Charles Baxter: The Feast of Love

“No. I told you. I woke up disoriented. It happens all the time. Thinking about a book, I guess. I have to walk it off. Anyway, I already have a dog.”

“I didn’t know that. Where is it?” He glances around, pretending to search.

“Sleeping. She doesn’t like to walk with me at night. She doesn’t like how disoriented I am.”

“Smart. So what you’re saying is, you don’t know where you are? Is that it?”

“Right. I know where I am now.”

“Maybe you’re too involved with fiction. Well, don’t mind me. But listen, since we’re here, tell me: how does this new book of yours begin? What’s the first line?”

I start to pick some chewing gum off my shoe. “Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t give things like that away.”

“Come on. I’m your neighbor, Charlie. I’ve known you, what is it —?”

“Twelve years,” I say.

“Twelve years. You think I’m going to steal your line? I would never do that. I don’t do that. I’m not a writer, thank God. I’m a businessman. And an artist. Go ahead. Just tell me. Tell me how your novel starts.”

I sit back for a moment. “ ‘The man,’ ” I recite, “ ‘me — no one else, it seems — wakes in fright.’ ”

He kicks the toe of his shoe in the dirt and tanbark, and Junior sniffs at it. Now Bradley tries out a sympathetic tone. “That’s the line?”

“That’s the line. It’s still in rough draft. Actually, it’s just in my head.”

He nods. “Kind of melodramatic, though, right? I thought it was a cardinal rule not to start a novel with someone waking up in bed. And what’s all this about fright? Do you really awaken in terror? That doesn’t seem like you at all. And by the way I believe the word is awakens.”

Irritated, I stare at him. “When did you become Mr. Usage? All right, I’ll revise it. Besides, I do wake in terror. Ask my wife.”

“No, I would never do that. What’s the book called?”

“I have no idea.”

“You should call it The Feast of Love. I’m the expert on that. I should write that book. Actually, I should be in that book. You should put me into your novel. I’m an expert on love. I’ve just broken up with my second wife, after all. I’m in an emotional tangle. Maybe I’d shoot myself before the final chapter. Your readers would wonder about the outcome. Yeah, the feast of love. It certainly isn’t what I expected when I was in high school and I was imagining what love was going to be, honeymoon jaunts, joy forever and that sort of thing.”

I glance at the dog, who is yawning in my face. I bore this dog. “Aren’t you going out with a doctor now? Some new woman?”

“That’s private.”

“Hey, you came up with the title, and then you decide I can’t have it because it’s a metaphor? And you want to be a character in this book, and you won’t give me the details of your love life?”

“Metaphor my ass. I don’t know. Call it The Feast of Love. I know: call it Unchain My Heart. Now there’s a good title. Call it anything you want to. But remember: metaphors mean something,” he says, sitting up. Junior also sits up. “You remember Kathryn, my ex? My first ex? When Kathryn called me a toad, which she did sometimes to punish me, I’m sure she chose that metaphor carefully. She took great care with her language. She was fastidious. She probably searched for that metaphor all day. She went shopping for metaphors, Kathryn did. X marked the spot where she found them. Then she displayed them, all these metaphors, to me. After a while it became her nickname for me, as in ‘Toad, my love, would you pass the potatoes?’ They were always about me, these metaphors, as it turned out. She got that one from The Wind in the Willows, her favorite book. You know: Mr. Toad?”

He says this in his low voice and surveys the gloom of the playground, and now, in the dark, he does sound a bit like a toad.

“It could have been worse,” he informs me. “A toad has dignity.” He looks around. Then he breaks into song.

The Clever Men at Oxford

Know all that there is to be knowed

But they none of them know one

half as much

As intelligent Mr. Toad.

“Anyway, I got on her nerves after a while. And of course, she was a lesbian, sort of, a little bit of one, a sexual tourist, but we could have handled the tourism part, given enough time. At least that’s what I thought. The real problem was that she didn’t like how inconsistent I was. She thought I was the man of a thousand faces, nice in the morning, not so nice at night. Men like me exasperated her. She once called me the Lon Chaney of the Midwest, the Lon Chaney with the monster light bulb burning inside his cheekbone. The phantom, she called me, of the opera.” He waits for a moment. “What opera? There’s no opera in this town.”

He stares up into the night sky, then continues. “Well, at least I was a star. You know, women admire physical beauty in men more than they claim they do.” He says this to me conspiratorially, as if imparting a deep secret. He sighs. “Don’t kid yourself on that score.”

“I would never kid myself about that,” I tell him. “This isn’t Diana you’re talking about? This is Kathryn?”

“No,” he sighs angrily, “not Diana. Of course not. No, goddamn it, I told you: this was my first. My starter marriage. You met her, I know that. Kathryn.”

“No,” I say, “I don’t remember her. But you weren’t married to Diana so long either.”

“Maybe not,” he mutters, “but I loved her. Especially after we were divorced. A fate-prank. She loved someone else before I married her and she loved him while I was married to her, and she loves him now. The dog and I sit out here and we think about her, and about the business that I own, the coffee business. I don’t actually know what the dog thinks about.” A little air pocket of silence opens up between us. I hear him breathing, and I look down at his clasped hands. One of the hands reaches into his pants pocket for a dog treat, which he hands to Junior, who gobbles it down.

“You shouldn’t do that. Get lost in nostalgia, I mean. But Diana was beautiful,” I say.

“She still is. And I’m not nostalgic.”

“But she was unfaithful to you,” I tell him. “You can’t love someone who does that.”

“I almost could. She was powerful. She had me in a kind of spell, I’m not kidding.” He looks straight at me. “Nearly a goddess, Diana. I could let her destroy me. In flames. I’d go down in flames watching her.”

Just as he finishes this sentence, some noise — it sounds like a crow cawing — filters down to us from very high in the nearby trees. Odd: I cannot remember ever hearing a crow at night. At the same time that I have this thought, I hear a man laugh twice, distantly, from the houses behind us. A horribly mean laugh, this is. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“Oh, by the way,” I say, “I just came from the football stadium. Guess what I saw.”

“They’re going to put a big fence around that place.” He laughs. “Didn’t you know that? A big fence. With a gigantic new Vegas-style scoreboard. People like you keep trying to get in.”

“There’s no fence around it now,” I tell him.

“I can see where this is going,” Bradley snorts. “Walking around at night, you’re soaking up material for your book, The Feast of Love, and what to your wandering eyes should appear? I know exactly what appeared. You saw some kids who’d snuck into the stadium and were actively naked on the fifty-yard line.”