The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  That evening at dinner I broke the news to Esther.

  Aaron has disappeared, I said. I tried calling him but his number’s dismembered. Disconnected, I mean.

  Oh, honey. No one disappears. What do you mean?

  I explained. Maybe no one disappears. But he has, not to the world of course, but to us. I told you: his phone’s disconnected. He’s not working at the florist anymore.

  Esther put down her fork. He’s just moved, Harry. He’ll tell us where he has moved to as soon as he can. We have to be patient with Aaron. His maturing is taking its time.

  Maturing! He is one of these never-never land Americans who will never grow up. Intellectually he is still in diapers. I feel like calling Los Angeles missing persons. I feel like calling the Martian embassy.

  Don’t do that yet, she said. He’s not missing.

  I could hardly look at her face.

  He’s not missing, she repeated, to succor me. He is somewhere. He is always somewhere.

  But he was missing. The police could find no trace of him. They recommended a private detective who at great expense to us found a few sniffs and scents of him in the Pacific Northwest but not the person himself, not Aaron, our son.

  America, as everyone knows, is large enough to lose a child in. The tendency of the country to absorb its inhabitants and to render them anonymous and invisible had gone to work. He was now a runaway, a runaway from us, and was effectively erased.

  My vice is the comfort of abstractions. Concrete events as a rule disable me. When my son disappeared from the face of this earth, I was willing to try out sociology, I was willing to commit a social science the better to know the patterns of mislaid children in a post-industrial economy. I was willing to try out religion: Judaism, Christianity if need be. An exceptionally developed capacity for abstract thought does not preclude a consideration of the soul, a word I do not surround with fussy quotation marks. But I did not know how to look for him, and I no longer knew how to think about him, either. Concerning Aaron, I could find refuge in no known set of ideas. Aaron had gone to work on his own invisibility with zest and imagination, as if he had finally discovered a calling, which was the eradication of himself.

  We have, Esther and I, two successful children, Sarah and Ephraim. We love them and think about them. But we do not think about them half as much as we do Aaron, who is unsuccessful and invisible besides. As the tongue goes to the missing tooth, so do we poke and pry at his absence. He is our null.

  He is not a boy, but a young man. We must — we had to — give him over to the mischievous criminal attentions of the world. And now he had taken his heartfelt leave of the public realm. He did it to hurt us.

  When Esther and I are alone together in the evening, we avoid looking at each other’s faces. Aaron’s disappearance is much too visible in our eyes for us to bear the mutual sighting of it in ourselves. Esther and I know each other so thoroughly, we don’t even have to confirm our thoughts back and forth anymore. I know her moods; she knows mine. Aaron has achieved his purpose. I mean this: When you break the heart of a philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.

  Thus encumbered, I taught Chloé to waltz on her wedding day, humming to her tunes from Die Fledermaus.

  TWENTY-THREE

  IT DOESN’T SEEM FAIR that I’ve spent all this time telling you about Kathryn and Diana, who made me unhappy, but not about Margaret, who did the opposite and filled me with joy, a word I don’t trust and have never used in my life until this moment. When I met Margaret, I wasn’t inclined to tell anyone what was going on between us. People don’t go to psychiatrists and pay good money to talk at length about how happy they are. Talking can spoil it. As a rule you don’t settle down at the end of the day with a beer and tell your friend the particulars of how you lucked out and how well the day and the week and the year went, unless you’re the gloating type. You just don’t do that. It’s provocation. You find some other neutral ground. If you’re smart, you keep happiness to yourself.

  THE FIRST TIME I called Margaret to invite her out, she asked me why I had called, and I told her that I had admired the color of her yes. I meant eyes but said yes. I think she was touched by my dazed friendliness. She wasn’t inclined to go out with me — she had an on-again, off-again boyfriend — but at last she decided to take a chance on me, just for coffee at first, at Jitters.

  I gradually learned that she’s so used to emergencies that she’s relaxed and urbane about the rest of life. Almost nothing fazes her. She has a calming effect, as a human being, as a person. As a doctor, she’s used to the sight of blood, gunshot wounds, broken bones, and the other norms of calamity. A daily diet of emergencies puts existence itself into a steady and calm perspective. She told me a few weeks after our first date that I looked like someone who had offered love to a lot of people but that I hadn’t had any takers so far. Then she said that I was an unusual man, and when I asked her why, she said I was “openhearted,” which made me look down at the ground, not knowing what to think. Women use such words at the oddest moments. No, that’s wrong. Only Margaret ever used that word, maybe because she’s a doctor. Then I was gazing at her face with such concentration that I could hardly hear what she was saying. When I realized what she had said, I kissed her, and she kissed me back. Bradley stood nearby watching us and wagging his tail. She never called me a Toad. Perhaps she had never seen one.

  We were standing in the kitchen. It was raining out. She leaned back against the kitchen counter. She said, “I’ve heard about men like you, but I never actually met one until now.”

  I went to her dripping blood, my heart in tatters over Diana, and she cured me of that in a week.

  She was born in this country. Margaret’s parents were African diplomats who sent her to schools in the United States, where she decided to remain after she’d finished her internship. She didn’t dislike white people. She liked emergency medicine and wanted to practice it in a large training hospital. That’s all I’ll say about that.

  HERE’S A PROFUNDITY, the best I can do: sometimes you just know. Chloé and Oscar knew. You just know when two people belong together. I had never really experienced that odd happenstance before, but this time, with Margaret, I did. Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn’t have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us. Whatever I was, well, that was what Margaret apparently wanted. I wasn’t sure that she’d want a white guy like me, a service person afflicted with modesty, but she said she didn’t care about my color or my temperament one way or another because they were fine just as they were. She hadn’t thought she could love a man of my race, but once I showed up in her life, I turned out to be the man she loved, what is the word, regardless. To this day I don’t know exactly what she loved about me and that’s because I don’t have to know. She just does. It was the entire menu of myself. She ordered all of it.

  We do what you do in tandem when you belong together. We go to movies, we go dancing (she’s a better dancer than I am), we go to the grocery store and hold hands in the aisles (scandalizing the racists), we decide about furniture, we cook, we make love, we talk about the future, we play with the dog and take him for walks, we talk about our plans to get married, where and how and when. We fit together. (I avoid saying these things in public; people hate to hear it, as if I’d forced them to eat raw sugar.) There’s nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I want to say to her. Life has turned into what I once imagined it was supposed to be, as complacent and awful as that sounds. In fact, I don’t really want to talk about this anymore. As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it’s the unhappy ones who create the stories.

  I’m no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.
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  THE ART. First I sketched her in charcoal and then I did a portrait of her. I hadn’t done human figures in years. I drew and painted her nude and clothed, asleep and awake, wearing her amused expression or the thoughtful one, frowning. I did each portrait, each study, quickly. Inspiration made me confident and efficient. Besides, she doesn’t like to sit very much for these portraits. She’s too nonvain. So I do most of them from memory. Her skin tone was very hard at first for me to get, the way light hits it. But through trial and error I learned the tricks of shading flesh the color of hers, first in charcoal and then in oils. You should see what I accomplished, but I won’t let you, because I will not show any of these pictures in public, ever. They’re not for sale.

  I’M TALKING ABOUT gains and losses here.

  When Oscar died, it was a Saturday in mid-November, and he was out playing touch football with his friends and with Chloé. Just before that, during the afternoon, they’d been watching the televised University of Michigan Wolverines as they defeated the Ohio State Buckeyes on the gridiron, and the sight of it inspired them and brought their blood up to a boil. I was working at Jitters with another assistant I’d hired, Stusnick, and had given those kids, Oscar and Chloé, the day off. Harry and Esther Ginsberg were strolling around the edge of the park with Bradley the dog (I’d given them a set of keys to my house), worrying about their missing son, Aaron.

  They’d gone to the park, this group of people, and they’d found others from our neighborhood there, out for a stroll, out for a physical release after the tension of that game, and these neighbors, these keyed-up fans, who happened to include Diana, my ex, and her new love, David, who was athletic and who — I believe I’ve said this already — liked to hang out near the park for pickup basketball and touch football games, they were there too. They were invited to join Oscar’s game. Oscar and David knew each other from previous basketball. The more the merrier. For all I know, Kathryn was out there, with her partner, Jenny. Pregnant as she was, Chloé was on the sidelines watching and cheerleading. This is a small city. All these spokes of the wheel came into place that afternoon, all these gears meshed, everyone drew together at that moment.

  It’s February now. I’ve taken my dog out to that field, out into the snow. Bradley and I walk over the field, crusted with winter. In February the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to your psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely. I stand in the middle of the field, right about where I imagine Oscar ran out for that pass, and then, I mean now, with Bradley running after a winter squirrel, I imagine Oscar leaping up, out of the range of everyone else, and I can see him, even at this moment, in the middle of winter, catching the football the way he did in November, and then falling, still holding it, to the ground, and lying still.

  I can see them all bending over him. Even Bradley the dog has come over to examine him. Oscar’s friends are talking to him, or what’s left of him. I can see Chloé running out to the field. Someone — it’s his friend Scooter — nudges him. They say someone must have hit him and knocked him out cold.

  What hit him?

  I dunno. He got the wind knocked out of him. That’s all. Or, hey, maybe not. Maybe it’s something else. Oscar? Hey, man, Oscaaaaaar. Jeez.

  Maybe we gotta get him down to the hospital.

  Naw. He’s okay. I’m pretty sure he’s okay.

  Somebody take his pulse? He doesn’t look like he’s breathing.

  They bend down. They listen. Diana takes his pulse. Chloé pushes her aside and starts shouting that they have to get him to the emergency medical thing. Come on, come on, come on, come on, she says. Pick him up, you guys. Pick him up!

  So they load him into the nearest car, which happens to be David’s, and David and Diana and Chloé prepare to take Oscar — Oscar’s body — to the University Hospital, where Margaret has just, as it happens, finished work and is headed in the opposite direction, back to me.

  But they have all forgotten about the football traffic after the game. Every street in Ann Arbor is snarled with cars. This is a small city, and it takes a long time to empty of traffic. The stadium holds over one hundred thousand human souls. When David honks and waves his arms frantically, the drivers ahead of him and to the side honk happily in return and wave their arms and make the V-for-victory sign, or, using the same gestures that David has used, hold their fists in the air, unless they’re Ohio State fans, in which case they sit and glance around sullenly, hands clutching the wheel. No matter how much he honks, no one moves aside, no one lets him proceed with the body of Oscar to the hospital. There is no space to move. In both directions the traffic has halted, like blood in a blocked artery. He cannot shout. What good would shouting do, in this crowd of happy shouters? They’re all shouting. He’s one of many. He can’t get out of the car because that would accomplish nothing: the cars in front of him are stuck as well. His sedan with its occupants moves by slow increments toward the hospital.

  What’s worse is that the cars to the right and left of him have stopped in the same traffic jam he’s in, and their happy inebriated passengers witness Chloé bending over on the seat and breathing into Oscar’s mouth. They misunderstand what they are observing. They think it’s passion. They think it’s the feast of love in the back seat. Apparently they don’t see her clamping his nostrils shut, as she breathes her breath into his lungs, because they give her smirks and grins and smiles, honking in great amorous collaboration at what they take to be Chloé’s celebrational mouth-to-mouth. Go for it, girl! Go Blue! And they don’t stop giving her the high sign until she turns her face away from Oscar’s. Then she fixes her eyes on them, and she screams, but the scream is swallowed up in the tumult. She then brings her mouth back to his, to keep him alive.

  It all takes a long time.

  AND STILL HE ISN’T ALIVE when they arrive at the hospital, and nothing that is done to him there can bring him back. He has had (we learn these helpful terms later) hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the medical slang for which is “hocum.” Goddamn these doctors anyway, with their jargon, their jauntiness, damn them all except for Margaret, who is my beloved exception. Ventricular fibrillation dropped him down. Eventually he was declared dead, Oscar was. An autopsy showed an abnormally enlarged murmured heart, from the track and the basketball and the genetic code, though I refuse to give up the metaphor and think it enlarged itself from his love of Chloé. Margaret explained all this to me in her calm, horizon-greeting African Zen style, using terms like commotio cordis. Against the terrors and sorrows of death, only the multisyllabic Latinate adjectives and nouns for protection, the know-how, and then the prayers, for those who have them.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THERE I WAS, CAGED. I sat in the front seat next to David, with Chloé bending over Oscar in the back, trying to breathe her life into him. All around us people, these fans, these monkeys, hollered. They whooped. They celebrated. On their faces were all the manifestations of glee. Being of a difficult and combative nature, I wanted to kill them early in their lives.

  I sat in the car, containing myself but wild with sanctioned fury, and then I thought of whom I would sue.

  Oscar and Chloé, these two kids, who had served me coffee day after day out at the mall — I had taken a liking to them. I enjoyed the spectacle of how they felt about each other. I thought it was rather inspiring, actually, those two orphans, with nothing, really, to their names. They weren’t middle class in any of the tiresome customary ways, and they didn’t have two nickels to rub together. You could tell from the fatigue lines under their eyes that they’d been around a few blocks. Sometimes, seeing them working together at Jitters, I thought: David should marry me. We could have that. Except, possessing money, we would have it easier
, we would do it with a little more style and a little less emotion.

  And now, in the backseat, Oscar looked, to all appearances, no longer living, no longer even dying. His dying had been successfully accomplished. Watching Chloé trying to keep him alive, putting her lips to his, I started to cry. I never do that.

  I’m a lawyer. I reached for the car phone. I called the emergency number. I explained the situation. The dispatcher told me that no ambulance would be able to move faster in this traffic than we were able to do. No helicopter would be able to land where we were located, the congestion being what it was. Such a maneuver, I was informed, would be unsafe. It would be faster if we just continued to drive.

  So we stayed in the car.

  I’m a lawyer. I think about responsibility. And in my ire, I thought: I’ll sue the university, for staging the game; I’ll sue the city of Ann Arbor, for having clearly inadequate plans for controlling and siphoning off the traffic. Within Ann Arbor, I’ll sue the police department and individuals within that department, standing at intersections and misdirecting the cars, buses, trucks, and vans; and then I will organize a suit against the city manager, for permitting the congested and overfilled parking lots to block proper egress from the city; and the zoning board, for the proximity of the buildings. I’ll sue the architects, for the design of those buildings. I’ll institute proceedings against the automobile manufacturers, for the size and shape of these vehicles. I’ll sue the athletic department, no, I’ve already done that; I’ll sue the advertisers who have supported these games; and I’ll sue the Wolverine Fan Club; I’ll sue each and every one of the businesses lining this street, for being located there and for blocking our way. I’ll sue the driver of the car in front of us and I’ll sue his drunken girlfriend — I already have their license plate number committed to memory — and the two passengers in the back, waving at us while David gives them the finger and then leans on the horn, they’ll all be penniless by the time I’m finished with them and sorry that they were ever within living proximity to me. In my wrath I’ll sue the drivers and passengers in front of them. I’ll sue the manufacturer of the football that Oscar caught, that proximate cause, I’ll drag the officers of that company into court and pull their names through the mud, so that even their children will refuse ever to speak to them. I’ll sue the makers of the clothes Oscar wore, including his shoes (he may have slipped! he may have lost traction! he may have fallen because of the shoes!); I’ll find out what he ate while he watched the game, and I’ll sue the brewers of the dangerous beer he drank and the makers of the arteriosclerotic snack food he consumed; I’ll sue the tattoo artist who tattooed the skull and crossbones onto Oscar’s back (Chloé told me about it) with the word “Die” underneath it, goddamn it, I’ll sue them for prophecy; I’ll sue Oscar’s father, the Bat, for not taking care of him, for not preventing this eventuality, and for generally endangering Oscar and Chloé’s welfare; I’ll sue the doctors, I will take their fat-cat medical school asses to court and nail those asses to the wall, for whatever they give him, for whatever they do, in their wisdom and knowledge, oh, let them try anything, fuck them all, for I shall see to it that their efforts could be construed as unprofessional, mistaken, foolish, and wrong. I’ll sue the doctors and the drug manufacturers for not bringing him back to life; I’ll sue Jesus, who is acquainted with Chloé and who once met her at a party, for not being here, when we needed Him; and I’ll sue God, who passes out misfortune with equanimity.