The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [105]
About twenty minutes later, she came back out and said, “Well, that’s done.”
“How’d he look?” I asked her.
“He didn’t look like himself anymore,” she said, working up to a concentrated scowl. “So what I gotta do is, I gotta remember him, instead.”
AFTER THE VIEWING and the cremation, Chloé and Oscar’s friends had a party-wake for the two of them. There was a controlled tumult of drinking and dancing and stories about Oscar. She took the wooden box containing his ashes along, and put it on a shelf near the stereo system. I asked her about drugs. She told me — I was being the starchy big sister — that, pregnant as she was, she wasn’t drinking or smoking anything at the party. She had made a resolution about that. After all, it was Oscar’s baby too she was carrying, and she didn’t want to fuck it up with anything toxic, she wanted it to come out big and strong. Those were her words. Big and strong.
The next time I went back to Jitters for my morning cup of coffee, the box with Oscar’s ashes in it was sitting on the shelf on the back wall, near the signboard listing the varieties of coffees and drinks. That box looked as if it belonged exactly in that spot. There he was, Oscar, a bit more anonymous now, back at Jitters, following his death leave.
Bradley and I had gone back to being wary friends. Whatever had gotten into us, to think that we would be successful partners? It was an embarrassing interlude, our marriage, of which we were both slightly ashamed. Still, we greeted each other with pleasure, those mornings when I came into his shop for coffee, and he was there, the Toad, behind the counter.
Chloé managed her grieving in an absentminded way, but she managed it all the same. She told me that she knew Oscar was dead, but she didn’t believe it. I didn’t ask her what she meant by that, but I should have.
I DON’T KNOW if David and I will stay together. Our lovemaking is so stormy and theatrical that we keep tearing into each other, and when we do, we tear holes. Sometimes what we do is more like fighting than love. We slam each other around. I think we’re trying to find each other’s souls, knowing they must be in there somewhere, close to our undernourished hearts. You shouldn’t envy us, sexy as we might appear to be. It’s not sustainable. No one could endure it. This intensity can’t continue forever. But it’s the way we are, hard-assed and mean and a bit selfish, and yet the main point to make here is that we’re obsessed with each other and are willing to admit it now, for all the good it does two people like us to be in love, if that’s what it is, which is very little good at all. We probably shouldn’t be in love. Dragons shouldn’t be characters in love stories. We should turn our attention to something else. The orgasms I have with him go up to my shoulders and down my arms and leave me beleaguered for hours afterward. The thing that we create when we’re together is wondrous but certainly not wonderful. I hate the idea of marriage. I hate seeing couples in cars going the other way on the highway. It makes me cringe. I go into rages.
On some days I’d like to be more like Chloé, who has star quality, but I’m not like her, and I won’t be. I’m bad, because I lack usable tenderness and I don’t have a shred of kindness, but I’m not a villain and never have been. That’s what you should remember about me.
TWENTY-FIVE
BEFORE I MET OSCAR, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn’t go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn’t the same person anymore. He mutated me.
First off, I had to do some serious crying. It got me nowhere, but I did it anyway.