess it gave her some sort of permission. It went further and profoundly into night, all this mushroom sex, and then on and on toward morning. I’d fall asleep and wake up to feel her working on me. She wouldn’t let me sleep. We had bruises. I never imagined this happening, but no matter how naive you sometimes think I am, I knew that whole night, by then, watching her, that she was in love with someone else, intensely, and had always been, and been tormented by it, and now she was taking it out on me, and making it obvious and those were her thoughts, the ones she couldn’t tell me, not for a penny, not for a pound.

  We had some great times, Diana and me, but we couldn’t last, and we didn’t. We brought the statue of the boy home, and Diana put it into the garden close by where the petunias and pansies had been despite my protests.

  FIFTEEN

  THERE’S A STORY of Kierkegaard’s that I especially like. A philosopher builds an enormous palace, but to everyone’s surprise he himself does not live in the palace but establishes his residence in a dog kennel next to it. The philosopher is invariably offended when it is pointed out to him that he lives in this ludicrous manner. But how else could I have built the palace, the philosopher asks, if I had not also lived in the dog kennel?

  It is like a Jewish joke. Kierkegaard made great efforts to live in the palace of thought he himself had built, but of course he could not manage it, given to polemical rages as he was, and to a peculiar kind of spiritual unhappiness driven by heart-spite. Besides, one eventually grows attached to one’s own doghouse and the daily bowl of scraps. Stubbornly we stay on in the dog kennel to prove that we were correct to have established ourselves in there in the first place.

  The story about Kierkegaard I like is the one in which he falls drunkenly off a sofa at a party. Lying on the floor, he starts to refer to himself in the third person when the other guests try to help him up. “Oh, just leave it there,” he says, speaking of his body. “Let the maids sweep it up tomorrow morning.”

  THE NEXT TIME Aaron called on the telephone — like the secret police, the terror experts, he always made the bell ring in the dead center of the night — he informed me that the money I had sent him was an “installment.” In consideration of emotional crimes against him, he said, he would regard his intentional death as postponed until after the next such payment.

  I was braver this time. I told him he was talking nonsense.

  Between us in the electronic ether, the thousands of miles, a silence brewed and thickened, was salted and seasoned, mixed with the sounds of his breathing.

  Nonsense? he asked. Nonsense?

  Just so, I said bravely, touching with tenderness the crease in my pajama leg. Esther likes to iron my pajamas, it relaxes her. Utter nonsense, I said with a fatherly rumble. And furthermore, I said, to nettle him, You sound like a schoolgirl, all these theatrics about killing yoursel
f. Please. Get yourself some grit. If you want to kill yourself, Aaron, you are free to do so. But prior to that you must not blame us. It is too late for these complaints. You are an adult now. Your life is a gift to do with as you choose. Such blame as you enjoy directing at me, at your mother and me, no — it is baseless, and I cannot accept it. We are two mild people, your mother and I, who love you dearly. For true villains, Aaron, you must look elsewhere.

  I was frightened out of my wits, saying these terrible condemning words. But the sentences came out of me as if I meant them.

  You’ve done it this time, he said. You’ve done it this time, there’s no going back . . . Gently, my broken heart thumping, I hung up the phone, laying the receiver in its cradle.

  I entrusted his life and his soul to God at that moment, placing my son in His hands, this God in whom I do not believe.

  AND KIERKEGAARD? Kierkegaard himself says that the gods created humankind and its troubles simply because they were bored.

  SIXTEEN

  WITHIN A MONTH after our return to Ann Arbor, we were talking about a divorce. Diana lived with me for a while, a few desultory months, and then, once she had the renters removed from her house, she moved out of here and back in there. She took the stone child she bought in the Upper Peninsula and put it in her back yard. Snow fell on that child all winter long; drifts blew up against it, and gradually it disappeared into the snow. She also salvaged the pictures I had drawn of herself on the back of the dragon. Those she saved. That dragon erased the two of us.

  That’s all I’m going to say about the subject for now. As Chloé says, some things don’t bear much looking into. If you want something to read, then read the white space on the rest of this page. That’s me, down there in the white.

  SEVENTEEN

  I COULDN’T GET Mrs. Maggaroulian out of my head. I’d be sleeping, and there she’d be in my dreams, pulling up a chair for an intimate girl-to-girl chat. Her wig’d be edging down toward her forehead and her nail polish would sort of be flaking off. I mean, she looked like a human pawn shop, Mrs. Maggaroulian did, but she never was one for appearances anyway. The whole point of Mrs. M as a person was inner truth. The outer Mrs. Maggaroulian was a horse that somebody should have let out to pasture years ago; you could see she didn’t even have a game plan for contemporary life. She was post-makeover and just about post-human. You could have, like, set her on fire, and I don’t think she’d even have noticed or minded.

  But in my head and my dreams, she made sense. She talked to me about Oscar and myself, us as a couple, and she told me to get my marriage license signed immediately, because time was running out on the two of us. She said we had to get married right away on account of our personal eternity was contracting rapidly into a space the size of a dime. We had just about no eternity left, Mrs. Maggaroulian told me. If we weren’t careful, we would be forcibly tossed out of a time window. She couldn’t elaborate. She went on about how you can’t name names in dreams. She had all these disclaimers, how she knew everything there was to know but only had an operator’s permit from the universe to tell me a tiny percentage of it before I woke up.

  I told Oscar some of this. I trusted him.

  She was a soul-antique, Mrs. Maggaroulian. You could see that she believed in marriage by the way she talked about it. A sacrament, she quoted from somewhere, rubbing her big hands together. Mrs. Maggaroulian talking about marriage was weird. It was kind of like a dog talking about being the mayor of Cleveland. But if the dog does it long enough, talking on and on about the difficulties and the responsibilities of being mayor and how he has to keep track of everything and not slip up, you start to believe him. Well, she could have called it — what Oscar and I had — anything she wanted to, because, as you know, we were getting married. Mrs. Maggaroulian was telling me what I already knew. I mean, I knew we were holy and would only become more so. She was just saying to get holier in a hurry, to put it on the fast track.

  JANEY, MY FRIEND the video artist, called me and said she wanted to have coffee, so I met her at a rival caffeine establishment, Goodbye Blue Monday, that was more downtown Ann Arbor than we were at Jitters, out there at the mall. They had GBM decorated to look Eurochic, with posters on the wall of people wearing berets and Woody Allen in French and all that other Parisian high life everywhere. Janey was sitting at a back table reading the current issue of Bust magazine. She was all grown up but you could see where her pimples had once been when you approached her. When she smiled at me, it was wolfish. Untamed, though not in the good way. She had brown hair like a wolf. Some girls, it almost doesn’t matter if they wash their hair or not. Shampoo won’t help these ladies. I can be a bitch, I got to watch that tendency.

  You just knew from the radar that she was a woman who dug other women physically but wouldn’t do anything about it, and she had spent her young life hemming and hawing, lighting cigarettes and putting them out in frustration. She had an inventory of failed gestures. Being modern, I’d slept with other girls once or twice myself but that was all over now that Oscar loved me and we’d have a life together. Janey, she was pretty in a predatory way, like that pianist, Liberace, but without the clothes he wore to keep you confused and off the scent. She just wore jeans and tee-shirts, like me. You could see by peering at her why she wanted to film porn all day. She stared with these dead-fish eyes at whatever was swimming by her. She was a hungry ghost, sucking people up in her karmic vacuum cleaner and storing them in the dustbag. Also, she chewed her fingernails. I hate that. Still, we were friends, maybe out of convenience or something.

  Anyway, she was sitting there with the videotape on the table. She gave me a sort of bored wave of hello, like I was already a disappointment to her before our first words had been spoken, very Hollywood agent, and she flipped her head back with this girl-of-the-world shake, accompanied by her patented wolf smile, which looks better on guys than it does on her. “Hey, Barlow,” she said. Barlow is my last name. “Whassup?”

  “Not much,” I said. “How ’bout you?”

  She shook one of her hands like there was water on it. “Do you ever get bored with weather? The weather is so sobering around here.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I pretended to smile, which came out as a real smile. “I’m going to move to Seattle or somewhere where they have some goddamn actual weather. You know: real rain? Rain and heroin. As opposed to what we get here? Oh, and guess what. I’m discovering something,” she said, sipping her cappuccino. “Guess what I discovered.”

  I leaned back. “No idea.”

  “Try to guess.”

  “Janey, I gotta be at work in a coupla hours. I don’t have time to guess.” She was staring at me like she wanted to dine out on me, and she flashed me a quick thing, an event-horizon thing lowering and happening on her face, and then it was gone, and she was normal again. “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “Okay,” she said. “The video we made? The one with you and Oscar, that I shot and directed? We’re not going to make any serious money out of it. In fact,” she said, “we’re not going to make any money at all, almost.”

  “Like how much?”

  She leaned back. “Like almost nothing. Like zilch.”

  “Jeez.” I felt that punch in your arm you feel when you’re disappointed. I hadn’t minded Janey taping us doing our mating dance because I figured we’d get enough for a deposit on a better apartment. Besides, you could tell straight sex just bored her silly, when it was happening in front of her, and she wasn’t paying attention, except technically. “I was expecting a lot more,” I said. “Considering how easy it was, doing it.”

  “Well it just goes to show. I guess it’s harder to break into the sex industry than I thought. They’re sort of going for the details, those guys. People are bored with what we served up. They want exotica. They didn’t say anything about exotica in the ad. But get this. They said the video was too dull. I have to tell you, I was offended. I mean, hey, I worked on that video. I put a lotta effort int
o it.”

  “How do you mean? Dull?” Suddenly my pride got up. Oscar and me, dull? In bed? No way.

  “They called me.” She leaned her head back and her eyes went up just like a shark after a bite of leg and shoe. “They said they could maybe, maybe, use a few minutes of it someday in a video anthology devoted to today’s youth. They said the marketing would be tough, though. There’s no target audience for watching people like you and Oscar. The only thing they liked was Oscar’s skull tattoo and the ‘Die’ underneath it. They said the sex was too midwestern. And they said the setting was bad. Unimaginative. I asked them what was bad about it, and they said it was just a bedroom somewhere. When I asked them where it was supposed to be, they said, well, someplace different, like an office at a used-car lot.” She thrummed her fingers on the table. “And no offense, Chloé, but they said you were pretty but not voluptuous. What do they expect? And they said that the costumes you and Oscar were wearing weren’t any good. They were very critical, these people.”

  “What do you mean, the sex was too midwestern? And what was wrong with the costumes?”

  “Well, like I told you, they said it wasn’t exotic enough. Like, track star and cheerleader aren’t exotic? But they said they weren’t. Your bodies were okay but nothing special. You took your shoes off. That’s a no-no. What’s the big deal with feet? Anyway, you’re supposed to keep your shoes on. And they claimed you guys didn’t have a ‘look.’ Hey, I argued with them. Chloé, I really did. I defended you. And they said there were other problems.”