The Feast of Love (33 page)

“Back to that topic? Sure,” I said.

“Me too. You know why?”

“No.”

“’Cause he’s interested in me the way he’s interested in everybody. Being the way I am, big trouble in a small shape. Hey, I got a riddle for you. What’d the elephant say to the naked man?”

“I don’t know.”

“ ‘How do you eat with that thing?’ ” He smiled fiercely. “Get it? ‘How do you eat with that thing?’ I think that’s funny. You know, Oscar always said you were pretty, and I guess you are, but it’s more like country-cute.” He studied me for a moment. “With that toothy smile you got.”

“Thank you.”

“I can see why Oscar’d want to sleep with you and even marry you. All that marriageable cuteness in one package and such.”

“What was Oscar’s mother like? He’s told me —”

“ — Do you mind me saying what I just said, a dirty word or two? Sometimes I cain’t help it.”

“Well, no.”

“You should of. You should of said, ‘Mac, don’t talk that way, it’s nasty.’ Like that time I called you a dirty word. I shouldn’t remember doing that, but I do.”

“Well, it is nasty, I guess, but —”

“ — Not as nasty as the act, y’know. Which you did in my house, can you remember it? Walkin’ past me on display? That got me started.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

The Bat reached down and took a swig of his beer. He appeared to think for a moment. “So you can apologize after all. I liked it though.” He stared at me. “Seeing the features of yours. You sure are pretty.” He appeared to think for another moment. “Your parents ain’t comin’, right?”

“No, they’ll be here any minute.”

“I don’t think so. I think you’re puttin’ me on. You’re just actin’. That’s all you ever done with me, was pretend. I had high hopes, drivin’ over here in my four-wheel. Missy and Mac, I thought, maybe we can be friends.” He stood up and walked toward the kitchen area. He scratched his scalp with the beer bottle. “You think I’m a bad person? Honestly? Tell me now.”

“I don’t know what you are,” I said.

“That’s the ticket.” Now he scratched his ear with his index finger, then examined the finger. I wanted him to stop all the scratching. “That’s the ticket right there. I don’t know either. I just don’t know what I do from minute to minute. Goddamn, I am confused.” He stared up at the ceiling. “Lord, I am confused and tired. I am forever gettin’ tired. You think, Missy, we could, y’know, somehow, well, be friends, and I could someday, when your baby comes, help you out? I’d like to do that. Babysitting. I might help.”

“I think so.”

“I think so too. We could start all over. Like nothin’d ever happened between us. ’Cause I’ll be a granddaddy. We could give it a baptism. Wash it in the blood of the lamb. What you gonna name it?”

I told him I didn’t know.

For a moment this thing happened on his face. I had never seen it there before and I couldn’t be sure I was seeing it now. His face calmed down for a few seconds, settled into itself. He was peaceful and quiet. I saw at that moment that all my worries about the Bat were mistaken. He was just a harmless little middle-aged guy who drank way too much and who had once followed me around and who had trouble with demons.

“You wanna give me a hug?” the Bat asked. “A hug for the father-in-law?”

“Well, not quite yet,” I said, softening. “Maybe later. Soon. In a little while.”

“Okay,” the Bat said, scratching himself higher, on his chest. His face was getting dazed again, maybe from the beer. “If you’ll excuse me, I gotta go for a pee.”

“Be my guest,” I said. The Bat disappeared into the bathroom and I reached under the hideabed for Oscar’s knife box, and I took a knife out and hid it under a magazine. I reached over to the bowl where the potato chips were, and I grabbed some and ate them.

The door to the bathroom opened an inch or two. “Hi,” he said, from behind the door. Here things get a little hazy, a little unclear.

After another minute or so, the Bat walked out, with his pants off, and his underwear off, and his shoes and socks removed. His dick swung back and forth like an inspection tool, as he made his way in slow motion toward me. I remember looking at the window quickly. Maybe someone would see this. He stood there for a moment, naked from the waist down, as if he couldn’t decide on his next move. Then he said, “How ’bout that hug now?”

“Mac,” I said, trying to hold my breathing steady, “you left your underwear and your pants off.” I couldn’t run; he was closer to the door than I was.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” he said, clearing his throat. “Maybe I oughtta put ’em back on.”

“That’s a good idea.” I stood up. My knees were shaking. My face had gone ice cold. “Why don’t you do that? Just turn around and go back in there.”

“I forgot,” he said. “Thought I was home. Thought it was Missy and Mac, quiet evening at home.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t that.” I was measuring the distance to the door. He started to walk toward me, his dick swinging again a little.

“I’d like that hug now,” he said. “Then I’ll put the pants back on.”

I couldn’t think. I didn’t have a single good idea to help me out.

“The shades aren’t down,” I said, feeling my tongue rattling. “People will see.” The Bat turned around to lower the shades, and when he did, I reached for the knife under the magazine and held it behind me. I took a deep breath. I’d never been so scared in my life, but I was also not scared, which is harder to explain. But I am going to explain it, because I’ve thought about it ever since. I mean, I knew he could kill me, or rape me and kill me, but I also knew that I could probably kill him, if I wanted to, and that maybe at any moment any of us could do any of that to anybody. He hadn’t decided what he would do, not yet. But the more amazing thing is, I felt Oscar’s spirit pass through me right at that same exact instant, and I almost cried out,
Oscar!
’cause there he was, my boy and my man and my husband, he had just walked inside of me out of nowhere, out of death, and I could think like Oscar and move like Oscar and be strong like him, strong and fearless. Maybe all I was doing was thinking of Oscar. That’s probably it. Thinking of being fearless. Which I wasn’t, scared to death as I was, but I was also this other person, right at that moment, like that person was on one side and the scared person was on the other. I was going to give room to the fearless side. Oh Oscar, I thought, be in me.

The Bat walked over to me, calm as a cucumber, but drunk all the same. Concentrating on his every move, calculating the odds. “Shades’re down now.”

“Get away,” I said. “Don’t come any nearer to me.”

“You sure are pretty,” he said, getting closer. “Prettiest little thing. Always were. I can be pretty, too. I can be a kindly man.”

“Put your clothes on, Mac,” I said. “Besides, I’m pregnant.”

“I get so confused,” he said. “Help me. There isn’t anybody I can talk to. I get so tired. Help me out, little one.” His arms reached out as he got next to me. “I’m not askin’ for much. Please. I’m askin’ please. From politeness. Just a little hug. And a kiss? The tiniest bit of love.”

Then the air unfroze itself.

The Bat put his arms around me and he pressed himself against me, and my hand came down once, stabbing him through his shirt into the upper arm with Oscar’s knife.

He looked hard at his arm for a second, then howled in surprise and dropped to his knees. Some blood appeared on my blouse, as the knife sort of worried its way out of his arm, and with its blade shiny with blood fell to the floor, spattering the linoleum. I got to the doorway and grabbed my jacket and ran outside. I turned the lights off as I went. I thought:
I’ll get the neighbors. No no no: he’ll be here in a minute, he’ll accuse me of something. Assaulting him.
I should’ve gotten the neighbors, but I wasn’t thinking so clearly. I just wanted to get out of that building. I raced down to the Matador and started it. I had a few minutes on him, but no particular place to go.

If you’re in your right mind, you drive straight to the police, but I wasn’t in my right mind, and besides, the roads were terrible. I was thinking: I did the wrong thing, and now they’ll arrest me, Chloé, for what I did. I saw myself, arrested, ruined, panhandling on the street. I thought of Rhonda, my sister, too far away; my friends, too unhelpful and stoned; and then I thought of Bradley, my boss and my friend, and his girlfriend, Margaret, because maybe I was still thinking of Oscar, I could still feel him, and I was thinking of our wedding day, and the party that Bradley had thrown for us, the feast of love he’d laid out on his table. I thought of that, too.

THE ROADS HADN’T
been plowed yet, and this thick snow lay over everything, and the Matador had rear-wheel drive, plus it was old and rusty, and the first thing I knew I was going down my street sideways, and then I wasn’t going anywhere at all, just spinning and spinning at an intersection. I thought of the Bat and his four-wheel truck gaining on me, and that was when a face appeared on my driver’s side window, and I screamed.

But it was only a passing pedestrian walking his dog, and, like, offering to push me. It’s amazing he stayed when I screamed like that. But he did, and he pushed my car, and I was off again.

I made my way around the city trying to get to Bradley’s street, over by Allmendinger Park, and at one point the engine died and I had to start it again, and at another point I found myself on a dark street with the snow falling and I had to stop the car because I was crying and shaking and shivering. But then I faced up to things and got strong, and I made another New Year’s resolution two months early that I wouldn’t give in to cheesy panic or anything, even though it made sense to panic, and was the easy, logical thing to do, lame though it was.

The street lights passed over me, and I felt myself getting faint and helpless, and I had the sudden recognition that I didn’t know where I was, but then I passed the football stadium where Oscar had once given me a Slurpee, and I made a right turn, and another left, and another right, and I started skidding down Bradley’s street, and suddenly I felt my baby kick, although it was way too early, it couldn’t have been the baby kicking, so I guess it was my heart thumping, which is how I knew Oscar was leaving me, because I was having this little tiny heart attack, just like the one Oscar’d had, except very small, so it was time for Oscar to go. And then he was gone, out of me entirely, having helped me in my time of trouble. He re-died.

I parked in front of Bradley’s house, which was, like, totally dark. I opened the Matador door with its formerly satisfying squeak. I ran up to his door, and when I did, the snow got into my running shoes, and I rang the bell, rang it and rang it and rang it, and Bradley the dog started barking inside, but there was no Bradley the human there, or Margaret either, and I thought, oh please, someone save me now before the Bat gets here.

So I ran over next door, where Harry and Esther Ginsberg were, and there was more snow in my shoes, and I thought I would faint, but I pounded on their door knocker, and I said, “Help! Please, help! Somebody, please!”

And I heard Harry coming toward the door, and as he opened it, he said, like he didn’t know it was me, like my voice wasn’t my own but a man’s voice, like he thought it was someone else, “Aaron? Is that you? Aaron?”

I KNOW ONE UNASSAILABLE TRUTH:
Help your friends and those whom you love; hurt your enemies.
The very banality of this formulation ensures that most academics — who enjoy hurting their friends — will ignore it.

For days, in any case, I lay awake, thinking of Aaron and of how I might have done him indeliberate harm. I awoke, nocturnally fevered, my forehead sweating, perspiration soaked into my pajamas, in my unforgiving mind’s eye the spectacle of Aaron being ill served by my negligence. On my son’s behalf, I had performed no heroic measures, the ones that, bright with prudence, you wisely do not perform in the daytime but whose nonperformance terrorizes your conscience following the arrival of dusk. Disquieted, assailed, I would rise out of bed and aimlessly walk down the hallway to the bathroom. I would switch on the light. All bathrooms, whatever their minute variations, are overilluminated at night, just as, at night, all telephones when they ring are too loud. The existential nocturnal glare of bathrooms has a certain ghastliness built into the shadowless illumination. Under such lights one discovers the first signs of cancer.

Moody and forlorn with middle age, baffled by the enigmatic Christian knight of faith, Kierkegaard, who nevertheless came to grips with spiritual psychologies as few thinkers ever have, battered with visual memories of Aaron, I would walk back to the bed, comically abandoned by sleep. It occurred to me that my lifelong tramps through the landscapes of philosophy had set Aaron off in the direction of counterphilosophy, of Scientology and Theosophy and Anthroposophy and the other occult sciences he favored. Who knows, who knew, what set him off? Perhaps he loved men and not women. But who would care one way or another about such a choice, in this era, except the unenlightened? We would have accepted him gladly, accepted his homosexuality, if that’s what it was. We would have welcomed him back to the house. He knew that. He could have come back, our own beloved prodigal, bedecked with strange clothes and jewels, dressed like a gypsy, and we would have swung wide the door and hugged him and kissed him. But no, he preferred to hate and to be hated.

This is the only cure for insomnia I know. Lying on my back, I would imagine myself in a cosmopolitan but still rather lethargic city, a city that had long ago given up worldly ambition, a city in genteel decline, Lisbon, for example (which I have never visited), where I am sitting at an outdoor café during a mild summer afternoon, drinking bitter coffee and reading the paper in Portuguese. Esther sits there with me, commenting on the architecture of the square — shabby Baroque — and on the passersby. Some are solitary. Others, the lovers, walk arm in arm. They all have an inaptitude for work. The women wear bright scarves tangled around their necks, the young men wear peacock-colored shirts. Occasionally we witness a group of three or four, laughing quietly as they pass in front of us. Then I revise the city so that the square faces the estuary. Boats sail in and out past the anchorage, near a breakwater at whose end is a harbor light. I am also on some of these boats (I am subdivided), and I wave to myself affably. No one has to go anywhere, no one has to accomplish anything. One has, it seems, an entire lifetime to sort through the major questions and to develop a coherent set of opinions and judgments on these matters. The meaning of everything will arrive in due course.