The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [3]
The moonlight reflects off the rows of stands. I look down at the field, now, at 1:45 in the morning. A midsummer night’s dream is being enacted down there.
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires and those of a solitary naked couple, barely visible down there right now on the fifty-yard line, making love, on this midsummer night.
They are making soft distant audibles.
—
BACK OUT ON THE SIDEWALK, I turn west and walk toward Allmendinger Park. I see the park’s basketball hoops and tennis courts and monkey bars illuminated dimly by the streetlight. Near the merry-go-round, the city planners have bolted several benches into the ground for sedentary parents watching their children. I used to watch my son from that very spot. As I stroll by on the sidewalk, I think I see someone, some shadowy figure in a jacket, emerging as if out of a fog or mist, sitting on a bench accompanied by a dog, but certainly not watching any children, this man, not at this time of night, and as I draw closer, he looks up, and so does the dog, a somewhat nondescript collie-Labrador-shepherd mix. I know this dog. I also know the man sitting next to him. I have known him for years. His arms are flung out on both sides of the bench, and his legs are crossed, and in addition to the jacket (a dark blue Chicago Bulls windbreaker), he’s wearing a baseball hat, as if he were not quite adult, as if he had not quite given up the dreams of youth and athletic grace and skill. His name is Bradley W. Smith.
His chinos are one size too large for him — they bag around his hips and his knees — and he’s wearing a shirt with a curious design that I cannot quite make out, an interlocking M. C. Escher giraffe pattern, giraffes linked to giraffes, but it can’t be that, it can’t be what I think it is. In the dark my friend looks like an exceptionally handsome toad. The dog snaps at a moth, then puts his head on his owner’s leg. I might be hallucinating the giraffes on the man’s shirt, or I might simply be mistaken. He glances at me in the dark as I sit down next to him on the bench.
“Hey,” he says, “Charlie. What the hell are you doing out here? What’s up?”
ONE
“HEY,” HE SAYS, “Charlie. What the hell are you doing here? What’s up?”
Sitting down next to him, I can see his glasses, which reflect the last crescent of the moon and a dim shooting star. In the half-dark he has a handsome mild face, thick curly hair and an easy disarming smile, like that of a bank loan officer who has not quite decided whether your credit history is worthy of you. His eyes are large and pensive, toadlike. I realize quickly that if he is sitting out here on this park bench, now, he must be a rather unlucky man, insomniac or haunted or heartsick.
“Hey, Bradley,” I say. “Not much. Walkin’ around. It’s a midsummer night, and I’ve got insomnia. I see you’re still awake, too.”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding unnecessarily, “that’s the truth.”
We both wait. Finally I ask him, “How come you’re up?”
“Me? Oh, I found myself working late on a window in my house. The sash weight broke loose from the pulley and I’ve been trying to get it out from inside the wall.”
“Difficult job.”
“Right. Anyway, I quit that, and I’ve been walking Bradley the dog, since I couldn’t fix the window. Do you remember this dog?”
“His name is . . . what?”
“Bradley. I just told you. Exact same as mine. It’s easier to call him ‘Junior.’ That way, there’s no confusion. He’s my company. But you’re not sleeping either, right?” he asks, staring off into the middle distance as if he were talking to himself, as if I were an intimation of him. “That makes the two of us.” He leans back. “Three of us, if you count the dog.”
“I woke up,” I tell him, “and I was seeing things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him.