Charles Baxter: The Feast of Love

I fear we shall out-sleep the coming

morn

As much as we this night have

overwatch’d.

This palpable-gross play hath well

beguiled

The heavy gait of night. Sweet

friends, to bed.

Interesting that that play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like Macbeth, has insomnia as one of its many dramatic subjects, though the comedy is concerned with summer love insomnia and treats it with calm sweetness, while the tragedy’s sleeplessness, by contrast, is a container for guilt and has the feeling of desperate and cursed winter about it: insomnia as icy cold criminal mania, the arrival of the moving woods, the stalking trees, the hoarfrost. Not all insomnias are alike, as any victim of this condition knows very well.

I TURN THE CORNER and approach Michigan Stadium. A grandiose new cast-iron and brick fence surrounds it, and a high gate. You can’t get into this place anymore without a ticket and certainly not at night. These days, you can’t wander in and out during the summer or any other off-season. Too bad. Large construction machines block the west entryway into the stands. All this construction work has to be completed by the time football season begins. During the day I can hear the machines, distantly churning, from my study window. This stadium has become even more monumental, with enormous steel girders poking up above the current highest tier to support an additional section of new seating and a seven-million-dollar scoreboard. Around the upper reaches of the stadium’s exterior are some words in gigantic maize-and-blue-colored lettering, but with most of the phrase invisible from here:

HAIL TO THE CONQUE

At the corner, the stoplight is blinking red in one direction (north-south) and amber in the other. It’s too late even for the skateboard rats to do their practicing, their beautifully risky and ankle-busting curb jumping at this corner. No one driving by seems to have the slightest interest in me. They don’t even bother looking in my direction as they whiz by on their errands. I have the sensation that I’ve become invisible. It’s very quiet. All the voices have died out in my head. I’ve been emptied out.

Before I turn to walk toward the woods, I check the eastern horizon, where I detect the faintest glimmerings of dawn. My glimmerlessness has abated, it seems, at least for the moment.

I enter the Pioneer High School Woods, bordering our house. It’s darker here than before, because the gypsy moths have not come back this year. The forest was sprayed with moth-attacking bacteria. I no longer remember the Latin phrase for it. I’m too tired for that and no longer moth-crazy. The trees have consequently leafed out and now block whatever moonlight might have filtered down to the path. But the path is exactly where it has always been, of course. The mental map, a phrase that psychologists use to refer to the means by which we conceptualize the home territories with which we’re familiar, also applies to my imaginings. My mental map will get me through these woods and get me home. It’s dark, almost pitch dark in here, but I can see.

A pleasant weariness overtakes me. It’s a moment of drowsi-ness that promises a few hours of sleep. Birds — which one is that? I don’t recognize the two-note song — are calling above and be-hind me.

AT THE OTHER SIDE of the woods, coming out onto the street, I walk past the vacant lot, on which no one will ever build a house because of the drainage problems.

I enter the house soundlessly. The dog does not wake or bark at me. I pass by the mirror that is so old that it can’t reflect anything anymore, and I head up the stairs. How tired I am, how quiet these sentences have become, drifting slowly out of me, outward and away. The cogs are turning together, synchronized at last in the dark. I am dazed with sleepiness. Our time here is short. I can hardly stay awake. In the bedroom I take off my clothes and lie down under the sheet and the summer blanket, and she puts her hand on my back and says, “Where were you?” but already I am drifting off to sleep and cannot formulate the words in time to name aloud those places where I have been.

In loving memory of my brother

THOMAS HOOKER BAXTER

(1939–1998)

Earlier versions of three of the chapters in this book appeared in Boulevard, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly. Thanks to the editors of these publications. Grateful thanks also go to Mark Ricciardi, William Wiser, Dick Bausch, L. M. Daniel for his dragon, Eileen Pollack, Carol Houck Smith, and Dan Frank. Martha H. and Daniel J. saw it through and deserve more than a mention. The title and the summer solstice party in Chapter Twenty-seven were suggested by Virgil Thomson’s translation and musical setting of the anonymous second- or fourth-century A.D. poem the Pervigilium Veneris.