Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

“Sure. Nothing’ll happen. This guy is all middle-aged and bald and a wimp and a loser. Besides, honey, Oscar — well, I’ve seen him naked, right? That boyfriend of yours is strong. He may have done drugs once, but he can sure handle himself. I mean, he looks like a tough motherfucker.” She stopped to sigh admiringly. “Though I know how sweet he is and everything.” She reached around and scratched her back and looked annoyed, like I should be doing it for her, the scratching.

“That money,” I said. “How much was it? I want to get this right.”

She named the sum, and then she said, “Maybe I can get it higher, but I doubt it. It’s already a huge lot.”

“Well, I’ll ask Oscar. But I don’t think so. I really don’t think so.” I waited. “I mean, we’re broke, and we could use the money and everything…”

“Well, it’s like being sex workers for one night. One night only. Putting on a show for a lonely guy. Hey, I hear you guys are getting married. Wow. You’re so traditional.”

“You heard that?”

“Yeah, word gets out. Congratulations.” She started to shake my hand, thought better of it, and stopped in midair.

“Thanks. We’re gonna do it in a week or two.”

“Where?”

“Well, my boss, this guy, Bradley Smith, he’s offered us his back yard for the reception.”

“Who’s going to perform it? Like, the minister?”

“We’re going down to city hall first. You know: the clerk. The clerk does it.”

“Hey,” she said, “you remember that guy, Buddy Preston, from school?” I nodded. “Well, he’s made himself into one of those ministers you become if you send in a matchbook application and twenty dollars. He could marry you, and it’d be legal. He’s married a couple of people lately.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “A couple of people we knew from school. I forget their names. He does it as a sideline. He makes a little money from it. I saw one of his weddings a while ago. It was a real wedding. And he’s a friend of ours. Well, not a friend. But an acquaintance. I mean, you remember him, right? He lives out in Dexter now.”

I gave her a long stare. I was super-irritated. “Do I look zany to you?”

“Well, no.”

“This is my wedding I’m talking about. Jesus, Janey. I want a proper city hall wedding. I don’t want some quack minister. Come on, Janey. Have some respect for my feelings, would you please?”

“Okay, sorry.”

I took a sip of my lemonade. I don’t drink coffee, it’s bad for you. “Oscar and me, we don’t go to church or anything, so we gotta settle for city hall.”

“Let me see your ring.” I showed it to her. I held out my hand in her direction, and she put my hand in her hand. I knew that was the thrill for her, my fingers touching hers, not the ring. “Wow. It’s real pretty. A stone and the whole nine yards. Is that gold? Where’d you get it?”

“I didn’t get it. Oscar got it. He bought it for me.”

“Where’d he get it? Is it, like, an engagement ring?”

“Sort of. It’s a real short engagement, though. He bought it at the jewelry department at the mall. He made a special trip.” I didn’t want it to seem like I was gloating, so I didn’t say anything more about my ring, which had a genuine zirconium diamond in it. It wasn’t glass, if that’s what you’re thinking.

She leaned back and examined the ceiling. “Your parents coming?”

“My parents hate me,” I said. I tried to find what she was looking at on the ceiling but couldn’t. “My dad threw me out, you remember that, back in my party-animal days. They think I’m a loser. Plus my dad is taking orders from my mom about ignoring me. So I’m pretty harsh on them, too, now that the ball’s in my court. What I do is, I exclude them from stuff, such as my wedding.”

“Yeah. You gotta be radical,” she said.

“So anyway, I’ll tell them after the wedding. But they’re not invited. Rhonda, my sister, you remember her? She’s coming. She’ll be at the reception.”

“What about Oscar’s parents?”

“He’s only got one parent. The Bat. Very scary individual. Don’t know if he’s going to show up or not.”

“Am I invited?”

“Well, yeah.” I gave her the time and the address, but you could see she was pissed about not getting a written invitation, of which there weren’t any.

She tried to recover herself by getting girlish. “You guys goin’ on a honeymoon?”

“Yeah. We’re going to a School of Velocity concert the next day and we’ll spend the night in a motel in East Lansing.”

“Chloé, you are so hot. You’re going to be the happening married couple. So what about this guy who wants to watch you two lovebirds fuck?” She was going back to street language, back to business. She smiled at me like she had indigestion and was trying to cover it. “Like all that money?” She named the figure again. “Now there’s a fortune. What about him?”

“It’s way creepy. But, like I say, I’ll ask Oscar.”

THE THING WAS, I wanted to buy Oscar some medical insurance, because Bradley couldn’t afford to give us any benefits at Jitters. And I thought that if we had it, and something happened to Oscar, we’d be covered. But! I knew, alas, that you can’t get an insurance policy for five hundred dollars, but you almost can. What I was worried about also was the pre-existing condition thing, how they never cover that. Well, maybe we could put a deposit on a better apartment.

As for us, I didn’t want anyone watching us ever, exactly. But I also thought: Hey, this customer wants to watch Oscar and me, it’s his problem, right? It’s not our problem. We’re not watching. We’re just doing it the way we always do, being in love and physically endorsing it. Some poor loveless unloved excuse for an American human wants to watch from the bottom of his particular barrel so we can pay for Oscar’s health insurance or a down payment on an apartment, well, hey, there’s a possibility for positive gain here. I guess everybody wants to watch, sort of. Except: you don’t feel like doing it quite so much, maybe you don’t feel like it at all, the air goes out of that particular tire, any of the things you usually do, when somebody’s got their gloating eyes on you.

And then I thought about what sort of man would want to do this. I mean, he had to be pretty desperate, calling up some service somewhere, just because he wanted to watch. I took a walk in Allmendinger Park to think about it. I watched the dogs and the parents and the kids. I imagined him coming home from work, another lonely guy doing the dishes, standing under a lightbulb and listening to the radio, trying not to be a creep but being one anyway, and one night he realizes, bingo, that he’s in hell, he just lives there permanently, hellllooooo, he’s never getting out. The fix is so in, you can’t get more in than that. So what he wants is, he wants to look at what it’s like in heaven, where we are, he wants to see two representatives of the youth culture, which is us, Oscar and me, just lying around and making love, and maybe he could get clarified that way, you know, sitting there, looking at us yelping with happiness the way we do.

It’d be sort of like bringing a dog to a person in an old-age home. Therapeutic. Except you can pat the dog. Us, he wouldn’t be able to touch. I’d insist on that.

Seeing is believing. Seeing is different from telling. I mean, it’s different from me telling you about it, right? Right?

Well, I think so.

But suppose Oscar starts to give me a kiss. When nobody’s watching, he’s, like, doing it for me, and for himself, because he likes to. He likes the way I taste to him. He just breathes me in up here and down there. Would he give me a Slurpee? Maybe not if we were being studied. He’d get shy. But when you’ve got this golf-playing lonely polyester hyper-wimp sitting in a chair watching, this guy who’s bought, excuse me, a fucking ticket, then you’re doing it, like, for him. The whole deal changes. It turns into a show.