Charles Baxter: The Feast of Love

“Well, yes.” I wait, disappointed. “How did you know? I mean, I thought it was rather sweet. And you know, I was touched.”

“Touched.”

“It’s hard to describe. Their…”

His curiosity gleams at me from his permanently love-struck face.

“Oh, you know,” I say. “The waning moon was shining down on them. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or something of the sort.”

“All right, sure. I know. Love on the field of play. Happens all the time, though,” he says in a calmer and possibly sedated voice. For a moment I wonder if he’s on Prozac. “Didn’t you know that? I grew up around here, so I should know. Kids sneaking in, it’s a big deal for them, they can point to the fifty-yard line and say, ‘Hey, man, guess what I did down there with my girlfriend? That’s where I got laid, Bub, right down there where that big guy is being taken off on a stretcher. ’ ”

“Well,” I say, “I gotta go.”

He grabs my arm in a strong grip. “No you don’t. That’s the most ridiculous claim I ever heard. It’s two in the morning. You don’t have to go anywhere.”

“My wife’s expecting me back.”

He sits up suddenly. “Listen, Charlie,” he says. “I’ve got an idea. It’ll solve all your problems and it’ll solve mine. Why don’t you let me talk? Let everybody talk. I’ll send you people, you know, actual people, for a change, like for instance human beings who genuinely exist, and you listen to them for a while. Everybody’s got a story, and we’ll just start telling you the stories we have.”

“What do you think I am, an anthropologist?” I mull it over. “No, sorry, Bradley, it won’t work. I’d have to fictionalize you. I’d have to fictionalize this dog here.” I pat Junior on the head. Junior smiles again: a very stupid and very friendly dog, but not a character in a novel.

“Well, change your habits. And, believe me, it will work. Listen to this.” He clears his throat. “Okay. Chapter One. Every relationship has at least one really good day…”

EVERY RELATIONSHIP HAS at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there’s always that day. That day is always in your possession. That’s the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don’t. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, “Yeah, that’s the day we had an angel around.”

I DON’T THINK that Kathryn and I had been married more than about two months when this event I’m about to describe occurred. About five years ago, we were living in a little basement apartment, and we both were working two jobs. She had a part-time job at the library during the day and she was waiting tables at night. I was the day manager at a coffee shop — not the place where I am now — and getting headaches from the overhead lighting, and I was also doing some house painting, but it was late autumn and the work came in fits and starts.

Kathryn was strong and spirited, she once even threw a chair at me, but she had one fear. She was profoundly afraid of dogs. And not because she had ever been bitten. She claimed she hadn’t been bitten. No: it was just that when she saw one of these animals, on or off a leash, walking toward her, the hair on the back of her neck stood up. What you might call primal terror. She had no idea of the source of this fear. She just wanted to run away. I once saw her gallop down a steep hill in the Arboretum to escape a dog, a German shepherd puppy that had trotted up to her, its tail wagging, for a head pat. When I caught up to her, she was crying. “I don’t ever want to come back here again,” she said. “I can’t bear it.”

“It was a puppy, Kathryn,” I told her.

“I don’t care what it was. None of that matters,” she said. I had my arms around her, but then she turned so that she broke free of my embrace. She ran back to our car and locked herself inside, and I had to beg her to let me in. Man, I had to beg. And I ain’t too proud to beg. She had had her hair pinned up, but in her panic it had fallen down around her face, little tendrils, and her face was blotched with her crying. God, you know I hate to say it, but she was gorgeous like that, and I would have liked to help her. You need to do something for people when they get terrified, but terror is usually so vague, you can’t talk it out of anyone. What are you going to do when it doesn’t matter what you say?

But it’s a funny thing about other people’s phobias, when you don’t share them: you pick at them, like a scab. You want to remove them.

So on this day I’m telling you about, we were both free of our jobs, Kathryn and I, one of those late autumn midwestern Sundays, with a few golden leaves still attached to the trees, you know, last remnants, leaves soaked with cold rain and sticking to the car windshield or clinging to the branches they came from. She woke up and we made love and I said, I’ll make you breakfast, and I did, my specialty, scrambled eggs with onions and hot sauce, and then I made coffee, while she sat at the table, smiling, with her legs tucked under her. That was something she did. She sat in chairs with her legs tucked under her like that.

We lazed around and read the Sunday paper and I massaged her neck and then we made love again, and then she said, “I want to go somewhere. Toadie, take me somewhere today, please?” So I said, Okay, sure. We got dressed for the second or third time that day, and we cleared off the pizza boxes from the front seat of my car, do you remember it? that old Ford Escort with the bad clutch? and we drove off. By this time it was about noon, maybe a bit after that.

Without considering what I was doing, I found myself driving up toward the Humane Society, and I thought, the Humane Society? No, I really shouldn’t be doing this, but I kept driving because I was distracted by the leaves and by a knocking noise from the engine, which turned out to be the lifters, though I only discovered that later.

“Uh, excuse me, but where’re we going?” Kathryn asked.

“Up there,” I said in my cryptic secretive way. I did have those kennels and cages in mind but thought I should keep quiet about it. You can’t tell some women everything. You just can’t. Once we arrived, we parked in the lot, close to this animal bunker that the Humane Society is housed in, and you could hear the barking echoing off the walls and the trees. My God, could you hear it. A deaf person could hear it. It’s constant and unrelenting. When they’re in that condition, dogs have a kind of howl that’s close to human, and it makes your body grip up; your nerves get restless and uneasy, listening to dogs crying out, carrying on. The old alarms seep down into your bones, right into the marrow where fear is lodged. And what I did in the car was, I sneezed, and Kathryn watched me sneeze without saying anything. No gesundheit, no God bless you, no nothing. She let me sneeze. Then she waited some more. I waited, too.

“Is this what I think it is?” she asked. “Is this your great idea of where to take me on Sunday, our day off? Because, the thing is, I’m not going in there.”

“Kathryn,” I said, “it’s the Humane Society. They’re in cages.”

“No, Bradley,” she said. “I won’t. You probably mean well, probably, I’ll give you credit, but, no, I won’t go in there.”

“I’ll hold you,” I said.

“Hold me?”

“Honey, I’ll hold you around the shoulders. And I have an idea. Kathryn, I have an idea about what you should do when you get inside.”