Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

I enclosed the check with this note. On the front of the envelope I attached a stamp — the American flag. Well, I don’t mean for these details to have an oppressive poignancy. I stamped the letter and wrote his name and address, a post office box number, on it. I walked to the corner and dropped it in the mailbox. In the dark it lay among the other fellow letters, whispering to one another their messages of love and longing and betrayal.

But almost as soon as I released the metallic lip of the box, I remembered that Aaron had instructed me to send the money by express mail, as a sign of his last-minute emergency condition, the bloodletting of his threatened mortality. What could I do? The letter had been thoughtlessly mailed. Briefly I considered calling the airlines to get a ticket immediately out to Los Angeles, to intervene personally. But by now I knew that to him I was worse in person and therefore more ineffective as a father than I was when reduced microscopically to a mere voice over the phone. In person, revulsion at the mere sight of my paternal features would settle over his face instantly, before I had committed the first father crime of the day.

Inside the house, Esther slept on restlessly, poor old girl.

ENWOMBED WITHIN MY FORD CAR, not knowing where to go but recognizing for my own good that I should not go anywhere near the Amalgamated Education Corporation, I drove to my neighbor’s coffee shop in the mall. Bradley was not there in person. Instead, I found in front of me a young American girl whose tee-shirt was labeled RAGING HORMONES and who asked me for my order.

Coffee, young lady, please.

Any kind?

Any kind is fine.

Blend-of-the-day?

Fine, fine.

Comin’ right up.

Excuse me, I asked, but where is the manager? Where is Bradley?

In back somewheres, she said. Ordering stock. You know him?

He is my neighbor, I informed her. In fact he lives next door.

Wow. You’re Mr. S’s neighbor. No kidding. Hey, you want a Kleenex? she asked. Here. She held one out to me.

For what purpose?

You look like you need it, she said. She pointed at my face. Like, tears or something?

I hadn’t realized, I said. Thank you. Thank you very much. After paying her, I took the coffee and the Kleenex and found my way to a chair near the back. I dabbed at my eyes. My eyes were damp but not yet completely overflowing. I was the only customer. In desperation I glanced around for something to read. The newspapers, however, were in the front.

She came toward the back to clear the tables near mine.

So, she said, whattya do?

I teach philosophy, I said.

Oh jeez. I could use a philosopher, she said, like right this week. Right now. This minute. She stopped and put her hand on her hip. Like, I’m about to do something? Maybe you don’t mind my asking. And this thing I’m about to do, it’s bad? But it’s going to result in something good? So, in your opinion, should I do it?

What’s your name, young lady? I asked.

Chloé. Clow -ay.

Not Clow- ee?

Naw. I customized it. Everybody should customize their names.

The answer is no, Chloé. The ends never justify the means. Almost every ethical philosophy of consequence will tell you so. Kant’s categorical… well, bad actions make the result turn out bad.

I thought that was what you’d say. Thanks. Uh, she said, do I owe you anything?

What?

Like money? For your opinion. Because it’s your job as a philosopher to give advice, right? And besides, you live next door to Mr. S. Since it’s your job to think, I should pay you. Anyway, do I owe you anything?

No, Chloé, you don’t. But thank you for offering. I bowed my head. In silence, she went away. I drank my coffee. Never once had Aaron as an adult child asked me for advice. To my best recollection, never as an adult had he ever asked me so much as a single question.

Bradley returned. He stopped by my chair. He sat to make neighborly conversation. He asked me how I was. And I told him, the genial man, I told him everything, because I hardly knew him, and because Chloé was taking care of his customers, and because he had hung up The Feast of Love in the back, and because he was so vacant as a human being — I do not mean this as criticism — that I could fill him, that morning, with my difficulties, and not cause a flood condition. Toward the end, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was a consolation of sorts.

And how are you, Bradley? I asked.

I’m in love, he said. It’s recent. I’ve met this wonderful woman.

And who is the lucky lady?

Her name’s Diana, he said. We’re going to be married, I think.

Well, you must bring her over to meet Esther and me.

And with that, I rose to leave.

I CAN BE SO UNMOTIVATED. For example. You know the dust that can, like, float in the air? Me, I was totally capable of sitting in a chair for hours, watching the dust-fuzz hanging in front of me. If there was sunlight in the room, just the particles of visible molecules or whatever, I was excellent and enthralled.

I’m not saying that I’m deep, I’m just saying I watch the dust, and I’m not stoned either, when I do it. Just observant. I’m concentrating on it, figuring out its mystery, its purpose for being here in the same universe with us.

When I tried to get Oscar to study the dust, he went: you’re so, like, Looney Tunes, Chloé. Jeez, dust. He was smiling when he said that, criticizing my dust interest. But you could tell that he didn’t get the profundity of dust at all. Poor guy. Well, some people can’t sing, either.

But what I’m saying is, I can get motivated when I have to. I can stop dust-meditating and get off my ass and get the job done. Which means that when I had to figure out the future, I took steps.

Oscar’s friends, these boy-men from his high school jock clique — Speedy and Ranger and Fats (who was not fat — where do guys get names like this?) — came by our apartment, grab-assing Oscar and demanding that he come out to play basketball, it being early summer, and the two of us, Oscar and me, not having to work at Jitters that day. Oscar! Hey, man, they said, first of all hollering up to our window, dude, you just gotta come shoot some hoop, dooooooode, Oscaaaaaaaar, we just gotta have another guy. Oscar hears the call of male needs, he barks his yes downward to them, so then he puts on his shorts and his Nikes and kisses me and gets his shoulders punched in the parking lot and his ass whapped and he is gone. Like poof, like a husband. Empty nest.

I had to figure out if Oscar and me had any prospects at all, as a couple, together. So there I was, me, Chloé, alone. But with the keys to Oscar’s ancient AMC Matador, and I sat there, and I’m like, I gotta find out the future from an expert. So I took some money and put it into my pockets and my shoes in case I got robbed, and I drove over to Ypsilanti, where the psychics are. You can’t do psychics off of TV. The TV psychics are mostly wrong, and way too expensive besides.

I had been reading my tarot cards on Oscar and wanted a second opinion. And I figured I’d need to take something of his, so I took a mungy sweat sock and his track team relay baton and one of his knives, which he had told me not to touch, but which I did touch, for his own good and mine too.

YOU GOTTA GO TO YPSILANTI to find out the future. Or Willow Run. See, what you do is, you leave the ho-hum middle-class environs of Ann Arbor and Pittsfield Township, and then you explore your way down the strip, past the used car lots and the Arby’s and the Dairy Queen, and then there’s Eastern Michigan University with its stiff-dick watertower (but there’s a brick condom on it — go see it for yourself if you think I’m kidding), and then downtown Ypsi, but then, when you get east of there, that’s when it turns really interesting and nasty over there in the Twilight Zone, that’s where the future-experts ply their trade.