Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

“I think your dad’s home,” I said, standing there. My hand stayed on the doorknob.

“Fuck him,” Oscar said.

“No, I think he’s really home.” I waited. “He’s peeling food,” I said, to prove it.

“So what’re you going to show me?”

I took the videocam out of my backpack. “This,” I said. I hoisted it on my bare shoulder and aimed it down at him.

“Where’d you get that, Chloé?”

“I sort of stole it. The people who own it, they won’t miss it.” I meant my parents, who I knew pretty well.

“And what’s your plan?”

I put the camera down on the floor and got back into bed with him, my forearm on his chest. “Well, this girl told me how, you make a tape, you know, us in bed, you sort of invent a name for yourself and a story and then, I mean, we, well, what we do is, we just make a tape of ourselves doing it, like what we usually do, maybe some additions, fancy stuff, costumes that we take off for the camera, and there’s an address these sex industry magazines have where you send the tape, or, well, you send them a sampler first, then the tape, and they send you huge bucks. This girl I know, Janey, she’ll do it all for us. She wants to break into the video industry.”

Oscar didn’t look that happy about it. You could see he was kind of divided. ’Cause after all we had just been talking about a house, and, like, vases and stairs. And so much money that you weren’t afraid of anything in the world. It’s hard to make big bucks at Dr. Enchilada’s or Jitters. But he was the one who said our sex lives were so good we ought to be able to make some money out of it, but clueless as to how, leaving it to me. He was the one who said we were magnificent, or some word like that. I told him I knew he was smart and could think of a story we could act out. It would be harmless.

But. I also had a little disgusting feeling, even as I was saying what I was saying. I mean, Oscar’s got a nice body and, me, I’ve got a nice body, but I could see these old men looking at our tape and drooling. Excuse me, that’s not always the road to vases and flowers and kids upstairs. That’s radically poor karma, guys drooling. Also, as a rule, guys who drool don’t shave. Gargoyles! But I thought, hey, a few times, why not, hey, nothing ventured? And we don’t have to see the guys. We’ll be safely inside the television screen.

Anyway, this friend I had, this video person named Janey, would help us make it look cool. And tasteful. She was the one who gave me the idea in the first place. She said she knew what to do with it, to sell it. She had taken film and video classes at the community college. She knew lighting and how to focus.

This is where, out of the blue, Oscar said, “Chloé, it’s weird, but I love you.” He waited. “I never said that before.”

And I said, “Oscar, I love you, you are everything.”

“You think we can make some money out of this?”

“Maybe.” Then I said my nothing-ventured thing and how we were so minimum-wage and actually desperate right now.

“It’s way creepy,” he said. “But it’s okay. I guess. ’Cause of the money.”

“Right.”

“And it’s not like work, either.”

“No, it’s not like that.”

“Chloé, tell me somethin’ about when you were a girl.”

“Why?”

“I want to hear it. I just want to see you from then.” He looked right in my eyes. He wasn’t zoned. So I, like, got up and sort of straddled him.

“Okay,” I said. “When me and my sister, we rode in the car? long trips? We sat in the backseat. And time goes slower in the backseat than the front seat because the front seat gets everywhere first, in case you haven’t noticed. Just zombie slow. So what my sister Rhonda and me did was, we took Kleenex tissues, just plain Kleenex, from our mother, who had zillions of them in her purse, and we’d take them, and this was a contest. We invented this.” I had my hands on his shoulders, pinning the boy down. “I’d open my back window, just partway, and put the Kleenex, just, sort of, the edge of it, into that groove that the window makes, and then I’d, like, close the window? Rhonda did that with her Kleenex on her side. So there was mostly Kleenex tissues flapping outside, but held in place, and the car’s speeding along, with these white Kleenex ears on both sides of it. And Rhonda and me, we’d watch our respective Kleenexes, out there, as the landscapes flew by, cows and farmland and cities and landfills, and the one whose Kleenex lasted the longest, didn’t get torn up by the wind, she was the one who won the contest. I know it sounds dumb. But I — you know — I kinda enjoyed this. It kinda passed the time.” I waited. “Well, you wanted a story.”

That was when I heard footsteps outside our door. I was sure I heard them.

“Oscar,” I said. “Oscar, I think your dad’s outside. I think he’s listening.”

Oscar looked toward the door. “Dad?” he said. “You there?”

I heard a floorboard creak. The Bat was standing, just standing out there, giving off ghoul-auras. Jesus. My philosophy is, if somebody’s standing outside your bedroom door, not saying anything, they’re not going to be good for you. They are going to be the devil’s hatchlings.

“Dad?” Oscar sat up in bed. He lowered his feet to the floor and stood up. He reached down under the bed. He got a knife from the box he had under there. The blade was very shiny and pointed. I didn’t like Oscar being naked, though, under those circumstances. A man’s gotta have clothes on to be in a fight. Shorts, anyway, like in boxing. Just my opinion. Oscar could’ve probably taken him, though, he’s so buff.

“ I tell you what,” the ghoul-voice said. “You get that girl out of your room and your bed, Oscar, and you do it now. Or else,” and here he coughed, just like a human-bat would, “I’ll have to do it myself. I’m not running a motel here.”

“You drunk dumb fuck,” Oscar said under his breath. “Would you like that?”

“Did you hear me?” the Bat asked, flapping his bat wings, out there outside the door, where I couldn’t see him.

“Yeah,” Oscar said, real quietly. But dangerously, too, like he wasn’t scared of mayhem. “He is one mean son-of-a-bitch,” Oscar said quietly, turning toward me. “But I can be, too, if I gotta be. You better get dressed, Chloé. Just don’t be scared. I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch if I have to. You know why?”

I was putting on my underpants — black ones, that I had bought for him to see — and my jeans, and then my bra, and my tee-shirt that said RAGING HORMONES on the front, right across my tits, and then my jacket and the backpack. I was doing it fast. “Why?”

“’Cause I’m so into you, I’d protect you.” He leaned down and put his clothes on, but not fast like me. Slow and slick, the jeans slowly rising up his legs where you can see the muscles to his waist. Like he could take his time. That was Oscar all over. Then he put away the big knife and got another one out of his dresser drawer. This one was, like, all folded up. “I gotta move out of here. Outta this house.”

“Cool. Move in with me. We can make space.” My efficiency was tiny but I could always create room for Oscar, seeing as how he was saying he loved me.

“Are you doing what I said?” the Bat asked.

“Maybe we should climb out the window,” I suggested. I could tell my voice was, like, shaking? “Out onto the lawn.”

“Fuck that,” Oscar informed me. “Come on.” He took my hand and walked me to the door. “You ready?” he asked. I nodded. “Let’s have the introductions.”