The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  They got in the car and now she put her hand on his chest and started kissing him. They kissed for a while. I should have turned away. I tried.

  A fire truck went by a few blocks away, howling. Chloé came and collected Oscar and they went home together in Oscar’s beat-up Matador.

  I staggered home and couldn’t sleep. It occurred to me for the first time that I had smashed my life with a hammer.

  THE JOB AT JITTERS became a different job.

  Couples, plain-style Americans, would come in, hand in hand, arm in arm, treating each other as delicacies. They’d order a pound of coffee or they’d order decaf cappuccino, and they’d sit down at a table and talk, leaning toward each other, their secretive knees slowly but ever-so-surely touching. Every day this familiar tableau that I myself had painted in The Feast of Love was presented to me as a done deal, an actuality. In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

  The mere sight of happiness made me groan inwardly. Now, when I walked in the parks, all I saw were couples, Chloé and Oscar types of every description. At intersections I would find myself behind couples necking in the backseat, or some woman next to a guy in the front. I would watch. I would see her toying with the back of his neck. Twirling her fingers there. Playing with the little curls. Sometimes I’d see people smiling for no reason. Just smiling, happy with life. This enraged me. I suffered from the happiness of others.

  It helps that in Michigan everyone goes inside from November through April. But from May until October they are outside, on display, and all of a sudden if you are single, you have a window to heaven and no way at all to get in.

  My attitude toward my art changed. Now I didn’t paint my canvases; instead I vandalized them. Harry Ginsberg came over one evening and said, “I have heard of action painting, but this is new. Bradley, you are at last a pioneer in the visual realm. You are post-action and post-Pop. This, what you are doing, is devastation painting. You are the first painter of the new millennium.”

  I was pleased by his comment.

  ONE EVENING I LEFT Bradley behind in the house, and I drove to Jackson, Michigan, which is about thirty miles west of Ann Arbor. I had no idea what I would do when I arrived there. It was just a place to go. Jackson is one of those hopeless-case cities that are cited in magazines at the very bottom when they list America’s most livable communities, one of those working-class locales where they’re all repairing cars in the front yard and otherwise having fights and breaking beer bottles over the nearest head. The houses aren’t painted, and the siding is falling off. They’ll kill you for a nickel and steal anything that isn’t nailed down. What can I say? Folks there are enjoying themselves any way they can.

  When class warfare erupts in America, as it must within the next decade, it’ll start in Jackson, probably. Those citizens are not being fooled.

  Anyway, I found myself driving to Jackson’s one tourist attraction, the Jackson Cascades. This guy named Sparks built it in the 1930s. He was a radio tycoon. He thought Jackson needed some waterfalls, for the view. It needed something. But there weren’t any visible waterfalls except for the ones that Consumers Power had already dammed up. So he built this thing in the central city park. It’s huge, the size of a football field. Water gubbles out at the top, where it’s been pumped, and it flows down these ten or so artificially built cascades, like a display in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas, and you sit in the chairs they have, having paid your four dollars, while computer-controlled lights play over these cascades — it only opens after dark — and the speakers they’ve attached to telephone poles play Mantovani and Neil Diamond and the 101 Strings. This is where I decided to go to collect my thoughts.

  The water doesn’t flow during the day. It sits there. Mosquitoes breed in it. At night they hatch and go insane. They go after you.

  This was a Tuesday night. I bought my ticket and sat down in a sort of bleacher chair. The management gives you a fly swatter, a little one with Jackson Cascades printed on it, and you’re supposed to swat the mosquitoes with this device. Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” was blaring over these internment-camp speakers, and I was sitting there with my head in my hands wondering what I was doing in Jackson, Michigan. The colors on the water were turning from magenta to a sort of hot pink, and I was having this insight that my parents had let me loose in the world without explaining anything of importance to me.

  Down below me were some families, likewise sitting, likewise watching this spectacle but perkier than I was. One child wearing Oshkosh overalls was running in widening circles. He was yelling, “I’m gonna explode!” I nodded at him. Okay with me, kid. You just explode right there. I’m watching, and I’ve got the good view.

  The music switched to Mantovani, this string slop, pouring molasses over hapless George Gershwin.

  In front of me this picture-perfect high school couple was sitting on a bench. He looked a little bit like the guy that Diana was seeing, and she looked a tiny bit like Diana. The resemblance was close enough to indicate God’s trickster pranksterism. They were talking. Then, God help me, they were kissing. Everywhere I went I saw people kissing. It was this smooch conspiracy. These two were holding hands, and with the hand that was free, she was swatting mosquitoes on his back, and he was swatting mosquitoes on hers.

  I found them unbearable. Another couple in love, this time at the Jackson Cascades, swatting mosquitoes off each other’s backs, and they both looked dirt-poor, knowing the system was rigged against them, and they didn’t care because they were both sedated with amour.

  Down with love, I thought, and all its theatrics. I felt a sort of energetic, visionary despair.

  I raced back toward my car. As I drove home, typically, I was arrested for speeding. I, Mr. Toad, was traveling eighty-five miles an hour on I-94. I was given a breath test. Sober sober sober. Oh, I am a sober man, and the state trooper wrote me a ticket to confirm my sober crime.

  Back in Ann Arbor, Bradley greeted me with great joy, which for once was not contagious. I walked into the kitchen and turned on the overhead fluorescent light. It snaps at you when you do that, before it begins to shower glare and that flickering corpse-blue illumination on the sink and the Formica counter and the red dish drainer. For once I believed Harry and Esther; there was indeed a dybbuk living in the house with me. I saw it in the living room. It had the appearance of an easy chair. Demons can disguise themselves cleverly.

  I sat down. My head was full of wild ambitious urges to hurt myself. I tasted the ambrosia of maddened impulse. I wanted my interior pain out in my body somehow. I wanted this vague pain to be specific. That’s how I explain it.

  I took out my sharpest knife and cut off the very tip of my little finger. On my left hand.

  I sat there and bled while my dog whined and barked at me. Then I called my neighbor, Harry Ginsberg, and he drove me in my car down to the hospital. He did not comment or ask questions. He’s a good man. Philosophy has taught him how to keep his mouth shut when necessary. I insisted on taking my car because I knew I would leave bloodstains soaked into the leatherette, and indeed I did: great expressive blotch-stains. At the emergency entrance, Harry dropped me off to park the car. Eventually they put me into a room with this black woman, this doctor, who introduced herself as Dr. Margaret Ntegyereize, and she was the one who bandaged me up. She asked me how I had done such a thing. I explained. She had beautiful eyes, Margaret did, and no wedding ring, and I fell in love with her on the spot. I couldn’t tactfully get her phone number right there but resolved to obtain it by stealth.

  Driving me home, Harry told me — how could I not know it? — that Jackson Pollock had cut off the tip of his little finger at the age of seven. Seven! Jesus Christ. Not even my pain is original.

  TWENTY

  IN THOSE DAYS, before I fell in love with Diana and married her (which was after Bradley had met her, married her, and she left him for me) — befor
e all that, I used to hunt in the forests and marshes up north. Deer, in particular, but ducks also, and pheasants. Now that I’ve lost that passion, I remember my prey with an odd clarity. I see all the individual animals I killed and cleaned and prepared for meals, crossing my line of sight one by one like mechanical birds in a shooting gallery flipping up from one side and sinking down on the other. I see their eyes, small glintings there. Sympathy for these animals? Why should I feel sympathy? That’s for others. They were one form of life, I was another. I was never one of them.

  It could be that I didn’t think at all. The cells of my body collectively strained to be outside with a weapon in my hand, in pursuit of them.

  Every part of this pursuit made me edgy and alert. I didn’t say to myself: I like to hunt. Liking had nothing to do with it. It was much more simple: I was a hunter, and that simplified my identity. I didn’t really have to consider the matter at all. I hunted the way an apple tree produces apples, as if it was purely second nature. My father had taught me how. I felt his presence there in those woods and fields, the weight of his flesh and bones on my shoulders, the sound of his gruff voice in my ear.

  I counted the days until hunting season opened just as other men counted the days on the calendar until baseball or football season began. My hunting clothes were stored in a basement closet, the bright orange for deer hunting, the camouflage for the ducks. I’d go to that particular corner, open the door, yank at the pull chain for the light, and just look at the clothes, hanging there, swaying sometimes in the draft I had brought in, or from the furnace vents, swaying like ghosts dangling on the clothes rack. I’d have a beer in my hand and I would drink the beer as I gazed at the contents of the basement corner, an expression of suspended animation on my face.

  I had a succession of girlfriends who tolerated this behavior. Then I had Katrinka. I married her.

  I gave it all up when I left her and moved in with Diana, when I left my boys, Carl and Jeremiah, and took up with her. Once Diana belonged to me, and once I had begun to experience what it was like to live with her, and to live without my sons except on weekends, to have lost or at least be separated from my children, I abandoned all my interest in hunting. I took all my guns and my hunting clothes to the dump. I had no intention of selling them or giving them away. I didn’t want them to fall into another man’s hands. I wanted their history to end with me. I loved her, I loved her with some kind of violence, and that was all that mattered.

  THERE’S ANOTHER STORY I want to tell you, and then I’ll be finished. I don’t think people should talk about their health, but this story is more about love than medicine. I had gone to the dentist for a routine cleaning. The dental hygienist, a pleasant woman about my age with whom I conversed easily, had just about finished the job when, as she was examining my throat, she said, “Hmm.” She asked me to open wider and to say, “Ah.” I did. She looked. I gazed out the window at the view. She did not say what she was looking at. I stayed calm. She called in the dentist, who also took a long look at me — at my tonsils, it turned out, and the uvula, on which were spots of some sort.

  “There’s something there,” she said with maddening nonspecificity. “I don’t think it’s serious, but I’m sending you to a specialist. Just for a look.”

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “Probably nothing,” she said. “Probably just a couple of papillomas. Which are like warts, a wart on your throat.” She looked at me carefully. “Really,” she said, “that’s all I think they are.”

  She gave me the name of the specialist I was to see, a Dr. Hovhanessian. When I called his office, I discovered that I would have to wait for a month for an appointment. It was August, and Dr. Hov would be on vacation, his secretary told me, so I — and my throat and its contents — would have to bide the time until he returned.

  On the day of the appointment, I drove over to the medical complex, checked in at his front desk, and sat in the waiting room reading old copies of Time and Newsweek. Eventually the nurse called my name and ushered me into an examination room that at its center featured a chair like a dentist’s chair. Up on the wall were various posters about deafness and throat cancer. I had thought about throat cancer and about the possible choking or pain that might accompany it, I thought of speaking with an artificial larynx, but the truth is that until that moment I had really done my best to be a man about it and to keep the whole matter out of my mind. I’m quite good at such denials and exclusions.

  Bad health is for others. I’m not supposed to get sick.

  But in that examination room with that black chair in front of me, my heart began to pound, and because the chair I was sitting in was a simple metal one with stainless steel sleighlike runners resting on the slippery blue-speckled linoleum tile, I found myself moving slowly across the floor, powered by the pounding of my heart against my back. Fear has a certain horsepower, I discovered.

  Dr. Hovhanessian eventually arrived. He was an oval-faced man who affected an authoritative air and who presented a general and perhaps inflated aura of competence. We exchanged pleasantries and he was kind enough to show interest in the research work I do for the drug company (I’m a molecular biologist). Then he said, “Let’s have a look at you.”

  When the exam was over, he leaned back and said, “You don’t have anything.”

  “I don’t have anything?”

  “You had your tonsils out once. Those are lymphatic deposits. They’ve been there for years.”

  “Oh.” Then I smiled. “I guess that’s a relief.”

  “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said. Then he rubbed his face. “You know, when I first started to practice medicine, I thought my patients wanted me to give them a clear diagnosis of their illnesses and a clear course of treatment. But that’s wrong. What my patients really want is for me to tell them that nothing is wrong with them and that they’ll be fine and that they’ll live to be a hundred.”

  I nodded.

  “Nothing is wrong with you,” Dr. Hovhanessian said, “and you’ll be fine. You’ll live for another fifty years, give or take a decade.”

  I thanked him and walked out of his office and got into my car. What I didn’t do was drive back to work. Instead I drove along the river for an hour or two and then went into a bar downtown and ordered a double scotch. Instead of making me drunk, the scotch brought me to a higher pitch of lucidity. I made a resolution, the only one I can remember making and keeping. I decided not to tolerate, in my life from then on, any form of trivial unhappiness.

  This thing had been a lesson to me. Our time here is short.

  That night I told Katrinka that I would be leaving her, and I informed her about Diana. Diana’s story about the denim shirt is her invention. I was the one who initiated all this.

  I CAN’T TALK about love directly. I never have been able to. The only way I can talk about it is by talking about hunting and visits to the doctor.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I’D BEEN AT THE GROCERY BUYING, I don’t know, food, for example orange juice, and a candy bar and ice cream for Oscar, and I had come out to the parking lot to unload all this stuff into the Matador and take it home. That was when I saw, over there in the corner by the dumpster, my future father-in-law, the Bat, leaning against his truck, an open-sewer smile on his face. He was taking his own time, the Bat was. He had his wings folded up but he was calamitizing me with his evil.

  I figured that word had finally gotten out to the Bat about Oscar and me getting married. Maybe Oscar had invited him to the reception as what you’d call a friendly gesture.

  That must’ve just shoved the Bat’s psyche down to the barroom floor among the peanut shells and the sawdust. His short-fatherhood was obsolete now, he had no necessity for being alive. Nobody wanted him here on Earth. Anyway, explanations aside, his little greaseball head nodded at me directly over the space of the cars in the parking lot. Like, recognition. He hoped! Maybe he thought . . . shit, why am I saying this? I don’t care what
he thought.

  I pulled the car out onto Stadium but fuck and alas, there trailing behind me, still at a distance, was the Bat himself, busily hunched over his steering wheel smoking his Camels and drinking his no-brand beer while he kept me in his line of sight. Well, now at last I had a one hundred percent genuine stalker, and not a handsome one like some women get, with a killer smile and Continental manners, but a genuine blue-ribbon humanoid rodent. I turned by the Dairy Queen, hoping to shake him, but his intentions, being impure, were strong. He hung on to me from his distance. I could feel his puny rat’s eyes boring into the back of my neck.

  I drove downtown and parked in the police station parking lot. I figured some proximity to the law would give him the willies. Plus you put human refuse next to courts of law and the human refuse will get anxious and crazy, and eventually they will go away. I thought I’d got rid of him. I waited and then I drove over to our apartment.

  But when I got there, the Bat had already arrived and was parked across the street, like we had an appointment. I eased the Matador into the parking lot and hefted the grocery bags into my arms and made my way to the front door. I was not about to run away. The ice cream would melt, wasting my hard-earned money.

  Oscar was at work. I should mention that now.

  I was trying to open the door with my hand, holding all the groceries. From behind me I heard the Bat say, “You want some help?”

  “No,” I said, trying to get into the building.

  “Hey, maybe you and me could have ourselves some lunch?”

  “Well,” I said, “Lunch? I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Or dinner? Not that I need ’em. You been standing against me,” the Bat said, getting closer. There was this odor in the air that preceded him. “You been back in my house.”