The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  “Oh, better, Tommy, much better. Besides, that’s all the money I have. They have golden dogs, dogs who wait for you while you’re at school, and dogs that fetch the paper, and dogs that sleep with you at night and watch television with you, any show you want, and dogs that’ll sit at your feet at the dinner table and eat the food you can’t stand to eat. You can just buy a wonderful do-everything dog now.”

  “Bradley does all that.”

  “Listen,” I said. “You just go ahead and stuff that money into your pockets and then hide it and be sure not to let your mom put those trousers into the washing machine until you’ve taken the money out, and don’t tell your mom or anybody else that I’ve been here until she wakes up, and I’ll take Bradley with me, and he’ll make me happy again, and then you and Louie can go down to the Humane Society and pick out a dog of your own with that money I just gave you. No more blue Monday ever again. Okay?”

  “Okay. I guess.” He scooped up all the bills and stashed them in his pockets, as I had instructed him. “Can I kiss Bradley good-bye?”

  “Sure.”

  Bradley sat with me in the front seat all the way down to Ann Arbor. I drove the legal limit. It isn’t every day that a toad can free up a dog. We listened to the jazz station from Detroit, and when he stood on his four legs on the passenger side, he smiled at me with his big dopey face, as friendly and as unsubtle as a billboard. His tail wagged, but not in time to the music. Let’s not get sentimental. That dog never had an ear for jazz.

  SHE CALLED ME at dinnertime, as I knew she would.

  “I cannot believe you did what you did!” she shouted. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. Enraged spittle was teleported over the phone lines and was spattering out of the earpiece. “You stole the dog! Damn you, Bradley. What is the matter with you?”

  “Watch your language. You have children. I didn’t steal him,” I told her. “I bought him back. It was Dog Liberation Day.”

  “You bribed Tommy. Who would do that to a child? You are a monster. I am truly, truly angry at you.”

  “Uh, no. I didn’t bribe your son. He shook me down.”

  “You paid him fifteen dollars for Bradley? That’s a rotten trick. Goddamn you!”

  “Honor is such a guy thing,” I said. “Uh, what did you just say?”

  “I said you paid him fifteen dollars. That’s low. That’s the lowest you’ve ever gone.”

  “Fifteen dollars, eh?” My nephew was a child of deep cunning, I was discovering. “You get what you pay for. What was Harold’s reaction?”

  “You called him at the barbershop! You brainwashed him. He’s changed his tune. He never liked this dog anyway, he says. And now Louie is saying that he never liked the dog either. I think Tommy paid him off to say that. Only me! I was the only loving one! You guys are ganging up against me. You’re all against me!”

  “Now you’re self-dramatizing,” I said coolly. She slammed the phone down.

  THE UPSHOT OF IT WAS, I kept Bradley. I fed him and petted him and I built him a doghouse and called his name when I came home, and in return he loved me. My sister and brother-in-law found another dog, as I knew they would. Whom they also named Bradley. Now there are three Bradleys. Their Bradley is smarter than this Bradley, but I don’t care about that at all, not really, because at least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

  FIVE

  OSCAR AND ME, we had such good sex together we thought there ought to be a way to make some money out of it, to live off of our crazy ruinous love forever. Only we hadn’t figured out how. Oscar’s real good-looking once you get his clothes off and his body into its characteristic behavior. As a boyfriend he’s kind of indescribable. Words violate him. And me, Chloé, I’m even more that way. There’s almost no point in me saying anything about myself because the words will all be inhuman and brutally inaccurate. So no matter what I say, there’s no profit in it.

  Still: once upon a time he, Oscar, had been a stoner, sort of upwardly mobile from pot to hash and XTC and heroin, but it was just an excursion for him, Oscar being ambitious in other directions. He got fascinated by oblivion but discovered its secret, which is that it’s boring. But on some days you could look at him standing and eating a cheeseburger and see from his eyes that he had been ruined for a spell. He had been briefly tragic.

  He told me once that in a drug dream he’d seen the famous African whispering monkey. The whispering monkey told him awful things about his possible future, bleeding scabby death in garbage alleyways, and that was what sent him into rehab.

  After his substance-abuse experiences he became advanced, a reformed boy outlaw. Plus, we were, as I said, both real lively between the sheets. We were swoon machines.

  WE MET AT THIS fast-food place, Dr. Enchilada’s. They’d just hired him, Oscar, he was new. He had to wear the little paper hat over his semiblond hair. It’s the law in this state, for hygiene. He came in and he looked at the hat, turning it in his hands. When he finally put it on, he wore it an angle, like he was not wearing it. He had an attitude about the hat, which made it okay and unopinionated. He was above the hat, the hat wasn’t above him. That day, they gave him five or ten minutes of training, and then he was working the register, Mr. Can-I-Help-You, but looking bad and cool and totally unhelpful, and I was on the taco assembly line gooping on the guacamole. I was only looking at him occasionally, in secret, him being the new boy. It isn’t really guacamole, by the way. They call it guacamole to keep up appearances at Dr. Enchilada’s, which is owned by Citibank or somebody.

  Anyway, we took a break together. We went outside to the parking lot for a smoke. He was still wearing the hat. To make conversation, he pointed at my ear and said, “Your name’s Chloé? That’s cool. Well, hey, Chloé, you’re pretty but you’re way underpierced.”

  So I kicked the dead caterpillars in the driveway and said, Fuck you but, you know, giving it a friendly girlish inflection, a smile, an invitation, just the right tone to start flipping him out.

  He said, smiling back, “No, no, really, just one isn’t enough.” And he raised his finger to my earlobe. His hand motion was halfway on its journey to being a caress. It was then I noticed how nice-looking he was. The blond hair, the snaggle-toothed smile, the bomb-shelter eyes. A cute guy who can look at a woman such as me directly and not turn away has the courage of a mountain climber. Sometimes they get scared off by the eyeliner and the mint-green glint in my cornea, and they worry that they won’t be up to the challenge. But boys in recovery have that reentry calmed-down zombie look, which you can’t buy in stores, and they do sometimes turn it to their advantage if they aren’t scared of girls. Oscar looked burned away and rebuilt, like a housing project. Survivors are sexy, sort of the way secondhand clothes are sexy because they hang right, you don’t have to break them in or get the sizing out.

  When he looked at me, he was sending me a signal that extended into the future and made my teeth rattle. He said he was pierced all over the place. And he told me about where he was pierced, including his tongue stud, and also the secret tattoo he had, of the skull, which said “Die.”

  I was deeply impressed. Also he had nice shoulders, despite everything he’d been through. He had been an athlete once, before indifference took him over and he absolutely no longer cared who won anything. I felt no lust toward him at that moment but knew that I would within a few brief hours, the itch starting in my heart and moving downward into my hands.

  We went back to work. That afternoon it was kind of electrical as I watched him take orders and fuck up when he gave change.

  That night when I told my best friend, the Vulture, about it, the Vulture said Oscar and I would happen, that we were inescapable and inevitable. She’s never wrong about things like that, the Vulture isn’t.

  HE GOT MY PHONE NUMBER, in that house where I was living with about sixteen other people. They were a
ll from high school, and we were existing generically and domestically together before we found serious jobs and apartments and lives that we could claim as our own. Some of them were working at this coffee franchise, Jitters. For this guy Bradley. I ended up working there. I guess you know him, obviously.

  At home there was this constant desperate party going on day and night, which can be depressing and effortful. You get tired of the burns in the furniture and how the bathroom is always locked, or, when you get in, there are potato chips floating in the toilet. Anyway, Oscar’d call and say, I want Chloé. Not, Can I speak to Chloé? Or: Is Chloé there? But every time: I want Chloé. I liked that, especially the “want” part. My roommates taught him to say Please. They’d imitate him, these girls. Give me Chloé I want Chloé, was their envious little whine. The Spice Girls I lived with — Dopey and Sneezy and Slutty and Bookish — they were so urbane that they pretended not to eat or to cook or anything — they subsisted on air and bulimia. So Oscar took me to some movies and we ate popcorn out of the same bag. As a gift, he gave me his syringe and his spoon and his rubber tubing thing. He put them in a box with a sort of rubber band around it. He told me never to give them back, that I was the new event in his life, the new car in his driveway. The old events were passé. Things developed between us. I’m summarizing here.

  He told me that he was burning for me, and he meant it. When he was around me, he gave off a smell of young man musk, mixed of salt and leather and grass. He’d stare at me desperately, smoldering his life away.

  To be more romantic than we were, you’d have to kill yourself in the middle of the street and then write about it. Shakespeare did that.

  He took me out to dinner at the Happy Chef, for example. The Happy Chef himself is outside the restaurant on a concrete pedestal. He’s ten feet tall and made out of plastic and wood and glue. He’s the symbol of everything that happens inside. Oscar let me press the button at the side of the Chef that makes the Chef talk, from a recording. “Hello. While you’re at the Happy Chef, you may notice that some of the water glasses have no ice in them. This is not because we forgot to put ice in the glasses — all of our water comes with ice in it — but because the water got hungry, and ate the ice.” Like that. We laughed sadly at the lame-o humor, then went inside for hamburgers. Oscar put his foot between my legs, and he touched the inside of my wrist with his fingers. I loved it, how high he carried a torch for me. It was romantic, at least as romantic as my life ever gets.

  But! He still lived with his father in Ypsilanti. He took me over there and showed me his knife collection stashed under the bed in this velvet-lined box. He wouldn’t let me touch his knives. Because I would hurt their aura. He said. As if I could blunt a knife! Also I got shown his stamps, that he had collected in fourth grade. Those I could touch. He still had his track team medals up, and his track shoes on his windowsill, all this boy-holy shit. He had run the relays. That was the last thing he did before he tried out syringes filled with mind-soak for a little while. But what really got to me? Was that he still slept with his Bert. Or maybe it was Ernie. It was the one that looked like President Bush, with the pinhead, whichever. Oscar gave it to me when I asked for it because it smelled like him, grass and vinegar and musk. It had Oscar-aroma.

  His father dynamited tree stumps for a living, then hauled them away. That’s what Oscar said he did, though even Oscar wasn’t sure about his dad’s total occupation. Early on, I saw Oscar’s dad a few times, through the window, coming home in his truck. He didn’t come inside back then. I believed it: about the dynamite. Oscar’s dad had the strangest name I ever heard of on a man: Batholdt. And that was only his first name. Everybody called him the Bat. Oscar had to hide the fact that he slept with Bert from the Bat. The Bat was scary. The Bat is scary. Oh, you who are reading this book, brothers and sisters, look over your shoulder, for the Bat crouches behind you.

  OSCAR SAID, You won’t believe this, but I think of sex all day long. I didn’t while I was temporarily a teen junkie but now I do again. Sex has made me totally pointless in the human realm. I would know stuff like the capital of Mormonism if I wasn’t Mr. Obsessed. My mind is a pornographic event. I’m an onionhead. Oh, Chloé, you set me on fire.

  But I — me, Chloé — was sick that way too, though not about boys generally, just about love, and then sort of gradually about Oscar. He made me feel actual. When I was with Oscar I felt I was in prime time. So I told him that, and when I did, his eyes lit up as if we had a connection, a plug to a socket. Then a week or so later he said he thought of me all the time, how he wanted to be with me, and talk to me, and how he was distracted at Dr. Enchilada’s, thinking about me, how much I was a car that he wanted to drive, no, not a car — the car. I would take him to heaven. It was so sweet of him to say that. He had a streak of romanticism, it turned out.

  By then I had earrings all the way up and down my ear. He had done his vibe on me and I had answered. Also, we had talked all night long twice, by phone. We said that no matter what, we’d be there for each other. So then we did the inevitable and fucked happily several times and he sort of moved in. Not that he really moved in, he was just there all the time day and night, touching me everywhere. My roommates, the Spice Girls, tried to ignore him. As if they could ignore a boy that beautiful, good in bed, as I carelessly bragged, a boy in recovery and therefore almost glamorous, a knight in shining armor galloping out of rehab.

  But then we decided we had to move out, this particular night when the noise level was extreme, a headbanger party, bodies everywhere, every room a mosh pit. This couple, these two sexual fascists, they were kissing and molesting each other unobtrusively — they thought! — in the kitchen, standing up. But it was show-offy, whatever it was they were doing, and unsanitary besides. I didn’t even know them. They were friends of somebody. When I told them they should find a bed like everyone else, the girl stopped what she was doing and said that being a food-service professional had warped me and would I please keep my opinions to myself. How’d she know about my day job? It had to have been that they had seen me at Dr. Enchilada’s tricking out the tacos with the guacamole pistol. There and then I decided to get another position somehow. I don’t know, maybe the Spice Girls had been talking about me. But these two, they were blocking the refrigerator. You just don’t do that at a party. When you don’t know the people who’re doing it, sex, or whatever those two were doing, can be repulsive and karma-damaging, if I may be so bold as to say.

  So me and Oscar decided to take a walk.

  We went down the side streets in the dark. I could hear locusts, and the hot night air lay like a damp towel against my skin. I saw this pre-teen girl doing cartwheels on her front lawn, back and forth, slowly and sweetly, as if she were performing all those actions as absentmindedly as a Ferris wheel. She was wearing a charm bracelet, and tinkling came from her wrists. I said, “I used to do that. I used to practice back flips. I was into cheering.”

  Oscar said, “You?”

  “Yeah. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a cheerleader. So I was. For the wrestling team.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah. But I guess I got degenerate, or something. That was when people didn’t believe my cheers anymore, I guess. My cheers weren’t infectious.”

  We walked on quietly for a while, hand in hand.

  Oscar said he’d read in the paper about the Perseid meteor shower. Because it was August or because it was time for them to die. The meteors were all suicidal. They were bored with space, he said, looking up toward the night sky. They were burning themselves up in the atmosphere. A meteor deathfest. It was romantic, the way trees are romantic, and the way Oscar could be romantic if he set his mind to it. Also cosmological, a word I once learned. He pointed out constellations to me, the ones viewed for centuries and named for kings and queens. We were walking hand in hand and then we were talking about this new music group, Castro District, that we both liked. Our conversations were getting deep and personal the longer we talk
ed. I could feel his love entering me through my spine. And we’d look up to see a meteor, but, fuck and alas, all you could see was another street light.

  So Oscar said, Chloé, we gotta sneak into the Michigan stadium.

  Which was how we got in there, to see the meteors, because Oscar? he’d been there before, he knew the secret way which I can’t reveal to you, it’s like almost a CIA thing, they can kill you if they find out you know. He took me right to the fifty-yard line, and we looked up at the sky. It was pitch dark, extreme dark in there with only the grass under you. You could hear sounds of traffic miles away. Trucks shifting gears. People shouting and screaming. People contemplating murder. The usual summer sounds.

  Oscar said, Man it’s suddenly cold out here.

  I said, Well, what d’you have on, one layer?

  Yup. No kidding, it’s like: nipples, air.

  That was when, boom, I saw one, a meteor. It was a streak. Then, ten seconds later, boom, another one, another streak. I’d never seen anything interplanetary before, at least not in real life.

  And Oscar, next to me, says, Honey, did you see it?

  That was what he called me. Honey. An endearment! It blew a fuse in my brain because, for all the quasi-romantic encounters I’d ever had, no boy had ever managed to say anything sweet to me, at least that he meant. My life had entered a new phase then and there because I knew that Oscar loved me and not only loved me but was able to say so. So I got all hot all of a sudden, I felt like dancing in my bare feet on the grass almost, and so I said, Oscar, gimme a Slurpee. Please, please, please? I want to look at the meteor shower while you gimme a Slurpee.

  Slurpee is a name we have for this sexual thing we do. So we got my jeans off and my underwear and I lay down on the grass. It wasn’t cold anymore. I only worried about the grass. That it would tickle. But it was just doing what grass does, growing under me and photosynthesizing, so I didn’t mind it at all. Oscar, he went to work with his tongue down there on me and before very long I was clutching at the grass and saying his name and cheering him on like the pom-pom girl I once was and looking at the meteors streaking across the firmament. He has this really talented tongue. The stud on it helps, too. I started coming and almost couldn’t stop. It was the best Slurpee I’d ever had.