The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [121]
I mean, you can say that love is obsolete and retro, okay, but everybody comes home at night wanting somebody there, even villains come in the door and say hopefully, “Honey, I’m home?” and either somebody is there to kiss you, or somebody isn’t. And if somebody isn’t, if there are no kisses, you’ve got to deal with it. Maybe you get a dog so that the dog kisses you, like Bradley did once. Maybe the cat dances around your feet, meowing with happiness. That happens. It’s no disgrace to kiss a dog in the evening. Dogs don’t mind. I’m not saying you can’t manage one way or another, I’m just saying you have to cope, such as the dog solution. So anyway, I come home to my basement that I rent from the Ginsbergs and of course Oscar isn’t there. Oscar isn’t there because he’s dead. I mean, I know that he’s dead because I saw his dead body, close up, but even though I know he’s dead, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’s dead. He’s around here somewhere. I just know that, don’t ask me to explain. I sleep with his Bert or Ernie doll, and I can smell him on it. And so that’s part of the reason I’m out there walking. I’m gonna find Oscar. It’s partly because of what I did to him, how I changed him. That boy befriended me. I suppose that I made a man out of him, but I don’t think that’s really much of an accomplishment. Oscar could’ve made it to manhood on his own, without my help. I keep talking about all the sex we had, but what I forget to mention is what else we did together. We danced and listened to music and played cards (I taught him gin rummy) and went to movies and we talked all the time, complete with our opinions about things. Oscar had a lot of opinions. Some of his opinions were unique and experimental. He said that the universe was expanding, it had to expand, to make room for all the souls, human and animal, that had died in it. Each soul took up considerable space. The universe had to accommodate that. He thought that the rich had invented poverty in order to get poor people to do terrible and stupid jobs no one would consider doing unless they needed the money. Money, he said, was God’s worst invention, the only way he could think of to get people to work. Get out! I said, but no, he meant it. He thought that when the world came to an end, everybody would sort of forget about Australia, and it’d survive the end of the world through sheer negligence. He didn’t believe in cars, Oscar didn’t; he thought cars would contribute to the end of the world as we know it. He thought that there were time zones on the moon, but only two. If it was midnight on the dark side of the moon it’d always been noon on the other side. Two time zones on the moon, two times of day or night. You wouldn’t need daylight savings time on the moon because you couldn’t save the lunar daylight just by adjusting your watch. He wasn’t zany. He used common sense. He could be old-fashioned despite his tongue stud and his outward appearances. Like, he once brought me flowers in a vase. He once brought home a lobster for us to eat, but we couldn’t put it in the boiling water to cook it — we didn’t have the heart — and so we put it in the bathtub with some water for the night and returned it, alive, to the grocery store the next day for a refund. As for sex, except for when he got excitable, Oscar believed in extensive foreplay, he was a real traditionalist in that respect; the drugs had helped him to see there was no point in ever rushing anything. He didn’t ever beat me up. I can’t remember him ever hitting me once. Oscar the Gent. When I think about him now — and I think about him way more than I ever think about myself — I think of him like he’s standing on a hill somewhere, this cow pasture, looking into the future, and telling me what he sees. I have my hand on his dick and I can feel his heart murmur through it, his blood bounding joyfully. I’m sorry he didn’t make it to the year 2000 because he thought for sure there would be major changes in the cosmos, everything, down to physics, would be revamped. All the same, despite his radical-traditional