Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

Then I go back to Jitters.

Following Kathryn’s departure from my life, I’d go to work after giving Bradley the dog his early morning walk. I have to admit it: the business gave me a boost. I liked having a place to go in the morning. I liked having a purpose. I liked arriving there before the mall had opened. It’s what you might call a dawn feeling. No doubt there is a word for this in German. Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history. I’d look out through the steel-mesh security curtain at the dim interior spaces of the Briardale Mall. You know, stores have a peculiar bitter vacancy when there’s nobody in them, nobody wanting anything. They succumb to pointlessness.

I’d sit down and inspect our books and spreadsheets, then make sure the cups and saucers and equipment were all in place. I’d make the brews for the day and load the dispenser-thermoses with them. I’d open the cash register and do a count. I’d page through Specialty Coffee Retailer. I’d look out through those cell bars at the empty mall. Shiny surfaces. Every surface washed and polished. After an hour or so, the bakery would deliver our breads and pastries for the day. I’d chat with the delivery guy, Hans.

Jitters is meant to be inviting. We have wood floors and semiwood ceilings. We have tables and chairs, and large sofas and furniture — Pottery Barn knockoffs — scattered every which way. Soft surfaces. We have — well, we have my paintings on the wall. The Feast of Love is up there, in the back. A portrait of Bradley, my dog, is also up near the entryway, but it’s very abstract. You can’t tell whether it’s a dog or a contraption or what, though it looks friendly in its abstract way, like Nude Descending a Staircase except with a dog. You can see Bradley in there if you know where to look. He’s eating dog chow, the food suggested by drips and dribbles. It was cubism plus charm.

If I had everything ready for the day and a few moments free, I’d start to draw. I’d draw the Dragon with the Rubber Nose, the dragon that Harry Ginsberg had told me about. I got started with this art thing by being a cartoonist. I’d draw this dragon on little sheets of motivation paper I’d filched from Heppelworth’s, the dragon rubbing out all the wording in Heppelworth’s, all that motivation. Then I’d draw little pictures of him browsing and shopping and setting fire to JCPenney’s and Nordstrom’s and eating all of the cinnamon buns just down the mall from us and then eating the Mortal Kombat machine at Fun Factory. And then, resting. My dragon: like God, on the seventh day. Some of these drawings were technically quite difficult.

When the exterior doors of the mall open, the senior citizens arrive and start their mall walking. Smelling of antique cologne, they hold their elbows up and appear to be quite complacent as they grind by.

Chloé comes in right about then, Chloé who works at Jitters because she says there’s a harmonic convergence right in this very spot in the mall. She says it’s a sacred place, like Sedona, Arizona. Sweet girl that she is, Chloé gives my nerves a good shaking every day. Sometimes she comes in so yeasty with sex she’s just had with her boyfriend that I feel like applauding. She gives off sexual odors like a flower out in the front yard trying to make a statement about gardens, which of course flowers don’t need to do. Her shirt says RAGING HORMONES across the front. She’s in love with Oscar now, it’s gone beyond sex, and Oscar has told her (after consulting me: should he tell her?) that he’s in love with her. They look so punk and disreputable, those two, but they’re just a couple of kids, dressed and costumed to affect a menacing appearance.

On this particular day, she comes in and says, “So how’s it going, Mr. S?”

“Oh, okay,” I tell her. “The usual. Monday, you know. I kept noticing those little crosses on the curves on the way here.”

“Monday!” she exclaims. “Right. And those crosses. Did I ever tell you I went to school with one of the guys who, uh, got one of those crosses? He was a total asshole. He wasn’t even a fun asshole, which, you know, some of them are. Even dead, he’s lucky to get a cross. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t give that guy a shave.”

“What was his name?” I ask.

“Bumford,” she says. “Bumford McGonahy. A loser. With a loser name. Those crosses. Cry my eyes out. He was a mean guy. Guess I should have more sympathy, huh?”

She puts on her apron and starts arranging the pastries, like an art project.

“How’s Oscar?” I ask. “What time’s he coming in?”

“You should know that,” she says. “I’m just labor. You’re management.” She smiles, and then she stops to think. “Around one.” She stands up straight. “No. One-thirty.”

We have overhead track lighting, five lights over the service area, and Chloé has a habit of moving back and forth behind the counter so that she appears sequentially under the lights like an actress on a stage. She’s careful not to plant herself in the small shadowy vacant gaps between the lights. She’s star-practicing. She flicks her head to highlight her hair. She’d be breaking my heart if she weren’t my employee and a kid and Oscar’s lover, besides.

“Do you think,” she asks, rubbing her cheekbone, “that it’s bad to do a bad thing if a good thing is going to come out of it eventually?”

“Beats me,” I tell her. I’m staunchly stacking franchise coffee cups near the entryway. “What sort of bad things?”

“Well, not way bad, just bad.”

Now she’s positioned herself behind the display case so that she can see her reflection on it. The glass is at an angle, but when she’s under the lights, she can see her face reflected there, although she doesn’t know that I know she can. When she stands in exactly the correct spot, she looks down at herself and kisses the air as if her reflection is kissing her, she’s that pleased with the stringy unkempt unofficial beauty of herself. No doubt each time she undresses she unwraps herself like a Christmas present. I have a feeling she blesses her body for her various wild gifts every half-hour or so, now that she knows what they are and she can use them.

“Well,” she says, “like putting yourself on display.”

“I don’t follow you,” I tell her, having lost my concentration. I’ve been setting the copies of the New York Times and the Detroit Free Press on the reading rack. “Putting yourself on display how?”

“Skip it,” she says quickly. She’s regrouping. “You hear the weather report this morning, Mr. S?”

I tell her I didn’t.

“Mucho thunderstorms and mucho kaboom. Sky evil. ‘Course, who’d know in a mall?”

“Who’d know?” I agree.

“What’s the worst thing ever happened to you?” she asks, frowning downward at her purple fingernails. She’s arranging the foods for our sandwiches.

“The worst thing?” I wait. “How come?” I come back behind the counter and adjust my manager’s smock.

“Just curious. Yeah. Just curious.” She gives me an odd square smile.

“Hmm,” I say. “Hard to decide. I can’t think of it. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, it isn’t the worst, it’s just that I remember something, at this very moment. Here it is.” I straighten up to scratch my eyebrow. “One time, in college, a bunch of us somehow got cheap airplane tickets to Paris for a few days. We were hitchhiking once we got there. Anyhow, when you’re in Paris, you go to the cathedral, Notre Dame. Big tourist attraction.”

She nods.

“So the four of us go into Notre Dame. And Notre Dame, you know, is actually a working cathedral. People, supplicants, I guess you’d call them, go in there and pray. They have Mass every morning, despite all these tourists milling around.” She’s stopped arranging the food and looks up at me. “Well, we went in there. We started at the back. In the back of the cathedral you can buy votive candles from some nun or other and light them for a loved one who needs help, and even if you’re not a Catholic, you can still do this. And because someone I knew was sick, I bought a votive candle and lit it. I mean, a votive candle looks like a soul, doesn’t it? And then I went over to put it on the stand.”