Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

“It’s almost nine o’clock, Mr. S.”

“I know. We’re almost ready. I got here early. Let me finish this story.” I could see some customers outside our chain security gate waiting for their morning coffee fix. “Well, we’d been traveling, so I was tired, so my hand was shaking. And these stands they have, they’re thin and spindly, like thin wrought iron, and delicate, because this is Europe. That’s where we are. And because my hand was shaking, I reached down to the holder, this freestanding holder or candelabra or whatever of votive candles, and somehow, I don’t know how this happened, my hand caused this holder of candles, all these small flames, all these souls, to fall over, and when it fell over, all the candles, lit for the sake of a soul somewhere, there must have been a hundred of them, all of them fell to the floor, because of me, and all of them went out. And you know what the nun did, Chloé, the nun who was standing there?”

“She spoke French?”

“No. She could have, but she didn’t. No, what she did was, she screamed.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, the nun screamed in my face. I felt like…”

“You felt like pretty bad, Mr. S. I can believe it. But you know, Mr. S, those were just candles. They weren’t really souls. That’s all superstition, that soul stuff.”

“Oh, I know.”

“No kidding, Mr. S, you shouldn’t be so totally morbid. I thought when you were telling me about the worst thing you ever did, it’d be, like, beating up a blind guy and stealing his car.”

“No. I never did that.”

“Oscar did, once. You should get him to tell you about it.”

“Okay.”

“He was drunk, though.” She prettily touches her perfect hair. “And the guy wasn’t really blind. He just said he was, to take advantage of people. It was, like, a scam. Oscar saw through all that. It’s nine o’clock now, Boss. We should open up.”

“Right.” And I unlock the curtain, and touch a switch, and slowly the curtain rises on the working day. The candles are nothing to Chloé; they’re just candles. I feel instantly better. Bless her.

The processional begins, and we have employees from nearby businesses coming in to get a cup of coffee and maybe something else, a brioche. We turn on the music: cool piano jazz to counteract the Mozart the mall is always playing on their PA system to keep the mall rats out. I look at them all, all our customers, and I smile. I chat them up. Many of them I know by name. But really, Chloé’s right. I’m too morbid. I need to work on it.

For example, when I’m conversing with people, checking out the young women coming in and out, these women, even while I’m doing these day-to-day things, I’m in a reverie. I’ll be standing there, behind the counter, and first I’ll think about women, possible women who might be my girlfriends or wives or something, you know, the usual fantasies, candlelit dinners, for example, and then, when I get bored with that, I’ll think about my own funeral, which always cheers me up. I mean, I’ll imagine the church, full of distraught supermodels listening to the eulogy and sobbing. All these supermodels boohooing over my death. And there in front of the church would be someone like what’s-his-name, Robert Schiller, the televangelist, the one with the silver hair and the electronic smile, and he’d be going on and on about me, shockingly eloquent.

“Bradley W. Smith,” he’d say, and he’d shake his distinguished head. “No one really understood Bradley W. Smith, except maybe his dog. And, yet, unbeknownst to many, he was a great person —”

“ — Could I have a double decaf cap, please?”

“Sure,” I say, pulling myself out of my imaginings. It’s probably not healthy to maunder through a fantasy about your own funeral. Morbid, as Chloé says. But, as the song says, it’s a hard habit to break. And it’s harmless.

Around eleven o’clock my next-door neighbor, Professor Harry Ginsberg, comes in, mostly soaked, his remaining hair plastered to the sides of his face. He shakes out his umbrella, the one with the duck’s head on it. He then waves at me — not to me, but at me — in greeting, before he says, “Have you seen it outside, Bradley? Really, this is something you should see.” He smiles and shakes his head, and raindrops drizzle downward off his face onto the floor.

“What?” I say.

“Skies so dark, my boy, that you can’t read under them, and this in the daytime! Go look.”

“Harry, I can’t leave the business.”

He checks out Jitters and spies some of my art. “I see you’ve hung The Feast of Love there in the back. Your very best effort. Is it for sale?”

“No, Harry, it’s hors de commerce. And it’s —”

All at once there’s a crack, like someone snapping a whip, and a low roaring, and a strange singeing smell, coming from I don’t know where, and Chloé, who’s been bussing the tables with the collection tray, looks up.

“Didn’t you hear?” Harry asks me. “They’ve been predicting tornadoes.”

“There’s no weather in malls, Harry,” I tell him. “Not even tornadoes. We’re impervious — is that the word? — we’re impervious to conditions.”

“I should have such optimism,” Harry says, opening his mouth and laughing silently, a gesture I do not care for. “ ‘Impervious to conditions,’ an interesting phrase. I should have —”

Another roaring, longer this time, seems to be approaching us, silencing Harry’s meditation on my wording, and when the storm sound starts to reverberate throughout the mall, like the echo in a bowling alley, my customers hear it, and they all look up, and at this point the lights blink, and the Oscar Peterson CD falls silent inside Jitters, and Mozart leaves the podium in the mall, and that’s when I hear the shard-crack sound of shattering glass.

“My God,” Harry Ginsberg says. He takes his espresso-to-go and walks out into the atrium.

At that point the power fails in Briardale. The emergency lighting flickers on, battery-operated evacuation spots, and all but one of my customers get up and leave. Why should they leave? They’re safe here. One woman near the entrance is drinking her cup of espresso and reading the New York Times, and she doesn’t so much as budge while everyone else scurries out. The light inside Jitters becomes emergency light: frosty and cold and glaring. But she just goes on reading, her head down, deep in concentration.

You can hear the wind shaking the Masonic emblem skylight, then hail assaulting it, and you can hear the gusts shaking the exterior doors, but otherwise it’s gone very quiet in the mall. Windtunnel, looking imperturbably smug, saunters over from Heppelworth’s and says, “Power failure, huh?”

“Yup, I guess so.”

“It’ll be back on, no time flat,” he says, gazing at the ceiling. He has trained himself to be an optimist, a professional optimist, a success maniac, despite conditions. Look at his tie today! It has yachts on it!

“Hope so,” I tell him. “You want anything?”

“Naw,” Windtunnel says, breathing in my direction, his breath so heavy with wintergreen he could stun an ox with it. “Maybe in a little while.” And he saunters back toward his darkened motivation market, all of whose customers have fled. His protective gate lowers until it is halfway down.

Chloé joins me near the counter. “This is freakazoidal,” she says. “Quel rush.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “Come on.”

We walk out toward the mall. You can hear the wind futilely attacking the mall’s exterior, but you would need a full-scale level-five tornado to blow this place apart, and so far we don’t have that. From here we can see into the depths of the mall. These cold emergency lights are giving all the merchandise a shakedown, and when you gaze into Motherhood, all the maternity-ware has turned ghastly. The clerks have their elbows on the cash counter, including Marilyn, a sweet babe, pure honeydew. I should talk to her. The orphaned shoes in the neighboring shoe store are like artifacts or clues to a crime. It’s uniformly gray inside the mall now. What few customers there are seem to be distressed or disheartened. They’re limping along, without purpose. It’s as if, when you turn the power off, the merchandise somehow becomes nothing but a ruin. People lose the desire to buy. Their hearts go out of it.