The Feast of Love (16 page)

For example, when I’m conversing with people, checking out the young women coming in and out, these women, even while I’m doing these day-to-day things, I’m in a reverie. I’ll be standing there, behind the counter, and first I’ll think about women, possible women who might be my girlfriends or wives or something, you know, the usual fantasies, candlelit dinners, for example, and then, when I get bored with that, I’ll think about my own funeral, which always cheers me up. I mean, I’ll imagine the church, full of distraught supermodels listening to the eulogy and sobbing. All these supermodels boohooing over my death. And there in front of the church would be someone like what’s-his-name, Robert Schiller, the televangelist, the one with the silver hair and the electronic smile, and he’d be going on and on about me, shockingly eloquent.

“Bradley W. Smith,” he’d say, and he’d shake his distinguished head. “No one really understood Bradley W. Smith, except maybe his dog. And, yet, unbeknownst to many, he was a great person —”

“ — Could I have a double decaf cap,
please?”

“Sure,” I say, pulling myself out of my imaginings. It’s probably not healthy to maunder through a fantasy about your own funeral. Morbid, as Chloé says. But, as the song says, it’s a hard habit to break. And it’s harmless.

Around eleven o’clock my next-door neighbor, Professor Harry Ginsberg, comes in, mostly soaked, his remaining hair plastered to the sides of his face. He shakes out his umbrella, the one with the duck’s head on it. He then waves at me — not to me, but at me — in greeting, before he says, “Have you seen it outside, Bradley? Really, this is something you should see.” He smiles and shakes his head, and raindrops drizzle downward off his face onto the floor.

“What?” I say.

“Skies so dark, my boy, that you can’t read under them, and this in the daytime! Go look.”

“Harry, I can’t leave the business.”

He checks out Jitters and spies some of my art. “I see you’ve hung
The Feast of Love
there in the back. Your very best effort. Is it for sale?”

“No, Harry, it’s hors de commerce. And it’s —”

All at once there’s a crack, like someone snapping a whip, and a low roaring, and a strange singeing smell, coming from I don’t know where, and Chloé, who’s been bussing the tables with the collection tray, looks up.

“Didn’t you hear?” Harry asks me. “They’ve been predicting tornadoes.”

“There’s no weather in malls, Harry,” I tell him. “Not even tornadoes. We’re impervious — is that the word? — we’re impervious to conditions.”

“I should have such optimism,” Harry says, opening his mouth and laughing silently, a gesture I do not care for. “ ‘Impervious to conditions,’ an interesting phrase. I should have —”

Another roaring, longer this time, seems to be approaching us, silencing Harry’s meditation on my wording, and when the storm sound starts to reverberate throughout the mall, like the echo in a bowling alley, my customers hear it, and they all look up, and at this point the lights blink, and the Oscar Peterson CD falls silent inside Jitters, and Mozart leaves the podium in the mall, and that’s when I hear the shard-crack sound of shattering glass.

“My God,” Harry Ginsberg says. He takes his espresso-to-go and walks out into the atrium.

At that point the power fails in Briardale. The emergency lighting flickers on, battery-operated evacuation spots, and all but one of my customers get up and leave. Why should they leave? They’re safe here. One woman near the entrance is drinking her cup of espresso and reading the
New York Times,
and she doesn’t so much as budge while everyone else scurries out. The light inside Jitters becomes emergency light: frosty and cold and glaring. But she just goes on reading, her head down, deep in concentration.

You can hear the wind shaking the Masonic emblem skylight, then hail assaulting it, and you can hear the gusts shaking the exterior doors, but otherwise it’s gone very quiet in the mall. Windtunnel, looking imperturbably smug, saunters over from Heppelworth’s and says, “Power failure, huh?”

“Yup, I guess so.”

“It’ll be back on, no time flat,” he says, gazing at the ceiling. He has trained himself to be an optimist, a professional optimist, a success maniac, despite conditions. Look at his tie today! It has yachts on it!

“Hope so,” I tell him. “You want anything?”

“Naw,” Windtunnel says, breathing in my direction, his breath so heavy with wintergreen he could stun an ox with it. “Maybe in a little while.” And he saunters back toward his darkened motivation market, all of whose customers have fled. His protective gate lowers until it is halfway down.

Chloé joins me near the counter. “This is freakazoidal,” she says. “Quel rush.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “Come on.”

We walk out toward the mall. You can hear the wind futilely attacking the mall’s exterior, but you would need a full-scale level-five tornado to blow this place apart, and so far we don’t have that. From here we can see into the depths of the mall. These cold emergency lights are giving all the merchandise a shakedown, and when you gaze into Motherhood, all the maternity-ware has turned ghastly. The clerks have their elbows on the cash counter, including Marilyn, a sweet babe, pure honeydew. I should talk to her. The orphaned shoes in the neighboring shoe store are like artifacts or clues to a crime. It’s uniformly gray inside the mall now. What few customers there are seem to be distressed or disheartened. They’re limping along, without purpose. It’s as if, when you turn the power off, the merchandise somehow becomes nothing but a ruin. People lose the desire to buy. Their hearts go out of it.

Why is the light given? you think. Why is the light taken away?

Down at the center of the mall, the fountain has stopped surging into the de-ionized air, and the water sits there, gathering dust. Here and there in the far recesses of the mall, the customers move around, totally unmotivated, confused and abandoned, quite conclusively Monday-morning, and everything we’ve got here for sale loses its allure. Nothing but wallflower commodities, spinster products. Two old people, arm in arm, help each other walk toward the exit.

Across the acres of merchandise a vast silence prevails.

“Wow. This is amazing,” Chloé says, and I nod in agreement. “You know what this makes me think of?” she asks.

“What?”

“Well, uh, your candles going out.” She smiles at me, and one of her blond eyebrows lifts, as she thinks of what to say next. But she doesn’t say anything, eloquently sexy in her silence.

“Hmm,” I say, pretending to think this over. But actually I
am
thinking it over.

Chloé and I go back into Jitters. She ambles toward the back, taking off her apron, swaying as she goes, her hips alive to their possibilities. She sits down in a sort of wing chair back near the rest room, and seems to doze off. Oscar keeps her busy at night. I’ll wake her up when the customers return. I’m a demanding boss but a fair one.

Then two things happen. I go up to the woman who’s been sitting at a small table near the front, reading the
New York Times.
I say to her, “How can you read in this light? It’s so dim.”

“I’m used to dim bulbs,” she says, not looking up.

“In that case, you’d be right at home here.”

She seems startled by my witticism, and smiles at me, and in the dim light I can see that her eyes are blue. We introduce ourselves eventually, and I find out that her name is Diana.

Not to get ahead of myself here, but she becomes my second wife.

The other thing that happens is that before the lights go back on in the mall, a strange little man with greasy hair appears outside what I guess you’d call our doorway. He stands there and stands there, shifting from one foot to the other. He’s not large, but he looks strong and wiry, and when I first see him I get the impression that he’s not really looking over the brioche, he’s searching for someone, and then he finds what he’s searching for, which is Chloé. Even though she’s at the back, taking a catnap, he’s staring at her.

“May I help you?” I ask him, to fill the time.

He shakes his head. From where I’m standing, I can smell the whiskey on his breath. I can even tell that it’s cheap whiskey, a Canadian blend, the worst of all possible whiskies. The next time I look over in his direction, he’s vanished.

When I tell Chloé about him, and I describe him to her, all she says is, “Yuck. It’s the Bat. Señor Creep-o-rama.” Then she looks at her watch. “Where’s Oscar? He should be here by now? Where’s Oscar, Mr. S?”

I tell her I don’t know. But right at one o’clock, on the dot, Oscar swaggers into Jitters. After soul-kissing him, Chloé tells Oscar about the Bat’s mysterious apparitional appearance. All Oscar says is, “Dumb old man.” Then he puts his apron on.

But I am not really thinking about them because I am thinking about Diana, having already obtained her phone number. I took courage because she hadn’t been demeaned as yet with someone else’s engagement or wedding ring, I had taken care to notice. Before the lights came back on in the mall, I was thinking of eat-ing supper with this woman, Diana, whose blue eyes and stay-puttedness in the midst of storm and wrack had banished from my mind all thought of eulogies and votive candles and little white crosses accompanied by plastic flowers that poked up through the dirt and unfolded their zombie blossoms on a cheerless Monday morning.

“LISTEN, UH,
what did you say your name was?” Diana asks.

“Charlie.”

“Listen,
Charlie.
I mean, I suppose this is all very interesting and everything, but it gives me the willies. First of all my story is
not
a story. Second of all, it’s not yours. It’s mine, isn’t it? I thought my life was mine and not yours. Third of all, I . . . I just lost my train of thought. Oh, I know: it’s all private. My life is not in the public domain. All right? Please don’t write about me.”

“Oh, I won’t. Not exactly. But I’ll invent a replica of you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t really have time to argue. I’m a busy woman. I’m an osteopath, you know.”

“Oh, that’s fascinating,” I say without irony, because I mean it. “An osteopath? What do osteopaths do? Do you mind my asking? I’ve always been confused about osteopaths.”

“No, sorry, I don’t have time to explain. You can look it up.”

“Okay. Maybe I’ll make you into a lawyer.”

“A lawyer? How can you do that? Incidentally, what did you say this project of yours is called?”

“The Feast of Love.”

“Ah
-huh.
Just like Bradley’s painting. I got that, didn’t I?”

“Yes. Just like Bradley’s painting.”

“It’s the best thing he ever did,” she says.

“There you go,” I tell her. “See, you have opinions to contribute, too.”

“That wasn’t an opinion,” she says. “I didn’t say anything. And I’m not going to say anything, believe me.”

“Okay,” I tell her. “But you’ll wish you had talked to me.”

“What does that mean?” she asks. “Are you threatening me? I should give you a piece of advice. As a favor. Free. Here it is. Don’t threaten me.” Her voice somehow manages to rise and to stay calm simultaneously. “Don’t threaten people, especially lawyers. Don’t threaten your own characters. It’s for your own good. You’ll wind up in a mess of litigation and
. . . subplots.”
She pauses. Then she seems to laugh. At least I think it’s a laugh. “You’re probably an intelligent man. Let’s not beat this shit to death. You get the point.”

THE POINT WAS,
I didn’t need a lover. I already had one of those, a married man who sometimes came over and who brought bunches of beautiful cut flowers, or soup he had made at home the night before.

He’d sneak the soup, carrot-leek being my favorite, out of his house in Tupperware containers, pretending he would serve it to himself for lunch. How he snuck the containers back was not my concern. He favored white shirts with French cuffs, lightly starched, though he sometimes wore a leather jacket and sunglasses to my place for his beauty’s sake. The last time he tried that I said, “You look like one of the Village People, sweetie,” kidding him, and he never wore those clothes again. As a back-door man he was devoted to me, and reliable. He wasn’t a lawyer, thank God. He worked for a pharmaceutical company, and his hours were flexible. I wasn’t in love with him so far as I could tell, but I liked him, sometimes to bursting, and I enjoyed talking to him, going to bed with him, and cooking meals with him, anything you could do inside four walls and away from public view.

He was athletic and fierce, funny when he wanted to be, and affectionate. As a lover, he was so companionable and enthusiastic, and he was clean as a knife. He had a thick head of hair, absolutely gorgeous features, and kiss-curls at the neck. I only saw him sweat hard when we were physically locked together, and his sweat had no odor, none, though his body did, a wonderful breadlike smell. We could have sex all day. He could make me come over and over again, but he didn’t bring me to a boil. How can I put this accurately? As follows: I didn’t have to sit up any further than normal for him and take more than the usual notice. Maybe I should have.

The only trouble with having an affair like ours is that the two of you can’t go outside much. It tests the friendship more than it tests the sex. The old story: you can’t be viewed in public, you’re always Anna and Vronsky on this diminished suburban scale. You can’t work in the garden, the two of you. You can’t rake the leaves. You can’t go to movies at the cineplex and you can’t find yourselves at concerts or gallery shows. You have no opportunity to sit around on Sunday morning, funky and grungy and full of opinions, while you read the paper. You just stay in little rooms, those times when you can arrange it, the illicit playground of furtive and therefore heightened eros. The constraints challenge your sexual resourcefulness. Sometimes you have sex inventively all afternoon, in bed or on the floor or in the shower, for want of anything better to do. You do the fireworks. You light them and watch them go off. Of course, he didn’t mind that, but, like me, he saw its limitations.