The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [42]
“What kind?”
He had his hands now in my hair, which was tricky, ’cause my hair’s so short. “I don’t know.” It was hard for me to imagine the fucking flowers in the damn vase while Oscar’s heart was murmuring and death was taking a close look at him. “Roses,” I said. I took a big breath, to imagine them. “Red roses, with petals? Like they have them.”
“Okay. We’ve done this. What’s upstairs?”
“Oscar, I’m sort of tired of this.” I shined a big fakey smile at him, then dropped the idea.
“Come on, Chloé, what’s upstairs?”
I shut my eyes. I was working at it. I was imagining. Imagining is hard work for me, at times.
“Well?” he asked.
“I’m still goin’ up the stairs.”
“Okay.” He waited. “You up there, yet?”
“Yeah. Just about. I got my hand on the banister.”
“So what’s up there?”
I had this problem then. Because what I was seeing was, all the kids Oscar and I would have. Like three kids in their kid clothes, OshKosh overalls with spit-up on the bibs, and they’re yelling and jumping up and down and breaking shit and having fun, like a kid party. And maybe a baby in a crib or something.
“Well?” he asked.
“Big bedrooms, Oscar. The thickest carpeting you ever saw.”
“Right. I can see it. It’s, like, gotta be white.”
“Yeah. It’s the second floor. White carpeting in the hallways. Thing is, Oscar, I’ve never been in a house with a second floor. So it’s hard for me to know.”
“I have,” he said. “They got bedrooms up there.”
“Okay.” He closed my eyes with his fingers. He did it real softly. “Okay. I guess I’m, like, supposed to imagine the rest of it,” I said.
“What’s in the bedrooms, Chloé?”
“We are.”
“And what else?”
I took a deep breath, from way down in, what do they call it? the diaphragm. By which I mean my heart. Because I have one, too. “Kids, Oscar. There’s kids everywhere. They’re our kids. We’ve got, like, three? I can’t count them all.”
His dick started standing up again. “I was hopin’ you’d say that.”
“Bullshit. You were? Really?”
“Yeah. On account of I am the person who is not scared, like I said. Fearless. So that would also include kids, right? I like kids, man. Gettin’ into trouble and shit. I was a kid. Absolutely.”
“Absolutely!” I said, so happy my toes were tingling, little battery-operated things zapping them. “So . . .”
“Yeah?”
I was thinking of his heart. “So I have this idea.”
“What’s that?”
“I brought it with me,” I said.
So what I did then was, I got out of bed, naked, and I walked over to my backpack, and I was about to get the thing I wanted to show him out of there, but I had to clean myself up, I was dripping, so I said, like the Princess of Wales: Excuse me, I’ll be right back.
I went out into the hall, I guess you’d call it. Oscar’s bedroom is on one side, and his father, the Bat, well, the Bat’s bedroom is on the other side, and that’s it, in this little ranch house. Oscar’s older brother, he’d moved out, and there’s no mother because she’s dead and everything. It was about four in the afternoon. I was going to the bathroom to clean the remnants of Oscar off of myself. And I did. But when I was returning to Oscar’s bedroom, I thought I saw something way down out there on the corner of my eye. It was Oscar’s dad, the Bat, in the kitchen, sitting at the table, peeling some kind of awful fruit, and I sort of thought he got a measuring look at me, without my clothes on. Maybe I was imagining it. That can happen.
“I think your dad’s home,” I said, standing there. My hand stayed on the doorknob.
“Fuck him,” Oscar said.
“No, I think he’s really home.” I waited. “He’s peeling food,” I said, to prove it.
“So what’re you going to show me?”
I took the videocam out of my backpack. “This,” I said. I hoisted it on my bare shoulder and aimed it down at him.
“Where’d you get that, Chloé?”
“I sort of stole it. The people who own it, they won’t miss it.” I meant my parents, who I knew pretty