The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [5]
He nods. “Kind of melodramatic, though, right? I thought it was a cardinal rule not to start a novel with someone waking up in bed. And what’s all this about fright? Do you really awaken in terror? That doesn’t seem like you at all. And by the way I believe the word is awakens.”
Irritated, I stare at him. “When did you become Mr. Usage? All right, I’ll revise it. Besides, I do wake in terror. Ask my wife.”
“No, I would never do that. What’s the book called?”
“I have no idea.”
“You should call it The Feast of Love. I’m the expert on that. I should write that book. Actually, I should be in that book. You should put me into your novel. I’m an expert on love. I’ve just broken up with my second wife, after all. I’m in an emotional tangle. Maybe I’d shoot myself before the final chapter. Your readers would wonder about the outcome. Yeah, the feast of love. It certainly isn’t what I expected when I was in high school and I was imagining what love was going to be, honeymoon jaunts, joy forever and that sort of thing.”
I glance at the dog, who is yawning in my face. I bore this dog. “Aren’t you going out with a doctor now? Some new woman?”
“That’s private.”
“Hey, you came up with the title, and then you decide I can’t have it because it’s a metaphor? And you want to be a character in this book, and you won’t give me the details of your love life?”
“Metaphor my ass. I don’t know. Call it The Feast of Love. I know: call it Unchain My Heart. Now there’s a good title. Call it anything you want to. But remember: metaphors mean something,” he says, sitting up. Junior also sits up. “You remember Kathryn, my ex? My first ex? When Kathryn called me a toad, which she did sometimes to punish me, I’m sure she chose that metaphor carefully. She took great care with her language. She was fastidious. She probably searched for that metaphor all day. She went shopping for metaphors, Kathryn did. X marked the spot where she found them. Then she displayed them, all these metaphors, to me. After a while it became her nickname for me, as in ‘Toad, my love, would you pass the potatoes?’ They were always about me, these metaphors, as it turned out. She got that one from The Wind in the Willows, her favorite book. You know: Mr. Toad?”
He says this in his low voice and surveys the gloom of the playground, and now, in the dark, he does sound a bit like a toad.
“It could have been worse,” he informs me. “A toad has dignity.” He looks around. Then he breaks into song.
The Clever Men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed
But they none of them know one
half as much
As intelligent Mr. Toad.
“Anyway, I got on her nerves after a while. And of course, she was a lesbian, sort of, a little bit of one, a sexual tourist, but we could have handled the tourism part, given enough time. At least that’s what I thought. The real problem was that she didn’t like how inconsistent I was. She thought I was the man of a thousand faces, nice in the morning, not so nice at night. Men like me exasperated her. She once called me the Lon Chaney of the Midwest, the Lon Chaney with the monster light bulb burning inside his cheekbone. The phantom, she called me, of the opera.” He waits for a moment. “What opera? There’s no opera in this town.”
He stares up into the night sky, then continues. “Well, at least I was a star. You know, women admire physical beauty in men more than they claim they do.” He says this to me conspiratorially, as if imparting a deep secret. He sighs. “Don’t kid yourself on that score.”
“I would never kid myself about that,” I tell him. “This isn’t Diana you’re talking about? This is Kathryn?”
“No,” he sighs angrily, “not Diana. Of course not. No, goddamn it, I told you: this was my first. My starter marriage. You met her, I know that. Kathryn.”
“No,” I say, “I don’t remember her. But you weren’t married to Diana so long either.”
“Maybe not,” he mutters, “but I loved her. Especially after we were divorced. A fate-prank. She loved someone else before I married her and she loved him while I was married