The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [31]
And Oscar, next to me, says, Honey, did you see it?
That was what he called me. Honey. An endearment! It blew a fuse in my brain because, for all the quasi-romantic encounters I’d ever had, no boy had ever managed to say anything sweet to me, at least that he meant. My life had entered a new phase then and there because I knew that Oscar loved me and not only loved me but was able to say so. So I got all hot all of a sudden, I felt like dancing in my bare feet on the grass almost, and so I said, Oscar, gimme a Slurpee. Please, please, please? I want to look at the meteor shower while you gimme a Slurpee.
Slurpee is a name we have for this sexual thing we do. So we got my jeans off and my underwear and I lay down on the grass. It wasn’t cold anymore. I only worried about the grass. That it would tickle. But it was just doing what grass does, growing under me and photosynthesizing, so I didn’t mind it at all. Oscar, he went to work with his tongue down there on me and before very long I was clutching at the grass and saying his name and cheering him on like the pom-pom girl I once was and looking at the meteors streaking across the firmament. He has this really talented tongue. The stud on it helps, too. I started coming and almost couldn’t stop. It was the best Slurpee I’d ever had.
So after a little, you know, after I’d recovered, I thought, now Oscar gets his reward, now he gets a prize, so I took his clothes off with my hands and teeth thread by thread and laid him down on the grass and scrambled on top of him. He looked up at me, no kidding, with hunger and impatience and appreciation. It doesn’t take much to make a boy happy, often the basics are enough.
So he was lying there, sky-gazing. Deep inside me was Oscar, big and hard as thunder, doing the reliable thrusts that keep life going, the meteors showering all around us. And I was working away on him, moving my premium American-girl hips up and down, and then I looked up at the stands, built solidly way in the distance and bolted into the concrete.
And that’s when I saw some guy sitting in the stands and looking down at us in the dark. It gave me a karma whiplash, and an idea.
SIX
SINCE YOU ASKED, I live next door to Bradley W. Smith. I see him walking his dog, also called Bradley. What is this, that a man should name his dog after himself? The man runs a local coffee franchise, a modest achievement, in all truth. Megalomania can strike anywhere, I suppose is the point.
After he lost his second wife to another man, I decided to explain to him about Kierkegaard.
AS A JEW, I am drawn in a suicidal manner toward the maddest of Christians. Kierkegaard, being one of the craziest and most lovable of the lot, and therefore, dialectically, possibly the most sane of them all, is of compelling interest to me. All my life, I have tracked his ghost doggedly through the snow. Lonely, eccentric, and crazed, the man Kierkegaard worried continuously about the mode in which one might think, or could think, about two unknowns: God and love. These were for the hapless Kierkegaard the most compelling topics. They bound him in tantalizing straps. Of the two vast subjects about which one can never be certain and should therefore perhaps keep silent, God and love, Kierkegaard, a bachelor, claimed especial expertise. Kierkegaard’s homage to both was multifarious verbiage. He wrote intricately beautiful seminonsense and thus became a hero of the intellectual type.
AS A MEMBER of the bourgeoisie, I live quietly in this midwestern city of ghosts and mutterers. Everywhere you go in this town you hear people muttering. Often this is brilliant muttering, tenurable muttering, but that is not my point. All these mini-vocalizations are the effect of the local university, the Amalgamated Education Corporation, as I call it, my employer. It is in the nature of universities to promote ideas that should not be put to use, whose glories must reside exclusively in the cranium. Therefore the muttering.