The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  “No, I haven’t.” I wasn’t going to get inside of my building in time. I’d have to face him directly.

  “You been in my house and you been takin’ my things over here for your own self.”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. I put the grocery bags down on the stoop. He wasn’t going to hurt me in broad daylight. Bats don’t do that. Not here. God, he stank. I could hardly breathe. Evil has got a smell. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

  “You been takin’ my things, girl. You could have got you your own things but you took mine and you kept them for yourself. You even took that souvenir glass dish I like. I want the things back, all the valuables that you got your little bitty hands on.”

  “What glass dish? I don’t have your things,” I said. “Except Oscar, and he’s not yours.”

  “I oughta punish you for your smart mouth,” he said. “Wouldja like that?” He smiled, making a joke. “Some do.”

  “No.”

  “I been thinkin’ ’bout how I might just manage it. The punishment.” He put his chin in his hand like a demonstration of thinking. “It’d hurt. And you, with them nice pretty features you got there, it’d sure be such a shame and a mess.” He waited in a posture of thoughtfulness. “I’m still pondering it, considering the right and the wrong.” He smiled again, and what an awful sight that was. Demons smile, as a rule, before they force themselves into you. “You showin’ your naked self to me in my house and then stealin’ my son the same breath, and takin’ my valuables, I oughta just cancel your rights right on the spot, missy.”

  “What spot would that be?” Maybe I could get him on technicalities.

  He looked confused for a microsecond. “Any spot.”

  “Like this one?”

  “You’re tryin’ to turn me around. All’s I’m sayin’ is, you return what you stole. Meanwhile I’m keepin’ my eyes on you, so’s you don’t take you any more of my belongings and then smile yourself up like the little weaselly piece of tail you are.”

  He did this little swivel thing and walked back to his car before I could correct him on his dirty language. It’s sad when youth has to reprimand the elders. I could hear him chuckling to himself. I felt relieved that he wasn’t going to try anything violent on my front stoop. He couldn’t have done anything anyway because that week, being totally in love, I was immortal. Also I was relieved to see evil in such a pure form and to see how stupid it looked. The thing about Oscar’s dad was, he was a moron. God himself could’ve tried to tutor the Bat and He’d’ve gotten absolutely noplace. Still, he was Oscar’s dad, and I was sorry we’d never have cheery Thanksgivings around the turkey, family reunions, photo albums, and suchlike. We’d have this dumbfuck drunk meanness, instead. We’d have forty miles of bad road always stretching out in front of us.

  It just amazed me that Oscar had come out the way he had, with a father like that. It just goes to show you how inexact a science genetics is.

  I took the groceries upstairs and got the ice cream into the freezer before it melted.

  Oscar’d been gone a lot, working at Jitters during the day and taking classes at the Arbogast School of Broadcasting at night. He wasn’t going to do coffee all his life. Oscar was not a loser. He had a future in broadcasting. He would be Radio Man. We both agreed on that. He would practice his glottal thrust in the bathroom where the echo was good. In the shower with me, while I was washing his back or his chest, he’d recite commercials that he had written himself in his broadcast voice. He wrote commercials for products that didn’t exist. He wrote a commercial for a pair of scissors with three blades instead of two. You could efficiently cut two things with it simultaneously. He wrote a commercial for a pocket furnace that you’d carry in your overcoat during the winter. Oscar had many many ideas, several of them amazing.

  He made an audition tape for a radio show he wanted to do, a mix of Goth, techno, and progressive rock. I listened to it at home. You’d never guess that it wasn’t already on the air. His DJ name was Bone Barrel. He had a medium-low voice and could sound scary and crucial.

  We had to do something, since the sex thing hadn’t been lucrative and had been a morale drain besides. We were starting to map out our future. He would be in radio, and I was going to do something utterly else, only I hadn’t decided what yet. Oscar said I should be in the movies as a screen star, and I did consider it. I figured I was so good at so many things, I could kind of pick and choose. I was beginning to think that maybe I could go into social work. I didn’t mind being in the service sector. Anyway, Bradley had asked me if I wanted to learn bookkeeping so I could keep the books at Jitters. So maybe I would do that. I had many options.

  For the next couple of days we didn’t see the Bat. He went back to his cave, I guess. And then it was the day of our wedding.

  IT WAS A SUNNY DAY in August, the thirteenth. We dressed casual. Bradley Smith was going to meet us at city hall to be our witness. We wanted him there because he’s like an official adult, and he’d always been ultra-nice to us. Also he was going to have a reception for us that afternoon in his back yard, and we wanted to let him have the honor of being at the ceremony, the authorized witness.

  On the way to city hall, I went down on Oscar, right in the Matador, that’s how much I loved him. I started at a red light near that new tellerless bank and finished about a mile and a half later, near a minimart and a dry cleaner. I don’t know if anyone saw me. I don’t think so. Oscar said, “Honey, I’m just amazed.” I believe he was. He just let out a little mew when he came, and then he accelerated accidentally. It was straight from the heart, him and me, whatever we did. I kind of hoped you’d be able to smell his splurge on my breath an hour or so later after I said “I do,” but I don’t know if you can detect that smell conversationally. I didn’t leave any stains on him; I swallowed it all down, neat as a pin as I am, though there wasn’t much to swallow, since for good luck for our marriage we had made copious desperate love about two hours earlier on the floor, before we got dressed. Oscar’s cum tastes like wheat beer with a dash of Clorox, by the way. We were a couple of wild childs, that’s for sure. Everything we did was holy instead of scandalous. You have to trust me on that.

  Bradley was there, grinning, at city hall, when we arrived. His left hand was all bandaged up. We went in, and when we came out an hour later — there was another couple waiting, and that slowed us down — with Bradley as our witness, the mayor officiating, Oscar and me were man and wife. Once we were married we kissed, even though it was redundant, the two of us being who we were.

  I was Oscar’s wife. In the olden days I would have been Mrs. Oscar Metzger, but since we were living in contemporary times, I was still Chloé Barlow. Anyhow, it was time to celebrate.

  WE SET UP THIS BOOM BOX in the boss’s back yard, and a collection of CDs, and he’d taken some tables out there and covered them with food, and over to the side were coolers filled with beer, and jugs and jugs of wine. We would never run out no matter how much we drank or who we invited. I didn’t know why Bradley wanted to do this for us except that we had started as his employees and stuck by him or something. We were Bradley Smith loyalists, Oscar and me, despite our almost minimal wages and the oppression we experienced by having to work hard.

  The sun did what it’s done for decades: it shone. First thing I did when I got there was toss my shoes off so I could dance. I wanted to dance on the grass and feel it on my bare feet like an African woman approaching her new husband. I wanted to be that fierce. I took Oscar’s shoes off myself by hand and I started to feed him food by hand from the table including the cake that Bradley had remembered to buy. I would breathe oxygen into him if I had to.

  My sister Rhonda was there, and the Vulture, and Janey, taking her videos, and a bunch of my big-haired friends from high school, and a couple of the Spice Girls I used to live with, plus some of Oscar’s friends like Ranger and Spinner and Fats, and a guy whose name was unimaginatively just plain Don. Bradley’s dog, Bradley, was racing around,
barking conversationally to everybody and eating the hors d’oeuvres out of your hands. Bradley the human, not the dog, had invited this new woman, this doctor, who was black and amazingly superchic. I was drinking a fair amount, and Ranger had brought a big number that he lit up on the other side of the house, and although I was the new bride, I got high anyway.

  Funny stuff happens to me when I get stoned. Two years ago, before I met Oscar, in my wild-girl days, I went to a summer party. Here’s how high I got. At that party I saw Jesus, the real one, also in attendance at the party. Not all that many people have that honor. He was glistening. Glistening! I mean, he looked like an average Joe, but you could tell he wasn’t. This guy, just standing there, waiting around for I don’t know what, was the Son of Man, so-called, and you could tune in on that without asking anybody, it was so obvious. He was dressed in white and was wearing sandals, and He was so beautiful you just wanted to, like, eat him. He had a million watts of candlepower. He didn’t have to introduce himself because his divinity was so blatant. He didn’t stay. He had business to do. He drank some lemonade and then asked for directions. Jesus nodded while I told him where he wanted to go. It wasn’t the Celestial City, just a street address on the west side. He thanked me. And then he left. Jesus was on an errand, if you can believe it. I wished he’d stayed. He’s probably busy all the time. Everyone in the world wants to talk to him constantly, not just the prison population — everybody.

  My point is, I saw Jesus once, and I’m still alive, I’m still here. Talk about luck!

  I WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL woman there at the wedding party that afternoon. No one could take their eyes off me. I drank and danced and smoked Ranger’s weed and kissed Oscar, and if a man or a woman wanted to dance with me and get high by being near me for a moment or two, okay, but then I’d go back to Oscar. Bradley’s next-door neighbors, Harry and Esther Ginsberg, they dropped by. Harry and I have a lot in common. We’re both interested in philosophy. We compare notes. He asked me to dance, and I did. He’s a gentleman, and sweet, and he’s so smart you can tell thinking bothers him and takes up a great deal of his time. He gave me a little speech while we danced, ordering me to be happy, which I explained I was anyway, and he said, no, I had to be aware that I was happy. I asked him about evil, and he explained. He wanted to waltz, so I waltzed with him. He showed me how, and I picked the moves up right away.

  At one point I looked at the street and saw the Bat just standing and watching, but then he vanished. I should have been concerned, but I wasn’t.

  Bradley danced with this black doctor, Dr. Ntegyereize, and she was a much better dancer than he was, but she didn’t seem to care. They looked nice together. You got the feeling that all his life, Bradley had been looking around for an emergency-room physician, and at last he found one, and she was beautiful, besides. People who said that Bradley was unmarketable as a boyfriend and husband would just have to eat their words with a fork and spoon from now on.

  He had drawn a picture of Oscar and me riding a dragon, and he put this picture up on the back door into his house, so you’d see it in passing when you went in to the bathroom to do your business.

  Late in the afternoon a lot of the guests — our relatives and friends — were getting pretty drunk and/or stoned, but that was okay and totally acceptable behavior at a wedding party. I came out of the house from the bathroom, and I looked at this table, the one Bradley had set for us. The light was shining on it in a certain celestial way, blazing blazing, and for a second the table turned into a bonfire, and so did the food and the wine. The party became, like, incandescent, right in front of my eyes, and I heard voices saying my name, Chloé, like the air was saying it, or God saying it, celebrating me. This table in front of me, the party, was so bright you could be blinded by it. It was just like one of Bradley’s paintings, the one of the table he’d put up in the back of Jitters.

  Oscar started dancing with me, whispering love-and-sex stuff in my ear, wrapping himself around me (for a sometimes inarticulate boy, he could sure be eloquent, at least about me, when he whispered to me), and I was afraid I’d take my clothes off there and then, in front of everybody, shameless and crazy with love as I was, giving myself to him body and soul on the lawn, so we excused ourselves from the party and got rice thrown on us and we thanked everyone and we remaindered our sweaty selves into the car (I forgot my shoes in Bradley’s yard), but instead of going to the School of Velocity concert and staying at a motel in East Lansing, we went barefoot back to our little apartment, where we did our lovemaking all night long, my legs wrapped around him oh sweet sweet sweet fucking, like happy birds, which is sort of what you should do anyhow, given the circumstances, newlyweds and everything. We were legal now. We fell asleep at sunrise, birds chirping outside, all our limbs intertwined and confused.

  “Sweet dreams, girl,” he said to me.

  “Sweet dreams,” I said.

  I’D HAD MORE HAPPINESS than most people do in a lifetime, so when Oscar died four months later, I wasn’t ready for it, but I tried to be. I was pregnant by then, and I had memorized every inch of Oscar so I’d never forget any particle of him, inside or out. I didn’t think Mrs. Maggaroulian could be wrong about something that big, and she wasn’t.

  ENDS

  The Soviets made me change Romeo and Juliet so that it would have a happy ending, a barbarism, because living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.

  — SERGEY PROKOFIEV

  TWENTY-TWO

  THIS BAREFOOT YOUNGSTER, Chloé, wearing her bridal blue jeans, approached me to make a few inquiries at her wedding party, which happened to be next door at Bradley’s. Why, she asked, did love — by which she appeared to mean sexual love — attract so much, her phrase, weird badness to it? She said that as a philosopher I would know and that she needed to have the answer in a hurry. (I am not a philosopher; I teach philosophy of the antique and outmoded variety, and there is after all a difference between making philosophy and teaching it, a difference of stature and modesty.) Her question was not entirely clear. She stood there beautifully young in the hot sunlight. She referred to “scumbags,” but I grasped her intention. She was holding a beer and grinning quizzically. Her lips were so chapped it must have hurt her to smile.

  When I asked about the scumbags, she referred to pornography in a general way and then pointed to a strange little man staring at us from a distance near the street. Who was he? She didn’t say. But he, the strange man, appeared to be the scumbag problem to which she referred.

  Oh, I said — I had had some wine myself by that time, my syntax was not of the best — the force of eros, which is godlike and has been known to be such since ancient times and therefore does not have to include morality, being outside of it — think of the Bacchae, the unleashing of this force, the goatish caperings, well, any force as powerful as that is premoral. Eros, I told Chloe, is a devil as well as an angel; the faces are the same but the expressions are dissimilar. Every positive attracts a negative and must contend with it. I mentioned The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Freud and de Sade, the mingling of the angelic and the demonic, the control of these forces by means of ritual, of which her official marriage was one. I was prepared to speak of Spinoza and Plato, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, but she asked me to dance just as I was about to pontificate.

  I taught her to waltz, this young woman in bare feet. Esther danced with the handsome groom, who was similarly unshod, if otherwise decorated with earrings and a necklace of animal teeth. The music was not waltz music, but I hummed it into existence. Her delicate bones under my hand unleashed in me an unexpected surge of protectiveness. She was someone’s daughter. Of her parents, nothing was visible at this party. I took this to mean that at the ceremony itself, her father had not given her away. She had given herself away, courageous girl.

  FOLLOWING MY SON Aaron’s last call, I had decided not to interfere again with the misconstrued ironies of his life. I would not bother him with my fatherly intentions. I would
not call to ask for his news. What news he had always tended toward the apocalyptic. Let him call me. This was my plan.

  I failed to carry it through. Afternoons, I worked in the garden, planting snapdragons and petunias, or weeding, and while I did so, I thought about my son. These thoughts were tormenting, buzzing gnatlike around my head, because they had no content except by way of the images they presented. I added fertilizer to the soil. Aaron on a swing set, Aaron playing touch football, Aaron slouched in a chair reading Churchill’s ghostwritten history of World War Two. I remembered his shy tokens of affection toward his mother and me, pen-and-pencil sets he had bought us, homemade birthday cards, school projects from the elementary grades we had never had the heart to throw out.

  I remembered how he got the scar on his forehead and the scar on his knee. I remembered his face as a Bar Mitzvah boy.

  I tried to think of my new project, the book about Kierkegaard and his admirer Wittgenstein, but my attention continued to turn in the direction of my son.

  At last, giving in to my own myopic affections one Thursday around dinnertime, I called his apartment in Los Angeles. From the phone came the mechanical message that that particular number had been disconnected and was no longer in service. I dialed information and asked for Aaron Ginsberg on Ambrose Street. There was no longer such a person at that address. I obtained the numbers of all the Aaron Ginsbergs without street addresses, the new listings, but none of them were him.

  I called the florist in Los Angeles where he had worked intermittently as a delivery person. He had quit, they said. He had moved. To where? He hadn’t told them. He had been soaked into the ethers, and there he was dispersed.