The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [38]
I would sometimes mention these matters to Harry Ginsberg. I figured, well, he is a philosopher, after all. He’d be shoveling snow off his sidewalk, and I’d be doing the same, and I’d come over to his side to help him out. This was March, when you’re sick of the snow and the overcast skies, and the sickness also has a way of settling down on your self, particularly on those days when money, more and more money, doesn’t seem like the solution to anything.
Harry was glum, worried about Aaron again. “Good morning,” he would say, downcast.
“Aloha,” I said this one time, to cheer him up, leaning on my snow shovel. “How’ve you been, Harry?”
“It does not bear discussion,” he said, pushing snow in my direction. Then he propped his shovel on his arm as I had been doing. “Today I was thinking of a story. A poem, I think, that my mother used to recite.” He looked at me and breathed in. “About a dragon with a rubber nose. This dragon would erase all the signs in town at night. During the day, no one would know where to go or what to buy. No signs anywhere. Posters gone, information gone. Interesting, isn’t it? A world without signs of any kind. The poem was in Yiddish. Signlessness is perhaps a Jewish fixation. Very curious. I often think about that poem.”
“Very interesting,” I said. “Harry, where did you meet Esther?”
“At a political rally,” he told me, a twinge of impatience darkening his face. “Why do you ask?”
“I sometimes think I need to meet someone.”
“Ah,” he said. “Are there not conventions and get-togethers in your coffee business?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then go to one,” he said, resuming his shoveling. “Meet someone. Meet anyone.” I could tell that in his present mood he didn’t want to talk to me anymore, so I left him there, disappointed with the snow, the fact of it.
NEVERTHELESS, I DECIDED to follow his advice. A month later, I went off to a convention in Indianapolis of specialty coffee retailers, and I asked Chloé and Oscar to stay in my house, so that I wouldn’t have to pay the expense of boarding Bradley the dog at a kennel. They would house-sit, and they did. They moved in with cagey smiles on their faces.
In Indianapolis, at the convention, I had a one-night stand with the assistant manager of a Starbucks in Minnesota, and the experience was extremely pleasant but quite hard to remember after it was over — she was, and I’m not this saying as criticism, taxing once you got past her superficial prettiness, and at breakfast we finally decided not to converse because of the difficulty in finding topics of common interest. Our sudden and surprising apathy toward each other made the time pass slowly, above the scrambled eggs and the toast and the coffee. With the haze of drunkenness having faded and sobriety taking its place, she apparently found me shabby and colorless in the way that people can often be in the morning. I do remember that her red hair smelled of smoke when we were in bed. Smoky red hair, as if the head were on fire.
When I returned home from the convention in Indianapolis, the house was spick-and-span, nothing out of place. I mean those two, Oscar and Chloé, looked like castoffs and flotsam, but, being in love, their inner lives were conventionally brisk, and they were fastidious and neat, as if they wanted the world to continue for a while so that they could be in it.
I’d only been back in the house for a day or so when I noticed that an imperceptible change had overtaken the first floor and the bedrooms