The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  “Like?”

  “The love thing.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “They said that it looked like you and Oscar were in love.”

  “So?”

  “They said the love thing makes the video off-putting. That was the word the guy used. ‘Off-putting.’ It wrecks it visually. That you can just tell by watching. It kinda takes the kick out of it. It makes it creepy to watch. The way you two look at each other was alienating, like you had a thing going. And he really had a deal about the way you went at it. Creepy, he said, too plain-style and also too midwestern. Can you imagine? Fuckin’ mondo. This guy on the phone, working for who he works for, tellin’ me about creepy? I got a little indignant. He blamed the pacing on me, as the director. He said it would a better video if you guys had used your imaginations.”

  “No way.”

  “That’s what I figured. Well, he was one mean guy, and I guess the result is, I’m not going to make my fortune with you and Oscar.” She poked down at a bag. “Here’s your videocam back. I’m getting another one.”

  “What about the money?”

  “What about it?”

  “You mentioned a figure.”

  “First I have to sign an agreement. Then he said the check would be in the mail. It’s not here yet.”

  “He said that?”

  “Those,” she said in a kind of weird half-whisper, “were his exact words.”

  “So you haven’t got the money?”

  “Chloé, would I lie to you?” She pouted for a split second.

  “I don’t know. I guess not.” It occurred to me just then that Janey hadn’t talked to anybody, that she had made the tape for herself.

  “There’s this other thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  “I’ve been asking around town. I made a few inquiries. I found someone. You wouldn’t believe some of the people I talked to. But I guess the Midwest is like anywhere else. I know someone here in town who’ll pay you and Oscar a lotta money if you do something. I brokered it, so I’d have to get fifty dollars out of that.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s pretty, uh, slight. All you and Oscar have to do is make love to each other. You can do that, for sure. All you have to do is sex, and all you need is love.” She looked disgusted.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a catch.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “Well, this person here in town wants to watch.”

  “Watch us?”

  “Yeah, I guess. You know, he’ll be there in the room, sitting on a chair, watching you. That’s all. It’s not exactly what you’d call a job, Chloé. I mean, it isn’t work. You just make love and then you get paid.”

  I got instantly depressed. Ordinarily I have high spirits. This scene was getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, like an event out of somebody else’s life that you don’t even want to hear about in a story. What had happened to how holy we were, Oscar and me? I had fallen low, I could see that, thanks to economics, the hunger for money in a hurry, and I was worried about dragging Oscar down with me. Thinking about foyers can corrupt you, I guess. “Janey,” I said, “did you ever think when we were in fifth grade that we’d be having this conversation?”

  “I didn’t think we’d be having this conversation last week.”

  “So who is this guy?”

  “I don’t know. Just some ordinary horrible guy I met. He’s harmless. Some typical man with eyes. The world is full of them.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Sure. Nothing’ll happen. This guy is all middle-aged and bald and a wimp and a loser. Besides, honey, Oscar — well, I’ve seen him naked, right? That boyfriend of yours is strong. He may have done drugs once, but he can sure handle himself. I mean, he looks like a tough motherfucker.” She stopped to sigh admiringly. “Though I know how sweet he is and everything.” She reached around and scratched her back and looked annoyed, like I should be doing it for her, the scratching.

  “That money,” I said. “How much was it? I want to get this right.”

  She named the sum, and then she said, “Maybe I can get it higher, but I doubt it. It’s already a huge lot.”

  “Well, I’ll ask Oscar. But I don’t think so. I really don’t think so.” I waited. “I mean, we’re broke, and we could use the money and everything . . .”

  “Well, it’s like being sex workers for one night. One night only. Putting on a show for a lonely guy. Hey, I hear you guys are getting married. Wow. You’re so traditional.”

  “You heard that?”

  “Yeah, word gets out. Congratulations.” She started to shake my hand, thought better of it, and stopped in midair.

  “Thanks. We’re gonna do it in a week or two.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, my boss, this guy, Bradley Smith, he’s offered us his back yard for the reception.”

  “Who’s going to perform it? Like, the minister?”

  “We’re going down to city hall first. You know: the clerk. The clerk does it.”

  “Hey,” she said, “you remember that guy, Buddy Preston, from school?” I nodded. “Well, he’s made himself into one of those ministers you become if you send in a matchbook application and twenty dollars. He could marry you, and it’d be legal. He’s married a couple of people lately.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “A couple of people we knew from school. I forget their names. He does it as a sideline. He makes a little money from it. I saw one of his weddings a while ago. It was a real wedding. And he’s a friend of ours. Well, not a friend. But an acquaintance. I mean, you remember him, right? He lives out in Dexter now.”

  I gave her a long stare. I was super-irritated. “Do I look zany to you?”

  “Well, no.”

  “This is my wedding I’m talking about. Jesus, Janey. I want a proper city hall wedding. I don’t want some quack minister. Come on, Janey. Have some respect for my feelings, would you please?”

  “Okay, sorry.”

  I took a sip of my lemonade. I don’t drink coffee, it’s bad for you. “Oscar and me, we don’t go to church or anything, so we gotta settle for city hall.”

  “Let me see your ring.” I showed it to her. I held out my hand in her direction, and she put my hand in her hand. I knew that was the thrill for her, my fingers touching hers, not the ring. “Wow. It’s real pretty. A stone and the whole nine yards. Is that gold? Where’d you get it?”

  “I didn’t get it. Oscar got it. He bought it for me.”

  “Where’d he get it? Is it, like, an engagement ring?”

  “Sort of. It’s a real short engagement, though. He bought it at the jewelry department at the mall. He made a special trip.” I didn’t want it to seem like I was gloating, so I didn’t say anything more about my ring, which had a genuine zirconium diamond in it. It wasn’t glass, if that’s what you’re thinking.

  She leaned back and examined the ceiling. “Your parents coming?”

  “My parents hate me,” I said. I tried to find what she was looking at on the ceiling but couldn’t. “My dad threw me out, you remember that, back in my party-animal days. They think I’m a loser. Plus my dad is taking orders from my mom about ignoring me. So I’m pretty harsh on them, too, now that the ball’s in my court. What I do is, I exclude them from stuff, such as my wedding.”

  “Yeah. You gotta be radical,” she said.

  “So anyway, I’ll tell them after the wedding. But they’re not invited. Rhonda, my sister, you remember her? She’s coming. She’ll be at the reception.”

  “What about Oscar’s parents?”

  “He’s only got one parent. The Bat. Very scary individual. Don’t know if he’s going to show up or not.”

  “Am I invited?”

  “Well, yeah.” I gave her the time and the address, but you could see she was pissed about not getting a written invitation, of which there weren’t any.

  She tried t
o recover herself by getting girlish. “You guys goin’ on a honeymoon?”

  “Yeah. We’re going to a School of Velocity concert the next day and we’ll spend the night in a motel in East Lansing.”

  “Chloé, you are so hot. You’re going to be the happening married couple. So what about this guy who wants to watch you two lovebirds fuck?” She was going back to street language, back to business. She smiled at me like she had indigestion and was trying to cover it. “Like all that money?” She named the figure again. “Now there’s a fortune. What about him?”

  “It’s way creepy. But, like I say, I’ll ask Oscar.”

  THE THING WAS, I wanted to buy Oscar some medical insurance, because Bradley couldn’t afford to give us any benefits at Jitters. And I thought that if we had it, and something happened to Oscar, we’d be covered. But! I knew, alas, that you can’t get an insurance policy for five hundred dollars, but you almost can. What I was worried about also was the pre-existing condition thing, how they never cover that. Well, maybe we could put a deposit on a better apartment.

  As for us, I didn’t want anyone watching us ever, exactly. But I also thought: Hey, this customer wants to watch Oscar and me, it’s his problem, right? It’s not our problem. We’re not watching. We’re just doing it the way we always do, being in love and physically endorsing it. Some poor loveless unloved excuse for an American human wants to watch from the bottom of his particular barrel so we can pay for Oscar’s health insurance or a down payment on an apartment, well, hey, there’s a possibility for positive gain here. I guess everybody wants to watch, sort of. Except: you don’t feel like doing it quite so much, maybe you don’t feel like it at all, the air goes out of that particular tire, any of the things you usually do, when somebody’s got their gloating eyes on you.

  And then I thought about what sort of man would want to do this. I mean, he had to be pretty desperate, calling up some service somewhere, just because he wanted to watch. I took a walk in Allmendinger Park to think about it. I watched the dogs and the parents and the kids. I imagined him coming home from work, another lonely guy doing the dishes, standing under a lightbulb and listening to the radio, trying not to be a creep but being one anyway, and one night he realizes, bingo, that he’s in hell, he just lives there permanently, hellllooooo, he’s never getting out. The fix is so in, you can’t get more in than that. So what he wants is, he wants to look at what it’s like in heaven, where we are, he wants to see two representatives of the youth culture, which is us, Oscar and me, just lying around and making love, and maybe he could get clarified that way, you know, sitting there, looking at us yelping with happiness the way we do.

  It’d be sort of like bringing a dog to a person in an old-age home. Therapeutic. Except you can pat the dog. Us, he wouldn’t be able to touch. I’d insist on that.

  Seeing is believing. Seeing is different from telling. I mean, it’s different from me telling you about it, right? Right?

  Well, I think so.

  But suppose Oscar starts to give me a kiss. When nobody’s watching, he’s, like, doing it for me, and for himself, because he likes to. He likes the way I taste to him. He just breathes me in up here and down there. Would he give me a Slurpee? Maybe not if we were being studied. He’d get shy. But when you’ve got this golf-playing lonely polyester hyper-wimp sitting in a chair watching, this guy who’s bought, excuse me, a fucking ticket, then you’re doing it, like, for him. The whole deal changes. It turns into a show.

  That’s not healthy.

  THAT NIGHT, WE WERE MAKING hamburgers at the tiny stove, so close to everything that it’s not even in a kitchen, and I told Oscar about it, Janey’s proposal, and you know what he did? He sat there. So I just sat there. Then we both started talking. Eventually he yelled at me and I yelled at him. He and I fought and we ended up crying together, but by the end of the dinner hour we’d decided.

  We told each other it wasn’t a big deal.

  After all, everybody likes to watch. I mean, I like to watch Oscar, I even like to watch him shave when he’s naked, and he likes to watch me.

  We decided to do it. But we wouldn’t go to anyone else’s house, we had to do it here. The guy would have to come in and we would close the door. Those were the conditions. And we did. I called Janey and Janey called him.

  THE GUY CAME OVER, just this anonymous middle-aged smallish bald guy with asthma, wearing an old-fashioned gray fedora hat. You could tell his upper lip had been surgically reconstructed. There were flesh fault lines heaving upward from his off-center mouth.

  Anyway, this citizen sat on our chair, our furniture — and that was almost the worst part — and we did it for a while, for long enough, anyway. The trouble was, it was an act. And I never felt that Oscar and me were an act before. I couldn’t look back at the guy watching us. I just concentrated on Oscar. I never took my eyes off him. I held on to Oscar like you’d hold on to a lifebuoy that keeps you afloat. At one point his eyes said he couldn’t go on, and my eyes told him he had to, so he did. It was the low point of my life so far.

  When we were finished, the guy said he wanted to see us do it again, with some variations.

  Oscar sat up in bed. He said okay, sure, in a minute. Then he said he wanted to talk about a movie he’d seen. Did the guy like movies? The guy shrugged. So Oscar said he’d just seen this movie called Cyber Catch or something, and in this movie there’s a vast evil megacomputer that the super-secret government owns that can analyze your DNA from a blood sample. And the computer, the big mainframe, has some people all predicted from here until infinity, their lives laid out and everything based on the DNA, even their afterlives are predicted by the computer before they’re born, in their pre-life. The computer also knows if you’ll go to hell or not, even before you’re born. Your entire post-life is completely mapped out. What it doesn’t get from blood it gets from handwriting samples. The computer wants total control for a consumer society, including the afterlife. The hero and his girlfriend are trying to get at the computer, but the computer knows all about them, so the guy-hero has to think his way into being somebody else in order to defeat the computer, and the girl-hero has to change her identity into, like, this minimum-wage cleaning woman. They’ve got to imagine their escape.

  Oscar sat up in bed naked doing this plot summary for about ten minutes. I never knew he could make up stories before that. Then the bald guy with the facial fault lines said, “That’s nice, kid. But if I wanted to go to a movie, I’d go to a movie. Maybe you could do what I’m paying you for, okay?”

  “Okay,” Oscar said, and he shrugged his naked shoulder. He turned to me and gave me a peck on the cheek, like the show had to go on.

  The second time was harder, that’s all I’ll say. We earned that money. At the end of the show, when we were finished, we got paid. I’d almost never seen so much cash in my life.

  I swore off life for a day or two after that. My New Year’s resolution was to bag it.

  I won’t even tell you about how I vomited the next day. Or how I got rid of the chair the guy had sat in. My life isn’t sad, I have a good life, so I won’t convey that it’s pathetic or anything. But I did get rid of that chair.

  The funny thing was, after all this happened, and before we actually got married, I stopped thinking of myself as a girl. I had thought of myself that way, on and off, up until then. But after that, no. No more girl. The girl was out of me. It didn’t apply. The word sort of made me flinch from then on.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE LITTLE MARRIAGE EXPERIMENT with Bradley hadn’t worked out, and so here I was, doing a recently divorced debutante show.

  It was Saturday. I had drifted into this summer evening party, a back yard gathering with pinprick clouds of gnats disturbing the air, in that space where the other guests were drinking and talking. Farther back, near the garage, a wasp nest was hanging from a maple branch just above the phone lines. I didn’t see any wasps, but the guests were windmilling their hands in front of their faces to keep th
e gnats away. “Hi, Diana,” they would say, waving as if to say good-bye. The hostess, Lydia, smiled with relief when I came in. I am rarely a disappointing guest. I tend to spice up whatever social gathering I am invited to. I create small harmless scenes.

  The weather seemed untroubled. I heard birds crying out, somewhere above us.

  These two people, my friends, the hosts, had constructed this back deck a few years ago, parallel gray boards nailed to a frame. Lydia’s taste was for a certain easygoing informality that thrived on summer parties but not winter ones; this marriage, the one with Don, was her third, and all sorts of children and stepchildren and semi-orphans had been dressed up and were serving condiments and hors d’oeuvres. One of them, whose name was Edgar — you don’t expect a small child to be named Edgar — was playing the piano in the den. The windows were open, and the music-beginner’s Mozart — mixed with the sounds of conversation.

  People lazed around. They came and went. Coolers full of beer lay open for inspection and slow bluesy jazz arose like candle smoke out of the stereo and was combined near the house with the sound of Edgar’s Mozart, the minuets he was playing. Their house, which was stuffed with scratched-up antiques, was set back far enough away from the street for privacy, and the hedges were littered with kids’ toys, tricycles, and broken plastic battery-operated games. Walking in, you’d see this wreckage, and it was comforting, familial. Then you’d get to the back and note a treehouse falling to pieces close to the nest of wasps. And down there, in the yard, under the wasp nest, the guests had assembled. The invited guests and the more or less invited guests, people like me, our laughter mixing with the sounds of the crickets and the outcasts, the cigarette smokers, huddling in the back corner, grumpily inhaling.

  Lydia is a tall, straight-lined woman with curly black hair that sweeps in a tangle down both sides of her face and her neck. She’s not beautiful, exactly, but her eager, smiling intelligence greets you at the doorway, and before very long you’re divulging your small wickednesses to her, and she’s telling you hers, and she takes on the attractiveness of anyone for whom every sub-minor detail is interesting. Interesting events cling to her. She’s a perfect hostess for a party. She’ll just pry the outrageousness out of you for the sake of a story. She wants to hear about everyone, and it’s only later that you remember that you neglected to ask her about herself.