Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

“What’s so great about this?” We were lying side by side, doin’ our thing with our hips sedately, but it’s weird because it’s so secondary, though I’m heating up? I was so wet down there but I was also trying to concentrate on what he was saying. “What’s so great about getting bills?”

“Hello? You’re not listening to me,” he said. “’Cause I’ve got these bills, they’re like, uh, you know, the national debt, but look at the look on my face.”

“Now?” His eyes were kind of not-focusing just then. He was staring toward the Monopoly game, on the other side of the room, and his glass Mason jar full of pennies, and the other Mason jar full of old shoelaces.

“No, not now. In the future. Look at me, Oscar-of-the-future. Uh. Do I look scared?”

“I can’t see you.”

“Yes, you can. Look harder. Close your eyes.”

I closed them.

“Okay, now imagine Oscar-of-the-future. That’s me. That’s me comin’ home to the house, not-bummed by the detour. Look at the look on my face while I’m holding these huge bills I gotta pay. Do I look scared?”

“No.”

“How do I look?”

I kept my eyes closed. “Like a man. Confident and like that. A hero, even. You’re smiling?”

“Fucking A. I’m smiling. You know why I’m smilin’?”

“’Cause you can pay all those bills, right?”

“Oh, yeah. ’Cause I’m a big man and nothin’ scares me and I can pay all the bills because we got plenty of money, and, uh, I’m fearless —”

He made a yelp, and he suddenly came, to his surprise. When he comes, his shoulders sometimes jerk back, and they did this time, too. It made me so happy to see him that I came with him, right on the dotted line, but quick. Efficient. It’s like we’re connected with wires that way. Something happens to him, it happens to me. We’re concerted. Is that a word? It should be. Now it is.

We took a minute out for a breather, though we kept ourselves together. No condoms, I don’t like them, I’m on the pill. It’s funny about Oscar, he can come and pretty soon he’s got his hard-on back, standing up and smiling at me. Weird. Maybe this was, like, the month of his sexual peak. I mean, in some ways he was still a boy. You could tell how he was still treating sex like it was a drug and vastly illegal. He had that addict glint in his eye. But it could be tiring also, like shoplifting. It goes from being hip to being a chore. You get to where you want to do something else. The righteousness goes out of it. That can happen.

“Now you,” he said.

“What about me?”

“The future, man. We were talkin’ about the future.” He put his finger on my earlobe, where it had been pierced, as per his suggestion, my earlobe where I wasn’t underpierced anymore, thanks to him.

“I can’t see anything.”

“Sure you can. Chicks can always see the future, it’s what they do. Guys don’t, so much, except those weathermen, you know — meteorologists. Forecasters. So whattya see?”

“I can’t see anything,” I repeated.

“Don’t be lame. Close your eyes.” I did. “Okay. Whattya see?”

I put my head on his chest. “Well, maybe in that foyer we were talkin’ about? With the, what do you call it? umbrella stand?” I was speaking real slow. Groping love-talk.

“Yeah?”

“There’s a table made out of wood? And there’s, like, this vase, and it’s red glass, and it’s got flowers and… wait a minute.”

“What?”

“Your heart sounds weird.”

“Oh, yeah, that.”

I had my ear to his chest, where usually with humans you hear chunka-thoom, chunka-thoom, chunka-thoom. But! Oscar had this other sound, chunka-jazz-thoom, chunka-jazz-thoom, chunka-jazz-thoom.

“I’ve got this heart thing,” Oscar said. “Valves and shit. Like a murmur.” He shrugged. His dick went down from where it was, but he was working up the confidence look and the greaser sneer on his face, like what’s-his-name, the movie star. Even in bed he was working hard on his attitude. “It’s nothin’,” he said.

“Fuck and alas, Oscar! It’s something. You should, like, have it looked at?”

“They did already. And they said, Forget it, he’ll live. So tell me about this vase, Chloé, that you mentioned.”

But now, I sort of didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to imagine the future. The righteousness had gone out of that, too. But I thought maybe I should, a favor to Oscar. “There’s flowers, you know, people have flowers in vases.”

“What kind?”

He had his hands now in my hair, which was tricky, ’cause my hair’s so short. “I don’t know.” It was hard for me to imagine the fucking flowers in the damn vase while Oscar’s heart was murmuring and death was taking a close look at him. “Roses,” I said. I took a big breath, to imagine them. “Red roses, with petals? Like they have them.”

“Okay. We’ve done this. What’s upstairs?”

“Oscar, I’m sort of tired of this.” I shined a big fakey smile at him, then dropped the idea.

“Come on, Chloé, what’s upstairs?”

I shut my eyes. I was working at it. I was imagining. Imagining is hard work for me, at times.

“Well?” he asked.

“I’m still goin’ up the stairs.”

“Okay.” He waited. “You up there, yet?”

“Yeah. Just about. I got my hand on the banister.”

“So what’s up there?”

I had this problem then. Because what I was seeing was, all the kids Oscar and I would have. Like three kids in their kid clothes, OshKosh overalls with spit-up on the bibs, and they’re yelling and jumping up and down and breaking shit and having fun, like a kid party. And maybe a baby in a crib or something.

“Well?” he asked.

“Big bedrooms, Oscar. The thickest carpeting you ever saw.”

“Right. I can see it. It’s, like, gotta be white.”

“Yeah. It’s the second floor. White carpeting in the hallways. Thing is, Oscar, I’ve never been in a house with a second floor. So it’s hard for me to know.”

“I have,” he said. “They got bedrooms up there.”

“Okay.” He closed my eyes with his fingers. He did it real softly. “Okay. I guess I’m, like, supposed to imagine the rest of it,” I said.

“What’s in the bedrooms, Chloé?”

“We are.”

“And what else?”

I took a deep breath, from way down in, what do they call it? the diaphragm. By which I mean my heart. Because I have one, too. “Kids, Oscar. There’s kids everywhere. They’re our kids. We’ve got, like, three? I can’t count them all.”

His dick started standing up again. “I was hopin’ you’d say that.”

“Bull shit. You were? Really?”

“Yeah. On account of I am the person who is not scared, like I said. Fearless. So that would also include kids, right? I like kids, man. Gettin’ into trouble and shit. I was a kid. Absolutely.”

“Absolutely!” I said, so happy my toes were tingling, little battery-operated things zapping them. “So…”

“Yeah?”

I was thinking of his heart. “So I have this idea.”

“What’s that?”

“I brought it with me,” I said.

So what I did then was, I got out of bed, naked, and I walked over to my backpack, and I was about to get the thing I wanted to show him out of there, but I had to clean myself up, I was dripping, so I said, like the Princess of Wales: Excuse me, I’ll be right back.

I went out into the hall, I guess you’d call it. Oscar’s bedroom is on one side, and his father, the Bat, well, the Bat’s bedroom is on the other side, and that’s it, in this little ranch house. Oscar’s older brother, he’d moved out, and there’s no mother because she’s dead and everything. It was about four in the afternoon. I was going to the bathroom to clean the remnants of Oscar off of myself. And I did. But when I was returning to Oscar’s bedroom, I thought I saw something way down out there on the corner of my eye. It was Oscar’s dad, the Bat, in the kitchen, sitting at the table, peeling some kind of awful fruit, and I sort of thought he got a measuring look at me, without my clothes on. Maybe I was imagining it. That can happen.