The Feast of Love (10 page)

“Yeah. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a cheerleader. So I was. For the wrestling team.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah. But I guess I got degenerate, or something. That was when people didn’t believe my cheers anymore, I guess. My cheers weren’t infectious.”

We walked on quietly for a while, hand in hand.

Oscar said he’d read in the paper about the Perseid meteor shower. Because it was August or because it was time for them to die. The meteors were all suicidal. They were bored with space, he said, looking up toward the night sky. They were burning themselves up in the atmosphere. A meteor deathfest. It was romantic, the way trees are romantic, and the way Oscar could be romantic if he set his mind to it. Also cosmological, a word I once learned. He pointed out constellations to me, the ones viewed for centuries and named for kings and queens. We were walking hand in hand and then we were talking about this new music group, Castro District, that we both liked. Our conversations were getting deep and personal the longer we talked. I could feel his love entering me through my spine. And we’d look up to see a meteor, but, fuck and alas, all you could see was another street light.

So Oscar said, Chloé, we
gotta
sneak into the Michigan stadium.

Which was how we got in there, to see the meteors, because Oscar? he’d been there before, he knew the secret way which I can’t reveal to you, it’s like almost a CIA thing, they can
kill
you if they find out you know. He took me right to the fifty-yard line, and we looked up at the sky. It was pitch dark, extreme dark in there with only the grass under you. You could hear sounds of traffic miles away. Trucks shifting gears. People shouting and screaming. People contemplating murder. The usual summer sounds.

Oscar said, Man it’s suddenly cold out here.

I said, Well, what d’you have on, one layer?

Yup. No kidding, it’s like: nipples, air.

That was when, boom, I saw one, a meteor. It was a streak. Then, ten seconds later, boom, another one, another streak. I’d never seen anything interplanetary before, at least not in real life.

And Oscar, next to me, says, Honey, did you see it?

That was what he called me. Honey. An endearment! It blew a fuse in my brain because, for all the quasi-romantic encounters I’d ever had, no boy had ever managed to say anything sweet to me, at least that he
meant.
My life had entered a new phase then and there because I knew that Oscar loved me and not only loved me but was able to say so. So I got all hot all of a sudden, I felt like dancing in my bare feet on the grass almost, and so I said, Oscar, gimme a Slurpee. Please, please, please? I want to look at the meteor shower while you gimme a Slurpee.

Slurpee
is a name we have for this sexual thing we do. So we got my jeans off and my underwear and I lay down on the grass. It wasn’t cold anymore. I only worried about the grass. That it would tickle. But it was just doing what grass does, growing under me and photosynthesizing, so I didn’t mind it at all. Oscar, he went to work with his tongue down there on me and before very long I was clutching at the grass and saying his name and cheering him on like the pom-pom girl I once was and looking at the meteors streaking across the firmament. He has this really talented tongue. The stud on it helps, too. I started coming and almost couldn’t stop. It was the best Slurpee I’d ever had.

So after a little, you know, after I’d recovered, I thought, now Oscar gets his reward, now he gets a prize, so I took his clothes off with my hands and teeth thread by thread and laid him down on the grass and scrambled on top of him. He looked up at me, no kidding, with hunger and impatience and appreciation. It doesn’t take much to make a boy happy, often the basics are enough.

So he was lying there, sky-gazing. Deep inside me was Oscar, big and hard as thunder, doing the reliable thrusts that keep life going, the meteors showering all around us. And I was working away on him, moving my premium American-girl hips up and down, and then I looked up at the stands, built solidly way in the distance and bolted into the concrete.

And that’s when I saw some guy sitting in the stands and looking down at us in the dark. It gave me a karma whiplash, and an idea.

SINCE YOU ASKED,
I live next door to Bradley W. Smith. I see him walking his dog, also called Bradley. What is this, that a man should name his dog after himself? The man runs a local coffee franchise, a modest achievement, in all truth. Megalomania can strike anywhere, I suppose is the point.

After he lost his second wife to another man, I decided to explain to him about Kierkegaard.

AS A JEW,
I am drawn in a suicidal manner toward the maddest of Christians. Kierkegaard, being one of the craziest and most lovable of the lot, and therefore, dialectically, possibly the most sane of them all, is of compelling interest to me. All my life, I have tracked his ghost doggedly through the snow. Lonely, eccentric, and crazed, the man Kierkegaard worried continuously about the mode in which one might think, or could think, about two unknowns: God and love. These were for the hapless Kierkegaard the most compelling topics. They bound him in tantalizing straps. Of the two vast subjects about which one can never be certain and should therefore perhaps keep silent, God and love, Kierkegaard, a bachelor, claimed especial expertise. Kierkegaard’s homage to both was multifarious verbiage. He wrote intricately beautiful seminonsense and thus became a hero of the intellectual type.

AS A MEMBER
of the bourgeoisie, I live quietly in this midwestern city of ghosts and mutterers. Everywhere you go in this town you hear people muttering. Often this is brilliant muttering,
tenurable
muttering, but that is not my point. All these mini-vocalizations are the effect of the local university, the Amalgamated Education Corporation, as I call it, my employer. It is in the nature of universities to promote ideas that should not be put to use, whose glories must reside exclusively in the cranium. Therefore the muttering. There are exceptions, of course. The multimillionaire lawyers and doctors and engineers — how did they get into the university in the first place? — live here among us in their, to quote Cole Porter,
stinking pink palazzos,
and motor about in their lustrous sleek cars. The warped personalities, like myself, like my prey Kierkegaard, walk hunched over and unnoticed, or we wait at the bus stops, managing our intricate and tiny mental kingdoms as the rain falls on our unhatted heads. We wait for the millennium and for Elijah.

MY WIFE IS ESTHER,
a tough bird, the love of my existence. She works as a biochemist for one of the local drug companies. It was Esther who years ago found out that the wonder medication Clodobrazole deformed babies in the womb, gave them unnatural shapes, took away toes and fingers and entire arms. If Esther’s mother hadn’t joined the Party as a young woman (and who else but the Reds was trying to desegregate the public beaches in those days? who else had a
single
social idea worth implementing?) and hadn’t put Esther in red diapers, and hadn’t signed Esther up for the Party as a child, she would have been proclaimed, my Esther, from the rooftops. But somehow, in the shower of publicity, some measuring worm looked up her background, and, though Esther as a youngster was blameless, and not a Leninist but a reader of Trotsky, that was that.

We live, in all truth, a tranquil domestic life. We have a year or two to go before retirement. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I cook dinner. My specialty is a beef burgundy, very tasty, you have to remember to cook it slowly, covered of course, in the liquids so that the meat and the onions and the potatoes become tender. Tuesday and Thursdays are the nights when Esther cooks. We read, we talk, we play canasta and Scrabble. We feed the two goldfish, Julius and Ethel.
They must live.

As is proper, the children — all grown — have left home. We have three. The oldest, our beautiful daughter Sarah, is, like her mother, a biochemist. She is successful but, so far, unmarried. She would be a handful for any man. I mean this as praise and description. The middle one, Ephraim, is a mathematician and father to three wonderful little ones, our grandchildren. I have pictures here somewhere. Of the youngest, Aaron, who is crazy, I should not speak. And not because he blames me for the mess in his head. No: he deserves to be left alone with his commonplace lunacies — he calls them ideas — and given peace. He lives in Los Angeles.

AFTER KATHRYN,
Bradley’s first wife — a woman I never met, I should add — left him, Bradley became the manager of a local coffee shop and bought the house next door to us. He became our neighbor. He moved into a haunted house, haunted not by ghosts but divorce. A divorce dybbuk scuttled around inside the woodwork. Young couples would purchase that property, they would take up occupancy, they would quarrel, the quarreling would escalate to shouting and table-pounding, they would anathematize each other, and, presto, they would move out, not together but separately. They would scatter. Then back the house would go onto the real estate market.
Three couples
we saw this happen to.

I should explain. At first sight, each time they arrived, they were fine, scrubbed American pragmatists you might see photographed in a glossy magazine. Blond, blue-eyed Rotarians, fresh owners of real estate, Hemingway readers, they would unload their cheerful sunny furniture from U-Haul vans. By the time they moved out, they would have acquired mottled gray skin and haggard Eastern European expressions. Even the children by that time would have the greenish appearance of owl-eyed Soviet refugees stumbling out of Aeroflot. These young families emerged from that house bent and broken, like vegetables left forgotten in the crisper.

So, when Bradley arrived, alone except for his dog, we thought: the curse is over. The dybbuk will have to locate itself elsewhere . . . This Bradley, an interesting man, invited Esther and me to dinner the second week he was installed in that house. A courageous gesture. He was not afraid of Jews. He served veal, which Esther will not eat. In the dining room, she picked at it delicately. She left small scraps of it distributed randomly around her plate. I said later: at least no ham, no pork, no shrimp mousse, no trayf. But Harry, she said, veal to me is like a frozen scream. I can’t eat it. So don’t eat it, I said. So I don’t, she said. So?

The man, Bradley, had a certain hangdog diffuseness characteristic of the recently divorced. But he was trying against certain odds to be cheerful. He asked me about my work, he asked Esther about
her
work, and he listened pleasantly while we did our best to explain. These topics do not provide good conversation. He listened, though. He had large watchful eyes. I was reminded of an extremely handsome toad, a toad with class and style and good tailoring. He seemed to be living far down inside himself, perhaps in a secret passageway connected to his heart. Biochemistry does not scintillate at the dinner table, however, nor do neo-Kantian aesthetics. Only when I mentioned Kierkegaard did Bradley perk up. From behind a locked bedroom door, his dog simultaneously barked. I assumed that the dog had caught sight of the dybbuk or was interested in Kierkegaard.

Prompted by his interest, I said that Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, had fallen in love with an attractive girl, Regine Olsen, and then he had concluded that they would be incompatible, that the love was mistaken, that he himself was complex and she was simple, and he contrived to break the engagement so as to give the appearance that it was the young lady’s fault, not his.

He succeeded in breaking the engagement, in never marrying her. Cowardice was probably involved here. Kierkegaard wished to believe that the fault lay with the nature of love itself, the
problem
of love, its fate in his life. From the personal he extrapolated to the general. A philosopher’s trick. Regine married another man and moved away from Copenhagen to the West Indies, but Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, carried a burning torch for her, in the form of his philosophy, the rest of his days. This is madness of a complex lifelong variety. He spent his career writing philosophy that would, among other things, justify his actions toward Regine Olsen. He died of a warped spine.

Esther says that when I am seated at a dinner table, plates and food in front of me, I am transmogrified into a bore. Yak yak, she says. At the table she adjusted her watchband and raised her eyebrows to me. I felt her kicking me in the shins.

Still I pressed on.

Søren Kierkegaard maintained that everyone intuits what love is, and yet it cannot be spoken of directly. Or distinctly. It falls into the category of the unknown, where plain speech is inadequate to the obscurity of the subject. Similarly, everyone experiences God, but the experience of God is so unlike the rest of our experiences that there, too, plain speech is defeated. According to Kierkegaard, nearly everyone intuits the subtlety of God, but almost no one knows how to speak of Him. This is where our troubles begin.

At this point I noticed Bradley’s attention flagging somewhat. Esther kicked me again. She glanced toward Bradley, our new neighbor. Don’t lecture the boy, she meant.

I raised my voice to keep his attention: Speaking about God is not, I said, pounding the dinner table lightly with my spoon for emphasis, the same as talking about car dealerships or Phillips screwdrivers. The salt and pepper shakers clattered. The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up — wordless, inarticulate — by denying their existence altogether, and
pfffffft,
they die. (They can, however, come back. Because God is a god, when He is dead, He doesn’t have to stay dead. He can come back if He chooses to. Nietzsche somehow failed to mention this.)