The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [28]
Anyway, we took a break together. We went outside to the parking lot for a smoke. He was still wearing the hat. To make conversation, he pointed at my ear and said, “Your name’s Chloé? That’s cool. Well, hey, Chloé, you’re pretty but you’re way underpierced.”
So I kicked the dead caterpillars in the driveway and said, Fuck you but, you know, giving it a friendly girlish inflection, a smile, an invitation, just the right tone to start flipping him out.
He said, smiling back, “No, no, really, just one isn’t enough.” And he raised his finger to my earlobe. His hand motion was halfway on its journey to being a caress. It was then I noticed how nice-looking he was. The blond hair, the snaggle-toothed smile, the bomb-shelter eyes. A cute guy who can look at a woman such as me directly and not turn away has the courage of a mountain climber. Sometimes they get scared off by the eyeliner and the mint-green glint in my cornea, and they worry that they won’t be up to the challenge. But boys in recovery have that reentry calmed-down zombie look, which you can’t buy in stores, and they do sometimes turn it to their advantage if they aren’t scared of girls. Oscar looked burned away and rebuilt, like a housing project. Survivors are sexy, sort of the way secondhand clothes are sexy because they hang right, you don’t have to break them in or get the sizing out.
When he looked at me, he was sending me a signal that extended into the future and made my teeth rattle. He said he was pierced all over the place. And he told me about where he was pierced, including his tongue stud, and also the secret tattoo he had, of the skull, which said “Die.”
I was deeply impressed. Also he had nice shoulders, despite everything he’d been through. He had been an athlete once, before indifference took him over and he absolutely no longer cared who won anything. I felt no lust toward him at that moment but knew that I would within a few brief hours, the itch starting in my heart and moving downward into my hands.
We went back to work. That afternoon it was kind of electrical as I watched him take orders and fuck up when he gave change.
That night when I told my best friend, the Vulture, about it, the Vulture said Oscar and I would happen, that we were inescapable and inevitable. She’s never wrong about things like that, the Vulture isn’t.
HE GOT MY PHONE NUMBER, in that house where I was living with about sixteen other people. They were all from high school, and we were existing generically and domestically together before we found serious jobs and apartments and lives that we could claim as our own. Some of them were working at this coffee franchise, Jitters. For this guy Bradley. I ended up working there. I guess you know him, obviously.
At home there was this constant desperate party going on day and night, which can be depressing and effortful. You get tired of the burns in the furniture and how the bathroom is always locked, or, when you get in, there are potato chips floating in the toilet. Anyway, Oscar’d call and say, I want Chloé. Not, Can I speak to Chloé? Or: Is Chloé there? But every time: I want Chloé. I liked that, especially the “want” part. My roommates taught him to say Please. They’d imitate him, these girls. Give me Chloé I want Chloé, was their envious little whine. The Spice Girls I lived with — Dopey and Sneezy and Slutty and Bookish — they were so urbane that they pretended not to eat or to cook or anything — they subsisted on air and bulimia. So Oscar took me to some movies and we ate popcorn out of the same bag. As a gift, he gave me his syringe and his spoon and his rubber tubing thing. He put them in a box with a sort of rubber band around it. He told me never to give them back, that I was the new event in his life, the new