The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [48]
SUCCESS: Every effort no matter how large or small contains the kernel of its own reward. In every inventory your greatest asset is you.
Then there’s another one of a raging river cutting through a swath of pine woods. Underneath that you would read the following thought.
THE FUTURE: I can go no higher than my hopes can take me. Therefore I must be defined by my hopes and the awe-inspiring practicality of my dreams.
Sometimes I go into Heppelworth’s on my break. I speak to the manager, Windtunnel — not his real name, I don’t want him to sue me — about customer traffic and about business. Windtunnel occasionally visits us when he comes into Jitters on his break, though he always drinks the cheapest coffee we have. He has the murderous blank open-eyed look of a screech owl, and his breath smells of floor cleanser. Anyway, in Heppelworth’s, I look at these posters Windtunnel has put on display, and of course I feel the onset of mall hallucination. I am so far beyond being motivated that I want to punch the nearest clerk. But I don’t! That’s discipline. I start to think up my own motivation posters. I’d put them just below photographs of automobile junkyards and clear-cut forests and gray skies sick with cloudy indifference. The Gospel According to Bradley. The Book of Job, pronounced “job.”
DISCIPLINE: I am a peaceful man. Peace is my mission: I will not smite any customers today. That is sound business practice and a sure path to profits.
Then I go back to Jitters.
Following Kathryn’s departure from my life, I’d go to work after giving Bradley the dog his early morning walk. I have to admit it: the business gave me a boost. I liked having a place to go in the morning. I liked having a purpose. I liked arriving there before the mall had opened. It’s what you might call a dawn feeling. No doubt there is a word for this in German. Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history. I’d look out through the steel-mesh security curtain at the dim interior spaces of the Briardale Mall. You know, stores have a peculiar bitter vacancy when there’s nobody in them, nobody wanting anything. They succumb to pointlessness.
I’d sit down and inspect our books and spreadsheets, then make sure the cups and saucers and equipment were all in place. I’d make the brews for the day and load the dispenser-thermoses with them. I’d open the cash register and do a count. I’d page through Specialty Coffee Retailer. I’d look out through those cell bars at the empty mall. Shiny surfaces. Every surface washed and polished. After an hour or so, the bakery would deliver our breads and pastries for the day. I’d chat with the delivery guy, Hans.
Jitters is meant to be inviting. We have wood floors and semiwood ceilings. We have tables and chairs, and large sofas and furniture — Pottery Barn knockoffs — scattered every which way. Soft surfaces. We have — well, we have my paintings on the wall. The Feast of Love is up there, in the back. A portrait of Bradley, my dog, is also up near the entryway, but it’s very abstract. You can’t tell whether it’s a dog or a contraption or what, though it looks friendly in its abstract way, like Nude Descending a Staircase except with a dog. You can see Bradley in there if you know where to look. He’s eating dog chow, the food suggested by drips and dribbles. It was cubism plus charm.
If I had everything ready for the day and a few moments free, I’d start to draw. I’d draw the Dragon with the Rubber Nose, the dragon that Harry Ginsberg had told me about. I got started with this art thing by being a cartoonist. I’d draw this dragon on little sheets of motivation