Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

I pass by the health club. The manager is often outside, enjoying a cigarette.

SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, on one of our Sunday morning phone calls, when I asked my dad whether he had ever had trouble rising and shining at daybreak or getting motivated for his job at the agency, he became exasperated with me. He said, “Son, Monday morning is Monday morning. Everybody’s got to do it. There are no solutions, there’s only the work.” My father, a gentle man, becomes somewhat abrasive on long distance. “Brad, you want food on the table, you have to go to the job like everyone else,” he said, as if this thought had not occurred to me.

“I was just asking,” I said.

My poor old dad: liver spots, seven years from retirement, quadruple bypass, still overweight, a weekly participant at AA meetings. He’s got little scabs on his scalp, I don’t know from what. I imagined him standing there by the phone, a graying, pudgy Vietnam War survivor trying to offer sage-sounding advice to his son.

“Nobody likes a whiner,” he wheezed. “What brought this up?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “A man’s gotta show up at the place where they expect you to show up.” He coughed and hawked phlegm into the mouthpiece, or so it sounded. “You have a good job. But since you want advice, I’ll tell you something to keep your spirits elevated. I just recalled this. Something your grandfather once told me. This was his cure for low spirits. When you pour your first cup of coffee of the day, if you’re feeling crummy, put a dab of ice cream into it. It’s festive. Then you gotta trudge off like everybody else, like I said, but you got the ice cream with you. Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.”

Booze once, ice cream now, I thought. Jesus, the poor guy, I should be the one giving him consolation and reassurance.

“No,” I said. “Dad, it’s just… you know, with my marriage breaking up…”

“Listen, Brad,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I just can’t… I don’t know. You’re way past the age when you tell your parents much of anything. It’s just what?” My father worries about long-distance costs almost as much as he worries about me and sometimes is short in these conversations. Really, he means well. I’m not presenting his best side here. “You don’t like your job, managing that coffee store, then get another position.” He waited, and his voice grew a bit quieter. “Son, believe me, I blow some of my brains out at work every day. My head’s full of bullet holes. It’s what work does to you. Life is suffering, as the major religions say. Face up to facts.”

“Well,” I said, “as long as we’re on this subject of advice and everything, how have you managed to stay married to Mom for so long? What is it, thirty —”

“ — Thirty-eight years.”

“Thirty-eight years,” I said. “How’d you manage that?”

“That’s no sort of question. You can’t ask me that. But since you’ve asked, I’ll answer it. It’s simple. You want to know the secret? I’ll tell you what the secret is. Here’s the secret. I kept my mouth shut.” He waited, a wintry pause. “That’s the secret.”

There was another long cessation of talk, during which I smelled rubbing alcohol from somewhere in my house (had Bradley the dog found a bottle in the bathroom and knocked it over? I would have to look), and then I wished my father well and hung up. Months and months ago, after he had first met my wife-to-be, he had somberly told me that my marriage to Kathryn would not work out. So far he hadn’t reminded me that he had said so. He wasn’t that kind of parent, not so far.

I ARRIVE AT THE MALL and park my car and check the sky for rain or snow. On this particular morning, the sky has a weird pinkish cellophane-like tint to it. The air smells like factory exhaust. I walk in through one of the service entrances. I am a service person.

When I go into the back entrance to our business, I smell the beans and the roasters and the antiseptic-lacquered-with-fruit smell of floor cleanser, and then, even more faintly, the strange bleary artificiality in the air, characteristic of enclosed shopping malls. The ion content in the oxygen has been tampered with by people trying to save money by giving you less oxygen to breathe. You get light-headed and desperate to shop. The air smells machine-manufactured, and the light looks manufactured or maybe recycled from previous light.

Above us in the mall’s atrium, close to our entrance, is a skylight in a mystical geometrical shape like one of those Masonic emblems. Don’t get me wrong: I believe in business and profit. Only… anyway, across from us is a clothes store, Snooker, specializing in clothes that have a slick polyester thug appeal, and next to it on one side is Video Village, and on the other side is All Outdoors, where they sell what they call wilderness products — though there’s no wilderness within a thousand miles of here — hiking clothes and such, along with alpha-wave sound-effect tapes of breakers crashing on the beach and nearly extinct birds singing their farewell songs. The place smells of cedar and burlap. Nearer to us, down a sort of mall alleyway heading out to the north entrance, there’s a cinnamon roll concession and a one-hour photo lab, and a Fun Factory and a maternity store called Motherhood, next to a nutrition store for bodybuilders. They sell megavitamins, protein powders, and motivation magazines and tapes in there. The last store in that alley is eXcess-ories (“Everything eXtreme you want”).

Out on the courtyard is a salad-and-snack store, The Marquis de Salade. Next to our business is Heppelworth’s, which sells weekly, monthly, and yearly planners, and motivation posters and motivation books. They sell motivation in there, preachers of aggression, hard-sell cures for Monday morning blues. Motivation! Almost everyone at our end of the mall sells motivation except us. Everything around here is a cure for Monday morning. Well, I guess we do that, too, with our coffee. The biggest-selling items in Heppelworth’s are the framed posters with pictures of seagulls flying over misty Pacific coastlines thick with lyric beauty and printed wisdom underneath. There is an enormous markup for these items. Here’s a sample of what they print on the posters.

SUCCESS:

Every effort no matter how large or small contains the kernel of its own reward. In every inventory your greatest asset is you.

Then there’s another one of a raging river cutting through a swath of pine woods. Underneath that you would read the following thought.

THE FUTURE:

I can go no higher than my hopes can take me. Therefore I must be defined by my hopes and the awe-inspiring practicality of my dreams.

Sometimes I go into Heppelworth’s on my break. I speak to the manager, Windtunnel — not his real name, I don’t want him to sue me — about customer traffic and about business. Windtunnel occasionally visits us when he comes into Jitters on his break, though he always drinks the cheapest coffee we have. He has the murderous blank open-eyed look of a screech owl, and his breath smells of floor cleanser. Anyway, in Heppelworth’s, I look at these posters Windtunnel has put on display, and of course I feel the onset of mall hallucination. I am so far beyond being motivated that I want to punch the nearest clerk. But I don’t! That’s discipline. I start to think up my own motivation posters. I’d put them just below photographs of automobile junkyards and clear-cut forests and gray skies sick with cloudy indifference. The Gospel According to Bradley. The Book of Job, pronounced “job.”

DISCIPLINE:

I am a peaceful man. Peace is my mission: I will not smite any customers today. That is sound business practice and a sure path to profits.