The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [27]
SHE CALLED ME at dinnertime, as I knew she would.
“I cannot believe you did what you did!” she shouted. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. Enraged spittle was teleported over the phone lines and was spattering out of the earpiece. “You stole the dog! Damn you, Bradley. What is the matter with you?”
“Watch your language. You have children. I didn’t steal him,” I told her. “I bought him back. It was Dog Liberation Day.”
“You bribed Tommy. Who would do that to a child? You are a monster. I am truly, truly angry at you.”
“Uh, no. I didn’t bribe your son. He shook me down.”
“You paid him fifteen dollars for Bradley? That’s a rotten trick. Goddamn you!”
“Honor is such a guy thing,” I said. “Uh, what did you just say?”
“I said you paid him fifteen dollars. That’s low. That’s the lowest you’ve ever gone.”
“Fifteen dollars, eh?” My nephew was a child of deep cunning, I was discovering. “You get what you pay for. What was Harold’s reaction?”
“You called him at the barbershop! You brainwashed him. He’s changed his tune. He never liked this dog anyway, he says. And now Louie is saying that he never liked the dog either. I think Tommy paid him off to say that. Only me! I was the only loving one! You guys are ganging up against me. You’re all against me!”
“Now you’re self-dramatizing,” I said coolly. She slammed the phone down.
THE UPSHOT OF IT WAS, I kept Bradley. I fed him and petted him and I built him a doghouse and called his name when I came home, and in return he loved me. My sister and brother-in-law found another dog, as I knew they would. Whom they also named Bradley. Now there are three Bradleys. Their Bradley is smarter than this Bradley, but I don’t care about that at all, not really, because at least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.
FIVE
OSCAR AND ME, we had such good sex together we thought there ought to be a way to make some money out of it, to live off of our crazy ruinous love forever. Only we hadn’t figured out how. Oscar’s real good-looking once you get his clothes off and his body into its characteristic behavior. As a boyfriend he’s kind of indescribable. Words violate him. And me, Chloé, I’m even more that way. There’s almost no point in me saying anything about myself because the words will all be inhuman and brutally inaccurate. So no matter what I say, there’s no profit in it.
Still: once upon a time he, Oscar, had been a stoner, sort of upwardly mobile from pot to hash and XTC and heroin, but it was just an excursion for him, Oscar being ambitious in other directions. He got fascinated by oblivion but discovered its secret, which is that it’s boring. But on some days you could look at him standing and eating a cheeseburger and see from his eyes that he had been ruined for a spell. He had been briefly tragic.
He told me once that in a drug dream he’d seen the famous African whispering monkey. The whispering monkey told him awful things about his possible future, bleeding scabby death in garbage alleyways, and that was what sent him into rehab.
After his substance-abuse experiences he became advanced, a reformed boy outlaw. Plus, we were, as I said, both real lively between the sheets. We were swoon machines.
WE MET AT THIS fast-food place, Dr. Enchilada’s. They’d just hired him, Oscar, he was new. He had to wear the little paper hat over his semiblond hair. It’s the law in this state, for hygiene. He came in and he looked at the hat, turning it in his hands. When he finally put it on, he wore it an angle, like he was not wearing it. He had an attitude about the hat, which made it okay and unopinionated. He was above the hat, the hat wasn’t above him. That day, they gave him five or ten minutes of training, and then he was working the register, Mr. Can-I-Help-You, but looking bad and cool and