The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [32]
MY WIFE IS ESTHER, a tough bird, the love of my existence. She works as a biochemist for one of the local drug companies. It was Esther who years ago found out that the wonder medication Clodobrazole deformed babies in the womb, gave them unnatural shapes, took away toes and fingers and entire arms. If Esther’s mother hadn’t joined the Party as a young woman (and who else but the Reds was trying to desegregate the public beaches in those days? who else had a single social idea worth implementing?) and hadn’t put Esther in red diapers, and hadn’t signed Esther up for the Party as a child, she would have been proclaimed, my Esther, from the rooftops. But somehow, in the shower of publicity, some measuring worm looked up her background, and, though Esther as a youngster was blameless, and not a Leninist but a reader of Trotsky, that was that.
We live, in all truth, a tranquil domestic life. We have a year or two to go before retirement. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I cook dinner. My specialty is a beef burgundy, very tasty, you have to remember to cook it slowly, covered of course, in the liquids so that the meat and the onions and the potatoes become tender. Tuesday and Thursdays are the nights when Esther cooks. We read, we talk, we play canasta and Scrabble. We feed the two goldfish, Julius and Ethel. They must live.
As is proper, the children — all grown — have left home. We have three. The oldest, our beautiful daughter Sarah, is, like her mother, a biochemist. She is successful but, so far, unmarried. She would be a handful for any man. I mean this as praise and description. The middle one, Ephraim, is a mathematician and father to three wonderful little ones, our grandchildren. I have pictures here somewhere. Of the youngest, Aaron, who is crazy, I should not speak. And not because he blames me for the mess in his head. No: he deserves to be left alone with his commonplace lunacies — he calls them ideas — and given peace. He lives in Los Angeles.
AFTER KATHRYN, Bradley’s first wife — a woman I never met, I should add — left him, Bradley became the manager of a local coffee shop and bought the house next door to us. He became our neighbor. He moved into a haunted house, haunted not by ghosts but divorce. A divorce dybbuk scuttled around inside the woodwork. Young couples would purchase that property, they would take up occupancy, they would quarrel, the quarreling would escalate to shouting and table-pounding, they would anathematize each other, and, presto, they would move out, not together but separately. They would scatter. Then back the house would go onto the real estate market. Three couples we saw this happen to.
I should explain. At first sight, each time they arrived, they were fine, scrubbed American pragmatists you might see photographed in a glossy magazine. Blond, blue-eyed Rotarians, fresh owners of real estate, Hemingway readers, they would unload their cheerful sunny furniture from U-Haul vans. By the time they moved out, they would have acquired mottled gray skin and haggard Eastern European expressions. Even the children by that time would have the greenish appearance of owl-eyed Soviet refugees stumbling out of Aeroflot. These young families emerged from that house bent and broken, like vegetables left forgotten in the crisper.
So, when Bradley arrived, alone except for his dog, we thought: the curse is over. The dybbuk will have to locate itself elsewhere . . . This Bradley, an interesting man, invited Esther and me to dinner the second week he was installed in that