Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

And I could point to a boy and then point to a girl, and they’d look at each other and it’d happen, they’d be locked, helplessly locked, and I had the power to point to a boy and maybe another boy, and even if they had been straight they’d decide, that very night, to try it, to try love on each other just once, flesh against flesh. To see two guys kissing is sometimes a big relief, for a girl. It takes the burden off womanhood. Or it might be girl on girl, because it was the summer solstice, and that’s what Venus requires, though Venus prefers boy on girl because Venus is into procreation. I ruled that party. I had a star in my forehead. People saw that it was me, that I was making it happen, and they were in awe. Look out, I’m coming, it’s Chloé, and I’ll make you come, too, and I’ll point at you and you, and you can just try to ignore it, but you’ll be helpless. Ha. Slowly and then more quickly you will approach each other, you’ll make these efforts at conversation, and your mouth will be dry because you’re so scared and excited. You’ll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won’t have a chance against me until you’re very old, if then.

The dawn arrived and we all dressed and went home and took showers and then went off to minimum-wage work, dressed in our clothes of the day, our workers’ uniforms, like the worker bees we were. Mostly we all had crummy jobs and mostly in our day-to-day lives we’re irritable and humble and bummed. We just sit around and watch television and argue about who’s going to go to the store to get potato chips and ketchup. I’m on, like, the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, as they call it. I can’t do the money thing. That’s not where my power resides. But that night, that summer solstice, we traded in those costumes of nothingness we usually wear for our nakedness, and that’s how we became gods and goddesses for a few hours, and of all the goddesses, I was the supreme one and everybody knew it. They bowed down to me. You would too. Okay, give me a chance to get my breath, one more time.

There. I think I’m all right. I was going to tell you about this other party, this one other party, where I saw Jesus and then saw this other thing. I won’t say that I was clean and sober that day, because that would be, like, false. Jesus had already come and gone. I was sitting outside, almost passed out, in my chair, smoking a cigarette and eating a chunklet of cheese. I don’t believe I ever bragged about my virtue or my party manners. Anyway, I was sitting there with, I don’t know, a beer to wash down the cheese, and a cigarette there somewhere, and because it was a Sunday afternoon, I thought I would check out the sky. Which was blue, with clouds. I’d just said something really dumb and nonsensible when I looked up. There was something up there. It was scary. I looked and looked. This thing was made of cloud matter, but the longer you looked at it, if you were as high as I was, the more it became circular. I know you’ll say, Get real, Chloé, you saw a cloud. Hey, that’s all you saw. Okay, okay. Maybe. I said, “Hey, look at that cloud,” but no one looked up, they were all too out of it to bother. So like I said, it was circular, white and burning, like a fiery merry-go-round, with, if you looked closely enough, people attached. And cogs. You could see them, these people, getting on and off the inflamed cloud wheel in the sky, and they’d be strapped in facing out, and they’d be turning slowly because it turned slowly. It turned slowly like a huge grinding thing, and there were other wheels and gears in the sky, and they were all meshing together. And these people, they were all naked, walled up in the sky, attached to the wheel. I wished I hadn’t seen it, the wheel turning in the sky, because even if you’re stoned as I was, it fills you with majesty and terror, but that was the day I knew I had a goddess in me, because I had seen that. Oceans and rivers and fires of light, and I swam in that river from then on.

I asked Harry Ginsberg: Who saw the burning wheel? Because I knew someone else had. Harry is very educated, he would know. He was reading something else, a book, and for a moment he looked up. And he said, Ezekiel, Chloé. Like two people had seen it, Ezekiel and me. I know he was speaking to me, addressing me, but I took it another way, that it was a list of two people, very exclusionary, a tiny club in which I was one member, Ezekiel being the other.

So now I work at the coffee shop where Oscar’s ashes are in a pretty wooden urn on a shelf up near the listings of coffees we offer, and nobody except Bradley and me know that he’s there, my husband Bone Barrel. Down here in my basement — I’m doing Harry and Esther a huge favor by staying here, by the way, because they’re lonely and they need contact with the youth culture — I’ve set up a crib and a changing table and I have baby toys ready. My breasts, they’re huge, they’re ready for lactating and nursing. I smell of milk. I’m careful about what I eat and drink: lots of milk and Caesar salads and steak and fruits and vegetables. I quit smoking. It wasn’t needful. I wait for the baby and I wait for the return of Oscar. Oscar wasn’t unsung. I sang him, so he’ll be back. In whatever form he takes this time, I’ll welcome him. Sometimes I think of what Harry likes to say, The unexpected is always upon us, and I think, Yeah sure it is, but maybe he’s right, and one evening I’ll be down here, and, who knows, Charlie, I’ll be gazing toward the ceiling, just thinking about nothing, feeling my baby’s kicks as she or he gets ready to be born, this baby that’s half Oscar and half me, and I’ll be thinking about the baby’s name, and I’ll hear somebody outside, somebody who’s, like, approaching the front door, and maybe it’ll look like Harry and Esther’s son Aaron, who they’ve been waiting for all this time, who had previously invisibled himself but now has reappeared. He’ll come to the door, he’ll come in, they’ll welcome him back, but it’ll be me who’ll know who he really is. Once someone has bound your heart, he’s the only person who can let it loose again. I’m waiting, Charlie. I’m patient. I don’t ever want my heart unchained, except by him.

The song was right, sweet Jesus. Here’s your lemonade.

Ain’t no grave will hold his body down.

Our life is no dream, but ought to be and perhaps will become so.

— NOVALIS

“YOU’RE NOT really going to start your book with a character waking up in bed, are you? That’s the first rule, isn’t it? Don’t start a story with a character waking up in bed?”

Bradley’s words.

But yes: I am going to do that. I am going to break that particular rule.

I RISE FROM THE BENCH and start to make my way back around the periphery of Allmendinger Park. Year after year I have come to this spot to wait out the particular nights that are radiant with the moon, and voices, and wakefulness. Here and there, mostly on the other side of the street, are the restless joggers, who I first assume are all insomniacs but who on second thought are probably night workers, nocturnal laborers, home from their jobs and eager to get some exercise before they shower and bed down for a day’s sleep. Overhead, a slight breeze riffles the branches, and the air smells of the white pines to my right through which the wind has passed. One of the lyrical consolations of insomnia is that the sufferer becomes acquainted with the special luminous emptiness of 4 A.M., these spectral stirrings when, just before dawn, the spirits seem to be abroad and are moving slowly toward you for reassurance. As I walk, I notice that the few joggers who are out here are all men. The women are afraid to jog at this time of night, wary of assault. No, I’m wrong: there’s one very slender woman wearing a Toledo Mud Hens baseball cap and clutching a small can of pepper spray in her right hand. She jogs by, hardly bothering to look at me, intent on her times, probably a marathoner.