The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [120]
I think of a poem I had to memorize in college: “Love makes those young whom age doth chill,/And whom he finds young, keeps young still.” Something like that.
The unexpected is always upon us. Of all the gifts arrayed before me, this one thought, at this moment of my life, is the most precious.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LOOKS LIKE I GET the curtain speech.
Some nights I walk around town, protected by my malachite machine-made bracelet that Esther gave me and by Oscar’s track team relay baton, which I could use as a weapon. The obstetrician said I should exercise for the baby’s sake, and when I do that, I sort of accidentally see into people’s living room windows even though I don’t always want to. But because it’s spring, the windows’re open and the curtains are pulled aside, flufftering in the breezes, and it’s that movie, Rear Window, by Hitchcock, except in my case everything’s out front, Front Window, by Chloé. Generally people are just practicing their slumping vegetable life by watching TV, or they’re mowing down the lawn or grubbing in the grub garden, but what’s amazing is how often you see people sitting on the front stoop staring off into space. I guess you’re not supposed to do that, stare into space, because it’s not-for-profit, but believe me, that’s what people do with their unapplied leisure time. They look like human-sized possums. And when they see a pregnant woman walking by unaccompanied, pregnantly huge like me, carrying a track team relay baton, they usually give me a smile or a wan wave, like I’m contributing to the Gross National Census or the enlarging welfare of humanity. People go by, things go by, such as me. When people are staring off into their neighborhood infinity, before they see me, what are they thinking about? That’s what I’m trying to grasp. I think they’re stupefied, thinking about love, mostly, how they once had it, how they got it, how they lost it, and all the people they loved or didn’t love, how they ended up royally hating somebody, like, the weirdness and wetness of it. Bradley says they’re thinking about money, but I know they’re not. Love comes first. They’re humming their love songs, for example as sung by Frank Sinatra or the Beatles or Madonna — did she ever sing one? a love song, I mean, and not just sex and money? I guess so — and they imagine about how they’d like to be with somebody else, or truly the person they’re actually with, sitting there on the stoop, accompanying them on life’s journey by talking, talking about nothing special, just talking. Or sitting in the kitchen, making turkey club sandwiches for each other. Or watching TV together. Or dancing. Or in the bedroom, having sex merrily or maybe not so merrily as the case may be. One thing I never mentioned so far was that once Oscar and I made love so hard that I got out of bed with a sunburn. It’s true! If he hadn’t died, he could vouch for me. We had tried something we hadn’t done before, I won’t go into harmful detail, and when he was doing me he asked if I was happy and I said I was. We did it for as long as we wanted to and then when we were finished I went to the bathroom and I had acquired a sunburn. And I thought, this is totally inexplicable. But I had it. Making love with Oscar gave it to me. I wish I still had it. Now I’m as pale as a sheet. Maybe I’ll get it again when my baby is born. I’ll give birth to the baby and get a sunburn in the delivery room in the process. Positive ions will darken my skin and I’ll look like a native. So, as I said, I walk past these houses and I see all these domestic arrangements, I guess you’d call them. Women living with women. Women living with men. Men living with men. Women living alone. Men living alone. Sane people and crazy people, people who have lost what once remained of their minds. The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way. I believe that. Dan Cupid’s arrow can make you one bubble off-level, is what I’m saying. Love has some ingredient for flat-out lunacy in it. Everybody knows that. Look at the Bat if you need proof.