Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

“I don’t have anything?”

“You had your tonsils out once. Those are lymphatic deposits. They’ve been there for years.”

“Oh.” Then I smiled. “I guess that’s a relief.”

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said. Then he rubbed his face. “You know, when I first started to practice medicine, I thought my patients wanted me to give them a clear diagnosis of their illnesses and a clear course of treatment. But that’s wrong. What my patients really want is for me to tell them that nothing is wrong with them and that they’ll be fine and that they’ll live to be a hundred.”

I nodded.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” Dr. Hovhanessian said, “and you’ll be fine. You’ll live for another fifty years, give or take a decade.”

I thanked him and walked out of his office and got into my car. What I didn’t do was drive back to work. Instead I drove along the river for an hour or two and then went into a bar downtown and ordered a double scotch. Instead of making me drunk, the scotch brought me to a higher pitch of lucidity. I made a resolution, the only one I can remember making and keeping. I decided not to tolerate, in my life from then on, any form of trivial unhappiness.

This thing had been a lesson to me. Our time here is short.

That night I told Katrinka that I would be leaving her, and I informed her about Diana. Diana’s story about the denim shirt is her invention. I was the one who initiated all this.

I CAN’T TALK about love directly. I never have been able to. The only way I can talk about it is by talking about hunting and visits to the doctor.

I’D BEEN AT THE GROCERY BUYING, I don’t know, food, for example orange juice, and a candy bar and ice cream for Oscar, and I had come out to the parking lot to unload all this stuff into the Matador and take it home. That was when I saw, over there in the corner by the dumpster, my future father-in-law, the Bat, leaning against his truck, an open-sewer smile on his face. He was taking his own time, the Bat was. He had his wings folded up but he was calamitizing me with his evil.

I figured that word had finally gotten out to the Bat about Oscar and me getting married. Maybe Oscar had invited him to the reception as what you’d call a friendly gesture.

That must’ve just shoved the Bat’s psyche down to the barroom floor among the peanut shells and the sawdust. His short-fatherhood was obsolete now, he had no necessity for being alive. Nobody wanted him here on Earth. Anyway, explanations aside, his little greaseball head nodded at me directly over the space of the cars in the parking lot. Like, recognition. He hoped! Maybe he thought… shit, why am I saying this? I don’t care what he thought.

I pulled the car out onto Stadium but fuck and alas, there trailing behind me, still at a distance, was the Bat himself, busily hunched over his steering wheel smoking his Camels and drinking his no-brand beer while he kept me in his line of sight. Well, now at last I had a one hundred percent genuine stalker, and not a handsome one like some women get, with a killer smile and Continental manners, but a genuine blue-ribbon humanoid rodent. I turned by the Dairy Queen, hoping to shake him, but his intentions, being impure, were strong. He hung on to me from his distance. I could feel his puny rat’s eyes boring into the back of my neck.

I drove downtown and parked in the police station parking lot. I figured some proximity to the law would give him the willies. Plus you put human refuse next to courts of law and the human refuse will get anxious and crazy, and eventually they will go away. I thought I’d got rid of him. I waited and then I drove over to our apartment.

But when I got there, the Bat had already arrived and was parked across the street, like we had an appointment. I eased the Matador into the parking lot and hefted the grocery bags into my arms and made my way to the front door. I was not about to run away. The ice cream would melt, wasting my hard-earned money.

Oscar was at work. I should mention that now.

I was trying to open the door with my hand, holding all the groceries. From behind me I heard the Bat say, “You want some help?”

“No,” I said, trying to get into the building.

“Hey, maybe you and me could have ourselves some lunch?”

“Well,” I said, “Lunch? I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Or dinner? Not that I need ’em. You been standing against me,” the Bat said, getting closer. There was this odor in the air that preceded him. “You been back in my house.”

“No, I haven’t.” I wasn’t going to get inside of my building in time. I’d have to face him directly.

“You been in my house and you been takin’ my things over here for your own self.”

“No, I haven’t,” I said. I put the grocery bags down on the stoop. He wasn’t going to hurt me in broad daylight. Bats don’t do that. Not here. God, he stank. I could hardly breathe. Evil has got a smell. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

“You been takin’ my things, girl. You could have got you your own things but you took mine and you kept them for yourself. You even took that souvenir glass dish I like. I want the things back, all the valuables that you got your little bitty hands on.”

“What glass dish? I don’t have your things,” I said. “Except Oscar, and he’s not yours.”

“I oughta punish you for your smart mouth,” he said. “Wouldja like that?” He smiled, making a joke. “Some do.”

“No.”

“I been thinkin’ ’bout how I might just manage it. The punishment.” He put his chin in his hand like a demonstration of thinking. “It’d hurt. And you, with them nice pretty features you got there, it’d sure be such a shame and a mess.” He waited in a posture of thoughtfulness. “I’m still pondering it, considering the right and the wrong.” He smiled again, and what an awful sight that was. Demons smile, as a rule, before they force themselves into you. “You showin’ your naked self to me in my house and then stealin’ my son the same breath, and takin’ my valuables, I oughta just cancel your rights right on the spot, missy.”

“What spot would that be?” Maybe I could get him on technicalities.

He looked confused for a microsecond. “Any spot.”

“Like this one?”

“You’re tryin’ to turn me around. All’s I’m sayin’ is, you return what you stole. Meanwhile I’m keepin’ my eyes on you, so’s you don’t take you any more of my belongings and then smile yourself up like the little weaselly piece of tail you are.”

He did this little swivel thing and walked back to his car before I could correct him on his dirty language. It’s sad when youth has to reprimand the elders. I could hear him chuckling to himself. I felt relieved that he wasn’t going to try anything violent on my front stoop. He couldn’t have done anything anyway because that week, being totally in love, I was immortal. Also I was relieved to see evil in such a pure form and to see how stupid it looked. The thing about Oscar’s dad was, he was a moron. God himself could’ve tried to tutor the Bat and He’d’ve gotten absolutely noplace. Still, he was Oscar’s dad, and I was sorry we’d never have cheery Thanksgivings around the turkey, family reunions, photo albums, and suchlike. We’d have this dumbfuck drunk meanness, instead. We’d have forty miles of bad road always stretching out in front of us.

It just amazed me that Oscar had come out the way he had, with a father like that. It just goes to show you how inexact a science genetics is.

I took the groceries upstairs and got the ice cream into the freezer before it melted.