The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  There. I took a breath. Sometimes I get light-headed and I think I’m going to faint. Anyway, you can’t figure out love without figuring out death, too, but the effort it takes can knock the wind out of you. Love is the first cousin of death, they’re acquainted with each other, they go to the same family reunions. Mrs. Maggaroulian’s office is empty, her sign’s been removed, and another sign, THIS SPACE FOR LEASE, is up there instead. I wish she were still there, with her Laurel and Hardy clocks. I could use some help and advice from her. I could use a few e-mails from the future, a few pennies-per-serving tidbits from the prophet of Ypsilanti, where the three Christs once lived. We’re constantly getting bulletins from the future, in case you haven’t noticed, but mostly we ignore them because of the unsightly messengers, the slobby crackpots who get the information and have to pass it on with their bad breath and missing teeth. Harry Ginsberg, the professor who lives upstairs, is always going around saying, “Chloé, the unexpected is always upon us,” but what he really means is that the future wants us to know what is about to happen and it, the future, sends us people like Mrs. Maggaroulian to help us out. I suppose he really means that I am the unexpected and that I am always upon him, but maybe he wants to say that he expected his son Aaron to show up one day and what he got was me, instead. He lost a son but he gained a sort of daughter, which was myself. You can’t always get what you want but sometimes you get what you need — truer words than that have been spoken, but not much truer, and for sure not in my lifetime. Here’s what I think: every once or so often, the Mrs. Maggaroulians appear in your life to help manage your most exciting and troubled times and to help you get through them. Ever notice how drag queens and street people and madmen typically show up at your doorstep just when you’re about to take a new job or go on a long journey? They’re there, as a rule, to tell you how it’s all going to turn out. You’ve got to cock an ear in their direction, despite the bad oniony smells they give off. If you ignore them, good luck, you’re on your own, that’s all I can say. Here’s another example of what I mean. Oscar had a cassette player installed in the Matador, so he could listen to music dimensionally when he drove to his various destinations. After he died, and I got the car, being his widow, I started to motor around town listening to the audition tape Oscar made at the Arbogast School of Broadcasting, where he was, like, practicing to be a DJ. On this tape, Oscar tries out different names for himself during his broadcast. Sometimes he’s Sam Loomis. Sometimes he’s Mister Van Damm or Bone Barrel. Oscar didn’t think “Oscar” was a good name for a radio personality, it had something dreadful about it. It’s funny. He plays music and does the weather and reads commercials that he wrote himself for clubs and used-car lots and window shade companies. God, I love hearing his voice. He’s mellifluous. I found that word in a dictionary, where it belonged until I used it just now. He announces songs but he doesn’t play them, not on this tape, except for one. In the middle of the tape he says that the next song is going out for Chloé. He doesn’t say who’s singing it. It’s not rock or Goth or heavy metal or anything like that. What happens instead is, this old bluesy guy comes on and sings it. It’s an old blues song, I guess. “Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down.” I guess Oscar liked it because of the title or the tune. Anyhow, on this tape he plays it, and it’s for me, and the reason it’s for me is that Oscar knew he was going to die, but that he would come back some way or other and find me. No grave would hold his body down. It’s also a sexual boast. I have to take another breath here, I’m feeling a little faint.

  Okay. I know it’s audacious for Oscar to say he was going to be resurrected. But why shouldn’t he be? Resurrection is a form of recycling. There’s an efficiency to the cosmos. Souls don’t get thrown out in the garbage dump. They get reused. The universe does not believe in waste, as you have no doubt noticed from observing the stars and the way they’re always right back in the same places night after night, on the job for stellar occasions. One Sunday morning I was driving around on the other side of town and noticed this little church, the African Baptist Hope of Resurrection Church, and I figured, okay, sure, it’s true that I’m white, but, hey, it’s a church and that happens to be the place where people think about souls being recycled. It was, like, February, when you really need a resurrection or two. So I parked the car and quietly crept in, trying not to track in the snow. Inside they had an organ and a choir singing, they were so beautiful in their robes, and near me there in the back was Dr. Ntegyereize and the only other white person, her boyfriend, my boss, Bradley the human. Bradley the human, being white, couldn’t dance around and hold his hands joyfully in the air the way the black people could, but, and this is the important thing, he was doing these little steps, like he was concentrating on them. He was concentrating on joy for once. He was doing it in a white-guy way. It was because he loved Dr. Margaret and had resurrected himself for her sake. You could hear the shoes of the celebrators tapping on the wood floor. He and Margaret noticed me, but somehow they also didn’t notice me, they were so into the spirit world, so I turned around and got back into my car and drove to Harry and Esther’s, with the singing still in my ears and the sight of Bradley the human doing his little dance inside my mental framework. Hey, sometimes I’ve wanted to throw off my clothes and dance in the street out of pure happiness at the holy spirit moving inside of me. I understand dancing. Harry was reading the New York Times when I got back, which I guess is his form of Sunday morning joy. It reminded me of something Oscar and I had done after we were married. It was Halloween. Oscar and I didn’t have to work that night. We decided that you’re never too old to go trick-or-treating, and besides we both liked candy, the same brands. Oscar decided to dress up as a big powerful dragon, the one with the eraser for a nose, and I decided to dress up as Venus. In day-to-day life Venus the goddess wears tight sweaters and skirts but, and this is the most important feature, you can recognize her because there’s usually an invisible star in the middle of her forehead, a silver one, that she hypnotizes you with. I wore that. Oscar had a big eraser attached to his nose, held there by a rubber band around his head, and a green cape, for scales. We went to a few homes of friends we knew, and we collected treats. It turned into a party. I kept thinking about the Dragon with the Rubber Nose, in Bradley the human’s drawing, because actually the poem is about things about to disappear and not just signs and billboards being erased, it’s about death. The Dragon with the Rubber Nose is found in most mythologies. We were Venus and the Dragon, and it wasn’t until November or December that I realized that Oscar’s costume was another form of prophecy, because the Dragon with the Rubber Nose self-erased Oscar. In another month he was gone.

  But no dragon ever dies, either. That’s how I know I’ll find Oscar somewhere. I don’t want to tire you out, so I’ll finish this as soon as I can. Diana says I should sue the Bat in a civil action, but I won’t. Suing the Bat would be like trying to collect damages from a cold virus. The Bat is just there, in whatever form he takes, such as Oscar’s dad, and because I haven’t seen him lately, I think he’s gone in retreat back to his cave. Soon he may appear in another shape. That’s Oscar’s plan as well, of course. I know you’re wondering why I dressed up as Venus and why I think the Bat will appear in another shape. It’s because the shapes we have are, like, fragile. I once was Venus. I didn’t look like her. I was her. These friends I had, these dropouts, they lived out in this rental farmhouse west of here, and a summer or two ago they decided to throw this summer solstice party, and as the night went on, it got pretty wild. We were all drunk or stoned, which helped. People were getting naked and running through the woods and the fields, and the girls had braided garlands for themselves and the boys had God knows what, and there was dancing and gallons of wine and beer and outdoor fucking and singing most of the night. That happened in my party days. Around midnight I went out into the woods and someone naked ran past me in pursuit of someone else who was also naked, and I thought: This sure is old-fashioned.

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bsp; And I could point to a boy and then point to a girl, and they’d look at each other and it’d happen, they’d be locked, helplessly locked, and I had the power to point to a boy and maybe another boy, and even if they had been straight they’d decide, that very night, to try it, to try love on each other just once, flesh against flesh. To see two guys kissing is sometimes a big relief, for a girl. It takes the burden off womanhood. Or it might be girl on girl, because it was the summer solstice, and that’s what Venus requires, though Venus prefers boy on girl because Venus is into procreation. I ruled that party. I had a star in my forehead. People saw that it was me, that I was making it happen, and they were in awe. Look out, I’m coming, it’s Chloé, and I’ll make you come, too, and I’ll point at you and you, and you can just try to ignore it, but you’ll be helpless. Ha. Slowly and then more quickly you will approach each other, you’ll make these efforts at conversation, and your mouth will be dry because you’re so scared and excited. You’ll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won’t have a chance against me until you’re very old, if then.

  The dawn arrived and we all dressed and went home and took showers and then went off to minimum-wage work, dressed in our clothes of the day, our workers’ uniforms, like the worker bees we were. Mostly we all had crummy jobs and mostly in our day-to-day lives we’re irritable and humble and bummed. We just sit around and watch television and argue about who’s going to go to the store to get potato chips and ketchup. I’m on, like, the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, as they call it. I can’t do the money thing. That’s not where my power resides. But that night, that summer solstice, we traded in those costumes of nothingness we usually wear for our nakedness, and that’s how we became gods and goddesses for a few hours, and of all the goddesses, I was the supreme one and everybody knew it. They bowed down to me. You would too. Okay, give me a chance to get my breath, one more time.

  There. I think I’m all right. I was going to tell you about this other party, this one other party, where I saw Jesus and then saw this other thing. I won’t say that I was clean and sober that day, because that would be, like, false. Jesus had already come and gone. I was sitting outside, almost passed out, in my chair, smoking a cigarette and eating a chunklet of cheese. I don’t believe I ever bragged about my virtue or my party manners. Anyway, I was sitting there with, I don’t know, a beer to wash down the cheese, and a cigarette there somewhere, and because it was a Sunday afternoon, I thought I would check out the sky. Which was blue, with clouds. I’d just said something really dumb and nonsensible when I looked up. There was something up there. It was scary. I looked and looked. This thing was made of cloud matter, but the longer you looked at it, if you were as high as I was, the more it became circular. I know you’ll say, Get real, Chloé, you saw a cloud. Hey, that’s all you saw. Okay, okay. Maybe. I said, “Hey, look at that cloud,” but no one looked up, they were all too out of it to bother. So like I said, it was circular, white and burning, like a fiery merry-go-round, with, if you looked closely enough, people attached. And cogs. You could see them, these people, getting on and off the inflamed cloud wheel in the sky, and they’d be strapped in facing out, and they’d be turning slowly because it turned slowly. It turned slowly like a huge grinding thing, and there were other wheels and gears in the sky, and they were all meshing together. And these people, they were all naked, walled up in the sky, attached to the wheel. I wished I hadn’t seen it, the wheel turning in the sky, because even if you’re stoned as I was, it fills you with majesty and terror, but that was the day I knew I had a goddess in me, because I had seen that. Oceans and rivers and fires of light, and I swam in that river from then on.

  I asked Harry Ginsberg: Who saw the burning wheel? Because I knew someone else had. Harry is very educated, he would know. He was reading something else, a book, and for a moment he looked up. And he said, Ezekiel, Chloé. Like two people had seen it, Ezekiel and me. I know he was speaking to me, addressing me, but I took it another way, that it was a list of two people, very exclusionary, a tiny club in which I was one member, Ezekiel being the other.

  So now I work at the coffee shop where Oscar’s ashes are in a pretty wooden urn on a shelf up near the listings of coffees we offer, and nobody except Bradley and me know that he’s there, my husband Bone Barrel. Down here in my basement — I’m doing Harry and Esther a huge favor by staying here, by the way, because they’re lonely and they need contact with the youth culture — I’ve set up a crib and a changing table and I have baby toys ready. My breasts, they’re huge, they’re ready for lactating and nursing. I smell of milk. I’m careful about what I eat and drink: lots of milk and Caesar salads and steak and fruits and vegetables. I quit smoking. It wasn’t needful. I wait for the baby and I wait for the return of Oscar. Oscar wasn’t unsung. I sang him, so he’ll be back. In whatever form he takes this time, I’ll welcome him. Sometimes I think of what Harry likes to say, The unexpected is always upon us, and I think, Yeah sure it is, but maybe he’s right, and one evening I’ll be down here, and, who knows, Charlie, I’ll be gazing toward the ceiling, just thinking about nothing, feeling my baby’s kicks as she or he gets ready to be born, this baby that’s half Oscar and half me, and I’ll be thinking about the baby’s name, and I’ll hear somebody outside, somebody who’s, like, approaching the front door, and maybe it’ll look like Harry and Esther’s son Aaron, who they’ve been waiting for all this time, who had previously invisibled himself but now has reappeared. He’ll come to the door, he’ll come in, they’ll welcome him back, but it’ll be me who’ll know who he really is. Once someone has bound your heart, he’s the only person who can let it loose again. I’m waiting, Charlie. I’m patient. I don’t ever want my heart unchained, except by him.