The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [47]
“No,” I said. “Dad, it’s just . . . you know, with my marriage breaking up . . .”
“Listen, Brad,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I just can’t . . . I don’t know. You’re way past the age when you tell your parents much of anything. It’s just what?” My father worries about long-distance costs almost as much as he worries about me and sometimes is short in these conversations. Really, he means well. I’m not presenting his best side here. “You don’t like your job, managing that coffee store, then get another position.” He waited, and his voice grew a bit quieter. “Son, believe me, I blow some of my brains out at work every day. My head’s full of bullet holes. It’s what work does to you. Life is suffering, as the major religions say. Face up to facts.”
“Well,” I said, “as long as we’re on this subject of advice and everything, how have you managed to stay married to Mom for so long? What is it, thirty —”
“ — Thirty-eight years.”
“Thirty-eight years,” I said. “How’d you manage that?”
“That’s no sort of question. You can’t ask me that. But since you’ve asked, I’ll answer it. It’s simple. You want to know the secret? I’ll tell you what the secret is. Here’s the secret. I kept my mouth shut.” He waited, a wintry pause. “That’s the secret.”
There was another long cessation of talk, during which I smelled rubbing alcohol from somewhere in my house (had Bradley the dog found a bottle in the bathroom and knocked it over? I would have to look), and then I wished my father well and hung up. Months and months ago, after he had first met my wife-to-be, he had somberly told me that my marriage to Kathryn would not work out. So far he hadn’t reminded me that he had said so. He wasn’t that kind of parent, not so far.
I ARRIVE AT THE MALL and park my car and check the sky for rain or snow. On this particular morning, the sky has a weird pinkish cellophane-like tint to it. The air smells like factory exhaust. I walk in through one of the service entrances. I am a service person.
When I go into the back entrance to our business, I smell the beans and the roasters and the antiseptic-lacquered-with-fruit smell of floor cleanser, and then, even more faintly, the strange bleary artificiality in the air, characteristic of enclosed shopping malls. The ion content in the oxygen has been tampered with by people trying to save money by giving you less oxygen to breathe. You get light-headed and desperate to shop. The air smells machine-manufactured, and the light looks manufactured or maybe recycled from previous light.
Above us in the mall’s atrium, close to our entrance, is a skylight in a mystical geometrical shape like one of those Masonic emblems. Don’t get me wrong: I believe in business and profit. Only . . . anyway, across from us is a clothes store, Snooker, specializing in clothes that have a slick polyester thug appeal, and next to it on one side is Video Village, and on the other side is All Outdoors, where they sell what they call wilderness products — though there’s no wilderness within a thousand miles of here — hiking clothes and such, along with alpha-wave sound-effect tapes of breakers crashing on the beach and nearly extinct birds singing their farewell songs. The place smells of cedar and burlap. Nearer to us, down a sort of mall alleyway heading out to the north entrance, there’s a cinnamon roll concession and a one-hour photo lab, and a Fun Factory and a maternity store called Motherhood, next to a nutrition store for bodybuilders. They sell megavitamins, protein powders, and motivation magazines and tapes in there. The last store in that alley is eXcess-ories (“Everything eXtreme you want”).
Out on the courtyard is a salad-and-snack store, The Marquis de Salade. Next to our business is Heppelworth’s, which sells weekly, monthly, and yearly planners, and motivation posters and motivation books. They sell motivation in there, preachers of aggression, hard-sell cures for Monday morning blues. Motivation! Almost everyone at our end of the mall sells motivation except us. Everything