Charles Baxter: The Feast of Love

Hard-boiled eggs’re okay, she said. Still she continued to weep.

Please sit down, Chloé, I requested of her.

I’ll try.

She sat successfully at the table and dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. What are you going to do now? I asked.

I can’t go back there, she said. That little shithead — pardon my French — is gonna be followin’ me around. I can’t… She shook her head. I can’t think, for starters.

Well, you’ll live here, then, Esther said. Until you think of something to do. For the interim, you’re right here. You can move into one of the bedrooms upstairs, or we can make up an apartment for you in the basement. You could have privacy down there. You could come and go as you please.

Esther looked at me, an expression on her face not of inquiry — Was this plan acceptable to me? — but of unarguable confirmation — We are going to do this. Why would I argue? I just nodded.

Here, Esther said, and she pulled a green bracelet off her arm and put it on Chloé’s.

What is it? the girl asked.

Malachite, Esther told her. It gives courage.

Later that day, I drove with Chloé over to her apartment and helped her collect some of her household gods: her clothes, her radio and CDs, her little TV, her late husband’s track shoes and baton, pathetic odds and ends. In two carloads we brought them over. The chairs and table we left behind for a later trip.

Eventually she broke her lease. She is now our tenant.

She decided that she wanted to live in the basement. I don’t want to have windows, she said, even though the basement did have glass-block windows up near the ceiling, through which the light strained into the room. Chloé’s living in our house was Esther’s idea; before anyone had thought the matter over, it was done and completed. Consequently: there she resides in what was once our rec room. Where Ephraim and Sarah and Aaron once played Ping-Pong, Chloé now lives. She reads Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, watches television, goes to work, listens to music, sleeps, and prepares for her delivery. From time to time she comes up the stairs to the kitchen. Now and then she joins us for dinner or breakfast. Mostly she keeps her own hours, does whatever youngsters of her generation do. (I don’t inquire.) Sometimes, from down there, I hear singing, Chloé’s intermittent solitary warbling.

She has swelled up. She radiates the preemptive procreative heat of pregnancy. Esther accompanies her to the Lamaze classes. They come back laughing and whispering. My wife appears to be regressing to presumptive girlhood and to be enjoying it. She often has on her face a pumpkin grin. Myself, I have agreed to be godfather to the baby. This is all inappropriate — a Jew as a godfather? — but I have decided to indulge what Kierkegaard calls “the blissful security of the moment.” Even baptisms hold no terror for me. It is simply what the Gentiles do.

Bradley’s new girlfriend, Margaret Ntegyereize, has promised, if she’s available, to deliver the baby. As Jimmy Durante used to say, Everybody wants to get into the act.

Bradley Smith and Margaret Ntegyereize — how will it end? This coupling is no more preposterous than the others, and perhaps less than most of them. It is possible that Bradley will fall in love with a new woman every two years and marry her, like, what’s-his-name, Tommy Manville. I see them together, Bradley and Margaret, walking hand in hand, trailed by the dog. The days of my pestering Bradley with conversation appear to be over. If I am going to be lucid, I must talk to myself.

But the father-in-law, Metzger, what of him? Do I remember my German? A Metzger equals a butcher. This Metzger, of dubious humanity, he is a more difficult case. Chloé calls him the Bat, but I prefer his name without metaphoric trappings. We have not, I think, seen the last of Metzger. As long as there is Cupid, as long as there is Venus and for that matter Adonis, there is Metzger, the broken wheel, the nail rusty with infection.

Feeling that she should not do it herself, I returned alone to Chloé’s apartment, intending to pick up the remaining furniture. There was not much to take, very little substance. The hideabed I left there. She didn’t want it.

Oscar and me fucked our brains out on it, she said crudely but straightforwardly. I don’t wanna see it again. Its career is over.

But I recovered a lamp, a chair or two, a table. I brought back her books — Edgar Cayce and the prophecies of Nostradamus — and one or two small items she’d missed, including, to my surprise, a tea strainer and an egg coddler. I resisted the pathos of this small collection of kitchen fixtures. Girls leave home every day, set up house, and buy dish drainers, colanders, and garlic presses, thus bringing a version of themselves into existence. It is their rendition of a late afternoon in Lisbon reading the paper near the quay, except for the reality of it.

On one of my trips out to the car I encountered a man I took to be Metzger, there on the sidewalk. He had an inescapably trashy look. Pallor was mixed with incipient disease on his remarkably ignoble features. He was both pre- and post-venereal. Apparently the knife wound had not slowed him down. He nodded at me and grabbed at my elbow. I believe in the great courage and perseverance of the working classes, but this Metzger was an exception, a step down from the lumpen proletariat into the ash can.

That chair yours? he asked me.

I put it down on the sidewalk. I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting, I said.

I don’t believe we have, he said.

Harry Ginsberg, I said, holding out my hand.

Howdy do, he said, shaking it.

And you are…?

Friend of the family, he offered. That chair yours?

Yes, I said.

Lookit, he said. I think it got stole from me. I got my truck over there for it. You’ll wanna take it for me?

Sorry, no, I told him.

Perhaps I have not mentioned: I grew up on the streets of Chicago, and despite my abstracted and somewhat airy ways, am not a physical coward, quite the contrary, in fact. In my youth I fought the boys and men who wished to fight me, some of Chicago’s best, mostly Irish bullies affronted by Jews. Many of these Americans went home Ginsberg-bruised and bloodied. It had been years since I had found myself in a brawl, but the prospect of one with this man of doubtful probity filled me with cheer beyond measure. I had not practiced my pugilism for years, but I was ready. I felt happy and truculent.

I had taken hold of two of the chair’s legs, for carrying. The little greasy-haired man now grasped the other two legs. We began a grotesque dance on the front sidewalk, a shoving match. He muttered, while I kept silent. My blood, somewhat dormant at the Amalgamated, began to boil.

Greedy fucking kike, said the smelly diminutive shegetz. I put the chair down and popped him one. He stood for a moment, as if surveying the sky for blimps. Then his knees gave way under him and he appeared to sit down, dazed, on the sidewalk. How easy it had been! And how pleasurable! I had expected to expend more effort in subduing him. He stood up. Again I slugged him, an easy uppercut this time. Fistfighting is like riding a bicycle: you don’t forget how. Down he went again. But there he sat, fingering what would soon be his shiner. I carried the chair to my car, returned to the building, messaging my knuckles, locked up Chloé’s mostly empty — except for the hideabed — apartment, and returned to the front sidewalk.

He was standing up by now, but not steadily.

You’ll hear from me, he said.

By phone or telegram? I asked. I reached the car, lowered myself inside, and drove away.

ONE DAY, I THINK, Metzger will find us. Chloé’s enemy is now mine, however, and my feeling is: Let the lamebrain Metzger do as he pleases. I am ready for him. I am pleased to have an enemy who is not symbolic.