Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

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 talked. 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.

So after a little, you know, after I’d recovered, I thought, now Oscar gets his reward, now he gets a prize, so I took his clothes off with my hands and teeth thread by thread and laid him down on the grass and scrambled on top of him. He looked up at me, no kidding, with hunger and impatience and appreciation. It doesn’t take much to make a boy happy, often the basics are enough.