Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

I’m no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

THE ART. First I sketched her in charcoal and then I did a portrait of her. I hadn’t done human figures in years. I drew and painted her nude and clothed, asleep and awake, wearing her amused expression or the thoughtful one, frowning. I did each portrait, each study, quickly. Inspiration made me confident and efficient. Besides, she doesn’t like to sit very much for these portraits. She’s too nonvain. So I do most of them from memory. Her skin tone was very hard at first for me to get, the way light hits it. But through trial and error I learned the tricks of shading flesh the color of hers, first in charcoal and then in oils. You should see what I accomplished, but I won’t let you, because I will not show any of these pictures in public, ever. They’re not for sale.

I’M TALKING ABOUT gains and losses here.

When Oscar died, it was a Saturday in mid-November, and he was out playing touch football with his friends and with Chloé. Just before that, during the afternoon, they’d been watching the televised University of Michigan Wolverines as they defeated the Ohio State Buckeyes on the gridiron, and the sight of it inspired them and brought their blood up to a boil. I was working at Jitters with another assistant I’d hired, Stusnick, and had given those kids, Oscar and Chloé, the day off. Harry and Esther Ginsberg were strolling around the edge of the park with Bradley the dog (I’d given them a set of keys to my house), worrying about their missing son, Aaron.

They’d gone to the park, this group of people, and they’d found others from our neighborhood there, out for a stroll, out for a physical release after the tension of that game, and these neighbors, these keyed-up fans, who happened to include Diana, my ex, and her new love, David, who was athletic and who — I believe I’ve said this already — liked to hang out near the park for pickup basketball and touch football games, they were there too. They were invited to join Oscar’s game. Oscar and David knew each other from previous basketball. The more the merrier. For all I know, Kathryn was out there, with her partner, Jenny. Pregnant as she was, Chloé was on the sidelines watching and cheerleading. This is a small city. All these spokes of the wheel came into place that afternoon, all these gears meshed, everyone drew together at that moment.

It’s February now. I’ve taken my dog out to that field, out into the snow. Bradley and I walk over the field, crusted with winter. In February the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to your psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely. I stand in the middle of the field, right about where I imagine Oscar ran out for that pass, and then, I mean now, with Bradley running after a winter squirrel, I imagine Oscar leaping up, out of the range of everyone else, and I can see him, even at this moment, in the middle of winter, catching the football the way he did in November, and then falling, still holding it, to the ground, and lying still.

I can see them all bending over him. Even Bradley the dog has come over to examine him. Oscar’s friends are talking to him, or what’s left of him. I can see Chloé running out to the field. Someone — it’s his friend Scooter — nudges him. They say someone must have hit him and knocked him out cold.

What hit him?

I dunno. He got the wind knocked out of him. That’s all. Or, hey, maybe not. Maybe it’s something else. Oscar? Hey, man, Oscaaaaaar. Jeez.

Maybe we gotta get him down to the hospital.

Naw. He’s okay. I’m pretty sure he’s okay.

Somebody take his pulse? He doesn’t look like he’s breathing.

They bend down. They listen. Diana takes his pulse. Chloé pushes her aside and starts shouting that they have to get him to the emergency medical thing. Come on, come on, come on, come on, she says. Pick him up, you guys. Pick him up!

So they load him into the nearest car, which happens to be David’s, and David and Diana and Chloé prepare to take Oscar — Oscar’s body — to the University Hospital, where Margaret has just, as it happens, finished work and is headed in the opposite direction, back to me.

But they have all forgotten about the football traffic after the game. Every street in Ann Arbor is snarled with cars. This is a small city, and it takes a long time to empty of traffic. The stadium holds over one hundred thousand human souls. When David honks and waves his arms frantically, the drivers ahead of him and to the side honk happily in return and wave their arms and make the V-for-victory sign, or, using the same gestures that David has used, hold their fists in the air, unless they’re Ohio State fans, in which case they sit and glance around sullenly, hands clutching the wheel. No matter how much he honks, no one moves aside, no one lets him proceed with the body of Oscar to the hospital. There is no space to move. In both directions the traffic has halted, like blood in a blocked artery. He cannot shout. What good would shouting do, in this crowd of happy shouters? They’re all shouting. He’s one of many. He can’t get out of the car because that would accomplish nothing: the cars in front of him are stuck as well. His sedan with its occupants moves by slow increments toward the hospital.

What’s worse is that the cars to the right and left of him have stopped in the same traffic jam he’s in, and their happy inebriated passengers witness Chloé bending over on the seat and breathing into Oscar’s mouth. They misunderstand what they are observing. They think it’s passion. They think it’s the feast of love in the back seat. Apparently they don’t see her clamping his nostrils shut, as she breathes her breath into his lungs, because they give her smirks and grins and smiles, honking in great amorous collaboration at what they take to be Chloé’s celebrational mouth-to-mouth. Go for it, girl! Go Blue! And they don’t stop giving her the high sign until she turns her face away from Oscar’s. Then she fixes her eyes on them, and she screams, but the scream is swallowed up in the tumult. She then brings her mouth back to his, to keep him alive.

It all takes a long time.

AND STILL HE ISN’T ALIVE when they arrive at the hospital, and nothing that is done to him there can bring him back. He has had (we learn these helpful terms later) hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the medical slang for which is “hocum.” Goddamn these doctors anyway, with their jargon, their jauntiness, damn them all except for Margaret, who is my beloved exception. Ventricular fibrillation dropped him down. Eventually he was declared dead, Oscar was. An autopsy showed an abnormally enlarged murmured heart, from the track and the basketball and the genetic code, though I refuse to give up the metaphor and think it enlarged itself from his love of Chloé. Margaret explained all this to me in her calm, horizon-greeting African Zen style, using terms like commotio cordis. Against the terrors and sorrows of death, only the multisyllabic Latinate adjectives and nouns for protection, the know-how, and then the prayers, for those who have them.

THERE I WAS, CAGED. I sat in the front seat next to David, with Chloé bending over Oscar in the back, trying to breathe her life into him. All around us people, these fans, these monkeys, hollered. They whooped. They celebrated. On their faces were all the manifestations of glee. Being of a difficult and combative nature, I wanted to kill them early in their lives.